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One of the truths of the gamer blogger community that you will realize if you hang around for very long, is that we really like having events.  There is the Newbie Blogger Initiative that runs during may, and for some reason a few years back I started Blaugust or at least popularized it.  Another one of these events that has happened on a yearly basis is the “Developer Appreciation Week”.  As far as I can tell the practice was envisioned by the blogger formerly known as Scarybooster.  Back in 2010 he envisioned a week where bloggers posted one or many posts talking about the developers, companies and folks in the games industry that we really appreciate.  Unfortunately the Scarybooster blog has been deleted for some time, so the early posts announcing this event are also gone with it.  Thankfully through the magic of the internet archive you can still see some of those first posts.  With the absence of a Scarybooster blogging presence, the week itself also was a little forgotten this year.  Traditionally this happens during the last year of March, and since that seemed to be a crazy time for a lot of us… I suggested we simply reschedule the week for the tail end of April.  The theory there is that all of this blogging excitement just might also drum up some excitement for the Newbie Blogger Initiative that will be happening in some form during the month of May.

The concept is simple.  During the week of April 24th through April 30th, make one or more posts talking about your love and or appreciation of someone or some group from the games industry responsible for making those games that we love.  The concept however is important.  The good folks in the games industry enter it because they love video games, and often times have a life long goal of ending up there.  The industry itself is a really rough one, and we can all see how caustic the communities can be when they turn against a game or an individual.  This has been all the more evident in the last few years with the various “crusades” against this or that that have cycled through the gaming world.  I think it is important that we set aside this week to lower our pitchforks, and set down our causes…  and marvel in the reality that these folks do for a living what many of us wish that we could.  The folks that make are games are not huge monolithic corporations that poop out games… they are folks that had a dream and are fighting really hard to see that dream realized.  I maybe have a slightly different spin on things since over the years I have had a lot of friends join the industry… and many of them leave after a few years because it is honestly a largely unappreciated one.  It is time for us bloggers to step in and show them some of the love we feel deep down in our hearts beneath the rants and the criticism.

So I ask you all to join me in Developer Appreciation Week.  Lets continue this tradition that Scarybooster started long ago.  Lets tell all those folks in the industry that we still care, even though we often times have some very serious complaints.  At this point I am not sure yet if I will be posting something related to DAW 2016 every day of the week, but even if you only make a single post… it will be appreciated.  For those wondering what others have written in the past, I happened to be doing the Blog Bonanza at MMOGames this time last year and wrote up a summary post of the various things folks said during the week.  Unfortunately #DAW2016 and every other combination of hashtag I could think of is being used by Dyslexia and Dementia and several other causes…  so what really matters I guess is the blog posts.

April Fools On Me

Yesterday morning began with a really interesting turn of events.  I got up, got dressed, went out to get breakfast… and as is often the case when I finally got set down I opened email to see if there was anything important for me to deal with.  In my inbox was an order receipt from Domino’s Pizza… which at first in my sleepy state didn’t seem all of that odd.  Then it dawned on me… that it has been weeks since we last ordered anything from Domino’s so I opened it to figure out what was going on.  Much to my shock… it was a very real looking order statement for some $600 worth of stuff… ordered at 1:30 in the morning and to be delivered to my address at 11 am Saturday.  The list goes something like this…

• 25 Large Hand Tossed Cheese Pizzas
• 13 2-Liters of Coke
• 3 Stuffed Cheesy Bread with Bacon and Jalapeno
• 25 Side Marinara Dipping Cups
• 6 Side Garlic Dipping Cups
• 6 Side Ranch Dipping Cups
• 25 Side Blue Cheese Dipping Cups
• 25 Chocolate Lava Crunch Cakes
• 25 Side Icing Dipping Cups
• 1 Sweet BBQ Bacon Specialty Chicken

It seemed like someone had gotten into my account on Dominos.com and placed an order, using an old credit card that was on file there that expired sometime in 2015.  At 8 in the morning on a Saturday neither the local Domino’s or the corporate Call Center were open, so I instead called my credit card company who assured me that they denied the order.  So for a little bit I went on about my business yesterday morning with the intention of calling the local office around 10:30 when they opened to make sure they realized it was a fraudulent order.  I had been in the backyard spraying weed killer for a bit, when I went back inside and realized I had a few missed calls.  Apparently the manager of the location had physically come by the house to verify that the order was legit before processing it.  His workers however apparently thought nothing of it, and were just about to start in making the pizzas.  I mean who orders 25 cheese pizzas?  I am not sure if this was a targeted attack on me in particular, or if this was just some sort of scripted attack, whatever the case it made for an interesting morning… and a very interesting story.

Day of Chores

Yesterday as a whole was a day filled with doing stuff around the house.  I got to play exactly one match of Iron Banner yesterday before shutting back down to run some errands.  It was largely a day for doing a bunch of stuff that had been needing to be done for a bit.  One of the major goals of the day was to get the new wireless multi-function printer hooked up, and working with all of our devices.  Other than taking a bit to install drivers on each machine this actually went pretty smoothly.  There is some strangeness with Google Cloud Printing, in that the printer must be owned by one google account, and then shared to other Google accounts.  But I have to credit my wife with figuring that bit out.  It is kinda cool being able to print from a chromebook finally, or print from chrome itself anywhere and have it come out on the printer at home.  I could see that useful sometimes, especially for printing order receipts.  The next mission was to try and figure out why our high volume printer just stopped working last week.  When I went to investigate whether the Parallel to USB cable was still hooked in tightly… the entire thing fell apart in my hand.  Not sure what happened but it seems like I simply need a new one of those.

As far as today my goal is to play some more Iron Banner because I really want to be able to hit rank 5 and maybe see some of the weapons as drops.  I am not sure that any of the rolls available on Lord Saladin are really worth purchasing, but in theory if I got some better perks it would be well worth my time.  I still need to get several heavy kills to complete the weekly bounties.  I am holding onto all of the brown bounties because I have been told that they greatly increase in value as the event comes to a close.  We have the usual laundry and cleaning to do, but my hope is that unlike yesterday…  today can be largely a day of gaming and chilling out.  Yesterday was a really strange day, but other than the pizza thing a good one.  I was super excited that for the most part AggroChat went off without a hitch.  We recorded a fairly long show about a bunch of interesting things, and there was zero occurrence of chipmunk Belghast.