Welcome to the Windy Weather Website.
These are musings from my vantage point on the Oregon South Coast.
A long-time software engineer and general geek, I continue my exploration with Photography, 3D Graphics, Linux and other nonsense. Come along for the ride.
Wheew. Not as bad as either Griffon or certainly Skyscale, the Roller Beetle is still a full two day process. Assuming you have all the maps required.
There are a few events that you have to wait on. Notably:
This is all much easier than even the Griffon or the Skyscale, so take heart and power through. And it’s all much easier if you have a flying mount. I saved lots of time by having the Skyscale before I did the Roller Beetle.
:ww
At long last I have a Skyscale Mount in GW2. It has been a long and punishing journey. The longest effort by far has been to get the various parts of the “Saddle”.
After the first few steps, there is the long grind for 250 of each of 6 different materials. This is a punishing grind for a couple of reasons:
(1) There is a throttle on each one of these materials so that only so many of them can be gathered each day. They are account bound when acquired so it’s not possible to purchase them on the market board. If they are gathered, then after so many are gathered, then then the nodes where they are gathered just dry up.
(2) Also, the areas where most of the materials are gathered are very dangerous for solo players. Thunderhead Peaks, and Kourna are so dangerous that solo farming is essentially impossible. I was able to farm Eternal Ice in Bjora Marches and with that material, you can purchase each of the other materials. But Eternal Ice gathering, or collecting from Events or Chests is throttled as well. I was only able to purchase 10 or 20 of the other materials per day since each 10 materials required 75 Eternal Ice. I was able to do chains of Meta Events in both zones of the BJora Marches map once or twice a day to get quite a few Eternal Ice to purchase other materials. It is reasonable to farm Diflourite in the Sandswept Isles as a Solo player and this is quite an interesting zone. I was able to get about 100 Mistborn Motes in a day with gathering and doing events in Dragonfall. I had another 150 or so of those from previous events and gathering from working Dragonfall during the Skyscale Achievements.
Continue reading “Skyscale Achieved”I have recently come to the realization that Economics and Politics both wield power by controlling Scarcity.
It seems interesting to note that in the Universe at large, there are no scarcities of anything.
The Universe is full of Resources. Outside the restrictive gravity wells of planets, each Solar System and Each Galaxy is full of unclaimed Resources that are easy to exploit. Without conflict or competition. And the stars provide all the energy that any power hungry Economist might want to exploit those Resources.
The Universe is full of Choice. There are infinite many directions to take any endeavor. The Scarcity of Choice is artificial; often constrained in the pursuit of Economics. Beyond Politics there is Freedom.
I am hopeful that Humanity moves beyond the Artificial Scarcities of Economics and Politics someday and moves out to the wider unconstrained Universe of Post Scarcity of any kind.
The only Scarcity beyond Resources and Choice is the Scarcity of Time. We, as finite beings, strive toward the Infinite Lifespan. However, I fear that Biology, though miraculous, is destined to be forever finite. However, I see a future of Post Biology, where beings are freed from the Scarcity of Time to live infinite lifetimes in Virtual and Real space simultaneously. Fully redundant, fully plastic beings who change at will and who live forever. Continuously renewing their Silicon, or Post Silicon substrates to live on to pursue the goals of avoiding Species Extinction Events through redundancy and to explore the Galaxy. Only then can we explore the rest of the Galaxy and Beyond.
Multitudes in Fleets of planetoid sized Starships, spreading through the Galaxy. Stopping at Solar Systems to Replicate in Kuiper and Asteroid Belts far from energy sapping gravity wells of planets and then to move on in many directions, along the Filaments of Matter that chain the stars together. Only with infinitely interesting and renewed lifetimes can this be accomplished.
Some stopovers might Bioform suitable planets and leave Ancestral Biology Colonies of life behind where this does not disturb already developing Biology.
Of course our first steps must be to become Post Economic and Post Political. And the first steps to that end are to Forgive All Student Debt and provide Universal Health Care.
Small Steps toward a larger future.
:ww
Back in October I started working on getting the Griffon Mount in GW2. After some frustration I have that mount now. Mounts in GW2 are account wide, so all my 18 or so characters have access to the Griffon.
It turns out that you don’t have to do all the story quests of “Path of Fire”, but only the last section. At least there’s that. There are some good guides for getting the Griffon. Mostly this is a matter of jumping puzzles to get Eggs and then the cost of about 250 Gold to buy the items required. In each of the Five maps there are eggs to collect and Events to participate in. You purchase various items from heart vendors and others. All in all, a reasonable effort.
The Skyscale is a whole other matter entirely.
I’ve pushed my way through most of the effort, and after grinding for a few days on getting Eternal Ice to get Kralkatite Ore, and a few more days farming Diflourite Crystals, I now need Inscribed Shards. Fighting my way around the map and doing some events got me about 20, and I made another round today for only 6. What a waste of time.
The reason I want Griffon and Skyscale is to have them for the upcoming End of Dragons expansion where we go back to Cantha.
Continue reading “A Tale of Four Mounts”So as of about a week ago, Gameforge has taken over Tera from Enmasse. And apparently Enmasse has shut down and when you go there, Firefox says the certificate is Expired. Not even a good bye.
So I fired up Gameforge Tera this morning and made a new character in one of my “Saved” slots. I saved slots we got over the years by putting dummy characters in them with names like “Place.Holder.A” and so forth.
The startup screens have changed and there is some choice that I didn’t look into. The left choice is the game I’ve played before.
So, the operation of Credit Cards is apparently stuck in the last Century. The major suppliers of credit cards have not kept up with the requirements of the modern age of online transactions.
Case in point: My credit card was used Fraudulently. I have a couple of cards, one for physical transactions where I’m always present – well almost always present. And another that I only use On-Line. Of course, the fraud involved the credit card that was used online. I purchased some Game Currency from a game I play a lot for $10, and less than a week later someone tried to purchase $5599 at Best Buy. There was a lot of confusion about whether the transaction occurred On-Line, but the address was given as Minneapolis, Minnesota. Which is far from where I live. So the transaction was declined, and I was alerted. But that’s not the end of the problem. That card number is now stopped. It can no longer be used. And if this were last century, I could just use another of my few cards to eat take-out at restaurants, or buy groceries.
But this is 2020, and that credit card is in the hands of over a dozen on-line merchants whose computers will automatically try to use it on some random schedule to provide services that I use. These include Netflix, my internet service, my satellite tv service and so forth. I’m “waiting four to five business days” for the new card to arrive. And any of these days one of these many services’ computers might try to use that dead card. To say nothing of the fact that it will take an hour or so to go through all the services’ websites and give them a new card number. I need a better way.
Continue reading “Credit Cards Stuck in Last Century”The amount of work to get Skyscale to “Fly” in GW2 is punishing. For this amount of work, compared with the amount of work to get flying mounts in other games, this Skyscale mount should fly at the speed of sound and have a damage skill that could kill anything in the game in one shot.
But no. It doesn’t even really fly, as we mentioned before.
This is not a guide. There are better ones out there. I used a Youtube video to find all the Skyscales – Here’s the one I used. Most of them can be gotten if you have the Springer and you can borrow Skyscales from around the world once you unlock the Achievment. For two of the Scales, I had to get help to kill mobs that were nearby. Most of the scales were actually far from mobs, and I had no problem soloing them.
Finishing the last part of the story to unlock the achievement is very well written. Part of it is an arcade game where you’re riding Aurene to bring the Big “K” down. Quite a ride.
Continue reading “Skyscale – “Flight” in GW2″So, back on 6 October 2020, my main computer broke. This story is going to be complicated, so let’s call this one “Crystal”. I name my computers after the cases they are in, usually.
The verdict from the shop was the the CMOS battery was weak – replaced. And that the Ryzen 1800x CPU was bad. Good enough to run memory tests, but could not access storage. When the shop put in a Ryzen 5 CPU into the motherboard, the system ran just fine.
So I purchased some upgrades.
I’m working my way through Path of Fire to get the Griffon mount. It’s the first mount that looks like it’s flying, but it’s not.
The second “Flying Mount” introduced into GW2, Living World Season 4 is the Skyscale. This has enhanced flight mechanics, but still can’t really fly.
There must be some “religious objection” to flight. Ever since Gliders were introduced in Heart of Thorns, we could only “Glide” while all other popular games in the genre have True Flight. Well, not really…
Continue reading “Why Not Just Fly?”Couldn’t be bothered to back this up by a year to hide it.
Virtual Box on Windows Host, running a Linux Mint 20 Client.
When rebooting the Linux Mint client, this always happens. It only happens when you “RESTART”. Shutting down with “SHUTDOWN” works correctly, oddly enough.
Continue reading “Virtual Box Bug Report”
