The Redundant Ancient Gaming Noob: August 01

Showing posts with label August 01. Show all posts

Sunday, August 1, 2021

Welcome to Blaugust 2021

The time has come again, the annual neighborhood blogging event has arrived.

As I mentioned previous, back in the day this was a bit of a hardcore event, an attempt to get people to blog every day for a month. But the blogging neighborhood was a bit different in 2014. That can be a bit daunting for some. We all write at our own pace and along the way the event became more one of cross-pollination, bloggers coming together to meet up, share a few ideas and opinions, and to link out to each other.

So I will get right to that first bit. Here are the bloggers signed up for the 2021 event.

Adelle – Pixel Fairy
Alli – The Parent Trope
Ashgar – Ashs Adventures
Aywren Sojourner – Spot of Mummery
Belghast – Tales of the Aggronaut
Bhagpuss – Inventory Full
Blockade85 – A Page Where My Brain Leaks Onto
Chestnut – Gamer Girl Confessions
Easha and Poppy – Glittering Girly Gwent Gaming
Endalia – Narratess
everwake – Everwakes Adventures
Jaedia – Dragons and Whimsy
jamesmcrosby – MMO Folklorist
Jen – Book of Jen
Kaylriene – Kaylriene
Kluwes – Many Welps
Knifesedge Games – Knifesedge Blogs
Krikket – Nerd Girl Thoughts
Magi – Indiecator
Mailvaltar – Mailvaltar – MMOs and other stuff
MMOJuggler – MMOJuggler
Naithin – Time to Loot
Nimgimli – Dragonchasers
Nogamara – Battle Stance
Rakuno – Shards of Imagination
Roger Edwards – Contains Moderate Peril
SDWeasel – Unidentified Signal Source
Shadowz – Shadowz Abstract Gaming
Solarayo – Ace Asunder
Stargrace – Nomadic Gamers Eh
Stingite / Tom – The Friendly Necromancer
Telwyn – Gaming SF
Thyanel – Thyanel Plays
Tipa – Chasing Dings!
UltrViolet – Endgame Viable
WelshFox – Whats Occuring
Wilhelm – The Ancient Gaming Noob
Wolfyseyes – Through Wolfys Eyes

That is 38 bloggers as I write this. We’ll see if I remember to update that number if the list grows. And it could grow, because it it NOT TOO LATE to join in. You can do it. Just go read the informational post about the event, fill out the sign up sheet, and join the Discord server to say hello.

Believe me, it is easy to get started because you can just write a Welcome to Blaugust post like this and you’re already on your way. It is practically a freebie, something a lazy person like myself appreciates.

There is, of course, some loose structure to the whole thing. It isn’t required, but it there to give you something to chew on if you’re looking for a post idea.

The 2021 Calendar

The ambitious will be out the gate on day one with the theme of the week. And then there is me, who will get to it on the Saturday, hitting the publish button at the last minute. But you don’t have to get on board for that. I just feel mildly obligated because I signed up as a mentor, so ought to lead by example or something.

Actually, I guess I am ahead this week. As I said, “Welcome to Blaugust” is a bit of a gimme. Others have already done theirs, but I am not as late as usual to the party. If I were feeling ambitious I would list them all out, but I just put in a list of links to all the participating blogs, so you can just click on that if you want to see who is already on board.

There are still achievements to be earned, if you so desire.

Newbie Blogger Award – You did it! You created a new blog and we are extremely happy to welcome you into this raucous community. As a result we are going to recognize your efforts just for signing up.
Bronze Award – You made at least 5 posts during the Month of August 2021.
Silver Award – You made at least 15 posts during the Month of August 2021.
Gold Award – You made at least 25 posts during the Month of August 2021.
Rainbow Diamond Award – You did it, you posted 31 or more posts during the month of August 2021.

I personally aspire to the Rainbow Diamond Award. I will try to post every day this month, proving both that it can be done and that you can make a bunch of blog posts and still not have anything profound to say.

Every blogger has their own style and standards. Some sit on their posts and polish them. Some won’t post unless they have something new and different to say. (“Should I repeat myself?” is often a topic of discussion on the Discord server. I say you should, and certainly if you have had any change of heart of feel there is more that could be added.)

And then there is this blog, where everything is a first draft, a bit of a gut reaction, a memory jotted down in the moment that can be reconsidered at a later date. For me it is better to have written and posted and the only posts I really regret are the ones I did not make.

Anyway, I’m already a post into the month, so I am on my way.

For those interested in the event… and I must stress that it is NOT TOO LATE to join in… you can find all the relevant information here.

Saturday, August 1, 2020

Blaugust Promptapalooza Arrives

August is here, which usually brings with it the Blaugust festival of blogging event.

However, as I mentioned at the tail end of yesterday’s post, we already did Blaugust back in April… Blapril… because everybody was home, pandemic, free time, blah blah blah. And not everybody is up to doing an event like that two times a year. So, instead, we will be having the Blaugust Promptapalooza.

August means some sort of Blaugust

The plan, which is laid out in detail by Belghast, is to have a chain of posts, each connecting back to the previous blog that posted and linking out to the next one on the list. A set of writing prompts were handed out to those who raised their hand over on the Blaugust Discord, but those were optional. If you didn’t like what you were issued, you could go with something else. And, if you saw one you liked you could jump right in and write about it as well. The prompt list is linked from Belghast’s post.

I happened to get one that fit in with me, so ran with it. I’ve already written it and it will hit later this week.

The list of blogs currently participating, and the dates of their posts are:

07/31/2020 – Belghast – Tales of the Aggronaut
08/01/2020 – Dragonray – Azerothian Life
08/02/2020 – Mailvaltar – Mailvaltar – MMOs and other stuff
08/03/2020 – Roger Edwards – Contains Moderate Peril
08/04/2020 – everwake – Everwakes Internet Adventures
08/05/2020 – Wilhelm Arcturus – The Ancient Gaming Noob
08/06/2020 – Stingite – The Friendly Necromancer
08/07/2020 – Rambling Redshirt – Beyond Tannhauser Gate
08/08/2020 – Easha and Poppy – Glittering Girly Gwent Gaming
08/09/2020 – Paeroka – Nerdy Bookahs
08/10/2020 – Krikket – Nerd Girl Thoughts
08/11/2020 – SDWeasel – Unidentified Signal Source
08/12/2020 – Jen Thorpe – Book of Jen
08/13/2020 – Heather – Just Geeking By
08/14/2020 – Chestnut – Gamer Girl Confessions
08/15/2020 – Syp – Bio Break
08/16/2020 – Endalia – Princess in a Castle
08/17/2020 – Bhagpuss – Inventory Full
08/18/2020 – Nogamara – Battle Stance
08/19/2020 – Solarayo – Ace Asunder
08/20/2020 – Naithin – Time to Loot
08/21/2020 – JamiesVlogUK – Whats Occurin: A Life of a Welshman
08/22/2020 – Professor Beej – The Geekery
08/23/2020 – MagiWasTaken – Indiecator
08/24/2020 – Joar – WoW Alt Addiction
08/25/2020 – UnwiseOwl – Leaflocker
08/26/2020 – Telwyn – Gaming Sans Frontières
08/27/2020 – Sandrian – Aeternus Gaming
08/28/2020 – UltrViolet – Endgame Viable
08/29/2020 – Kanter – MMO One Night a Week
08/30/2020 – Belghast – Tales of the Aggronaut

You can see me tucked in there on the 5th of the month.

So look for this coming to a blog near you in August.

Thursday, August 1, 2019

Blaugust Arrives and You Call This Prep?

On the first day of Blaugust… I wrote a post about Blaugust. No surprise there.

Blaugust, back in its early origins, was a goal, a challenge, to write a blog post every day for the whole month of August. It has softened up a bit over the years, merging a bit with the Newbie Blogger Initiative idea, to become more of… well, as it says on the logo… a festival of blogging.

You can read all about it here. It is not too late to join!

But I hold myself to the traditional goal of the event and plan to post daily for a month.

Which, of course, means I am in a bit of a panic here on day one. How the hell am I going to find something to write about every day for a full month?

That is my usual lack of confidence speaking. It ignores the fact that not only have I managed to fulfill that task in every Blaugust so far, I wrote more than a post a day for a full month just last month. July could count as my Blaugust.

In fact, if you look at the stats of the blog, I have effectively write more that one post a day for most of the years that the blog has been around. In 2009 and again in 2017 I only wrote 350 blogs during the calendar year. Those were my worst years ever. Given that my goal is a post every weekday, which adds up to about 260 posts in a year, I am well ahead of the curve.

None of which can dissuade my brain from trying to calculate out how I am going to make it this year. The past is old news, I have to do this today, this week, this month! Aigghhhhh!

It is good thing that this is, according to the suggested calendar for the event, prep week. So let me do some planning here in front of a live studio audience to see if I can calm myself down a bit… or let you in on my thought process, which might be a more useful/scary way to look at it.

Blaugust 2019 Schedule

How to fill up that calendar?

Well, to start with, I can skip that last week, that is September. I’ll worry about next month when it arrives, though that Monday will probably still be a summing up post about the event.

The other weeks each have a topic, I can probably make something out of each of those… except developer appreciation week. I appreciate devs, and wouldn’t necessarily want their career path, but I never know what to say when people get on that appreciation topic. I’ll find something. So that is five topics for August, five posts down, including this one, 26 to go.

Then there are my standard weekly FML posts. The league goes on through the end of the month, so that is a post every Wednesday, so four more knocked out, 22 to go.

There is also the monthly look at the SuperData numbers and the EVE Online monthly economic report, plus there will be an August patch update for EVE Online. Oh, and month in review, the cornerstone of every month! That brings the number of posts down to 18.

What is coming up in August?

There is the final two aspects of the Season of Skills event in EVE Online and another EVE Online stress test event. And my 13th anniversary of starting off in EVE Online lands this month. That is four more posts easy, so call it 14 needed now. (I’ve already written that last one too.)

WoW Classic is coming. Launch day is August 27. I wish it was earlier in the month, but you get what you get. There will be at least one looking forward post, the launch day post, and a post about the chaos of the first night. At least four posts this month will likely be about that, so now we’re to 10.

What else is coming up?

DC Universe Online is launching on the Switch on August 6th. Might be worth a mention, just to keep track of what Daybreak is up to. That gets us to 9.

Time to look in the drafts folder.

I have three almost complete posts in there, all started with Blaugust in mind. I should be able to knock those out. That leaves us at 6 posts. I need to come up with six new post ideas over the course of August. That doesn’t sound too bad.

Likely topics:

Ops I fly in EVE Online
Looking at Dota Underlords after a couple weeks of play
Looking at Teamforce Tactics, a Dota Underloards competitor
TorilMUD introducing a new character class… 36 year old MUD is still going
My Pokemon Go 3 year anniversary
The Switch Lite – my daughter an I have been talking about that
Something about my new keyboard
Kickstarter project review
Something about books/movies/TV

Things I will jump on if they happen:

Any Daybreak announcements/rumors
BlizzCon rumors
CCP making people mad in EVE Online through words or deeds… some more
Anything particularly quotable in the MMORPG space
Waves of nostalgia, my own or from others

From all of that I think I might be able to scrape out 31 posts, one for each day of Blaugust. We shall see.

So welcome to Blaugust!

In furtherance of Blaugust spirit, I present a list of the current participants according to the master list that Bel has. There are some old, well established blogs there, some brand new ones, some that have been quiet for a while, and some that won’t need to change pace to plow through the event with a month’s load of posts.

The list is in order of when people signed up so I can just compare the end of Bel’s list with this list and add people as they appear. Hopefully he won’t sort the list, since there isn’t a time stamp field or anything.

For those with a social media bent, there is also a Twitter list of participants that Chestnut put together, as well as a Blaugust subreddit on Reddit that Bel launched because there is apparently not enough pain in his life. (That might just reflect my own experience with Reddit however.) And UltrViolet has a post up with an OPML file of the RSS feeds for the participating blogs if you want to import them all into your feed reader.

Anyway, there are all the blogs on the list. I’ve clicked on every single one and only had to fix one URL. Of course, Bel’s post today also has a list up as well, but I already did the work on this one so I am keeping it.

Wednesday, August 1, 2018

It Is Blaugust and What Should I Even Write About?

Blaugust is upon us. We are off and running. If you want to see everybody involved, I am trying to keep the list I made up to date on my first post about this year’s Blaugust.

Blaugust Reborn

And according to the organizing post this week is:

August 1st – August 7th – Topic Brainstorming Week – posts about ideas for topics that the participants can then mine for the rest of the month.

After a dozen years you might think I have a plan here, a guide as to how to crank out a post almost every single weekday for year after year, with enough ideas left over that I have to double up some days or move into the weekends. According to my eleventh anniversary statistical nightmare post, I had written, on average, 1.097 posts per day over the life of the blog up to that point.

And I seem to be keeping on that track. I wrote 34 posts just last month, 32 in June, 31 in May, and 32 in April. You have to go back to March to find me slipping under one a day, and then I wrote 27, which is still more than my target of one every weekday.

So how do I manage this?

I’ve covered bits and pieces of this before, especially during the old Newbie Blogger Initiative, where I tried to dispense what little practical advice I could muster. In a lot of ways blogging is a very personal thing and the topics I pick and the way I go about writing work for me but likely wouldn’t work for you. Different experiences, different lives, different values, all sorts of things drive what we do.

But I will straight up say that one piece of advice I gave out during the 2015 NBI stands pretty true:

And Low standards. I cannot emphasize how much just wanting to write something, versus wanting to write something good, helps out.

A lot of days it is that simple. I don’t want to write something epic or filled with deeper meaning or pithy quotable passages or that is headline news and gets thousands of page views or retweets. I just want to jot down something about video games I am playing. Some observation or change or marking or a current or past event.

There is a strong nostalgia thread in what I write, or a history thread if you prefer. I am still cranking out posts about TorilMUD, an online game I started playing back in late 1993, which was almost 25 years ago on my calendar. (I actually have three more posts about TorilMUD in draft form, so we’re not done there yet.)

But in writing about that I often come across things I wish I could remember or had written down some place. I wish I could remember, as an example, the start and end dates of the various iterations of the MUD. So, to some extent, knowing that I am missing so much information on games I have played in the past drives me, and that is basically everything before late 2006.

There is the difficulty of finding some of that information. Yes, WoW is pretty well documented. I can find a screen shot of Captain Placeholder when I need it. But there is this line in the late 90s, before digital cameras were everywhere and when disk space was at a premium compared to now, where information dries up pretty quickly. And even more recent but smaller games can pass by without much coverage. And none of that marks what I was doing at the time. I need to do that, and to do that I must write!

So you might reasonably expect this blog to have a lot of very short posts. I think one every weekday is too few for my state goal. So how am I doing so far this year?

2018 Site Stats Through July 31

So I am writing about a post a day. July 31 was the 212th day of the year. But I am writing what many might consider longer posts. An average of a thousand words each feels like a lot to me. I will run on.

Sometimes I run on to capture details that I know I will want. Often in my EVE Online posts about fleet operations I will mention things that happened in the fleet, like an argument breaking out over BBQ sauce, because that flavor… heh… my memories when I go back and read the post a year later. Other times I run on in order to pile up a few things into a single post, so rather than three posts about World of Warcraft I might end up getting everything into one longer post.

Sometimes I wish I would just opt for shorter, single topic posts. It makes going back to look for details easier at times. But pushing things together also has value in at least establishing context and relationships between topics.

And, of course, I cheat a bit as well. I have a structure to some of my posts. There are posts that recur monthly, or even weekly in the case of Fantasy Movie League, which give me something to write about on a regular basis. Knowing that on Wednesday I have a post already can be a help. Knowing that the last day of every month will be the Month in Review posts is nice. And that is one I can start working on in advance. I already have the bulk of August in Review written, since those posts are mostly the looks back to what was going on a year, five years, and ten years ago. And knowing that I am going to do a post about the New Eden Monthly Economic Report and SuperData’s digital sales charts fills in some of the gaps. Some times it is nice to have a regular topic. It is almost a day off. And then things get busy and I have a dozen topics I want to write about and I end up doubling up on those days all the same.

Back in the early days of the blog, maybe through the first three years, I used to feel I had to play a lot of new MMOs in order to keep things interesting for both myself and the reader. I played games simply to blog about them. I am pretty sure that explains Warhammer Online. Writing about a new game gives you lots of topics to delve into and also gets you more page view. New is much more likely to attract people than old. But with the old comes history and evolution over time.

Then there is the time factor. Where does one find the time? Again, I’ve already written on that. People find the time to do the things they really want to do. If you see somebody’s blog and say wistfully to yourself that you wish you had the time, you’re only kidding yourself. I tell myself I wish I had the time for all sorts of things. And I do have the time. I just choose to spend the time elsewhere. In the end that is how you know what is really important to you. I spend time writing about video games, often more time that I spend playing them on a given day.

And here we are more than a thousand words into a post… again… and I haven’t even thrown out any actual concrete ideas about which one might write. Typical me. All theoretical, no practical.

Then again, by my own philosophy, I shouldn’t worry too much on what I should write about and focus more on writing something. It is better to write something than nothing at all. When in doubt, make a list or do some bullet points.

Or you could just do what Syp wrote, which is far more to the point.

Summer Movie League – Tom Cruises

Week nine is now in the books for our Summer Fantasy Movie League. It is also August and it feels like the end of summer is looming now.

This past week saw what one might consider the last real blockbuster of the season hit theaters. Box office expectations for new releases going forward are considerably more modest. But, in reality, a $30 million opening weekend is very good for most films.

Anyway, this week saw the following choices.

Mission: Impossible        $756
Mamma Mia 2                $227
The Equalizer 2            $201
Hotel Transylvania 3       $157
Teen Titans GO!            $149
Ant-Man and the Wasp       $116 
Incredibles 2              $89
Jurassic World             $76
Skyscraper                 $61
Blindspotting              $41
The First Purge            $28
Eighth Grade               $26
Unfriended 2               $18
Sorry to Bother You        $18
Three Identical Strangers  $16

Another installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise was clearly going to rule the box office. And, from what I have heard, the film was a good entry in the series, living up to the action expectations previously set. But was it worth three quarters of your weekly budget for a single screen?

On Monday I thought it was. For the Monday Hot Takes league I went with 1x Mission: Impossible, 2x Jurassic World, and 5x Sorry To Bother You. I then copied that pick to all of my leagues, which I do every Monday just to be sure I don’t end up with a “no pick” entry if I forget to check back before things lock.

If I has stopped there, or went into a coma five days, or otherwise left my picks alone for the rest of the week, I would have been pretty well set. Mission: Impossible ended up being the anchor for the perfect pick for the bonus-free TAGN league. If I had gone with Unfriended 2 rather than Sorry to Bother You, competing $18 picks, I would have been in first place.

Summer Movie League – Week Nine Perfect Pick

And, as it was, I would have been tied for first with Vigo, who also went with my Monday pick. But then I went off and researched the week, read updates and forecasts and all that, and messed everything up.

Which isn’t to say that research is bad. There have been weeks when last minute data has made obvious the right pick. I remember the week last summer when 8x Baby Driver was the go-to once the Thursday night previews were announced just before the league locked.

But there are weeks when research just messes with your head, where there isn’t a clear enough path so you start second guessing yourself, which is what I managed to do for the rest of the week.

I had, based on some reading in FML chatter, most notably the Bonus Bar discussion, decided that Mission: Impossible really needed to be close to $70 million in order to be worth the price as an anchor. I was wrong on that, clearly, since it made the cut with around $60 million. But I arrived at that number mostly by over estimating how much everything else was going to do. I set targets as to how much a potential anchor pick is going to have to make to be worthwhile, but sometimes in making that guess I mentally anchor my view of its potential there, even if I am just pulling that number out of my hindquarters.

Looking at possible anchors I got a bit fixated on The Equalizer 2. With Mission: Impossible tracking between $50-60 million, I could get four screens of Denzel for almost the same price as a screen of Tom Cruise and would come out close or possibly ahead in the bargain. I didn’t think Mamma Mia 2 was going to hold up any better, certainly not enough to be worth the price, and I remain simply biased against Hotel Transylvania.

And then there was Teen Titans GO! Given the holy war between fans of Teen Titans and fans of Teen Titans Go!, I was not prepared to go anywhere near that title. Add in the fourth wall breaking nature of the movie, wherein the Teen Titans want to star in a movie, and I was well past any hope for that as an option.

Come the Thursday morning lock for the TAGN league I was in for 4x The Equalizer 2, 1x The Incredibles 2, 1x Skyscraper, 1x The First Purge, and 1x Sorry to Bother You.

Summer Movie League – My Week Nine Picks

Normally I follow the strategy of trying to keep the number of different titles in my pick as low as possible. That was in a new player guide I read back when I started, where it said that winning lineups rarely exceed 4 different titles. But then last week’s perfect pick for the TAGN league had six titles in it, so I was ready to go in with more titles to spend as much of my budget as possible.

There I was, locked in, when Box Office Pro published their weekend forecast, and they were calling Teen Titans GO! at $17.5 million. I had already figured that anywhere north of $14 million or so would make that pick the only possible anchor, so now it was Thursday afternoon and I felt I had missed a huge opportunity. But I still had the remaining leagues that locked on Friday morning. I changed over to a 6x Teen Titans anchored lineup and copied it to all of those leagues. At least I wouldn’t be left out there.

And then, of course, Teen Titans GO! ended up making $10.4 million. Six screens still kept you not that far from the leaders, at least in the TAGN league, but it wasn’t the resounding victory that Box Office Pro predicted.

Meanwhile, my Thursday pick, anchored on The Equalizer 2, kept me ahead of those on the Teen Titans GO! bus, but only just barely. Then there was my Monday pick which, as I said, I would have been better off sticking with and eschewing any research. And so it goes.

The scores for the week shook out as follows:

Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $81,564,959
Goat Water Picture Palace – $81,258,669
Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $77,772,503
I HAS BAD TASTE – $76,212,668
Wilhelm’s Abyssal Pocket Playhouse – $72,267,827
Too Orangey For Crows – $71,412,269
Ben’s X-Wing Express – $71,412,269
SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $70,920,659
grannanj’s Cineplex – $70,169,864
Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $69,609,716
Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies – $66,702,069
Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $62,286,338
Joanie’s Joint – $65,895,544
Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $65,030,230

Only 14 people picked this week, and FML isn’t displaying all the people who forgot, so I’ll just list out those who did pick.

As noted, Vigo went with the winning anchor, betting on Mission: Impossible and two screens of Jurassic World. Of the top four, only Corr had something different, going with three screens of Hotel Transylvania 3.

Then there was me and me bet on Denzel, which put me a step ahead of the next three on the list, who were all anchored up on Teen Titans GO!, which SynCaine having what ended up being my Friday pick.

After that people were dragged down by unfortunate filler choices, with Blindspotting being the dead weight of the week, the worst price/performer.

That left the overall standings looking like this:

Wilhelm’s Abyssal Pocket Playhouse – $835,772,736
Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $834,004,835
I HAS BAD TASTE – $815,877,306
Goat Water Picture Palace – $798,942,124
Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $798,312,590
Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $783,203,111
Ben’s X-Wing Express – $756,022,312
SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $753,622,997
Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $736,038,512
Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $733,779,261
grannanj’s Cineplex – $724,501,443
Too Orangey For Crows – $691,973,906
Kraut Screens – $688,649,141
Joanie’s Joint – $679,568,291
Paks’ Pancakes & Pics – $641,653,028
Biyondios! Kabuki & Cinema – $639,347,136
aria82’s Cineplex – $605,936,381
Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies – $520,110,394

I remain just baby steps ahead of Corr, with the gap between us just short of $1.8 million. That is as close as makes no difference, and with five weeks left to go there is plenty of time for somebody to secure a lead.

I will have to go back and check, but I think what really differentiates the top five in the season so far is that none of us have missed a week nor had a really bad pick so far.

Which brings us to week ten. The options for the week are:

Christopher Robin        $513
Mission: Impossible      $512
The Spy who Dumped Me    $268
The Darkest Minds        $154
Mamma Mia 2              $136
The Equalizer 2          $126
Hotel Transylvania 3     $131
Teen Titans GO!          $93 
Ant-Man and the Wasp     $88
Incredibles 2            $76
Jurassic World           $70
Death of a Nation        $55
Skyscraper               $45
Eighth Grade             $32
The First Purge          $16

We say farewell to Blindspotting, Unfriended 2, Sorry to Bother You, and Three Identical Strangers.

Taking their places are Christopher Robin, The Spy who Dumped Me, The Darkest Minds, and Death of a Nation.

I am torn on Christopher Robin. On the one hand, Winnie the Pooh was a staple of my childhood, both the original books and the Disney movies. I can still know the lyrics to I’m a Little Black Rain Cloud and such. But do I care about adult Christopher Robin, even one played by Ewan McGregor, having stuffed animal flash backs? Isn’t that more of a Seth McFarland sort of thing? Is that enough to dethrone Ethan Hunt and the Impossible Mission Force? CR was forecast for about $30 million, so all Mission Impossible has to do is drop less than 50% in the first week to be worth the extra dollar.

I have no such conflict over The Spy Who Dumped me. The premise is only so-so, the is cast bland, and the reviews are not promising. Still, there are not a lot of comedies on the list right now, at least non-musical ones. The long range forecast was $16 million, but had been trending down. Still probably good for $14 million though.

If I understand the story correctly, The Darkest Minds is essentially an X-Men movie featuring young mutants without a Dr. Xavier to guide them. Long range forecasts had this at $9 million.

And then there is Death of a Nation. What to even say about this? The poster… and I gather the movie itself… attempts to equate Donald Trump with Abraham Lincoln. I guess the #MAGA crowd found their own version of Michael Moore. Opening on more than a thousand screens, at least this kills the idea that the media is controlled by liberals. A red state wild card I suppose, and maybe a barometer for the upcoming mid-term elections this November, but otherwise not a promising pick to my mind.

Given all that, my Monday Hot Takes picks were 1x Mission: Impossible, 6x The Incredibles 2, 1x Eighth Grade. Betting it all on Tom, Pixar, and the filler that happened to fit. Still, I am looking at Mama Mia 2 as a possible. It had a big fall for week two, but people keep comparing it to Book Club when it comes to audience, so if it could soften its fall in week three and pull maybe $8 million, it could be a real contender.

As usual, the TAGN league locks in less than 24 hours from this post, so get your picks in now!

Tuesday, August 1, 2017

Guild Wars 2 Path of Fire Expansion Announced

The announced announcement was announced today when ArenaNet announced the next expansion for Guild Wars 2, Path of Fire.

Guild Wars 2 – Path of Fire

I do like the art style they use for the logos.

There is, naturally enough, a site dedicated to the expansion along with a FAQ with a whole bunch of information ANet would like to share with you.

There are new zones, new stories, new specializations, and mounts.

Bhagpuss at some date in the near future…

They aren’t all bunny mounts, but that there are bunny mounts says something… I’m just not sure what.

The expansion itself is slated to become available on the morning of September 22, 2017. You can, of course, pre-order immediately, which will net you some “bonus items” which are:

Sunspear Weapon Skin of your choice
a Miniature Balthazar
The title of Elonian Envoy

As is the custom of the time, the expansion itself comes in three flavors.

Path of Fire editions

The price range here, coming in at $30, $55, and $80, seems more in line with reality than the $40, $80, $130 price range that Standing Stone Games put together for the Mordor expansion.

And, like the LOTRO expansion, and the last couple of WoW expansions, Path of Fire comes with a booster to bring a character up to max level so you can go straight to the “good stuff” you’re buying, should you not already be at max level.

According to the FAQ you do not NEED to have the Heart of Thorns expansion in order to enjoy Path of Fire, but if you don’t have it you should to note the following:

You must purchase Heart of Thorns to unlock and use the gliding mastery, as well as all other masteries introduced in and exclusive to that expansion. You will be able to complete all of the content in Path of Fire without the use of any Heart of Thorns-exclusive masteries.
You must purchase Heart of Thorns to unlock and use the 9 elite specializations introduced with that expansion.
Path of Fire includes access to the revenant profession, but not the Herald elite specialization. If you only own Path of Fire, you will be able to create a revenant character and unlock the Renegade elite specialization.
You must purchase Heart of Thorns to claim the new guild hall released in Path of Fire, and access the Scribe crafting discipline to fully upgrade your guild hall.

But if you’re pre-ordering Path of Fire they’ll throw in Heart of Thrones for a discount. Then nobody need ever know what a slacker you are.

You know you want it…

And if you’re not convinced about the expansion, ANet has some scheme to let currently registered users in good standing try it out from Friday, August 11 through Sunday, August 13. Since the base game is free, you could just create a new account if you were interested enough.

So there it is. I expect we will see a big spike on the Guild Wars revenue chart when NCsoft announces their Q3 2017 financial results.

Blogger Fantasy Movie League – Week Nine

We are getting close to the end of the thirteen week Fantasy Movie League summer season, so if anybody is going to change their place on the standings they need to do it soon. The last week will be too late, unless Liore just doesn’t pick that week. And I am not sure that would be enough.

I started out the week the way I generally do; I looked down the list of options and made my gut pick. The options were:

The Emoji Movie          $400
 Dunkirk                 $373
 Atomic Blonde           $289
 Girls Trip              $219
 Spider-Man              $151
 Planet of the Apes      $126
 Despicable Me 3         $100
 Valerian                $99
 Baby Driver             $52
 The Big Sick            $44
 Wonder Woman            $39
 Wish Upon               $15
 Cars 3                  $14
 Transformers            $6
 Guardians of the Galaxy $4

My gut favored Atomic Blonde at those prices. The Emoji Movie seemed likely to under perform, I wasn’t sure that Dunkirk was good for more than a week at the top, and Girls Trip seemed like a one-week wonder from which Atomic Blonde might steal viewers. So I was in with three screens of Atomic Blonde, two of The Big Sick, and three of Cars 3. That spent $997 of my $1,000 budget. I could have hit $1,000 if I had gone with Wish Upon, but that hasn’t lived up to an expectation so far.

The gut pick is always just that, my baseline. Then I start looking at reviews and update my spreadsheet to tinker with estimates and run “what if” scenarios. That is the reason I use the spreadsheet, so I can see what happens if something goes over or under estimate and where the line is when it comes to choosing.

My spreadsheet took the estimates out there and told me that I should be all-in on Girls Trip, supported by Wonder Woman, and Transformers to fill in the last screen. Never leave a screen empty if you can avoid it.

However, I kept seeing opinions that Atomic Blonde was going to out perform its estimates, that it was the only new action picture for the week and with a strong female protagonist it might be the R-rated Wonder Woman this week. You see enough of this and you start to believe it. So rather than going with what the spreadsheet told me I went with my gut.

My Monday gut pick locked in on Friday

Then, when the picks were locked on Friday, I saw Liore had gone with the same Girls Trip anchored set of picks my spreadsheet had been pointing at. Nothing to worry about yet. Maybe she was playing conservative. Atomic Blonde might out perform.

I followed up by checking the “All Week 1 Starters” league, which lists out everybody who has been playing for the full season. There I went through the first few pages and just about everybody there… the people winning, the people vying for first place overall on the site… was down with Girls Trip. There wasn’t an Atomic Blonde contrarian anywhere near the top. Not a good sign.

And then the Saturday estimates for the weekend showed up and I was in last place, just behind Belghast, who also anchored his picks on Atomic Blonde. The Sunday estimates did nothing to improve the situation as Girls Trip and Dunkirk seemed to be over performing, The Emoji Movie seemed to be doing better than expected, and Atomic Blonde was way under performing, running $8-10 million the estimates I was working with.

And so, when the official results hit, I had lost a lot of ground to Liore.

Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes – $91,164,740
Ocho’s Octoplex – $79,717,900
Braxwolf’s Waffleplex – $79,258,853
Syl’s Fantasy Galore Panopticum – $79,097,410
Pasduil’s Popcorn Picturehouse – $78,522,139
Moderate Peril’s Sleazy Porno Theatre – $75,924,105
Murf’s Matinee Mania – $74,889,695
Void’s Awesomeplex – $74,626,920
Bel’s House of Horrors – $64,311,729
Wilhelm’s Clockwork Lemon Multiplex – $64,083,255

So yeah, bottom of the list are the two people who went with three screens of Atomic Blonde, while two ahead of us is the person who went with two screens of Atomic Blonde. Syl did better with one screen of Atomic Blonde, but she also had two screens of Girls Trip.

Still, it could have been worse. I could have run with The Emoji Movie.

Liore did well, winning the week, but at least she didn’t get the perfect pick of the week, which would have added another $7 million to her score. Transformers was the filler pick of the week.

Perfect Pick for Week 9

Only 14 people got the perfect pick this week, the lowest count I have seen so far this season. But a lot of people got close and those going with four screens of Girls Trip still dominate overall.

So at the end of week nine the standings look like this.

Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes – $988,883,891
Wilhelm’s Clockwork Lemon Multiplex – $923,317,058
Ocho’s Octoplex – $863,692,644
Void’s Awesomeplex – $829,561,915
Moderate Peril’s Sleazy Porno Theatre – $813,500,401
Pasduil’s Popcorn Picturehouse – $799,691,067
Braxwolf’s Waffleplex – $777,900,530
Murf’s Matinee Mania – $772,489,095
Syl’s Fantasy Galore Panopticum – $724,835,336
Bel’s House of Horrors – $711,041,163

Aside from Syl and Bel changing positions again, the rankings stayed pretty much the same though, as noted, Liore is even more solidly in first. I am now $65 million behind Liore… more than my score for this week… and Ocho is $125 million back. That is a long way to go with just four weeks left to go.

So now we are looking at the picks for week ten.

 The Dark Tower         $343
 Dunkirk                $201
 Girls Trip             $176
 The Emoji Movie        $171
 Detroit                $167
 Atomic Blonde          $127
 Spider-Man             $100
 Planet of the Apes     $70
 Kidnap                 $63
 Despicable Me 3        $62
 Valerian               $38
 Baby Driver            $33
 Wonder Woman           $32
 The Big Sick           $27
 An Inconvenient Sequel $13

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is off the list again, one would think for good at this point. I’d ask who was still even showing it, but a couple of our local multiplexes have a couple shows running in evening still.

There are four movies opening this week that made the list.

At the top is The Dark Tower, based off of a Stephen King novel that is part of a series that I may have read some of ages ago… or maybe not. I might be confusing it in my head with The Talisman, but I couldn’t say for sure. Some of it sounds vaguely familiar.

Anyway, The Dark Tower is at the top of the chart as the only big opener this week. Stephen King has a huge following, but movies adaptations of his works haven’t always translated well to the screen. It is cheap enough that you can anchor your lineup with two screens of it and still have enough budget to get a few more solid titles in behind it.

Then there is Detroit, which depicts the events that sparked the 1967 riots in the city of Detroit. Being long, rated R, and depicting unhappy events will probably limit its box office appeal, though I expect it will fare well in Oscar nominations.

Third on the list is Kidnap. It stars Halle Berry, which ought to be something of a draw. However, the movie wrapped up filming three years ago and the team has been trying to salvage something watchable out of it ever since. Unlikely to find a spot on any of my screens.

Finally, Al Gore is back with An Inconvenient Sequel which has reviewed well and seems likely to outperform based on the current political climate, as it doing well at the box office can be spun as a rebuke of the current administration. Also, it is the cheapest flick on the list, so I expect it will round off many a pick.

Looking at all of that, my early week gut is that the standard pick will be two screens of The Dark Tower at one end, a screen or two of An Inconvenient Sequel at the other, and then figuring out what to sandwich in between. There are a lot of paths forward from there. Of course, The Dark Tower doesn’t have to slip much to make four screens of Dunkirk an attractive proposition. And how the hell do you get a Stephen King novel to fit into 95 minutes?

So the options for the week seem more varied that usual.

Monday, August 1, 2016

Breaking into Delve

Not everybody in the Imperium spent last week wandering casually down to our staging station in Sakht. Fleets had been active in Delve for several days, focusing on the constellation YX-LYK, and by Saturday we had already taken the system Q-HESZ.

But the first real test of the invasion wasn’t until yesterday, when the ihub, station, and TCU in the system 1-SMEB, previously reinforced, were contested. 1-SMEB was also the capital system for the League of Unaligned Master Pilots (ticker: LUMPY), which gave it a boost to its ADM, making it a tougher nut to crack.

There had been pings in advance asking people to show up and be ready for a fight. The first ping for a subcap fleet, under Jay Amazingness, went out at 16:30 and it filled up quickly. It was a Proteus fleet and I got out my Oneiros, which I had just run down from Saranen on Friday, and joined up with the logistics contingent.

Once that fleet filled another went up, and another subcap fleet after that.

We undocked after only a short wait.

Emerging from the Genolution Biotech Production station

We held on the gate to 1-SMEB and waited for a bit. Then a fourth fleet showed up to pass through the gate. It was a fleet of capital and supercapital ships, jumping into 1-SMEB for the event.

Once they were through, we jumped into 1-SMEB ourselves, then into 6Q-R50, and then into RCI-VL, where we set up around the MJXW-P gate, which seemed like sort of an odd, dead-endy location.

However, it turned out to be the right place, as the hostiles fell on us there, starting with the Pandemic Legion FC Killah Bee, who landed on grid prematurely and was immediately targeted. I even managed to get an ECM drone on his, so as to get on the kill mail. After that though, I let my drone take its own course as there were reps to be applied as the two sides closed and got stuck into each other. NCDot and PL had a T3 fleet, which formed the bulk of the opposition, while the locals, led by LUMPY, were using Gilas. On our side there was the Proteus fleet, a Confessor fleet, and Asher’s Cerberus fleet. Bubbles were up to hold the foe in place.

The fight develops

In the middle of all of that, a cyno went up. As I watched, a single Wyvern supercarrier landed on grid.

A wild super suddenly appears!

Time dilation was already hitting hard, so the capital fleet jumping in on top of the fight unfolded slowly. Soon, however, I was in the middle of a lot of big ship.

My Oneiros in the midst of a lot of caps

With the presence of a capital fleet on grid, the fight went from a brawl to trying to knock off as many hostiles as we could before they could get away. I even got to see one of the new doomsday effects as one of the titans We even got an official observer when ISD Lunaire Elois showed up in a Polaris Inspector Frigate to watch the supers in action.

Somebody has come to watch us

That was towards the end of the fight and, as usual, a couple of pilots lit our after the ISD ship, only to find its performance envelope was well beyond their ability to catch.

Meanwhile, our foes escaped as best they could and that was about it for big fights for the day. All told, that was about 90 minutes of time from undock to the caps heading back towards 1-SMEB where they formed up on a gate to smart bomb the Pandemic Horde and Mordus Angels frigates and interceptors that were in the area. The battle report for the fight unsurprisingly shows the ISK war going in our favor, though not that much ISK was expended given the values of the fleets on grid. However, the totals and participants keep changing when I go back to look at that report, so I am not sure how far to trust it.

July 31, 2016 RCI-VL fight

It did seem that the majority of the hostiles were not Delve locals. They must miss us up north.

With the fun over, the work began. It was time to play the Fozzie Sov game so, over the next few hours we spent time running entosis link modules over command nodes in order to take ihubs, stations, and TCUs.

A command node in “action”

There was a bit of see-saw on a couple of the objectives. At one point LUMPY was at 95% for the 1-SMEB TCU. However, they seemed to give up before they got that last 5%… though with us roving through the constellation in force, I guess I can understand why… and the actual command node objectives were left to us.

The only opposition was a gang of interceptors that were dropping on nodes to try and break lock on the nodes to slow things down. This was aggravated by our decision to use force auxiliaries… fax machines… for entosis work. If I understand correctly, we did this because they were supposed to be immune from ECM while sieged. However, this turned out to be only true for directed ECM and not area affect ECM burst.

So we ended up with the worst of both worlds. Fax pilots had to endure the capital entosis warm up cycle penalty both when they started in on a node AND whenever an ECM burst broke their lock.

Fax machines continued on, but there was also a call for subcap pilots to come out and run entosis links as well. By that point our fleet was split up by wings and sitting on nodes in a system where no hostiles bothered to show up, so I got out my alt. He happened to have a Rapier fit for solo entosis work, so I ran him out to our system and put him on whatever nodes were available.

With multiple objectives in play, coordination was… not very well coordinated. If the goal of Fozzie Sov was to reinforce the officious “spreadsheets in space” aspect of EVE Online, then op success, because this sort of event pretty much requires some master spreadsheet coordinator to run with any efficiency. Instead we had multiple fleets on multiple coms and people going here and there. On a couple of nodes I was running a fax machine would show up, having been assigned the node. I would convo with them and tell them to let me know when they had spun up through their initial cycle, after which I would fly off to another node.

But at least I was out doing something with my alt. The majority of our fleet was just sitting around watching nodes get wanded. As I have said before, this is not engaging game play. You don’t see ISD ships flying out to watch people conquer sov.

Asher, on his latest podcast, had some idea for updating Fozzie Sov to make it more interesting, or at least force more fights. But it seems like CCP, buoyed by the cheers of people who don’t actually engage in sov warfare and who, in some cases, seem to actively dislike sov null and its residents, will not be revisiting Fozzie Sov for the foreseeable future.

Life in sovereign null sec. We’re told get too much attention paid to us one day, and then on another day we’re blamed for the PCU drop because we’re not warring hard enough to keep people’s attention.

On the bright side, hours of entosis work… I spent 3 hours on it myself after the initial fight before decided I wanted to do something else for the rest of the day… did get us some ihubs, and TCUs, as well as freeporting a couple stations in Delve.

The result of Sunday’s work

The Ministry of Truth even put out a song about the fall of LUMPY in Delve.

So the conquest of Delve seems to be off to a good start. Now we just have to hold what we have taken while doing the Fozzie Sov shuffle in a about a dozen more constellations.

My screen shots from the day collected up into a gallery: