Moar Diarblo!

Posted on May 2, 2023 by baudattitude

Getting this out of the way first: Diablo 3 marks the second time ever that I have finished a game and then immediately played it a second time, with the first being Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly.  That’s pretty high praise, so you may assume that I liked D3 quite a bit – particularly since I had to buy the game a second time to do it!

Fortunately, buying the “comes with everything” Diablo III: Reaper of Souls – Ultimate Evil Edition version was only $19.79 on PSN thanks to the current Spring sale.  If I’d had to drop the full sixty bucks it usually costs, you wouldn’t be reading this article right now.

Getting some basics out of the way, just in case someone finds this blog post in the future and is curious how the save transfer process goes when you are transferring your Diablo 3 characters from the PS3 game to the PS4 game running on a PS5 – it’s pretty simple and Just Works, at least as of May of 2023.  I updated Diablo 3 on the PS3, chose More > Export Save from the main menu, then purchased and downloaded Diablo III on my PS5.  When I launched that for the first time, it asked me if I wanted to import the save, and after doing that my character from the PS3 version was ready to roll.

I do have my PSN account linked to Battle.net, and I suspect that is mandatory. I am NOT, however, a current PS+ subscriber.  So this doesn’t seem to use the PS+ cloud saves to transfer data.

And, while it’s probably not a shock that the PS4 version looks better than the PS3 version, I wasn’t properly prepared for the quality jump.  The PS3 version runs at sub-HD resolutions while the PS4 version runs at a full 4k / 60 fps.  Apparently there is some dynamic resolution if you’re running it on a PS4 Pro but the PS5 can brute force its way past the scaling.

So on a PS5 you get something like 13x the number of pixels and there is scarcely a jagged edge in sight.

Bringing your character over doesn’t bring over story progression, however, and since my goal in moving to the updated version was, at least in part, because I wanted to unlock the Whimsyshire level of D3… well, I had to play through most of the game again.  Specifically I had to get nearly to the end of Act 3 before I could get into the dungeon that dropped the last component needed to make the Staff of Herding.  This is reputedly a 5% drop off a rare spawn in a specific dungeon and takes a lot of time or a lot of luck and…

…well, I am happy to report it only took me three tries.  I’m not sure how I would have felt after ten attempts, or twenty.

Whimsyshire was put in the game as something of a middle finger pointed towards a certain group of Very Online People who were offended by early screenshots of Diablo 3, and that is, admittedly, part of why I wanted to play it myself.

Turning pink unicorns into bloody chunks of pink unicorn also made me grin like a maniac in a way that should probably have me on a list somewhere, assuming I’m not already on the list.

Anyway.  Unlocking Whimsyshire took me very nearly to the end of Act 3, and getting there was VERY quick considering I’d imported an end-game character so it seemed appropriate to push on.

Completing the remainder of Act 3, then Act 4 to finish out where the PS3 game had ended, and then Act 5 which was the “Reaper of Souls” expansion took only a few hours and left me feeling very satisfied.  I don’t play many games where you feel like an unstoppable absolute badass at the end of the story, and this definitely scratched that itch.

Posted in ps3, PS4, PS5, videogames | Leave a comment

Diarblo

Posted on April 30, 2023 by baudattitude

It’s been nearly sixteen years since the last time I tried playing any games in the “Diablo” series, and my attempt back in 2007 to get into the first game ended pretty abruptly.  I couldn’t get on with the controls and even for the time the graphics were pretty dated.

To be 100% clear here, I realize that many people hold the Diablo “mouse click to do everything” controls near and dear to their hearts, and while your ways baffle and disturb me I’m not going to try to talk you out of it.  You’re slightly better than people who invert the Y-axis for first-person games, at least.

Now that I’ve managed to insult probably half the people who will ever see this, let’s move on to roughly 2018, when I decided that I was going to give “Destiny” a try.  By this time, Activision really wanted everyone to be playing Destiny 2 and I had to go out to an actual store to buy a physical copy of the original game… which was easily found in the “$5, or 4 for $10” bin at the nearest GameStop.

The other games I picked out of the bin included the original release of Diablo III for PS3, since I’d heard that the controls on console were much easier to deal with.

5 years after THAT, well.

I figured I’d give it a go.

To be clear, this is probably the worst possible way to play this game.  The PS3 and Xbox 360 were very much on their last legs in 2013, and Diablo III plays in a sub-HD resolution that euphemistically “targets 60 fps”.

It ain’t pretty.

Oh, and neither are any of my screenshots.  The PS3 didn’t have a built-in screenshot feature and when I tried to hook it up to a capture card I discovered that it has HDCP permanently turned on.  All pictures, therefore, are literal screenshots.

Anyway, while I understand that the campaign mode is somewhat dismissed as a glorified tutorial, I started up a character and spent the next few days turning low polygon demons into glorious piles of color coded loot drops.

And I will admit, this game makes the experience of Making The Numbers Go Up a very pleasant experience.  You get to put your new drops up against your old gear and say things like “well it’s 3 more intelligence but do I really want to lose that 4% crit damage?”

Some choices are easier than others, of course.  Also the vocabulary in this game!  Like, I am an AD&D kid from the 1970s so I am perfectly comfortable with the odd glaive-guisarme, but what the HECK is a “poignard” ?

I suspect someone, possibly many someones at Blizzard go to a lot of ren faires.  I would say something like “I’m not judging” but that would be a lie.

One of the best touches of the whole loot thing is the times you get an orange legendary-quality item and you get to hold down a button while the game “identifies” it and the anticipation builds and builds and then you find that you have looted magical fart pants.

LEGENDARY magical fart pants.

Sadly D3 does not have any sort of cosmetic item appearance change option, like WoW’s Transmog feature.  My demon-vanquishing wizard went through most of the game looking like this, or worse:

It’s probably a good thing that most of the action is extremely zoomed out.

As a side note, I usually play as melee-heavy tanky sorts of characters in any RPG, since spell casters are traditionally sort of glass cannons and I am bad about not getting hit.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that the game lets you recruit a companion, in my case the very tanky and also healy Templar character, and he did a fine job of keeping monsters from eating my face while I turned them into ash.

My only regret is that the PS3 version of the game never got the patch that increased the spawn rate of the rare monster that drops the rare drop that lets you get into the Secret Rainbow Pony Level.  I think there’s a way to transfer your characters from PS3 to PS4, however, so I suspect my $2.50 purchase is about to turn into $22.50 overall.

For now though, this is like only the third or fourth game I’ve finished this year and it’s nice to actually see some end credits roll.

Posted in ps3, videogames | Leave a comment

OK. macOS Live Text is pretty mental.

Posted on April 23, 2023 by baudattitude

So, recently I have been trying to “cloudify” pretty much everything I can.  The idea is that the computer hardware I’m using is secondary to the data present, and I should be able to go to any device I own and have access to the same, well, STUFF.

I am, of course, keeping local backups because I’m not 100% an idiot.

One of the things that I was most reluctant to move over to cloud-based storage was my music library.  I tried Apple’s “iTunes Match” service several years ago, and it wasn’t exactly perfect at the time with quite a few mismatched songs.

In 2023 it seems better about song matching.  I checked all of the songs I could remember it messing up previously and they were all OK this time.

There’s just one problem, and it only affected 17 songs in my library, but it was an annoyance:

A number of songs I bought from the Japanese iTunes Store, mostly between 2007 and 2010, were copy protected AND didn’t exist on the iTunes Store server any more.  So it was both unable to upload the songs (because copy protection) and couldn’t match them to song masters in Apple’s library (because expired licenses maybe?).

So I couldn’t get these into iTunes Match.  I did a little searching and found that the universally-agreed-upon solution was very low-tech and consisted of burning them to a CD and then re-importing them.  Obviously there’s a generational loss there, but I’m getting older and my ears aren’t getting any better.

Burning them to a CD was easy enough, after I rummaged through some boxes in my garage and found a single 80-minute CD-R blank.  The Mac I use for the Japanese iTunes Store is a 2009 MacBook Pro that actually has an optical drive in it, and I was able to hook up an external optical to my M1 Mac mini to import the music.

Naturally, iTunes had no idea what the track names or artists were, etc, and I was not looking forward to manually entering all this information.

Now.  Apple introduced a feature back in macOS Monterey called “Live Text” which lets you copy and paste text out of pictures.  I knew this was a thing, and I’ve even occasionally used it.  But how good WAS it, really?

Well.

I took a screenshot of the CD burn screen on the MacBook.

I copied this screenshot over to the other Mac.

I moused over the kanji.

I hit command-C and command-V into the artist field, and it pasted as “避坂大河（釘宮理恵），※枝実乃梨（堀江由衣）＆ 川崎亜美（喜多村英梨）”

So, I’ve been using computers for over 40 years and there have been very few times when I have had my mind absolutely blown by something they can do that I thought was impossible.  The first time I can really remember that happening was the first time I saw Wolf3d in motion, and it has remained a high water mark despite being a 30-year-old memory.

But this, THIS is black magic of the highest order.

Also it made filling out all the metadata on these tracks extremely easy, and I am happy to report that I now have access to all of these via iTunes Match.

Posted in mac | Leave a comment

In which, I am stalked by a gadget.

Posted on April 15, 2023 by baudattitude

I recently realized I had a number of devices that supported WiFi 6, and did not have a WiFi 6 access point. Naturally, THIS COULD NOT STAND.

I bought this:

It’s a UniFi Access Point U6 LR,  and it’s obviously not in its final location at this point, but I needed to hook it up and test it.

The “LR” stands for Long Range, which means that I may be able to cover the entire house with a single access point, and also means that it requires a 30W PoE injector rather than the 15W PoE injectors I had already so I needed to spend even more money and then wait for the new one to arrive.

Fortunately, that didn’t take TOO long and the UniFi controller picked the new AP up as soon as it was connected to Ethernet, applied a firmware update and then adopted it into my network.

That’s when I looked at the list of WiFi clients, got vaguely annoyed that MOST of them were simply showing up as MAC addresses, and started trying to track them down and give them friendly names. This wasn’t a serious problem when it came to phones and computers, and even game systems make their MAC address reasonably easy to find. It got trickier when I was trying to label Google Nest speakers, but I eventually labeled all of those, and my Geeni smart plugs, and the TV…

…but there were still two devices showing up, identified only by their MAC address. To make things more frustrating, while MAC addresses are SUPPOSED to be registered to vendors, these ones weren’t coming up in any of my searches.

Moreover, both of them were connecting as WiFi 4 devices, which I thought meant that they were pretty old, but I changed my WiFi password not too long ago and that should have disconnected any older devices.

I fumed a bit and started turning things on to see if they were using a WiFi connection in standby. Still couldn’t find it. On the plus side, if and when I turn on either of our Vitas they now have friendly names assigned.

I even started unplugging things to see if I could get either device to disappear. No joy. I was starting to consider turning off circuits at the breaker panel.

I took a second look at the devices. One of them was staying resolutely connected to a single AP, but the other was roaming like crazy, switching between all three of my APs, almost as if

as if it were following me

I looked at my wrist. I looked at the UniFi controller. I turned off WiFi on my WATCH. Mystery Device #1 disappeared from the console. My wife was sitting in the living room reading something, and had beeen doing that for some time. I asked her to turn off WiFi on HER watch and Mystery Device #2 immediately disappeared as well.

So, I’m not going to say that was time particularly well-spent but now I will be able to look at the admin page for my Ubiquiti devices and know what every one of them is.  That’s something!

Also, Apple: please register the MAC addresses used by your watches with one of the applicable governing bodies.  When you get a spare minute.  Thanks.

 

Posted in gadgets, iOS | Leave a comment

I’ve escaped gacha idol hell.

Posted on April 3, 2023 by baudattitude

OK. It’s inaccurate to say I’ve “escaped” gacha idol hell, because I didn’t really escape it. After 9 years of service, the plug got pulled on Love Live: School Idol Festival, sending all of my hard-earned idol .pngs to a black hole.

And when I say “a black hole”, I really mean it. See, while the makers of Love Live: School Idol Festival are offering a transfer service that takes all of the cards you collected and adds them to an album in the sequel game, this service was only available to players of the North American or Japanese versions of the game. Players of the European version weren’t eligible to transfer, probably due to some sort of contract nonsense.

…did I say “Players of the European version”? I’m sorry, I meant “anyone who ever logged on to the game while they were in Europe”. So the week I spent in Brussels and France back in 2019 meant that I was not eligible to transfer my stuff to the new game… something that’s both bad and good. While it means that I don’t get to flip through my virtual idols like the baseball cards of my childhood, it also means that I don’t feel driven to download the new game once it comes out.

That isn’t to say that I won’t try it. Love Live: School Idol Festival was a supremely fun game, and looking at my play stats on its final day of service revealed that I had logged into it on 1159 unique days since installing it in January of 2018. That is a LOT of play time.

Also, over the course of five years, I spent about sixty bucks total on it – and most of that was just because I wanted particularly pretty cards, not because I needed them to play the game. As far as a free-to-play game goes, it was EXCEPTIONALLY generous with the amount you could play and the amount of currency that was thrown at you to draw for random characters.

So, on the last day, I logged in, played one final song – START:DASH!! – and took a few screenshots to remember it by.

Here are some of my favorite cards, selected because they were really pretty:

Yes I may have a little bit of a Nozomi bias. BEST GIRL.

And one very special card to me for how broken it was:

This particular Kotori card had a special ability that the game developers added to exactly three cards ever and then never ever put on a card ever again. It was simple enough in theory: Every time you got a certain amount of score, Kotori would give you a little more score. I think that it was something like getting a 200 point bonus every time you got 1800 points. Nothing huge, right?

Well, you could have multiple Kotoris in a team. And if you were playing one of LLSIF’s team events, Kotori’s “add score” would fire on the team’s score rather than just your score. And it would activate for every Kotori in your hand. The end result was rather explosive, and the score counter would keep scrolling for quite a while after a song ended just to update with your final score.

Let’s not talk about her giant, nightmare-inducing syringe. Some people have very particular fetishes.

Anyway. It was an awesome game, it’s dead now, I’m a little sad but life goes on.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Lore-abiding citizen

Posted on January 9, 2023 by baudattitude

It’s been about a month since I posted about WoW’s latest expansion, Dragonflight, and at the time I was pretty positive about the whole thing.  I’m actually still quite positive about it!  It’s a little less metaphysical than the Shadowlands expansion, which was all about the afterlife and redemption and uh…

I’ve mostly forgotten really.  There were some delightfully wicked little fairies in it and then we went off to discover that all of the various afterlives were actually constructed by some sort of spiritual Magrathea and then the big evil guy of the expansion turned out to be a construct himself and honestly I doubt they are ever going to come back to this storyline ever.

And that’s truly a shame because the expansion included the Best NPC ever, voiced by Aysha Selim, and I desperately want to know what her Whole Deal was.

Dragonflight is much less abstract.  There are some good dragons and there are some bad dragons and the bad dragons drop loot and that’s all I need to know.

…well, that’s all I usually need to know.  For some reason I got really into running around and actually doing all of the side storylines and got my first “Loremaster” achievement since 2016’s Legion expansion.  This is an achievement you get for walking up to literally everyone you can find with an exclamation mark over their head and doing whatever they tell you to do.

Most of the side quests are pretty enjoyable and my only quibble with them is that a couple of them send you into my least favorite instanced dungeon in the entire expansion.  This is very unusual for Loremaster achievements, as I understand, since the achievements in previous expansions have largely been doable without grouping.

I elected to get around the requirement by being overgeared and a tank and doing the dungeon solo.  This took longer than doing it the “right way” would have, but I enjoyed being able to set my pace and not being responsible for leading a group, which is an experience roughly equivalent to trying to herd four kittens all chasing different laser pointers.

The whole questing experience is also made considerably nicer by the dragon riding system.  The last few WoW expansions have disabled flight at the beginning of each expansion, which is (a) a way for the developers to make you actually ride around their carefully-crafted areas on foot so you can really appreciate the work they put in on them and (b) has the side effect of slowing you down quite a bit so you can’t chew through everything the expansion has to offer in the first week.  Being able to fly to and from quest objectives has made getting around an absolute joy by comparison.

I actually have another post I’d like to write talking about how the loot system in Dragonflight is also a considerable upgrade, but that’s going to be boring and full of numbers.  I’ll leave off here for now.

 

Posted in MMORPG, PC Gaming | 1 Comment

In which I shoot myself in the foot, and then fix it with a shell script.

Posted on December 14, 2022 by baudattitude

I don’t make a secret out of my long-running MMO habit, at least on this blog.  I tend not to mention it in polite circles, because an MMO habit is one step above admitting that you are a heroin enthusiast, but nothing about the internet is particularly polite.

My policy of late has been to drop MMOs at the point where I realize that I am simply logging on to Make The Numbers Bigger, and not because I am enjoying the game or the people I play with.  I do tend to keep a bunch of screenshots around, however, so I can occasionally go back and look through them to remember when these were cutting edge graphics:

Everquest’s sharks were prone to transcending their watery limitations, at least in the early days.

One slight problem is that I tend to get a ton of screenshots after a while, and if I move from device to device to play on then the screenshots tend to get jumbled up and out of order.  One way to work around this is to toss them all in a directory and sort it by date.

Except.

Recently, I was working to clear documents and pictures off a couple of Windows PCs, and did so by uploading everything to iCloud Drive and then deleting it from the PCs.  I did not realize that one of the TINY INCONSEQUENTIAL QUIRKS of iCloud Drive on a PC is that it updates the time/date stamp on the file to the date uploaded.

So this is what a folder of screenshots from FFXIV looked like:

OK, so.  This is less than optimal, but there’s still timestamp information. It’s just in the file names rather than the metadata. Surely I can work with this.

So after a fair bit of hard work browsing StackExchange, I came up with this.  No guarantees that this will work for anyone other than me. I stole most of it from other people without properly understanding what they were doing.

#!/bin/bash
#
#
# fixdates
# reads dates in filenames and tries to set the file date from the date stamp in the name
#
# character replacement stolen from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2871181/replacing-some-characters-in-a-string-with-another-character
# dash escape stolen from https://superuser.com/questions/528162/how-to-escape-in-bash
# relies on all single digit days and months having leading 0s.


for filename in *.*
do
	# Set up our variables
	year="2000"
	month="01"
	day="01"
	hour="12"
	minute="00"
	second="00"
	fulldate="20000101"
	fulltime="000000"
	filegood=0
	
	# drop the extension.  May break with filenames with multiple periods?
	filenamenoext=${filename%.*}

	# drop dashes
	filenamenodash=$(echo $filenamenoext | tr -d "-")

	# replace underscores with spaces
	filenamespaced=$(echo $filenamenodash | tr _ " ")
		
	# this will replaces both dashes and underscores but let's leave that aside for now:
	# filenamespaced=$(echo $filenamenoext | tr -- -_ " ")
	# and yes the -- is important since it says "there are no more options after this point, treat the dash you're about to see as a character"
	
	# break the extensionless filename into components by space
	
	read -ra filenamearray <<<"$filenamespaced"
	
	for i in "${filenamearray[@]}"
	do
		itemsize=${#i}
		if [ "$itemsize" == "8" ] && [ "$itemsize" -eq "$itemsize" ]; # cheap way to check if something is a number
		then
			fulldate=${i}
			((filegood++)) # we have a date, touch is go
		fi
		if [ "$itemsize" == "6" ] && [ "$itemsize" -eq "$itemsize" ];
		then
		# we have a time? probably
			fulltime=${i}
		fi
		if [ "$itemsize" == "14" ] && [ "$itemsize" -eq "$itemsize" ];
		then
#			This looks like date and time in one string.
#			We're going to assume date first because otherwise is madness
			fulldate=${i:0:8}
			fulltime=${i:8:6}
			((filegood++))
		fi
	done

	if (( filegood == 1 )); # We think we at least have a date
	then
		if [ "${fulldate:4:2}" == "19" ] || [ "${fulldate:4:2}" == "20" ];
		then
			year="${fulldate:4:4}"
			month="${fulldate:0:2}"
			day="${fulldate:2:2}"
		else
			year="${fulldate:0:4}"
			month="${fulldate:4:2}"
			day="${fulldate:6:2}"
		fi
		hour="${fulltime:0:2}"
		minute="${fulltime:2:2}"
		second="${fulltime:4:2}"
	touch -d "$year"-"$month"-"$day"T"$hour":"$minute":"$second" "$filename"
	else
	echo "Bad file (Couldn't find anything that looks like a date):" "$filename"
	fi
done

And this, for the time being, seems to work and I have my screenshots back to the proper times and dates.

Also, it’s generic enough that it worked for files with their time stamps in the following formats:

gsdx_20170411131943.bmp
Kandagawa Jet Girls 2022-05-23 23-24-14.mp4
ffxiv_09242015_191807.png

But there’s little to be done for uPlay unless I massage the filenames manually first or figure out how to parse the entire string for “2019” or “2020” and then extract the date from that point and add leading zeros to the single-digit entries and… look, Ubisoft, would it have killed you to write your dates in a little more sensible manner?

Assassin's Creed® Unity2019-4-17-15-33-0.png
Tom Clancy's The Division® 22019-10-4-2-25-9.jpg

Also a space between the game title and the date would have been cool.

But gosh dang it, I have the world’s hugest sense of satisfaction right now.

Posted in shell scripts | Leave a comment

World of Warcraft: How to Main Your Dragon

Posted on December 11, 2022 by baudattitude

So, the latest World of Warcraft expansion came out a couple of weeks ago, right when I was supposed to be studying for the JLPT. So I didn’t get very far into it until after the test.

Now that I have… it’s pretty good? I think I like it?

For context, I have to admit that Warcraft Lore is one of my weakest points as a nerd. I never played any of the RTS games and I’ve only played WoW during a couple of more recent expansions. So my experience with WoW has included a lot of times where I’m following a storyline and then there’s a Very Dramatic Cutscene where SUDDENLY SOMEONE APPEARS and I’m like, huh, everyone seems very shocked by this.

Sometime the unexpected guest, or guests, turn out to be dragons, and that’s the case with Dragonflight. But, you know, these are good dragons and very rarely eat people.

WoW seems to have a lot of good dragons, and bad dragons, and my wife who has played far more of the game and read far more of the supplemental material is very up-to-date on which is which and which dragons are GOOD dragons BUT had dads that were total jerks. This is different from my typical approach to dragons, which is to ask whether I need frost or fire resist gear.

Anyway.

The previous WoW expansion was set entirely in the afterlife, and consisted of a storyline where you marshaled your forces to fight back an evil, but extremely hot, vampire daddy and then found out that he was JUST A PAWN AND THE REAL VILLAIN was…

…was…

…was super boring by comparison. Like, they made one charismatic villain and peaked.

Thankfully, the dungeons were top class and kept me coming back time and again. Except you, Plaguefall. You get to sit in the Bad Dungeon Corner and think about what you did.

So after that, your characters come back to the Real World and presumably have a very hard time convincing everyone that you saved the world again because it’s not like anyone on Azeroth actually saw hot vampire daddy. But hey, champagne all around, except now there are evil dudes running all over Azeroth summoning elementals which is a fair less metaphysical sort of danger.

It turns out that these guys are trying to bring about the rebirth of some evil bad dragons who we’ve never heard of before because there was a war with the good dragons like a super long time ago and the good dragons won but they didn’t want to kill the really bad dragons so they just imprisoned them because good is dumb.

I’ve already forgotten why this is any of my concern as a non-dragon. It would have helped if one of them had just come clean and said something along the lines of

“Look, we may be immortal flame breathing lizards the size of a greyhound bus but we could really use some help from you puny mortals. We’ll let you keep anything you get off their bodies. Do we have a deal?”

Mind you, the raid zone where you do this hasn’t opened for business yet, so everyone is just running around the world and doing all of the other stuff you can do, which includes a pretty bitchin’ dragon flight simulator and storylines revolving around the day to day challenges of Centaurs and Walrus dudes and how you puny humans can make their lives easier, one quest at a time, in exchange for 40 to 60 gold and possibly a new pair of shoes.

There are some Bad Centaurs to go with the Bad Dragons, as an aside. All of the Walrus dudes seem pretty chill, though.

If you’ve done enough chores and want to get into some five-man instanced content, the expansion has eight dungeons at launch. I’ve run all of them at least once and there don’t seem to be any real stinkers. None of them seem quite as fun as Shadowland’s De Other Side, but maybe they’ll grow on me.

Dragonflight also brings the game’s first new class in quite a while, the Evoker.  Evokers are limited to a single race, which is also the game’s first new race in a couple of expansions, and there are a LOT of Evokers running around right now.  The evoker class can choose between healing and DPS specializations, so if you like to play tanks in MMOs and liked being in demand before, you may find the added popularity either welcome or overwhelming.

Also roughly half of my WoW guild has switched over to Evoker mains for the upcoming raiding and mythic season.  So I am predicting a lot of drama around mail armor.  I will be continuing to play a Paladin and ignoring the entire issue.

For anyone masochistic enough to do crafting in a MMO, WoW did a pretty comprehensive overall of the crafting system. I still haven’t quite wrapped my head around it, but my impression is that it seems less awful than FFXIV’s crafting, but not as good as EQ2’s crafting. It definitely promises payoff for people who deep dive into it, but it also lets you invest deeply into specific crafting specialties with no way to reset them should you suddenly realize you’ve made huge mistakes.

Also there’s PVP for those who want it, even if the Horde and Alliance officially have a truce now. I did a lot of that in Shadowlands, but don’t feel like doing any more of it in Dragonflight. Presumably it’s less of a hot unbalanced mess early in an expansion launch cycle, so getting in on that now is likely going to be the best time for it.

Look, I’m not going to pretend that I’m suited to review an MMO expansion, or even that doing so in its first month is a good idea. But Dragonflight seems good so far and if you’ve liked WoW in the past, but fell off with Shadowlands, I think you’d enjoy this one. It also wouldn’t be an awful place to start playing, since you get to level from 1 through 60 in the fairly down-to-earth Battle for Azeroth expansion and then go right into Dragonflight without any weird detours to alternate dimensions.

 

Posted in PC Gaming, videogames | Leave a comment

It’s like poetry, it rhymes. A dose of online nostalgia.

Posted on November 20, 2022 by baudattitude

So it’s been an exciting week on the Internet. Twitter found out that saying “yeah, so whacha gonna DO about it?” to the world’s richest man might not have been the greatest plan, and the site has been experiencing some … challenges ever since. An awful lot of people seem to be looking for somewhere else to go that fills the same role, and I keep seeing Mastodon kicked around as the Next Big Thing so I naturally did some research.

To be clear: I’m not particularly worried about the future of Twitter, and if the site inexplicably went down tomorrow I would only REALLY miss the English Word of the Day twitter account and like two or three other cool people I follow.

Plus a whole lot of Genshin Impact fan art of various levels of work safeness.

But to get back to my original point, I started looking into this Mastodon thing and it instantly snapped me back to the person I was like 30 years ago, because it’s like FidoNet all over again.

If you weren’t online 30 years ago, or maybe not even alive 30 years ago, FidoNet was this big, mostly non-commercial network of computer bulletin board systems. Like, imagine that you really liked parrots and you wanted to devote a computer and a phone line to running a program that that let people call in and talk to each other about parrots and download parrot pictures and maybe play parrot-centric games. FidoNet would let your system communicate with OTHER systems run by parrot fans, so people on your parrot site could talk to people all across the world without paying long distance bills.

OK, yeah, one more thing from the dark ages of history. It used to cost money to make phone calls – or computer modem connections – to anywhere outside of your immediate geographical area. So instead of every parrot fancier in town making multiple long-distance calls to all the different parrot fan sites, your local parrot Uber-fan would shoulder the costs of batching up all of your conversations and exchanging them with all of the other sites.

Anyway, FidoNet was how the individual systems, which were called Nodes, could communicate with each other, and the conversations about parrots, or cars, or movies, were sent around on a system called Echo Mail. The idea was that countries were split up into smaller and then larger geographic areas and messages were routed in a way that was the least cost. It would sometimes take days for your messages to reach all of the other parrot fans throughout the world, and their replies might take days to come back.

In theory, FidoNet had two social rules and one technical rule. The technical rule was that for an hour every night your system had to be closed to users and open for FidoNet communications, and the social rules were “Do not be excessively annoying, and do not be excessively annoyed”.

In practice, there were a ton of other rules and a whole mess of politics.

For example: because Echo Mail was expensive to run, systems would typically all pay money to ONE guy who would handle the process of collecting and distributing all Echo Mail from and to a particular geographical area. That guy got to pick what Echoes, or discussion topics, he would forward. Our local Echo Mail host was pretty famous for not liking certain topics (anime among them), so he simply wouldn’t host offending Echoes. Also, if it turned out that he thought you were forwarding messages to a system that wasn’t paying HIM, he would simply cut you off the network. In that case, your option was to try to find another source for Echo Mail and incur the network charges yourself.

Oh, and then he went through a messy divorce and left town, breaking Echo Mail for every system that had been paying him.

There’s a reason it used to be called “Fight-O-Net”.

Side note, because every system you used was literally Some Guy’s Computer, the person running the BBS had full access to everything on it. So if you were sending private mail to another user of the same system talking about what a tyrant the admin was, the admin was right there reading it. They could also see your passwords – this was before passwords were hashed, so they were typically just stored in plaintext – so if you used the same password on multiple sites you REALLY had to trust the admins.

So. Back to Mastodon. Where the admins can read your DMs, just like in the FidoNet days.

Every Mastodon instance is its own distinct thing and ALSO part of a larger network, like FidoNet Nodes and the FidoNet itself, and Mastodon admins are a lot like the BBS administrators of old. They have an interest in a topic, they are willing to spend money to host a system for people to talk about that topic, and their system can interface with all of the other systems.

And woo boy the drama is right there, just as strong or maybe stronger.

For example: there are a lot of legitimately awful sites on the internet, so there are some very well-intended blacklists to ensure that the users on the awful sites can’t interact with users on your site.

On the other hand, you – assuming you’re daft enough to set up your own Mastodon instance – may have your site wind up on one of these lists because, oh, you have one legitimately awful user, or maybe you have a user who just seems problematic or maybe because you yourself aren’t blocking the right sites. You can get off these blacklists, sure – just correct your behavior and grovel in the right ways, make sure you’re blocking the right sites and you’ll be back in the good graces of the community in no time. In the meantime, if you’re an individual parrot fan and not the admin, you probably have no idea why your feed just went dark.

So say you’re an admin and you have a guy that signs up to your instance at 2 AM and blasts racist nonsense to every other site he or she can find and you wake up at 8 AM to an inbox full of angry email and need to deal with the collective Karen that is the internet when it isn’t getting its way Right Now.

Or, heaven forbid, someone on your instance toots something that goes viral. Suddenly dealing with the server costs of 20,000 Boosts may put you into massive debt, because Mastodon doesn’t seem to have copied the hub and spoke model of FidoNet. Your system is responsible for sending that Boosted Toot out to every other instance that interacts with it via point-to-point connections, which are fast but oh-so-very inefficient.

From a user’s point of view, since the individual sites are largely run by hobbyists and nerds, you also run the very real risk of the Messy Divorce or maybe even the “You guys have ruined every bit of fun I once found in this, I’m pulling the plug” and suddenly all of your data poofs into the virtual ether.

So after educating myself on what the heck Mastodon was all about, I naturally went looking for drama. I confess, it was just a massive nostalgia hit at this point. It brought me right back to those late 80s/early 90s flame wars that seemed SO IMPORTANT at the time.

Honestly, this is the virtual equivalent of eating a lot of really greasy food. It may taste good in the moment, but you are going to regret it in a few hours.

Anyway, one particular complaint kept popping up over and over: To wit, there were a ton of people who had their own super nerdy, super niche space that was their haven, and they naturally wanted to make it easy for other Cool People to join this space.

And then the Cool People came, and some slightly less Cool People that they knew, and some generally entirely un-Cool People who wanted to get in on this thing that was suddenly Happening, and the original batch of Cool People suddenly feel that they’ve lost control of their space.

And man, if that don’t sound familiar.

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I’ve assembled something!

Posted on November 13, 2022 by baudattitude

I bought this Lego Y-Wing shortly after seeing Star Wars : Episode IX : Skywalker-palooza in the theaters, in December of 2019.  It has been sitting in its box ever since, slowly collecting a fine layer of dust and taunting me with its state of disassembly.

Roughly a year ago, I opened the box, took out the four bags of parts, read the instruction booklet and then put everything carefully back in the box.

Tonight I decided to just get down to it, and three-and-a-half-hours later I was holding a damn Lego representation of the best starfighter to ever come out of the Star Wars universe.  It also made me realize why the Y-wings shown in the Clone Wars series were designed with the armor plating around the engine, because man those struts are some kinda flimsy and the armored design probably made the toys considerably easier to make in a way that was sturdy enough to survive the first five minutes of play.

Speaking of this as a toy, it’s pretty cool.  You’ve got two spring-loaded blaster bolts you can fire out of it – and a spare for when you inevitably lose one – and the bomb bay holds three bombs that load in from the top.  You also have a rotating ion cannon up top and it has space for a pilot and the included nameless Astromech Droid.

I mean, I’ll never actually chase the cat around with it making engine noises and firing blaster bolts at him, because that would be childish and I am a Grown Man Now.

Part of being a Grown Man apparently includes wasting three years before assembling a Lego kit.  But at least it’s finally done.

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