podcast

Oopsiversary

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Good Morning Friends! This year I have been more than a little bit scatterbrained and unfocused. As a result, many things have slipped… not the least of which is realizing that it is apparently anniversary time. For whatever reason I tend to start a lot of things in April and both the anniversary of Tales of the Aggronaut (April 17th, 2009) and our AggroChat Podcast (April 13th, 2014) landed this month. Then there was April 26th of 2013 when I started what I called the “Grand Experiment” of forcing myself to blog every single day which lasted a little over three years before landing on something more manageable of “every weekday unless I really don’t feel like it”. You could say that this also ultimately led to the creation of Blaugust because I personally found a lot of success in forcing myself to blog damn the torpedos. In the grand scheme of things the key to longevity for me, was to shift my focus of this blog as a vehicle for some specific planned idea… and instead just make it about whatever I happened to want to be talking about at the time. This is my blog… the Bel does dumb nonsense blog… and if you are along for the ride awesome. If this is not your jam, that is also awesome because I realize I am very much an acquired taste. I don’t have an overwhelming number of readers to be honest, but the ones I do have… end up being exceptionally loyal. Most of them are people that I legitimately consider friends… which is why in part the whole recent verbiage of “Good Morning Friends” is not inherently dishonest. I realize I am mostly talking to a circle of friends that occasionally has some rando stumble into that conversation. The thing is… those randos are also more than welcome to hang out and become friends too. When I post on social media that I am not making a post for a given day… it isn’t out of some ego trip because I know the world continues to tick along just fine if I have not extruded words. I do it because in the past when I have skipped a day… I had a lot of folks checking in on me to make sure I am okay. I do it out of a sense of not wanting to make this community of friends that read my ramblings worry about me. Honestly, my favorite part about joining the Fediverse and leaving Twitter has been just how many new faces I have seen join the ranks of people who appear to be consuming my nonsense each day. I want you all to feel welcome, but also I am still mostly writing these posts like I am talking to myself so… sorry for not being more interesting.
So if you have been reading my blog for a bit, you will probably be familiar with Tripod… the admittedly horribly named three-legged feral calico cat that lives in our backyard. I’ve not talked about this situation lately because it honestly really depressed me. Roughly a month ago… two dogs got into our yard under the front fence and seemingly chased her off. We’ve been watching anxiously hoping for any signs of her, checking the video camera feeds multiple times per day hoping for a glimpse of her. We were starting to worry that something had happened to her. The next-door neighbor saw the dogs chasing her, but also that she got away from them and they did not follow. However, we’ve learned from experience in the past with other backyard ferals… that when they disappear they are often gone permanently.
However last night while my wife was sitting on the back patio reading, she showed back up. I went out and put some food out but she was too skittish to come over and eat. My hope is that once my wife went inside she fed, though I did not notice her on the camera. That said she is also pretty damned good at avoiding detection algorithms. This morning she was milling around the little house we have in the backyard for her, so my hope is she spent the night there. When I go out to feed in a few minutes I am hoping that she comes out and eats. I mean it isn’t like she is defenseless and I am certain that she is more than capable of catching a meal… but she also looks way thinner than when we last saw her. I cannot explain fully what a gift it is to see her again because we were overwhelmed with concern for the last several weeks. So much so that I just could not bring myself to write about it.
In other nighttime visitor news… we have a few adorable Raccoons and at least one very chubby Possum that come by. I really should start uploading to Catfriend Television again, my dumb YouTube channel that I started during the pandemic where I uploaded clips from our security cameras of cats and other visitors. There is one video clip that I have somewhere that shows two raccoons up on the porch, and another few waiting in the wings on the sidewalk. I feel like some people would have a drastically different reaction than I do… but so long as they are not causing a mess I am more than happy to have them visiting. When I was a Scout camp counselor, I remember some raccoons getting into my igloo cooler and stealing my dry Gatorade powder. Maybe I should put some out for them and see if this group likes that too. I know it was a raccoon because there were sticky red paw prints leading out of my tent.
Lastly, I recorded another one of my dumb videos yesterday. I have been running up an alt in Path of Exile and was amused at just how easily Toxic Rain Ballista/Caustic Arrow deletes mobs. I was talking to my friend Ace about it and decided to record a video showing it off. Granted this is just the campaign and I have no idea if this will continue into mapping… but I am probably going to do a follow-up video once I have verified that it still remains good. Like always I mostly record these for me, or for some other purpose than to ever get YouTube viewers. I enjoy making these short dumb videos, and just like with my blog… am perfectly fine if no one actually consumes them. Anyways! I am officially in my fifteenth year with this blog and I just want to thank you all for following me on this journey. At this point, daily blogging is so ingrained in my person that I am pretty sure I will be doing this 25 years from now as well. The slow death of social media has only served to drive home just how important it is to me to have a place on the internet that I can call entirely my own. The post Oopsiversary appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

AggroChat #427 – Potential Rubbish

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Featuring: Ammosart, Grace, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week Bel talks about his experiences playing Diablo IV Beta and how it is nothing as he expected and mostly Diablo the MMORPG.  From there Bel and Grace talk about their experiences playing Last Epoch multiplayer doing the endgame activity called Monoliths.  Tam talks about Star Citizen 3.18 recovering from its server woes and how fleshed out the new racing league feature is.  Kodra talks about how much he enjoys games that are themselves effectively a tutorial.  We’ve talked about Battletech by Harebrained Schemes quite a bit but we dive into an update about the current state of mods.  Then we end up going off the deep end into a discussion about the 90s internet and the things that are now lost to the sands of time.

Topics Discussed:

  • Diablo IV Beta
    • Bel Has Concerns
  • Last Epoch Endgame with Friends
    • Bel and Grace Play Monoliths Together
  • Star Citizen 3.18 Recovers
    • Racing League
  • Tutorials in Games and Tutorials as Games
  • Battletech with Mods
  • Remembering the 90s Internet
The post AggroChat #427 – Potential Rubbish appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

AggroChat #413 – Grand Expositions

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AggroChat #413 - Grand Expositions
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Tamrielo
Hey Folks! We have a bit of a short show, maybe the shortest we have recorded in a long time.  We start off with our recurring topic of Elon Musk and the Corporate Collapse Speedrun of Twitter. From there we dive into some preliminary discussion of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet.  Last week during the show Kodra and Ash spent the entire time playing with a Hollow Knight Randomizer and we talk a bit about that process.  From there we dive into the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo of 2952 in Star Citizen.  Tam shares a few hardware topics about his new Flight Stick setup and migrating over to an Ultrawide display.  Finally, Bel talks a little bit about his adventures in New World and hitting 200 in Armorsmithing.

Topics Discussed

  • Corporate Collapse Speedrun Week 4
    • Vox Populi, Vox Dei
    • Twitter is down to a few hundred employees
  • Pokemon Scarlet and Violet
  • Hollow Knight Randomizer Shenanigans
  • Star Citizen
    • Intergalactic Aerospace Expo 2952
    • Big Events in Games
  • Fun with Flight Sticks
  • Ultrawide vs 4k
    • Continuing to enjoy 1440p
  • New World Leveling Updates
The post AggroChat #413 – Grand Expositions appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Capped for A Day

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Capped for A Day

Morning folks… I am struggling today.  Both in the waking up department because there is simply not enough coffee in the world… and in the illness department because I seem to be coming down with whatever the hell is going around the office.  I’ve yet to decide if I can make it to work today, so we will see what happens between now and finishing this post but I am taking a breathing treatment as I type.  As far as the weekend I did a bunch of assorted gaming because that seems to be how I roll right now.  Instead of focusing hard on one thing I seem to be splitting my time between a bunch of things, and as a result I spent a good deal of time making tiny images and updated my “Recently Playing” sidebar.  It mostly follows the post I made last week with the major exception of me apparently forgetting to include Elder Scrolls Online which I still dip my toes into occasionally.

Capped for A Day

In the Destiny 2 front I spent a good deal of the weekend knocking out anything that could get me a Powerful/Prime Engram and wouldn’t you know it… I reached 600 light the current cap.  This is a cap that I will enjoy for another whole day…. because when the black armor DLC releases on December 4th the cap is going up to 650.  The truth is I am fine with this.. because the last cap was quite the stretch to get to from the levels I was sitting at when Curse of Osiris released, which is unfortunately the last time I really seriously played the game.  Sure I got in and did the Warmind story content and a little bit of planetary stuff but I really was not pushing myself to cap out at that point.  Additionally Forsaken made it way easier for someone to play casually and reach the cap, so I am looking forward to Black Armory and some of the new open world “Forge” content as I have always dug things like the Blind Well or Archon’s Forge and Court of Oryx from Destiny 1.  I need to get serious about trying to wrangle folks for the purpose of having a raid night… Squirrel keeps volunteering himself but at my count that still leaves us down four people.  So if you are interested in that sort of nonsense on the PC platform drop me a line.

Capped for A Day

Since this is the first post of December I thought I would talk a bit about InPiPoMo which just finished.  For years I had not joined in because I largely considered my blog cheating given the nonsense number of screenshots that I post.  I apparently have a problem because the goal was to hit 50 “pictures” during the month of November to parallel NaNoWriMo and its 50,000 word count goal…  since a “Picture is Worth a Thousand Words”.  During the month without really attempting to do so I posted 93 screenshots if my quick count was correct, so yeah…  that is a thing I do.  Like this morning I had a screenshot of Diablo 3 on the Switch that I wanted to post but nowhere really to post it so I sort of shimmed it into this paragraph.  Huge thanks to Chestnut for keeping this going this year and you should totally check out her blog Gamer Girl Confessions.

Capped for A Day

Over in Monster Hunter World the Winter Star festival is going on and with it a set of gear that you can farm.  For both PC and Console players this also means that almost every event that has ever been active is active once again allowing you to farm anything you might have missed.  That list is considerably smaller for PC players unfortunately, but it does let you get things like the Wyvern Ignition Great Sword and cosmetic nonsense like the Wiggler head.  From what I can tell the only event that is not active is the Code Red event tied to the Devil May Cry cross over potentially because it just ended right before this event.  You can however farm Kulve Taroth again until your heart is content.  There is a set of lackluster armor that you can craft, or you can do what I did and cash in your tickets towards the layered armor set so you can make ANY gear look like Santa Claus.  I plan on farming up enough tickets to also be able to purchase the super adorable Snowman Palico outfit… or Snow Woman in the case of Kenzie who regardless of the game is canonically female.

Capped for A Day

I’ve talked about how awesome the screenshots are at the end of fights, because they always capture you doing something interesting.  In this case it is me dodge rolling out of the way of a line of lightning while everyone else is apparently downhill engaged with the monster.  When you hit Hunter Rank 49, in order to make forward momentum you have to face this monster in particular…  Tempered Kirin.  It took me forever to manage to get this on the console and in truth it was probably only because I was getting carried super hard by Shiana that Ashgar and I wound up getting it at the same time.  On the PC I’ve been dipping my toes into these waters for awhile now, and I have reached the point where it is not me that is fainting and causing us to fail…  but regardless still end up failing out most of the time.  Monster Hunter does this thing where the screen freezes and it can mean either you beat the encounter or someone other than you got carted and caused the whole group to fail.  When the screen froze at this point… I just assumed we failed it… but in truth it turns out with one life left to go we managed to take down Tempered Kirin.  I will probably NEVER fight this again…  that is unless someone who has recently started the PC winds up needing help to get through it.  Super happy to be moving again on the other side… which caused me to instantly shoot up to 58.

Capped for A Day

I also spent a good chunk of the weekend fiddling around in Final Fantasy XIV… which frustratingly has started doing this thing where it does not exit cleanly and strands a black fullscreen window that seemingly has the power to block task manager.  This is really only a problem for me personally… since I have been streaming every bit of gaming recently from gaming desktop upstairs to my laptop downstairs.  When this happens I have to go upstairs and fiddling with it in order to restore functionality, which can be a bit maddening considering how regularly I am hopping games in a given evening.  Regardless I have reached my first wall gear wise in the Main Story Quest and it requires me to get to 335 I believe which means I either need to buy my way out of that hole or start doing enough content to farm up some gear.  I am probably going with the later given that I never was rich in Final Fantasy XIV terms.  In the meantime however I have decided to revisit my old friend the Palace of the Dead to push my Dark Knight up high enough to be able to do the Heaven on High content the rest of the way to 70.  Probably a significant amount of my time will be spent catching up classes so that they are ready when Shadowbringer releases tentatively next summer.

Capped for A Day

All Things  Geekery is a great podcast by my friends Detached and Victus that among other topics tends to be a great source of Destiny 2 related conversations.  They have been doing this thing recently where they highlight a member of the community at the beginning of their show, which I thought was a really great idea when they started this concept with the very amazing Chestnut.  However I am now starting to question their mental state because apparently they saw fit to include me in this construct as well.  This week I apparently am leading off the show, but really you should probably just fast forward past that and listen to their interesting discussion of Red Dead Redemption 2… a game I am super interested in but waiting to see if it releases on the PC given that is my platform of choice and I have a bad habit of rebuying games for it.  You can find the podcast at…

Finally there is of course the podcast we recorded this weekend where we talk about Final Fantasy XIV, Monster Hunter World Winter Star event, what happens when MMORPGs close down, Tetris in Virtual Reality and a few other topics shimmed in between.  I tend to be really bad about promoting the thing that I actually do, so I should get in the habit of talking about it more on this blog so there is some cross pollination.  I am still shocked anyone reads this thing… let alone listens to me ramble on the other thing.  At this point I have decided to stay home and crash this morning because I had very few things on my calendar for today.  If I had a packed day of meetings I might have struggled through it and probably infected the rest of the office.  Now I am going to get in some fuzzy pants and forget the world exists.