This is going to be a bit of an odd post but it is something that has been on my mind. Steel yourself for a rather melancholic romp through my childhood. I have to physically go into the office this morning, and I don’t really have any other content ideas staged so we are going to go with this one. It is also going to be somewhat difficult to write because I want to speak in generalities to protect the innocent. If you have been reading this blog for some time you might know that I grew up in a very small town. The town was so small that it largely did not have much in the way of the infrastructure required to survive from day to day. I live an hour south from the small town that I grew up in, but about twenty minutes west was a medium sized town that we were in constantly because that is where the closest Walmart was, along with various sundry other amenities like the nearest hospital.
Recently I have been spending a good deal of time in this medium sized town because with my father breaking his hip then having a hernia surgery and various assorted doctors visits… have pushed me to drive its streets once again. I would say that honestly this medium sized down holds more memories for me than probably even my home town because we spent so much time there. During the summers I would take part in this Arts Enrichment camp at their performing arts center that is this giant art deco adjacent building. I would spend four or five weeks each year going eight plus hours a day to this camp, some of which was completely unstructured time roaming the facility and in a way it almost feels like a home that I once lived in. Each time I pass the building waves of half remembered memories wash over me and it was one of these that I am going to focus on this morning.
There are so many faces that I remember vividly, but I am awful with names. However in all of these fragmented bits of my databanks, one specific name stood out. I have no clue WHY I specifically remember their name but as one does when you are bored one night… I googled it. Seems as though it is a pretty unique name because everything that I was able to pull up from Google seemed to be linked to this individual. In part this is why I am not using names because I have a feeling that they might just be the only person named this on the internet. Among the links I found was one to an Art Portfolio website that included a contact form. It took me a few days but I finally cobbled together a message that I am certain sounded like the murmurings of a madman and hit send.
A lot of the memories of this time blend together because I went to the Art Camp a number of different times under different disciplines. The first time I attended was in the band program, the second time I think was for traditional art, the third time for photography and the last time was for creative writing. Everything is pretty clear other than those middle two times… not sure which one came first but in any one of these disciplines there are roughly ten to fifteen kids that go along with one or two instructors. The person in question I remember in association with the traditional art program. I remember hanging out with them quite a bit that summer, eating lunches in the same pod of folks and even hanging out at a dance that was associated with the program. I remember them being extremely agitated that night over something but I don’t remember what.
There are certain songs that trigger memories of that dance, namely Never Let Me Down Again by Depeche Mode. I think this is largely because the individual I reached out to, had a friend who was super into Depeche Mode in the Ballet program, and at this dance they kept trying to get whoever was controlling the sound system to play it. I remember the name of the Pottery instructor and that we made Raku which is a kind of pottery where we fired it in a makeshift Kiln that was effectively a trashcan packed with wood and paper… which leads the glaze to crack and the clay to turn black from the soot. I also remember making this nonsense leather mask in the class that was somewhere between Kabuki and Voodoo themed. Each memory is a vignette out of space and time and I’ve sort of woven them into a narrative for lack of other context.
Scanning back forward to today, I thought maybe the Art Portfolio website was unattended and that maybe I was just sending an email out into the void. I set my expectations that I was unlikely to ever hear back from this person, but roughly a day later I had a return response, which lead to a handful of exchanges back and forth. While the recipient was extremely gracious about such a weird interaction, and remembered a number of details about that summer… while they never really said as much I can tell they have no clue at all who I am even when I provided a picture from that era in my life. This person was memorable enough for them to act as an anchor in my memory but whatever recollections they might have had about me were washed away by time. I understand this completely because my parent will dredge up people that I supposedly knew as a child and I cannot with any amount of concentration muster any details about them.
This whole sequence however has had this weird impact on me. It is starting to make me question my own personal narrative about how events in the past went down. Like in this case I remembered hanging out with this person quite a bit in maybe a group of four people total. Maybe I was just the annoying kid that was hanging on trying to find a place to fit in? Maybe I just came across as random white dude number 407 in a sea of other very similar folks that blended into the background radiation? Thinking back I do remember this was likely before my final growth spurt and absolutely before facial hair, and from my high school days onwards the three defining features that people generally recall about me are the beard, being 6’4″ and having a deeper than normal voice. During that summer however, I had none of these on my side.
It does however make me wonder what sort of impression I leave on people now. Am I just a nameless and faceless voice in the chaos of the internet? Am I someone that leaves a mark on those that I have interacted with? I warned you this was going to be a melancholic post, and I don’t really have any answers to these. I am told that I leave a mark on people, but also when confronted with the fact that someone I very clearly remember has zero memory of me… it does sorta make you wonder how tenuous that connection might be.
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Morning Friends! It has been awhile since I wrote a complete nonsense post and as such now that I have some nonsense to talk about I thought it was high time. I am a horrible human being. Like I realize that is a big blanket statement but I will attempt to explain WHY I am a horrible human being. First there are some key elements that you need to understand for this story to work. This is Josie rolled into a ball sleeping on the box beside me during the work day. She is a mess, but a delightful one. As a ringtail breed as I understand them… she will pretty much be permanently in a state of extended kittenhood. She plays with everything and has a grand ole time doing it. She is also EXTREMELY precocious and figures out ways to get into pretty much everything. She wakes us up on the weekends by trying to running across us, attacking the rug at the foot of the bed or attempting to climb the curtains. Let me reiterate… she is a mess but we love her greatly.
Another key bit of information that is important for this story to make any sense is the fact that my wife has no depth perception. I don’t mean this is a funny “ha ha” sort of way stating that she is bad at catch, but instead in a very literal sense. She was born without her eyes fused together and while she spent much of her childhood going through an arduous path of attempts to make them fuse… it never quite happened. There are some truly adorable photos of her as a child sporting an eyepatch, mischievous grin and adorable curls… and I can’t revel in just how stinking cute she was because it is a traumatic experience. It took me until recently to understand some of her behavior like her reluctance to use drive throughs or to gas up her own car. These are both things I do for her generally, but never understood why until she finally explained some twenty years after marriage that she cannot figure out where she is in relation to the drive through or the gas pump.
The next bit of information that you need to understand is what a “Roly Polly” is, which admitted gets called by a bunch of names depending on the region you grew up in. I think more collectively they are known as pill bugs. One of the first things we learn as a child is that they roll up into a ball as a defensive mechanism (or to preserve moisture in periods of dryness). It is fun of course to flick a rolypolies and watch it go rolling across the ground. We have a partially collapsed ductwork through our concrete foundation and as a result the odd random smol bug finds its way into our house. Generally speaking I leave Rolypolies alone because they are obviously lost if they made it inside but occasionally I will just open the bedroom door and set them outside so they can find a better climate.
Now that you have all of the key bits of information we will move on with this story. I had gotten up and showered and was getting dressed when my wife was in the bathroom. Josie has this habit of obsessively staying in the bedroom with us as we get ready, and she was apparently stalking something in the adjacent bathroom. My wife proclaimed that she thought there was a bug on the floor and I of course asked what kind. She wasn’t sure and that lead me to come into the room and upon seeing it I immediately said it was just a rolypolie and not a big deal. She doubted me because she said it didn’t look like a rolypolie… because again no depth perception she just saw a flattened black thing on the ground. So without thinking I reached down and gave the bug a little flick… it rolled up into a ball and skidded across the room.
Remember that Josie is extremely precocious. She immediately grasped what had happened and proceeded to start batting the rolypolie around the bathroom floor. I am a horrible human being because I taught a cat how to torture a poor little bug. At some point she lost track of it and we proceeded to quietly open the back door and rescue the poor thing. However I am absolutely certain that Josie is not going to bop every single bug to see if it rolls into a ball and can be made into a “more funner” toy. I’ve given her a bit of information she did not need to know because up until now she had mostly just quietly followed bugs around the house out of curiosity. I just taught her that they can also be really fun toys.
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Good Morning Folks! This is going to be a bit of a short post because I have to take my father to the hospital this morning. He is undergoing an outpatient surgery so hopefully you all will keep him in your thoughts today. I am not entirely certain what my day is going to look like so I am packing a bag full of nonsense to keep me entertained. I am also not entirely certain what the situation at the hospital is going to look like, but I am thankful that as of yesterday my full “immunity” should have kicked in from my Covid-19 vaccination. I am as prepared as I can be to be around other people… and as such I am apparently going to be giving it a major test by hanging out in a hospital.
Last night was the final evening of the Jester’s Festival buff and I didn’t do nearly as much grinding as I thought I would. Instead I found myself finishing off a few holiday event quests, picking up the unstable morpholith pet which will ultimately be required to get any of the other items from event quests. However I am finding out that each time you upgrade the pet into something else… you lose your original pet and have to purchase it again. I failed to do enough daily quests in order to get the OTHER thing that was available during this event. I am not sure how much I care about player skins in the game because they are all sorta overpowering in appearance.
Even thought I didn’t really participate that much in the event, I feel like I had a pretty great success for the single week that it was open. I largely spent this event catching up my stable of alts, because Elder Scrolls Online is one of those games where I had never really spent time on any other characters. As such I had my Dragon Knight at maxed level and pushing champion levels… but almost everything else was sub level 10 before starting the event. My Warden was a bit higher but all told I leveled it, my Necromancer and managed to get my Nightblade to 31 before running out of juice. I figure the next event which also offers a similar buff… I will focus on the quests and end my night grinding rather than starting it that way.
Here is the thing though… much like leveling the content in a very specific order… grinding up alts to 50 is entirely a “me” thing. For me I like leveling my account as a whole and right now my Champion level is 441 and I want to see that increase. Also my personal jam in this game is running around and questing through zones which I will absolutely do on my level capped alts. I just wanted to be gaining Champion Levels instead of base levels while doing that however because you can burn through CP pretty rapidly while questing. Grinding the Dark Anchors is absolutely NOT the optimal way to play the game if you are doing this for the first time. It is just a thing I am doing to catch my stable of desired alts up to my main so everyone can share in the Champion Leveling experience.
If you have found yourself watching from the wings as I roam around Tamriel and considered getting into the game, now might be the ideal time to do so. Right now in honor of the seventh anniversary of the game they are running an event that allows you to have a free trial of the game until the 13th of April. It is available on PlayStation, Xbox and then the PC cluster of services Steam, Stadia and the Elder Scrolls website/launcher. Seeing as I date back to Alpha I play the game through the official Launcher given that the game started out that way. PlayStation and Xbox are islands and you can only play with other players on those specific networks. PC players get to mix it up and all NA and all EU players are together regardless of the service.
The main difference being if you start on Steam for example, all of your future purchases will have to be through Steam. Same is true with Stadia or going through the official website. Similarly if you start on Stadia, I believe all purchases have to go through Stadia but I am not entirely certain about that one. When I briefly tried Elder Scrolls Online on Stadia I had all of my DLC that I purchased through my main PC account so your mileage may vary. Also of note, PC players can absolutely use a controller if that is your jam or play like I do with Mouse and Keyboard. If you have been curious about the game, then right now might be the time for you to dip your toes in and see if you like it without any risk. Normally speaking the game is “Buy to Play” but I do highly suggest the ESO Plus subscription which gives you a magical endless crafting materials bag and all DLC packs other than whatever the most current expansion is.
Well I am running out of time this morning so it is time for me to wrap this up and pack. Hopefully everything will go smoothly today and Dad will be out of surgery and recuperating by 1 pm. I hope also that he isn’t in a lot of pain and that it doesn’t hamper his mobility much. If you do find yourself trying out Elder Scrolls Online, my in game id is @Belghast so drop me a line and say hi.
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I realize I am extremely late to this party, but for those who have not yet heard the news there is a rumored discussion happening about Microsoft purchasing Discord. This acquisition has a rumored 10 billion dollar price tag associated with it and there are many articles talking about it so I am just going to link this one. This is apparently causing a large amount of discontent among the gamer circles, but I feel like this knee jerk reaction might be a little too fast. There are some things you have to understand before starting this article. My entire working career has been tied to Microsoft products and as such I have seen the ebb and flow of different initiatives. I’ve even been at several Microsoft development conferences over the years and had the benefit of meeting Bill Gates in the flesh during one of those cattle call meet and greet sessions. I feel like I sit comfortably in a camp between the Microsoft fanboys and the Microsoft doomsayers.
Microsoft has been on a bit of an acquisition spree of late snapping up a number of game studios, including the most recent Zenimax acquisition which largely just means Bethesda Softworks to most folks. From what I have seen so far, Microsoft appears to be a good steward of these games properties. For example I have followed Undead Labs pretty closely being a major fan of the State of Decay franchise and from what I can tell… Microsoft money has taken a lot of pressure off the studio to just do the stuff that they do best. Other commentary from folks at Obsidian and Double Fine seem to indicate the same. Not having to worry about how to make the next payroll probably does wonders for creativity in allowing folks to actually just sorta create the games.
However there is a very recent Microsoft failure in the minds of gamers and I think it is coloring their opinions right now. In 2016 Microsoft acquired a plucky little start up streaming platform called Beam and then proceeded to change its name to Mixer and pour copious amounts of resources into trying to make it a viable alternative to Twitch. This was a losing proposition from the moment Microsoft started down this path but it did give folks for awhile an alternative. The problem with this match up however is while you had Mixer backed by Microsoft, you also had Twitch backed by the power of Amazon. Twitch was already the brand leader in streaming, to a degree that not even YouTube has ever really been able to steal much market share away from them.
Having used both as a streamer and as a viewer… I personally believe that Beam/Mixer was the superior product. However I also believe that there was no fighting the purple juggernaut called Twitch. Having streamed on multiple platforms, there are just way more people that interact with Twitch as a whole and it becomes progressively harder and harder to convince your viewers to use anything other than that platform. Much like there will never really be a WoW Killer or a Facebook Killer… it is highly unlikely that anyone will ever top Twitch for streaming. They are just too dug into that niche and while I blame Microsoft for doing a piss poor job of notifying the streamers that they were going to be closing their doors… I don’t blame them for the failure of the platform.
However in the last week I have watched multiple communities attempt a quick migration away from Discord over a fear of something that may never actually come to fruition. It seems like a number of folks are jumping over to a service called Guilded, but largely it suffers from some of the same questions we have had for awhile. Like this has been the topic of many discussions among the AggroChat crew trying to glean exactly how Discord or a service like Guilded actually makes their money. Sure Discord has Nitro and Server boosts, but that cannot pay for anything close to the amount of server processing power, bandwidth and disk space required to keep a service like theirs up and running. Guilded similarly plans on offering premium access accounts and skins but likewise that cannot come close to paying the infrastructure bills.
In 1973 the artists Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman produced a short video titled “Television Delivers People” which from what I can tell is the initiation point of the old adage “You’re Not the Customer; You’re the Product”. I mean we have seen that written a number of different ways over the years but the words largely speak true. Any time you are not paying for a product, there is something that you are adding to the process that is valuable and are essentially creating the product that is sold. That product could be usage statistics or in the case of television access to your eyeballs and by reference your wallet and spending habits. So I have long tried to sort out what exactly is Discord or Guilded for that matter selling about us that makes it worth keeping a service up and running.
In the case of Microsoft reportedly looking at spending 10 Billion dollars to Acquire Discord, that transaction makes a lot of sense. Discord does a really good job of providing a free alternative to Teamspeak or Ventrilo and also does a pretty solid job of letting folks roll their own communities on the fly. While I love Teams… there are without a doubt some aspects of it that could be improved through an infusion of tech resources coming from a company who has likely been trying to keep things running on a relatively slim tech stack. Additionally Xbox Live chat sucks horrifically and if you could simply gut it and plug discord in its place… you would have an immediate fix to what feels like a sub par implementation that has not aged well. Similarly Skype is not a great user experience and could likely be refreshed greatly with an infusion of newer technology as well.
So this one acquisition for Microsoft serves to solve three potential problems in their aging infrastructure. Those products all make money for the company and it is pretty clear how the benefit works in each of those scenarios. Truthfully I would feel better about using Discord if I better understood its funding model and also knew that the folks working for the company would benefit from the stability of a massive corporation backing them. I’ve known several folks that worked at Microsoft over the years and from what I have been able to glean it seems like a relatively good place to work. It seems like they invest quite a bit of resources in their employees so I can’t see that it would be a bad call for anyone specifically looking to be acquired. While Mixer is a glaring exception, they do tend to support tech significantly longer than someone like Google that has a large graveyard of promising tech that they have buried.
Essentially to the gamers freaking out about this potentially happening… I would say to chill the fuck out. Microsoft has done some pretty cool things. Xbox Game Pass for example is quite possibly the best value in gaming right now and is extremely pro-consumer. Similarly they have done a pretty great job as the steward of Minecraft with significant development effort poured into that product and still maintaining both the more open ended Java client and the more locked down and regulated C# based Bedrock client. Again I get that a lot of this reaction is over Mixer, but that product was never going to claw away significant market share from Twitch no matter how many big name celebrities they convinced monetarily to switch platforms. The streaming market is too stratified and it will take a major paradigm shift for anything to beat team purple.
The evidence I see in front of me though, would tell me that Discord who is already a market leader in the services they provide would be just fine under the umbrella of Microsoft. Chances are the funding would allow them to grow and expand product offerings and maybe just maybe utilize some of the streaming tech. I can see a future where the Xbox client is replaced by a modified version of Discord that offers all of the same functionality. It seems like a pretty good future to me honestly.
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