EVE

Good Morning Folks. I’ve been on a bit of an anime kick of late. I am not entirely certain what led me down this rabbit hole but something… prompted me to give Dan Da Dan a shot. It took about three episodes before I was hopelessly hooked, but last weekend I spent most of Saturday snuggled with cats and chain watching my way through season 1 and most of season 2. This afternoon/evening the last episode of Season 2 should be releasing and I am looking forward to it with great fervor. The thing is anime is something that I have always tangentially enjoyed, but it is a world I have never really felt part of entirely. I mean in high school I was tracking down copies of Akira or Vampire Hunter D… which were still shockingly hard to find… or the Final Fantasy V based series. I am also addicted enough to Bleach that I snagged a chunk of the intro to use for the AggroChat opening. However modern Anime is just not something I have indulged, because it was hard to listen to something for hours upon end because I did not want to isolate myself from my spouse for that long, and she was VERY much not into it.

However with me now being entirely alone… for quite literally the first time in my life… it is no longer that big of a deal. I don’t really love reading television… but most everything these days seems to be available in dual language versions. Maybe at some point I will actually attempt to learn Japanese, which is a thing I have wanted to do since I was a teen… and learned that a lot of video games came out in that language first. I will likely never go down the rabbit hole of manga… because reading them in reverse order is something that will always fuck with my head. I tried to do this with Trigun Extreme, because I love Vash the Stampede immensely… and just could not bring myself to stay hooked. I guess the question is… for someone who loves Dan Da Dan, Fullmetal Alchemist, Bleach, Darker Than Black, Cowboy BeBop, and Ghost in the Shell… what series would you suggest that I give a shot? Drop me a line below.

I’ve also been diving into Pantheon… which brings up the age old question of is it anime if it does not come from Japan? I’ve always said yes. I consider Avatar in its many forms Anime, and as such I consider Pantheon by Amazon to be very much one as well. This is a wild trans-humanism ride in the vein of William Gibson novels, asking the question… what is humanity once it uploads itself into the cloud. I highly suggest giving it a watch. I just wrapped up season one and it was phenomenal, and expect to start on Season 2 probably Friday night… since tonight is our usual Thursday night Guild Wars 2 romp. When a cartoon brings you to the point of tears… you know it is good. Do I think I will ever get to the point of being an Otaku that goes to Anime conventions? Honestly not likely, but I do greatly appreciate the level of joy that folks bring to that world. For example this live action dance/cosplay version of the season two Dan Da Dan intro is phenomenal.

Over in Guild Wars 2 I wrapped up the Fractal Incursion Champion achievement which gives you two bag slots, two 20 slot bags, a host of exotic gear tokens, an ascended accessory with 10 agony resistance, and at the very end an universal legendary weapon starter kit granting you access to any Generation One legendary. I am trying to decide what I want to go for with this thing, and most likely… I am probably going to craft the spear since I generally like using it on almost every character. Right now I have sword, axe, longbow, hammer, and 3 of the two handed swords so that I could craft eternity. The other option that I might go for is a Staff, since I tend to use this on Necromancer and would not mind getting into Druid at some point for support. I am likely going to sit on it for awhile. I just cashed in my eternal ice for volatile magic so at some point I should be able to buy up a bunch of trophy bags to get close to crafting whichever gift I am missing. I am still super low on mystic clovers so I should probably wait until I regenerate those a bit before crafting another legendary.

In another Guild Wars 2 news… I am missing two badges from the investigation achievements. The thing is I know where the two missing badges that I need are, I have just not been randomed into either of those fractals since learning this knowledge. When I was looking for a guide… there are times I forget just how damned good the wiki for this game is. All of the information that you need to know to be able to find the badges is located in the Troubleshooting 1 and Troubleshooting 2 wiki articles. Basically I need to run the Volcano and Snowblind again, and veer off the main path to get both of the badges I am missing. I think maybe in the situation from the other day where most of the party bailed, it was probably that they were just needing the badge as they disappeared shortly after we got to the fireball section on the Volcano where the badge is located at.

In another news, since I seem to be in MMOFPS mode right now with Destiny Rising, I thought I would give EVE Vanguard a shot. There is currently a free trial event going on, and you can download the stand alone client through the EVE Vanguard website. I’ve not made it terribly far but thusfar it does seem to be a very responsive shooter, but I am missing the jumping mechanics from Destiny games. I will probably play through the rest of the extended tutorialization at some point over the weekend. The whole proximity chat thing is a bit weird to get used to, but voice chat felt pretty seamless. I need to change the keybind to my normal push to talk because pressing and holding left alt felt extremely foreign to me. I did not make it super far last night because I was meeting up with Ace to play some Destiny Rising.

One of the things that I found interesting playing with a lower level player in Destiny Rising, is just how reasonable the scaling ended up being. Ace was 38 and I am of course capped at 80 and progressed quite a bit past that, and collectively we could do their content level without it feeling like I was dominating everything. I was not one tapping every single mob at least with weapons, but my ability scaling and better artifacts did seem to make a bigger difference when it came to clearing trash mobs. They pushed past 40 and I think when you hit 46 you can start running heroic content, so at some point we will likely flip to me leading the party and dragging them along in bigger kid stuff. If nothing else it would allow them to start collecting mythic weapons early I think. At some point I need to focus on some of the activities that can award exotic mods for items and exotic artifacts. I am not sure if I have to wait until Acclaim 10 or not for those, but I am getting closer and supposedly the patch that was applied over night sped up the leveling a bit. I have an awful lot to keep me engaged right now… which is good because I need it. I have Diablo IV Season 10 that I am still contemplating trying out, and then in early October is Legion Remix in World of Warcraft which I will probably also give a shot. Distractions keep me from feeling so painfully alone. The post Animation Adoration appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Leak Testing

At this point it has been raining for roughly four days nonstop, and at the same time been hovering near freezing. This has seriously harmed any desire I had to go out into the world and do anything. As a result however we have a bunch of errands that we HAVE to do today, in order to return to being fully functional human beings in the real world. I also cannot believe tomorrow… we have to go exist in the real world again. This has been one of the most chill holiday weekends we have had in years, but then you realize… the reason why it is so chill. The last decade has had a horrible cost on our combined families, and quite honestly… we just don’t have the people we used to. We are doing good to get a single Thanksgiving or Christmas per side of the family, let alone the four or five that we used to have to hit when we first got married. My mom used to say to us, that we would miss these family get togethers when they were gone… and she was absolutely right. I miss the people… but I do not miss in any way the stress of feeling like we had to appease everyone.

The other thing that is awesome about this weekend… is it is essentially the first time in a month we have not had strange people banging on our house. Wednesday day the contractors did the final walkaround, and there are still a few things… but for the most part we are done. The dumpster has been removed from the driveway, and we can once again park our vehicles in our own damned driveway. The positive about four days of nonstop rain is I feel like it has thoroughly leak tested the house. All of the old leaks are gone, and thankfully thus far we have yet to find any “new” leaks. I like the bedroom with the door in it, because it ends up getting a lot darker during the day which makes taking naps all the more enjoyable. We still need to weatherstrip around the edge of the door, but we can already tell that the siding and insulation have made the house significantly more temperature stable. We set a temperature on the thermostat and the heater rarely kicks on to bring it up to temperature… whereas previously during the winter the heater would almost constantly run making my upstairs office unbearable. Which means maybe just maybe… my office will be comfortable during the winter months, because last night when I had it shut off completely while podcasting I didn’t really get hot at all.

World of Warcraft

This week for better or worse has been all about comfort gaming for me… and with that a return to the World of Warcraft. At this point last week I was mostly fighting the desire to log in… and failing ultimately playing my sub level 20 characters for free. This week I have dove head first into the timesink, and used my free boost to 100 to create a Tauren Paladin for the purpose of playing with my horde side friends. I’ve not really played much horde since the early days of Warcraft, and the only time I had a at level cap character was during Wrath of the Lich King when I was raiding a bit with Batteries Not Included… the raid group that would ultimately form the majority of Facepull the horde guild I am in now. I’ve always said at one point or another I would level another character so I could hang out with some of the excellent people on that side of the fence. Now after doing so for just a little bit I am kinda kicking myself for not doing it sooner. I’ve never bought into the Horde versus Alliance rhetoric… but it just feels like people are friendlier Horde side.

There have been three separate occasions where I have been out in Tanaan Jungle, and got overwhelmed… only to find another Horde healer dropping down from above and healing me. One of them I ended up thanking them and having a forty minute conversation about the various people we know from the early days of Argent Dawn. It always felt like the Horde at least on Argent Dawn was more closely connected than the Alliance side… and I always assumed in part it was due to the fact that they were massively outnumbered. With the grand merging of realms that feels less true, especially since we are in the same battle group as the Alea Iacta Est horde mega guild. That said it does feel like people are more willing to help out other players, especially when you are running around as a giant cow. There is a certain kinship that Tauren seem to have for their other “beefy brethren” as one of the folks that helped me out put it. I still love my Ally characters, but for once I feel like I have a horde character that feels good and natural to me. Maybe I see some race changes to Tauren in my future… because there is just something appealing to being an adorable lumbering bull.

As a side project I have been playing some EVE on the free trial. I was drafted as an EVE virgin, even though I played a bit during the alpha and beta tests eons ago. My experience so far has not been without issues… namely there is apparently a known bug that can happen during character creation. When you are creating your character, you have to have a piece of clothing selected for every slot… problem being as you can see on the right side bar there is no drop down for “Bottom”. I did not find this out until I had already spent a significant amount of time sculpting my face. I also thought it was a little odd that I only had one hairstyle, but I thought maybe that had something to do with the fact that I was a free account, and that when you purchased an account maybe it unlocked additional styles. However after not being able to move forward I did some digging and this is a bug that has been regularly reported since around 2011. Somewhat shocking that something like that has been allowed to stick around the game this long.

On attempt number two of creating a character… I made sure that every drop down had something in it before really starting the process. I ended up going in a completely different direction … namely my own take on Dave Lister from Red Dwarf. Though I am sure no one would really notice that unless I specifically pointed it out. I named my character “Bel Ghast” and set out into the world to see how the game had changed. Ironically the game works pretty much exactly like I remembered it, but the big thing I did not remember was just how slow the pace is. In many ways it reminds me of the original Everquest where every action has a certain amount of downtime in it. I immediately fell back into my old habits, which were to upgrade my ship… to carry more ore… to allow me to save up money to buy more interesting things. The problem being is I have hit the 5 hour wall that Tam has talked about… where you need to pour about ten more hours into the game before you can do anything interesting. There is a place where the prices for the things you want jump from being 10k isk, to 500k isk… to 2.5m isk. So now I am in this gulf where I am questioning my will to push through it. Additionally I am struggling finding new areas to “hunt” in like the Rogue Cloning Facility. I can oneshot pretty much every ship in that area, but feel like I need to find something bigger to test my weapons on, but not sure where to find it.