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A Shit Year for Idols

December 27, 2016 by Belghast

In the microcosm that is my life today was a pretty good one. My wife and I spent it running around Northwest Arkansas… more specifically the sprawling corridor that connects Fayetteville to Bentonville and all points between. We have family there and quite honestly… its just a nice place to go visit every now an then. We always say we should do it more often… but in truth we seem to get there once a year… almost exclusively over Christmas break. However while running around and enjoying myself… I was also processing the news that this asshole of a year 2016… took yet another awesome person from us. So now that I am finally home I thought I would write a thoroughly bummer post and talk about all of the amazing people we lost this year… or at least a small list of them.

@belghast its just a sign were getting older combined with the speed news can travel. this same kinda of thing happens every generation

— Squirrel Pope (@squirrelpope) December 25, 2016

The other day I commented about just how many people this year has stolen from us and my friend Squirrel gave some sage advice. Firstly that we are getting old, and that the people that are dying… are finally folks we looked up to as kids or at least came to know through out our lives. I remember my parents going through this same phase, and I guess it is my time. They now joke that they attend more funerals than anything else… and since I have gone through the “everyone is getting married” phase, and the “everyone is having kids” phase… I guess I am beginning to enter that territory as well. Since the Idols we grow up with tend to be a generation ahead of us… I guess that it makes sense we are entering that territory with them first. Tonight I am going to talk a little bit about some names that we lost this year.

David Bowie

This one hit me way harder than I expected it to. Bowie was one of those presences that always just sort of existed as a beacon that you could literally be anything you wanted to be. Throughout my life I watched this man re-invent himself every few years and still seem just as genuine in doing so as he did the very first time. He was a force of constant evolution that made me realize that we never had to stop growing as people. Tin Machine still will stand out as probably my favorite of his phases… but I can find something from literally every one of his phases that I can relate to.

Alan Rickman

Such an amazing actor that I am still pissed that this shitty year conspired to rob us of. Sure he was Snape, but before that he was Hans Gruber, the voice of god, a hair stylist, and so many other roles that always played out in unique and interesting ways. By Grabthar’s hammer, by the Sons of Warvan, you shall be avenged!

Garry Shandling

This is the theme to Garry’s show, the opening theme to Garry’s show… Garry called me up last night and asked if I could write his theme song. I grew up during that weird time during the early days of the Fox Network… and one of those early shows was the Garry Shandling show and I loved it so much. He has a sense of humor that seemed to match mine and he even played a great bad guy… as evidenced from Winter Soldier.

Prince

Now I am not the biggest Prince fan in the world, but no one can doubt how much of a force he was in music. So insanely talented, and even though he become the brunt of many punchlines during the era when he shifted to being an unpronounceable symbol, he managed to continue trucking on and making solid music. I guess the biggest thing about him is that he was an individual much in the same way as Bowie was, and served as this alternate focal point to say you could grow up to be any damned thing you wanted to be. All of his music holds up today in the same way as the day it was released.

Morley Safer

For me at least this man represented seasoned journalism in a way that probably few could. I grew up with him as the face and voice of so many stories on 60 minutes. In many ways it feels like the end of an era… and in this political cycle where the truth seemed not to matter much… we are far worse off for it.

Kenny Baker

This was the first of the Star Wars cast that we lost during 2016, and for those who might not know who he is… he was the actor behind R2-D2. For me he will always be Fidget from Time Bandits, or honestly a long slew of roles he played.

Gene Wilder

I am pretty sure if you did not like Gene Wilder you did not have a soul. He was the only Willy Wonka as far as I am concerned. There is an entire chunk of my childhood devoted to laughing at movies like Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein.

Leonard Cohen

So if anyone is going to single out a single song by Leonard Cohen… they are going to bring up Hallelujah. It has been covered time and time again… because in truth it is just that damned good. It would be hard to find a more perfect song in composition or lyrics that conveys a certain feeling of lost innocence and longing and still a tinge of hope for better things to come. I was late to know about him to be honest, because it was not until the Natural Born Killers soundtrack that I even knew he really existed. There was something about his voice however that was just so damned unique and intoxicating. I am personally partial to The Stranger Song.

Carrie Fisher

This one is possibly the hardest right now… because it is also the freshest. It is impossible to put into words or adequately explain how much Star Wars meant to me growing up. Luke and Leia were almost family members, and as those characters shifted into the very real world Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher they almost felt like the Aunt and Uncle you wish you had. There has been a certain pride as I followed each of their careers, and it was absolutely glorious and triumphant to see both in Force Awakens this time last year. Star Wars was the second movie I saw in my life… and in many ways it was the character of Princess Leia that taught me that Princesses didn’t really need saving in the first place. While that might sound cheesy it was a powerful lesson that I carried with me from that point on. The real Carrie Fisher though… was a freaking badass. I angrily shook my fist at 2016 when she had her heart attack and told it that the year could not have her. This year really is horrible, and I am saddened that it won.

There are so many others that I didn’t mention for one reason or another… but earlier I paged through a list of some hundred or so deaths this year… and so many of them were really important figures that we lost. With each one I think there was a certain feeling of “it can’t get any worse right?”… but no it continued to get worse as the year went on. I am ready to put a close to this chapter and hope the next year will start to get even the slightest bit better. In the immortal words of Ripley… take off and nuke the entire year from orbit… it’s the only way to be sure.

Posts I Didn’t Hate: 2016 Edition

December 23, 2016 by Belghast

With the impending arrival of the end of the year, I have been going through a lot of introspection. As a result I have been thinking about a handful of posts as a sort of way of reviewing the past year. One of the side effects of daily blogging, or at least week day blogging like I have been since the tail end of this year… is that you feel pressure to put out a post regardless if you have a lot to talk about. After doing this so long I can sit down at the keyboard and come up with a post regardless if I think there is actually stimulant for it. However occasionally I make posts that don’t actually embarrass me. The point of this mornings post is to review some of the posts this year that actually made me feel sorta okay about this blog.

January – Virtual Reality

My entire life Virtual Reality has been one of those things that is only a few years away from happening. In the January post I am singling out I talk about how close we apparently are… and how generally unexcited I am by it.

February – Brightly Colored Tinker Cart

During the February post I talk about nostalgia and how certain events just give you the warm fuzzies. I tell a story about one of our World of Warcraft servers long time residents and originals.

March – Open Game ID

During the March post I lament how many different systems and IDs that we have as gamers that we have to manage. I wish for an Open ID platform that anyone could use, that would potentially supply cross game communication.

April – Seven Years

The post from April that I singled out is the one celebrating the seventh anniversary of Tales of the Aggronaut. More importantly it shows off the amazing artwork that I commissioned my good friend AmmosArt to do for me.

May – Cycles

During the May post I talk about a weird sequence of events that lead a whole slew of bloggers to contemplate stopping. I was personally going through a long slump where I was struggling to find the motivation to keep going.

June – For Azeroth

During the June post I talk about how much I enjoyed the Warcraft movie and how much nostalgia it had wrapped up in it. While it failed to make significant box office bank, it was absolutely a film out there for the fans of the franchise.

July – Revisiting Memory

During the July post I talk about my experiences leveling through Wrath of the Lich King, and how we might have been wrong about it. Wrath of the Lich King has been heralded as the best of Warcraft, and I talk about how we have largely been looking at it through rose colored lenses.

August – Expansion Retail Forgot

The August post was ultimately misinterpreted by some reading it… however I still think it is an interesting post. With the release of Legion I noticed just how non-existent the retail presence happened to be and talk about my experiences with retail and past expansions.

September – Operation Hey Folks

During the September post I talk a bit about an attempt to return civility to the World of Warcraft random dungeons. In Final Fantasy XIV it is common place for folks to talk… whereas Warcraft has been a traditionally silent experience. As a result we started off with a simple “Hey Folks” and it had some interesting results.

October – Finally Grasp It

This is an interesting post in October because it had been a long time coming. From the release of Guild Wars 2 I never quite grasped why folks seemed to like it. After spending a lot of time with the AggroChat crew running the “end game” content, I finally found some reasons and a sense of progression.

November – Family We Choose

This post is a deeply personal one. In November my friend Tam unveiled his side project in which he had Ammo draw how he viewed a lot of his friends. Each and everyone one is so perfect and filled with details about that specific person. This gets me talking about our friends and the family we choose.

December – Four Years of Thought

Finally we end up with my December post, where in my current introspective state I have been going back through the last four years of posts since starting the daily posting thing. As a result I noticed that bloggers don’t seem to collaborate with each other nearly as much as they used to. I also talk about what seems to be a chilling effect in the sort of topics we discuss.

Shaders and Eyasluna

December 20, 2016 by Belghast

We have one week down officially for the Sparrow Racing League… and I have to say I am still having a blast. There is just something about this game mode that makes me happy… and the bounty of rewards available only serves to sweeten the pot. It seems that when SRL goes away officially… it will still be available through the private match list so there is even talk of organizing an unofficial league of sorts to race during the off time. There is just so much to like about this event that it hard to place my finger on what exactly makes it special. You have entire sets of gear up for grabs, with light levels up to 400. I have to admit a lot of my drive to keep on racing is for the glimmer of a chance at finding some light 400 items. So far I have gotten one, that I ultimately infused into my best fusion rifle that I am not pretty partial to. A good amount of my gear is sitting at 399 light with my two severe hold outs being my artifact at 393 and ghost shell at 394. There are technically ghosts available through the SRL but I have not personally seen one. As far as the Artifact I guess my option there is probably doing some Court of Oryx because I have heard they drop there up to light 400.

Probably my personal favorite thing about the event is the availability of all of these interesting shaders. You can check my twitter feed for a shot of one I found last night called “Ghast” which given my name seems a little fitting. The above shader is my current favorite called Krokos which is mostly white with purple accents… that just happens to look really cool with the PS4 exclusive Jovian armor set. There are fourteen shaders up for grabs… and I have managed go get thirteen of them with the last one tied to the record book achievements. According to Destiny Tracker I have raced 68 times and played a total of 7 hours 38 minutes of the Sparrow Racing League… which is pretty much entirely this year given that for whatever reason I only raced last year on my Hunter and Warlock. Generally speaking I do a few runs to clear up the bounties and then retire downstairs to racing through the remote client, because really… me winning or losing doesn’t much matter when I am largely in it for the possibility of maybe just maybe hitting 400 light level. The goofy part is that even with the input lag caused by remote play… I still generally end up finishing in the top three and have even managed to win a few maps in this fashion.

The other huge perk of the SRL is that it levels your crucible rep while at the same time giving you access to some older legacy crucible weapons. Of these the one I have been wanting since initially coming back to Destiny during Taken King is the Eyasluna. This weapon is essentially a legendary version of the Hawkmoon, a personal favorite of mine in the exotic hand cannon category. Over time I strayed away from Hand Cannons due to the ammo issues, but have recently started getting used to them again and even bought the vendor Palindrome last time I was capped on Legendary Marks. When I saw this weapon was on the list of available items… it has been my hope to see it show up on my end of match rewards list and finally last night it did. I am not really sure what a god roll looks like on this weapon, but I can make the one I got work with Triple Tap, Braced Frame and Grenadier. While this is going to drop me down to 9 instead of 10 shots in the magazine… it gives me 5 points from maxed stability which should make it insanely easy to headshot with. The range of 38 is pretty solid for a Hand Cannon as well and the 81 impact is nothing to complain about. I spent some time running around with it last night… and I think I am going to like it.

If you were not around for the Sparrow Racing League last year, I highly suggest you get in on the Dawning event while it is available. We still have two more full weeks of racing… but at some point soon I am going to have to care about the other side of this event… which is the strike list scoring if I hope to complete my record book. Playing SRL really has made me realize how much I miss games like Wipeout, and the fact that we will at least get to play this game type in private matches going forward gives me some solace. The only thing that worries me is that a lot of my enjoyment right now absolutely comes from the fact that I have a shot at interesting rewards at the end of the match. With this carrot removed… will I care about it nearly as much? As a final side note…. I have to thank Playstation support for taking care of my issues yesterday quickly. It took some doing… but I finally managed to find the correct link to get some resolution with. Within a few minutes and a few questions answered… they reset my compromised account back to the original email address and I was able to get in and take control once more. Additionally when I got home I added the two factor authentication… which I did not even know they offered until yesterday. I guess when they introduced it they didn’t make much of an announcement. In any case… after talking to some folks who got compromised there was a pattern to these attacks.

They transferred 50 of whatever the local currency was to the wallet… for me it was Dollars for others it was Pounds Sterling or Euros.
They changed the Sign-In email for the account… which frustratingly invalidates the links being sent out in email that allows you to quickly contest these actions
They created a sub account and set it up with unlimited purchasing rights.

What they were planning on doing from there is unknown because I think I maybe got things stopped in time to be able to find out. I had already put in a Paypal dispute, and Sony asked me to cancel that and they refunded the $50 taken from within their system. They were quick to point out that they had no legal requirement to do this… since all sales are final… and that they were doing it out of the goodness of their hearts as a one time exception. Whatever makes me feel better at the end of the night, because in the end I got my money back without having to claw it back through paypal. The gotcha however is that instead of refunding it to the bank… they just placed it in my PSN wallet, which in truth I guess is fine given that I was going to pre-purchase Horizon Zero Dawn at some point anyways. It was a frustrating start to the morning, but in the grand scheme of things everything seems to be restored to normal. The only thing that I am going to do as a follow up is to get them to completely remove the sub account. For now I have changed its password and decimated it through parental controls so it really can’t do anything.

Point of Mythic Plus

December 19, 2016 by Belghast

Well this is a generally shit start to a day… but I guess the show must go on. I was just setting up to start blogging this morning and then suddenly I noticed an email in my inbox from paypal verifying that my $50 transaction from the Sony Playstation Network had succeeded. My not nearly caffeinated brain took a moment to realize… “Bel you haven’t bought anything from the PSN”. When I went over to check the email account that PSN is attached to… at 6:19 in the morning… literally while I was sitting upstairs drinking my coffee someone changed the email address on my PSN account. Currently the link from Sony that you use to report this… is throwing a 404 error so I am wondering if there are broader issues happening currently. I’ve since gone onto the Paypal website and put on a dispute on the transaction to attempt to claw it back, which was its own special version of hell. I’ve verified that neither my primary or my secondary email accounts have been compromised because I leave all of my gmail accounts running with the IP logging thing turned on… and I recognize every connection in the last several days. I hope this is not evidence of the sort of week I am going to have as a result.

The real point of this mornings post was going to be talking about how I was wrong about something. For awhile now I have had the attitude that there was not really much of a point to Mythic Plus dungeons. This is of course from the stance of someone who has access to raiding. The risk to reward equation seemed to be pretty crummy considering just how high of a mythic plus you needed to run in order to start seeing upgrades over raid gear. I am coming here this morning to admit that I was wrong about this stance… not the part about risk to reward but the point about there being no real point. Sunday night is Karazhan night generally, and instead of doing that this week my team decided to knock out the four mythics weekly quest to see if we could get any upgrades given that we have now killed enough Emerald Nightmare for it to be a heroic cache. While gear may not really be the point… they are insanely fun when you are running them with a solid team. Over the course of the night we ran three plus two mythics, a plus five and eventually a plus seven. The truth is… in our raid geared state none of them seemed that insane, and thankfully I had Kylana to keep directing me where I should be going and what I should actually be pulling.

The other cool side effect of all of this madness is that they seem to be a really excellent source of chaos crystals, which given that I am not the raid enchanter due to the fact that the last one transferred off server… this is maybe going to be a good source of mats to help fuel raid enchants. When you can two and three chest the lower dungeons… it means you have lots of purples to grind down into tasty enchants. As a whole my Nightmare Cache ended up giving me a 5 item level upgrade with a gem socket… so that was well worth the time, and along the way I managed to pick up a ring that is situationally better than the one I had been using. The long and short of it however is that I had a lot of fun last night running dungeons with friends and it brought back some life into a game experience that was starting to wear a little thin. I now kinda want to see what my breaking point is when it comes to mythic plus madness… and I want to try a ten or higher just to see what happens. The best part of last night is the fact that we will all be seeing Mythic Seven chests in our Order Hall come Tuesday morning and in theory… the possibility of decent upgrades as a result. So if I can just sort out what happened with my PSN account… it is going to be a potentially great week.