Musings

156 entries. 120,011 words.

September, 2012

• Pointers in Games. 2012-09-17 2:06 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  • Opinion
  
  Guild Wars 2 is an awesome game. But there is one thing about it that drives me insane. In fact, I have the same problem with almost every game that has a pointer. You can’t see the pointer! This is a major problem in GW2 because many of your abilities are ground-targeted spells, so you need to be able to point to the spot where you want to cast it. (I use the option that automatically casts wherever you are pointing.) If you’re out soloing it’s not a problem, but many times you’re in an epic battle with fifty people pounding on a boss and there’s flashing and fireworks and dazzling spell effects going on all over the place. Picking out the pointer in those situations is near impossible for me. Even when I wave the mouse around like I do on the desktop, it can still take a long time to find the damn thing. 214 words.
• Greens and Blues. 2012-09-17 7:55 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  Am I crazy or did GW2 make green items better than blue items, which is 100% the opposite of every other MMO in history? Did they just arbitrarily pick the colors or is there some logic to it? Somebody “on the Internet” said blue < green < yellow makes more sense because it follows the color wheel. But, like, green < blue < purple follows the color spectrum (ROYGBIV). 69 words.

February, 2013

• Upcoming 2013 Games. 2013-02-23 10:10 PM.
  • Musings
  • Status
  • Steam
  
  Looking at upcoming PC games for 2013, I’m only seeing three that I think I’ll buy when they come out: Bioshock Infinite, Elder Scrolls Online, and Neverwinter. GTA V is a possibility but I think I can wait for a Steam sale on that one. (Especially since GTA 4 sucked.) 50 words.

May, 2014

• Scheduling Posts. 2014-05-08 3:00 PM.
  • Advice
  • Blog
  • Musings
  • Responses
  
  I saw this excellent post from Belghast a while back: Thumper Logic. The first part of his post got me thinking about my own publishing schedule, and as it is NBI month I thought a meta-blogging post would be a good topic. I too have tried to write one post a day-in the past. I applaud the effort, and anyone who can do it is far better at this than I am. 494 words.
• Inadequate Naming. 2014-05-22 3:00 PM.
  • Musings
  
  I need a new name. I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I like the name of the blog, Endgame Viable. But I don’t like using UltrViolet as my personal identity. It’s weird, because I am UltrViolet. Ever since I was in the Crayola Clan back in NetQuake days. Ah, good ol’ ]CC[-UltrViolet. But in this age of cross-media brand recognition and whatnot, it’s a terrible name. There’s no ‘a’ in my UltrViolet, which is vitally important to the name. There’s a reason there’s no ‘a’ which goes all the way back to Quake in 1996. (Reason: “]CC[-UltraViolet” was one character too long to fit in the 15-character limit.) 519 words.

June, 2014

• WildStar – Headstart Screenshots. 2014-06-02 3:00 PM.
  • Dungeons
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  Just some random screenshots from the WildStar Headstart weekend. I started out playing a Spellslinger, thinking I would play an easy-mode ranged DPS class to tour all the dungeons, but I realized at level 8 that I was bored and disgruntled. I switched to an Esper, and started to have a lot more fun. It also helped to choose the Everstar Grove zone which I had not seen in beta. 194 words.
• Weekend Versus Weeknight Characters. 2014-06-04 3:13 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  It just occurred to me that I am a completely different MMO gamer on weekends when compared to weekdays (weeknights, actually). For me, weekends are about exploration and discovery and lore, but on most weeknights, I just want to “grind” and avoid a lot of mental engagement. This WildStar launch weekend has given me a great example of the distinction. On Saturday and Sunday I spent a fair amount of time reading lore and quest text (or trying to, with that microscopic, reader-unfriendly font) and looking around at things. 258 words.
• WildStar – Monday Screenshots. 2014-06-09 3:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  Just some amusing WildStar screenshots. Flying cows! Err wolves. Err ... whatever alien animals those are. I made the college football team! Got a toxic wasteland in your ear canal! (Styx reference? Kilroy Was Here? Get it?) Wait, I wanted fries with that Quarter Pounder. 45 words.
• Friday Blues. 2014-06-13 3:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  • Status
  
  Today I’ve got the blues. It’s been a generally lousy week. I was going to skip posting today because I didn’t have anything queued up and in the broad spectrum of life, who really gives a crap whether one blog out of a billion misses a post. Instead I’m going to attempt to rid myself of this funk by writing a little bit, because it’s Friday morning and my workplace is dead as a doornail on Fridays so I have eight full hours to kill. 476 words.
• WildStar – PUG Attunements!. 2014-06-19 3:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  Yesterday I said that WildStar’s dungeons are too hard for PUGs, so today I’m going to solve that problem. Okay, I don’t really know how to solve it. But I have an idea: PUG Attunements! Or as I like to call it, “Stuff you have to do before you can queue in the dungeon finder.” In order for a PUG to even have a chance at success, you need each member of the group to know how to dodge and interrupt. You also need the tank to know how to maintain a little bit of threat, and you need the healer to know how to heal people who are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. 683 words.

July, 2014

• GW2 – Gates of Magoo Can Bite Me. 2014-07-14 3:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  Note: The following ragey invective was written after dying a number of times during the GW2 Living Story 2 instance Fallen Hopes which I had hoped would be a fun way to kill some time while waiting to go to a doctor’s appointment. It was not. However, I have since completed it and moved on with my life. There is not much room to maneuver in here, and Marjory and Kasmeer are NO HELP AT ALL. 322 words.

August, 2014

• Warlords of Draenor Launches Nov 13, 2014. 2014-08-14 10:56 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  I don’t really have anything to say about it, though. I just wanted my cleverly-crafted post title to draw you into my blog lair. Ha-ha! I social-engineered you! (I’ve been reading about copywriting and headlines today. Sorry.) I will say, though, that I’m a little surprised Warlords of Draenor is shipping so early. I figured it wouldn’t be out until December. I haven’t heard anything but “it’s not ready” from beta testers. 72 words.
• Congrats Blauggers!. 2014-08-15 3:00 PM.
  • Blog
  • Musings
  
  I just wanted to drop in and say congratulations to everyone participating in Blaugust: Belghast’s challenge to post every day during August. Clearly, I’m not participating, because I’m being a lazy bum this summer. Would that Blaugust had occurred in Blarch or Blay or Blune. Even if I hadn’t taken a vacation, my daily schedule has been turned upside-down so much that I’m struggling to find the right way to write anymore. The carefully constructed, complicated routine I used to use is out the window now. Now when I want to write something, I just sit down, open up WordPress in whatever computer happens to be nearby, and write. But it feels extremely weird to write that way. 251 words.
• WoW: 10 Years, 10 Questions, 10 Answers. 2014-08-19 3:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  • Responses
  
  Alternative Chat is asking everyone 10 questions about WoW for a documentary. Most answers that I’ve seen have been coming from semi-hardcore WoW players, but I thought it would be fun to give answers from a non-hardcore WoW player. Plus, it’s good material for a blog post! 1. Why did you start playing Warcraft? I started playing in 2006 after I saw the infamous Make Love, Not Warcraft episode of Southpark. I had had a WoW trial CD (yes, a CD!) sitting around for a long time prior to that from (I think) a video card purchase. I was scared to try it, though, because I had previously played Asheron’s Call way too much and I was a little worried I would get sucked into WoW in the same way. (Turns out I didn’t.) 1,006 words.
• Why Endgame Viable. 2014-08-31 3:00 PM.
  • Blog
  • Musings
  • Responses
  
  Well, here’s a topic. From Rowan Blaze: Why Have I Touched The Sky? Sort of a meta-blogging topic. So my second challenge for you, Dear Reader, in these few days of Blaugust: Why did you title your blog what you did? Do you think the name still fits? My first name for this blog was Melanthius. I still think that’s a cool name that rolls off the tongue, but it doesn’t have any inherent meaning when you look at it. 209 words.

September, 2014

• Results of Un-Learning Invert Mouse. 2014-09-09 3:00 PM.
  • Advice
  • Musings
  • Status
  
  I noticed that I never reported the results of trying to un-learn the use of Invert Mouse. After about two weeks, I was no longer fighting my muscle memory and could play MMOs unhindered. After about a month, I felt like I could aim pretty well again in shooters where precision is important. It’s now been nearly six months, and I feel like I’ve never played any other way. So it is possible to switch, even if you’ve played with Invert Mouse all your life. I have not attempted to play any flight simulators since switching though. I suspect I would crash and die instantly if I did. 108 words.

November, 2014

• A November Kitchen Sink Post. 2014-11-11 4:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  • Status
  
  Hi! You may remember that I used to write blog posts. At least occasionally. Unfortunately this month two things have happened: Rift Nightmare Tide and NaNoWriMo. Those two things, particularly the former, are way more interesting than writing blog posts. But I thought I would take a break and quickly write down some stuff about things. Chatting with Arak near the end of Draumheim. Overwatch. Blizzard is making a role-based shooter (cough Team Fortress cough). This is probably a great idea that will make bazillions of dollars. I personally have less than zero interest in yet another shooter in a crowded, stale market. The only way I could possibly become interested is if they find a way to solve the ridiculously unbalanced gameplay that usually occurs between casual newbies and hardcore veterans. Most shooters are not fun unless you decide to dedicate your life to them and start on day one. I can’t tell if they are addressing any of that from the information I’m seeing, but I’m guessing that if it’s Blizzard, there will be progression in it, so they probably aren’t addressing it. 709 words.

December, 2014

• Bloggy Xmas Day 7: Community and Me. 2014-12-07 5:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  Sitting down to write this, I can’t help but wonder why on Earth I signed up to write about community and gaming. I’m pretty introverted, so the idea that I might have anything to say about being a part of any community seems laughable. And to top it off, I don’t much like the Christmas season, either. But the nature of community compels me to write anyway. Despite my own anti-social nature, I still feel like I’m a part of a gaming community-a collection of people who share a common enjoyment of gaming, particularly the online multiplayer variety. 839 words.
• ArcheAge – Post-Mortum. 2014-12-11 4:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  • Opinion
  
  I’m determined to sit here and write a complete blog post. Inspired somewhat by j3w3l’s recent post, I’ve been thinking about ArcheAge. Thinking, that is, but not playing, because my work schedule has been ramping back up and ArcheAge is not a game you can play when you only have a little bit of time to play it. Not to mention the possibly-related fact that I’ve lost interest in it. I still log into ArcheAge once or twice a week to make sure my taxes are paid and to stockpile more tax certificates, but that’s about it. (Why they changed it to let you pay taxes with labor points I’ll never know.) I slaughtered my geese and haven’t planted any new fruit trees after they mysteriously disappeared one day. (I’m not entirely sure that someone or something wasn’t messing with my geese, too-I logged in several times to find them in various stages of fed/unfed/starving/recovering, and I’m quite certain I didn’t do any of it.) 808 words.

January, 2015

• Comparing Played Times. 2015-01-21 4:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  I found an old, old screenshot of my main Asheron’s Call character from near the end of my playing time: What MMORPGs looked like when they were more work than fun. There’s some interesting things to note there. First of all, my /played time was 17d 11h 26m 22s. I spent a ridiculous amount of time playing that game… it seemed like my entire life was spent in that game for about a year. (I was playing AC when everyone else was playing EverQuest.) Yet I only reached level 35. In AC, your character “level” wasn’t much except a measurement of how much you had played-your power level came from your skills. Level 35 seemed like an impossibly high number to me back then. I knew people in their 40s and I couldn’t imagine how anyone could get there without giving up sleep entirely. 402 words.

February, 2015

• Hello MassivelyOP. 2015-02-05 1:00 AM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  • Responses
  
  I knew they’d be back. :) The web site isn’t live yet but it’s going in my feed reader the second it does. I was really honored to see my page mentioned on the last Massively post. Thanks guys! Reading over all of the finale posts on Massively this past week reminded me of something I forgot to mention in my earlier post, which was that all of the contributors are really top-notch writers, too. 143 words.
• Improving Screenshot Technology. 2015-02-16 4:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  Dear MMO Developers: Sometimes I want to take screenshots. Almost all of you are really great at providing a “take screenshot” key. Most of you even put it in the proper place, which is the “Print Screen” key if you don’t know. (Why some of you still insist on forcing us to use F12 or F9 or F10 or even F11 still boggles my mind, but I can let that slide. And there are even a few of you who think that saving your screenshots in a format other than JPEG is okay, but I won’t name names here.) 455 words.
• Storybricks and The Nature Of The Internet. 2015-02-23 4:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  • Responses
  
  More alarming news about SOE/Daybreak/EQNext. Speaking as a gamer, even if EQNext had launched with the Storybricks AI (and I use the term “AI” loosely) included, it almost certainly wouldn’t have been as impressive as it sounded (see this demo), and it probably would have ended up being a non-factor in the game like that UO “artificial life” thingy. I’ve been very skeptical of SOE’s claims of “emergent behavior” ever since they first started talking about it. 231 words.
• Crowfall And Much Rambling On Game Types. 2015-02-27 4:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  • Pre-Release
  
  A number of people are questioning whether Crowfall is asking for enough money to make their game. I don’t really care about that. (But I think they know what they’re doing.) My main worry is that they’re making an MMO that I won’t like. And they know it. I suspect that’s why they are crowdfunding like this: Real investors wouldn’t support making a game intentionally targeted at a small niche market that doesn’t include mostly-casual PvE players. 845 words.

March, 2015

• Liebster Award Saga Continues. 2015-03-08 10:16 PM.
  • Community
  • Musings
  
  Thanks for the nomination j3w3l! I find these things kind of silly, but I guess it would be rude not to participate in the phenomenon that has taken over the MMO blogosphere lately. I’m such a perfectionist though it’s taken forever to put this together. :) Eleven quick facts about me: I’ve self-published a book on Amazon and sold over three copies. I used to write music and record songs in a home studio. I’ve had tons of dental work done. I secretly wish I could do slight-of-hand magic. My perfectly sane retirement plan is to become a best-selling author. This year I’m hoping to buy a house; I’ve been renting for three years. I hate talking about myself which makes job interviews painful. I used to have really long hair but I cut it short on my 40th birthday. My favorite pickle is the Mt. Olive Kosher Dill pickle. I don’t talk much but sometimes I can be annoyingly verbose. I can juggle up to four balls. Answers to j3w3l’s questions: 1,120 words.
• Low-Energy Gaming. 2015-03-15 3:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  • Single-Player
  
  Real life’s been kicking me in the teeth lately-I’m adjusting to a new work role/schedule and of course there was the annoying end of Daylight Savings. So my MMO gaming (and writing, and overall mental attitude, and almost everything else) has suffered. Oddly enough I’ve landed on Path of Exile as a mental tonic, a game which I had previously rejected as uninteresting all the way back in its nearly-perpetual beta. Now I see that it has one very compelling feature: You can play it one-handed. 297 words.
• On The Radar For 2015. 2015-03-30 3:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  • Pre-Release
  • Predictions
  
  Last time I did this. Note that some games aren’t on the following list because I have either a) forgotten about them, or b) never heard of them. MMORPGs I’m Looking Forward To These are games that I’m still anxiously awaiting the opportunity to play, because I haven’t yet seen or heard anything to wreck my enthusiasm. Black Desert. I keep seeing good things. Skyforge. I keep hearing good things. 799 words.

April, 2015

• General Request For Podcasters. 2015-04-03 3:00 PM.
  • Musings
  • Wish List
  
  This happened to me while listening to a podcast during my morning pre-work routine: My mind was wandering while the podcasters were talking, then something in what they were saying about a game grabbed my attention and made me want to check out said game. But I had no idea what game they were talking about, so I had to rewind until I got to the very beginning of their discussion topic to find out the name of the game. 216 words.

May, 2015

• FFXIV – UI Wish List for Heavensward. 2015-05-27 3:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  • Pre-Release
  • Wish List
  
  With the Final Fantasy XIV expansion Heavensward coming soon (June 23), I thought I would put together a list of all the nagging UI issues that I hope are addressed in 3.0. It’s a testament to how good the game already is that I have trouble coming up with any significant gameplay issues to complain about-only these nitpicky UI faults. (Knowing how good Square Enix is at patch notes, I could probably go somewhere and find a detailed list of exactly what’s going to be in Heavensward, but let’s just assume there’s still some doubt about the feature set. And also that I haven’t seen much of anything about Heavensward except what I’ve seen in FC chat and that benchmark.) 1,015 words.

August, 2015

• A Dream About Enemy Base Infiltration. 2015-08-03 3:00 PM.
  • Musings
  • Stories
  • Writing
  
  Blaugust Day 3 It’s Sunday morning as I write this. I had the strangest dream last night. That’s not unusual because, honestly, a lot of my dreams are strange. I think the scientific explanation of dreaming* involves your subconscious re-processing things you’ve experienced, but that doesn’t explain a lot of my dreams. Quite often I see things in my dreams that I have no memory of ever seeing, hearing, or experiencing before. Sometimes I’ve heard complete songs with melodies and lyrics. Sometimes I’ve seen stories with plots and dialog. Of course the next morning they are completely gone, which makes me wonder if those songs really had melodies and lyrics, or if I just thought they had melodies and lyrics. 600 words.
• The Wild Internet Frontier. 2015-08-06 3:00 PM.
  • Musings
  • Politics
  
  The hubbub surrounding John Smedley stepping down from Daybreak has gotten me thinking once again about The Internet and its place in society. I’m sort of a Libertarian at heart so the very idea of The Internet has always appealed to me. A place where everyone is free to make their own way, without any pesky government regulations. A place that breaks down political and social borders and treats everyone like an equal human being. 461 words.
• Rift – The Primalist Announcement. 2015-08-07 3:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  Of course the big news Thursday from Gamescom was Trion’s announcement of a new Calling-the Primalist. I can’t say the name jumps out at me as being the coolest name for a calling ever, but then it’s hard to follow up the likes of Mage, Cleric, Warrior, and Rogue. I mean there’s not much left after those four. Bureaucrat? Astronomer? Primalist is as good as anything. Although it doesn’t quite sound like something that channels animal spirits. 268 words.
• Skyforge – Sound Design Matters. 2015-08-08 3:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  I duck into Skyforge now and then but it’s rapidly losing its appeal for me. Part of it is because Dark Souls demands my attention right now, but I think I figured out another reason yesterday: The sound effects, or lack thereof. On my 2-Hour Scorecard for Skyforge I marked the Sound as “Okay.” Now after five hours I’m going to downgrade it to “Bad.” When my Cryomancer is out in the world defeating bad guys and such, throwing out these huge AoE whirlwind spells and dropping comets from the sky (or whatever that ability is), you would think that my speakers would shake and rattle everything on the desk with the sheer magnitude of it. 304 words.
• The Elite: Dangerous Expansion And Value. 2015-08-09 3:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  • Responses
  
  Elite: Dangerous has an expansion coming out and you’ll never guess what happened after the announcement: People on Reddit got mad. In a related story, the sun rose and set today. I admit I’m just an average guy who doesn’t grasp all this new-fangled math the kids use, but I have never understood the “it’s not fair that if someone buys it today they’ll get a better price than someone who bought it before” logic when it comes to games. Of course now that I’m writing it out, I can’t think of the right words to explain why that doesn’t make sense to me. But here goes. 560 words.
• Reactions To WoW Legion. 2015-08-10 3:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  • Pre-Release
  
  World of Warcraft is so far off my radar right now that the announcement of the new Legion expansion* is about as interesting to me as a deer tick. Even that horrible analogy was more interesting to me. It’s not that I don’t like WoW when I play it. It just doesn’t hold my attention for very long. There are two things I just don’t understand about WoW fandom: The first is how people can look around at all of the MMORPGs out there and decide that WoW is the only one they want to play, and the second is how anyone can follow any of the lore that happens in WoW. 674 words.
• ArcheAge – Server Merges aka. Evolution. 2015-08-16 3:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  ArcheAge is merging servers, and of course all of the ones I play(ed) on are affected: Naima and Calleil. (Of course those two aren’t merging together, so I’m still going to end up on two different servers: Kraken and Hanure.) So it looks like if you didn’t stick with one of the very first full servers with all-day queues, you’re getting merged. Out of curiosity I logged in to see what the game looks like now. It’s still on my to-do list to finish leveling my Elf from 48 to 50, which probably wouldn’t take more than a day. Oh, actually I guess it’s 55 now. Or is it more now? Clearly I haven’t been paying attention. I dread trying to play again, though, because as with most MMORPGs, I fear the re-learning curve. It’s probably not that bad with ArcheAge, but still, it was a dangerous world out there at level 48. 582 words.
• Dark Souls – Screenshots. 2015-08-17 3:00 PM.
  • Musings
  • RPG
  • Single-Player
  
  Have some Dark Souls screenshots to start your work week. I am absolutely in love with the “look” of this game. I’ve always been a big fan of realism in game graphics and this game looks like you could reach out and touch what’s happening on the screen, at least after you install the DSfix mod. Tomb of the Giants Before I found out that Anor Londo was the place I needed to go, I wandered around The Catacombs and the Tomb of the Giants for quite a while. The Tomb is so dark you actually have to find and use a hideous skull lantern to see more than two steps ahead. My Knight is seen here wielding the enormous, heavy Dark Knight sword you get from the Undead Parish: I got so sick of those Skeletons down there that I pulled out something that would smash them flat. 399 words.
• Quake CTF Nostalgia – CC vs. DPS. 2015-08-19 3:00 PM.
  • Musings
  • Shooter
  
  This is off topic for this blog, but my old Crayola Clan mate ]CC[-Orange converted some of our Quake CTF match demos into videos. It’s not an exact copy of what we would have seen on our monitors back then (we probably ran at 800×600, and the fov looks higher than I remember) but it’s close. Most of the time I was average, but this one Quake 2 match I was “on” so this is how I will choose to remember my performance from the good old days. :) 315 words.

December, 2015

• WildStar PSA – Password Length. 2015-12-20 4:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  • Status
  
  I finally figured out why I couldn’t log into WildStar. This little saga has been taking place over the weeks and months since the game went free. Originally there was the fact that I’d completely forgotten that I’d setup the Google authenticator, so it kept rejecting me for leaving out that code. That took a while to figure out. (Admittedly I wasn’t looking very hard for the solution.) Next I had to reset my password, because I’d forgotten it. Possibly I’d reset it somewhere during the time I was figuring out the authenticator problem. Of course it wouldn’t let me set it to the password I wanted to use because it doesn’t let you use any of your previous passwords, so I had to make up a new one. This time I made a pretty long one and typed it into the web page and everything was fine. 335 words.

January, 2016

• 2015 Winter Steam Sale List. 2016-01-22 4:00 PM.
  • Musings
  • Steam
  
  This was a post I intended to publish somewhere near the beginning of January. I bought a lot of things in the 2015 Steam Winter sale, but I kept all of my purchases to 7.99 or less, so I consider that a relative success. I even installed some of them. :) Undertale. 7.99. It didn’t look like my kind of game, but I’ve heard a lot of good things about it. I installed and played it briefly … but it isn’t really my kind of game. At least in my current frame of mind. 692 words.
• ARK – So Good Yet So Bad. 2016-01-25 6:00 PM.
  • Musings
  • Survival
  
  If anyone looks at my YouTube channel*, you can tell I’m still playing a fair amount of ARK. I’m in a very “I want to be by myself” gaming mood right now and toodling around by myself on a giant island of dinosaurs is a good fix. Thanks to a suggestion from Aywren I’ve customized my server settings to make the game a little more palatable. I haven’t altered it much, just a few tweaks to GameUserSettings.ini to minimize the annoyances: 1,537 words.
• Star Wars and X-Files (Spoilers). 2016-01-28 1:36 PM.
  • Media
  • Musings
  
  Star Wars: The Force Awakens Apparently the moratorium on spoilers for Star Wars is over, although personally I don’t think it should end until a film is released to streaming or rentals. The theater experience is not as good as my house, even though I don’t have an especially great television or sound system like I used to. Movies in theaters are generally awful experiences. There are very few movies that would get me to go to a theater anymore. Not any of the comic book movies, not The Martian, not Interstellar, not any of the upcoming nerdy movies coming out this year, pretty much nothing … except a new Star Wars movie. A Star Wars_ sequel_. With the original cast in it. 1,435 words.

February, 2016

• Don’t Feel Bad About Getting Bored. 2016-02-03 4:00 PM.
  • Advice
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  • Responses
  
  I recently saw a farewell post on My Life in Azeroth. I’m sorry to see anyone stop blogging, and I hope they resume someday, but the tone of the post got me thinking. It seems like a lot of WoW players sound apologetic or guilty when they discuss leaving that game, like they are somehow letting Blizzard or the community down. I’ve seen it in blog posts, and I’ve seen it on Twitter. Like they are admitting some deep, dark secret that they didn’t want to tell anyone. Like they are revealing some deep personal flaw in themselves. 307 words.
• Punishing PvP Activity In PvP Games. 2016-02-05 4:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  • Responses
  
  I was reading the Albion Online State of the Game and came across this part: Red zones will be full loot PvP zones that do not contain any claimable territories. Red zones will be subject to a crime and reputation system that makes sure that killing peaceful players - in particular, if they are zerged down - has more consequences for the attackers. No part of that makes me more interested in Albion Online. 263 words.

March, 2016

• Finally, The Debate Is Settled. 2016-03-17 2:18 AM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  I’m so glad this debate is finally settled, so we won’t need to go over it again in any future MMORPGs. 21 words.
• Is Black Desert Online Alt-Friendly?. 2016-03-22 1:17 AM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  I’ve been thinking about alts in BDO. I saw a lot of comments early on about how alt-friendly it is, but I disagree. When I think of an alt-friendly game, I think of a game where each alt has a different gameplay experience. So that if you get tired of playing with one character, you can log in with another to see or do something completely different. The most famous example of that is, of course, WoW, where every race has a different starting zone and their own storyline for 20 levels or so. SWTOR might be an even better example, since those class stories go all the way up to level 50 I think. Rift is very alt-friendly to me because of the wide variety of playstyles you can put together with the soul system. 338 words.

May, 2016

• New. 2016-05-16 5:59 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  • Single-Player
  • Status
  
  I am writing this post on my phone while I sit in my new cubicle at my new job, which is not so much new as it is different, in that I have only moved about 15 yards away from my old cubicle which I left Friday. I moved from an old and dying project where I constantly had to deal with the world collapsing around me to an equally old but at least stable, funded project where I will only be responsible for a straightforward set of requirements. 584 words.

June, 2016

• NBI 2016 – Kill Hippy GIFs With Fire. 2016-06-07 2:15 PM.
  • Blog
  • Musings
  • Opinion
  
  The topic of animated GIFs came up in the NBI Discord this morning so I thought I’d write a little bit about it. I hate animated GIFs. That is all. No, really, I hate them. I lived through the 1990s World Wide Web, so I have vivid memories of the days when every advertiser put obnoxious blinking animated GIFs in every web ad, making every web page into some crazy dystopian night-time Las Vegas scene with blinking neon signs in every direction. (There was an early Futurama episode that captured this very well-I think it was A Bycyclops Built For Two.) It was horrible. It was so bad it birthed the entire ad-blocker industry. 514 words.

August, 2016

• That New Jersey Guy Suing Niantic. 2016-08-03 1:26 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  I wrote the following on July 20: With all of the talk about Pokemon Go, I started to wonder: Do I own the virtual space on my private property? I just bought a house on 3 acres of land. I have legal ownership of that physical space (at least until the government decides to take it for whatever reason). But if Niantic goes and puts a Pokewhatsis on my map coordinates, shouldn’t I own that too? Shouldn’t Niantic have to get my permission before it can do anything with my map coordinates? With anyone’s? 504 words.
• Melee Classes in WoW. 2016-08-26 6:14 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  While leveling my alts in WoW, it occurred to me that I don’t ever play any melee characters. I have a Warrior-two of them in fact-but I just don’t like Warriors in WoW. My very first character in 2006 was a Warrior, who I leveled to about 20-something and gave up on because I kept getting killed by those stupid Defias (or whatever they’re called) guys in Westfall. (Back in those days if you ever got jumped by 2 mobs you were basically dead-at least I was-hence my switch to a Hunter.) 807 words.

September, 2016

• Why I Can’t Follow WoW’s Story. 2016-09-02 3:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  I hadn’t had a chance to play much WoW since Tuesday, so I logged in Thursday night to continue my adventures with my Mage and his new Ebonchill gizmo. I hadn’t done much of anything since he obtained his Artifact. When I logged in, I had a quest to turn into the Great Alakazam, or whatever his name is. (I can’t quite make it out in the picture below.) I clicked him and turned in the quest, not really paying attention to what it was. I vaguely remembered this guy was supposed to find more mages to bring into “my” class hall. 1,012 words.
• Bonding With Characters. 2016-09-15 2:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  It’s only been two days and I already regret changing my main FFXIV character’s gender. Who is this total stranger running around in Eozera now? What happened to the free-spirited girl who rode to Gridania in search of fame and fortune, and ended up conquering titans and dragons? This new guy is an imposter. He hasn’t earned the right to be there. Imposter! You don’t deserve to be in that grand company! 381 words.
• Three Albums. 2016-09-29 3:00 PM.
  • Musings
  • Responses
  
  I saw Liore’s post on #3AlbumsThatChangedMyLife, and I started to think back on my own impressionable youth and the albums that affected me. I was raised in a somewhat musical family, but I didn’t become “interested” in music until let’s say my mid-to-late teenage years. Prior to that most pop songs went in one ear and out the other and I never owned any albums. (Okay I did buy a single of M-M-M-My Sharona, a song that was entirely inappropriate for my then-age.) In high school I started to learn to play guitar (again) and really started to buy, collect, and “study” music. Since then I’ve dabbled in writing songs and home recording and all manner of audio things, which now manifests as an occasional YouTube upload. But I think my musical senses really peaked in my late teens and twenties, which is reflected in this list. 1,227 words.

January, 2017

• Steam Entertainment Value 2016. 2017-01-02 4:08 PM.
  • Musings
  • Steam
  
  Here’s a chart I just made showing all my Steam purchases in 2016. I computed the cost per hour for playing each game, based on the price I paid for the game and the number of hours I played (according to Steam). In this way I came up with a list of games sorted by best entertainment value. If the cost per hour came out more than the purchase price (such as Bastion which came out to $37/hour), then I capped it at the purchase price. It didn’t make sense to me for the mathematical cost to be more than the actual real world cost. 1,017 words.

April, 2017

• International Grammar: Punting. 2017-04-26 3:00 PM.
  • Musings
  
  Risking military action by the NFL by showing this picture of Drew Butler. Here’s a grammar thing I learned, regarding the word “punt.” I’m American, so the word “punt” has always meant exactly one thing: Punting a football, as in kicking the ball to the other team. (American football, that is.) Occasionally I also see “punting” used metaphorically, as in something like, “I’m going to punt on making that decision.” In that sense, it means you’re going to put off making the decision, or give it to someone else to make. 439 words.
• Rogue One (Spoilers). 2017-04-29 4:00 PM.
  • Media
  • Musings
  • Reviews
  
  I did not see Rogue One in the theater. I regretted that decision for a day or two, then felt good about it. I decided that it was “fan fiction”-a term I don’t use in a particularly positive sense. (Sorry superfans.) I waited until it came to FIOS VOD. Then I forgot about it. Then I remembered it. I went into the movie with very low expectations. I wasn’t expecting “real” Star Wars. (I am expecting to repeat this behavior for the “Han Solo” movie.) 550 words.

May, 2017

• 13 Reasons Why (Spoilers). 2017-05-06 3:00 PM.
  • Media
  • Musings
  
  After Two Episodes I have seen a number of people on Twitter talking positively about the new Netflix show 13 Reasons Why, so I watched the first two episodes last night. I expected it to be a touching drama about a teen suicide, but it appears to be more of a tense psychological thriller, somewhat in the vein of I Know What You Did Last Summer (except that we, the audience, don’t know). 2,963 words.
• Chris Cornell and Audioslave. 2017-05-26 2:30 PM.
  • Media
  • Musings
  
  Today’s writing topic is: Chris Cornell, who sadly committed suicide. I might be a smidge older than some of the other folks reminiscing on Twitter about Soundgarden and Chris Cornell in the wake of his recent death. My memory of Soundgarden is limited to exactly two songs from 90s radio: Black Hole Sun and Spoonman. I liked both songs, possibly even loved Spoonman. I remember vividly where I was the first time I heard it, actually. It’s an enthralling song. 674 words.

July, 2017

• Ranking My Play Personalities. 2017-07-21 2:30 PM.
  • Discussion
  • Musings
  • Responses
  
  Thinking Play had a very interesting post recently about Play Personalities, something I had never heard of before. I recommend reading it. It’s a bit like a Meyers-Briggs test for how you spend your leisure time, or the Bartle Test. Here’s my self-assessment of how I fit the different play personalities: The Joker. Nope. Well, maybe a little. Sometimes I do like to poke fun at things that other people find deadly serious, much to my own detriment on Twitter. Although I am not a “class clown” by any stretch of the imagination. 508 words.

August, 2017

• Meet-Cat. 2017-08-06 11:39 PM.
  • Musings
  
  So Tuesday afternoon I went out to my garage to get some tools, and a very friendly cat popped out from beneath my car and meowed. I meowed back and the cat went on to explain with a long series of meows that he was very hungry and he further asked if I might have some extra food please? Now I’ve seen probably a half dozen different cats wandering around the vicinity of my house in the last year, not to mention packs of stray cats hanging around the cul-de-sac where I last lived (I am pretty sure a neighbor across the road fed them). Not one of these cats has ever walked up and started a conversation with me. They’ve always run away, like outdoor cats usually do. 730 words.
• Random Friday Tidbits. 2017-08-18 4:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  • Progression Report
  
  Another brief post just to post something today. GW2. I did in fact retry Chapter 16, “Hearts and Minds,” and beat it after two more attempts Thursday night, which took another hour. If you leave the instance for any reason, by the way, you have to start all over. So take my advice: Don’t rage quit if you die to the last boss. :) I’ll probably start Living Story Season 3 this weekend although I’m kind of burned out on GW2 already. 298 words.
• Dimrill Dale and Eclipse Jealosy. 2017-08-20 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  One thing that happens when you make a conscious effort to post every day is that half of your blog posts turn into diary entries. “Dear diary: Here’s what I did today. Well, yesterday.” Yesterday I completed the Moria Epic Story and officially returned to the world under the sky in Dimrill Dale, attaining level 60 in the process. I got to revisit the Watcher in the Water deep in the bowels of Moria. Volume 2, Chapter 5 ended with having to complete three different skirmishes where you defend various places in Moria from Orc invasions. They were ridiculously easy to the point of tedium. In the end, the dwarves got their precious mithril axe Zigilburk back so I guess they are happy now. (That’s a terrible name for a legendary axe by the way.) 596 words.
• The Return of The Ringed City DLC. 2017-08-22 2:30 PM.
  • Musings
  • RPG
  
  Yesterday morning I finally returned to my Ringed City DLC blind playthrough videos after a two month break. The first thing I encountered was a dragon boss, Darkeater Midir. I died. I decided to go a different direction. :) I ran into Judicator Argo and his entourage of Dark Spirits. It took a couple of tries but I got through that ordeal to a woman whom I assumed to be Princess Filianore. 380 words.
• The Mist (2017). 2017-08-26 8:47 PM.
  • Media
  • Musings
  • Reviews
  
  When I heard that there was a new version of Stephen King’s The Mist available to watch, I ran to my nearest cable box and found the ten episodes of season one buried in Spike TV’s video on demand on FIOS. The Mist has always been one of my favorite Stephen King stories. It was a novella at the beginning of the collection Skeleton Crew. (Survivor Type is the other memorable story from that book.) 600 words.

October, 2017

• GW2 – Fun While It Lasted?. 2017-10-23 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  I hate to say this, but once I finished the GW2 Path of Fire story, I found that my drive to keep playing rapidly dwindled. I think I understand now why they didn’t put very much of the story on the final two maps. They are less fun to play on. Bhagpuss alluded to this early on in his first first impressions post. There is a very noticeable ramp up in difficulty from Elon Riverlands to The Desolation. I have to admit I chuckled at his nailing the exact difficulties that I routinely experience in Heart of Thorns in his description of Path of Fire: 702 words.
• Passing on PC Destiny 2. 2017-10-25 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  The-guy-that-Nathan-Fillion-voices from the open beta. Soon you will probably see a lot of talk about the launch of Destiny 2 on the PC. I’m trying to be more discerning with my game purchases these days, so I have no plans to pay full price for an over-hyped, mediocre shooter whose main attraction seems to be a large cult following. Maybe if it goes on sale I’ll take a look at it, but who are we kidding, this is Activision/Blizzard and it’s never going to go on sale, so I’m probably never going to buy it. 311 words.

November, 2017

• GW2 – Story Over Time. 2017-11-10 3:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  Remember Checkhov’s gun here? I didn’t either. Still waiting for someone to use it. Guild Wars 2 posts do fairly well for some weird reason (but not as well as Dark Tower posts, go figure), so here’s another one. If you aren’t caught up with GW2 there might be some accidental spoilers below. I mentioned before that I’ve been re-playing the Living World Season 2. Eventually I’ll be uploading them to my YouTube channel, because hey, why not. “Pivot to video” and all that. I actually got six whole views on one of my Path of Fire videos! 679 words.
• WoW – What I Thought In 2006. 2017-11-22 3:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  In light of the announcement of World of Warcraft Classic, everybody’s abuzz with WoW nostalgia, so I thought it would be fun to re-post my very first thoughts about WoW Vanilla from 2006. From blizzard.com - I can’t find any screenshots prior to 2014. World of Warcraft October 10, 2006 Inspired by the recent episode of South Park, and being bored with FlatOut2, I finally installed my trial version of World of Warcraft yesterday, which I’d gotten with a video card about a year ago I think. I’ve been trying to stay away from MMORPGs because, as South Park indicated, you really can’t play them competitively unless you’re willing to join some kind of guild and give up your life, and really, what’s the point in playing a game if not to win? :) But I’ve heard repeatedly that WoW was particularly good for so-called “casual gamers” and people who liked solo adventuring, so I gave it a shot. 1,565 words.
• Writing versus Story. 2017-11-27 3:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  Bhagpuss said something interesting in his last comment: In general I think the idea that GW1 had good writing is fanciful. Much though I like Prophecies, the writing is pretty shoddy. I think when people praise the writing they are mainly talking about the plotting, which is fairly coherent. The dialog is mostly stilted and unconvincing, often risible. First, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the word “risible” in my entire life. It means laughable, as in, “It’s risible that I’ve never seen the word risible.” 380 words.
• Social Jumping. 2017-11-29 3:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  Shadow added in post to enhance the illusion of height :) I’m not going to write about how thoroughly exhausted and beaten down I was last night after completing the epic ~45 minute death march of a fight in the first chapter of the first episode of GW2’s Living World Season 4. Instead I’m going to keep it light and talk about jumping. I saw a remark somewhere in passing about jumping in MMORPGs (apologies but I can’t remember where) which inspired me to write this. 643 words.

June, 2018

• E3 – Anthem, Sekiro, Cyberpunk 2077, Fallout 76. 2018-06-11 2:30 PM.
  • Musings
  
  Fine! I’ll write something about the E3s and whatnot. I’m not a big fan of these kinds of game conferences but I actually sat down and watched some showcases this weekend, because really, who among us can honestly say they’d pass up a chance to write snarky tweets and ruin people’s fun on the Internet. I missed most of the EA show on Friday. I started watching right before the Anthem gameplay footage, which was followed by approximately 20 continuous hours of FIFA gameplay. 895 words.
• E3 – Square Enix, Ubisoft, Sony. 2018-06-13 2:30 PM.
  • Consoles
  • Musings
  
  I watched the Square Enix showcase but it left little impression on me. Unlike seemingly everyone else, though, I liked that it was just a series of trailers and videos, and not one of those awkward live presentations in front of a confused audience. I just feel like in the year 2018, we should have evolved beyond the 90s-Steve Jobs-cult-of-personality-walking-around-on-stage phase of our lives. Although the guy from Bethesda talking about Fallout 76 actually was pretty entertaining. I’ll make one exception for him I guess, if I could remember his name. Everybody else sounded, though, like a corporate robot talking about PowerPoint slides, graphs, and charts, and sucked every bit of fun out of the games they were supposed to be excited about, because it’s so, so obvious that it’s just numbers on a spreadsheet to them. 1,499 words.
• On Blogging More. 2018-06-18 2:30 PM.
  • Blog
  • Musings
  • Writing
  
  This is an amalgamation of an old draft from March 2017 that I never got around to publishing, probably because I never found a picture for it, and some new thoughts because the subject came up again this past week. My keyboard, stylistically distorted purely for artistic effect, not at all to mask the dust and dirt that showed up because of the side lighting angle. 2,366 words.
• Controller Woes: Aging and D-Pads. 2018-06-25 2:30 PM.
  • Hardware
  • Musings
  
  I’ve been playing a lot of Dark Souls Remastered lately, which requires playing on a controller. Technically you can play the game with mouse-and-keyboard on PC (and it’s even easier in the Remastered edition) but the control scheme is completely alien to any other mouse-and-keyboard game, and it takes a lot of getting used to, and it’s just not worth the effort for one game. Even the controller scheme takes a fair amount practicing and learning, even if you’re used to using controller. 915 words.

July, 2018

• GW2 – Writers Fired. 2018-07-06 2:30 PM.
  • Musings
  
  Given recent unexpected events at ArenaNet, I feel pretty awful about my last post on GW2. I’ve expressed displeasure over ArenaNet’s handling of story and gameplay plenty of times here which is exactly the kind of thing that led to the firing of two ArenaNet writers. So I wanted to say a couple of things. Oddly contrite-looking Commander screenshot seems appropriate here. First of all, I absolutely respect any game writer or developer’s right to tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about, that I don’t understand the challenges associated with writing for a game, etc., etc. I don’t know what it’s like to write for a game, and I’m quite sure it’s entirely different from writing a book or writing a blog. I try to keep that kind of thing in mind when I’m commenting on games but sometimes I forget. 772 words.
• WoW – Questioning My Belonging In MMORPGs. 2018-07-24 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  MMORPG players are abuzz about World of Warcraft’s next expansion, Battle for Azeroth, which begins next month. (There are too many posts to link here; throw a dart at the blogosphere and you’ll find a post on Battle for Azeroth preparations.) The last character I played in unsubscribed WoW: A level 3 Goblin, c. 2017 Nothing makes me puzzle over my association with the MMORPG genre more than a World of Warcraft expansion. Nothing makes me feel so out of place-so much like an outsider, like I don’t fit in with the MMORPG player crowd. 1,192 words.
• Primary Care Doctors. 2018-07-30 12:42 PM.
  • Blog
  • Musings
  
  This afternoon I have an appointment with a new primary care doctor, one I’ve never seen before. I had no choice but to select a new one because I had to buy new insurance this year, and my old doctor wasn’t “in the network.” It took three months to get this appointment. I don’t like doctors even on a good day. Especially “primary care” doctors. As far as I can tell, the main goal of this type of doctor is to shove you out the office door as fast as possible with the most generic of healthcare solutions that they can think of: “Here, take this generic prescription and come back in a couple weeks if your problem’s not better.” That appears to be the main thing they teach you in primary care doctor school. 347 words.
• The Medical Report. 2018-07-31 3:11 PM.
  • Blog
  • Musings
  
  The very brief medical news is: Yesterday, the doctor was considerably more concerned about my high blood pressure than my hands. I’ll be starting on some new medication for it. I have a followup appointment Wednesday morning where bloodwork will be done and they will see if my pressure is still in what they casually referred to as the “stroke zone.” They did an EKG and I got the distinct impression that if the readings had gone poorly, I might very well have been strapped to a gurney and carted to a hospital right then. But apparently the result was acceptable. 367 words.

August, 2018

• Blaugust Introduction – Blaugust 1. 2018-08-01 7:22 PM.
  • Blog
  • Musings
  
  This is my back yard and the raucous neighbors who frequently visit. Today is the first day of Blaugust. I thought I would start by introducing myself, something I probably should have done a long time ago. Hi! I’m a middle-aged guy who lives alone in a somewhat rural-ish house with a dog and a cat. I’m “in my 40s,” though in truth I’m now a lot closer to 50 than I would care to admit. I was married for a time, but now I’m divorced. I don’t have any kids. I’m an INTP and/or an INFP depending on my mood when I take that test. 659 words.
• Gaming Goals Aren’t Fun For Me – Blaugust 2. 2018-08-02 2:59 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  I’ve noticed over the years that a lot of bloggers post their gaming goals at the start of every month. I’ve always found this both fascinating and puzzling. I myself can’t think of a time when I’ve ever made long-term planning goals for any games I’m playing. My goal-all the time, every month, every day, every time I log into any game-is to experience something fun or interesting or entertaining or challenging or surprising. 342 words.
• The Cataract Report – Blaugust 3. 2018-08-03 8:30 PM.
  • Blog
  • Musings
  
  Not from today, but from 2010, the last time I saw an eye doctor before 2018. This morning I finally saw the cataract specialist. It’s been about five months since the optometrist told me I had a cataract. It looks like I never wrote a full post about that. No Blaugust back then. :) The delay was mostly because of having to meet insurance requirements: To make a long story short, I have new insurance this year, and that insurance requires a referral from my primary care doctor, but I had to find a new primary care doctor because my old one was not in the new insurance network, all of which adds up to a lot of waiting for appointments. (There was also a little bit of me delaying making the appointments because I hate doing that.) 774 words.
• New Writing Process Didn’t Work – Blaugust 5. 2018-08-05 11:44 AM.
  • Blog
  • Musings
  • Writing
  
  This photo of boats is completely relevant to this post! I think I’ve collected enough observational data now to abandon my new writing process. At first it was new and invigorating, but after a week it’s kind of irritating and not any better or faster. For posterity, here’s what I did: I turned on the webcam and recorded myself talking for about 7 or 8 minutes. I played back the video with VLC and set the playback speed slightly slower, and transcribed what I said into a Scrivener document. Then I copied the transcription into another Scrivener document and edited it into a blog post. I read the final post out loud several times to complete the editing process. Then I copied it into WordPress, added a picture, and published it almost immediately. 507 words.
• I Wish EQ2 Would Explain More – Blaugust 6. 2018-08-06 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  EverQuest II would probably rank second on my list of MMORPGs that I wish was easier for me to get into and play more (below Lord of the Rings Online). But they sure don’t make much of effort to accommodate new or returning players. The longest I’ve ever played EverQuest II is leveling a Warden up into the 40s five years ago. Whenever I return to that character, it’s almost impossible to figure out how to play the game again, because EQ2 follows the “more-is-more” philosophy of giving out hotbar abilities every character level. If you don’t play regularly, it’s pretty hard to comprehend the sheer magnitude of hotbar skills given to you, when to use them, or whether to use them at all. 1,027 words.
• Back Yard Bird-Watching – Blaugust 7. 2018-08-07 11:22 PM.
  • Blog
  • Musings
  
  The classic and ubiquitous American Robin from many years ago at a different house. My dad was an avid backyard bird-watcher. He would setup bird feeders and watch all the wildlife that showed up through binoculars from the living room. In the early days of video cameras, this was back in the 80s, I remember he’d setup one of those monstrous suitcase-sized VHS camcorders on a tripod to record birds at the feeders. 690 words.
• The Hand Report – Blaugust 8. 2018-08-08 8:24 PM.
  • Blog
  • Musings
  
  This morning I went to another doctor’s appointment, the fourth one in the last nine days. This time I went to see a hand specialist, as I had been referred from my primary care doctor. I was amazed to be able to get an appointment to see him two days after calling. It’s interesting to see the kind of people you find in waiting rooms. Based on my meager experience the last couple of weeks, doctor’s offices seems to be the social hotspot for people over 60. Today an entourage of four older folks were in the waiting room to help one of their number with an appointment for an injured arm. I listened to them talk amongst themselves about how to fill out the medical history forms. “She has trouble with depression doesn’t she? She doesn’t want them to know about that though. How much does she weigh?” This and many other very private subjects were broadcast throughout the waiting room for anyone to hear. It was quite funny. Waiting rooms: Great places to hang out if you want to steal identities. 805 words.
• Nineties News Nostalgia on Netflix – Blaugust 9. 2018-08-09 7:48 PM.
  • Blog
  • Media
  • Musings
  
   I just finished watching the American Crime Story: The People Versus O.J. Simpson series on Netflix. It’s pretty good. I’m not sure it deserved to win any Emmys, but I enjoyed it anyway, especially the second half of the series. I didn’t remember a lot of the twists and turns. I didn’t see much of anything about the whole OJ Trial when it happened. I remember the basic framework of it: The Bronco, the trial, the gloves, the acquittal. Oops, spoiler alert! Anyway I didn’t pay any attention to the details at the time. For example, I never knew that OJ’s friend is the same Kardashian that spawned all the Kardashians we know and love today. 297 words.
• My Oldest Computer Files – Blaugust 11. 2018-08-11 2:30 PM.
  • Blog
  • Musings
  
  My dog likes to be involved with everything. They say everything’s been written before and there’s nothing new to write on a gaming blog. Well, okay, I say that, because I’m lazy and not very motivated. I keep looking at all the mountains of writing prompts floating around Blaugust, including the ones I wrote, and thinking, “Meh, I’m just not interested in writing about that today.” 880 words.
• Developer Appreciation Overthinking – Blaugust 18. 2018-08-18 2:30 PM.
  • Blog
  • Musings
  
  The Blaugust theme of the week is Developer Appreciation, but I’ll be honest, I have no idea how to write on this topic. It’s one of those situations where I have to decide whether to write what I think everyone expects, or write what I actually think. I’m sure the intention here is to simply state, “I think games are great and I don’t think developers should get death threats on Twitter!” But that sounds a lot like “Sky Is Blue Week” or “Water Is Wet Week” to me. Of course I appreciate the developers of the games I play. I wouldn’t be buying or writing about their games if I didn’t! Of course I don’t think developers should be getting death threats, because I’m a normal human being who understands cause and effect, and the consequences of my actions. 830 words.
• Drustvar Complete, Mastodon – Blaugust 21. 2018-08-21 1:24 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  So we meet again, blank page. Stop yelling at me, now-a-total-of-150-draft-posts-I-can’t-use, you know what you did. Ever wonder why I embed the image in the post and also set it as the "featured image" in WordPress, so it shows up twice on the web site? For the RSS feed. I design my posts almost exclusively for RSS feed readers. 627 words.
• That Amazon New World Preview – Blaugust 22. 2018-08-22 12:41 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  From the [new New World game site][1]. Cool for a game, but loads of historicity to pick apart there. :) We got our first “hands on” look at Amazon’s New World from Tech Advisor UK, and it doesn’t look pretty. (I mean, it looks pretty, sure, but I am referring to the gameplay.) 680 words.
• A Logical Dead End – Blaugust 26. 2018-08-26 3:19 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  Island Expedition tutorial I just went ahead and cancelled my World of Warcraft subscription today. It was largely a formality. I can’t imagine a world (of Warcraft! Har!) where this expansion would have been so great that I’d have played for more than a month. Incidentally, no other MMO makes it so easy to cancel its subscription, I’ve noticed. You just click the “Cancel” link and that’s it. No questions, no guilt trips, no nothing. 834 words.
• Side Quests and Spigots – Blaugust 27. 2018-08-27 1:51 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  Isn’t anyone going to clean up this beach? Really bad for tourism. My Blaugust posts have definitely turned into a diary. Not normally what I like to write, but the posts must be posted. I’ve abandoned the concept of playing World of Warcraft by giving the game my full attention. I played for two more hours yesterday while watching Hulu, clicking through the quest text without reading it, blindly killing mobs and collecting drops until the objectives were done. 813 words.
• Hard Drive Shopping – Blaugust 29. 2018-08-29 2:00 PM.
  • Hardware
  • Musings
  
  Casualties of War aka. Information Technology. This SSD and external USB drive both died last year, both less than two years old. I mentioned my main 2 TB D: drive conked out yesterday morning for mysterious reasons. It’s working again now, but I’m eyeing it suspiciously, because I’ve noticed some odd behavior in my applications and rebooted a couple of times yesterday to straighten it out. I’m not sure it was hard drive related but it could have been. I successfully copied all of my “documents” (which includes documents, music, pictures, and videos) to a safe place, so I won’t lose anything important if the drive dies completely. 1,093 words.
• Blaugust Performance Self-Review – Blaugust 31. 2018-08-31 2:00 PM.
  • Blog
  • Musings
  • Writing
  
  Back in July I filled a directory with 70 photographs for potential use in Blaugust posts. Last chance to use them! This is Chingoteague. I’m not sure if this is sunrise or sunset but let’s just say it’s sunset to fit the theme of the post. 2,723 words.

October, 2018

• Not Dead Yet – The Inactivity Report. 2018-10-18 3:36 PM.
  • Consoles
  • Musings
  
  Horizon Zero Dawn, the only thing I’ve played in the last week. I was trying yet again to think of something interesting to write, when I saw Roger talking about Blaugust this morning, which led me to Gevlon talking about Blaugust, where I found out that I’m no longer an active blogger. I mean, sure, I haven’t posted in a week, whereas I normally try to post something once or twice a week. But man, talk about a tough room. 1,201 words.
• Video Game Museums. 2018-10-29 8:55 PM.
  • Musings
  
  The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, photo by Brandt Luke Zorn. I saw a tweet the other day that made me raise an eyebrow: Hey Twitter fans: please go track down people who could legally get us Star Wars Galaxy's server code, and City of Heroes server code. If they agree to hand over the server code, we can bring those games back online legally. 688 words.

November, 2018

• Mandatory BlizzCon Post. 2018-11-08 2:43 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  Random WoW image from the media library because I can’t be bothered to find one that makes sense for this post. This will be what I hope is a quick blog post about BlizzCon, largely inspired by peer pressure more than any real interest. In fact, the main reason this post didn’t get deleted was I needed a vehicle to say that I’m trying to reserve most of my writing energy this month for NaNoWriMo. I’m still having back trouble so typing at keyboards for long periods of time is challenging. You can safely skip the rest of this post because I won’t be saying anything about BlizzCon that you haven’t already read a thousand times before. 563 words.
• My Grandfather on Armistice Day, 100 Years Ago. 2018-11-11 4:00 PM.
  • Musings
  
  Exactly one hundred years ago today, World War I ended with the signing of the Armistice. I’m posting this at 11:00 my time, though of course the actual Armistice was signed in France, so I’m probably four or five hours late. My grandfather was a part of the American Expeditionary Force along with a million others, went through basic training, shipped over to France, and arrived just in time for the last offensive in the war, the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, which began on September 26, 1918. He was 23 at the time. 1,013 words.
• November in Review. 2018-11-28 3:24 PM.
  • MMO
  • Musings
  
  I don’t normally do month-in-review posts, but since I was largely absent this month, I figured I should do one for a change. I’ve spent most of November trying to recover from back pain. The first day of the month it got really bad, then it got better, then it got really bad again, and now it’s getting better again. I’ve been taking a muscle relaxant called baclofen every day this month, and last week I started going to physical therapy to try to loosen things up. X-rays have shown it’s entirely a muscle problem in my upper back, neck, and shoulders, most likely caused by years of slightly incorrect sitting posture (my own theory, since I have no other ideas-assuming it’s not some as-yet-undiscovered medical issue). Technically I have a slight curve in my spine between my shoulder blades but they tell me it’s not unusual and not the root cause here. 765 words.

December, 2018

• Another Year Over. 2018-12-20 2:00 PM.
  • Music
  • Musings
  • Videos
  
  I’m playing RimWorld in pretty much every spare moment of every day right now. This game is just amazing. If MMORPGs had even a tenth of this much interesting gameplay elements, maybe they wouldn’t be dying out. :) Note: I don’t really think MMORPGs are dying out. They’re just evolving into the game equivalent of Marvel summer blockbusters: Designed by focus groups to appeal to the broadest possible audience, which often doesn’t include MMORPG players of the 90s, who are clearly in the minority of gamer audiences these days. 1,279 words.
• Fighting Early Access Disasters. 2018-12-24 2:29 PM.
  • Musings
  • Responses
  
  Live shot of players navigating the gaming industry in 2018. Bhagpuss has a post referencing, among other things, the deplorable state of Early Access game releases right now, seen in such recent launch disasters as Fallout 76 (not technically early access but, seriously, it was) and Atlas (which as I write this hasn’t been out more than a day and has already been review-bombed to death on Steam). 610 words.

January, 2019

• RimWorld Anecdotes. 2019-01-02 2:05 PM.
  • Musings
  • Single-Player
  • Steam
  
  Raiders tunneling into Ancient Danger. Again, the screenshot looks dumb and meaningless. Just trust me when I say this was a super dramatic, white knuckle, holy crap moment. People on Twitter are probably sick of hearing about RimWorld by now, but blog readers can enjoy these quips for the first time! Unless you follow me on Twitter, then you’ve probably seen them before. But now you can read more about what I meant with the power of more words! 2,082 words.
• A Train Wreck. 2019-01-05 1:42 PM.
  • Musings
  
  If you don't instantly recognize this, we can't be friends. While seemingly every where I turn at the start of 2019 I see people talking about how it’s a great time to start blogging because blogging is super hot and rewarding and it’s all fine and nothing is on fire and burning right to the ground around us, *I* am sitting here wondering what the heck is even the point of this blog anymore. 594 words.
• Cynicism vs. Observation. 2019-01-07 2:29 PM.
  • Musings
  
  I’m going to try a new thing this year on the ol’ blog. Last year, I would start writing a post, thinking it was the greatest thing ever, words flowing all over the place, but then I’d hit a wall and couldn’t really think of a conclusion, and I would wander away to something else. Then I would read the post the next day or the next, and realize it wasn’t that good, despite having a kernel of a good idea. So I’d edit it again and put it away. Then the next day I’d realize it’s even worse, and edit it again and again and again, adding paragraphs, removing paragraphs, changing it entirely from what it once was on the first day. Eventually I’d decide it was utterly pointless garbage that didn’t have a conclusion for a reason-because it was garbage-and it would remain forever buried in the Drafts folder. This is one of those posts. But this year, I’m going to post it anyway! Maybe that’s kind of cynical. It feels kind of cynical. But after writing this post, I don’t really know anymore. 1,044 words.
• Audio Talk Is The Coolest. 2019-01-08 4:45 PM.
  • Musings
  • Streaming
  • Videos
  
  Here’s another one of those posts I started one day and then decided the next day that it doesn’t really say anything, and doesn’t contain any valuable content except the one link to Scopique’s post. But per the new 2019 blogging rules, I’m posting it anyway. I saw Scopique’s post on audio settings for streaming, which gives me an excuse to write about one of my favorite things: Audio engineering! I could write thousands and thousands and thousands of words on the inside baseball minutia of all the work I put into the audio tracks on my YouTube videos. (“See how different it sounds when you move the microphone two inches *that* way?? See how much different it sounds with a 4.25:1 compression ratio instead of a 4.5:1 ratio??? Isn’t that the coolest thing ever???”) 677 words.
• Return to Subnautica. 2019-01-14 3:30 PM.
  • Musings
  • Single-Player
  • Steam
  
  Well we’re starting off the week by deciding *not* to post the post I was going to post about why blogging is such work for me right now, because of the reasons I explain in that post, because I just don’t want anyone to know how much work it is, which quickly kills off the era of “2019 is when I post my half-finished drafts even when they’re not done instead of letting them accumulate in Drafts for years on end.” Let’s just assume there isn’t a terrified artist child hiding behind these posts at all, cringing and holding his breath every time he hits that publish button, and I am just another confident egomaniacal writer who revels in forcing my thoughts and opinions on everyone out there! 581 words.
• Building vs. Simulation – Dwarf Fortress. 2019-01-15 2:43 PM.
  • Musings
  • RPG
  • Single-Player
  
  So a weird thing happened. I played more Dwarf Fortress. And then a little more. And I kind of started liking it. “It’s really not that hard once you learn it.” This is Bekarlogem, my third fortress. Bekarlogem apparently means "Dippedpainted" which makes me giggle every time for some reason. Ha! Just kidding. It’s still super hard. Every screen has a different method of navigating the menus. Sometimes it’s arrow keys. Sometimes it’s tab. Sometimes it’s the + and - keys. Sometimes it’s the * and / keys. I’m not kidding about any of that. Every single thing on the screen leads to the question, “What does *that* mean?” As in, “What does it mean when that dwarf is blinking like that? What does it mean when those letters pop up in the corner of the screen there? What does it mean when this guy’s name is blinking in this list?” 839 words.

February, 2019

• An Influencer Was Born. 2019-02-25 5:30 PM.
  • Musings
  • Videos
  
  I can’t stop chuckling about this so I have to mention it. I got an email. Someone saw my Dwarf Fortress videos on YouTube and sent me a Steam code to try their game. I’m an INFLUENCER now. Live image of a YouTuber becoming an influencer. This is hilarious to me. After 4 years of putting videos on youtube, someone thinks I'm an influencer and sent me a code to try their game… all it takes is 4 long years of punishing work, a thousand hours of video editing, and you get a free game! THE DREAM IS REAL 510 words.
• Two Kinds Of Gamers. 2019-02-26 5:30 PM.
  • Musings
  
  Bhagpuss’s recent post and also one of his older posts that I can’t remember-because for some reason I never, ever bookmark things I want to refer to later-remind me of a theory I’ve had for a while now but I haven’t quite been able to articulate, so I’ll give it a shot now. This also touches a little bit on “Gevlon’s final post,” which I haven’t read yet, but Bhagpuss quoted some of it. 875 words.

March, 2019

• Critical Role and D&D. 2019-03-13 4:24 PM.
  • Musings
  
  Last week there was a sudden burst of attention for that media juggernaut known as “Critical Role,” the Friends of the RPG community. They launched a Kickstarter to fund an animated show, and smashed through their goals and stretch goals and super stretch goals somehow within a negative amount of spacetime (or so it seemed, without actually paying that much attention), and the tabletop RPG corners of the Internet rejoiced. 3,635 words.
• My First ChromeBook. 2019-03-16 11:21 PM.
  • Musings
  • Reviews
  
  My 2013 MacBook Air died recently. Don’t ask how, because it’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever done with an expensive piece of electronic equipment. Okay, I dropped it in some water. It wasn’t in the water for more than a second, and only the keyboard part was submerged, but that was enough. It continued to work while wet, surprisingly enough, but I immediately turned it off to let it dry out, and it hasn’t powered back up since. (Probably because laptops are never entirely “off.”) 1,209 words.
• Google Stadia Announcement. 2019-03-20 2:30 PM.
  • Consoles
  • Development
  • Musings
  
  Google announced a new gaming “platform” curiously named Stadia. It’s a lot of things, but in simple terms I’d call it a cloud gaming service, similar to that OnLive service that died a horrible death some time ago. But it’s more than that. On first glance, I’d say it has about as much chance of long-term success as OnLive did. It sounds like a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. But it does have a few things going for it. 497 words.

June, 2019

• E3 Non-Reaction. 2019-06-10 3:28 PM.
  • Musings
  
  I wrote this tweet this morning: Man, when I hear people talking about E3, I realize I must not be a gamer AT ALL anymore, if I ever was. This must be what it feels like to leave Scientology. — Endgame Viable (@endgameviable) <a href="https://twitter.com/endgameviable/status/1138085833490276352?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 10, 2019</a> It’s a tweet that deserves to be a full blog post. But I have this terrible habit of saying everything I want to say in two pithy sentences, with little room for expansion. Twitter is a great blogging platform. 744 words.
• Amazon Gaming Chair. 2019-06-18 1:24 PM.
  • Musings
  • Reviews
  
  Someone on Twitter asked a question that gave me an extremely rare idea for a blog post that I haven’t already covered before: Gaming Chairs. So, my PC chair is on it's way out, and starting to get uncomfortablke. Anyone have any decent recommendations? I was thinking on looking at all those "gaming" chairs that are all the rage since I'd like a higher armrest and some comfort but…y'know, need suggestions 859 words.

July, 2019

• Blaugust Is Next Month. 2019-07-16 12:48 PM.
  • Musings
  • Streaming
  • Videos
  
  I’ve just been reliably informed that next month is August. In fact, it will be August in just over two weeks from the time of this writing. (Which was yesterday, as of the time of this posting.) That means Blaugust is back. Head over there to Tales from the Aggronaut for all the details. Thanks to Belghast for making these awesome images available! I have to be honest. The idea of writing a blog post every day for a month elicits a heavy sigh from me. It’s like signing up for a marathon. Literally, for me, since I doubt I could even walk a mile right now, let alone run 26 of them. It’s like signing up for something that I know is going to be a slog for me, in other words, and it’s hard to find a lot of motivation for that. 1,719 words.
• Setting Up A Stream. 2019-07-17 12:31 PM.
  • Musings
  • Streaming
  
  I think I’m sufficiently setup for streaming now. I just have to push some buttons and I’ll be live on Twitch. I did a test this afternoon and everything seemed to work satisfactorily. I mean except for the part where the final frame of the video was me rubbing my nose in an awkward way, so that when the video ends my hand is frozen there on my nose and it looks weird. Don’t forget to wait a few seconds after hitting the “stop streaming” button! Anyway I think Twitch deletes everything after a couple weeks if you don’t make an effort to save the streams. 611 words.
• Blaugust Game Schedule. 2019-07-18 2:56 PM.
  • Musings
  • Steam
  • Streaming
  
  Here is the official list of games I will play for Blaugust, randomized with random.org using atmospheric noise or some such nonsense: TimeShift The Lord of the Rings: War in the North Antichamber Majesty Gold HD Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 Dead Space 2 World in Conflict Viscera Cleanup Detail: Shadow Warrior Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit NEO Scavenger Vortex: The Gateway KHOLAT Crysis Warhead Game of Thrones Apotheon Penumbra: Requiem The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Alan Wake’s American Nightmare A Story About My Uncle Darksiders II The Bureau: XCOM Declassified Crysis Wars The Age of Decadence Gothic 3 Forsaken Gods Enhanced Edition Crysis 2 Maximum Edition Max Payne 3 Tree of Savior (English Ver.) Titan Souls Enclave Middle-earth™: Shadow of Mordor™ Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna) Darksiders Warmastered Edition Mount & Blade: Warband Total War: EMPIRE - Definitive Edition Serious Sam Fusion 2017 (beta) S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat Brütal Legend CivCity: Rome Hitman: Absolution Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions Evolved Remember Me BioShock 2 Remastered Now you may have noticed there are 42 games there but only 31 days in August. I don’t exactly know how that’s going to work. I’m building in some wiggle room in case I have to throw some games out because of technical problems or just not feeling like playing them on any given day. 382 words.
• Of Apple, AAC, And ABZU. 2019-07-19 1:58 PM.
  • Musings
  • Videos
  
  One of my long-term projects is to “compress” the mountains of videos I have put on my network drive over the last couple of years into smaller bitrates to save space. I thought a 16TB NAS was basically the same as “infinity” space, but it turns out when you record a whole lot of game videos at 14Mbps, it actually isn’t. Now, I render my videos to smaller bitrates before putting them on the NAS. 1,182 words.
• Salvaging Old Music Projects. 2019-07-20 2:51 PM.
  • Music
  • Musings
  
  Today’s post is an experiment in a different writing position. Due to various aches and pains that I mentioned before, I’m constantly looking for new physical positions to write in. Here are the writing positions that I know cause pain over time: Sitting at desktop PC like I’ve done all my life “Standing desk” in front of living room television Sitting in living room chair with laptop in lap Sitting in living room chair with laptop on a mobile laptop stand shelf thingy Lying in bed with laptop on lap Lying in bed with laptop on a stand thingy I recently bought This time, I’m trying to sit in the living room chair, looking at the television, using a wireless keyboard in my lap that is attached to the media PC. This will keep my head in an elevated position, not hunched over, while keeping my arms relaxed at my sides for typing. 1,506 words.
• Staying Private In Public. 2019-07-21 8:16 PM.
  • Musings
  
  I forgot that I was trying to write something every day to get into shape for Blaugust. Writing calisthenics, if you will. (I just now learned that I have no idea how to spell the word “calisthenics.” My first attempt was “calusthetics.” It’s entirely possible I have never written that word in a document before in my lifetime.) Writing is a habit that needs to be exercised, by the way. You can’t just sit down and write out of the blue, just like you can’t just run a marathon out of the blue. Well, you *can* (and should-start writing, that is, not run a marathon) but those first words you write won’t be as good as the ones you write after writing every day for a while. It’s just how it is. It’s why *starting* to write is the most important part-and by far the hardest part-of writing. 1,102 words.
• Newsflow RSS Reader for Windows 10. 2019-07-22 9:02 PM.
  • Musings
  • Reviews
  
  I’m trying a new RSS feed reader for this Blaugust. It’s a Windows-based reader called NewsFlow. The grid layout. I don't read posts like this but it was more colorful for the screenshot than just a list of text. It’s not that I particularly wanted to try a new reader, but InoReader, my web-based reader of choice, has implemented a limitation of 150 feeds in the free version. At the time they implemented the limitation, some time earlier this year, I had over 300 feeds in my list. I went through and cut the list down to under 150 after removing a bunch of feeds that haven’t updated in years or have vanished from the web entirely. 560 words.
• Finished Bloodborne, Resumed Demon’s Souls. 2019-07-23 2:45 PM.
  • Consoles
  • Musings
  • RPG
  
  It’s raining this morning, which is always a bummer of a way to start the day. Even my dog and cat don’t want to do anything on rainy mornings. I thought I would mention something about games on this gaming blog for a change. I don’t know if I ever mentioned that I finished playing Bloodborne on the PS4. I’m uploading the video series now. (I did a much better job with thumbnails and metadata than I did with Sekiro.) I was pleased to find that my thumb performed much better than I anticipated by the end. I could maintain playing on a controller for an hour or so every day without any significant loss in hand functionality for the rest of my non-gaming activities throughout the day. 809 words.

August, 2019

• Blog Post Formatting. 2019-08-07 7:16 PM.
  • Musings
  • Writing
  
  Lurking over in the Blaugust Discord today, I noticed a conversation about the details of precise formatting in blog posts. Someone was having some trouble trying to get the WordPress editor to format their post exactly the way they wanted it to be seen. It inspired me to throw out a bit of unsolicited blogging advice related to this topic. First of all, I think we can all agree that the newest WordPress editor is terrible. Okay, well I don’t like it. I routinely have difficulties with it, that basically boil down to “it’s just weird and you just have to learn how it’s weird and work around it.” My biggest problem is that it routinely deletes an entire paragraph whenever I try to delete the last sentence in a paragraph. 811 words.
• On Deciding Not To Post. 2019-08-17 9:30 PM.
  • Musings
  
  I’m writing this on the morning of August 9th, so it’s the ninth day of Blaugust. I’ve streamed and posted a first impressions piece about a game from my Steam backlog every day for 12 days in a row now. It’s been grueling work, but I’ve whittled it down to a fairly streamlined process, so it “only” takes about 2 cumulative hours out of every day, or merely half the time of a part-time job. 1,080 words.
• Is Remnant: From The Ashes a Souls-Like?. 2019-08-24 5:45 PM.
  • Musings
  
  I started hearing some buzz about this new game called Remnant: From The Ashes. Most of what I’m hearing is that it’s “too hard” and that it’s a “Souls-like.” This of course triggers the usual “games have to make everyone feel like a winner” backlash, which is mostly what drew my attention. I’m sure the PR folks behind Remnant will be ecstatic to hear that, because I probably never would have heard of this game otherwise. 677 words.

September, 2019

• Blaugust 2019 Wrapup, Part 1. 2019-09-02 2:45 PM.
  • Musings
  
  Congratulations everyone on the completion of another Blaugust! Belghast put together another fantastic event, and I do not envy him now having to compile the results. :) This is the first of my posts where I evaluate my Blaugust performance as part of the Lessons Learned week. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote last year but I recall I wrote a lot, so this year I’m going to try to avoid that. 966 words.
• Blaugust 2019 Wrapup, Part 2 – Streaming. 2019-09-03 1:30 PM.
  • Musings
  
  Writing a blog post every day is not new for me, although the exact process I used this year was new. But livestreaming every day for a month is definitely new to me. I have livestreamed before, but most of my experiments were back in 2015 before Twitch Culture became, ahem, that thing it is now. I also never made any attempt to impose any discipline on myself. I was curious how I would find the process of streaming every day. Honestly it was my main experimental focus of the month. The blogging thing was just a side effect. Here’s what I learned. 855 words.
• Blaugust 2019 Wrapup, Part 3 – Statistics. 2019-09-04 1:30 PM.
  • Musings
  • Streaming
  • Videos
  
  The Blog Here I present the reason you should never pay attention to statistics when blogging. My views actually went down during Blaugust 2018, and went down even more during Blaugust 2019. Views and Visitors I also offer this chart as evidence that the “you have to blog every day to build an audience” advice is completely obsolete. Blogging every day is strictly for fun and/or personal growth. Building an audience is accomplished by networking, and is largely unrelated to the content you produce. As always in life, it’s never what you know, it’s who you know. 641 words.

October, 2019

• Only Five Games In A Year. 2019-10-31 1:33 AM.
  • Musings
  • Responses
  
  Naithin poked some of us on the Blaugust Discord to chime in on this: If you could only play five games in a year, what would they be? It turns out this would not be a terribly big sacrifice for me. I don’t play a lot of games in a year to start with. I’ve already done some research for my 2019 year-end post, and the number of new games that I’ve purchased and started in 2019 is extremely small. (Three-Sekiro, The Division 2, Astellia Online.) The number of new games I’ve actually completed is even less. (One-Sekiro.) 1,099 words.

December, 2019

• Game Awards Unrolled. 2019-12-13 4:01 PM.
  • Musings
  
  I try to avoid “tweet storms” that go beyond two or three threaded tweets but I couldn’t resist the temptation to live tweet the Game Awards last night, as I was just sitting in front of the television and a laptop. My assumption is that people can mute tweet threads if they find them annoying (and let’s be honest, every tweet thread is always annoying to someone). It’s the first time I’ve watched them, and probably the last time as well. Today I found a tool to “unroll” my thread into text that I could paste into a blog post for posterity. (I only wish there was an option to include timestamps.) 1,035 words.
• Revisiting Ongoing Games. 2019-12-18 9:22 PM.
  • MMO
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  I briefly mentioned the category “Ongoing Games” in my last post (or “post”) as a potential replacement for the terms “MMORPG” and/or “MMO.” Even before I saw Jeromai’s post, which I agree with, I started to doubt my own judgment about it. The more I thought about it, the more “Ongoing Game” meant nothing whatsoever. It might as well be “Game.” Almost any game could fit into this category in 2019. Final Fantasy XIV? Sure. Fortnite? Sure. Sekiro? Probably. The Division 2? Definitely. Death Stranding? Absolutely. Outward? Well, maybe not that one. 226 words.
• Games Of My Decade. 2019-12-27 6:10 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  • RPG
  
  Here’s a quick rundown of memorable games that I played throughout the decade. These are games that I played more-or-less continuously for a month or more (that I remember, at least). In between these games were plenty of others, but these are the ones that made the biggest impact on me. Age of Conan. 2010. I can’t find many records of what I played in 2010. Age of Conan, WoW. (ref) 413 words.
• The Death Stranding Experience – Prologue. 2019-12-30 5:01 PM.
  • Consoles
  • Musings
  
  I finished the story of Death Stranding over the weekend. It took almost 80 hours over the course of two months. I left a large number of optional tasks unfinished, but I’m hoping to get back and do them at some point. It’s definitely the game of the year for me. These 80 hours have been quite an experience. I’m very thankful that I’ve been able to play a AAA game with so much originality, because frankly I didn’t think I would ever see one again in my lifetime. Major titles have become such homogenized reskins of previous successful games that I feel like I’ve been playing the same game over and over again throughout the 2010s. But that’s definitely not the case with Death Stranding. Love it or hate it (and there are good reasons for both), it’s impossible to deny it’s different. There have been ups and downs, good parts and bad parts, but it’s been a very unique ride. I’ve never played a game like it in my entire life, that I can remember. 2,943 words.

January, 2020

• The Death Stranding Experience – Episode 1. 2020-01-01 3:40 PM.
  • Consoles
  • Musings
  
  Previously on The Death Stranding Experience: The Prologue. As we roll into the second hour of the game, you may have noticed I haven’t talked about Death Stranding gameplay very much yet. That’s because, in the first couple of hours of Death Stranding, there isn’t very much gameplay. It’s extremely cut scene-heavy. (It becomes cut scene-heavy at the end as well.) It’s one of the game’s criticisms, though I personally found the cut scenes riveting so I didn’t mind at all. 2,747 words.
• The Death Stranding Experience – Episode 2. 2020-01-04 3:38 PM.
  • Consoles
  • Musings
  
  I had designs on writing at least something about all fifteen episodes of Death Stranding, but I’m getting tired of this already. The problem is that there is so much to go over, especially at the beginning and at the end. After the last post, I learned what “BT” stands for: Beached Things. That explains everything, right? Some of the terminology in this game feels like translation mistakes that they just stuck with and doubled down on. 1,975 words.
• The Death Stranding Experience – Episodes 3-8. 2020-01-12 11:39 PM.
  • Consoles
  • Musings
  
  Previously: Episode 2. As I’ve moved on to playing the next game in my list, which happens to be Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, a game whose story also requires a lot of processing, I’ve sort of lost interest in processing Death Stranding in writing. But I shall valiantly try to press on and remember some key points. This post covers Episodes 3 through 8, which represents the vast majority of the player’s time spent in the game. For me, getting through to the end of Episode 8 consumed about 70 out of the 80 hours I spent in the game. The final hours of the game is incredibly story-heavy, but I’ll get into that later. 2,027 words.
• Game Planning For 2020. 2020-01-14 6:13 PM.
  • Musings
  • Roundup
  
  I don’t really plan my gaming very much, I tend to just play whatever I feel like playing on any given day. But I decided to make a list of the games that are currently on my highest priority “to play” list at the start of 2020, along with a rough estimate of how long they’ll take to play, according to HowLongToBeat. The obligatory blog post picture requirement that vaguely relates to the text. Also a cool screenshot from Horizon Zero Dawn. 980 words.

February, 2020

• Catching Up On Life. 2020-02-20 9:45 PM.
  • Musings
  • Status
  
  I haven’t played much of any games in the last month, because I’ve been busy dealing with a lot of overdue tasks that I’ve been putting off for so long that they’ve gone from Merely Unpleasant to A Huge Overwhelming Insurmountable Problem. It’s mostly “administrative” tasks-household and personal and money and insurance stuff. All the things I hate dealing with and put off as long as possible, in other words. 416 words.
• YAG Laser Capsulotomy. 2020-02-25 10:17 PM.
  • Musings
  
  Unrolling a Twitter thread because it’s sort of like a blog post, kind of. Today I’m getting scar tissue blasted out of my eye with a laser beam. Maybe by tonight I’ll be able to read and write again. Or be permanently blind in one eye. The possibilities are endless! I’m using humor as a defense mechanism! Procedure is complete and I can already see much much better. Had no idea how bad it had gotten. Poor vision kind of sneaks up on you. 290 words.

March, 2020

• COVID-19 Or Something. 2020-03-22 6:21 PM.
  • Musings
  
  You’ll have to follow me on Twitter if you want all the minute-by-minute details, because I still don’t have new glasses yet and long-form writing is a pain, but I’m pretty sure I got “it.” Either that or I got “something” at a ridiculously coincidental time, when I haven’t had “something” in a good ten years. Fever spiked up pretty high yesterday (Saturday), and I spent most of the afternoon and night alternately shivering uncontrollably or drenched in sweat. So I’m officially now on day two of a strict two-week self-quarantine self-isolation inside my house. No symptoms before Saturday whatsoever. 351 words.
• Blapril and Mental Headspace. 2020-03-30 3:20 PM.
  • Musings
  • Writing
  
  First, just a quick note to say I feel like I’m “recovered” from whatever it was I had. I still have a minor cough now and then, but that’s something I’ve had for years anyway. Secondly, I’ve been so distracted lately that I’m only just now realizing that Blapril is not just coming soon, but already here and started. So go do that if you haven’t signed up yet. It’s a great event. 588 words.

May, 2020

• Gamer Motivation Profile. 2020-05-03 3:57 PM.
  • Musings
  • Responses
  
  I saw Roger posted his Gamer Motivation Profile, which “motivated” me to take the test myself. Many others have also done it, including Rakuno at Shards of Imagination, who links to surely at least a dozen others. Anything I can do to help dislodge that Bartle thing-the test that our gaming neanderthal ancestors* created from stone knives and bear skins and VT100 terminals and MUDs-from the public discourse is a win. Surprisingly fairly accurate. 596 words.

August, 2020

• August and Promptapalooza Arrives. 2020-08-01 1:50 PM.
  • Gaming
  • Musings
  
  The Blaugust Promptapalooza is starting, and I’m in it! I’ll be perfectly honest: I’ve been so completely out of it lately that I’m still not completely sure I understand the exact details of what I’m supposed to do. I think I’m going to be writing a post about a super secret topic on August 28th. As of this writing, I have no idea what to say about the super secret topic, so that should be fun. I’ll be spending the next 28 days paralyzed with indecision about whether to write honestly or pretend everything’s fine. 611 words.
• Despondence Over Divisions In Writing. 2020-08-02 2:38 PM.
  • Musings
  • Writing
  
  Yesterday’s Promptapalooza topic, spearheaded by Dragonray, asked which popular media we didn’t like. The first thing that sprang to my mind was a very touchy subject. I know it’s hard to imagine now, but in the not-too-distant past, there was a time when Harry Potter was universally loved. I, however, never particularly liked it. The movies were okay, but I didn’t even make it more than a chapter or two into the first book. (Less controversially, and more currently, I’d have to go with any Marvel or superhero-related property.) 338 words.
• Worldview-Shaping Media. 2020-08-03 3:19 PM.
  • Media
  • Musings
  
  Or: “I could actually use a bionic eye about now.” I didn’t intend to write about every Promptapalooza topic this month, but I don’t have any games to play at the moment, and I’m trying out a new blogging idea called “writing and publishing posts.” The prompt for August 2nd, which was actually the third prompt, [started with Mailvaltar][2], and asks What are some key sources of media (games/movies/etc) that have shaped your worldview? 487 words.
• Isaias and Old Books. 2020-08-04 1:15 PM.
  • Musings
  • Writing
  
  As I’m typing this morning, the remnants of the eye of tropical storm Isaias, which I neither know how to spell nor say, is passing about a hundred miles to the east. Yesterday and last night in particular, it dumped a massive amount of rain on my house, and this morning I woke up early to the sound of some of that rain dripping inside my house. I live in a house built in the 1950s, so it’s old and quirky. It needs new shingles, and there are a couple of spots on the roof that need repairs, but that’s an expensive proposition and I can’t afford it right now. I thought I had plugged all the leaks I was aware of, but apparently there’s a new one. Nothing is damaged beyond repair, but it’s annoying and a constant source of stress in my life. 399 words.
• Routines Or Nah. 2020-08-05 1:04 PM.
  • Musings
  
  Yesterday’s Promptapalooza prompt kicked off with Everwake, who wrote: The wheel of Promptapalooza has turned it's terrible gaze to me. The eyes of Belghast's Blaugustosphere empire rest upon my humble blog. Will I seize the provided prompt? Will I provide a response that leaves the masses weeping with joy in the streets? Or will I scribe a dithering dump, to the eternal ridicule of my blog peers? - Everwake Apologies for quoting so much, but it’s fantastic. Go read the post please. I added a second link to it so you don’t even have to scroll up to find it. 449 words.
• Hanlon’s Razor. 2020-08-06 1:39 PM.
  • Musings
  
  Technically I’m starting this post on the night of the 5th, while a thunderstorm passes overhead and rain pours down again. This time, there’s a lot of lightning as well, so I’ve turned off most everything in the house. I haven’t had a working uninterruptible power supply in quite some years, and the only drawback I’ve experienced is that I don’t like leaving my most expensive electrical equipment plugged in while lightning strikes within a few miles. 446 words.
• Catching Up On Prompts. 2020-08-09 7:27 PM.
  • Musings
  • Writing
  
  I’ve been having a lot of back pain over the last several days, so sitting down to write in the mornings, when I feel the most like writing blog posts, has been a massive chore. I’m trying to push through it to get this post done on Sunday so I don’t fall another day behind. I don’t think of myself as a chronic pain sufferer but over the last several years it’s becoming clear that my freedom of will is increasingly limited by the day-to-day status of my back, and I haven’t quite adjusted to it yet. 767 words.
• Abbreviated Creative Space. 2020-08-12 2:40 PM.
  • Musings
  
  Yesterday’s Promptapalooza prompt started with Krikket, and exhorted: Tell us about your physical creative space, and how it influences your content creation. Except it wasn’t yesterday’s prompt, it was the day-before-yesterday’s prompt now, because I completely forgot to post this yesterday. My first reaction to this prompt was pretty similar to Krikket’s: “Oh God I don’t want any part of that.” I have major problems organizing my “physical space.” My creative (and living) space is almost entirely inside my head or on a screen of some kind. Consequently in situations where there’s nobody else in the house to see, as is currently the case, I make little or no effort to organize, clean, or otherwise decorate my physical environment, because it’s invisible to me. 366 words.
• A Desert Sun Yellow Guitar Lost Along The Way. 2020-08-13 3:25 PM.
  • Music
  • Musings
  
  Now there’s a title that’s sure to wreck some page layouts. Thanks to forgetting about blogging for a day, I’m a day behind now, so I’ll be combining two prompts into one post. This works out well, because I don’t want to respond to one of them anyway. The first prompt from two days ago started with SDWeasel over at Unidentified Signal Source: What is something you have lost along the way that you would love to have back? Can be serious or frivolous. 646 words.
• More Prompts and a Remnant Update. 2020-08-18 3:08 PM.
  • Musings
  • RPG
  
  I got distracted with Remnant: From The Ashes, so here are the Promptapalooza prompts I missed: Tell us about a person/s or thing/s that has greatly influenced you. Most of the people on that list would be family or people I’ve known personally, but the first “famous” name that came to mind is Brian May, guitarist for Queen. I don’t play much like him, but his intellectual approach to musicianship has inspired me greatly. 440 words.
• Finishing Games, Or Trying To. 2020-08-23 1:25 PM.
  • Musings
  • RPG
  
  I meant to post this two days ago four days ago but I kept putting it off because I hated what I wrote and kept thinking that maybe if I just add a little more it will magically fix itself. So here we are. Not magically fixed at all. Then I put it off again because I didn’t feel like finding a picture. The Promptapalooza prompt from what is now two days past was: Do you “finish” games/hobbies/projects and move on or do you come back to the same things again and again? I typically do finish projects, then forget about them and move on to the next one. I’m a very project-oriented sort of person, as opposed to a routine-oriented person, if that makes any sense. My biggest difficulty is starting projects. 756 words.
• Remnant: From The Ashes Completed. 2020-08-25 9:36 PM.
  • Musings
  • RPG
  
  First, catching up on Promptapalooza prompts: Tell us about some of your hobbies outside of the realm of your specific niche. Ugh. I feel like all my hobbies have fallen by the wayside. But music, writing, stuff like that. Tell us about some of your favourite antagonists and explain why. Recently, Abby from The Last Of Us Part 2, though I would say it’s arguable whether she’s an antagonist or a protagonist. 742 words.
• The Next Year. 2020-08-28 2:39 PM.
  • Musings
  
  It’s my Promptapalooza time! Yesterday, Sandrian at Aeternus Gaming talked about content creation. Today, let us consider this topic: What are you looking forward to the most over the course of the next year? Hoo boy. That’s a doozy. I’ve been dreading this day since I first saw this prompt. Before you run screaming away from what is about to happen, let me direct you to tomorrow’s Promptapalooza writing prompt, which according to my notes will be hosted by Kanter at MMO One Night a Week. Go check it out! It’s sure to be less depressing than this one. 2,272 words.
• Yet More Prompts. 2020-08-30 3:42 PM.
  • Musings
  
  I thought about writing a little on New World and/or Crowfall but I’m having a lot of difficulty finding good things to say about those games and I don’t particularly want to ruin everyone’s hopes and dreams for the future of MMOs. So instead I’ll catch up on all the Promptapalooza prompts I missed. With the pandemic, we are going through an unprecedented time. In what ways has this shared global event impacted your content creation? Sometimes I write depressing blog posts but mostly I try to avoid the subject. It’s a toss-up whether people will respond better to honest discussions of real-world issues, thoughts, and feelings, or to entertaining diversions from real-world issues, thoughts, and feelings. In my experience, most people tend to prefer the latter. 502 words.