Screenshot Sunday: My SWTOR characters
I’m not sure I posted an overview of my SWTOR characters, so after the break there’s a lot of not so small screenshots to provide a little reference.
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Topic Brainstorming Week: How do you buy games?
Yay, I did find something for Blaugust Reborn’s “Topic Brainstorming Week” because it’s something I’d love to know if people are willing to talk about it.
How do you choose which games to get? Are you grabbing anything that comes out and looks interesting? At launch or at the first sale? Do you preorder? Do you buy Humble Bundles and then never play them? Do you gravitate towards or away from F2P titles? Or do you not care and decide case by case for these?
I think I’m not part of the majority of people who spend a decent chunk of their time playing games: I have just shy of 100 games on Steam, and as you can see in my yearly gaming expense reports I don’t buy many games, and when I buy one and only play it for a few hours I’m kinda let down. That’s why I’m usually debating with myself for months whether to get a game or not. Impulse buys aren’t really my thing.
Friends have told me I’m kinda tightfisted, but in reality I’d much rather gift a game for a few bucks to someone when I know they will play it than buy a cheaper one on sale for myself if I’m not sure I’ll play it. Or even worse, if I love the art style or something but know I will stop after a few hours. And no, I also don’t usually buy and try to evaluate it in 2 hours to return it…
PS: Blaugust has started and this is my fourth post.
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Random blast from the past
Yesterday Jeromai posted something I didn’t know, that you can get a random blog post out of your WordPress blog by appending “?random” to the URL – of course I had to try it and see if it’s something interesting.
My lucky draw was: Mirror, mirror on the wall from March 2010, and there’s a reason I want to write about that post.
Basically when I wrote Ranking WoW’s races two weeks ago I was pretty sure I had a post about this exact topic and wanted to link it, but either I didn’t find it or, more likely, forgot at the end of my rambling post.
So yeah, my taste has stayed closer to 2010 than 2005, but also not completely. That’s why I blog, to remember what I was thinking about 8 or 13 years ago 😉
PS: Blaugust has started and this is my third post.
Random blast from the past Read More »
Of dilemmas and other things
Came in later for work today because I had to run some errands in the morning, took a longer lunch break and then stayed an hour longer to finish something. That’s why I got out only just before 20:00 and that’s when the shops close. I had originally planned to grab something on the way home, but I wasn’t too hungry anyway so I skipped dinner.
That’s not the dilemma though, it’s that there’s like 50 new blog posts to read because all the Blaugust participants are eagerly writing. Reading blog posts takes time. That means I don’t really have time to play games tonight I guess (did half an hour of Dead Cells and then gave up for the night again), and so I have nothing to write about. What a dilemma. #firstworldproblems
But this week is Topic Brainstorming Week and I guess that’s not my cup of tea anyway. I wouldn’t say I’m 100% not creative, but I’m usually reacting instead of acting when writing things. I’m good at correcting stuff (short things and longer things like theses), I’m not good at producing any kind of text that’s not stream-of-consciousness blogging or chiming in on a topic with an opinion. And boy do I have opinions about stuff 🙂
At least I managed to write a proper post for tomorrow already, because I won’t be home and so far I don’t want to break my streak.
PS: Blaugust has started and this is my second post.
Of dilemmas and other things Read More »
Game Developers / Dead Cells
Some days ago I saw this article about Motion Twin on Gamasutra and wanted to talk about it.
Money quote(no pun intended:)
Dead Cells developer Motion Twin has been talking up its studio structure, which sees every single employee take home the same wage, irrespective of their position.
I’ve heard so many stories of bad pay and horrible hours about game studios which boils down to “exploit mostly young people who really want to work on games”. So even though I’m a software developer by trade I dodged this bullet once of starting at a games company (but it would’ve been a part-time job during university anyway) and I’m not keen on joining that industry now.
So while I don’t know and can only hope they don’t have to do 80 hour work weeks, I liked this and told myself to keep an eye on that studio. I wasn’t originally interested in Dead Cells, as I absolutely suck at Metroidvanias and am also not really good at platformers in general. Anyway, I watched the Dead Cells trailer and was kinda intrigued. Then I watched it again, because of the art style. Then I watched it again, because of the music. That was yesterday.
Today I bought Dead Cells and after a little cursing made it to the first boss once. I like this game.
PS: Blaugust has started and this is my first post
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Blaugust – Keep up with the news via RSS
People are different, so of course browsing habits are different as well, some preferably use their smart phones (I don’t), some use laptops or desktop machines. I suppose people playing video games are still mostly in the last camp although I’ve seen some impressive gaming laptops recently. But I digress, some people have a list of links to blogs they click through daily or weekly, some just type in the URLs, but many people use so-called RSS-Feeds to keep up with new posts on various websites, very often blogs.
To quote Wikipedia:
RSS (Rich Site Summary; originally RDF Site Summary; often called Really Simple Syndication) is a type of web feed which allows users to access updates to online content in a standardized, computer-readable format.
There are several RSS readers for desktop and mobile use, and a lot of websites that do this, for example Feedbin or Feedly or many others. I use Tiny Tiny RSS that I host on my own server.
Anyway, should you be interested in following all the participants of Blaugust Reborn this year, I created an OPML file (explanation) that you should be able to import into your feed-reader of choice. I will try to update it every few days at least, so you might want to add the latest participants manually. There’s also a plain TXT with the feeds.
If this doesn’t make sense at all, feel free to hit me up on Discord or comment for further explanation and how I can persuade you to love RSS 🙂
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Blaugust Prep Week
Maybe you shouldn’t take advice from someone with an average of two page views per post, but then again this is not a highly promoted blog.
I also don’t have a lot of advice, that others didn’t put more eloquently, but there’s a few things I want to mention.
The name your website/blog versus your domain name
See, this blog is hosted at armagon.wordpress.com – but nowadays I’m mostly going by Nogamara, except my twitter handle is still @Armagon – it’s not hard to google where the name came from, it’s also kinda an obscure reference, and I still have a toon in most MMOs by that name, but as it wasn’t original enough, I chose to mostly go by Nogamara (I also have that twitter handle) – but I won’t change the blog name. This might be a bad idea, but I don’t care. So my advice: Unless you plan to stick to your nick/handle for ages (and I do mean ages, I’ve used one nick at age 15-17, one from 17 until 27 and another one since then, and this is all just outside of gaming circles…) circumstances might change and either you want to be well-known and findable on the interwebs or you want to hide your juvenile mistakes by changing nicks at some point 🙂
Anyway. In ancient (for the internet) times Tim Berners-Lee (yes, that Tim Berners-Lee) wrote “Cool URIs don’t change” and because I’m an old fart I’m still sticking to that. So I’d rather change not change my domain name. If you want to, that’s your choice of course. Remember that it’s your website, your blog, your content. Unless someone’s paying you, do what you want unless you’re in other people’s faces. I’m just trying to encourage you to leave your old website (especially if it’s still relevant content like game reviews, guides, etc.) online (that’s where a free web host comes in handy) and not delete it. Yes, do as I say, not do as I do. I now (nearly 9 years later) wish I had come up with a cooler name. My original WoW Rogue blog was called “Vanish!” – also very narrow, but not totally off. Not a great name for a general blog either.
Interaction with other people
This is not my first blog and probably won’t be me last. On this one I’ve only had like 99% positive interactions with people, so apparently I was either flying under the radar, not posting very opinionated content, or something else. Keep in mind you might at some point write something controversial and then it gets linked on Twitter or Reddit and some Trolls are coming your way. Don’t let them drag you down. Don’t hesitate to moderate and block them or at least ignore them. Feel free to discuss but don’t take any attacks personal.
Commitments
If you want to blog a lot, go ahead! Blaugust is cool because you have other people around and it can be encouraging to read more posts, participate in discussions that take place in long form content instead of comments, and get to interact with other bloggers. If you don’t feel like posting, don’t despair though. If you signed up ready to try to get 31 posts going in August and feel you can’t make it – it’s fine. The Gold(25), Silver (15), Bronze(5) and Newbie (just starting a blog) Awards are fine, too. Do it for fun! Sure, you can take some of the bloggers who are writing daily or every week day as an example, but it takes practice for some people. It’s absolutely not the norm to be able to come up with a post every day. I certainly can’t sustain this for very long, I just have a chatty phase the last 2 weeks. I can absolutely not predict how long it will last, so my goal is Bronze and I’m overjoyed if I reach Silver. Sure, I could’ve just saved some of my last 10 posts for August, but this is my blog and if I write for 11 days until the 31st and then stop I’m a good target for ridicule – but I’ve been writing these last 2 weeks because I wanted to.
Blaugust Prep Week Read More »
Blaugust Reborn 2018
As I wrote last week Blaugust is happening again and now I gave in and finally joined – 5 minutes ago. This is the ninth post in a row (one daily) without really trying very hard. You may judge for yourself if a 5min description of me playing for a few hours is worth your time, but this was never a blog to try to get famous or woo the masses 😛
TAGN has a nice post with a list of the first 55 participants, although it should be around 70 already.
If everything works out as it usually does, this will absolutely be my last post for half a year and I won’t even begin with Blaugust. Morale ist still high though and I even have a single draft ready, although I tend to just forget those.
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Six down, two to go
My plans for this sunny Saturday were partially scrapped and partially moved to tomorrow, so something happened.
After Powertech, Juggernaut, Scoundrel, Sentinel, and Sage – a Level 70 Trooper, already on Command Rank 5 and having finished Ziost.
So for level progression that’s zero at Command Level 300, six at Level 70, and two at Level 50.
Now let’s look at story progression:
- 1x finished Knights of the Eternal Throne
- 1x Chapter 5 of Knights of the Fallen Empire
- 2x after Ziost, just before KotFE starts
- 1x between Yavin IV and Ziost
- 1x between Makeb and Shadows of Revan
- 2x between the original story and Ilum (the 2 Level 50 characters)
I’ve also been busy with Professions (damn you, completionism) and the current state is:
- 600 Biochem, Bioanalysis, Diplomacy, Treasure Hunting, Underworld Trading
- 550 Artificer, Synthweaving, Scavenging, Archaeology
- 530 2x Scavenging, Armormech
- 500 Cybertech, Armstech, Investigation
Still some stuff to do, but I see everything besides the Command Level 300 being moderately to very fun to tackle and not a chore.
Six down, two to go Read More »
Picross, Nonograms, puzzles
I might have mentioned it in the past, but Mario’s Picross was one of my favorite games on the Game Boy Classic (although I got my own copy only in early 2003 and played it on a GBA) and I’ve solved these nonograms on paper in puzzle magazines, and played through quite a few games. It never seems to get old.
Currently I’m playing “Picross Fairytale – nonogram: Red Riding Hood secret” and it’s one of the hardest ones I’ve ever played. (The music is nice, too, but the “story” is a bit thin and gladly skippable”. It seems to be free to play still, so go get it.
There’s also InfiniPicross (played for 27h, got 22/22 achievements) and Picross Touch (played for 99 hours, 17/18 achievements, including one for 1000 puzzles done, yikes). Also both very good.
On Android I played Picross Luna and am playing Picross Luna II right now (but I don’t like their near-endless engame with like 100 puzzles that form a complete picture) and Two Eyes. All of them are pretty cool.
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