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John Wayne and the Milkshake

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Good Morning Folks! Technically it is morning still at the time of writing this but it is considerably later in the day than I normally do a blog post. I’m in a funk. I think I can fully admit that right now. The thought of sitting down to write a blog post on most days when I am uncertain what I want to actually talk about… is a bit of a challenge at the moment. When I am actively sharing a build I am working on, or yammering about some cool game I am playing I do pretty well. When I bore myself thinking about what I have been up to… it doesn’t really bode well for trying to convert that into something readable. So instead you are getting an adventure in AI Image Generation using Stable Diffusion. This morning one of my coworkers was all excited about prompting Microsoft CoPilot to draw pictures for him.

I think this is a thing everyone goes through when they first start playing with AI Image generation. I tend to do more surrealist prompts… for example, I set forth the basic concept of “John Wayne Drinking a Milkshake”. This was more of a chore than I figured it would be. I had Luke Skywalker eating a bagel rather easily… but I was also trying to explain the concept of “hallucinations” to my coworker and this served as a good lesson. The above image is pretty much what I consider to be the most cogent example of what was generated. There are still some weird things going on with the eyes… and the milkshake that was rendered seems to be cookies and cream… which then was also inexplicably applied to the sleeves of the shirt because that makes perfect sense.

It was one hell of a journey to get there. At first, I thought I would try and get it to spit out “John Wayne in a 57 Chevy drinking a Milkshake”. There are so many things wrong with this image. Firstly you have the impossible space of a car that is sort of wrapping around the figures in a nightmare hellscape with two not-quite steering wheels… Legs that attach out of the wrong places… and right-side John Wayne appears to be sitting on the lap of a three-legged left-side John Wayne. Then there is the playdough fingers of the right subject and the extra joints of the left subject’s most visible arm and the melted playdough nature of the other arm. Legitimate nightmare fuel. The color palate is good though and FEELS like a 50s almost 60s-era photo. I decided that the bit of the prompt about the 57 Chevy was too challenging and that I did not want to fuck with it any longer so I abandoned it.

Let’s ignore the fact that we once again have two John Waynes. There are parts of this that look pretty solid. I have no clue why I got shirtless erotic John Wayne trying to hand me a Milkshake that someone is obviously holding with two hands… as evidenced by the phantom figures. There is some jacked-up perspective stuff going on where the mangled hand of shirtless Wayne is somehow holding the straw… which is much closer to the camera than the figure is. Like if you could somehow remove all of the nonsense on the left side of the picture and just have seated-Wayne at the counter with a single milkshake it would be somewhat reasonable.

Shit just kept getting weirder the deeper I went. This is probably my favorite because again two John Waynes… one of which is lovingly holding quite possibly the worlds largest milkshake. The other one is inexplicably wearing a miniskirt and one leg appears to be a table leg. I also sort of love the super skinny tall milkshake that is sitting on the ground. Basically, I wanted to show some hallucinations… and I got a fever dream to explain that concept. This is the problem I have had with “AI Images” is that for a second when scrolling past them… they seem normal. The longer you look at them the more surreal and nonsensical they become.

I finally had to start including that he was “standing alone” to start to reign in the nonsense and simplify things further. He was no longer drinking a milkshake but just holding one. Eventually, I got a few images that began to look reasonable. Even then the prompt was still a bit fucked up because if you go back to that first image for a figure who was “alone” there were still a couple of dead-eyed “AI Zombies” in the background. Basically I feel like AI in its current state is a neat party trick. If you want “Superman Riding a Horse with a Shotgun”, you are going to get something that fills that prompt… no matter how confusing or contorted it winds up looking. If you want specificity or correct answers… I am just not sure if we are at a point where large language models can fill that bill. I for example would never want to put anyone’s life in the hands of an AI-based decision engine yet.

If you want some surrealist nonsense as AI attempts to draw you a picture of something called “Glorbo”, then it absolutely has you covered.

Monsters Mastered

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Good Morning Folks! I spent a good chunk of my evening hanging out in Path of Exile down in Delve hunting for bosses. I finished up the Masterful Monsters challenge last night which involved defeating 50 Delve, Syndicate, Bestiary, or Incursion bosses aka the endgame bosses from the original “Master Missions” that went away this league. I would say the vast majority of those 50 bosses came from Delve since I spent most of my time down there, but I did pick up a number of beast spawns to knock out some of those as well. It seems like Curiosity Vaal Aspects have slowed down in sales, so I decided to go ahead and turn one of them into an Adorned Jewel. I didn’t get a high roll but I at least got one that is over 100% increased buff so usable. I am contemplating swapping over to the Adorned version of the Righteous Fire build so might create a few more if sales don’t pick up.

I am still not certain how many of these achievements I am going to go for, but in theory I should be able to knock out the Heist one called Tactful Thievery easily enough given the stockpile of contracts I have. Sanctified Scarabs will also be pretty easy given napkin math I will need to run 9 more maps with four scarabs to hit the goal. Map Magnificence is a much longer stretch… but also doable if I just put my head down and grind maps. Once again per napkin math that should take me around 260 t16 maps to finish that one off. In theory, I could just burn through all of my corrupted maps on my Elemental Hit of the Spectrum Champion and not worry much about the rewards. After that, the objectives become significantly harder. If I can do The Feared… I will wrap up another one but given how hard Atziri was in that fight… I am not sure I will be able to survive long enough to take her down.

I also spent some time leveling my Witch, who for the moment is not yet ascended and leveling through abuse of Storm Brand of Indecision. Like I remember folks complaining heavily about how much this skill was nerfed into the ground, but it still feels phenomenal for leveling purposes. Basically, once I can equip most of the uniques I have sitting in the bank I will respec the character entirely to go down the Tornado of Elemental Turbulence path. I managed to fish for a level 1/20% quality one so I will begin muling it at level 34. I am going to be extremely slow leveling this character because at the moment I think I care more about knocking out “acheesements” than I do leveling yet another character.

In another piece of news… Maxroll has thrown their hat in the Path of Exile Bulk Trading game. On top of this, they have also created their own TFT competitor Discord that will eventually connect up with the new website. Recently Zizaran partnered with Maxroll, and he appears to now be the owner of this new Discord. On top of that streamers Subtractem, Crouching Tuna, and Tenkiei have joined in to moderate the moderators and make sure things stay transparent and on the up and up. So I wish them luck and I hope they continue to expand the functionality of this new site. So far it seems pretty solid for bulk trading and I might try and liquidate my coffins at some point over the weekend. I am still picking them up but I think I am mostly not going to engage with graveyard crafting any further. It just isn’t really my jam.

I don’t love that it is “Yet Another Discord” and I’ve only minimally interacted with TFT, but I do like Maxroll quite a bit and think that they are doing a good job of trying to create “best in breed” applications to support the games that they cover. I can’t see that anything they have done so far cannot be a positive in the grand scheme of things. Partnering with Zizaran was a good move as the official host of his guides. Pohx would be someone else I would love to see them work with, but he has invested a lot of time in his own website. Anyways I know that these posts are only useful for folks who are already engaged in Path of Exile, but given that it is already a struggle to keep posting this is kind of what you are going to get.

Not Feeling It

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Good Morning Folks. This is going to be one of those posts that occasionally shows up on my blog that is of a more personal nature and that I do not go through any effort to syndicate. Both last week and this week I missed a blog post, and I have to be honest… sitting down to write this one was more of a chore than I would have expected. I’ve thought I was doing okay… but maybe that is less than truthful. I feel like I am on the cusp of another “turtle mode” or a period of time where I pull my head into my shell and pretend the world does not exist. All I find myself really wanting in life is to read my books and play my games and forget the world exists.

What prompted this current funk? I think it is largely work-related stress. Tuesday was the last day for one of my co-workers, one who had become my confidant and closest companion over the last decade. He stepped into the team lead and supervisor position that I vacated when I moved up to management, and he had been one of those people that I could just always rely on to do what needed to be done. Unfortunately, the person who I always assumed would step into his role… vacated the company last year leaving me with this feeling of having to start over from scratch. There is someone who has been trying to step up significantly and fill the shoes that were left behind, but it is going to take a lot of work and as such I am spending so much emotional effort trying to make sure things continue to truck along as they should.

I’m just sort of feeling hollow. At the end of the day, I am drained emotionally and mentally and no amount of evening seems to be enough to regenerate those creative forces in time for a morning blog post. When I have specific things to talk about it is fine… but most of the Path of Exile topics that I am dealing with are things I have addressed before. I am playing a Righteous Fire Chieftain… a character that I have played in that specific combination of skill and class at least four times. If you just talk about Righteous Fire Characters… this is maybe my eighth. So on top of the emotional turmoil… I also feel like I have nothing new to say.

I am not entirely certain what will happen in the coming weeks. I don’t want to force myself and make disingenuous posts trying to pretend like everything is okay. However, I also don’t want to get out of the habit of daily blogging. What is most worrying is that my desire to “cease to exist” has gotten much stronger lately. I am not so much worried about my suicidal tendencies, because I think I am good on that front. I mostly just want to flip off the television that has been my life for a while. That is a statement that probably makes no sense, but alas it is the mental pattern that has been playing on repeat lately. I feel disconnected from the world, but also the act of interacting with it… is a bit much right now.

Anyways. Part of this blog has always been the open dialog that I have with you all. I sit here and pretend that no one is reading it, but I know there are folks for whom my daily pattern is part of their own patterns. I’m sorry that I have been less regular lately, and feel even more sorry that probably in the coming weeks that pattern is going to be less frequent still. I need to push past what I am currently going through and find a new sense of equilibrium. The only way out sometimes is in fact through. I’m also shocked as fuck that apparently I have never titled a blog post “Not Feeling It” before today.

Necropolis Changes Coming

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Good Morning Folks! Well… that was a rapid turnaround. Yesterday GGG released a post on their forums indicating what they were planning on doing to resolve the dissatisfaction with the Necropolis league mechanic. When a league has reportedly the largest drop-off in player numbers I am guessing Klaxxons start firing and the teams rush into action. We probably would have had action sooner had the league not launched over a holiday weekend. Anyway, it seems like every complaint about the league is being addressed in one form or another save for the most requested feature… aka the ability to just not do it. I think everything in the post is largely a positive step forward, but I still think players are going to want the ability to simply not engage with the mechanic in any form. The ability to itemize corpses immediately is a huge win however and even if I have to loot something to clear a loot pile… I can throw it right back on the ground easily.

I have continued to do some shifting of gear around and am now up to 88% max elemental resistance and have squeaked past the Chaos Resistance cap as well. I’ve also managed to bump my Armor up to 25k which is a bit lower than I would like it to be, but still a good place to be. Combine this with the fact that I am shifting 50% damage to fire, and will in theory soon be adding another 10% of that to chaos damage it should make me pretty freaking tanky. Now I am simply in the place where I need a bunch more levels. I am contemplating trying to get the ignite proliferation glove implicit and then shifting up my Berek’s Respite for something either with more survival or more damage potential. Truth be told I have zero of the desired eldritch implicits so that will come as I farm more content and get more eldritch currency.

I’ve made a bit more progress into my Atlas, but have largely been holding off on doing all of the red maps that I have been collecting. Kirac bumps up the difficulty of his missions when you start running higher-tier maps, and I was trying to use him to help me finish out the yellow maps. That said I have reached a point where I am just going to have to deal with it if I want to keep making forward momentum. When I hit 50 Atlas Passive points I unlocked my second passive tree, and it appears that the third unlocks when I hit 100 passives. I ran betrayal until I had farmed up most of the enchants that I wanted and have now shifted to a strategy with Niko, Scarabs, and Harvest. This morning I cobbled together a second tree with Einhar and Ritual since they both live on the same side of the tree. As I get more passives I will probably splash in Beyond to add more spawns.

Because of the changes to the Niko nodes, it feels like I am filling up on Sulphite so much faster than I normally would have because I need to run fewer maps to get all the missions completed. As a result, I have reached a point occasionally where I would rather be pushing maps than pushing depth, and the Einhar tree will be good for flipping over to when that happens. As far as Delve goes I have farmed out three Vaal cities and have my first Abyssal city in sight. I am still just slightly below the 100-depth mark because the abundance of cities has caused me to go lateral rather than vertical. I feel WAY tankier than I normally would at this point and have been surprised at how fast my RF Chieftain has come online this league. I guess it makes sense because having built this before, I knew going into it the way I needed to build it as compared to the RF Juggernaut.

Delve and Mapping combined have created a virtuous cycle as the cities usually have several map lootboxes in each. This one for example had three different map-themed boxes in the same area, and the thing I have learned over the years is that Delve does not respect your atlas progress. This means you can easily see maps in Delve that cannot drop based on the Atlas nodes that you have already cleared. The only negative of this however is that once you get your four voidstones… these maps will continue to drop at their face value rather than upgrading to T16. This is why I have so many red maps that I have been sitting on and trying not to run, as these loot boxes drop a mix of white, yellow, and red regularly.

The thing I was not expecting is just how prolific the scarab drops are in Delve. Essentially every single node usually drops at least one scarab. This one happened to drop three at once, which is an outlier but not outrageously uncommon. I feel like this is related to Scarabs being put on the general drop-anywhere loot pool instead of being tied to specific mechanics. All in all I think this is a really solid change and my scarab coffers are filling rather quickly. It is going to reach the point where I am almost always running some sort of additional content being added from scarabs. The only thing I wish is that we would get some sort of UI element that allows us to pick scarabs out of our bank from the map device itself. It becomes tedious picking out the scarabs you want to run and then going over to the map device to run them. When I was regularly farming the same content over and over I would just leave a stack of scarabs in the map device.

My big “project” at the moment is attempting to get a six-link Cloak of Flame. I bought a two-link that was really well rolled and then proceeded to get it up to six sockets and color those sockets for Righteous Fire. Now comes the tedious process of pouring every fusing that I get into the chest and praying. With my Niko mapping setup I noticed that I seemed to get Niko Scarabs dropping more often than others. I am hoping there is some hidden affinity and that by shifting over to an Einhar tree I might happen upon the Black Morrigan scarab and link the item that way. Similarly, my shift over to Ritual I hope may see me finding an Omen of Connections which would also be a faster method for linking it.

All in all for a league where I do not care one bit about the mechanic… I am having a shockingly good time. I am definitely looking forward to the changes that are likely to be coming in this week and will probably try and do a bit more crafting as a result. I am not sure it will benefit this character, but it might let me get some good gear for alts. I think my very first alt is going to be an attempt at creating Kitava’s Thirst DD Blaster because it looks hilarious. I made a Witch mule to get Rolling Magma at league start and I figured I would turn that character into that build. It may be a bit before I stray from the fold however because I still have a lot of things to unlock and some voidstones to get.