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The Kerfuffle

December 30, 2015 by Belghast

Getting Out

For the last few days we have more or less been stuck in the house. We had quite literally three and a half days of nonstop rain, that then turned into ice, sleet and snow. Yesterday however we were getting to the point of being stir crazy. It is funny how much different you feel about your home when you feel like you can’t or at least shouldn’t leave it. I can happily stay home for days on end without leaving… but the moment I feel like I am trapped there… I start to go stir crazy. So as a result my wife and I had decided that yesterday we would get out regardless of how cold it was. Admittedly cold for me is sub freezing… not necessarily the negative temperatures that the rest of my readers might consider cold. We essentially had one task that needed to get done, and a bunch of other things that we sorted out somewhere in the middle. My wife’s tribal tag was due, so we had to trek out to the small town that has a Cherokee nation tag office, and what I thought was going to take fifteen minutes ended up taking close to an hour because they were short workers due to the holiday break. After that we grabbed a friend and went out looking for post holiday clearance bargains…. and the strange hair stuff my wife uses that no one seems to stock.

At the first place we stopped we managed to find both the hair gunk, as well as clearance Legos. At some point I had picked up The Phantom ship from Star Wars Rebels for cheap…. I want to say something in the range of $8-10. Then I had seen The Ghost a handful of times marked down but always passed it up for this reason or that. I had been kicking myself for not snapping it up when I saw the stores start to close it out, but apparently the target we went to somehow managed to still have one after the Christmas rush. Better yet it was marked down by like $40 making it the best deal I had seen on it yet. What I am really curious about is whether or not The Phantom will dock with The Ghost like it does in the television show. Some googling makes it seem like that is the case, so I am really hoping. My big problem with my Legos is finding a place to display them after I build them up. This is one of the big solutions I need to figure out for my office. I thought about some sort of shelving on the walls, but finding a way to make it somehow immune to cats jumping up there and knocking everything around is always going to be a problem. When we went out to eat yesterday I snapped a photo of what was a broken “legal age of drinking” sign in the bar area. Apparently we are super hardcore here in Oklahoma as we seem to allow newborns to drink.

The Kerfuffle

Something is going on in the WoW twitter community, and to be honest I am not entirely sure what is up. I’ve tried to piece things together as best as I can, but the root seems to be that two different groups are fighting… and it somehow is over the #warcraftpositivity hashtag. What has been so damned odd on the outside looking in is just how many people who are apparently not even involved in the initial kerfuffle are getting pulled into the fray. I had things I was going to say, but honestly I am not even sure if it matters. It just really sucks to be on the outskirts and watching two different groups of friends fighting over something that was supposed to be a good thing in the first place. Essentially while the Internet is a huge place… when you are mostly hanging out in a small corner of it there are going to be times when you keep running into people that for whatever reason you do not get along with. At this point you can do one of two things… you can make a big deal of it and get upset or you can just accept that these people still exist in the world and there is nothing you can do about it. Your friends can still be your good and true friends… and still like this other person. Sure it is awkward as hell to be part of a sequence of messages that include this other person… that might have you blocked and as a result you are only seeing part of the conversation… but at the end of the day no matter how much you huff and puff there isn’t much you can really do about it.

All of these things tend to start with a difference of opinion, and then it gets inflated to the point where it is a verbal war. Well meaning people get in the middle of issues that don’t actually involve them, and as a result it becomes a “thing” that seems to leaving everyone scratching their heads as to what exactly happened. I was not even really on social media that much over the holidays, yet I still seem to have gotten wrapped up in it as I got some random un-follows from folks loosely connected to the mess. I’ve used twitter since 2009 and in that time I have found less than a half dozen folks that were not bots getting auto-blocked from reporting spam… that I actually found vile enough to block. There are some folks and hashtags that I have muted in Tweetdeck but that is an entirely different story. Basically it takes a lot to get me to block someone, and I try my damnedest to never act based purely on third or fourth hand knowledge. I am not big on the shunning of people for a reason that are not deeply personal to me… and even then while I will never forgive some people, I can still functional and interact with them in a generally friendly manner. I hold some serious grudges against a few individuals based on my interactions with them in WoW, but I also knew that at some point because of mutual friends I would have to keep interacting with them.

WoW Community

The problem is… that due to events like this happening with a frighteningly regular frequency, the WoW Community has developed this reputation of being like a middle school lunch room. At times this is absolutely a fair assessment, but it is also a shallow one. The players who are online and interacting on a regular basis do not represent the bulk of Warcraft players. Most people just want to log in every night, and decompress while killing internet dragons… and don’t really reach out much past their own guild or immediate circle of real life friends. I’ve heard the WoW Community referred to as Toxic, and this is also I think unfair. Sure this particular community has some problems, but those problems are only really noticed…. because it is so insanely huge still. When you are part of the largest MMO community, even single problem is going to be magnified through sheer numbers. Sure there are more assholes in WoW, because there are far more players there to interact with… and the folks that hang out in trade chat and heckle other players… seem more noticeable when you have a hundred on a server… instead of just having two or three in other games. The same goes for the twitter presence, because the wow community as a whole out numbers pretty much every other MMO gaming community I am part of combined.

What gets lost in the noise is all of the positive things that are happening behind the scenes. There are people who are doing a lot of good and putting a lot of actual positivity out in the world. Just because a handful of miscreants takes offense to that, and decides to derail something…. doesn’t mean that it was a bad thing in the first place. The truth is… were it not for the fact that I was on twitter and interacting with a handful of the folks connected to the events… I probably wouldn’t have even known something was going on. Both House Stalwart the guild I founded back in 2004, and Facepull the horde side guild I am finally getting to do awesome things with… are both doing amazingly well and thanks to the holiday break have more smiling faces active and happy to be in game than I have seen in a long time. That is what matters in Warcraft, not the bickering or the name calling that seems to be happening somewhere in the ether above the actual game. I think those of us who are watching things seemingly burn down around us… need to remember that in a couple of weeks time no one will remember what the hell actually happened. Things will keep moving forward the way they have always moved forward, and people will still keep being awesome all around the community. So my hope is that if folks still cannot get along after all of this… that they just quietly disagree in their own corner of the twitterverse, so that the rest of us can continue having a happy place to rest our heads.

Week in Gaming 12/27/2015

December 27, 2015 by Belghast

Holiday Lagged

There are some mornings when trying to think is a struggle… this is one of those mornings. Last night I suffered from a pretty bad bout of insomnia, and instead of just sitting in bed and hoping for sleep to find me… I got up and played PS4. At which point I realized it was 2:30 in the morning and I really needed to try and sort out how to sleep. The day as a whole today is rainy and nasty and the antithesis of just how delightful the holiday was here in Oklahoma. On Christmas day I was running around in a short sleeved shirt, and were it not for the wind I wouldn’t have needed my hoodie. We were warned however that just after the holiday the temperature would drop, and from the sounds of it the panhandle of the state is now getting lots of ice. Thusfar it has been only rain…. but so much of it that sitting upstairs in my office it actually drowned out the sound of all of the various machines whirring away. I finally got up around 8:30 and attempted to start the day, but the problem being… that I have largely just been staring at the screen unable to get a post started. Then suddenly I remembered…. it’s Sunday… the day I have a crutch to fall back on in the form of the week in review posts. So I am hobbling along on this crutch for all that is sacred in the world… otherwise I have no clue what I would write about.

Return of Destiny

Week in Gaming 12/27/2015 — MIDA In Action

I guess Bungie got the message that it sucks when Xur does not have a weapon option during the Friday festivities. The last four or five weeks he has brought some new weapon each time…. and this week was no different with the newly Year-2-ized version of the MIDA Multitool. During this month he has also brought the Monte Carlo, Hardlight, and Telesto. The only problem here is Friday I have to make a decision… do I care enough about getting this weapon to grind out the 23 strange coins needed to purchase it. The Monte Carlo was a no brainer, because I have heard so many good things about this gun… that I just had to play with one myself. Telesto was similarly a no brainer, because I have gotten two of these to drop… so had no need for it. MIDA and Hardlight however I was left with the decision if it was really worth the needed grinding to pick it up. With the Hardlight I decided… that I already have a lot of Auto Rifles that I really like… between my love of the Zarinaea-D, Zhalo Supercell, Monte Carlo and the newly improved Fabian Strategy… I had no real use for a new Auto Rifle to add to the mix. For the MIDA however I crowd sourced my opinion and got messages back from Sig and Squirrel both saying to pick it up… that it was both amazing in PVE and PVP. So far I am liking it, but I am having to get used to using a Scout Rifle again. I have largely just been using Auto and Pulse Rifles for awhile now, so it is taking some adjusting. The truth is… for the most part there are very few weapons that I don’t like in Destiny.

Last night while dealing with Insomnia I decided to cast aside the Hunter and Titan briefly and instead focus on the Warlock who still need to hit the level cap of 40. I realize I could be leveling through doing the Taken King content, but instead I just ended up clearing out my bounty log. I am finally reaching the point where my Stranger’s Rifle is beginning to show its age, as I finally got some weapon drops that are technically higher than it is. The problem is… I am so damned used to using the Stranger’s Rifle… and the whole fully automatic pulse rifle thing is so overpowered… that I am probably going to keep at it until I hit 40, or at least until I get a purple weapon to replace it with. In the meantime I am left with the decision… do I grind my way to 40 like I am doing in a super chill and enjoyable way… or do I actually start with the quests. On my Hunter I largely waited to do quests until I was at the level cap, so I could revel in the sweet sweet engram drops that seem to happen like candy during missions. I still have all of the House of Wolves and Dark Beyond quests as well… and those in theory won’t be nearly as beneficial gear wise. So I might just start on doing those and see how close to 40 I can get.

Another thing I did this week was get my Ace of Spades exotic on the hunter. I am currently on the First Curse of the step of the Gunsmith quest on my Titan… and I have to say I am simply not looking forward to doing all of the bullshit you have to do to get it. The only problem with Ace of Spades is just how crap hand cannons seem to be right now. I am not sure which I dislike more… the absolute potato range of them… or just how small the magazine and ammunition pool is in general with them. I run out of ammunition while using a hand cannon faster than almost anything else… and I never seem to get enough normal ammo drops to be able to use these in strikes. So instead every now and then I break them out while doing bounties when things don’t matter quite so much. The positive of Ace of Spades however is that it just look bad ass. So in theory it might get some use, but not really likely given all of the other exotics that I have and legendaries that are also equally well stated.

World of Warcraft

The other day I posted about my mission that level a Cat Druid to 40 all so that I could leave the 360NoMount club… and add the Christmas Yeti mount to my collection. It has been two days and I am now getting close to the goal. As of last night when I finally reached the point where I thought it was probably time to attempt going to sleep… I was roughly 2/3rds of a level from 40 and was just now starting Feralas. It has been a fun ride pushing up a new Cow Druid, and went a lot faster than I might had expected. I took a slightly different route than I did with my Warlock and the end result feels like I got a lot more straight forward Kill Ten type quests which I can burn through insanely quickly. The other thing that helped is the fact that my druid is a skinner… and I was constantly jumping random leather bearing animals along the way to level that. Back the in the day all of the leveling guides used to tell you to always be engaged in killing something… like if there was a mob on your way to your objective to always kill it no matter what. Having done that on the Druid and not so much on the Warlock… I have to say that yes in fact that is the superior way to level especially with all of the experience boosted heirlooms that I am wearing. The question is… now that I have almost achieved my goal… do I hit 40 and quit… or do I keep pushing up the druid. I am not a big fan of the server cluster I am on, and the people seem to be insanely rude compared to Argent Dawn so at some point I may transfer the druid over once I finish it. I realize I can cross realm group… but man… some of the stuff I have encountered here I have never run into on AD. That is saying a lot given that I used to always think of Argent Dawn as a pretty horrific place.

The other activity that I spent time this week doing was leveling my Warlock. Basically playing her was my reward for completing my holiday dailies… and in part the only reason why I made so much progress on the druid so quickly, is that I completely started ignoring that holiday dailies existed. At some point I need to go through all of my characters and loot the presents in Orgrimmar and Ironforge before they poof, but I think once I get to 40 on the druid I am going to switch back to playing the Warlock. It is funny how isolating it can be playing on a different server even though you have access to BNet and your friends list. Facepull is just friendly and somewhat active green spam and I love having it around. It is my hope that at some point soon we will get the rumored battlenet channels, which will hopefully let us have guild like chat spanning across multiple games. If there was an addon that existed that gave me access to slack while playing World of Warcraft… I would be in a perfect place.

Best Gift Ever

December 26, 2015 by Belghast

Star Wars Christmas

There are times when the best gift at Christmas… you are not quite sure if it was intentional or not. I’ve talked about our relatively chill Christmas day plans for the better part of a week, and I have to say after going through it yesterday it was far better than I could have imagined. First off we have all this amazing food… that we will be eating for a week. On the menu….

Chilli-Cheese Rotel Dip
Sausage Cheese Balls
Pulled BBQ Beef
White Chocolate Cranberry Clusters
Chocolate Cashew Clusters
Snickerdoodles
Ranch Pretzels
White and Milk Chocolate dipped Pretzels
Flakey Biscuits to heap the BBQ Beef on

It was not exactly the most conventional meal, but we grazed happily throughout the course of the original three Star Wars movies. You cannot have read my blog over the last few months and somehow missed the fact that Star Wars was a major part of my childhood. I went to see the original when I was roughly 2 years old in the local drive in… and was hooked from that point on. So for Christmas it was a given that I would end up getting a bunch of Star Wars merchandise from my parents. The best gift however was this marathon and the effect it seems to have had on my wife. I am trying to keep my expectations tempered, but maybe just maybe we have another Star Wars fan in the family.

Granted she has always been amazing about my Star Wars thing… and has brought me home various artifacts like Star Wars Legos, or just the other night a cool set of Kylo Ren playing cards. So even though she didn’t get why the movie was important to me… she was always super awesome about putting up with my thing. I remember in college she even used to get into the hunt for new action figures, helping me crawl through the racks of figures to find the one or two that I didn’t already have. The prequels pretty much killed my desire to be surrounded by action figures on my walls… but I do pick up the occasional figure every now and then and on the wall between my monitors I have Dark Jedi Luke, Jedi Leia, Clone Emperor, Mara Jade, Admiral Thrawn, a snow gear Plo Koon, and a badass Savage Opress figure. So yesterday I half expected the desire to watch the three originals and then go see the new one… was at least in part a gift for me. That is until she invited one of her friends along for the journey. After watching the originals and seeing the new one…. she came home with all of these questions that I can’t really answer before she watches the prequels. So right now the plan is to spend today marathoning through those as well… and I am happy as a clam when I say… it was not MY idea to do this.

Keeping it Chill

There are a lot of things I am into that I think she would also like. I mean she was a huge fan of the Harry Potter series and got into it long before I did, and is also a fan of the Star Trek series and has been amped to see the newer movies. So the raw DNA of a Science Fiction and Fantasy fan is there, and I think if I could ever get her interested in say the modern Joss Whedeon Marvel films she would really enjoy them as well. However with those… we would need to start at the very beginning chronologically and do another Marathon since each movie at least in part fleshes out another corner of the Avengers universe. All of this said…. I am trying to keep it super chill and not put any pressure on her to like things more than she actually does. However just having my wife ask me questions about Star Wars… might be quite possibly the best Christmas gift I have ever received. I mean I guess it was impossible to live with me for the last two decades and not have SOME of the Star Wars franchise to imprint on her. She has always liked R2-D2, Chewbacca, The Jawas and the Ewoks… and she used to laugh when I would throw a blanket over my head and say Utini.

One of the awesome things about our marriage has always been that we could have completely different likes… but each of us would be supportive over whatever the other person was into. She has been awesome about the daily blog thing… and the podcast… and this game or that… because I know they really do put dents in our schedule that are theoretically “untouchable” where I need to be at a keyboard. Similarly I am cool with the fact that there are many nights where she works in her classroom until 8pm or has this or that church activity that needs attention. It has always amazed me at just how well we work together, when in truth we don’t have that many shared interests. At the core has always been this willingness to go along with whatever the other person wants to do… because I think we enjoy seeing the other half excited even if we aren’t that excited ourselves. All of this said… I am not expecting a Christmas Miracle… and all of the sudden my wife will be as obsessed with Star Wars as I have been all of these years. I still think its amazing however for her to be asking the same sorts of questions that I pondered all throughout my childhood and even now have nothing more than vague guesses at. I think without a doubt though, there will be no question as to whether or not we will be going to the next several movies because if nothing else… she seems hooked on the new generation of films after watching Force Awakens last night.

Christmas and Catte Durids

December 25, 2015 by Belghast

Chillest Christmas

This year is turning out to be the most chill Christmas, since 2003 when we took a cruise to Cancun. At this point I am honestly not sure how we managed to get away with this low key of a Christmas, but I am not complaining. For most of our married life, my wife and I have spent both Thanksgiving and Christmas running around like crazy, trying to appease every household with an appearance of adequate length. The entire process leaves us not really enjoying any of it, and stressed about the next place we have to go while at any given house. Now the last decade has wreaked havoc upon our family, and with it has slowly whittled down the number of houses we actually have to go to. Previously Christmas Eve was this tradition of going to my home town and going to mass with my mothers side of the family, and then opening presents with them afterwards… and finally ending up across the street at my aunts house late at night. This meant Christmas Eve we often didn’t get home until after midnight, only to need to get up bright and early Christmas morning to be at another house before noon. Unfortunately the matriarchs of both sides of the family have gone, and with it a lot of the traditions.

We are trying to create new traditions among my generation, like getting together the other night at Phat Philly’s here in town just to share a meal and a conversation. But many of these new traditions are not necessarily dependent on a given day, the way the past generation was. In my family it has always seemed that if it did not happen on the actual day… it didn’t count. For me… getting together period and hanging out counts regardless of when it is happening. We originally had plans for Christmas Eve, but those fell through due to illness in the family. As a result last night we ended up going out to dinner with my folks, and then them coming back to our house to open gifts and chill out for awhile. It was really nice, and while we have yet to see my wife’s side of the family… we are somehow ending up with this perfect Christmas day where we get to hang out at home and snack on all the goodies that my wife baked yesterday. As I have mentioned the last few days, we are doing a Star Wars Marathon and then hitting the new movie at 7pm tonight. Since I have been asked… we are only doing 4, 5 and 6 largely because neither my wife nor her friend that is coming over are really big Star Wars fans. When indoctrinating someone into the franchise… I think the prequels do nothing but muddy the water… because they expect you to already know a bunch about Star Wars. I am more than happy to simply not include them for the time being, because from what I could tell they had no real bearing on number seven.

Some Assembly Required

Yesterday I got a message from one of my friends, saying they had a Christmas gift for me. The only gotcha was that I would have to make a character on a specific server to receive it. This message came through at a time yesterday when I was babysitting the kitten… with us both locked in my office (to keep her out of the baked goods) so it worked out perfectly. I created Belgrave the Catte Durid and my friend met me in Newbie Cow Land. Next thing I know she had a trade window open and handed me the item on the right. At once I was both thrilled and understood what she meant when she said it might require some work on my part. On my blog I have talked about my current chase of the holiday Yeti mount, and how Lodur and I founded #team360nomount and unfortunately hunting this mount had kinda dominated my play sessions. Not only was my friend giving me the gift of a mount… but also giving me the gift of chilling the hell out and not worrying quite so much about doing every single holiday daily. The first thing I did every morning was work through my holiday missions, and I knew I would have ended up a ragey mess if I had done all of this… and still ended up without one.

This is proof positive that I have amazing friends, because so many times something like this has happened. One of my friends shows up to save the day… and my sanity. As a result however I am shifting gears and since The MooCowAdin is now my best geared character… I am going to start running up the catte durid instead of my Warlock. Right now the plan is to go a mixture of Kitty and Bear, which lets me tank and pewpewpew. I always say I am going to play Moonkin, but then never actually end up playing Moonkin because it is a super fiddly spec. The strangest thing about playing this character is how vastly different the leveling experience feels on a non-roleplaying server. On Argent Dawn and The Scryers in your open world zones you are playing with lots of other players from Role Playing servers. I have always said that RP servers just attracted a better caliber of people… and it seems like that really is the case. Within the first few minutes of playing my druid I had been spit on and slapped numerous times by other players, and while running around in Azshara last night I had people constantly trying to steal the skins from my corpses as I was looting them. Conversely while leveling my Warlock on the amalgam of Roleplaying servers… I constantly waving and blowing kisses at me while wandering around. There have been many times I was getting low on health that someone just shows up and throws a random heal. So I gotta say… the experience is so night and day that it just seems odd.

Merry Christmas

Christmas is a day that means lots of different things to lots of different people. So my hope is that whatever today means to you… it is in fact an awesome day. I don’t always sync up with my family, and there are a lot of times it feels like they don’t really “get me”. The person they assume I am isn’t always the same as the person I really am, but in the long run…. I think a lot of people feel that way. Otherwise we would never leave the home and strike out into the world. What I will say is that over the years I have carefully surrounded myself with awesome people that do get me. I am blessed with some truly amazing friends, and in the end… your friends are the family you choose. So whatever today means to you, or whatever your traditions happen to be… my hope is that you are spending it with the people that make you happy. I am going to spend the day chilling out with my wife and one of her friends and watching the hell out of some Star Wars while playing World of Warcraft. I feel like it is going to be an amazing day.