Media Consumption

Onslaught with Friends

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Good Morning Folks! Last night I had quite a lot of fun running around in Destiny Rising with Ace and Ammo. Since we had last grouped Ammo had managed to finish up the main storyline which opened access to a whole slew of new activities. She had not experienced Gauntlet Onslaught, aka the raid at all and after taking down the Stronghold we had uncovered for the pack, we queued one by one through all of the parts of it. We also did all of the new Gauntlet Blitz modes that are being previewed right now, and have guaranteed weapon drops associated with them. It was a heck of a lot of fun, and while we struggled a bit with Issakkis, in finding a group that could do the mechanic… we cleared everything without much issue. We did fail once at breakin, but shifted our strategy to make sure that I was on the first bridge crew, and Ace was on the last bridge crew… because we had someone take a key on that last round and just mill around killing random stuff.

The big highlight of the night is that I finally pulled the Renegade ghost shell on my main account, which drops from the raid. I also pulled a second copy of Izanagi’s Burden, which will allow me to progress that weapon at some point for Tan-2 and Umeko. Though to be honest, if I am going to play a precision character I am almost always going to be bringing Helhest. I really love Maru the new champion and am working on leveling her up so that she can become one of my mains for progressing content. I needed someone that I really liked that could handle spread shinkas and she does so masterfully. I think Ace and I are going to hang out tonight and do some of the weekly reset content, and maybe tomorrow during the day a bit since I am off due to the holiday. I have business to take care of in the morning but should be home by noon and ready to roll.

Over in Path of Exile, it was a weekend of finishing things up. I ended the weekend with 115 of 115 maps completed, my four voidstones, and all of the map favorites unlocked except Sirius and the Feared. At some point I will run Sirius, but I have not done enough maps to gain the fragments yet. I just bought fragments for the other ones, and I guess I could do the same for Sirius but it did not feel that pressing. I’ve also completed a t17 which unlocked my six socket map device, and have started running proper maps loaded with scarabs and everything. Right now I am alternating between Shipyard and Toxic Sewer, because both are fairly decent maps for the type of gameplay I play… and not too bad honestly for the breach mechanic. They both offer at least some modicum of bottlenecking for the times when you have to defend Ailith.

When I dinged 96, I devoted some time to running through a bunch of boss encounters and I completed the pinnacle fight for Breach, where you fight both Not-Tul and Not-Esh together. I am not sure if it is always Tul and Esh or if you sometimes get the other combinations of the Breachlords that are not Chayula. The story of this Breach league is really interesting and I love how it is essentially setting up the events that ultimately lead to the coming of Xesht in Path of Exile II. I would love it if we got more of these betweener leagues that move the story forward for each league’s content. For example I would love an updated version of Abyss that brings us closer to what it is like in Path of Exile II, because it is SO MUCH better than defacto Abyss that we currently have. The only league I am scared about them changing is Delve, but that is mostly because I love it so much that I do not want them to fuck it up and make it no longer fun for me.

I’ve been slowly working on my build while leveling my character towards 100, and I picked up a Foulborn Red Dream jewel, which is helpful this league for stacking life. As a result I have almost 8000 life, and there are some other things that I could do to push it higher. Pohx showcased a version of his build running 10k life, and I effectively need to swap from Immortal Flesh to a well crafted Stygian Vise to get there. This was a rather costly swap because the jewel itself was 2 divines, and then each of the five tattoos needed was around 70 chaos. That said… I’ve never run Righteous Fire with this much health so it is at least worth doing for the time being. I feel a bit squishier than I have in previous incarnations of RF, and I am not entirely certain what is going on there. It might be that I currently only have 30% reduced crit damage. I am contemplating swapping in a Taste of Hate to also get more phys to elemental conversion.

I am also still working on getting some better gear upgrades. On the Tree Tree I am working on crafting a new pair of gloves, because while my current ones are pretty solid and I have yet been unable to replace them… I could also have way more life on them. I am still fairly proud of the Archedemon Crown and Shaper Shield that I crafted. I bought a new sceptre which I picked up fairly cheaply, and recently swapped over to a Cloak of Flame with more ignite duration, more fire resistance, and 5% reduced fire damage taken which is super useful. At some point I would love to get a good corruption for Annihilation’s Approach boots, but the best one is super expensive thanks to Pohx’s video about them. My amulet and rings are all sort of trash and could be improved greatly, but it really depends upon how much currency I want to pour into them. Now that I am delving around 200 depth reliably and running t16s easily, I can start generating way more currency.

The other thing that I added was a Light of Meaning, buffing fire damage. I lost some damage in the swap to the Red Dream jewel because I had to give up a jewel with fire multi on it. This single jewel swap pushed me well past where I was originally with the damage and took the entire build up into the 1.5 million-ish range, making the boss fights way more comfortable and the general mapping and delving way faster. Right now I have a jewel with Fire Multi and Max Fire Res on it, and swapping that for one with max life would be helpful… but those are running around 10 div at the moment and I do not have that. I tried the Sir Gog method of crafting Jewels with the Tree Tree for a bit, and didn’t have much luck. I have way more luck printing gloves, so I am back on that path for now. Essentially I am looking for gloves with 21% regen, 100+ flat life, 45+ fire res, 58+ dex… and then anything else that is useful life. I’ve gotten close a few times and have sold the failures. If I get a 21% regen fractured roll I might try either fossil crafting or harvest crafting to get the rest of the way there.

I am basically at the point in the league where I need to start chipping away at achievements so I can get my totem pole. The build is stable and reliable, and I can pretty much do any content on it. I am fishing for an Aul in Delve, but have not had much luck. One thing that I have noticed is that I think they have killed the curse on hit rings from Delve, either that or made them extremely uncommon. I’ve cleared a bunch of the elemental nodes down there and not seen a single one yet. I always beeline for these because they also reward elemental fossils, which I find way more useful than any of the loot other than the curse rings. According to the trade site, they still exist… but have either had their rarity cranked or my luck has just been shit. The death of Hexblast Mines though, pretty much decimated the market for these so it is not like they were selling well anyways. I used to throw 20c on each of them in the hopes that maybe one of them would move, but given the deflation of this league it seems like they are all around 1c each.

In other unrelated news… I have been watching Frieren for the last few weeks and finished up season one on Saturday. This show is extremely delightful and I highly suggest giving it a watch if you like that D&D party vibe. I would say it has thematic notes aligned with Delicious in Dungeon/Dungeon Meshi except it is effectively the tale in reverse. Frieren was the Mage for a party that defeated the Demon King, and a huge part of the show is going on another adventure to somewhat retrace the steps that the first party made. Elves are effectively immortal in this universe, so the march of time just works differently for her… and the decade spent partying together… felt like a brief interaction for her. Through retracing the steps she is effectively realizing what she missed. You would think this would make the show deeply melancholy but it isn’t really, and through retracing the steps… she realizes how special the first journey was. Super charming honestly, and well worth a watch of the first 28 episodes. I will be anxiously awaiting the drop for season 2.

Animation Adoration

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Good Morning Folks. I’ve been on a bit of an anime kick of late. I am not entirely certain what led me down this rabbit hole but something… prompted me to give Dan Da Dan a shot. It took about three episodes before I was hopelessly hooked, but last weekend I spent most of Saturday snuggled with cats and chain watching my way through season 1 and most of season 2. This afternoon/evening the last episode of Season 2 should be releasing and I am looking forward to it with great fervor. The thing is anime is something that I have always tangentially enjoyed, but it is a world I have never really felt part of entirely. I mean in high school I was tracking down copies of Akira or Vampire Hunter D… which were still shockingly hard to find… or the Final Fantasy V based series. I am also addicted enough to Bleach that I snagged a chunk of the intro to use for the AggroChat opening. However modern Anime is just not something I have indulged, because it was hard to listen to something for hours upon end because I did not want to isolate myself from my spouse for that long, and she was VERY much not into it.

However with me now being entirely alone… for quite literally the first time in my life… it is no longer that big of a deal. I don’t really love reading television… but most everything these days seems to be available in dual language versions. Maybe at some point I will actually attempt to learn Japanese, which is a thing I have wanted to do since I was a teen… and learned that a lot of video games came out in that language first. I will likely never go down the rabbit hole of manga… because reading them in reverse order is something that will always fuck with my head. I tried to do this with Trigun Extreme, because I love Vash the Stampede immensely… and just could not bring myself to stay hooked. I guess the question is… for someone who loves Dan Da Dan, Fullmetal Alchemist, Bleach, Darker Than Black, Cowboy BeBop, and Ghost in the Shell… what series would you suggest that I give a shot? Drop me a line below.

I’ve also been diving into Pantheon… which brings up the age old question of is it anime if it does not come from Japan? I’ve always said yes. I consider Avatar in its many forms Anime, and as such I consider Pantheon by Amazon to be very much one as well. This is a wild trans-humanism ride in the vein of William Gibson novels, asking the question… what is humanity once it uploads itself into the cloud. I highly suggest giving it a watch. I just wrapped up season one and it was phenomenal, and expect to start on Season 2 probably Friday night… since tonight is our usual Thursday night Guild Wars 2 romp. When a cartoon brings you to the point of tears… you know it is good. Do I think I will ever get to the point of being an Otaku that goes to Anime conventions? Honestly not likely, but I do greatly appreciate the level of joy that folks bring to that world. For example this live action dance/cosplay version of the season two Dan Da Dan intro is phenomenal.

Over in Guild Wars 2 I wrapped up the Fractal Incursion Champion achievement which gives you two bag slots, two 20 slot bags, a host of exotic gear tokens, an ascended accessory with 10 agony resistance, and at the very end an universal legendary weapon starter kit granting you access to any Generation One legendary. I am trying to decide what I want to go for with this thing, and most likely… I am probably going to craft the spear since I generally like using it on almost every character. Right now I have sword, axe, longbow, hammer, and 3 of the two handed swords so that I could craft eternity. The other option that I might go for is a Staff, since I tend to use this on Necromancer and would not mind getting into Druid at some point for support. I am likely going to sit on it for awhile. I just cashed in my eternal ice for volatile magic so at some point I should be able to buy up a bunch of trophy bags to get close to crafting whichever gift I am missing. I am still super low on mystic clovers so I should probably wait until I regenerate those a bit before crafting another legendary.

In another Guild Wars 2 news… I am missing two badges from the investigation achievements. The thing is I know where the two missing badges that I need are, I have just not been randomed into either of those fractals since learning this knowledge. When I was looking for a guide… there are times I forget just how damned good the wiki for this game is. All of the information that you need to know to be able to find the badges is located in the Troubleshooting 1 and Troubleshooting 2 wiki articles. Basically I need to run the Volcano and Snowblind again, and veer off the main path to get both of the badges I am missing. I think maybe in the situation from the other day where most of the party bailed, it was probably that they were just needing the badge as they disappeared shortly after we got to the fireball section on the Volcano where the badge is located at.

In another news, since I seem to be in MMOFPS mode right now with Destiny Rising, I thought I would give EVE Vanguard a shot. There is currently a free trial event going on, and you can download the stand alone client through the EVE Vanguard website. I’ve not made it terribly far but thusfar it does seem to be a very responsive shooter, but I am missing the jumping mechanics from Destiny games. I will probably play through the rest of the extended tutorialization at some point over the weekend. The whole proximity chat thing is a bit weird to get used to, but voice chat felt pretty seamless. I need to change the keybind to my normal push to talk because pressing and holding left alt felt extremely foreign to me. I did not make it super far last night because I was meeting up with Ace to play some Destiny Rising.

One of the things that I found interesting playing with a lower level player in Destiny Rising, is just how reasonable the scaling ended up being. Ace was 38 and I am of course capped at 80 and progressed quite a bit past that, and collectively we could do their content level without it feeling like I was dominating everything. I was not one tapping every single mob at least with weapons, but my ability scaling and better artifacts did seem to make a bigger difference when it came to clearing trash mobs. They pushed past 40 and I think when you hit 46 you can start running heroic content, so at some point we will likely flip to me leading the party and dragging them along in bigger kid stuff. If nothing else it would allow them to start collecting mythic weapons early I think. At some point I need to focus on some of the activities that can award exotic mods for items and exotic artifacts. I am not sure if I have to wait until Acclaim 10 or not for those, but I am getting closer and supposedly the patch that was applied over night sped up the leveling a bit.

I have an awful lot to keep me engaged right now… which is good because I need it. I have Diablo IV Season 10 that I am still contemplating trying out, and then in early October is Legion Remix in World of Warcraft which I will probably also give a shot. Distractions keep me from feeling so painfully alone.

Weird Headspace Time

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Good Morning Folks. I’ve had a weird week and a lack of desire to put pen to digital page. As a result you’ve only gotten Monday, Wednesday, and Friday posts instead of one each day. Largely it has felt like I have not really had much to talk about, because in truth I am struggling to find purchase on anything that brings me joy. Part of this is due to the fact that we got a partial RTO (return to office) order yesterday, starting in July… after five years of being fully remote. I knew this was coming down, but I just did not know the timing. As such I am struggling to concentrate on much of anything, and while I am enjoying what I have played of Expedition 33 so far… it is just too much thinking. I need shut my brain off entertainment so that I can stew in my own mess and sort through my thoughts and feelings. I’ve also just sort of been bone weary tired lately, which is not helping either.

I finished Andor season 2 however, and it is quite possibly the best Star Wars anything out there. Everything else is going to feel like a bit of a let down after how phenomenal this tale has been. At some point I want to watch Rogue One, which was already my new favorite Star Wars movie… to see how the character of Andor evolved between the two properties and see if it matches up cleanly at all. Even if you are not a traditional Star Wars enjoyer, you owe it to yourself to watch the two seasons of Andor. Even from a pure artistic standpoint it is so lavish and stylish, giving us a whole new view of the galaxy far far away. While we are only getting two seasons of Andor, I would honestly really love to see some more connected properties about characters that were introduced here as gap filler between these events and the more familiar events of the Star Wars original trilogy.

I also finally got around to watching Freaky Tales, which is a weird 1980s quadrilogy of odd tales… that feels oddly adjacent to the connected story-lines in Pulp Fiction. The trailer gives the impression that it is much more of a fixed narrative, rather than four individual stories, each from the point of view of a group of characters. The events of everything weave in and out of the narrative, but effectively each story is a closed loop. What is wildest about this sequence is that apparently they are based on actual events that took place in Oakland around 1987. The entire story is woven by Too Short, who is played in the movie by an actor… but actually makes a cameo himself. There are a bunch of odd cameos, specifically Tom Hanks as a gambling den running cinephile video store owner was specifically out of left field. It is well worth the watch, especially if you grew up in the 80s and were ever a member of any of the various subcultures from that era.

Last night I started watching my way through Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld which is a Dave Filoni animated show tracing a series of events centered around Asajj Ventress and Cad Bane. I am not sure if there is an eventual crossover in the series between the two characters, but thusfar there appears to be a sequence of Ventress specific episodes and then a sequence of Bane specific episodes. I’m only a few episodes into the Bane part of the show, but the Ventress episodes were phenomenal. I’ve always liked this character, specifically the interesting redemption arc that they have given her. She went from being just a really cool looking villain to a very textured character over the source of the Clone Wars series. I think that has honestly been my favorite part about the Filoni-verse is how his shows have taken relatively paper thin characters and added mass and form to them.

So when I said that I was done with Sir Gog league… I had apparently lied. I’ve needed something that I can shut my brain off while playing… and Path of Exile at this point is one of those things. I’ve committed most of the game to muscle memory, and I accidentally landed on a fairly reasonable build. I’ve continued down the path of Sunder, but making it do lots of fire damage and leaning into buffing that through a few support gems. Combine this with a bunch of gear that I am getting through running Kingsmarch shipping missions, and you have a reasonably tanky character that does fairly decent damage. That said… the boss fights continue to be complete nonsense. They just feel progressively more and more cheap, like Grinding Gear Games was setting out just to find brutal ways to kill players rather than making well thought out fights.

I do think I have hit my hard limit though with this fight, because I have reached the point where I just cannot grind through an encounter. During the Doedre fight in Act 8… I am doing almost zero amount of damage to the boss before the massive room wide area of effect attacks take me out. All I am really doing at this point is incrementing the death meter, and showing zero sign of making it through the fight. I think this is the point where my character just ends. I made a good attempt at getting through the gauntlet, but it beat me. I could get my second ascendancy points, but I am not sure that would actually buy me anything significantly in the survival department. Like I said before, all of the builds that seemed to do this when it was a hardcore event were some form of miner that just one-shot everything. I believe this was during the seismic trap is overpowered days of the game.

The other game I have been playing quite a bit of lately is AFK Journey. Normally I have this as part of my nightly before sleep ritual of playing through a bunch of daily missions, and then never really getting around to anything else. One of my friends though is looking for someone to duo a bunch of corrupted monster encounters, and in order to get to them I have to have progressed a certain amount of way through the storyline. So as a result I am mainlining the story and trying to get as much of it knocked out as I can. Yesterday I believe I cleared the bulk of the seasonal storyline, and am now in optional territory. However I am going to keep cranking through this just to make sure there are no walls later in the game when we actually attempt to group up and do the content. I still find the game deeply charming and am consistently shocked at just how much of it you can play without having spent a dime on it. It is not that I am against spending money on games… even mobile games… but games like this don’t really give you any reasonable feeling means of doing so. All of the money sinks are specifically designed for whaling out.

Anyways that is where I am at. This is going to be an exceptionally busy weekend because Mother’s Day has snuck up on me once again and I have no clue how we are going to see everyone within the constrains of a single two day weekend. Hopefully y’all have your own affairs figured out, because I surely do not.

Recent Media Round-Up

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Hey Folks! I have been more or less taking the last several days off because I am technically on vacation. Due to the less-than-opportune placement of July 4th, I took off today and also largely checked out of doing blog posts late last week giving myself a bit of a vacation. This morning however I had to do some work really quickly and make sure that timecards were approved. So I thought that I might as well bang out a blog post because I have some things to talk about. More specifically I have watched quite a bit of movies and series of late, and thought I would give a bit of a round-up of some of my thoughts regarding them.

Nimona

I feel like all of you need to stop what you are doing right now and watch Nimona. It is available on Netflix, and if you don’t have access to Netflix… then pirate the fuck out of it because it is very good. If you are/were a fan of Lumberjanes or the most modern incarnation of She-Ra or pretty much anything else from ND Stevenson, then you are probably going to love this. If not… then you will probably still love this because it is exceptionally well-written. It is a story about trying to find your place in the world when that world often is diametrically opposed to your existence. It has a lot of things to say, but also… I want Nimona to be my sidekick. I had not been following the production mess that surrounded this property, but it sounds like it is a sheer miracle that this came out at all.

Very much a good film for the entire family as well. I highly suggest you check it out.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

First I feel like I have to say that I don’t hate Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The movie had problems and I feel like the whole aliens thing was pretty divisive, but for me most of the problems with that movie came from the fact that it looked wrong. We were still in the era of CGI “all the things”, and it looked it… and now I feel like we realize what we lost during the CGI boom years… and folks go out of their way to make things feel like practical effects even when they may not be. Dial of Destiny harkens back to the era of Last Crusade, and while it is still maybe a bit busy and a little bit less about bringing the audience along for the hunt, it feels more grounded in at least imagined reality.

I think what I like the most about this movie is that it serves as a nice bookend for the entire series. Indy is still punching Nazis and still chasing objects of tremendous power but is very much a man out of time. He doesn’t really fit into the world of the moon landing, but no longer has the vim and vigor to really keep chasing forbidden treasure. Dial of Destiny serves as a great last hurrah for Indiana Jones and hopefully can put the character to bed on a good note. If this series continues, it needs to continue in the hands of someone other than Indy, and at most him serving as a supporting character. He has had his curtain call, and I feel satisfied with this movie being the last stanza.

The Flash

I am not going to spend much time talking about what a seeming shithole of a human being Ezra Miller has turned out to be. I don’t really care much about the current state of the DC Universe. I’ve watched the various movies, and enjoyed them enough to keep watching them… but also never really felt the love for them that I have in the MCU. I was mostly interested in this film as it serves to give a last hurrah to “my Batman” aka Michael Keaton. What I was not expecting was to enjoy the film as a whole anywhere near as much as I did. I’ve always sort of hated Ezra Miller’s version of Barry Allen. I found the character annoying as shit and extremely abrasive… and this movie goes a long way to resolving that problem and shows reach growth of the character.

Michael Keaton as Batman and Sasha Calle as Kara Zor-El were both phenomenal. The two different Barry Allens though… felt almost like watching two different actors in the same way as you do when Tatiana Maslany plays dozens of unique characters in Orphan Black. The only disappointment in the movie though is the fact that I expected something that just simply was not there. Knowing that the DCU is being rebooted… I expected this movie to play more into that fact. There were a lot of deep cuts showing alternate timelines like the Nick Cage Superman… but the entire thing wraps up in a very weird note that makes me question what this means for everything that comes forward. It doesn’t so much give the current DCU one last send-off as much as it just deeply muddies the waters. It is still a good film but I would probably suggest waiting for it to release on streaming before you watch it.

The Witcher Season 3 Part 1

Unfortunately, Netflix has realized the error of its ways when it comes to releasing episodes… and has begun awkwardly cleaving a series in half so that they can have two different epic premiere dates. This weekend the first part of The Witcher Season 3 dropped, and with it comes the first five episodes that end on a bit of a cliffhanger. I have a lot of issues with this show… not the least of which is the fact that Henry Cavil will be moving on from the series after this season. I get WHY he would want to leave however because the showrunners and writers are needlessly fucking with details constantly. The Witcher is one of those shows that is good… so long as you know nothing about the supporting material. It reminds me of my early experience with the Harry Dresden series prior to reading the novels. I thought it was pretty good… until I actually read the books and then suddenly got annoyed at the weird inconsistencies.

I think what bothers me the most about The Witcher series, is the fact that entire scenes have been lifted from whole cloth from either the books or the games… but little details have been fucked with for no apparent reason. The worst of this is the way that they are suddenly changing the entire personality and motivation of different characters. I am sorry folks… but they did Eskel dirty last season… and this season they are making some truly bizarre fucking choices with Radovid. The series version of Djikstra is fucking heinous as well and is nowhere near as compelling of a character. Basically, the show feels sloppy, and that is maybe the worst thing a show based off course material can be. The only reason why I kept watching is that they’ve at least nailed the pivotal characters of Geralt, Ciri, Yennifer, and Dandelion/Jaskier. The source material is so fucking strong… that it just infuriates me that the folks writing this show seem determined to sloppily copy the original homework.

Final Thoughts

I cannot understate how much I enjoyed seeing the Keaton Batman ride again. Have you seen any of the media that I talked about? What were your thoughts? What things did I completely miss? I’ve tried to keep everything spoiler free because I do think that everything was worth watching at least once. Again I highly suggest that everyone stream Nimona because it was so freaking good.