Time for the end of year report card prediction adjustment.  Wilhelm’s is up.

Blog Resolutions

• Post more media in the blog. Pictures & video.  I think it would add more to the context.

I certainly blogged more, but not that many more pictures.  I ended up with nearly twice as many posts this year as last and more than doubled the hit count.  So win?

• Try out a diary format for a few posts. While I tend to focus on analysis, I think the recounting of adventures always fun to read.

Well, I started putting in more personal items, so it did end up more like a diary in a sense.  But not from a gameplay perspective.  No wins.

• More cross-posts. There are many, many bloggers out there.  I should do more to cross-post/link/comment.

Marginally more cross-posts is still more cross-posts.  It’s really quite ironic since I read so many good blogs out there. I need to force myself to do this apparently.  No wins.

• End the year with 200 posts. That’s about 4 per week, which should be manageable.

WordPress is really quite bad at reporting this data.  Some months were better than others, though March and August were off months as I was away from a computer for a long stretch.  No wins but it’s still a solid goal.

• Try more games! I won’t invest in a console, so I’m out about a dozen options per year.  But my tablet and Steam can keep me more than busy.

I did this.  Boy did I do this.  I must’ve played 50 games on the tablet and dabbled in tons of PC games over the year.  Super wins.

Personal Resolutions

• Actively work on an exit-plan for current project at work.

Haha, this is pretty sad and accurate.  Things went for a loop during the summer and I’m doing that just now.  No wins.

• Focus more on the family and what makes them happy.

The spring wasn’t so good for this but summer and fall have been great.  I’m a lucky guy.  Win.

• Take time to breathe and time to sleep.

Time to breathe is better, time to sleep not so much.  I’ve taken some steps to better manage stress and anxiety and it’s certainly improved since last year.  Miles better.  I’ll call this a win.

• Read at least a dozen books.

The fails.  I think I only ended up with 6 this year.  Murf’s idea to get through Hugo award winners is going to be a goal next year.

• Introduce my 4yr old and wife to tabletop/board games. My daughter received a Connect 4 and Trouble for Christmas and we played a fair amount.  She hates losing and wants to learn how to win. There are tons of games out there to try.

I’ll call a win on this.  My eldest has played nearly every board game in the house so far, including Imperial Assault, Galaxy Defenders and Shadows of Brimstone.  She has a kick for it. Going to try and get a few more next year, like Ticket to Ride for starters.  My youngest is now 3 and a bit, so time for her to join in the fun as well.

Predictions

• SOE won’t launch a single product in 2015. Specifically, the order of eventual launch is Landmark, H1Z1 (cancelled before launch) and EQ Next.

Ok, partial win here.  Nothing launched, but H1Z1 wasn’t cancelled.  Yet.

• EvE will increase their patch cadence a bit, to allow for more time between and draw out the ideas. Their subscription numbers will drop due to the stance on multi-boxing and bots.

I think I’m on the money for this one.

• Wildstar goes B2P by late spring. It either drops raiding as a focus or closes shop.

F2P, in the fall but did expand a lot of stuff on the “things to do at max level” list.  I’ll call this a miss.

• ESO will launch on consoles in the summer and go F2P at the same time. Still no auction house or viable crafting container.

I missed the B2P call but the rest of the items are accurate.

• WoW will drop back to 7m subscribers. Their PLEX-derivative won’t work due to the way the economy works (you don’t actually need gold to play WoW in WoD).

I was off on this one.  WoW dropped to 5m and their PLEX-like junk is still going.  Tobold is going to be playing for infinity for free due to it.

• WoD end-game will be Burning Legion tie-in.

Nailed it.  Sadly.

• WoW patches will continue to take an eternity to go out, with no expansion news this year.

We got expansion news alright.  On the shortest expansion in history and what’s expected to be the 2^nd longest content drought in history.  Blizz is feeling more like that drunk uncle everyone has.  You’re really not sure what’s going on over there but somehow he shows up to parties.

• Heroes of the Storm will “launch” in the fall, even though Closed Beta is taking your money in about 2 weeks. Pricing will change once the gates open.

Yessiree on the launch.  Pricing is certainly different than last winter.  Wins.

• Overwatch won’t show in 2015.

A closed beta is going on now but it’s been down for 3 weeks(?), so I’m going to count this a as a win.

• SWTOR will have 3 content patches, with new raids and planets. GSF will be forgotten.

I got this wrong.  Instead of patches there was an expansion.  No new raids or dungeons.  No one cares about GSF though, so that’s neat.

• Steam and Riot will get hacked, which will likely change the way PC gamers identify with hackers. They’ve only targeted consoles so far.

Neither happened, though Steam is reporting that ~70,000 accounts are compromised daily.

• 2015 will have a bunch of kickstarters finally launch. Pillars of Eternity, Star Citizen, Tides of Numenera and so on.

PoE launched (great game), Star Citizen is in 2^nd alpha (whatever that means) and Tides doesn’t have a date yet.  This is a miss.

• Microsoft will use the Minecraft source for a new game that’s used in schools. Makes a mint.

Microsoft hasn’t done squat with Minecraft.  Which is a win for gamers I guess.

• This is the year of the indie game standards. $15 dollar games will be held to similar standards as $60 games in terms of quality, less so content. Ori and the Blind Forest and Rocket League are good examples.

I’m calling this a win.  The ability for indies to make a buck has changed dramatically.  Games need to be amazing to even try to turn a profit.

• A new review system will be established detailing whether a game is playable at release or if you should wait for a kitchen sink patch.

Well, more sites have started a review in progress, or a second review after a couple months.  I wouldn’t say it’s everywhere mind you.  IGN and Kotaku mostly.  Ehh.

• Evolve, No Man’s Sky and Repopulation will do better than expected.

Nope, where is it?, and nope.

• 2015 will be the year of the RPG! (Witcher 3 for sure)

Well, we got Witcher 3, Fallout 4 and Pillars of Eternity.  I call this a win, though the trend seems to be going towards RPG/Sandbox games.

I hit the 50% mark in the Blog/Personal stuff, so that’s not too bad.  50% on the predictions as well, though some were safe bets.  It was an off year for gaming, with expectations set pretty low overall.  A year in review post will cover that stuff later on.  I didn’t expect to hit 50%, so yay?

Training is over.  Well, that part of the training is at any rate.  I’m a little split on it mind you, given that I’ve taken training that was more “advanced” than this in the past.  So I considered it as a refresher, plus the time to meet new people and share some ideas.  To further point, while I was in this course – let’s call it level 1 for lack of a better term – I was accepted into another course in March, which ostensibly we can call level 3.

I will say that I’m glad I was taking a refresher course and not a deep dive course of completely new material.  With a new government, and cabinet (because it’s 2015 is a great line), meant that I was rather busy.  The past 10 years of government have been, um, challenging.  Lots of good people were shut out of any decision making.  That’s changed overnight.  But old habits die hard and there’s still a risk-aversion attitude. I have a very just do it attitude at work, and while that’s been a double edged sword for some time, in this particular case it’s paid dividends.  Dealing with the highest level of government throughout the day is fun.  People are people after all, and this new government clearly wants to go social rather than the totalitarian viewset of the past (which as an aside, is a poor reflection on the high quality members that were present in the past).  I’m quite curious to see how the next year or so rolls out.

BlizzCon

This was the first year where it was evident I could care less what was being spouted.  You can check out MMO-Champ for a massive log of what did go down.  The highlights are: SC2’s final expansion is live today, D3 is the ugly step brother, HS is getting a new deck and mode, HotS is eating paint chips, OW’s closed beta is starting with a launch in spring, and WoW:L is still a year out.

That last one…I dunno.  The game is at 5.5M, a near 50% loss from the WoD launch. It’s still going to be 18 months between the final patch and the expansion.  And it’s not like the con didn’t talk about WoW, a lot of it was about that MMO.  But with the marketplace today, the sheer competition of everything else, it really makes you wonder what’s being smoked in those offices.  And some of the design promises just seem like a massive stretch for a 10 year old game.  After the sales pitch and delivery of WoD…I’d expect that most people have just plain ol’ given up and are ready to move on.

Wildstar

I decided to draw up another alt, this time a Stalker.  Back to my Rogue roots I guess.  Having gone through the leveling cycle a LOT, the first few zones were pretty quick runs.  The trick is to keep a 1-2 quest level buffer above your current level and simply move on when it gets easy.  More specifically, avoid quests that are tagged as tasks.  Think of it like SWTOR’s class quests being the most efficient XP route, same here.

So he’s level 30 now, has done some group content and the broad strokes of each zone.  The F2P tweaks and previous changes are obvious enough.  There are no more 5+ person quests, just 2+.  Mind you, soloing a 2 person boss is now actually hard.  The Stalker’s stealth mode is pretty sweet, making infiltration much easier.  Having a mount at level 1 is awesome.  Fast travel rocks.  Enemy HPs have been tweaked.  Quest objectives have been standardizes (very rare where you need to “farm” a quest for drops) and the social tools are super.  It really puts into contrast what was in the game at launch and what’s there today.

I will say that the burst damage appeal of the Stalker is neat, and much different than the sustain of my Esper, or the build up from my Engineer.  The downside is that if the enemy isn’t dead in 5 seconds, it turns into a slog.  When it does work, whoo is it satisfying.

The largest downside to the game right now is the lag, and not the network kind.  I’m well under 100ms ping and there is a consistent 3s lag that shows up every couple fights.  It’s much worse on weekends.  T reminds me a lot of WoW’s vanilla launch, and well, every expansion since.  It’s rather clear that the servers are unable to take the load, and it begs the question what NCsoft is going to do about it.  Always a tough question in a F2P environment.  My guess is that they are going to defer this issue for a little while.  I know I don’t care about it so much, as of today, because “war, war never changes”.

Fallout 4

So, early reviews claim this is the second coming.  I’m looking forward to the Bethesda bug-fest, combined with an amazing world and story.  I bought the game and it’s pre-loading for my play session in the evening.  Tell my wife and kids I love them, and I’ll see them in a month.

Alrighty then.  It would seem I’ve woken up to a new government.  I did my duty and voted last night, bringing the little squirts along.  We were going to “hide behind the boxes” as my youngest put it.  And it would seem that I was not alone.  Canada rarely has large sweeps in office, unless there are mitigating factors – mainly an economy in the toilet.  We have one of the highest GDPs, 7% unemployment and a nomial inflation rate – so all quite good.  We’re not at war, inside or out the country.  Even the governing party was only in a majority for 4 years, finishing off a 9 year term.  No, this was an election that was won on ideals.  It was eerily similar to the Obama campaign.

Our previous PM did a lot of good; got through a recession, cut back on government spending, made significant trade agreements (though not all are ratified). Unfortunately, that office also applied some of the most divisive wedge politics ever seen in our country. If you’re at all familiar with the US style attack ads, those were pretty much non-existent in Canada up until a few years ago.  Most candidates focused on themselves, what they could do.  The party line however… not so much.  There were dozens of new and modified laws that brought us back 50 years in social liberties, many of which were overturned by the Supreme Court.  For all the good that was done, there was always that tinge of horrible right next to it.

It would seem that Canadians as a whole had enough of that.  From 35 seats to 184 is unheard of in our country’s history.  From a distant third to a majority.  Even the other parties who didn’t make out as well (Green and NDP) were happy it was anything but the old guard.  Heck, here’s Paul Dewar’s concession speech, after having lost one of the only seats the NDP thought they had no chance of losing.

“In fact, let’s celebrate tonight, because it’s the end of cynicism, it’s the end of Harper, it’s a joyous occasion,” he added.

It’s abundantly clear that it was less about who to vote for as much as it was “how do we get rid of these folks?”  Now it’s time for the new crew to step up and follow through with their promises.  Fingers crossed.

Shade’s Eve

I ran Wildstar’s event quests last night, and was neatly impressed.  There are some basic quests in town to complete, nothing terribly complex.  Then there’s a Trick or Treat quest that has you visit 8 different housing plots.  That one is neat since it has you see other plots but actually finding plots with the specific candy you need is a major pain (thanks Reddit!).  Plus, you’re not actually tracking the candy, just a %, so that needs a little tweak methinks.

The neato quest is an expedition-like zone called Quiet Downs.  There are 3 parts to it, with varying levels of success.  The first is a maze-like portion where you’re given a flashlight and instructions to find a fountain.  Little critters can come around and knock you out, but you can also outrun them.  You’re timed here, and my first run through I failed this portion.  I personally find this portion of the zone too long, though the suspense portion is cool.  The 2^nd part is more an interactive play, with no real impact other than to the story.  The 3^rd part is a mini dungeon, similar to the Gauntlet ship layout.  Kill some ooze, baddies and then the big boss.  I will say that Jack Shade looks amazing, and the voice acting is tops.

All those quests give event currency, used to buy housing items, pets, costumes or a hoverboard.  I’m pretty sure I can unlock most everything with daily logins.  There are 2 items in the cash stop, a fabkit for the house (single use) and a mount (single character) that are drawing some ire.  Each is about $20 and since it can only be used once… that’s ticking a lot of people off.  Issue 1 with the fabkit (which admittedly is pretty neat) is that you can’t remove it, or you lose it.  Issue 2 is that you can only use the items once.  Carbine is working on making more things go across the entire account though, so for the meantime I’m just stacking everything on my Esper.  I’ll pick up the mount, since it comes out to being the cost of a monthly sub – plus who doesn’t want to ride a flaming ghost/skeleton warpig?

I like this event because it doesn’t make you run all over the darn world, or force you to do PvP.  It’s contained, it looks good, the story is ok and the prices (outside cash stop) are more than reasonable.

In this lovely part of the country I call home, last weekend was the weekend for fall colors.  At least in terms of leaves still being on the trees and not in your yard.  The downside to last weekend is that it was bloody cold and we had quite a few snow flurries.  Not exactly pleasing.  Still, from the car it was quite a sight.  And there’s nothing like a cold day that makes you want to stick yourself under a blanket and not move for a year.

Get Out and Vote, Eh

Today is Election Day in Canada, where we vote for our next Space Olympian (Prime Minister).  It was the longest official campaign since the 1880s, though in reality it has nothing to compare to the US preparing 4 years ahead of time.  We have 3 official large parties, 2 small ones (Green and BQ) and then a bunch of fringe ones. Choice is good, though 4 of those options are all left leaning.  Canada is an interesting country, with fiscal conservatives and social liberals, by and large.  Aside from the past 8 years, it’s been a rather centrist country, without too many wild swings in either direction.

This campaign hasn’t been much fun, with a rather ridiculous amount of vitriol and rhetoric going around.  Apparently I have to worry about brothels popping up next to my house if I vote a certain way.  I’m really curious as to who actually believes that’s a possibility – and then shake their hand.  As with many large countries, we use a first-past-the-post electorate system.  The main flaw with that system is that over time it reduces options to just 2 (as occurred in the US) – which generally means much wider swings from one party to the next.  There are better systems out there…but they cost more money.  Who knows where we’ll end up.

All that to say that I’m voting today.  Every able Canadian should vote.  People have died for that privilege.  It’s a duty I’ll be certain to instill in my children because every single vote counts.

Wildstar

This weekend was double PvP currency weekend.  I’m clearly not the intended audience, as PvP as a whole turns me off quite a bit – stat based PvP even more so.  Still, I gave it a few runs since the queues were instant.  I played once as a DPS and the rest of the time as a healer.  Context though, I’ve healed in PvE content.  The gear isn’t the best, only around ilvl 80, but it gets the job done.  With one exception, I was outhealed by a factor of 2:1.  On a PvP bonus weekend, that’s not a big deal to me.  It does however, pretty much ensure that I won’t be PvPing in the future as it’s a stat wall I have no intention of climbing.  The maps are neat, and the objectives short enough but it still doesn’t scratch any itch that I have.

I’ve been reading on the Wildstar economy, primarily from the Reddit forum.  Either Entity is immune to pricing fluctuations or I am missing a 0 on some item prices.  I find it absolutely hilarious to see people posting about making #plat on rune fragments when they haven’t sold for over a gold in a long time.  I’ve been back about 2 weeks, I’ve made about 30 plat so far, which was ok enough.  I’ve put my foot back into the flipping business, with moderate results.  I’m sure I could park a mule there and just flip like crazy but that’s not much fun is it?  I do know that it costs about 100p to unlock all the ability/amp slots if I bought them on the AH, but since there are other paths, I’ll try that out instead.

Final note, I haven’t really found any big limitations being a F2P player who had a box copy – or at least, not enough to motivate me to become a signature member. I appreciate not being nickel and dimed or get spammed (NW I’m looking at you) for sure, but at the same time, I’m curious as to where I should spend my money.  TSW, Marvel Heroes and Path of Exile had ways for me to drop coin.  I guess the store is just a little too young at the moment.  There are a lot of people playing, word of mouth is great, so hopefully that translates into some forward movement on income.

Time is relative.  *deep thoughts*  Age certainly has an impact on my recollection of events, or even my appreciation of them.  The time at the pool watching my kids swim feel so much longer than actually being in lake with them.  Observing and not participating makes things take a long time, or at least make me think that they do.

I was baking on the weekend, and the squirts helped out at the start.  I’m sure it took 3 times as long to get the work done, but it flew by.  Making dinner with the wife to host Thanksgiving was also a real time machine.  And last night we watched a bit of Suits and the clock just seemed to drone on.  Maybe I’m just more time conscious lately, or perhaps living the moment a bit more.  I’m glad that I’m done with the White Rabbit syndrome of “I’m late”, and instead in the mindset of “so what?  Let’s enjoy it.”  I’d like to think it’s a healthier mindset.

Wildstar

I find that my Esper and Engineer aren’t as compatible as I’d like.  Because the Elder Gem experience is character specific, and that exceeding the weekly cap grants a decent sized boost to gold, playing 2 characters is actually worse off than playing one.  Housing, Elder Gems, Ability Points and AMP Points are character specific, which is a pet peeve right now.  Truth be told, it always has been, but after having played a fair chunk of FF14, it seems downright archaic.  The concept that a character is an island just doesn’t work for me anymore, especially if the “long tail” gameplay needs to be repeated multiple times.  WoW started paying a bit more attention to this in MoP, then stomped on the idea in WoD and just made everything easy mode, shortening the tail.  Making me play longer is a good thing.  Making me repeat the bite size pieces ad infinitum is what drives people elsewhere.

I started a Warrior for kicks, to see the starter experience.  It’s a whole lot better.  Crazy better even.  Then it gets into the regular starting zones, though the first quest hub has a ton of content to get a grasp on things.  Content overload almost. The skill distribution hasn’t changed, or at least not enough for me to notice.  This ends up a bit in the lines of the Tortuga zone in Age of Conan, where the starting experience is amazing, then there’s nothing for a long time, then amazing again.

The classes change so much with skill/amp unlocks, and tier upgrades, that it really makes it hard for the game to properly explain mechanics at the start, in that they are relative at the end.  FF14 addresses this problem with forced grouping, through dungeons.  They even have mini-instances to understand the ever increasing complexity of group encounters (stuns, avoid AE, AE attacks, running, using items, etc…).  I sometimes feel like Wildstar gets you to level 10, then it’s all deep end.  The deep end is amazing, without question, but the F2P conversion is showing the cracks at how prepared people are for it.  If the game forced players to complete the normal modes (scaled to the appropriate level) before the veteran modes, I think people would be better off.  And it’s not like there are 100+ dungeons either.

More ramblings than anything useful, I know.  But the game is just screaming potential, with a few tweaks here and there.  A metric ton of quality of life items were applied in the F2P conversion.  It’s those changes that really put into contrast the core mechanics that are just way more complicated to resolve.  Another post will have me get into the topic of solo vs. group activities.  The more incentives there are in group work, and the easier it is to access (not complete, just access), the healthier a game becomes.  Next time.

I wonder if water and pop have the same effect as beer and coffee.  There’s a greasing of the wheels if you will, when the latter is offered.  Having a chat with a friend just seems to go better when those are around.  Even as a kid it was the coffee shop.

I’ve been doing some chatting these past few weeks with various folks, talking about personal and professional goals. From a professional front, I think we tend to want to talk to people who have gone through something similar, to get perspective.  I don’t mean shop talk, I mean actual career discussions.  I usually work with a Plan™, where each steps in my career is rather thought out.  I find the job that can use my skills but also provide me new ones.  I tend not to do the same thing for very long, maybe a couple years, before moving on to the next challenge.  The good/bad news is that due to the project I’ve been working on, that progress has been accelerated at an incredible pace, where I’m now into the 5-10 year window of where I planned to be.  So this is uncharted waters for the most part and I’m a solid 15-20 years younger than everyone I work with.  With 2 young kids.  It’s not that I’m bad at the job, just the opposite – it’s that the expectations of the position require some sacrifices at home, which I’m not really willing to do anymore.  Suffice it to say, this past year has been a heck of a ride and I’m trying now to get a better handle on it all – with varying degrees of success.

On the personal side, it has taken a very, very long time to find someone impartial with whom I can have an honest conversation.  Oh, there’s always family and the close circle of friends for sure, but there are certain topics that require, um, a certain skill set to discuss.  I am often unable to communicate ideas that are crystal clear in my mind, due to their sheer complexity and nuance.  It’s one of the main reasons I write this blog actually, to practice communicating ideas.  My wife and I were talking about this problem last week, and the list of folk on the list of “talk about anything” can be counted on one hand.  I have friends with whom I can talk sports, other philosophy, others science, others IT – some even cross across multiple fields.  Those that cross ALL the fields, those are really hard to find.  So when I found a professional that I gelled with, it was a really cathartic feeling.  Exhausting is a better term actually, since I typically don’t have the opportunity to talk about anything.  Having to think/analyze/absorb a complex conversation is fun.  And the beauty of it, is that afterwards I have the toolset to communicate it more effectively with my family/friends.  I know a lot of people have issues with mental health, and just finding someone with whom to connect makes a world of difference.

Wildstar

I did another veteran expedition, Space Madness. It’s a 15 minute run, if not less.  It’s such a massive contrast to some of the other expeditions, 30+ minutes in length, that I’m thinking I’m going to skip those other ones in the future.  The rewards are the same, though the longer ones have a few more enemies to kill.  Not enough to make the drop increases to be meaningful mind you.

I also spent a bit of time trying to figure out my tailor skill stream.  With drop 6, every tier got massively simplified – 2 items each, plus a “capstone” for extra points in the talent tree.  I took a look at the auction house and there isn’t a single “Master” level crafted item present, which is making me wonder if it’s worth the time/effort to pump up the skill.  I have more than enough plat to get there mind you… so I set some buy orders for material and we’ll see where that ends up.

In the meantime, I need to figure out why the load times are so dang slow.  The gaming laptop is about 6 months old and top of the line, so…there be something wonky somewhere.

In a meeting recently with a client that needed some help with a complex issue.  It was a long drive to meet them but it was something they insisted on.  So we arrive, do the introductions and get into the meat of the issue.  Clearly they are nervous and on our side, not quite sure if we have the solution that fits.

Except this one person, who insists on being hostile and dismissive.  I don’t mind being corrected when I make a mistake but I dislike arguing facts tempered with prejudice.  I can also only take it for so long.  So after about 15 minutes, I reminded this person that our group had traveled a long distance under good faith to help them with their problem.  That we could just as easily pick up our items and go back to the office and they’d be no better off (or worse, they’d have to explain why nothing came of it).  That small interjection was enough to get them back at the table trying to find a solution.

There’s an old adage of “don’t pee in the wind” that I think is fitting here.  Asking for help, then complaining the entire time doesn’t really make people want to help you.

Bad Rolls

The RNG gods are not with me lately.  Well, at least not in a sense that helps me out much.  I had a bit less than an hour yesterday in D3 and wanted to see if I could collect a few more Death’s Breaths, to help with my main build.  The farming build I’m using is based on a few unique pieces, and does decent work in T3.  I am however, still missing an In-Geom.

There is something fun about putting a bunch of enemies close together and having the screen go boom. While my U6/EP build does that in amazing fashion, this farming build just seems to fill the screen up with lights and explosions, all the while running a hundred miles an hour.

I ended up finding a goblin convention in three separate rift runs.  Those are the events where you find 10-15 goblins having a smoke break and you get to play pinatas with them.  Sadly, all that work and all I really got from it was Blood Shards to gamble with.  And no results from those shards.  Still… it’s like Christmas when you see that happen.  Nothing else matters.  Sparklies!

Fingers crossed for the next run!

Last night was a rather tiring night.  Or rather, I think it was the day’s work in the body.  Both my eldest and I were pretty exhausted, so the errands we needed to run were somewhat interesting.

One of them included getting some fish for our new tank.  I had some fish when I was younger, and I find the sight/sound of an aquarium rather peaceful.  It also teaches kids some level of responsibility, without having to worry about massive cost overruns.  So, cats and dogs, out of the picture.  My youngest ended up picking some Show Guppies.  They are surprisingly small to start but they sure do look neat.

After setting them up in the tank, my wife realized that the filter wasn’t working properly.  The fish were shaking, and scared.  That is a weird thing to see in such a small thing.  So I spent 30 minutes figuring out what was wrong, and it turns out there was a bit of sand in the impeller.  Fixed that and the fish were super happy, swimming all over the place.  We’ll wait a few weeks, maybe a month, then see if we can pick up some more.

Interesting side note here.  I use google for nearly everything, and I’m slowly teaching my wife how to use it as well.  I had asked her to find instructions to remove the impeller and though she was looking, she really didn’t have any luck.  About 5 minutes on my search and I found it.  It’s an interesting notion that while google is a powerful tool, there still is a significant learning curve to really make the most out of it.

Healthy Gaming

August is a good month and a bad month.  I am Canadian, and there’s a law here where you have to drink beer during the summer.  It’s a little known law, but the fine is having to drink beer.  The month of August therefore has a lot of beer and that doesn’t really jive well with belt sizes.

While I do have a workout plan, some nights it’s quite hard to get going or finding the time, especially after a long day and you just want to relax.  I’ve had an exercise bike for nearly 15 years now, and I’ve thought for some time about converting it to allow some PC gaming.  Console gaming I’ve done on the bike for a long time, but a mouse and keyboard can get tricky.

I did a bit of research and had a pretty solid idea of what I wanted.  A table like structure, where I could put either a laptop or keyboard, slightly larger on the right for a mouse.  There are a surprising number of options out there, depending on your set up.  I rummaged through my supplies at home and found a tread and riser (the step and backplate from stairs) from a previous reno that I could use.  Only to hook it on the bike, which has handles at an odd angle, and make it removable.   I found some bicycle tire hooks that did the job – they look like big J hooks, that you can screw in.

Long story short, I was able to put it all together in about 10 minutes.  I played some D3 for a while, finding the right spot for good reception for my wireless keyboard and mouse.  You don’t even realize you’re exercising, which is really the best part.  And it’s set up in such a way that my wife can use it easily too, so win-win.

Diablo 3

Patch 2.3 brought in Kunai’s Cube, which is a sort of gambling machine that requires various components to work, depending on what you want to get out of it.  The main ingredient is Death’s Breath though, and you need 10-25 per pull.  These things only drop from rare and above monsters, only 1 at a time, and at varying percentages based on difficulty.  I’d get maybe 10 per rift run or so.  Suffice to say, it’s the new bottleneck.

Luckily, I have a lot of odd pieces of gear on me and I could create a setup on my monk that uses the Sage’s Set, which increased the Death’s Breath drops by 1.  A bit more tinkering is required, but I should be able to do T4 without any big hiccups, which should provide me with 25-50 drops per run.

Kunai’s Cube is certainly a neat mechanic, and the ability to passively slot legendary affixes is really opening up gameplay to some interesting combinations.  I’d say it’s more than doubled the amount of gearing options available, and should make GR runs hit the 90s before the season is up.  That would be something.