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So Much Cheese Pizza

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April Fools On Me

So Much Cheese PizzaYesterday 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

So Much Cheese Pizza

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.

Life in Tornado Alley

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Closer Call
Life in Tornado Alley

Last night was an interesting night to say the least.  In the morning folks were talking about the potential for serious storms, but in Oklahoma we tend to take that with a grain of salt.  From the months of March through June pretty much every week there is some severe thunderstorm either hitting or looming on the horizon.  Living in “Tornado Alley” gives you a strange relationship with the weather.  It is something you fear at least a little, but also something that you get used to.  There are close calls and then there are close calls so when you hear a storm is a few miles away, you get to the point of being able to look at a map… knowing the general topography and deciding that will never make it to me and going on about your business.  Last night was not really one of those nights, because the storm in question was a bit of a sidewinder.  At first it looked like it would miss the suburb of Tulsa that I live in, so I was milling around upstairs not thinking much about it.  Then I got an urgent series of messages from my wife saying that they were watching it out of the window of the church and that it was coming straight for town.  I of course did the most Oklahoman of all things that I could do… I went out on the front porch and tried to see the storm.  In the above picture I circled the area of the cloud that was starting to lower, and moments after taking this photo I watched it slowly rope its way downwards towards the ground.  It was at this point that I started to take things deadly serious.  The below video that I found linked to a local news site shows the same area as I pointed out in the picture, but as it was actually lowering.

The problem is… if a Tornado hits our house we are probably dead.  The conventional wisdom is that you need to get to an interior room, as close to the center of your house, with no windows and doors.  The way our house is laid out this room doesn’t really exist.  We do however have a very tiny laundry room crammed between the garage and the hallway outside of the bedroom.  From the garage side there is a steel core door, and from the other side a wooden one.  So I proceeded to hang out on the floor of our laundry room crammed between the washer and the dryer with a thick blanket to pull over my head if things went really bad.  I tried to gather the cats, and as any cat owner will know… the best way to get your cats into an area is the shut the door.  So I shut myself in the laundry room and within a few moments the cats were scratching at the door so I let them in and shut it again.  I had the bedroom television blaring so I could somewhat tell where the storm was, and this is when it shifted course drastically again.  This time instead of coming straight for us like it seemed, when it hit the reservoir it shifted go to more straight east than north east and ended up passing just to the south east of us.  Since I mentioned it last night, we are fine just was a much closer call than I was used to.  Had the Tornado continued on its course it would have hit us, but instead it went off and hit a neighborhood about a mile and a half from us.  I spent the rest of the evening watching the weather as the storm picked up strength and hit other communities.  Unfortunately this is going to be the norm for the next several months as we make our way through another “Tornado Season”.  Huge apologies for missing the raid last night, but when shit like that is going on… I kinda need to prep to duck and cover.

Obsessions

Life in Tornado Alley

I originally had a post for this morning talking about “chasing unicorns”, but I feel like I want it to have its own full post, and with the happenings of last night I felt the need to talk about that instead.  So instead I am going to talk about another one of my Craigslist dealings.  I am cheap… and if you have read this blog for very long you will know that I really hate having to pay retail price for something.  I’ve gotten countless laptops, desktops, and gaming systems from Craigslist, but using the local site is an absolute craps shoot.  Some days there are amazing things out there, and then there are weeks or months of absolutely nothing.  When I get something stuck in my head that I would like to have… I tend to start searching Craigslist for it.  Recently one of those obsessions has been a Wii U and I had it in my head that I wanted to try and get one for under 200 bucks.  The bane of my existence however is that apparently on the Tulsa site no one EVER removes anything once they have sold it.  So you always have to start every discussion with the same message “Hey do you still have X thing you posted on Craigslist?”.  Last week I thought I had found my Wii U.  It was not in the Tulsa metro but was within easy driving distance… was $180, came with a pro controller, and I believe a single game.  The problem is by the time I contacted the guy he already had someone coming to look it at 4pm that day.  After not returning a text asking if they did in fact buy it… and the person still not having removed the ad from Craigslist… I was back at the drawing board.

The only problem is at this point the obsession set in completely.  I don’t have a clue why I decided I needed a Wii U, but apparently it was one of the more important things in my life for a period of days.  There was a point where I had text conversations going with four different sellers, trying to talk them down to the price range I was willing to pay.  All of them had positives and negatives… and none of them were willing to go all the way down to $200 for this reason or that.  The biggest problem in Tulsa is that everyone thinks their stuff is worth more than it actually is.  Then my wife suggested that I contact this one newer seller that had a bundle of stuff they were trying to sell for $300.  I had completely ignored it because it seemed so far out of my target price.  Amazingly enough after a few back and forths I got them to a $250 price tag for a very new looking system and four games:  Mario Kart, Hyrule Warriors, Splatoon, and Bayonetta 2.  All of the games being ones that I would have eventually picked up for myself…  except Bayonetta.  I figured if nothing else that game could potentially be traded off for something else, or it might surprise me.  Once I got the unit it actually ended up being a better deal because also installed on the system was Super Mario U/Luigi U and Megaman Battle Network 4: Blue Moon.  So a total of six games and a unit with no scratches that I could see for $250.  While the price was not as low as I was hoping I think the end value of the deal was worth it.  At some point I am going to pick up the title that ultimately made me want a Wii U in the first place…  Mario Maker, but I want to spend some time playing the games I just got before going down that road.  Now I need to keep my eyes peeled as we are junking for some of the Wii titles I never actually played.

 

Incremental Progress

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I’m playing Bloodborne with Kodra, which is a kind of self-flagellation that I generally reserve for your more serious sort of monastery rather than my living room. Still, losing this badly to a video game is an experience best shared, and to our credit we’re making slow but steady progress.

Incremental Progress

Like its Souls predecessors, Bloodborne is brutal, unrelenting, and utterly fair. It’s satisfying in a way that few games are, because you genuinely feel like some of the things you fight are impossible until you beat them and realize they’re beatable. I rarely feel like I’m fighting the controls in the game, and the enemies are numerous and varied but all message pretty well. It makes me pay attention to things I normally leave to the UI– watching the angle of attacks, watching enemy animations, watching the game, rather than a hotbar or an addon or a warning message or what have you. You run into these big, hulking person-shaped monsters pretty early on, and while the first time we ran into them we died horribly, the second time I was able to pay attention to their movements and figure out how to simply not be where they were striking.

It genuinely feels like I’m developing skill as I play the game, and part of it is perception, which I like a lot. I can get better at the game just by watching how enemies fight, so even if I lose, I learn– and I lose a lot. It’s worth noting that we’ve played for probably ten or twelve hours at this point and we haven’t beaten any bosses. We’re not great at this game, and neither of us have played much of the previous ones.

It’s still a great couch co-op game, in the sense that we trade off each time we die, or (more recently) sometimes when we’re looking at an enemy that one of us is better at fighting than the other. With our powers combined, we’re almost a single competent player, it’s awesome. One thing I’ve noticed is that the game rewards boldness a lot more than the previous ones. My previous experience with Demon’s Souls was hiding behind a shield and moving through the world in fear, very defensively. Bloodborne rewards me for acting boldly, dashing through that group of enemies and going back into the fight when I take a hit rather than hiding in a corner to lick my wounds and heal.

I also really like the little notes that are left around. Seeing other players try to string together warnings with the limited word/phrase selection is fantastic, and we’ve gotten quite a number of handy hints from them. It makes the whole game feel like a shared experience, and the blend of pre-emptively helpful (“reeks of trap!” and “remember hidden path”) and post-tragedy frustration (“vile crows” and “alas, ambush”) messages are often really funny. I think my favorite so far is, at the edge of a fatal-looking drop, simply “time for common sense”.

There’s something I love about people getting creative with heavily constrained communication. The ‘helpful’ messages littered throughout Bloodborne and the Souls games would be nowhere near as fun if players could simply type things out. Instead, the strict, limited word selection and short length makes for some delightful moments, especially when you run into a note that you know is trying to tell you something important, but you have no idea what it’s trying to say. Sometimes messages are just trolling you, but you’re not sure how until later.

The best note I’ve seen isn’t actually in Bloodborne– it was in Demon’s Souls. At the center of a bridge, filled with enemies and that a dragon would continually fly over and breathe fire on, there was a note. It wasn’t reachable for ages– you had to kill the dragon or otherwise be rid of it before you could stand on the part of the bridge where the note was, and I remember running past it but not being able to stop and read it maybe twenty times before finally getting a chance. I finally defeated the dragon, made the long trip back to that one bridge, fought all the enemies on it, and, curiosity burning, went to check the note that it had taken me nearly a week to reach and reveal.

It read, bright and cheerfully, “Hi!”

100th Episode Mishap

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Things Happened

This morning I am blogging a bit out of sequence, because things happened.  Normally speaking on Sunday mornings I go through a little ritual.  Traditionally I manage to get what I think of as my first pass edit done on Saturday night, so that Aggrochat mostly resembles its final form by the time I go to bed.  I get up in the morning and mash it all together and do the final pass, before posting it all over the place.  Last night however… when I listened to the show my heart fell in my chest as I noticed that it was significantly screwed up.  All it took was for me to see the waveform to realize that something just wasn’t right, and I thought it was pretty much going to be an entire loss.  This morning however I screwed with the audio until I reached a point where… it is still very much screwed up but it is salvageable.  Essentially for whatever reason on the new Teamspeak setup my recording is completely jacked an sounds like trying to watch Cinemax in the 80s when you didn’t have it added to your subscription.  Admit it guys… we all tried to sneak a peak at stuff we shouldn’t be seeing through the constant mechanical hum.  The original pass this morning sounded pretty much exactly like that with me being shifted to a higher pitch than normal…  dubbing it Chipmunk Bel.

After a few hours of trying various things I managed to isolate a lot of the hum, and now instead it just sounds like I am in the witness protection program and disguising my voice with a really horrible modulator.  I think the show might be salvageable, and I am getting a push by our fans on witter to go ahead and post what exists.  The thing that shocks me is just how little I have freaked out over this.  The worse case scenario was that we lost a show… and in the the grand scheme of things it is pretty much a miracle that this… show 100 is the first time we have really had major issue.  Sure there have been times we have gotten disconnected in the middle of recording and that I have had to knit together a show out of two pieces.  However overall we have had really good luck, so much so that we never even thought about having more than one person try and do a recording at the same time.  In the future however I think we are going to have a bot hanging out doing nothing but recording the channel with the hopes that it catches everything in one nice constant volume stream.

Stuff Went Wrong

Additionally on the positive side everyone OTHER than me last night sounded amazing.  So the new set up seems to be great…. once I can sort out what the hell went wrong with my side of things.  That is what is so screwy is that while talking everyone else said I sounded great too, however when it came to actually recording my own voice it went horribly wrong.  If nothing else doing the bot recording thing should take care of that problem, but I still think there is some setting somewhere that is wrong… given that teamspeak saves audio settings on a server by server basis and even at times a channel by channel basis.  The plan is to do a bunch of testing between today and next weekend and will hopefully sort out which magical setting unscrews my voice.  In the meantime however I am pretty damned proud of how much I managed to minimize the effect.  Granted things are still screwed up… but they are in a much less screwed up state than they were this morning.  One of these days I really need to take some lessons in audio engineering because it would help if I had a damned clue what I was doing.