Hey Folks! I’m getting around to a bit of a late start because we lost power for a few hours this morning essentially throwing my entire day into disarray. I figure I probably owe you all an update to yesterday’s post, so I am going to attempt to condense things down a bit. I had an eye doctor appointment at 1:20 and they poked and prodded me and performed maybe the most powerful dilation I have ever had… to largely arrive at a conclusion. The viscous fluid in your eye hardens around the edges of your eye and when a chunk of this breaks off it becomes a “floater”. The fluid also hardens around the retina and when a chunk breaks off from there… it can cause all of the same effects of a retina detaching save for the permanent curtain of vision loss sweeping across your field of vision.
This is what happened to me and now I am dealing with the ramifications of having some pretty massive new floaters. Given time they should break down into smaller and smaller pieces to where my brain can largely ignore them… much like my other existing floaters. Until this happens though I am basically stuck dealing with the constant desire to wipe something out of my eye. Ultimately my eye apparently looks healthy… or healthy for someone who is hyper nearsighted and very much legally blind without correction. Basically, I am waiting to either get used to it or for the impact to lessen because there is not much that they can do to help me out.
In other news, I got my Maelstrom upgrade this morning and can now buy loot boxes… which means that I will start churning through more gear to clear out my banks. I’ve already dumped my first round of 60,000 seals into three loot boxes and got a few pets that I did not already have. Now I am going to start trying to ease back into tanking on my Warrior. Right now I am level 85 and have been mostly leveling through a daily pvp roulette and a round of hippo dailies. Of note this is a super chill way to put on a single level in a job every single day. However, I really want to dive more into some of the other roulettes and get back used to tanking for strangers. The whole full inventory and full on seals problem was an obstacle that I am now pushing past.
Instead of playing Final Fantasy XIV, I spent much of my evening roaming around in Guild Wars 2. Yesterday was the reset day for weekly wizard chores, and one of them this week was to complete 10 events, and more specifically to do 5 Bounties in the Domain of Vabbi. I figured the later in the week I waited, the harder it would be to get a bounty group. So I spent about two hours roaming around with a commander taking down bosses. I stayed far longer than I needed because I figured I would pay it forward a bit for folks just now joining the group after I got my five.
I have to say that Commanders are really what makes Guild Wars 2 community what it is. I see the Mentor system in Final Fantasy XIV and it is largely made up of people grinding away trying to get 2000 done so they can get a shiny mount and bragging rights. Commanders in GW2 on the other hand… really get nothing for their time spent save for the undying respect of their community. The effect a commander can have though is absolutely magical. We had a moment last night when someone shouted in map chat asking for help, and our commander veered us all to their rescue. It was fun flying in like the cavalry as a group of 20ish players on wildly differently skinned skyscales. When a commander is leading, they always have a number of players following in their wake who may not have actually joined the squad and we absolutely had some of this going on last night.
One of the other weeklies involved doing the Gyala Delve meta event, so I spent a good chunk of the night working my way through all of that with a squad. I did not like the Wizard chores at all when they were first released, but at some point, they updated to be a bit better. Now they serve as a bit of a guidebook in determining which areas of content I focus on, and I dig that. It had been months since I last set foot in Gyala Delve, but going through the motions made me remember how much I actually enjoyed this meta-event. It will never be as epic as something like an Auric Basin or a Dragon’s End… but it is still a fun romp filled with an outrageous amount of loot. So much so that when I indentified my gear I filled my inventory entirely.
Now that I have completed the Maelstrom unlock though, I think I am probably going to focus on some dungeoning this evening. I really want to work on getting Warrior geared up and ready for Dawntrail. There is something about stepping back into playing Warrior that makes me happy. It feels a bit like coming home. I liked Paladin quite a bit, but I had mained Warrior all the way through Shadowbringers and it is really a key part of my FFXIV identity. Especially now that Overpower is an AOE attack… it basically destroys any reason why I was so focused on playing Paladin. Removing the benefits of running out of tank stance was also a huge boon to me, because I was one of those players that hated stance dancing.
Anyways! Thanks to everyone who shared their words of support yesterday. I am going to be okay and I am slowly stepping down from the sheer panic state that I had been over the weekend. I think it will just take some time to adjust to having some more obtrusive “floater friends” along for the ride.
The post Maelstrom Captain appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends. I am going to write this post in what I hope is the least “poor pitiful me” manner I can muster but I am still pretty freaked out. I’ve said that this blog is part therapy for me, and honestly… this is one of those blog posts that I do not plan to syndicate widely as a result. There are a lot of disabilities that I think I could figure out how to work around and still do the things that I love. The two that freak me out the most however are the loss of my sight and the loss of my mental capacity. I also have a hefty fear of not being able to breathe but that comes from growing up severely asthmatic and having so many moments in my life where I could not catch my breath. If you listened to this weekend’s podcast, and I seemed out of sorts at all… I was pushing through a pretty major panic attack to record it.
A few hours before we started recording I was upstairs playing Guild Wars 2 and I kept trying to brush what I thought was a thread caught on my glasses out of the way of my vision. I was in the Inner Nayos zone and there was already a lot of black crap blowing around in the air so at first I thought it was just a visual. However, no amount of cleaning my glasses seemed to remove whatever this visual obstruction was. I went downstairs to stare uselessly into my eye in the bathroom mirror because I thought maybe it was a stray lash… when all shit went wrong. It felt like I was looking out through the world in a sandstorm and there were all of these individually distinct black dots appearing all over my vision and swimming around. To some extent, it felt like I was looking out through one of those clear bottles of gel-based hand sanitizer that had all of the suspended air bubbles.
It was around this point that the world started spinning as I went into a full-blown panic attack. My mind was racing… “What do I need to do before I completely lose my vision”. This seems like an irrational thought pattern, but there is some additional history that you need to understand in order to make sense of that. My family has a medical history of having their retina detached, and I have always been paranoid about it. My grandmother(dad’s side) had hers detach when I was in high school, my dad had his detach when I was in college, and my aunt (dad’s sister) had hers detach at some point during my early career bound adulthood. I feel like I have been waiting for this shoe to drop for quite a long time, which admittedly colored my opinions.
To be fair this line of thinking is not one that is entirely new for me. During my Junior year of High School, I had this sinus surgery that was working up against the brain case. While prepping for the surgery they had prepared us for all of the worst-case scenarios like a tool slipping and cracking something and causing a leak of fluid that could lead to brain damage and the like. So it was in this fertile ground for terror and paranoia… that I started having an allergic reaction to the specific combination of anesthesia and reagent used to wake me up. It was delayed by a few hours… but I started to have stroke-like symptoms as I lost control of the left side of my face and my eye started pulling up into the corner. I remember having a very similar thought “What do I need to say while I still have my mental facilities, because I am going to lose myself”.
Zoom forward to Saturday night… I am trying to keep my shit together and record a podcast. However, as I am back upstairs trying to calm down and be personable a new problem starts to occur. When I move my eyes to shift focus between my two monitors there is this flashbang off the left side of my face. It sort of looked similar to the eyelash thing from earlier but bright white and disorienting. I got through the show but I fumbled the intro as I tried to stop looking at the monitor and missed Thalen’s name from the list I read down every week. It’s really hard to keep your shit together when there is a rave happening in your eyeball. While this was going on my wife was searching for any possible ophthalmological emergency services in the area but came up empty. She specifically checked our local emergency room… which is still dealing with the after-effects of a ransomware attack… and largely came up empty.
As soon as we wrapped the recording I logged out and went to bed, trying to calm the fuck down and sleep was harder than I would have expected. I was concerned about medicating myself to sleep with melatonin or something of the sort because I was not sure how it would interact with whatever the hell was going on with my body. I probably got around half of a night’s sleep but by morning things were more manageable. Now I am basically in a state where I have way more pronounced “floaters” but they have largely coalesced into a dark ink spot that appears floating around in the lower right corner of my vision and a black thread made up of individual dark pinpoints that appears in the upper left edge of the field of vision. There is also what I can on describe as a ” piece of cotton on my eyelashes” that occasionally appears which mostly just makes me feel like constantly cleaning my glasses or rubbing my eye to remove debris.
The positive is that whatever is happening seems to be limited to my left eye, which is ultimately the weaker of the two. I’ve needed a new prescription for a while and my doctor’s office opens at 8 am this morning I intend to beg and plead for them to see me quickly. The other positive is that things seem to have normalized a bit and I have not had any more of the “flash bangs” since Saturday night. I am not sure what happened to cause so many more floaters to appear in my vision but hopefully, we can get to the bottom of it today. The other thing that gives me a bit of hope is that so far nothing that I am experiencing is anything like either my dad, aunt, or grandmother described. They all talked about a curtain closing off their vision starting from one side and going to the other. Right now I just have way more floaters than my brain can cancel out. I think I could eventually get used to this albeit it will never stop being annoying.
Nothing really new happened when this all occurred. I was not exerting myself or being exposed to some new stimulus. I was sitting upstairs playing video games like I have done for large swaths of my adult life. I was not playing through a segment that involved flashing lights or anything like that. I can only assume this is a physical thing and not neurological because it does not seem to be impacting my right eye in the least. Anyways… I think partially I am writing this all out in case something happens to me or things proceed much worse… there will be a written record of what happened before I disappear. Like I don’t mean that to sound as ominous as I am sure it does, but I have no clue what the next few days will hold for me. I know my dad had to deal with this nitrogen bubble in his eye that was attempting to hold the retina back in place until it healed enough to reattach on its own.
Anyway I mostly threw in non-sequitur images just to have something to break up the giant block of text. For those unable to follow my train of thought the last one is Lisa “Left-Eye” Lopes from the 90s musical act TLC. I didn’t want to put a photo of an eyeball in this post because honestly… they are kind of gross to look at. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you all have a wonderful week and I hope I either get a clean bill of health and have to just learn to live with this nonsense or some sort of medical intervention to stop things from getting worse. Until this is resolved I am probably going to be in a more volatile than normal state, and I am pre-emptively sorry if I do anything odd.
The post Unwanted Sandstorm appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Morning Folks! In the great roulette that is post-Twitter social media, I’ve largely thrown my hat into the ring with Mastodon. I’ve been there long enough at this point that it just feels the most comfortable. I pretty regularly poke my head into Bluesky as well, but it feels very much like I am a visitor rather than a resident. Largely I say this in part to make sure my biases are known. Yesterday Mastodon, the primary branch of the fediverse hit 15 million total users which of course caused a round of congratulatory posts as a result. Thing is… I am not sure that number means what the general public seems to think it means. From my understanding that is 15 Million total accounts signed up on Mastodon servers, not necessarily 15 million unique people.
That led me to joke that likely 10 million of those accounts are accounts that users had migrated away from. The thing is… migration is common in the fediverse and folks pop back and forth between instances for all sorts of reasons. This is a feature of the software and part of why I am so comfortable here. While I actively participate and help administer Gamepad.club, I know that if something were to happen down the line, I could just move my chair to another stall and keep trucking on like nothing happened. I don’t have to worry about some tyrant buying up my social media of choice and then enacting all manner of stupid changes because, in a worst-case scenario, I can just create my own private instance and still keep communicating with everyone as if nothing happened.
Someone might misinterpret my joke as throwing shade at folks who migrate servers regularly. There is this one couple that in the time I have known them… have migrated almost once a week for the last year. The thing is I have no ground to stand on as I have migrated around my own account quite a number of times. However because of the way that migration works… most of those older accounts are still out there and still being counted in the total census of accounts. I thought it might be an interesting thought experiment to walk through my own migration history and talk about each of the hops.
@Belghast@Mastodon.cloud
This was my very first account on the Fediverse and I joined on August 16th of 2018 during what was at that time the first big migration wave. I don’t remember exactly what the hubbub was on Twitter at the time but there were a number of folks packing up their stuff and moving to Mastodon, the most famous of which was Wil Wheaton. That did not go well for him… and he was pretty much harrassed off the platform. I had no clue about anything and signed up on the first instance that seemed to have openings, not understanding that accounts were bound to a particular instance and that I was not actually joining mastodon.social the flagship instance. I was on this server for I think three days in total, but here it is out in the void taking up space as a unique Mastodon user.
@Belghast@Elekk.xyz
On August 17th of 2018 I signed up for Elekk.xyz but since the server was “approval only” I think it took me another day before I completed the migration. It took a couple of days before I realized that different servers specialized in different things. That isn’t necessarily a hard and fast thing, but at the time Elekk was the only server specifically advertising itself as gaming-focused. Noelle the admin was super awesome so it seemed like a no-brainer to migrate especially since I had only actually been on the other server for a few days. A good deal of your relationship with a specific instance is tied to whether or not you are aligned with the admin that runs it. This will come up later, but Noelle seemed drift compatible with my interests so I moved and was pretty happy there. I was considerably more active than the average user and the self-identified “gamers” were a bit more casual than I was used to but it still felt pretty comfy.
@belghast@nineties.cafe
Friends… I bounced around a LOT in that first year. Honestly I bounced way more than I even realized prior to sitting down to write this post. Time is largely meaningless when it comes to memory and I thought the events of Nineties.cafe and later MMORPG.social played out over a few years… but alas that is not the case. On August 25th 2018… I migrated to Nineties.Cafe so initially it appears that I was only actually active on Elekk that first time for a little over a week. Essentially my blogging buddy Liore decided that she was going to throw her hat into the ring for site hosting, and I joined along as a moderator to help out. The server was hopping for awhile but largely died down after a couple of weeks. It was a cool idea but there were only a handful of us that were ever active on it. Sadly the only way you can see this instance now is through the Wayback machine and as a result, this is not counting towards that 15 Million account total.
@Belghast@MMORPG.Social
In December of 2018 a friend of mine Gazimoff, who you will probably note is the current owner of Gamepad.club… decided to create a Mastodon instance targeted at MMORPG players. This was a really fun instance and I moved over once again to help moderate. Once again it was new and exciting… and extremely active for a month or so until the shine wore off and folks ended up going back to Twitter. I was still active here for quite a while and considered it my active home on the Fediverse. More than anything Gaz learned a ton of lessons on how he would not host a server in the future, as MMORPG.social became unsustainable. It folded in June of 2020 but I was “maining” this server pretty much its entire lifespan. It was a good year and a half and I had a lot of nostalgia over that time. Once again the only way you can see this site is through the wayback machine and as such it is not counting toward the 15 Million users.
Back to Elekk
With the death of MMORPG.social I needed another home on the Fediverse and since I didn’t really have any negative feelings towards Elekk I went back there. I honestly would have likely have stayed there were it not for assisting two different friends as they attempted to run their own instances. I migrated back in June of 2020 and was there until April of 2022. For a few years it was a great little home that gave me a window into the larger Fediverse. I never had any issues with the users of the instance, but I was starting to feel a bit stifled by the administration of the server. It had changed hands since I was first there, and while I adore the new admin… they were a bit quick to defederate from instances instead of limiting them. I get that there were some legitimately serious attacks on the server from hostile actors, but also defederating from the flagship instances like Mastodon.social can be frustrating for the individual users that have friends there. I wound up shopping for a new home in large part because I did not love being disconnected from friends I still wanted to talk to.
I hold zero ill will towards the admin or the users because you gotta do what feels best for your community, but I needed to get to someplace a little less cloistered.
@Belghast@Mstdn.social
Stux is an admin that runs a number of instances: mstdn.social, masto.ai, mastodon.coffee, and a bunch of other side projects like a Pixelfed instance. He seemed like an admin with a very steady hand that was not prone to isolate instances from the bulk of the network, so in April of 2022 I migrated there and had a lot of fun. I met a ton of people that I still communicate with on a regular basis thanks to the local feed on this server. It felt like a giant instance but had a bunch of really friendly folks who were very active, and when I joined I think it was prior to it hitting 10k users. However the mass migration in November of 2022 wreaked havoc on this server as it ballooned up to around 120k users… and at that point, it was a constant struggle for Stux to keep server resources online. He reached a point where he literally could not buy any more resources from his server provider and while he had shut off new sign-ups at 100k users… thinking that would help… he forgot to shut off the ability for users to send invite links that circumvented this. Legitimately over the course of a few days, we shot from 100k to 120k, and things ground to a halt. This account still exists in a tombstone state but is still counting towards that 15 million.
@Belghast@Masto.ai
I had legitimately planned on sticking with Mstdn.social for the long haul, but Stux fired up a new Mastodon instance in an attempt to handle the overflow. There were a lot of us who were more active users who decided to help lighten the load and migrate over to Masto.ai, and I did so on November 7th, 2022. It had the same vibe as Mstdn.social and a good number of the folks that I was talking to regularly made the jump as well. It was a great little place and quite honestly I would probably still be happy there had some other events not transpired. Some folks have an axe to grind against Stux due to his fairly public drama with the admin of Mastodon.art… but honestly, he was always a super chill admin as far as I was concerned. This account is still out there and active in a Tombstone state, so it will be counted in that 15 million.
@Belghast@Gamepad.club
So there is a whole situation that went down with another site and its admin… and I think in part it prompted Gazimoff to seriously consider starting an instance again. MMORPG.Social was a lot of work but also in the process of running that site for a year or so… he learned a number of important lessons. Mostly it seemed like he wanted a nice cozy gaming instance that would be a safe place for friends to gather, and as such in January of 2024, we started Gamepad.club. I officially migrated on the 24th of that month and have been there ever since. It has been impressive to see the site grow over that time and always seems to hover around 100 active users and a little over 200 total accounts on the server. It is legitimately my hope that this is my final resting place on the Fediverse, but if something changes down the line I will pack my bags and move again as that is just the nature of how this platform works. I’ve also got an account dedicated to Blaugust on this server, so technically I count as two different users in that 15 million number. Technically I also have an AggroChat account over on Botsin.Space which counts as one of those users as well.
What About Other Server Types?
So while I am throwing a bit of shade at that 15 Million number… thing is there are a lot of people on the network who are not being counted in it. That 15 Million users are just folks who are using Mastodon as a platform and not counting all of the folks on the larger Fediverse made up of a bunch of different server types. The above tree has become popular as a representative of what the Fediverse is versus Mastodon, but there are a number of platforms that are not even represented there. For example, I use Bookwyrm to track my reading so that account would not be counted towards the 15 million. All of this is why it is really hard to pin down how people are actually on the Fediverse in one form or another.
So while I am not entirely certain about this milestone… it is nonetheless impressive. The fediverse is way more active than anyone seems to think. I have no clue what the total active population would look like if you filtered out all of the dupes, but it would still be a large number. I think that is really the aspect of why I like Mastodon and the larger Fediverse so much is the interoperability of everything. I could in theory use my Bookwyrm account as my main account and still have access to talk to everyone on the platform. Similarly, Lemmy is a Reddit clone, and I could use my account on Lemmy.zip for all of my Fediverse needs. The result though is you end up creating a bunch of accounts on a bunch of different platforms… only to use a handful of them. I enjoy the concept of Pixelfed but never really use it because it is separate from my preferred Gamepad.
All that said… I love knowing that no matter what curveballs might be thrown at me… there will always be a place for me to participate. There is never going to be a time when some billionaire buys the network and takes it over to skew to his particular sensibilities. The side effect of that freedom however will always be that there is some friction to getting started. That friction is a bit more than most users will want because it isn’t ever as simple as just going to the app store and downloading something. In fact, doing that… is almost guaranteed to give you the worst possible experience as the official app is awful and the flagship server it connects to… is isolated from large swaths of the network. I realize none of this is going to win me any more converts… but it is still where I feel most comfortable.
If you are looking for a good home though… Gamepad is a great place but many other servers are equally good places. It is also perfectly normal and just accepted that folks are going to migrate for various reasons. I have no clue WHY I went down this rabbit hole, but if you have made it this far in the post I appreciate your tolerance of my nonsense.
The post Migration as a Service appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
For a post that I did not share publicly… I am somewhat shocked by how much traction my Wednesday post managed to get. Sometimes, I forget how many of you will read this blog regardless of what I do to promote it. I appreciate all the people who reached out to me in private… and there were so damned many of you. As a result, I thought it was probably a good idea to talk a bit about the situation I found myself in and what the resolution is looking like thus far. Yesterday I had my follow-up visit with my primary care provider, and essentially I now join the legion of folks on a daily blood pressure medication. I also did not fully realize how much it was impacting my life until after being medicated. There were a lot of things that I had just chalked up to getting older… that seemed to have magically gone away within roughly two hours of taking the meds for the first time.
For literally a decade or more… I have dealt with pretty much a constant headache. I even went so far as to have assorted tests trying to figure out what was causing this. I tried migraine medication even and it never really seemed to help so I kinda of just assumed it was something that I would have to live with. Just doing normal stuff would make me out of breath sometimes… especially bending over for long periods of time… which I just assumed was my sedentary nature and being as big as I was… and also just a sign of getting older. I would have dizzy spells and was a bit wobbly on my feet, which I just assumed was more wear and tear on my body from being rather large. Additionally, everything sorta ached all of the time and I just didn’t really seem to have any energy. This had been the background noise of my life and it is shocking how much you can get used to it and just assume it is normal.
Legitimately by the end of yesterday… almost all of this went away. I am more clear-headed, nothing hurts anywhere near as bad as it did… and my headache essentially disappeared. This is trite but it legitimately feels a bit like I am a new person. So I said this the other day but when I was in the ER my blood pressure was 210/110 and even after sitting there for a few hours it was only down to 180/95. In the Doctor’s office yesterday it was 165/90, and then two hours after taking my new blood pressure medication it was down to 130/80 by yesterday evening I took it again and it was down to 104/70. I am shocked that it worked that quickly… and caused such a wild result. I am partially kicking myself for not taking all of these little things more seriously and secondly wondering just how close I was to having a stroke. That prospect seems all the more scary in the rearview mirror after seeing how radical the impact of being medicated seems to have been.
I think on some level this latest round of crisis was brought on by some events happening in my life. A bunch of stressful situations have collided at once to push me beyond my normal limits. I spent some time venting about it to a friend yesterday, and once that dam cracked… a deluge came rushing out about all of the effects it has had on me. I think on some level I had not even realized fully the toll it had on me. So all of this… the pathological, the emotional, and the mental wear… seemed to just culminate in a medical crisis. I guess I am thankful that per the doctors and my otherwise clean bill of health… I did not seem to do permanent damage as of yet. I am shocked that was the case though given how much I had seemingly stressed my systems.
The hardest thing right now for me to get used to… is the absence of all of the things I was just dealing with. I’ve had a constant headache living in the back of my skull for longer than I can remember… maybe even for the better part of two decades. I’ve also just dealt with subtle aches and pains that I assumed were just the toll of the poor shape that I am in and carrying around as much weight as I do. But with all of that gone or at least lessened to a point where it does not even feel like it exists anymore… it is just surreal. I keep expecting reactions from my body to the things I am doing that are no longer there. It will take some getting used to everything and developing a new baseline.
Anyways! Thanks for everyone sticking with me through this and checking in on me. It meant a lot.
The post Health Update: On A Good Path appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
