Relaxing Rifting

Good Morning Folks. Last night was another return to normalcy. We had been on a stint of doing Thursday night Guild Wars 2 nonsense, and I had tagged out for a few weeks for obvious reasons. We did not do a ton of stuff, but ran the daily fractal which also doubled for the weekly, and then did a bunch of Rift hunts in Lowland Shore. Me talking about it in my blog yesterday apparently prompted the rest of the crew to do some of that since they had never really chained them. So we mostly just had this really chill night of going to the next rift and sitting on discord and chatting for a few hours. We normally stop earlier than we did last night, which I think is evidence of the relaxing vibes we had going on. I was yawning super freaking hard by the time we wrapped up and pretty much logged from voice and went straight to bed. I needed a night like that.

Over in Path of Exile I knocked out four more achievements for the league challenges and upgraded my sad little totem pole a bit. If you are not to this point yet in the league… I highly suggest you rathole corrupted, mirrored, influenced, and fractured items because you are going to need them for the Equipped Elites challenge. The other really easy one is to fully equip a mercenary in unique items. For Elated Exaltation I found that normal Exalt, Tainted, Eldritch, Shaper, Elder, Redeemer, and Warlord exalts were the cheapest options. In truth if you are planning ahead and don’t actually need to use these for crafting purposes… you can use this to complete any holes you have in influenced gear for the mercenary equipment achievement. Scarabs were pretty straight forward and swapping to my tanky single target bossing merc, was in fact what I needed to go ahead and finish up Pinnacles Paired keeping them alive when I downed Cortex. It also does not hurt that my damage output is way higher than it was when I took down the rest of the pinnacles with a merc.

As far as other things… I am still alternating between mapping and mining and have yet to find the damned hideout in Primordial Blocks. Every time I have seen it up for sale on TFT they have wanted 10 Divines to buy a portal… and I just cannot bring myself to spend that much on a stupid hideout. As the league runs on I might get more desperate. If I ever do find it on my own… I will absolutely shout out to the global I hang out in and give away portals to anyone who might want one because I am not hyper capitalist. I really want to swap things up a bit and run another map, because like I have said before… I don’t actually like the layout or boss for Primordial Blocks, I just want the hideout. I do however want to try and find a different Striker with a better setup. I love that I am getting Fortification stacks, but I really would like to have him generating some useful aura in addition to being a endurance charge bot.

I am thinking more and more seriously about the whole streaming thing, and might try a quick foray into that over the weekend. I spent a bit of time creating some necessary screens for like going AFK and swapping games, so that is at least some semblance of forward momentum. I need to spend some time updating my Twitch channel, because all of the info is very outdated at this point. Like my gear section still shows that I had a 980… which is 3 graphic cards ago because I went from that to a 1080 ti to eventually the 3080 that I have currently. At some point I want to burn down my setup upstairs and get consoles back up and running so that they can be streamed. In truth the only console that I have set up currently is my Switch 2 downstairs. At some point I want to get the loft setup with consoles again, but I have no clue how I am going to figure out how to record that. That is a problem for another day. Mostly just wanted to say that I am still moving forward potentially on starting streaming again, just so that I feel less alone while I am doing single player nonsense.

As far as everything else in my life… I had my first counseling session yesterday and it went pretty well. I get four more of these and for the most part this will be occurring every Thursday for awhile. It helped to have a professional validate some of the things I was going through as being perfectly normal. Even the soft hallucinations are normal. She described them as sort of a phantom limb pain thing, that my brain is just getting adjusted to my wife not being there and that it was not a sign of anything more concerning. I feel better just having someone echo back feedback that I had already heard from friends. I took the day off today because I am going up to move her stuff out of her classroom, so that is going to be rough. However her teacher friends are mostly going to be the ones packing up the room for me, and I will just be coming up to truck things back. In theory I am going to come back to the house and haul some stuff out of the garage that needs to be taken care of. I have a few dead tvs that I am going to try and find recycling for just to free up the space.

I’ve legitimately contemplated getting a storage unit so that I can box up and move her stuff into it… until I am ready to deal with it. There are a bunch of things I want to do in the garage, but I have always needed swap space to do any of it. Effectively I have to get rid of the piles of stuff from when she moved out of her last school district before I can do much of anything to improve the situation out there. I use the garage as sort of an extended pantry for the various stuff I order from Sams Club, and I would like to have proper shelving to put stuff on. I also potentially want to get rid of the collection of old door mats that I have out there, because they are so worn down the likelihood that I will use them again is minimal. Decorating our door wreath and the rug… are something that I will probably keep doing because while it was her thing… I do enjoy the whimsy of it.

Anyways… I am doing okayish still. I figure the best indicator of my mental health is that I am still getting up and making the bed. When I stop doing that… it is time to worry.