Uncategorized

Welcome everyone to the very first day of Blaugust…  the legit and actual month thereof.  It has been a wild ride to this point because as of just a few minutes ago we had a little over eighty blogs signed up and ready to go.  You are all proving that there is in fact a desire for this sort of thing still and that no… in spite of all of the hot takes to the contrary blogging is not in fact dead.  The reason why I did this thing was in part to stoke the fires of our community once more and see who all I could get to come out of the woodwork.  We have lived in this torporous state for far too long and it is time for us to get active again.  Blaugust is in fact a month dedicated to active posting.  We just finished the pre-game week as it were with posts on technical topics about actually getting started.  Now it is time to get out there and write some amazing content…  and with that comes a need for topics.

During this week you should see posts showing up in the community with ideas to keep you going for the rest of the month, and I have a few of my own to add to this.  However I wanted to take a moment this morning to recap just how impressive things have been so far.  First off… there is still time to participate in Blaugust even though the month has officially started.  The idea is about getting active not necessarily about posting every day, so as long as there is still some time left in the month there is time to sign up.  You can check out the official sign-up sheet here and join us on Discord for what is becoming an exceptionally active community of creatives.  There have been many conversations that I have peeked in on while sitting in a meeting this week, that have seemed really awesome.

I think now is probably the time to recap the folks participating as well.  There is a master list that I have been keeping updated if you want to incorporate it into your content or the amazing Chestnut has been maintaining a twitter list of the folks active on that platform.  Now for my own lists…  folks participating.

The Community of Mentors

• Aywren – Aywren Sojourner
• Bhagpuss – Inventory Full
• Braxwolf – Gaming Conversations/Beyond Bossfights
• Chestnut – Gamer Girl Confessions
• Detached – A Hobbits Journey
• eldaeriel – StarShadow
• Grace – Moonshine Mansion
• Grace – Moonshine Mansion
• Izlain – Me vs. Myself and I
• OceanMariee – Soul of the Forest
• Ocho – Casual Aggro
• Paeroka – Nerdy Bookahs
• Psychochild – Psychochild’s Blog
• Stargrace – Nomadic Gamers, Eh!
• Syp – Bio Break
• Telwyn – GamingSF
• Wilhelm – The Ancient Gaming Noob

The Awesome Folks Participating

• Abbi – Mmosey
• Ald – Ald Shot First
• Alli – TBD
• Anupama – yasashiijapanese
• Arc Cavalier / Arc – Arc’s Oddities
• Ashgar – Ash’s Adventures
• Atheren – Athernes Adventures
• C. T. Murphy – Murf Versus
• Cali – Diary of a Guild Leader
• Capsulejay – Tales from the Backlog
• ChaosConstant – Symphony On A Chip
• Data_Error – ThisThingIsNeat
• Elio – The Path They Walk
• Elio – Built on a Daydream
• Endalia – Princess in a Castle
• Galactrix – Self Distract Sequence
• Goodhand – Fresh Eyes in Gaming
• Heattanu – Heattanu’s Game
• Jamie Hughes – What’s Occuring
• Jeff Norman – MMO Syndicate
• Jen – Book of Jen
• Jeromai – Why I Game
• Jess – Calamity Jess
• Joar – Wow Alt Addiction
• Joseph Skyrim – JVT Workshop
• Joy2Day – TechJoy2Day
• Kluwes – I’m Not Squishy
• Magen – Magen Tales
• Mailvaltar – Mailvaltar – MMOs and other stuff
• Marathal – Deez Wurds
• Massacred Insect – Glyffe
• Matt – Geeky Dad Fitness
• Max Nash – Cinemaxica – Everyone’s a Critic
• Moderate Peril – Contains Moderate Peril
• neschria – Municipal City
• Nogamara – Armagon Live
• Ocarina Farmer – Ocarina Farms
• Pasduil – Thinking Play
• Pizza Maid – Pizza Maid
• profesorbeej – Professorbeej is Awesome
• profesorbeej – RunningShoes.tv
• punFLOWER – Simply Janine
• Rakuno – Shards of Imagination
• Rambling Redshirt – Beyond Tannhauser Gate
• RandomGamerX – RandomX
• rumorsmatrix – barely readable diary
• Sandrian – Aeternus Gaming
• Scarybooster – Scarybooster
• SDWeasel – Unidentified Signal Source
• Shadowz – Shadowz Abstract Gaming Blog
• Sharlen Grey – Gray’s Cozy Nook
• Shintar – Going Commando
• Shintar – Neverwinter Thoughts
• Stroeb – Galumphing
• Stropp – Stropp’s World
• SunnyBunny – Can I Play Too
• Troy – TroytlePower
• Tupapaonline – plan b better
• UltrViolet – Endgame Viable
• UnwiseOwl – leaflocker
• Ventium – Still a work in progress.
• Void – A Green Mushroom
• Welshtroll – Welshtroll
• Wolfy – Through Wolfy’s Eyes
• Zapp – Leeterati

In 2014 the first running of Blaugust we had 55 folks sign up and participate.  In 2015 we had our biggest year to date with 88 participants and in the last official running in 2016 we had 62.  At this point we have completely eclipsed two of the years and given the patterns that I have seen in the past of folks joining in mid month I fully expect that we will be blowing that 2015 number out of the water as well.  The level of support I have gotten in this initiative has been staggering, and I want to take a moment to everyone who is helping to make it an extremely lively place to be.  I’ve been attempting to pop my head into the proceedings as often as time allows but things have been sorta insane in my life the last few weeks.

One of the hardest parts about blogging is the fact that there are some days you are just going to have a completely blank mind.  The harder you try and materialize your thoughts so you can condense them into printed word…  the more they seem to fly around in your head at incomprehensible speeds.  Then there are days when you have too many things you want to say and they sort of log jam somewhere between your brain and your fingers.  In those cases it is good to have a backlog of topics that you can draw upon in order to force some sense of focus.  Here are some topics that I have kicked around in my head before but never actually written about.

Ten Random Topic Prompts

• Write about the first time a game made you cry.  This could in theory be substituted for any sort of media… a book, a movie, a play…  just write about the first time you found yourself completely caught up in the story and those walls fell.
• Write about your first online gaming experience and why it was positive or negative in shaping your opinions of online interactions going forward.
• Go find a random screenshot that you like and write about what was going on in your head or in the game at the moment you took it.
• Write about how you got involved in your first guild, and the sequence of events that prompted you to finally accept an invitation.
• Write about your three favorite items from any video game ever regardless of genre.
• Write about any goal you have achieved in the past and what it was like to work towards it and eventually get it.
• Write about some of the positive or negative interactions you have had with the blogging community.
• Write  about someone you met through gaming that has turned into a friend that transcended a single game.
• Write about times where your gaming life has clashed with your real life obligations and how you have handled that.
• Write about something you really truly love be it a Movie, Television Show, Piece of Music, Video Game or literally anything else you are super passionate about.

Finally in closing… today is an auspicious day not only because it is the official beginning of the month of Blaugust, but also because it is my 20th wedding anniversary.  It is just staggering to think about that it has been twenty years since our wedding.  I am super happy to be sharing this journey with my navigator…  because everyone knows I have zero sense of direction.

This morning I am going to go in a different direction… and ask the Blaugust community with assistance on something.  For years I have been a loyal FRAPS user for the purpose of recording game screenshots.  I have a legally registered copy… that happens to have personal information in the registration details screen so I have mosaic’d it out.  There are an awful lot of pirated copies floating about but I happily plunked down my $40 and have been using it for over a decade at this point.  It has always simply worked as intended and given me the ability to record screenshots without fail.  This changed however when Destiny 2 made the weird decision to block any form of an overlay for “security reasons” there by making it so that FRAPS could not record anything successfully.

First I feel like I need to start off with why I use FRAPS rather than in game screenshot tools.  It all comes down to the fact that I like posting a significant number of screenshots in my morning posts…  and that I am lazy.  I cannot remember what the directory MMO number 376 that I have installed on my system uses for screenshot storage.  As a result I like having everything dumped into the same directory where I can filter through them quickly, and eventually archive them off to my network attached storage.  I have a truly nonsense number of screenshots stored out there at this point.

Ultimately what I am looking for feature wise…

• ability to capture fullscreen, borderless and windows screenshots without capturing the window frame or my desktop
• ability to save to the format of choice… I tend to dump things to JPG because my blog gets grumpy if I upload PNGs anymore
• ability to work flawlessly without having to constantly check to see if its on
• ability to change the target directory and dump everything to one place
• ability to bind whatever it is to work off of PrtScrn button because its habit

For years FRAPS did all of these things but one of the recent Windows 10 updates seems to have changed that.  Now any time I launch a game I need to kill FRAPS and relaunch it to get the overlay to work properly.  This means that it is now a fiddly mess and it makes me grumpy.  So what I am asking you my community is…  is there a hidden gem out there for screen capture that I am unaware of?  Now I am going to talk about some of the alternatives that I have used.

GeForce Experience

This one seemed like a no brainer given that I run Nvidia based cards and this ends up installing to your system regardless if you want it to.  It isn’t a flawless system but it was the only reliable way that I seemed to have to be able to record Destiny 2 given that the overlay is hardware based and not something executing at a software level.  Its major flaws were the fact that it would not dump to a single directory, but instead a series of directories named off of what the game executable thinks it is.  This causes some weirdness when the game developers don’t actually go back and fix the name of their executable… for example the Quake Champions screenshots I have are in a directory called “PC” or Dauntless for whatever reason shows up as “Archon” which was maybe an early name for the game?

Another flaw is that you cannot change what format the screenshots are dumped in as it always saves to PNG, which involved me going through a morning ritual of converting all of the screenshots that I was going to upload to JPG to bypass the nonsense size limit.  Lastly and quite possibly the most damning problem is when I happen to be running a game in windowed mode…  it records my entire desktop like the above screenshot.  This means I either need to drop it in photoshop and cut out the window or just live with the fact I am posting a postage stamp for a screenshot.  Not ideal to say the least given that when I am streaming I occasionally run things windowed so I can see what is going on in stream etc.

Dxtory

Another screenshot software that has been recommended to me numerous times is Dxtory by ExKode which is I believe a Japanese based software house.  It is also in the 30-40 dollar range price wise and does a really good job of capturing both images and video.  The problem is… it would occasionally just stop working and not give any indication of this.  I would be playing along thinking everything was working as intended… I would still have an overlay in game indicating that the software is active…  then when I sit down to write a blog post the next morning I would have zero screenshots to show for the previous nights play time.  The unreliable nature and the fact that this was not an every night occurrence made me move away from it.  Some times it would go for three or four nights without flaking out on me… and other times it would happen multiple times in the same night.  I was not able to find any sort of pattern around it.  Whatever the case however it was unreliable and I opted to move away from it.

Greenshot

This is an open source software mostly designed to capture regions of an image much like windows clipping tool.  However it does in fact have an unattended screenshot mode and as a result I attempted to use it as my software of choice for awhile.  The problem is that when running Windowed Borderless… it would intermittently alternate between taking a screenshot of my desktop and taking a screenshot of the game.  This became problematic given that I was missing a bunch of screenshots and again… maybe had nothing to show for my night of gaming come blog post time.

The core problem is that most of the screenshot tools don’t really do the thing that I want them to do given that they are largely focused on capturing video…  and not capturing still images.  I have StreamLabs OBS for those moments when I want to capture video so I have that covered.  However what I want instead is just a reliable screenshot tool that I can use with literally every game I play, so the images don’t get lost somewhere on my hard drive.  I may give Dxtory another spin because it has been numerous years since I last tried it.  Ultimately however what I really want… is FRAPS to stop being a butt and just work again.  In the meantime however, I would love to hear some of your suggestions for screenshotting games?  Do you still rely on the in game screenshot tools, or have you consolidated to using some tool other than the ones I have mentioned?

 

Last night I logged in a bunch of characters in a failed attempt to prepare for the impending apocalypse that is sure to come with today’s patch.  What I mean by that is the 7.0 patch nerfed the prices of a bunch of the garrison missions as well as the sales prices of a ton of the associated nonsense that comes with that sort of thing.  So last night I logged in and collected any gold missions I had waiting to be collected since I had not logged into WoW in a few weeks…  and sold all of the items used to upgrade followers that I had in my inventory.  While the servers are still up and running at this very moment the patching process has already started to our clients, and by the time I come home there will be a whole new era of World of Warcraft started.  I am still not entirely sure how I feel about this.

I don’t mean this post to sound as hyperbolic as I am sure it will come off as, but Legion was sort of a tipping point for me in many ways.  Blizzard showed me how good a design could feel that didn’t focus on the red versus blue nonsense but instead dug down hard into the class story-line and creating situations where all of us…  Horde and Alliance worked together to solve issues.  While I didn’t stick with it for the long haul, Legion is probably my new favorite expansion for World of Warcraft replacing the previous…  Wrath of the Lich King.  I had hope that we would see a new shining era of working together to fight the bigger baddies in the world, but instead what we got was a doubling down on the infighting and bullshit, and a path that looks to be setting up both Jaina and Sylvanas on a possible path towards becoming raid bosses.

My dream for World of Warcraft is a time when I can sit down and play with both my Horde and Alliance friends together, and this expansion seems to be putting a final nail in that concept.  As a result my interest in this game has never been at a lower point, and were it not for twitter and people talking about the 8.0 patch constantly I probably would not have known it was a thing.  While a lot of my friends were in a flurry of activity trying to finish out their mage tower challenges, attempting to beat all of them before they went away…  I find myself in a situation where I never did a single one.  The last expansion saw me going into it with one of every class Alliance side at maximum level…  this expansion sees me going into it with 2 warriors, 2 deathknights, a demon hunter and a paladin.

This expansion also sees me planning on switching my allegiance and “maining” horde this time around.  It is going to be a weird ride when in less than a month now the expansion launches.  I have deeply mixed feelings about my future with this game.  I’ve heard the “its world of warcraft, not world of peacecraft” nonsense so many times it makes me want to punch people through the internet.  I used to keep going because I had this nexus of hope deep down inside of me that someday somehow things would change and the faction wall would fall and I could finally unite both groups of friends living on either side of that chasm.  That hope has died, and with it a lot of the reasons why I kept playing the game.  That said I know I will give Battle for Azeroth a shot and probably even find myself enjoying certain aspects of it.  However the hope has mostly been replaced with Dread as I watch this Warbringers series seeming to make good on that concern that we might be losing one more more powerful characters to a Raid someday.

After patching my addons and logging into a bunch of characters…  and then the requisite amount of “oh look its bel” and answering a series of messages…  I eventually retreated back into my comfy space that is Elder Scrolls Online.  I sorta knew that I could only log in so many characters before someone noticed my presence and started trying to interact.  I mean this is more of a thing on the Alliance side where I have been gone far longer.  On Horde side I am mostly greeted with a “hi bel” since I tend to darken those doors fairly often.  House Stalwart was the guild that I built on the day the servers opened in World of Warcraft and for a long time it was my home.  However the game has changed and with it the guild has changed as a necessity to keep folks active and happy.  I don’t begrudge anything that Elnore, Rylacus or now Kylana did to keep things up and running and the tweaks they made to stay viable.

That said House Stalwart feels like returning to the small town you grew up in, years after leaving it…  and while the folks are friendly all you can notice is the things that have changed and the names that are no longer there.  That guild and the Alliance side of the house are fundamentally different now, and quite honestly are different from when the Legion expansion rolled out and I went through my last period of heavy activity and raiding.  To say active and relevant you have to be a guild in constant motion, whereas the older I get the more I seem to want things to stay the same.  As it stands, though I created it…  I identify more with Greysky Armada our FFXIV guild than I do with House Stalwart these days.  While the Elder Scrolls Online guild bears that name it bears way more connection to Greysky and the AggroChat community than it ever did the original World of Warcraft one.

I think ultimately so much has changed in my life and inside of me since 2004 when the doors opened to Azeroth.  What used to feel like family now feels like a foreign country.  I can’t really blame the game or the players…  it is me that changed because I kept leaving with increasing frequency to go elsewhere.  I remember my first “WoW Tourist” jaunt happened about six months after release, before I had even made it to level 60 on a single character.  A bunch of my friends went off to play Everquest 2 with the group of folks who didn’t follow us into World of Warcraft but instead chose that path.  I remember doing this again for Warhammer Online and quite frankly every major MMO release seemed to pull me away from Warcraft for a period of time…  until those periods of time got longer than my actual time playing the game.

While this image is greatly outdated at this point… you can see this constant string of orange squares at the top to represent time spent playing World of Warcraft.  The only problem with that is it is a lie, and a lot of those interactions are time spent subscribed and poking my head back in for a night here or there and not large blocks of dedicated time.  I left the game during the early days of the Cataclysm expansion prior to the first patch, and in truth I never fully returned to feeling the same way about it as I did back then.  Sure I have come back with each expansion and usually become active again just prior to a new patch…  but that orange bar is evidence of a lot of time spent moonlighting in World of Warcraft but not actually playing it as my primary game.  I have some deeply complicated feelings about my inability to let go of the past and just move on, and a lot of those feelings have come to a head recently as I stare down the barrel of this expansion.

Sorry for what probably ended up being a bummer of a post, but occasionally I cannot predict the post that will come forth from my fingertips on a given morning.