Blog Features

Low Stake Hot Takes

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Krikket was the first of the mentors to offer to run with Blaugust 2025 this year, and she has been doing a phenomenal job of things. One of the things that they have been cooking is a Community Builder group project trying to get as many people as possible to make a post today on the topic of “Low Stake Hot Takes” aka things that you feel very strongly about… but don’t actually really matter in the grand scheme of things. Since I have largely not been joining in the Blaugust Reindeer Games this year for obvious reasons… I figured I would come out of hibernation and join in this nonsense. Being weirdly opinionated about insignificant things is definitely on brand with my blog. That is of course if my blog stops acting up long enough to get a post out. My web host seems to be having problems this morning, and it took me significantly longer to log in than I was expecting.

Ketchup is a Good Base, but a Bad Sauce

I have very particular feelings about Ketchup, namely that it is a really boring sauce and that there are almost zero reasons why you should be using it. Essentially there are so many sauces that are just Ketchup but better. Barbecue sauce for example, just neatly slots into every scenario where you would normally be using Ketchup. If you are not that adventurous there is always Cocktail Sauce or Sweet and Sour sauce… both of which can be made off a Ketchup base. Hell just adding Sriracha to ketchup makes it instantly a better sauce combination. Barack Obama commented on a podcast once that “In my opinion, and this is controversial in my family, but you should not eat ketchup after the age of 8”. I agree with him wholeheartedly because it just is not a good condiment. Life is way too short to smear bland tomato paste onto your food, you deserve more flavor in your life.

I am sorry Canadians… but Ketchup chips are mid as hell as well. It is the most boring flavor you could ever make chips out of. At least go with All Dressed where something more is happening. Barbecue chips are just Ketchup but better… and honestly same goes with something like Teriyaki where you can make a pretty good version of it if you use Ketchup as your base. I am just saying… Ketchup is incomplete homework. It is almost a good sauce but needs something more to make it work. Hell even the lowly Thousand Island Dressing… is a better Ketchup based sauce than Ketchup is. If you are still using Ketchup you need to expand your horizons is all I am saying. Shit you can just literally mix any other condiment you have in your house with Ketchup and almost instantly make it better. You are too good for Ketchup boo, you deserve better.

If It Makes it Two Years, It will Make it Twenty

So this is less a hot take and more just a guiding principal. Products fail for two reasons really… poor construction or mechanical failure of some critical piece. If I buy something and it survives two years, then more than likely it is going to make it for twenty years because it has left that window where the obvious failures are going to happen. I have an Alarm clock in my bedroom that I got when I was around twelve. That thing has been kicking for thirty seven years at this point and still functions every bit as well as it did when I was a kid. Maybe the buttons require a little more effort to push them, and maybe the plastic on the front is scratched up at this point, but it is a survivor and will likely keep ticking for another generation. Products are made more poorly now than they used to be, but generally speaking even in modern times… if a product you buy survives two years… it will probably just keep chugging along especially if there are minimal moving parts.

There is of course a caveat in this statement that you should do your best to regularly maintain whatever it is. There are some things I do not give a shit about, and they survive almost to spite me. There are of course going to be cases where a power spike will fry something and release the magical blue smoke, that exists outside of this concept. However if you lucked into getting something that was reasonably well assembled and operates within the tolerances it was designed to operate in… it should in theory just keep doing that pending there is no mechanical failure due to stress. I have lots of old things that I just cannot be bothered to replace, and similarly have had situations where I thought I would replace something with a shiny new bauble… only to have to fall back on the reliable one when the new one fails. I think an addendum to this is… when possible buy things with a single function. The more shit you are asking an object to do, the more likely one of them will fail within those first two years.

Listening to an Audiobook Counts as Reading A Book

This one is very near and dear to my heart because I love Audiobooks and my un-diagnosed ADHD tendencies make it very hard for me to pay attention while reading a book. I can read books, I just do so far less frequently than listening to them. My mind wanders when I read a book and before long I realize I have not been paying attention for several pages and have to flip back and re-read segments of the text so that I can glean understanding from them, even though mechanically my brain was going through the motion of consuming it. So the reason why I feel like listening to an Audiobook counts as reading, is because it activates the same centers of my brain while I am doing it. One of my favorite things that I have talked about at length is to listening to an Audiobook while I am keeping myself mechanically busy playing a game that does not require a narrative component. For me these are either MMORPGs where I am just farming content and I have committed everything to muscle memory, or playing something like an ARPG where I am similarly relying on instinct. If I stop and engage with chat or read quest text… I instantly lose the ability to consume the audio that is going into my head and glean any meaning from it.

Essentially I have through testing figured out that whatever part of my brain that does the mechanical motions of gaming, and the part of my brain that understands and engages with narratives… are completely separate. While I don’t have a brain scan or anything like that, I would be willing to bet that if you looked at my brain while reading text and while listening to text narrated… that they would be lighting up the exact same areas. When I shift that narrative processing away from the audio that is playing, the loss of meaning is instantaneous. The same thing happens when I am on a conference call, and a critical priority email comes through… I lose the meaning of what was happening on the call while I am reading that email. So basically my take is that listening is the exact same thing as reading for the purpose of consuming meaning. This might not be a thing for everyone, and maybe I am just wired in this particular way… but I honestly find that I listen better when I am doing something with my hands. I used to get in trouble for this all of the damned time while growing up because I would be voraciously doodling while listening to a lecture in class instead of taking notes. I would cross link the thing that I was drawing with the subject matter that I was learning, and it was almost as though one was encoded with the other.

Similarly if I am having a conversation with someone… I will cross link whatever I was doing at that time with the conversation that I was having. As a result there are all of these inexplicable hot-wired subjects in my brain where I will be thinking about this things, and immediately jump to something totally unrelated other than at one point they were linked while listening to a conversation. Anyways the thing is… because of the way my brain works, I often just use the shorthand of “reading” a book instead of diving into the details that I actually listening to it for 10 hours while playing Path of Exile, because that is a thing that society understands more clearly. I gained the same understanding of the material that someone who read it did, and often times it is way more deeply lodged into my brain because I took away the nervous energy that was blocking my brain from getting into a flow state and listening more intently.

That’s All Folks

I think that is a sufficient amount of opinions for one morning. I have others that I could go into, but then you are getting more into the founding principles of my personality. Things like “never trust someone who does not like animals” feels like it is veering out of the “low stakes” nature of this prompt.


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.

First of Blaugust 2025

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The Blaugust Logo that I did not create for once!

Good Morning Folks! Today is the beginning of August and as such also the official beginning of Blaugust. It is weird to see this event happening and me not really having much to do with it after over a decade of scurrying around to get things up and running. Please note… this is a good kind of weird because it is a miracle that my community is running it for me, since I could not deal with it myself this year. Krikket’s blog has been the place were a lot of details are launching and if you are curious about the event you can check out the intro post and the calendar of events and prompts post to get more details. I am still not entirely certain how much I am going to actively participate in the event, but I am at the very least following the tradition and making a proper First of Blaugust post. Yesterday I posted about the other significance of today’s date so I am not really going to go into that.

Old Man Bel with a Knock-Off Gengar Beanie

Often times we do a bit of an introduction in these here first posts, so I figure I will follow that pattern as well. Hi I am Belghast or Bel as most people who have been around this community tend to call me. I was born near the Gen X/Millennial divide and have some traits of both factions. I started this blog in 2009 during the height of World of Warcraft and it evolved over the years through various games and eventually just became my online public info dump page. Often times my posts are me working through my feelings regarding some subject, and lately with the death of my wife they can be a bit raw at times. In 2013 I challenged myself to blog every single day, and managed this for about three and a half years before relaxing the rigor and just blogging when I am feeling like it… which is still most weekdays. In 2014 this turned into the Blaugust challenge and there has been only one year where I did not run the event prior to this current year where my gracious community is running it in my absence. Over the years it became less about the challenge of blogging every day, and more about giving the blogging community a booster shot to keep folks active the rest of the year.

Double Divine Drop in Path of Exile

Lately you will find me mostly writing about my adventures in various ARPGs like Path of Exile, Last Epoch, and Diablo games. I tend to get fairly deep into the weeks and write posts that will largely be incomprehensible to anyone who is not already bought into the nonsense. However on occasion I do write targeted posts designed at trying to onboard friends into the madness of whatever I am playing. I do my best to be fairly approachable and am willing to share whatever knowledge I happen to have about whatever games I am playing. No question is too silly, especially in a game like Path of Exile that requires serious commitment to actually push through the early hours and succeed. I’ve probably played well over three thousand hours at this point and still consider myself somewhat of a newbie.

Weekly Fractal Nonsense in Guild Wars 2

Over the course of this blog’s life I have devoted a lot of time and effort to various MMORPGs. Most recently that has been Guild Wars 2 because its a-la-carte nature fits my gameplay and mental state most clearly. Similarly I have also created getting started content for that game and many others, but a lot of my posts are recounting whatever stuff I have been getting up to either solo or with my friends. For example on Thursday nights I have been getting together with some of my friends and running Fractals or whatever happens to fit the menu for that night. In theory at some point if we ever gather enough people to do it, we might change these into Strikes which require 10 players instead of 5 players. Occasionally I will flip the script and go hardcore into another MMORPG for awhile, like Final Fantasy XIV or World of Warcraft… but that has happened considerably less frequently lately than it previously did. The forced grouping nature of a lot of those games are a real turnoff when I am deep in turtle mode and staying away from other human beings.

Weekly AggroChat Podcast Episode

In addition to the semi-daily blog, I also record a semi-weekly podcast with a bunch of friends on Saturday nights, and publish the episodes on Sunday. The crew assembled are all folks that I met through gaming including a bunch of people that I used to raid with back in the early days of World of Warcraft (Tam, Thalen, Kodra), and then some friends that I picked up along the way back when twitter was actually good… and not an awful mess. Ammo for example does all of the artwork on this blog and the masthead represents something like a dozen different individual commissions that I have composited together over the years. Grace is someone that I met through Twitter initially but over the last decade we have become close enough that we literally consider each other siblings. Ash is someone that I initially met through Tam but sort of fell in love with them and they are genuinely one of the best people that I know on the planet. Just like with the blog we do absolutely nothing to really promote or monetize anything, because quite frankly it is just a time each week when we set aside to hang out with each other… and a show occasionally happens.

My Delightful Mess of Children

I have three cats with wildly different personalities. Mollie is now our eldest and she has some problems… namely she doesn’t fully understand how cats should cat and is scared of everything. Though at some point over the last year she decided she now lives on the bed… and gripes at me until I make it every morning and put her self warming pad in exactly the right position. Josie is my sweet baby… that has no coordination and can’t quite figure out how to retract her claws at the appropriate time. She has gotten more leery of the world as she has aged, but is still an amazing snuggler when correctly motivated. Gracie is the baby in every sense of that word, and cannot fathom that anyone exists on the planet that does not love her with all of their heart. Especially with the death of my wife, she is pretty much glued to my side 24/7 and goes where I go. Mollie snuggles with me when I first get to bed each night, but runs like hell when Gracie shows up and claims daddy. Josie sadly has not slept on the bed in awhile, but will occasionally jump on my side for some serious head-scratches before wandering off wherever she has decided to go that evening. Josie especially loves windows and sleeps during the day in these upstairs bathroom windows that were about half the size they should be for a cat of her girth.

That’s it folks. That is what you are in for with this blog. I do dumb things and then write about them, and occasionally post cute cat photos. Fair warning there have been a lot of “Sad Bel Times” posts lately as I deal with the ramifications of my wife’s passing. Stay awhile and listen… or don’t… its your call.