Anniversary Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Bad At Anniversaries

April 20, 2026 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. I am bad at realizing what time of the year it is… and that my blog and podcast anniversaries are approaching. As a result, last Friday, aka April 17th, was the 17th anniversary of Tales of the Aggronaut. The left side of the above image is one of the earliest revisions of the site as saved by the Wayback Machine. Then, of course, on the right side, you have what the site looks like now. I’ve not made any really significant revisions to the look and feel of the site in a very long time, other than to shim in more artwork from Ammo as I commission something else. There was a point where I cared about readership, but honestly, at this point, I view this blog as a sort of outsider art project. You either care about me and what I have to say, or you don’t, and I can’t be much bothered to tailor my writing to follow whatever trends might be happening. Many of you have been with me through the death of animals, the loss of my spouse of thirty years, and now, as I am dealing with cancer. I’ve tried to be as honest as I can be with my thoughts and feelings as I went through all of it. Without really intending to, I somehow built a community of folks who care about me, and I appreciate that so much when things get low.

I also completely forgot to talk about the Anniversary of AggroCha,t the podcast that I started in 2014. This past weekend, we recorded episode 656, and started this nonsense back on April 13th of 2014. Listening to the early episodes makes me cringe super hard, but I think it is more about how different human beings many of us were back then. A lot of stuff had not happened that shook the core of both our gaming roots and, honestly, American civilization, and it shows. Folks have come and gone from the roster, but the original core of Me, Ash, and Kodra has remained pretty rock solid through all of it. It’s only gotten better as we added everyone that represents our current core of Ace, Ammo, Ashgar, Kodra, Tam, and Thalen. At this point, it is way more about hanging out together at a fixed time and talking about discussions that we don’t necessarily make time for at other moments than anything else. For both the blog and the podcast, they are not money-making ventures, nor have I ever wanted them to be. However, I am still pretty proud of us sticking with this for as long as we have.

In gaming terms this weekend, I wrapped up my 36th challenge out of 40 and think that I am going to wind down Path of Exile for the moment. Mirage League was a lot of fun, but I have more or less accomplished everything that I care to accomplish. At this point, I would only be moving forward with the acquisition of currency for the sake of acquiring currency. We should be getting news on the Path of Exile II league pretty soon, and next Tuesday is the drop for the Diablo IV Lord of Hatred expansion. While I have not fallen in love with Diablo IV in the same way as I did Diablo III, it should still be fun to poke around and play with the new Warlock class a bit. I think I have also reached a point where I have wound down my interest in Last Epoch as well. Those seasons are great for a week or two, but I quickly run out of things that I actually care to do, at least much faster than I do in a Path of Exile league. All of the ARPGs are in a pretty great state, and they all become somewhat interchangible for my joy at any given moment.

On a complete whim, over the weekend, I picked up Crimson Desert and started playing that. I am honestly not sure what I think of this game yet. Combat is mostly pretty fun, but movement and the pace of the game in general are a bit on the slow end. The world is gorgeous, and there is a lot of interesting stuff going on. I was not sure what sort of game to really consider this, but after playing, I think it is more akin to something like Dragon’s Dogma. If I had my druthers, it would perform exactly like The Witcher 3, but I do not get what I want most of the time. I am not entirely certain how much I am going to play it, because I have already had moments where the slow pace was a bit too plodding for me. I was also immediately annoyed when Steam popped up the “you should play this with a controller” message, but the game itself performs perfectly fine with a mouse and keyboard. There is a rumor that we are just about to get another expansion for The Witcher 3, and if that happens, it means I am going to drop whatever I am doing and play that.

I have a backlog of a lot of recent titles that I really need to get around to playing. Greedfall: The Dying World moved out of early access to its final release version in March, and as a result, I am now interested in playing that. Greedfall was a deeply imperfect game, but it was doing a lot of things that I really liked. I am also somewhat interested in diving into Star Wars Outlaws and the next part of the Final Fantasy VII reimaginging trilogy. There is also Death Stranding 2, which might honestly be the right sort of game for the weird time that I am going through. I played the first one at the height of COVID isolation, and as a result, it felt deeply poignant. Since I am similarly greatly limiting my exposure to other human beings due to the chemotherapy wrecking my immune system, it might produce similar results. I have more games than I can ever play. If I am being perfectly honest, I just have to figure out something that lands right and brings me joy since I have wound down my old reliable partner in Path of Exile.

Anyways… I have been writing this post for several hours now. I need getting distracted by either work or chemo brain, and figure I should wrap things up. What are you playing right now that is bringing you joy? Drop me a line and let me know.

Froggy and Capy Are Best Friends

April 18, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks! Last Epoch Tombs of the Erased has launched and I am still in the process of leveling my character through the campaign. Just like I thought I was going to do… I rolled a Sentinel and specialized into Paladin going for something similar to what I have built previously. The thing is… right now this BelStillBurns is not a one for one copy of the previous characters I have built as ignite warpath, and I am sort of adjusting my ideas on the fly while I level. I am not going to write a super long blog post this morning so that I can get back to playing. I could have probably pushed into maps yesterday but I generally prefer a more relaxed trip through the campaign than trying to do the hyper optimal gameplay thing. Truth be told I generally like the campaign in ARPGs. Path of Exile II’s campaign was a bit of an exception for me… where I enjoyed it the first time but would absolutely skip it instantly if given half the choice.

Yesterday was unfortunately not a launch without some growing pains. The servers came up right around 11 am CDT and it took me a bit longer than that to get the 7.3 gb patch applied. However once I attempted to login I was met with good ole error LE-52 indicating that the login server was overloaded. This lasted until around 12 pm CDT, but once you beat the login boss the game was pretty smooth. I did have some minor issues trying to create my character, which has created the weird situation where I have two characters named the same thing. Once we are in the clear I will probably open a support ticket for that, because I am afraid to delete my second BelStillBurns for fear that it also deletes the primary character I am leveling.

For concurrent players Last Epoch blew last July’s patch launch out of the water and has consistently had more players than Path of Exile II. It was a Thursday launch which is not ideal timing for a lot of players, so I figure come this evening and over the weekend we will probably hit new peak numbers for the game as a whole. At one point last night Raxxanterax, a streamer that I have followed since his Diablo III days had 21,000+ viewers which was the highest number any ARPG streamer at that time. Someone referred to him as the Bob Ross of ARPG streamers… which is a title that I feel like he has to fight Pohx for because they both have that sort of energy. If you look at the Last Epoch category though, pretty much all of the Path of Exile streamers are playing it.

I have continued my tradition of Josie causing my first death. Last night I was on the couch and near the end of Act Five when she decided that she absolutely had to stand in front of me. Unlike with Path of Exile II… there is no pause and some random trash mob wandered over and killed me. The cats keep me real, and make sure I know that I have to take breaks in order to give them attention. Quite honestly I appreciate them playing this vital role. There was a bit where I stopped playing for thirty minutes because Josie also decided to lay on top of my keyboard hand, so it makes me think it was absolutely purposeful that she wanted me to stop paying attention to the screen. The furthest I have ever gotten Deathless was into the monolith, because I always die to Rahyeh on my first attempt for the second monolith.

I’ve not had the lucky run that I did the last two times I have played ignite warpath, and have yet to find a Firestarter’s Torch. I really miss the spreading flames ignite proliferation, but since I don’t have this… I am having to pivot into another drop. I got Taste of Blood with a good health on hit role and since both warpath and lunge are currently converting chance to bleed into chance to ignite… it still works as an amazing item for me. I am paring that with whatever rare sword I can pick up that has decent stats, and then have also grabbed a lucky Quicksilver Coil from a nemesis egg, which is not 100% ideal but has high regen, haste, and attack speed. Sadly the stats that I got from the egg are useless form my build but I will take a well rolled Quicksilver Coil regardless of how I got it.

I said this was going to be a short post… but in truth it ended up being just about as long as my normal fare. One thing that I completely missed yesterday is that apparently it was the 16th Anniversary of my blog. The literal Hello World post for this blog was posted on April 17th of 2009. I thought it would be fun to look up the original theme of the blog again and use that for today’s post. This blog started it’s life as a World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking and Raid Leading Blog. Super freaking niche and that did not last for terribly long… I essentially painted myself into a corner and when I stopped having fun raiding… it also meant that I stopped having fun blogging. Those early years are full of posts where I am apologizing for the massive lapses in time between posts. Once I shifted in 2013 to this just being a blog about me and my misadventures things got considerably more easy.

I know I have a pretty regular reader-base… but I am curious. Do I still have any readers that were with me way back in the beginning or at least after my initial viral moment of being featured on WoW Insider? If so drop me a line below because I am legitimately curious. I think a lot more folks know me for Blaugust than pretty much anything else.

Oopsiversary

April 20, 2023 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! This year I have been more than a little bit scatterbrained and unfocused. As a result, many things have slipped… not the least of which is realizing that it is apparently anniversary time. For whatever reason I tend to start a lot of things in April and both the anniversary of Tales of the Aggronaut (April 17th, 2009) and our AggroChat Podcast (April 13th, 2014) landed this month. Then there was April 26th of 2013 when I started what I called the “Grand Experiment” of forcing myself to blog every single day which lasted a little over three years before landing on something more manageable of “every weekday unless I really don’t feel like it”. You could say that this also ultimately led to the creation of Blaugust because I personally found a lot of success in forcing myself to blog damn the torpedos.

In the grand scheme of things the key to longevity for me, was to shift my focus of this blog as a vehicle for some specific planned idea… and instead just make it about whatever I happened to want to be talking about at the time. This is my blog… the Bel does dumb nonsense blog… and if you are along for the ride awesome. If this is not your jam, that is also awesome because I realize I am very much an acquired taste. I don’t have an overwhelming number of readers to be honest, but the ones I do have… end up being exceptionally loyal. Most of them are people that I legitimately consider friends… which is why in part the whole recent verbiage of “Good Morning Friends” is not inherently dishonest. I realize I am mostly talking to a circle of friends that occasionally has some rando stumble into that conversation. The thing is… those randos are also more than welcome to hang out and become friends too.

When I post on social media that I am not making a post for a given day… it isn’t out of some ego trip because I know the world continues to tick along just fine if I have not extruded words. I do it because in the past when I have skipped a day… I had a lot of folks checking in on me to make sure I am okay. I do it out of a sense of not wanting to make this community of friends that read my ramblings worry about me. Honestly, my favorite part about joining the Fediverse and leaving Twitter has been just how many new faces I have seen join the ranks of people who appear to be consuming my nonsense each day. I want you all to feel welcome, but also I am still mostly writing these posts like I am talking to myself so… sorry for not being more interesting.

So if you have been reading my blog for a bit, you will probably be familiar with Tripod… the admittedly horribly named three-legged feral calico cat that lives in our backyard. I’ve not talked about this situation lately because it honestly really depressed me. Roughly a month ago… two dogs got into our yard under the front fence and seemingly chased her off. We’ve been watching anxiously hoping for any signs of her, checking the video camera feeds multiple times per day hoping for a glimpse of her. We were starting to worry that something had happened to her. The next-door neighbor saw the dogs chasing her, but also that she got away from them and they did not follow. However, we’ve learned from experience in the past with other backyard ferals… that when they disappear they are often gone permanently.

However last night while my wife was sitting on the back patio reading, she showed back up. I went out and put some food out but she was too skittish to come over and eat. My hope is that once my wife went inside she fed, though I did not notice her on the camera. That said she is also pretty damned good at avoiding detection algorithms. This morning she was milling around the little house we have in the backyard for her, so my hope is she spent the night there. When I go out to feed in a few minutes I am hoping that she comes out and eats. I mean it isn’t like she is defenseless and I am certain that she is more than capable of catching a meal… but she also looks way thinner than when we last saw her. I cannot explain fully what a gift it is to see her again because we were overwhelmed with concern for the last several weeks. So much so that I just could not bring myself to write about it.

In other nighttime visitor news… we have a few adorable Raccoons and at least one very chubby Possum that come by. I really should start uploading to Catfriend Television again, my dumb YouTube channel that I started during the pandemic where I uploaded clips from our security cameras of cats and other visitors. There is one video clip that I have somewhere that shows two raccoons up on the porch, and another few waiting in the wings on the sidewalk. I feel like some people would have a drastically different reaction than I do… but so long as they are not causing a mess I am more than happy to have them visiting. When I was a Scout camp counselor, I remember some raccoons getting into my igloo cooler and stealing my dry Gatorade powder. Maybe I should put some out for them and see if this group likes that too. I know it was a raccoon because there were sticky red paw prints leading out of my tent.

Lastly, I recorded another one of my dumb videos yesterday. I have been running up an alt in Path of Exile and was amused at just how easily Toxic Rain Ballista/Caustic Arrow deletes mobs. I was talking to my friend Ace about it and decided to record a video showing it off. Granted this is just the campaign and I have no idea if this will continue into mapping… but I am probably going to do a follow-up video once I have verified that it still remains good. Like always I mostly record these for me, or for some other purpose than to ever get YouTube viewers. I enjoy making these short dumb videos, and just like with my blog… am perfectly fine if no one actually consumes them.

Anyways! I am officially in my fifteenth year with this blog and I just want to thank you all for following me on this journey. At this point, daily blogging is so ingrained in my person that I am pretty sure I will be doing this 25 years from now as well. The slow death of social media has only served to drive home just how important it is to me to have a place on the internet that I can call entirely my own.

Thirteen Years of Tales

April 18, 2022 by Belghast

Yesterday was the thirteenth anniversary of my very first post here on Tales of the Aggronaut. I realize last week I celebrated the 9th year of AggroChat but apparently, April is just the month I start new things. It was April of last year for example that I started the whole Mixtape Monday thing for example… which incidentally is something I plan on revisiting soon. It always feels weird and self-congratulatory to do one of these posts, but also feels like something I should do anyway. Looking back I apparently missed my twelfth anniversary altogether and never saw fit to go back and talk about it. Technically I should have been making this post yesterday, but was releasing an episode of AggroChat and I have this weird hang-up about doing more than one post in a single day. According to the Wayback Machine, this is what my blog would have looked like around this time.

2011 – WayBack fails to Capture the Rift Theme Era

However, I am learning for a fact that the Wayback Machine is fallible. The graphical treatment on that first image is like the second revision of my blog theme. The very first one was a direct clone of an existing wow-based theme, given that my blog started its life as a Warrior Tanking blog. The “Sons of Hodir” themed banner would have come much later and the above image is a complete fabrication because I know by the time we reached September of 2011 I was sporting a Rift-based theme. I dove completely into Rift and was even registered as an official fansite. Truth be told last time I logged into the forums, my account was still flagged as a fansite operator. You can see a bit of evidence of this in the sidebar but this is when I switched to the blue-themed text over the brown masthead.

The ship begins to right itself around 2014 when you can see this blue masthead text actually being captured by the Wayback Machine. The main difference during the Rift years was instead of Chibi Bel wearing Zul Aman gear, it was a Chibi Bahmi seen here on the right. I am honestly wishing I had gotten in the practice of taking a screenshot of my blog every so often during its life span. For years I have mostly relied on the Wayback Machine as a way of transporting me back in time but I am guessing it is starting to succumb to the process of digital rot. This is a bit concerning because our digital memories are not going to be preserved nearly as perfectly as we might have hoped. I think this is one of those things that we maybe took for granted… but also maybe should not have. I guess I should add screenshotting my blog… to the long list of other things that I have preserved through my screenshot archive.

All of the Chibi work that adorned my blog for years was done by my good friend Rae. She was one of the original members of AggroChat and is someone that at the time worked with me. I greatly appreciate all of the work that she did for me, but as the blog matured I found myself moving away from that art style. The original graphics for AggroChat seen above included Chibi versions of Rae, Ash, Kodra, and Myself… more specifically the version of my Elder Scrolls Online Imperial Dragon Knight character I was playing at the time. Ash being a bear that Rae was sitting on was not exactly a great representation, but given the other stuff, we were juggling this remained the artwork for far longer than I had intended.

The last era that still featured Rae’s Chibi work was in 2015. I had gone to a very streamlined look in the masthead and used a cropped version of the ESO Bel Chibi that I was at the time using as my Twitter avatar. This also begins the era of me stopping fiddling and trying to roll my own theme. I test drove several third-party paid themes and finally landed on Generate Press, and have more or less been using it since. I figure this is probably the beginning of the “modern” era of the blog as not a ton has shifted since this point. I desperately need to spend some time modifying my sidebar at this point. Some releases back WordPress added block support, and it would be so much easier to maintain if I just nuked it and started from scratch. However, that seems terribly daunting and I keep putting it off.

In 2017 we saw the first introduction of a Masthead featuring artwork from my good friend Ammo. The whole “how I met Ammo” thing is a truly contorted mess, and at some point, we are going to sit down and record an episode of Bel Folks Stuff to sort it out. Basically, I originally crossed paths with her mom Sol back in World of Warcraft as we were all on Argent Dawn US, but I am guessing I first met Ammo through Twitter. None of that really matters though because I love her artwork, and you should absolutely check her stuff out if you have ever experienced it. I mean she has a traditional website, but I still feel like the best place to experience it is via Tumblr. She cut her teeth on comics just like I did, and as a result, there is a very comic book nature to the art style. Right now she is working on enshrining my Guild Wars 2 Necromancer in artwork form, and it is so damned cool. I can’t wait to be able to share it with you all.

2019 – The Masthead Full of Ammo Art Era

Then by that time we reached the pre-pandemic Aggronaut, you have the masthead full of various individual commissions from Ammo. Each one of those was done separately but I have merged them into a single cohesive image. If you compare it to the current masthead it is missing the PSO2 and New World themed “Bels”. This madness all started however because I commissioned Ammo to draw an image for my seventh blog anniversary that I just fell in love with. I was enamored with the concept of having her illustrated the various versions of my primary “Belghast” character in each game because they all share some deep similarities.

So left to right you have my World of Warcraft Warrior, my character from Secret World, my Exo from Destiny 1 and Bahmi from Rift, then my ESO Dragon Knight, and finally my Lalafel Warrior from FFXIV. She still has the original shirt up for purchase on her TeePublic store. That all came about because I wanted a shirt made off this image, but wanted all proceeds from the sale to go to Ammo in case anyone else bought one at some point. Then when I decided to fiddle with my masthead I asked her to take the LalaBel featured in this image and blow it up into a full-sized graphic. Then one by one as I had her draw more things for me… we kept that same format allowing me to composite them together afterward.

Some years back I commissioned a series of moogles screwing around with “streamer” gear. Originally this was to be part of my Twitch page for a foray into streaming that never really happened. More recently I have used them to adorn the masthead. However, the next project that I am going to give Ammo is to do a similar treatment for other cute monsters from video games. I know for example I absolutely want an Arctic Quaggan and a Choya Pinata from Guild Wars 2. I am sorta brainstorming a list of cute critters I want to be done up, and at least mentally these are going to be part of a more broad site rework. I am hoping that by the time we reach the fourteenth anniversary of the blog, we have maybe moved forward a little bit in the way it looks.

I have to admit, this is not exactly the post that I had intended to make this morning but it is the post that came out. There are times that you just have to go with the flow when writing, and that has been one of the secrets to my maintaining this site for thirteen years. I wish I had been more prolific early in this site, because as I age… I find having this living journal to be a benefit for pinpointing exactly when various things in my life happened. Here we are some 2876 posts later and I am still getting up each morning to do this nonsense. That would average out to be 221 posts a year, but we all know that is a lie since my prolific nature did not really kick in until April of 2013. The part that shocks me more though is that I have had just shy of 9000 comments… especially when you consider how freaking bad I am at actually interacting with them.

Basically what I am trying to say in my very meandering manner is… thanks for reading and being here with me on this journey.