Tiny Featherballs

Babby Birbs

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Right now the highlight of our backyard adventures is the fact that my wife found a nest full of babies.  I am guessing these are “Babby” Robins, largely because anytime I got near the nest a Robin would make a horrible racket I assume trying to drive me away.  The cute little things have been trained well because they went from happily playing around with each other to being completely still the moment I got anywhere near them.  I am guessing that is a defense mechanism to freeze up completely as to keep motion from attracting a predator.  They are freaking adorable and they are in a location where we can pretty easily watch them as they do their stuff.  There is a leaf in the way so I had to get pretty close to get this clear of a shot, but as far as seeing their general well being we can track that from the comfort of our patio.  I am absolutely certain there are more babies out there, but I am guessing this might be the only group that is actually inhabiting one of our bushes…  that they probably mistook for a tree considering how overgrown they were.  It makes me wonder if there have been Robins nesting in it all this time.  I know last hear there was a group of Robins that nested in a gap in the stonework on the side of our house near the garage.  Unfortunately a huge windstorm came up and the next morning I found that nest on the ground with both eggs cracked open.  I am kinda worried about how precarious this nest looks, but I guess since they have already hatched and are already fat little feather balls…  hopefully they could function if something happened to the nest.

whiteflowerbetter

I talked yesterday about the batch of flowers that I thought were the first fatality of the backyard.  Sure enough all of the red flowers died out, and the white ones looked pretty sickly for a bit.  However yesterday after finally getting some solid sun, the white ones seem to be pulling out just fine.  It is my hope that now that we have freed up most of the space from the dead plant, that the white flower will go ahead and fill that space in.  I snapped this photo largely because of the droplets of water on the pedal.  All of the other flowers seem to be thriving which is awesome, especially after getting some tasty sunlight.  Honestly I wonder if the red one struggled not because of the watering situation but due to the fact that we went several days without much direct sunlight.  In any case the backyard is just as peaceful and relaxing as ever…  with the slight problem of it being insanely muggy.  The pool however seems to have finally warmed up so I am looking forward to using it in the near future.  I had stuff to do last night or I would have potentially taken a dip.

Challenge of Thursday

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On Thursday nights I have a standing date with Jex and Squirrel to do some Challenge of Elders, and often times a Nightfall.  Now the entire idea behind this is just to make sure that no matter what we get at least one set of characters through the Challenge of Elders that week.  Often times folks start running these like mad on Tuesday nights, a night where I already have a commitment in the form of the FFXIV Pony Farm/Raid night.  So that means I miss out on a bunch of the easy clan pick up group action.  Now most weeks I slide into another Clan group without problem, but  we simply set aside this night as a way of making sure that we get at least one set of drops from the challenge.  I look forward to the night because I greatly enjoy hanging out with Squirrel and Jex, because the two of them are the folks that revitalized Destiny for me and introduced me to the amazing Axioma clan.  Last night we got started a little earlier which means we also had time to squeeze in a Nightfall afterwards.  This weeks Challenge included a score bonus for super abilities, so a couple of us were rocking the Bad Juju as a way of feeding our super/orb generation machine.  One of the rounds we managed to score around 50,000 points which I am pretty damned proud of.  Unfortunately we still were just shy of the 90,000 armor score, which allowed us to have one match where we broke out our Sleeper Stimulants and just tore down the bosses.

As far as drops worth mentioning… I picked up a 330 Aegis of the Reef, which is the Taken themed Pulse rifle.  So far I have to say I am in love with this thing and it dropped with a solid set of perks.  In the first slot it came with Send It and Reinforced Barrel… which since the gun already has decent stock stability I have chosen Send It.  In the second tier it came with Full Auto, which is an interesting perk to get on an already stable pulse rifle, but unfortunately you can really burn through your ammo reserves quickly.  In the last slot it has a very interesting situational case of Third Eye and Life Support, letting me swap between the two based on what I need worse.  For the time being I am rocking Third Eye because I love having radar up all of the time.  When we got around to running the Nightfall I managed to pick up a second Darkblade Helm, this one sitting at 335 with almost exactly the same stat package as my original one that was only sitting at 305.  It was a straight upgrade and I guess I will wear it for awhile to get it nice and upgraded as an option.  I had forgotten how much I enjoyed running around with this helmet just because it looks cool.  All in all it was a pretty great night, and through all of our shenanigans I managed to gain rank from Variks, Vanguard, Future War Cult and the Cryptarch netting me a bunch of random infusables and legendary marks.

Combo Breaker

Ending the Streak

The other day I talked about how the three plus year streak has been looming over my head like this impassable object.  After long thought I’ve decided that the sooner I break it the better, and as a result I will not be making posts this weekend.  I mean that is in part a lie since I will be posting over on AggroChat Sunday morning in the form of our weekly episode.  However tomorrow morning I am going to chill out, and eat my breakfast in peace with zero thought of what the hell I am going to post that morning.  That is at least the theory… I have a feeling that in practice it is going to be a lot harder to NOT post than it is to post.  The end goal is basically to reach a point where I am posting a new post every workday morning, so I can continue the routine of drink coffee and write about stuff.  That means weekends and holidays I get to myself, or more than likely it just means I start gaming a little earlier on those days.  My hope is that some time off is actually going to present topics that I want to talk about, rather than trying to wrack my brain for a new post.

I have to tell you I am a little nervous about this “new experiment” following up the previous “grand experiment”.  It makes solid sense to just post week days since those are the days that folks generally read on.  However at this point I am just used to the comfortable routine.  So in theory the next time you will hear from me is Monday morning.  As far as my weekend plans…  I think I have a pretty chill one ahead of me.  Tonight may or may not be a thoroughly awkward family dinner, largely because I have not decided if I am actually going or not.  We just had one of these a few weeks back, but there is a family member in town that folks have not seen in some cases years…  so folks are pulling together an impromptu dinner.  Past that I am hoping the report of non-stop rain is exaggerated and I get to spend a little time out on the back porch.  I have bubbles that need blowing.  Last weekend I went to a birthday/adoption party and they had bubbles for the kids…  and it made me remember just how damned much I love blowing bubbles.  So I bought myself a small bottle of the soapy mess for hanging out on the back porch.  Viva adulthood and the ability to buy your own damned toys!

Light Level Cap

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It has been a little over a month since I last set foot in the Kings Fall raid, or at least it seems like it.  There was a bit of a change around that ended up with Squirrel trying to start an earlier raid team beginning at 8 pm which is more sane and rational for those of us who get up at 5 in the morning for work.  However that never really took off in the fashion that we had hoped, and it also lead for the official “rookie” raid night to get moved to Wednesdays.  As a result of this switcheroo I simply didn’t raid for several weeks, and this week was my first time signing up again largely on the promise of a “guaranteed” 335 artifact from the War Priest Challenge Mode.  Unfortunately that Guarantee like oh so many things in Destiny, was not really set in stone and I wound up getting yet another damned 334 item.  I did however have a lot of fun running the raid, and after some time away from it all of the jumping puzzles that stress me out so much didn’t seem quite so bad.  I even managed to run the orb on sisters without screwing up too badly.

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Last night Squirrel, Jex and I had what has become somewhat of a tradition… a night of Challenge of Elders and whatever the hell else any of us happened to need.  So on paper this should have been one of the easiest weeks, with precision shot bonus experience.  However in many cases we struggled to survive and I think it was largely the inclusion of “fresh troops” into the mix.  I died so damned many times last night, and we were just shy of being able to get to the 90,000 bonus in two rounds.  I would have felt bad about my performance were it not for the fact that both Jex and Squirrel died quite a bit as well.  The frustrating thing about CoE is it has become one of those “unskippable” activities each week because it is one of the few reliable means of getting 335 loot.  I say that… however almost every single item I got this week was a damned 334, which is completely maddening.  There seems to be some bug that hits where instead of giving you upgrades it starts giving you side grades.  That said I did manage to get a Titan Mark as end of match loot, and then after CoE we went to the Dreadnaught for some Court of Oryx.  After summing three Tier 3 events… the final one dropped my 335 Artifact taking me to the current light level cap.  This is extremely exciting for me, because this represents the first time in my history playing this game that I have EVER been capped on light.  Special thanks to Squirrel, Jex, Wet and the entire Axioma Clan for helping me get here.

A Little Closer

Best Laid Plans

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I had these grand plans for last night, and as is always the case when I seem to plan something… that is precisely what won’t actually happen.  The original goal was to pop into Destiny “for a bit” and get CoE finished on my Titan for the week, so that I could end up doing it later in the week on both the Warlock and Hunter.  I’ve managed to get the light levels up on both enough to be able to start getting decent loot.  The other goal was to chill out downstairs and play some more Diablo 3 since I am one piece of gear away from being able to rock the Invoker set over the Akkhan set, which I think is going to improve my quality of life greatly.  That said I am starting to maybe get the hang of playing Akkhan but still missing several items that make the build really viable.  I am however loving the flail that gives me an army of phalanxes to run around with me.  I think maybe that is ultimately going to be the best option for running with the Akkhan set since they seem to shred everything in my path.  I did get to play a little Overwatch last night however when my friend Tamrielo got home, and was pleasantly surprised that he too enjoys the game.  I am not sure if he is really a convert but it at least gets why the game feels better than Team Fortress 2, which was something I had trouble putting into words.  I managed to get in a few matches before my wife got home, and we ended up walking to go get dinner.

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When we got back I started in with the Destiny bounties, and ultimately ran a Prison of Elders to get my weekly loot box for completing that activity.  Last week I experienced a glitch, where after running a CoE I could not seem to be able to get the loot box, so I wanted to make sure that didn’t happen.  From this point onwards it was me trying to get Jex and Squirrel together in the same group at the same time, which is not something that happened until about 8:30.  This weeks Challenge of Elders is a little tougher than past examples because the bonus damage and bonus scoring have no real synergy.  For example in past weeks you had bonus damage from primary weapons, and bonus scoring from headshots…  so those two worked nicely with you simply focusing on primary weapon headshots.  This time around the bonus damage was melee based, but the bonus scoring was super kills.  Meaning we spent a good deal of time wandering around waiting for our super bars to tick up so that we could get bonus scoring.  We managed to get the 30,000 score step pretty easily in our first attempt, but did not score high enough to be able to get the 90,000 within two matches.

Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

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It was round about this time that the monkey wrench was thrown into the works, as Squirrel had signed up for the Crota’s End retro raid.  So Jex and I ended up getting pulled along after our first Challenge of Elders match into that.  Other than simply not being what I had planned to spend my night doing, I was totally down with this because I had never seen that raid.  For the most part I think I did okay and didn’t screw anything up horribly.  One of the group was hunting for the Crux of Crota that is used in the long quest chain that ultimately winds up rewarding you the Necrochasm Auto Rifle.  As a result we saved off a number of check points, which meant jumping off the back wall into the abyss so many times.  However this also meant that instead of just doing the raid on my Titan I was able to swap to multiple characters and get lots of stuff.  The only negative here is that apparently you get rewarded the two shaders and emblem ever single time you kill Crota if they were not already in your inventory.  What I did find odd is that every single time the Word of Crota hand cannon dropped, but with slightly different perks.  The only potential gotcha here was that I had to break out a rocket launcher with tracking and/or the horseshoes and hand grenades perk.  Thankfully I had a truth, that I ultimately leveled up… even though I never actually use rocket launchers.

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In other news I am now down to the point where I need a helm, primary, class item, and artifact at 335 to max out.  So the end result allows me to sit fairly comfortably at 334, which should help quite a bit when getting drops.  As far as Challenge of Elders loot, I wound up getting arms and another copy of the Her Fury sniper rifle with crappier stats than the one I have been using.  Speaking of sniper rifles this seems to be my week to get them, because I also managed to pull a LDR 5001 from a Vanguard package.  This seems to be the sniper that a lot of the youtubers are actively hunting god rolls for, but I don’t even know for certain what a god roll would look like.  The one I got has Partial Refund, High Caliber Rounds, and Firefly which is decent… but I would have rather had triple tap somewhere in there because that comes in so damned handy for boss fights.  It is probably a great option for like heroic strikes or non-boss PVE content, but not having triple tap really places it below my existing 1000 Yard Stare or Her Fury.  The main reason why I was interested at all is just because it is really damned cool looking.  Also you can see from the above ship shot that I managed to get a ship from Variks, which for whatever reason I thought was a Trial of Osiris ship when I had seen people using it.  Was ultimately a really great night, just one that didn’t got as planned.  That however is perfectly okay because sometimes the end result is much better.

Purple Hand Cannon

Challenge of Connection

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There are some nights where things don’t go quite as planned but ultimately work out okay in the end.  Last night was one of those nights.  The original plan was to do some Challenge of Elders with Squirrel and Sagacyte.  I got home at my normal time, but I couldn’t really commit to doing much of anything until after we ran some errands.  So the plan was once my wife got home, we would go run errands, and then grab dinner on the way home.  After munching some food it would be challenge time.  Unfortunately my wife got home significantly later than I had expected, and then our errands themselves took significantly longer than expected…  and when we went to grab food there was a longer line than expected.  The end result meant I didn’t actually get upstairs on the PS4 until a little after 8 pm.  By that time Squirrel was having all manner of connection problems.  While sitting in voice chat together we were getting only every third word he was saying, making it damned near impossible to understand what he was trying to say.  We gave it the good college try and made an attempt at doing the Challenge of Elders without him on voice chat.

However a few minutes into the match he disconnected which lead Saga and I to end up having to try and solo Sylok the first boss.  We attempted to duo the Cabal boss but had absolutely zero luck there, and ultimately went to orbit.  It was around this time that in the clan channel that Broken and Havel were asking for a third for their own CoE shenanigans.  I felt like a dick leaving Saga, but he assured me that I should grab the open spot.  Last week the bonus was primary ammo headshots, which was super easy and lead to allowing folks well below the suggested 320 light to be able to complete it without much issue.  This week however the bonus was grenade kills, making it significantly harder.  I went in as Sunbreaker because the Simmering Flames perk meant that so long as I had a super ready my grenade recharge was greatly increased.  To that I ended up swapping all of my gear so that I was sitting around 360 discipline.  On top of that I wound up getting a 324 Armamentarium moments before the first attempt at the Challenge, meaning that I also had double grenade charges going in.  Both Broken and Havel did similar steps to allow them to get super grenade action, and as a result we managed to get 108k score over the course of two matches.  So while it sucked that I didn’t get to run with Squirrel and Saga… it is pretty awesome that I managed to finish on my titan regardless.  During the course of the weekend my new goal is to make sure that both Squirrel and Saga get through as well.

Spoils of War

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The result for me is that I walked away with an interesting Hand Cannon that I am not quite sure if I will actually use.  I spent the rest of the night doing bounties with it to see if it was something I actually enjoyed using.  For ages I swore by the Hand Cannon, but then I got used to Auto and Pulse Rifles… and quite simply never use them.  The state they were in after the serious round of nerfs held me back from really enjoying the experience.  During year one I used the hell out of the Last Word, and then for the first part of year two I largely rocked the Hawkmoon… enjoying both weapons greatly.  As far as Her Revenge goes… I like how it feels and it has an interesting sequence of perks so for now I plan on leveling it up and seeing how I enjoy it in its final form.  As for my armor piece, I ended up getting a 328 chest piece…  which was below my current 329 so instead of keeping it I wound up shipping it off to my hunter.  As I talked about yesterday, there has always been a pecking order when it comes to gear… which generally falls in line with Titan > Hunter > Warlock.  My hunter is closer to being viable for things like Challenge of Elders so my goal is to buff him up enough to be useful when it comes to the current “end game” content.

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That said I did also manage to throw a few handmedowns onto the Warlock, bringing the light level up by a few points.  If I can keep stair stepping them up with no more than a 10 light level difference between them I think life will be pretty grand.  I think the mission for tonight is to try and run some content on either the warlock or hunter with the hopes of bringing their light level up a bit.  The biggest thing I need right now are legendary artifacts for both.  The best route to that is of course the Court of Oryx, but neither of them has an antiquated rune to make that possible.  I do have a few skyburner keys and wormsinger runes… so in theory I could burn through those hoping for some drops.  The other awesome thing from last night is that I managed to get another Sublime Engram which takes my set piece count up to three… with 2 chests, 1 helm, and now 1 Titan Mark of the new Jovian Guard set.  I really love the look of that thing, and while I am not sure it would win out over my Iron Banner set… it is still something that I would proudly rock.  Speaking of Iron Banner, Bungie has apparently announced the next bits of gear that will be available and I am super pumped.  I should finally be able to get legs to complete the Iron Banner look, and it also seems like I will be able to get a Titan Mark in the process.  Other than that this round is offering the Auto Rifle and Rocket Launcher, both things that I am super interested in.  Right now the goal is to push both the Titan and Hunter through, so I will be trying to do daily bounties on both of them.