Seeking Cat Tree Chair

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Morning Folks! I completed what is probably the last of the challenges that I am going to face in this league. I am happy to sit at 34/40 because other than the memories challenge everything else is T17 or Uber Boss related. I took the lame way out and just bought some bulk constrictor maps at 21 of them for a Divine Orb which allowed me to grind out the last few guardian maps that I needed for this challenge. I feel pretty great with the progress that I made during the Necropolis League and would be perfectly fine at this point if I did not play again until the start of 3.25. I am not saying for certain that is going to happen but that I would would feel accomplished for the progress I’ve made.

Today is the launch of Diablo IV Season 4 and I know that I will be spending at least a bit of time playing it. Generally speaking… I tend to start a Barbarian since that has been the last that I have enjoyed the most to date. They feel a bit weak at the start of the game but once you start gearing them they feel great. Earlier this week Raxx released a Tier list video and apparently… Necromancers especially of the minion variety have been significantly buffed. This is making me consider a Necro start given that I do love me some minion gameplay. I am not sure which class I will spend most of my time playing, and really how good the state of the game feels is going to be what determines my level of engagement. I had a heck of a lot of fun during Season 2 so here is hoping that Season 4 feels equally good.

Other than that I have been spending quite a bit of time playing Guild Wars 2. Kodra has been back and active a good deal lately, which has prompted me to want to go back and explore Tyria. I would love to be able to find a time when I can be online with various folks that I know and actually do some of the content. Fractals are probably the lowest common denominator, but I would love to get more engaged in Strikes and potentially even Raids now that there is a training wheels mode. I have a commander tag so that is pretty much what is required for doing multi-group activities.

My favorite aspect of the game is just how easy it is to engage in open-world group activities. I had a Wizard’s Vault challenge that asked me to kill 100 Risen. I figured I would pop over to Orr and do some gathering while slowly completing that challenge, and before I knew it someone was calling out that the Arah event was starting up, so I joined the crowd and made my way to the legendary High Wizard easily soaking up enough kills along the way. It is moments like that which really sell me on Guild Wars 2, because it is so easy to start doing one thing and get wrapped up in a bunch of other things along the way that you were not planning on doing at all.

Later in the evening, I wound up in WVW because I had cashed in my Wizard’s Vault tokens in order to get the third legendary weapon box. This meant that I needed to farm up another Gift of Battle, which meant following around and helping a group of folks take objectives. I had not really played WvW since the most recent round of changes but pending you are going there to actually do the combat, it seems like you gain progress faster than you did previously. I’m about halfway to my next gift of battle and figure in the coming weeks I will poke my head back into WvW a bit more as I tend to find it shockingly chill.

Unfortunately, when I cashed in my Wizard’s Vault tokens I did not pay attention to the other rewards. This chair is amazing and I must have it, which means I need to be fairly active each day to make sure I am gaining enough progress in order to pick it up. Why yes I do want to be surrounded by lounging cats while I am waiting on World Events to start. Chairs in this game are such an odd pastime, but I am happy to see a really great one available that is not in the cash shop.

Grueling Grinds

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Good Morning Folks! I had to take the obligatory screenshot of my sad little totem as it has become a little less sad and a little less little. I am currently at 33 of 40 challenges completed for the Necropolis League in Path of Exile and without a doubt I will be hitting 34 before I am said and done. In past leagues, I have been happy enough with getting 19 challenges completed in order to get the most basic form of the totem pole hideout decoration. As such I have totems for Sanctum, Crucible, Ancestor, Affliction, and now Necropolis. During the Affliction League, I was playing a particularly strong bosser character and managed to get a few more challenges completed than I normally would have during a league. This time around however I seem to have gone all in on a number of these and ground out things that I never thought I would accomplish.

The biggest event of the weekend was that I managed to take down “The Feared” which is a special Maven invitation where you fight a number of pinnacle bosses at the same time. Essentially you fight them two at a time and get a random order of Cortex, Chayula, Uber Atziri, The Shaper, and The Elder. It took me two attempts to complete this but I managed to take it down as a Righteous Fire Chieftain. I could have probably had an easier time were I to build a dedicated bossing character, but it feels more “legitimate” after having accomplished this on my own in my preferred method of play. Atziri really was the only challenge because her explosions just take up most of the room leaving you very little place to stand. What makes it even more wild is that I managed to do this… without having a healing potion equipped.

The reason why I did not have a health potion equipped is that I recently purchased a Mageblood. I realize this is the second mageblood I have owned, but it feels a bit more legitimate as I did not borrow anything from the guild bank to purchase this one. Last League Kodra managed to find a Mirror and as a result it felt a bit Oprah-esc as we all got to buy items of our wildest dreams. This time around I actually had a reason for purchasing it. Basically, I wanted to swap some of my gear and points around so that I could maintain 90% all elemental resistance from equipping a Ruby Flask, and then use flask rolls to make myself immune to shock, bleeding, corrupted blood, and poison. I still stand by my statement that Headhunters are way more interesting than Magebloods, largely because one lets you do something really fun… and the other just patches holes in your build.

Another thing that happened this weekend is that I went really hard on Heist. This is something that I have dabbled with in the past but never really focused on specifically. Essentially I had to knock out a bunch of Heist-specific goals for the Tactful Thievery challenge. This involved running five different blueprints with four wings unlocked… which in turn required me to level all of my rogues so that they had at least one level 5 skill. Basically, I ran a ton of heist on Friday since I took the day off from work, and in doing so I dove seriously into the mechanics of it. I gotta say with the right character, I think I enjoy it every bit as much as I enjoy Delve.

Another big goal that I completed this weekend was Mag Magnifience which is to clear 10,000 Tiers of Maps. What this means is each map that you run counts towards that total and it means that I have run at least 700 maps during this league. That number is probably significantly higher considering I spent several days running maps before I got all four voidstones and upgraded everything to T16. This is more mapping than I’ve ever done in a league before. Normally I spend the vast majority of my time down in the Delve mines, but the availability and variety of scarabs have made running just maps in bulk a ton of fun. Essentially I have been rolling up eight maps at a time and then chain-running them on my Elemental Hit Champion.

The last big challenge that I am working on currently, is Grueling Gauntlet Grinds which is designed as a bit of a capstone activity. This all started when I noticed that I had a bunch of Guardian maps completed, and still had even more sitting in the bank. Collecting corpses in T16 maps is pretty much a “gimme” and I reached level 100 earlier in the league on my Righteous Fire Chieftain. I had a ton of Kirac missions saved up, so I used those and my stockpile of scouting reports to fish for 8 mod maps that I could run easily. That just has left Guardian maps as the remaining task that I need to complete. I have a few more Kirac missions so I will likely fish for maps there and then potentially either buy off the market the remaining maps that I need or chain run T16s until I get some as drops. My goal is to finish this up tonight so that I can move forward into the next Diablo IV season with a clear conscience.

While I feel like I should be wrapping things up… I am still having quite a lot of fun piddling around in this league. I am hoping that D4 Season 4 will be equally fun and distract me for a bit, but in a worse-case scenario I would be more than happy to return to Necropolis League and continue to slowly chip away at these things. I’ve not touched the one related to Atlas Memories and have a bunch of those saved up that I could burn through. The only thing that is a bit disheartening is that I cannot see myself ever finishing the T17 or Uber-Boss-related ones without pouring some time and effort into building a proper bossing character. Bossing is just not really what I want out of a game like this, so it is never really my focus. I am a bit worried that I am setting myself up for the future expectation of getting this far into the challenges every time, since I am on a bit of a roll of getting further in each league lately.

Anyways! I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. Are you going to be playing some Diablo IV with the launch of Season 4 on Tuesday? Drop me a line below.

AggroChat #477 – Why Fallout Works

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Featuring: Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

We have a pretty big show which is surprising given we are down a few folks.  Happy Mother’s Day to all the Mothers out there who might be listening to this show.  We start talking about Bluey Surprise! Episode, and then dive into Kodra’s thoughts about Guild Wars 2 Season 1.  Bel talks a bit about why the Fallout series works but the Witcher series did not after the first season. Grace talks about Wylde Flowers a witchy queer farming sim and Thalen his experiences with Little Kitty Big City.  Kodra shares his thoughts about the platformer Metroidvania Animal Well and Tam about the massive changes with Star Citizen 3.23. Lastly, Bel talks a bit about beating “The Feared” in Path of Exile on a non-bossing character.

Topics Discussed:

  • Bluey the “Surprise!” episode
  • Guild Wars 2 Living Season 1
  • Why Fallout Series Works by Witcher Does Not
  • Wylde Flowers
  • Little Kitty Big City
  • Animal Well
  • Star Citizen 3.23
  • Virtual Tabletops
  • Bel Beats “The Feared”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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.