Booktalk

Accidental Black Light

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Good Morning Folks. One of my coworkers really cares deeply about his teleconference background… and recently added these cool vapor-wave neon strip things which spurred in my brain… that I could do something cool with my lighting. I have a ceiling fan with three 60W light bulbs… and I got it in my head that I could give myself some cool bisexual lighting by buying a blue, pink, and purple led bulb. The pink was way the hell too overpowering so I ended up with only a blue bulb and a purple bulb and it works… giving me this cool two-tone lighting that is way the hell easier on my eyes than bright white light. However what I did not expect is that I accidentally created a black light, because everything in my office that fluoresces is now glowing like crazy. I feel like I need to lean into this and get some proper velvet black-light paintings up in here. The above photo does not do the effect justice… but you can definitely see that little Kenneth the robot’s arms and head are glowing.

I think at this point I am enjoying my Brand Elemenalist more than the Toxic Rain Pathfinder, because it has officially leap-frogged it in levels and I am pretty close to dinging 92. Everything always slows down at 95 and I am not sure if I have enough survival to really push much further than that but I fully expect to get there before long. The only problem with this build is that so much of my success with it… is entirely depended upon the negative lightning resistance setup I have on my mercenary. If I were playing an actually GOOD build… I can see how dumb this would be especially for bossing purposes. This combined with the Inpulsa chest are giving me some tasty screen wide pops at times that I was not expecting for a brand build. I am still sort of shopping for a better merc, but I really want the ability that causes consecrated ground to cover the screen and the “better” options I have found don’t have that or herald of purity. I wish POE.Ninja tracked Mercenaries so that I could flip through a bunch of different setups to see what people are doing with the Doryani setup.

So one of the battles that I have been having with this character and build is… what the hell to do with the shield. The build that I loosely patterned this one off of was using Aegis Aurora and it makes some amount of sense. It’s a good chunk of armor and decent energy shield, and also has the ability to recover 2% of energy shield on block. The problem with this however is that essentially this is only 96 Energy Shield per block… which is largely meaningless. For awhile I was running Emperor’s Vigilance which has even more armor and energy shield and would allow me to drop a node on my passive tree to keep Glancing Blows, but also has the double edged sword that any unblocked damage bypasses my energy shield. I played around with Rise of the Phoenix and it was fine… but did not have enough chance to block and dropped me down below the block cap. I even tried a solid 5% of life on block shield that has a pretty decent roll and it just did not feel as good as it does on my Righteous Fire characters… because it is only around 200 life recovered per block and the general line of defenses is nowhere near as strong. So I am stick with the Aegis for now, mostly because I am not sure what else to try.

I am ripping through Alch and Go t16 maps without any issue, and am mostly using this character to run Betrayal on Primordial Blocks still chasing that damned hideout. I have a whole new appreciation for Betrayal largely because I never realized exactly how bit of an experience boost it is over any other mechanic. I don’t even care about Safehouses, I am just clicking whatever option there is on every single person just to get the bump of experience. I get it that folks have said Betrayal is great early league, but I always assumed it was for the enchants and abandoned it entirely this league… but legitimately it is probably still worth doing to get a bump in levels quickly. I am sure those Veiled Chaos Orbs were more valuable at the start of the league than they are now as well. I’ve run so much Betrayal and at least a dozen safe houses at this point and have still not found a single invitation for Catrina. I do wish there was some better guidance as to what person does what in which position however, because I keep getting the damned crafting tables… and they are awful.

The other thing I am hunting while running maps is for the memory tears that unlock a sequence of maps. Right now it feels like I am pretty close to knocking out Eldritch Expeditions and will likely need two of these sequences to wrap it up. When I get one of these I pretty much just rip my way through it as RF so that I can knock it out quickly and then return back to chill Ach and Go t16s. I should probably be knocking out t17s as well but those are way less happy chill fun times, and I have not been in the mood for it. Yesterday was “a lot”, and I took the day off to deal with “death things” as I am starting to collectively refer to it as. I had to go back to the funeral home to pick up death certificates and then spent the rest of the afternoon dealing with various things that had been in a holding pattern waiting on them. I still need to make a trek Saturday morning over to deal with another thing related to this, because I was just too beat by the time I got back home yesterday to make another jaunt in the opposite direction.

I had made plans with a friend of mine, but had to beg off last night because I was just too out of it. Instead I sat downstairs on the sofa with cats snuggling tightly, and played some Path of Exile while listening to Wicked Problems by Max Gladstone. I did not expect to necessarily chain through these books but after the ending of Dead Country… I had to know what was coming next. While I loved the Craft Sequence… so far this Craft Wars Trilogy is way more tightly focused and I like it better overall. Tara Abernathy is the best character in the entire series of books, and we are spending way more time with her in this book than some of the other sequels from the previous series. The first sequence hopped around quite a bit between characters, and there were entire books that did not really involve her. This definitely feels like we are headed for some sort of an endgame and all of the best elements of the previous books are being revisited in this one tight narrative arc. Like I said if you have never read any of these books I HIGHLY suggest starting them and unfortunately I would also suggest reading the first six book series, because you will largely be clueless about the importance of some of the events in this trilogy.

I am still functional… deeply low on spoons… but strugglebusing my way through the world.

Illusive Mollie Snuggles

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One of the strange occurrences that I have wanted so bad to message my wife about… is the changed behavior in Mollie our most skittish cat. She can be an extremely sweet cat, but also runs like hell at the slightest unexpected motion. She has been forcefully snuggling with me when I first crawl into bed, and gripes at me when I am not already in place when she expects me to be so. She runs away when Gracie decides it is time to come to bed, but for about thirty minutes at the start of every sleep cycle, she is there with me while I am fiddling around on my phone and doing dailies in the few mobile games that I play. I’ve attempted to get a photo of this, and so far this is the best one not only because I am laying down and attempting to take it… but also because the lights are off and the only light is from the television. It has only taken a decade to get this far… but she will headbutt me so freaking hard before she eventually settles down snuggling up against my side.

I did not join in the reindeer games in Guild Wars 2 last night because I was emotionally exhausted. I had a good therapy session, but it was a tiring one and after finishing that up… and doing the various nightly processes I just was out of it and fighting sleepytime. I stayed up until around 9:30 which is my normal bedtime, but was way too out of it to have joined in on any group activities. Instead I did some Audiobook and Path of Exile time as I started on Dead Country by Max Gladstone which is a new series with the flagship character of the Craft Sequence that I read over the last few years. There were six books in that series and I highly suggest all of them. What is awkward about those books is that they collected the first five into a single volume… then I guess Max decided to write a sixth book, and it makes my eye twitch that the artwork does not match the first five books at all which have a similar theme. Anyways looking forward to this new trilogy of which I think only two books are out.

One of the things that is not really being talked about right now in Path of Exile is how profitable Delve has been this league. It is a combination of the fact that there is no league specific crafting mechanic, and that the return of Kingsmarch has made gold fairly valuable because people want to run those big shipments for a shot at getting back mirror shards. Delve, Heist, and other second any secondary non-mapping content provides a pitiful amount of gold compared to juicy mapping. The common wisdom has been to focus on mapping and as a result… everything that comes from other mechanics has gone up in value. I put up a bunch of rare fossils for sale last night before I logged out to go to bed, and decided to take a screenshot when they had all sold showing you the sort of money I can pull in quickly. Divine Orbs are also really weak right now and only trading for 130 Chaos, meaning that converting up from Chaos is really valuable. I spent a lot of currency kitting out my Toxic Rain character and have made most of it back.

That said I spent a ton of currency this morning buying Awakened gems and 21/20% gems for the things that I could afford. I will likely never buy an Awakened Greater Multiple Projectiles as those go for like 300 Divines, but I did bump up everything that I could. Making this swap is always immediately noticeable in the speed at which you clear, and this was no difference because t16 mapping now feels extremely trivial. Mostly I am still in the process of pouring on levels so that I can get the passive points to finish out with a medium cluster and then unlock all of the jewel sockets that I have available to me so that I can start putting life and chaos damage over time multiplier in all of those slots. I have my health over 4000 which gives me a bit of a buffer and usually enough time to hit my life potion in time to keep from taking a death when my evasion fails me. I am still not great at keeping a life pot running at all times to mimic the effects of leech or regeneration. This is essentially the strength of a Pathfinder but I am bad at hitting the button all of the time.

The Mercs league had already slowed down considerably, but it is about to grind to a halt as Path of Exile II spoiler season has officially started. SirGog released a video this morning about the above spoiler posted on Twitter, and I mostly agree with him that this feels Harbinger Adjacent. I just hope they do not screw the mechanic up and make it worse… like they have for other mechanics implemented in Path of Exile II style. I am still not hugely supportive of the direction this sequel has gone so far, but I also know that large swaths of the community care about it and it will begin to drain attention from Path of Exile. Path of Exile II drops on the 29th, but it will have to wait until I have burned through the content in Last Epoch which drops before that on the 21st.

Amelioration Addict

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Good Morning Folks. One of the hardest parts about the situation I am in… is watching the cats trying to deal with it in their own way. Gracie has been struggling and her way of dealing with it, has been being attached to me pretty much 24/7. This is not a bad thing and quite honestly, having this adorable fuzzbutt at my side has helped me a lot as well. However she always interacted with me and my wife in different ways… and now I am having to be both momma and daddy. Like she used to get up in my wife’s face constantly and want to headbutt her… and she is starting to do that with me. She has also started recently standing in empty rooms and meowing a lot… because I think on some level she thinks maybe she can summon her back out of the woodwork. Either that or she has momentarily lost sight of me, and is afraid I will go away too. I always holler down to her and then she comes and finds me… but its been really hard to see the toll that it is having specifically on Gracie.

I finally started Cold Iron Task by James J. Butcher after sitting on this book for what feels like forever. The last book that I read before this was Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle… and that was back in March. I am not sure what exactly happened. I think maybe that book took a lot out of me and I needed a break… and then that break turned into month after month with me never quite getting around to starting something new. It has been good to crawl back inside of a book, because it helps pry me out of my own head and dealing with my own issues. I’m a little over halfway through at this point and this third book in the Unorthodox Chronicles series is considerably better than the first two. Not that the first two were bad, but they spent a lot of time setting up the character of Grimsby and now he has arrived as a fully fledged character with his own cast of supporting characters. So much so that I think you could probably just skip the first two books without a ton of issue, because when something is brought up from a previous book they still keep explaining what it means.

Over in Path of Exile I am still chipping away at challenges and am roughly seven pips away from level 100. Until I ding I am largely playing it safe and also carrying with me an Omen of Amelioration to diminish the impact of random deaths. My current play pattern is that I run maps until I am full on Sulphite and then dive back into Delve to spend that down, and when I gather up eight or so of the quest heists I chain through those to clear out my inventory. I’ve run around 100-150 copies of Primordial Blocks and still have not found my hideout. I am currently on an off cycle building up more blocks maps and running Defiled Cathedral in the hopes of getting a Nameless Seer so I can shift the divination card pool from Cathedral over to Blocks. I have found tons of these… but never on a map that I actually wanted to swipe the div card pool from. I’ve also not really gotten any big ticket uniques from the Seer so I keep hoping that one of them will give me something really tasty.

Over in Guild Wars 2 I am back to doing our Thursday night shenanigans which also turned into a Friday night this past week. I have a whole new batch of weeklies to start chewing through as yesterday was the reset. I will probably spend some time tonight doing that. This is really the only MMORPG I can seem to get into these days, because everything else requires too much focus. So much of Guild Wars 2 has been pushed to muscle memory, so that I can just sort of turn my brain off and run content without thinking too much about it. That is a lot of the reason why I play so many ARPGs is it allows me to just sink into the keyboard and exist while dealing with my own stuff in my head. We have the WvW event starting today, so I might spend some time doing that so that I can grind out a few more Gifts of Battle and keep pushing my ranks up.

Because I am a glutton for punishment… I also rolled a brand new character in Guild Wars 1. I am going to do prophecies because quite honestly… that is the one that I want to see the story for the most. It is also probably the worst of the campaigns so I will need strength of mind to get through it. I went Ranger and I am probably going to go Elementalist just for the elemental weapon buffs, given that I do not want to go daggers… which pretty much negates the popular combo with Assassin. I did not make it terribly far, but I am trying to complete as much stuff as I can pre-sundering because the world feels so much shittier once everything is monochromatic. I’ve always tried to do Warrior combos, and honestly… I think this game might just feel better as ranged.

I am doing okay. I made a post effectively saying as much on Facebook with the hopes of reassuring people who are worried about me… but it seems to have had the opposite effect. Clearly people are not prepared for me to be raw and honest about life. That makes sense. Most people just want you to say “fine” when they ask how you are doing, because it lets them know that they checked in on you… but in truth they probably didn’t actually want a real answer because now it forces them to deal with you not being okay. In truth I am doing far better than I thought I would be.

Dungeon Crawler Carl

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Good Morning Folks. I took yesterday off and while I had planned on writing a blog post.. one never actually happened. Instead you are getting the post that I probably would have written yesterday, a day late. This weekend I finished my consumption of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series… and I have to admit I am a bit sad that it is over. This has quite possibly been the book series that I least expected to get into… and then hungrily consumed as quickly as possible after getting into the first book. I admit the whole LitRPG genre never really appealed to me… why read about playing a game when I could just be playing a game? However it can create a really interesting backdrop to tell a well written tale against, as is evidenced by the fact I just spent thirty six days tearing through this series one after another.

The premise of the series is what if you took Duke Nukem… made him lovable… gave him a talking cat companion that is even more lovable… and tossed them both into a Smash TV style Dungeon Crawl where they have to kill their way to the bottom… or die permanently because the planet has been reclaimed for resources by an external galactic bureaucracy. That is one hell of a run-on sentence, but also is about as close as I can really come to explaining the appeal of this series. What this series has in spades is heart. It has so many well written characters that you fall in love with, and genuinely want to succeed and survive… but also know that the odds are stacked against them in spite of quite a bit of literal plot armor. Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk is quite possibly the best sidekick ever crafted, and to call her a sidekick though is a bit of a disservice to how much of the plot revolves around her learning how to “adult”. All of the characters show deep growth over the course of the series, and even ones that you kind of sort of loath when you first encounter them… become beloved friends several books in.

What the book series has in abundance though is meaningful payoffs. There have been so many times that a loose plot thread from book one… turns into some significant event later down the line. The dungeon crawl itself has a deeply rich lore surrounding it, and has clear rules that remain in place for the entire series. There are always several different plot threads going at once, and usually colliding in the major event of the individual book. What is really fun however is looking at the artwork for each of the volumes after having finished the book… because there are always so many different moments that suddenly make perfect sense. Sometimes a book series runs out of juice… but this one only seems to be getting better the longer it runs.

On the 16th I finished up This Inevitable Ruin, and it was probably the most epic of the entire series. Even before reading it… I sort of assumed that would be the case given the plot points that were sure to be involved in this single book. It was effectively the culmination of a major event that had bee discussed in every single book of the series, and the resolution was most definitely worth the wait. Carl is a bit of a fuck up at times… and a pure Agent of Chaos… but he is OUR Agent of Chaos. Donut is occasionally very self centered… as is the case with every cat ever to exist on this planet… but she is OUR precious princess. Like I see in her actions literally hundreds of things that my own Gracie, Mollie, and Josie end up doing every day. I feel about Donut the same way that I am certain dog lovers feel about Oberon in the Kevin Hearne books.

So here is the point where I suggest you listen to the Audiobooks instead of reading them. So much of my enjoyment of this series is I think in large part to how well they are acted out by the amazing Jeff Hays of Soundbooth Theater. I decided the embed this video as an example, because it does not really give anything away or steal from you any revelations from the series. God Dammit Donut is sort of the catch phrase for Carl specifically… but other characters occasionally say it as well in the series. So here is a delightful video of Jeff shifting between 14 characters uttering that phrase, and you can see how wildly different each character feels as result. What is often even more entertaining is the in universe advertisement for Soundbooth Theater at the end of every book. These feel like the mid credit scenes in a Marvel movie, because they often have some sort of payoff for the next book in the series… that just happens to take place out of the flow of the novel itself.

The problem with finishing an amazing series… is that I always end up wanting more of it… now. From what I understand more recently there has been a year lag between volumes of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, and since this last volume came out in November, it means I am going to have a bit of a wait on my hands. One of the other books that has been advertised throughout the audio books for Dungeon Crawler Carl, is Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon. I love Kaiju… and I enjoyed the DCC series… and with a preposterous name like that I figured surely I would love it. The weird thing about this book is that it feels like it comes from an earlier era in Matt Dinniman’s career… when he had not quite found his voice, or more so the voice of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. Technically this was published after the popularity of the DCC series, but I kind of wonder if this was a side project that had been shelved for a bit.

Essentially it is a very graphic bio-horror series about being trapped in a world of giant battling Kaiju and playing the support staff to keep them up and fighting. Have you ever dreamed about having an apartment in the bowel system of a giant monster? Oh yeah… me neither. It is most definitely interesting and I will have zero problem finishing it… but it is also just not really my jam. It makes me also think that maybe LitRPG is not really my genre. All of the game elements did not feel front and center in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series and instead it was more of a character driven tale. This very much feels like a book about a game, and the characters themselves seem paper thin so far. Maybe this will change over time… but so far none of the characters are particularly likeable… whereas I fell in love with Carl and Donut almost immediately. It is wild how much of a difference having POV characters that you care about makes for the reading experience.

If you have yet to be infected by the mind virus that is Dungeon Crawler Carl, I suggest you give it a shot. Matt Dinniman has a fancy new publisher and as a result all of the books are being released with more mass-market friendly covers and artwork. I think they all look pretty cool, but also do not have near the heart… nor the final payoff that the original artwork does. They do however make them look far less like graphic novels… which might have been a turn off for some readers. Whatever form you choose to consume them in… I suggest adding them to your list. Give it at least two books, because it is really in the second book that the series comes into its own. I am hooked and am probably going to be consuming these every single time a new one is released going forward. I will probably seek out another popular LitRPG book just to give the genre another chance… but I am not entirely certain reading about a game is really my jam and that DCC might have simply just been a brilliant outlier.