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Given that it is a Friday and the first of February… I thought I would spend this morning talking about a few experiments that I did during January.  First up is the EufyCam E that I was given a copy of to review by Anker.  When I posted the review I said I would provide updates talking about how well it has generally worked, and I figured now might be a reasonable time for one of those.  I have used this WAY more than I expected to use it, in part because it is constantly alerting me when any motion has been detected at my front door.  Because I also use a TicWatch I will get a little buzz buzz buzz on my wrist and see that the EufyCam has detected activity.  At which point I flip open the app and see a stream of video similar to the still that I snagged above.  Do you know how much it improves my day when I see my neighborhood cat friends have decided at random to come visit during the day?  In fact as I am typing this my wrist has buzzed to let me know that this exact same cat is outside wanting attention…  which is adorable because he likes to kinda jump up and head butt your hand.

Without the Eufycam I never would have noticed that I had this visitor one morning either.  At first when I viewed it on my mobile device since I tend to just watch a postage stamp sized preview… I thought to myself “well that is a chubby cat I have never seen before”.  It was only later when I watched it full screen that I noticed….  oh that is a Raccoon.  This makes an awful lot of sense because last year we had something trying to tear into one of our plastic chests in the backyard, and I guess I always assumed it was a squirrel…  but knowing how tricksy Raccoons could be I would not be surprised if it was this little guy.  Also weirdly we have had a flock of birds just sorta randomly land on the porch…  I am guessing gobbling up the excess catfood that I gave the buzz buzz cat above.  Regardless…  all of these little breaks in the day when I have animals on the security camera make me very happy.

The other really useful thing that I did not think about with this camera is since my wife and I right now have staggered schedules…  she often times gets home before me but immediately goes out for a walk.  The camera gives me a time when she left the house so I know approximately how long it will be before she gets back.  Lately I have been using this arcane knowledge to time a cup of coffee so that it is ready for her to come in from the freezing cold.  Other times I just use this as a way of determining when is a good time to start dinner so that it is ready when she gets back also.  There is of course the ubiquitous use of determining when a package has arrived, but weirdly…  I am way more jazzed about the random animal friends.  I’ve not actually had an occasion of a solicitor since I installed the cam, but I did freak out the outdoor cat one day when I used the “talk through” feature to say hello.  All in all I am super happy with how well the setup has been working, and when it is more widely available on the market I want to see what it would take to add a few more cameras.

Another experiment that seems to be working is the whole “kick all products off to a twitter list” thing that I did shortly after the New Year (January 4th to be specific).  Originally this list was called Brands, because that was my original usage…  to cleanse my twitter feed of all spammy brand related information.  Recently however I have renamed it to “DistanceFollow” because that is effectively what I am doing…  following a user but putting some distance between them and my day to day twitter usage.  So there are a few things that have come about as a result of this.  Firstly this combined with turning off the retweets of a few accounts has made my twitter experience way more enjoyable.  I actually enjoy popping in to read twitter because it feels more like it used to…  me checking in on what my friends were doing throughout the day.  While I don’t have near as much time to check in as I once did, that actually makes this feel better because I am not having to wade through a bunch of promotional junk to see updates that I might actually care about.

The second part about this is…  I am way more likely to “try out” following someone by throwing them in the Distance Follow list because I expect it to be spammy and if I happen to decide that I really want to follow them more closely…  I will actually do a proper follow.  This is effectively what I tried to do with the whole Timeline 2.0 initiative a few years back… but I was going about it the wrong way.  In that I was trying to create a special bubble that only had the people I cared about interacting with…  but in this I’ve started weeding my ACTUAL follows and making it represent that core group of people that I care about.  I am sure I will continue to prune… because once that process starts it gets a lot easier.

Another part that has helped this process is that I have been spending significantly more time on MMORPG.Social and Mastodon by nature is not a network that seems to give a fuck at all about follow numbers.  I have tried throughout the years not to care about this…  but still did to some extent in spite of not wanting to?  There are a lot of people that I never unfollowed just because they happened to be following me back.  Hanging out on the Fediverse and the fact that being mutuals isn’t really that bit of a deal there…  is starting to remove my giving a fuck about it on twitter.  As a result you can look at my Analytics and see that I have been slowly hemorrhaging followers for awhile now…  and I am okay with this.  I’ve come to accept that I do not have enough time in my life to hang out with every cool person I meet, and have also come to the realization that not everyone is going to like me…  and that is okay.

Social Media has always set up this weird dynamic giving you a false sense of connection when often times…  you are just an assemblage of pixels that occasionally says something funny to the person on the other side of the connection.  I’m wired weird where I tend to actually care about a lot of the people that I interact with.  The problem with that however is that there is no way I can keep that many people in my head at all times…  and then I feel like shit when I realize that it has been three months since I last had a conversation with some random person in my feed.  So as a result I am trying to care less about the minutiae and beat myself up less about not caring enough.  I have a circle of friends that widens and shrinks organically… and I am generally going to try real hard to be okay with that fact.

In the meantime however… looking forward to playing some more Anthem this weekend!

 

I’m struggling a bit this morning to pull together a blog post.  In theory I think I am fighting a cold or something because the last several days I have just felt lousy.  Last night for example I really wanted to pop into some Destiny 2 and do the weekly tasks that are set in front of me on a brand new day.  However I roamed around the tower a bit before logging out for the evening because I could not seem to focus enough to actually do something as intensive as playing a guardian.  I didn’t really play much last week either, so I have not been helping push the clan level up and for that I feel bad.  I have so many things that I need and want to get accomplished but have just been lacking the drive to actually do them.  The quest for the Last World exotic went in yesterday but after looking what all is involved…  I am really not looking forward to more crucible grinding.  I had to do plenty of that already for the Malfeasance quest line that I have yet to actually finish.

What I ultimately spent my night doing instead was working on the Blue Mage some more.  There are probably more productive ways to go about this process, but what I wound up doing was spent some time in Coerthas before eventually settling into Outer La Noscea grinding the 41-44 Goblin camps.  I managed to get Blue up to 37 so the progress was moving pretty well, but solo grinding largely involved controlling the camp spawns since I was many times the only person out there.  It reminded me a lot of the way that we used to play in Everquest, where you would work your way into an area and then try and hold that position while avoiding getting overrun as too many things spawned in at the same time.  There were a few moments where things got a little dicey if I had two bombs and two goblins on me at the same time, but all in all I reached a comfortable pace and thanks to Sticky Tongue I could yoink mobs over to my perch of relative safety.

The biggest challenge however is that 1000 Needles has started to miss a significant amount lately.  I am guessing its the fact that I have been hitting higher level mobs than my own level, but whatever the case it occasionally makes things a little questionable.  At this point I should probably be able to solo Haukke Manor just fine, but all of the remaining abilities that I can pick up are going to require some significant shenanigans to collect.  For similar reasons to why I didn’t play Destiny 2 last night…  I just did not have it in me to attempt soloing a dungeon.

What I ultimately want to be playing however…  is more Anthem.  So I am guessing that the Demo did it’s trick of embedding that world deep into my psyche.  This weekend we are supposedly getting access again and I am looking forward to it.  I am hoping the various connection issues are resolved and I can spend some time playing with friends and doing missions together.  I am also hoping they maybe give us a bit more of a drip feed of content…  at least more than the one strike mission.  Regardless I am looking forward to suiting up again because it feels like it is going to be a game that latches hold of me pretty tight.  Ashgar introduced us to the FashionLancers reddit, which I am finding super interesting… but also realizing that I didn’t do anywhere near what I could have with the cosmetic system.  Here is hoping we get a newer build this weekend and with it a bunch of the issue have been put on ice.

It has been roughly a month since we embarked on this journey of the MMORPG.Social Mastodon instance and I have been wanting to report back how things have been going.  For the uninitiated Mastodon is as social microblogging platform that runs on a technology called ActivityPub  which provides the functionality of decentralizing your access to a larger network.  What I mean by that is all of the individual Mastodon/Pleroma/PixelFed/GNUSocial and a bunch of other similar ActivityPub based tools “federate” with each other and effectively link up to form what folks commonly refer to as the Fediverse.

What this means in practice is that you address people not only by the @name convention but also @instance following the name.  In doing so you can follow and communicate freely with anyone using any of the ActivityPub based federating instances.  Because of this freedom it becomes more about choosing the local instance that most closely reflects your interests than simply dog-piling on the largest one.  Some numbers for example of the biggest instances…  Pawoo.net which is a mostly non-english speaking instance has as of the time of writing this… 441,376 users.  Mastodon.Social which is lead by the creator of the Mastodon software and largely considered to be the flagship is at 306,065 users.  On the other end of the spectrum you have thousands of single or handful of users instances that cater to very small communities.

Why Change Instances?

I’ve moved around quite a bit on the Fediverse, largely because as I got more engaged with the community I had reasons for popping elsewhere.  Thankfully Mastodon specifically gives you the tools to direct users from one profile to another profile and export/import the users you were following to make picking up your home and moving it a little easier.  Just for reference…  here is a run down of the people I have been on the Fediverse.

• @Belghast@Mastodon.Cloud – a large generic instance that was being used as overflow for Mastodon.Social when I first found out about the existence of the Fediverse.
• @Belghast@Elekk.xyz – I quickly realized that having a good local was more important than being on a big instance and this was an amazing home run by @Noelle who also serves as one of the moderators for Mastodon.Social and in general does an awful lot to help support the Fediverse in general.  Even though I am not actively using Elekk.xyz I fund her Patreon just to help support her efforts.
• @Belghast@Nineties.Cafe – My good friend Liore decided to start her own Mastodon instance, and with that I migrated myself from Elekk.xyz to Nineties.Cafe.  The first month was a glorious time, much like the launch of a new MMORPG but over time folks stopped posting and now there are only a handful of us that seem to check it these days.
• @Belghast@MMORPG.Social – I initially just signed up here to support the very awesome Gazimoff who is running the instance, and in the end wound up migrating completely because it has become a really cool environment.  Lots of MMORPG players hanging out and talking about the games they are playing.

Ultimately I didn’t have to move at all and I could have continued communicating with people from Elekk, Nineties and MMORPG all through my original Mastodon.Cloud account.  However one of the things I love about having a good local instance for a home, is that you get access to the Local feed that shows what everyone is publicly talking about on that server.  Each time I have moved it was because I wanted to be part of that local environment and keep taps on what was happening.  There is of course the Federated timeline which shows you everything being said by anyone that your instance is federated with, but that can be at times like drinking from the firehose.

Admittedly one of the hardest things to get used to for a long time avid Twitter user like myself, is how generally slow the pace is on the Fediverse.  You have to sort of think back to those early days of twitter when you weren’t following a couple of hundred very chatty people to get the same sort of experience.  Over time I have found people from lots of different instances that I follow, and because of it I have knitted together a community of people that I talk to on a regular basis.  However I want to throw out the warning that Mastodon and the Fediverse in general is going to feel like a really quiet place at the beginning before you branch out and find your tribe.

Why MMORPG.Social?

The instance has been going for roughly a month at this point and we have way more users than I ever expected at this point.  Gaz also has been working super hard to give lots of different options for the user base and even got us an official Mascot.  I have no clue if the mascot has a name… but I propose Mortimer.  Normally folks just stand up and instance and call it good, but Gaz has been doing a lot of fiddling under the hood to stand up infrastructure to support growth.  Here are some examples…

• https://mmorpg.social – this takes you to the default TweetDeck inspired interface that personally I find super comfortable since I generally use either that or a mobile client to access Twitter.
• https://lite.mmorpg.social/ – for those who prefer the twitter web client experience, Gaz stood up Halcyon which is a lightweight twitter clone interface.
• https://blog.mmorpg.social – is a WordPress site where he posts information about the instance which is pretty new but also super useful.
• images.mmorpg.social – is not directly reachable but serves as the infrastructure for AWS S3 where he is now hosting all of the images for speed and reliability
• mail.mmorpg.social – is also not directly reachable but is a dedicated mail server that handles that functionality again for speed and reliability since registration requires email notification

On top of that I believe he is experimenting with PixelFed which is an activitypub implementation that gives you a more Instagram like experience, but the challenge there is making it blend in seamlessly with the rest of the network so folks who prefer that Insta experience can still hang out and communicate with those who prefer the Twitterish one.  So much of this is contained in a really excellent “Getting Started” post that he crafted as a way of easing new users into our little corner of the world.

Adjusting Expectations

I think one of the challenges of the Fediverse is that so many people hop on that bandwagon thinking it will immediately replace Twitter as their daily driver network.  I too went into it with those expectations and quite frankly I was placing too much pressure on it to fill some predetermined niche I already had carved out.  As I have moved through the Fediverse and tempered that opinion…  I’ve realized that more or less it is a completely new continent to explore.  Sure you are ultimately leaving a bunch of people behind in that journey, but you are also going to meet a ton of people you might never have met if you didn’t hop on that boat to the new expansion content.

At it’s core MMORPG.Social was created to fulfill three basic goals.

• To build a microblogging home for fans of MMOs and online games
• To eliminate excessive and uninvited advertising
• To bring back features like chronological timelines, and add new ones like editing statuses and custom emoji

I personally think it is excelling at all of them and they have a pretty reasonable code of conduct statement as well.  The awesome thing about the Fediverse is somewhere out there is an instance being run in the manner that you want.  The fediverse in general gives the admins a lot of latitude in dealing with problems…  like the ability to block entire instances that end up being problem children.  This means that the fediverse experience is going to be very different for each user and especially on each local instance.  So far I am greatly enjoying my stay and if you are interested in Mastodon, the Fediverse or MMORPG.Social I am always more than willing to answer questions.  If you are interested in signing up check out the sign up link here.

A few weeks back I got a DM out of the blue from whoever manages the ParsecTeam twitter account.  Essentially they said that since I talk about Parsec all the time that they would like to send me a shirt as a sort of token of appreciation.  So yesterday said shirt came in the mail so I thought I would post a picture of it here.  It is REALLY bright blue, and the photo I took with it laying on the bed doesn’t exactly do it justice.  Basically think how bright Twitch Purple is… but blue.  I have this weird thing with products, in that I really only want to support the things that I truly believe in…  and Parsec is definitely one of those given that I use it pretty much every night.  I do not however have any sort of a formal relationship with the company and I am paying for services the same as anyone else.  I opted into the Warp account thing more than anything as a way of helping fund development which I THINK is around $50 a year but I am not 100% certain of that.

The reason why I keep talking about Parsec is because it has been a game changer for me personally in opening up my options to play games on a system that effectively no longer supports decent gameplay.  I’ve talked about this at length, so really don’t feel the need to dig back in this morning but if you are curious what I am talking about you can find the tales in these two posts:  “In Home Streaming” and “Wireless Ethernet”.  I guess throughout my life I have experienced a lot of things that I loved…  that for whatever reason did not stand the test of time.  As a result this has made me really want to show support for the things that products that make my life better.  Parsec has definitely been one of those products and as such I keep mentioning it any time someone brings up wanting to swap around the way they game, or have a better mobile gaming option.  I still would love to see native clients for the consoles, even if they can’t do bi-directional play and simply offers streaming from PC to console.

The thing I am the most curious about are the cloud options that they offer to rent.  One of these days I am going to try out that Amazon Web Services g3.4xlarge even though I have no real need to do so.  Mostly I am curious at just how viable it is for modern gaming and just how cost effective it would be to purchase one.  If you were going to try and recreate my current gaming rig right now…  even though it has some older parts in it… it would still cost around $2300.  You could effectively game 24/7 for 52 days straight before you spent in cloud charges as you would on that system.  My real question however is just how nice is the performance.  At the moment I am streaming Parsec across my LAN with it configured to always try a local connection first, so I am not really sure how it is going to feel going out to AWS.  One of these weekends when I don’t have another competing project I am going to give it a shot because I am super curious.  I’m also curious what that big box feels like as compared to the much smaller specced $0.51/hour set up.

This morning went down a rabbit hole that I did not intend to go down.  Originally I was going to make fun of my character in Assassin’s Creed Origins for somehow having two different bows, a battle axe, a sword and a shield slung across his back.  Instead I talked more about Parsec, but legitimately I am going to try out the cloud option at some point.  Mostly for folks that want to have a PC gaming experience a few hours a week without affording a PC…  it might be a really cost effective solution.  This is one of those things that I don’t need myself at all, but I would like to know how well it works before I offer it as a possible solution.  I’m in a weird spot gaming wise where I am still playing a single player game, but not really feeling like I have much exciting to say about it.  I’ve also been super exhausted this week, and need to wrap this up so I can get to work.

So readers…  How is your week going?