Aggrochat

Over the last few days I have been doing a number of minor renovations to AggroChat.com which is a site that you may or may not know about. Essentially the site is a mirror of the content that the various members of the AggroChat podcast do on the interwebs along with the resting place of each of our episodes. We use a plugin that is no longer actively supported… but still seems to work… to make a local copy of each post that comes out on the various sites that make up our group. What this means in practice is that the site is mostly filled with Aggronaut posts and podcast episodes given that I am way more prolific than the rest of our crew. The site itself had been in a weird place for some time, largely due to the fact that the previous web host made it very hard to modify anything as I had to go through a manual install process. So over the last few days since moving the sites over the weekend I have been making small tweaks here or there to the site to refresh it. The main change that I made is to swap from the cumbersome theme that I had been using over to Generate Press, the same highly modular theme that I use with Aggronaut. What makes this theme extra awesome is the fact that the licensing allows you to pretty much use it on any site that you own. I may be tweaking colors a bit, but I think for the most part things are now in a fairly stable state. The last major changes I made yesterday were to make private any content not related to the current staff, and to re-associate the podcast episodes to the AggroChat account instead of my account. What this gives me is a much cleaner Author widget in the sidebar that shows the last several podcast episodes lumped together as well as the last several posts from each author. Previously I really didn’t make proper use of the sidebar and now it has a much more consistent feel to it as well as linking to the various “AggroChat” branded social media accounts. I’m fairly happy with the current state of things and just felt like talking about it a bit this morning.

As far as gaming goes… I started my night attempting to do some Diablo 3. I say attempting because the thing that I really need to do is a round of bounties, and the thing that I keep struggling to do… is a round of bounties. For some reason over the last few days I have encountered issues where I get disconnected from Diablo and battle.net entirely… so much so that I often have to crash the client and restart it. This happened the other night while Grace and I were grouping up, which didn’t make it that big of a deal because she kept the session active. However when I am playing solo… this means whatever progress I made towards a round of bounties was lost since I only really need the Bounty Caches at this point and not whatever I happen to loot along the way. This also meant that Diablo 3 was not my final resting place for the evening.

My next go to was World of Warcraft Classic, but after screwing around on my newly minted Undead Warrior… I was not having much gusto there either. I think I might be in a holding pattern with this until it officially releases in August. Were they to tell me that they were not going to be resetting progress between now and release… then that would be one thing. However since leveling in Classic is not exactly fast… I am not exactly relishing the prospect of getting to a happy place in beta and then losing all of that progress for live. Classic served to tell me that yes I did in fact want to do this… and now I am more or less ready for launch.

Instead I largely opted to watch some episodes of The Toys that Made Us on Netflix. For the uninitiated this is a docuseries that outlines the various decisions that went into making the toy lines I grew up with in the 80s. I watched the first season when it initially was released, and yesterday was made aware that season 2 was available. So I watched the first of the new episodes on Star Trek toys, and then the majority of the episode on Transformers before I eventually gave up and went to bed. I think a lot of my restlessness from last night comes from the fact that I did not sleep well due to the storms. I was more or less dead to the world until the alarm went off this morning… and then was groggy enough that i couldn’t figure out how to turn the alarm off on my watch. Hopefully tonight will be more fruitful on the gaming front… and if not I will just keep on watching Toys that Made Us because it really is a charming show.