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.
Your Internet Service Provider [ISP] is watching everywhere you go on the internet. They are harvesting that information and selling it to the highest bidder. The easiest way for them to do this is to watch the DNS – Domain Name Service – requests coming from your network. DNS is the Internet Phone Book and every time you visit a website, or play a video or anything – from your phone over WiFi or from your computer, your computer or phone looks up the IP address – a number – based on the Domain Name – a text string. And DNS is the protocol that does this. Normal DNS is completely in the clear. That is, it is not “Encrypted” in any way. Once you reach a website, to purchase something or look at your Facebook page or whatever, almost all sites are “Encrypted” so that nobody can eavesdrop on what you are doing. This all happened a few years ago after folks were sniffing everyone’s Facebook pages in coffee shops and libraries. But I digress.
DNS has only just recently been fixed. And up until now, and until you fix your network, as I outline below, your ISP is sniffing all your DNS requests, because they can. This means they know everyplace you go on the network.
After the Shadowbringers Update, the Summoner and it’s base class Arcanist has some problems related to Solo Leveling.
First, at lower levels, the Emerald Carbuncle [blue caster pet] now appears to shoot an AOE which covers quite a large range, and may bring unwanted foes [mobs] to bear on the player. In previous releases, the Carby did a single target attack which did not aggro other mobs. Here is an example of the size of the AOE that the Carby does now.
Apparently, anything hit by the big green area, which is the auto-attack cast by the Carby, is aggro’d on the player. As you can see, two king wespe mobs are now attacking the player. Mobs do not attack the Carby, but only the player. This problem was so severe that I had to dismiss the Carby when doing a Fate at my level to avoid being overwhelmed by aggro’d mobs.
Secondly, the Topaz Carbuncle and the later upgrade to the Titan Egi, were Tank pets, which took aggro from the player. This effect has been removed. The rumor is that the pets are all the same, doing the same attacks with same potency, except for animations. In other words, the differences in pets are now just Eye Candy. I have yet to study this in detail. But it is clear from my testing that the Titan Egi no longer takes aggro. So this is a significant loss for the Solo viability of the Summoner.
But there’s another problem with the Self Heal for Summoner as well.
Just started playing Gunbreaker. The second job quest is pretty challenging. I failed the Duty called “Hired Gunblades”. I decided to level up and get a complete set of Shire gear to upgrade the item level before I try it again.
Working in Palace of the Dead has brought me to Level 61 and I wondered what happened to the stats, if the gear was not upgraded. So here are the stat changes between level 60 > 61 with the same gear. Some is Shire and some is not yet Shire gear.
Notice the number columns to the left are for level 60. Where there is only one column, there was no change. Hum. Not sure what to make of this, but there are changes, obviously.
BTW, Gunbreaker is a blast to play. And Palace of the Dead is a great place to get your rotation down. There have been a lot of Gunbreakers and Dancers in the Palace recently, as you might imagine.
Make you walk in the Light [Dark] of the Crystal.
:ww
But let’s not ban Spinach. Let’s just have everyone eat more of it. No Shots, just eat your veggies. Seriously though. On the continuum between “a Training Choice” and “Performance Doping” where do we think “Eating Spinach” is? I can get behind classifying shooting up a pharmacological extract of spinach as “Doping”. But choosing to add a common food stuff to your diet? That sounds like a “Training Choice”.
Maybe we need a study of expert athletes where half eat spinach and half don’t. Although I’m not clear on how we could make this one “Double Blind”. You pretty much know if you are eating Spinach and not Kale for example. Just look between your front teeth? Oh.. Cheap shot. And that leaves out the whole question about whether Kale shows an effect. I’m not clear where we could find a “Placebo”. Are we going to draw the line to the left or right of “Eating Red Meat” several times a week? Lots of questions.
From the ROFL department.
:ww
I started Shadowbringers today. I changed a character I had to Viera, and created a new Hrothgar. Everybody gets a Fantasia, which can do a race / look change, from a level 50 Main Sequence Quest. Or you can buy the Fantasia on the Mog Station for $10.
I spent a little time leveling the Hrothgar, and playing the Viera. Of course all the jobs have changed a little or a lot, so getting used to Summoner and Scholar on the Viera took a little time.
Then I ran into a snag. The servers completely bogged down about noon PDT – Not surprisingly. Continue Reading
The Other Sexy Game
So, FFXIV has been down for 24 hours for the Shadowbringers expansion maintenance, so I needed something to do. I checked in on Tera. It has been a while since I’ve been there and I’ve missed out on an expansion, increase in Level Cap and some other things. The patch for NA region was called Skywatch: New Heights, and is covered briefly here. Here’s a review that someone else pulled together.
But when I updated I saw immediately that there is a new Race/ Class combo, so I fired up one of my open slots as a Popo / Brawler to see what had changed.
In just a few hours I went through the streamlined Main quest line, took a side trip to get Sparky the Raptor mount, and leveled up to 36. Things have been even further streamlined to allow easier leveling. Clearly this is a game focused on “End Game”. One begins to wonder whether they will soon just do a skip to level 70 so you can play the end-game dungeons which is where they are clearly putting what little energy they have left to develop the game.
There is currently an event called the Moogle Treasure Trove going on in FFXIV. It ends when Shadowbringers launches, so only about three weeks left.
If you do dungeons to collect their special tomes, then you can get some mounts, minions and other items. But it takes 30 tomes for a mount, and 50 tomes for other cool items, so it takes a long time. Stop by an Itinerant Moogle in the capital cities to see what they offer. After two long days of spamming the low level dungeons with a few level 50 MSQ Dungeons tossed in, I was able to get a mount that I’ve been wanting – The Ixtal Dire Wolf.
And like almost all the mounts, it flies too.
Final Fantasy XIV has done something I have never seen a game do before – At least for an MMO. They have provided a DEMO of their new expansion. They are calling it a “Benchmark”, but it is really a demo of their new maps, job skill animations and character classes.
You don’t need an account, or to sign up for an account. Just download the demo and give it a try. You don’t play it, you just watch it. But it’s the real game engine running the real game content on your machine. And you get to create a new character to watch in it. It’s not a video, but the actual game engine. And you can run it as many times as you like with different choices.
Cut scenes in FFXIV are scripted game footage that the engine renders with your character in the mix. Unlike some other games the cut scenes are not pre-rendered as videos for FFXIV.
I just saw this on SlashDot. And then I did some searches.
Ok. The asteroid belt is pretty small, compared with, say, the Moon. But do we get how mind bogglingly big these things are?
The reason that I did a search for Titan is that I remember a movie Outland, from way back in 1981, with Sean Connery, that included the premise that humans were mining on Titan. Not sure it was ever clear what they were mining out there.
I’ve been watching some Youtube channels that talk about the Demise or just Problems of a few games recently and wondering what’s up. And then I saw a video about “Games as a Service is Fraud” and finally something has clicked for me. Here’s my theory about what’s happening in parts of the Game Industry.
Game Studios want to be like Movie Studios. Games have not, traditionally, been like movies. When games come out, they have been designed to be played for years, and that’s not surprising because making a good game takes years. Leave aside MMOs for the moment which take much longer, but there is a lot of person hours in creating a game. If you watch the credits for movies, you see 1000s of names, but not nearly that many folks are marshaled together to build a game, so it in the past making games has taken longer. Movie studios and the surrounding special effects and catering etc etc services are all geared up to put massive effort into a movie for a short time. Game Studios [Art and Software folks] don’t work like that obviously.
But this is a problem for Game Publishers – the ones doing the Business, not the ones doing the Art, Story and Software.
