Last night was effectively a repeat of Monday, but seemingly with more activity going on. I lost track of the number of Tornado warnings we were under at various points during the evening. The above photo is not mine but it is of a tornado that formed in my town. I quite possibly did the most Oklahoman thing ever and stood out on the front porch watching it happen. Before you chide me for not being safe… the storm cell was headed the opposite direction and at this point it was several miles away. Now this is not the first Tornado I have watched, but there is something mesmerizing about the process of watching it. It isn’t like the movies… the clouds feel like they are moving impossibly slowly as a plume of clouds begins to snake down towards the ground. In truth they are moving insanely fast but you just happen to be watching something massive occurring and the scale throws off any gauge of speed.
While we spent the night watching out for storms… the more insidious concern is the fact that we are having significant flooding. Thankfully where I live specifically… there isn’t much of a chance of flooding as I live outside of even what is the 500 year estimate floodplain. That said it is making travel around the area pretty rough as several of the roads that are normally completely safe to take are under water. Essentially we are in a rough spot as a state because all of the dams in this area are beyond safe capacity… meaning they are having to release way more water than they normally would. Effectively I think we are going to be past the 100 year floodplain estimates and will be setting ourselves up for the levels we have not seen since the “great flood” of 1986.
One of the things that you don’t expect in Oklahoma is the fact that we have the largest inland shipping port, and with it a huge navigational system. To add another monkey wrench into the works, last night two barges loaded with stuff broke free of their moorings and were heading towards one of the lock gates. The tugs were not available to try and round them up, because they had already rounded up two other barges that broke free earlier. So the concern is that if they slammed into the dam that is part of the lock system, and if it were to break… an entire town would effectively be wiped off the map not to mention other less immediate ramifications. For the time being however they appear to be hung up on some rocks and are still tied to each other… so folks are scrambling to try and anchor them in some more permanent fashion. Regardless the town in question has been evacuated in case things go south.
Basically right now we are living in a really weird time, and as such my game time has suffered. What you are getting from me instead in the meantime is a lot of random commentary about my life. I want to emphasize that I personally am safe and that my home is safe. The world around me however is less so… and it is interesting to be a spectator to all of the calamity going on around me. The area will most certainly be dealing with the ramifications going forward for a long time. I did however get some time to briefly play a bit of Necromancer in Elder Scrolls Online… and I have to say that the new game experience is a little weird. I am used to having the entire skill tree available to me from the start, and it seems like you only get access to something once you have used it? I didn’t get Two Handed Weapons for example until I had killed some stuff with one, at which point the skills opened up.
I still more or less plan on trying to play a Necromancer tank, but I probably should have gone through the tutorial to at least get some starter weapons. All I have found thus far in Elsweyr is a Two Handed Sword so I am using that for the moment. It feels really weird to be starved for skill points… seeing as on my main I have a stack of them that are sitting unspent. I figured a Dark Elf was probably the most likely to be a necromancer, so I went with that and with the scarred appearance. I hope to spend more time playing this when I am not dodging twisters. We were going to go buy flowers this weekend… but the Nursery is now sitting completely underwater so that won’t be happening. Memorial Day is going to be an odd one this year.
I made an attempt to write this post earlier… but my internet at home seemed to be having issues due to the storm and WordPress ate the entire thing (even though I thought it had saved a draft… not sure what I think of the latest version).
The last twenty four hours have been exceptionally strange to live through. First you have to understand that I have lived in the area known as “Tornado Alley” for my entire life, growing up an hour north of Tulsa and living in the Tulsa area since 1999. We largely take Tornados with a grain of salt, and while most of the cells that do pass overhead produce a Tornado at some point… the likelihood that you are going to get hit seems fairly small in the grand scheme of things and the prep work you go into seems often times for naught.
Yesterday however was a different beast entirely from what we are used to. We had been hearing for days that we were going to get bad storms… but given that it is May in Oklahoma that is effectively like telling me the sky is blue. What made us really take notice is when several of the school districts decided to preemptively cancel class. On the same day in 2013 a EF5 Tornado hit Moore Oklahoma and killed 24 and injured 212… including directly hitting the Plaza Towers Elementary School. When the weather folks tell you that there will be multiple major storm cells throughout the day… I guess we have learned the lesson the hard way to take note.
My wife got out a little early and I left right at 4, which allowed me to get a couple of errands done before making it home before anything major had started. My wife scrambled around and gathered all of our important stuff and some basic supplies and packed them into a rolling carry-on style duffle bag, sticking in in our “hidey hole”. The rules of shelter are basically that you need to get to a room on the lowest level of the home with no exterior walls. The problem with our house is the only place that fits these requirements that you can actually get human beings into… is the laundry room. So we created a little makeshift pantry of sorts on top of the washing machine and prepared for the worst.
There were a few of what I would call close calls, as in a storm that had produced Tornados passed within 10 miles of the house. One of which was close enough to trigger the sirens… at which point we went to the laundry room to ride it out, at least until the news that was blaring in both the livingroom and the bedroom gave us an updated trajectory. That is the thing about Tornados… they tend to behave in a fairly predictable manor. That is not to say that you should not respect every single one of them… but there are certain areas that get hit more than others. Often times the storm turns right before it gets to where I live and passes a little south of us… as did the two cases above.
The double whammy however is that as we were getting ready this morning… the news was projecting a Tornado headed directly for our house. It was serious enough that the Tornado Sirens blew seven separate times during the course of the thirty minutes it took to clear us. I am uncertain if there is any damage, but I am guessing it passed by the outskirts of my town. When it hit Tulsa International Airport however the storm turned… much like the others had and passed just south of us… by about five miles. What it largely caused is a delay in me getting ready and blogging… but we did hide out in the laundry room for a bit to make doubly sure we were safe.
Today I am sorta living in a permanent state of stupor. When you live in this region you do this thing when you finally surrender and decide you are perfectly okay with death so long as you get some sleep in the process. I finally reached that point around 10:30-11 pm and I have no clue when my wife fell asleep, but we left the television blaring in the thought that if something major was about to happen we could jump up and get into our shelter quick enough. I changed into night clothing, but I think my wife more or less slept in the clothing she had been all night long. You don’t exactly sleep soundly when you fall asleep in that state.
As far as gaming goes I spent the majority of the night playing Diablo 3 in little doses, but did manage to group up with my friend Grace during part of it. My lack of attention to detail and the fact that I am still under her level a bit… meant I largely spent the night dying a lot. That said I knocked out a few steps in the seasons journey and managed to gather up a few pieces of gear. I am one step away from completing Slayer… but that step requires me to do rounds of bounties until I gather enough crafting bits to cube a piece of jewelry. The challenge there however is that as the night went on I kept getting disconnected making a round of bounties impossible to complete.
I’ve decided that my favorite part of this season and the patch that came with it is the fact that you can now peek ahead in game to what is needed by steps in the seasons journey you have not yet reached. Previously you had to keep open a wiki and keep alt tabbing back and forth to see what you could be working on while you were waiting on something else that you could not necessarily complete at that moment. I really want the fiery cosmic bat wings that come from finishing ALL of the seasons journey steps, so I have a feeling over the coming weeks I will be spending a lot of time playing Diablo 3.
I am home sick today fighting some sort of flu like chest crud, and as a result I am taking a bit longer than normal to knock out a blog post. It will soon be evident that today you will be unable to escape the fact that this is “back to the future day”, or at least the day that Marty McFly supposedly went forward in time to. While I have a heaping helping of nostalgia about Back to the Future in general, I have to say the future is always a bit of a disappointment. If you asked my thirteen year old self, what the future would be like… he probably would have bought into the fantasy of Back to the Future 2. At the very least I expected to have flying cars, and to have colonized the moon… but what happened instead was potentially stranger and more interesting. Futurism is almost always inherently wrong. We envision the future as delivered by the things we can dream about today. As new technologies evolve they shape that vision, and we are historically bad at guessing what trends will look like in five years… let alone ten… or in the case of this vision of the future twenty six years. Something odd happens when you place a goal on the horizon… people tend to start working towards that. So in a swell of nostalgia… we have actually seen hoverboards, self lacing shoes, and even the goofy pepsi bottle… because this movie TOLD us to make it.
This happens all the time and more often than not we don’t even notice. The bright colorful ubiquitous Verbatim 3.5″ floppy disks I am sure look like they do, because almost the exact same thing existed on Star Trek as a means of reading and writing data. Similarly the iPad looks an awful lot like the handheld LCARS tablet device carried on Star Trek the Next Generation. The internet as we know it… seems to have patterned itself off of the futurism of William Gibson. The reason why this happens is that technologists are generally geeks… and geeks love geek culture. Even if you don’t mean to… we are all subconsciously influenced by the things we love. The problem is… in the case of Back to the Future… none of the technologies that have showed up are really “true”. They are media stunts that have been created to prove that it “could” be done, but not necessarily something that is a widely accepted and adopted technology. The flying car for example, for the majority of my life has always been ten years away. The problem is that ten year mark never actually arrives… and my big concern is that we just are not investing enough in the future as a whole. Our space program is in shambles, and the corporate sector is constantly focusing on what brings them profits six months down the road instead of six years. It feels like we have stagnated, and most of what we are getting as far as innovations go are just constant iterations on the same ideas. This makes me concerned that the future will never actually arrive… or at least when it gets here it will be Shadowrun instead of Star Trek.
The Height Poll
If you follow me on twitter… or any other network that my twitter re-syndicates to… you may have noticed a poll that I sent out yesterday. Some people called it the strangest gaming poll they have seen… and I feel like maybe I need to supply some explanation. I am tall in real life… sitting around six foot four inches. This is tall enough that you realize that the world was not built for someone of your height. I am constantly banging my head on ceiling fans, the occasional low door frame, and have to be super careful when getting in and out of cars. As a result when I play games… especially MMORPGs I tend to play significantly shorter races. My first character in Everquest was a Dwarf, and I have had an affinity for little races including my current Lalafell in Final Fantasy XIV. In a conversation with another friend I found out that she was short… and had a similar experience… preferring to play taller races. So that got me thinking… which lead to the poll wondering if this is common place or if we are outliers. I thank everyone that voted in the poll, because it produced the image you see above. If anyone else wants to join in the question you can either click the link above or the image to launch into the strawpoll.
One thing I left off the poll is the folks who are medium height and prefer to also play medium height characters. I am assuming that a lot of those people voted “no real preference”, but in truth I was mostly interested in the relation between the extremes. It turns out that I am apparently not the normal, at least in terms of this question. Based on the poll it seems like the majority of players either have no real preference or prefer to stick with their same height regardless of the games they are playing. Only a few of each type preferred to play the opposite of whatever they are in real life. I guess that says a lot of things, and mostly that people tend to be happy with themselves. For me at least when I play a character in a game I tend to create a revised version of myself, where I fix the things that I dislike about myself… creating a “Ultimate Belghast”. I guess if I were being completely honest with myself… were I to “fix” my height I would not actually go “short” but instead trend towards medium. For a man it seems like six feet tall is about the sweet spot… the point at which the entire world seems to be built around that height. I’d never have to worry about leaning down in hotel showers so that the shower head can hit me… never have to worry about banging my head on things… and wouldn’t have to constantly search for “tall” sizes. Four inches doesn’t seem like much of a difference but in terms of functioning in the world it really is. Nonetheless I thought it was an interesting poll question and it was awesome that folks were willing to take it.
