Blog Features

Blaugust in Another Castle

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Good morning folks. I am slowly getting back to my normal self. It is going to be a long road… covered with many potholes… but bit by bit I am returning to some resemblance of the person I was. I got a second good night of sleep, and probably would have gotten more hours were it not for the fact that my mom called as I was heading to bed… and then talked for an hour and a half. I love her… but she has never known social queues and also has zero chill when it comes to not telling me everything that she is thinking at that exact moment. She like everyone simply cares about my well being and is worried about me. Legitimately… I never knew this many people actually cared. I’ve mostly thought of myself as background noise most of the time, but apparently I am noticed and appreciated.

My friend Krikket has gotten the ball rolling on the Blaugust 2025 festivities with the traditional Blaugust is Coming post detailing all of the information. My mind went in a bajillion directions when my wife passed away, but one of them was to go into the mentor area of the Blaugust discord and admit to them that I could not do this. Krikket was the first person to offer to take up the mantle, but almost immediately everyone chimed in and just ran with it. This is the most beautiful thing for me because I wanted to build some semblance of a community that could exist without me… and apparently I did just that. I think it was Wilhelm/TAGN that created the logo… which admittedly captures the essence of pretty much every logo I have ever created. They busily planned in the mentor channel and I sort of let it all wash over me, not really paying much attention until yesterday when the announcement post went live.

I cannot fully express in words how thankful I am that this is going to happen, and that I am not having to touch anything. I am still trying to keep the media kit page updated, since that page gets a lot of hits during the event. You can find relevant things like the sign-up form and links to the various social accounts and discord. I am not 100% sure how much I am going to participate in Blaugust proper but I am signing up. It is going to be interesting taking a backseat to this event, but quite honestly… I am very happy I am not having to drive. That was honestly a thing that I learned with the guild that I lead in World of Warcraft… I mad everything too personal to my vision. In truth with Blaugust I wanted to create something that was malleable and could be formed into whatever vision it needed to take that year. As such I tried my best to keep a light touch on the steering wheel so that if I ever needed to jump from the moving vehicle I could, and let someone else take over. Apparently that more or less has worked.

Rebuilding Normal

I’ve had this string of big deep emotional posts lately, but I am not sure what new revelations I have for you this morning. I’ve come to realize that I was not the one mangling our sheets… because making the bed each morning is as simple of an act as pulling up the corner I turned down. I’ve also decided that laundry is super simple since I almost entirely wear dark colors, and can simply chuck things directly into the washing machine until I have enough to run a load and then run it regardless of what day of the week it is. I ordered a whole mess of Chinese food last night so that I can eat on it for most of the weekend. Other than that I am just trying to carve out something resembling a new normal. I need to talk to my boss this morning and find out how Human Resources wants me to codify all of the time I have been taking. I made some early inroads for dealing with some of the financial and insurance things, but quickly came to the point where I am going to have to have final death certificates before I can actually wrap any of that up.

I desperately need to go out into the garage and clean, so that I am going to have room to stack the things that will be coming from her classroom. Essentially on the day of the visitation, her teacher friends offered to pack up her room for me and separate what were educational resources and what were personal effects into different sets of boxes. The thing is… my wife would have wanted to pack everything up herself, but I am just going to allow them to help me with this thing. My vehicle can hold a lot of stuff and it will be easy enough to drag things home. I just need to clear out some of the boxes that I have not broken down yet, and take a load of cardboard to the recycler in order to make room to stack this new stuff. The ideal time to give away teachers resources is right now, just ahead of a new school year… but I am not sure I am going to have it in me to deal with any of it this year.

She also took up 80% of our closet and I intend to go through all of that at some point and find some organization to donate it to. There is always a high demand for professional clothing that fits larger women’s sizes, especially among the whole “pathway to work” type organizations. So I know at some point I would want to donate that, because there is no use in any of the clothing effective just rotting in my closet. We already regularly donated quite a bit of stuff so I have zero qualms about this being the avenue she would have wanted. Her dad was saying something about selling things… but he has always focused on the money and for me… it is more about helping others than trying to profit from this situation. Sure we spent plenty of money over the years on nice things… but I largely view that as the cost of existing as a human and not something I am going to ever attempt to recoup.

There are things that I want to do… but I have to reach the point where I don’t feel guilty for doing them. Like we had talked about getting rid of the nasty loveseat in the loft, so I am absolutely going to do that. I am however probably going to replace it with another comfy couch option and set up my consoles out there. Originally we had planned on turning it into a reading nook for her to curl up, and that would have been lovely… but that is also not necessarily me. I prefer reading from bed when I am reading books, and then more often tend to consume books in audio book form while I am playing games. So I am will be taking the initial inspiration and then just shifting it to make sense for me. I still want to maintain the living room as a more generic space and don’t want all of my consoles hooked up out there. I have my Switch 2 hooked up but that is about it, and that is also a pretty lightweight affair.

Whenever I deal with giving away the educational resources in her office… I am probably going to start shifting that space into more of a hobby room. I used to love painting miniatures, and I just never really maintained that hobby throughout the years. I liked painting way more than I actually liked playing the war games associated with it. I’ve always wanted to get into 3D Printing, so I am thinking her office might be the ideal place to set that up. Again… I am going to have to reach an emotional point where I can deal with even going into her office… let alone packing it up and giving it again… but someday. I feel guilty even thinking these thoughts. I don’t want to erase my wife from this house, but it also seems silly to have entire rooms of the house that are no longer functional because they were devoted to a thing that will never happen again. She was way less emotional about everything than I am… so I would like to think she would want me to re-engineer the spaces to fit my needs. Its just really fucking hard.

She was always the person who kicked me into action on all of the little ideas that we had. I was the one who was mostly happy with the status quo, because the status quo was simple. I am going to have to channel my wife if I ever want to get anything done. I miss her so god damned much. I am so angry that this happened and I am not sure that will ever change. She was my person, and I never imagined a world without her. Now that I have to deal with that reality… I am trying my best to cope with it. One life ended on July 2nd at 8 pm… and out of the ashes of it I have to figure out how to build a new life.

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.

Reject Content Mills

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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday the news broke that Polygon, a gaming website that I actually really enjoyed was sold to Valnet. This is a company largely known for being a content mill, with pretty awful working conditions, and also know for being exceptionally litigious. This is not necessarily a new thing and part of the larger general trend of the “enshitification” of games media. Similarly yesterday it was announced that Jeff Grubb left Giant Bomb which comes on the back of multiple rounds of layoffs in 2023 and 2024… and will likely signal the official end of that site. This comes after being acquired by Fandom, aka the folks behind some of the absolute worst gaming wikis you have ever had the displeasure of reading. This is a tale that has been told so many times in the past from the gutting of Vice Media to the explosion of Joystiq and all of its subsequent brands… to the gobbling up of so many sites you cared about by Ziff Davis. Though honestly… those under the thumb of ZD seem to be faring better than others at least thusfar.

Why is this happening? Because someone out there thinks they can turn a buck from “enthusiast industries”, so that they can convert your love of something… into questionable advertising dollars. The thing is… the shedding of writers generally comes first as part of the “restructuring” plans. Generally speaking we flock to specific sites because they develop a voice, a voice that we feel represents our certain perspective on the world. We develop a relationship with these sites, because we begin to feel like we can trust their opinions. The thing is… “voice” is not what a large media conglomerate wants. They want slick advertiser friendly prose devoid of emotion or opinion, that effectively amounts to a regurgitation of whatever was said in the press release. I know this because I am on the same mailing lists as all of these folks and see the press releases a few days ahead of the articles coming out.

I am small and unimportant, and hopefully so much so that no one cares enough to notice me writing about this topic. The thing is… I am also someone who paid attention to those bylines and noticed who’s voice I was caring about. One of the brilliant things that has been happening almost as a counter movement to the corporatization of games media… is that the authors have been spinning off and creating their own things. What I suggest to you as my reader, is to stop going to these sites that have become devoid of spirit… and instead make a conscious effort to go to more independent voices. That is not to say that these sites do not have their own conflicts of interest as they attempt to fund the ventures through a combination of patreon and ad revenue… but they are better than the alternative.

Massively OP

When Joystiq largely blew up in 2015, it caused several of the sites that I cared about the most to effectively die. One of these sites was Massively, because at that point I had transitioned from only caring about World of Warcraft, to caring about MMORPGs in general. Thing is over the years of being on gaming Twitter I had become friends with a good number of the writers there, so when they decided to spin off and make their own thing happen, I was one of the original backers of the kickstarter. Even today I chip in a meager $5 per month and have done so since the patreon went live. I don’t actually READ any of the news through Patreon because quite honestly I cannot be bothered, especially when I have it delivered to my Mastodon feed their their aggregator account there. However I suggest you get in the habit of reading the about page for the sites you are consuming, so you can understand a bit better about how they are organized.

Blizzard Watch

Another Site that spun up as Joystiq was dying, was Blizzard Watch. This site was crafted out of the flames of WoW Insider, which is responsible for my very first viral moment on this blog. This is another site created by a dedicated batch of writers who care deeply about Blizzard games, and kept writing about them. This is another patreon that I backed for quite awhile, and they even have set up residence on our very own Gamepad for their Mastodon account. While my own interest in Blizzard games has waned over the years, the site has continued to be an excellent source of news. Once again check out their About page to understand who is making the site what it is.

Aftermath

Remember the bit where I said follow the writers behind these sites? Well for years I have followed Gita Jackson, first on Twitter and then later on Bluesky. During one of the dust ups at Kotaku, they spun off into Vice Media’s Waypoint. Then with Vice Media blew up and killed Waypoint and a few other sub-brands, I followed them as they branched out to do their own thing with a bunch of other folks from Waypoint, called Aftermath. Like I have said numerous times, you can learn a lot about a site by reading the About link. I follow the site’s BlueSky account and they tend to cover anything major going on in the gaming industry. If you’ve never read the site, I highly suggest you check it out.

404 Media

Similarly when Vice Media exploded, it also took out Motherboard, which was a more generalist technology issues site. I followed the team over to 404 Media when they launched it in in 2023. Lately they have been chasing the Signal messages thread in United States political discourse, but they have also devoted a lot of page time to investigating various purveyors of AI slop. As far as authors go I specifically really enjoy the writing of Jason Koebler. Mostly I am throwing this out there to show that there are independent sites that have spun off for almost every subject you can think of, because the general abuse of writers has been wide spread enough to general an entire industry of folks who have had enough of this bullshit.

Loading Ready Run

I cannot talk about independent games journalism and entertainment however without also mentioning what I consider to be the gold standard. I have loved Loading Ready Run for so many years, and remember back when they were tied to the Escapist. Originally known for skit comedy, the have become this entire cottage empire making content about the things they care about. Qwerpline is one of my favorite things to exist on this planet, or whatever planet Nsberg is located on. Checkpoint embedded above is effectively required viewing every single week, and it is pretty common that we end up talking about some topic first introduced there on our own podcast. Over the years they have segmented their YouTube channel a bit into one devoted to Video Games, Tabletop Games, Magic the Gathering, Comedy, and then one that is mostly their live productions. Better than all of this is the fact that many of the folks are actually active on Mastodon, my social network of choice. At this point I assume you know about LRR but just in case… my god you have been missing a lot.

Independent Bloggers

Whether or not I necessarily intended to… through the poorly thought out creation of Blaugust in 2013… I have become a bit of a nexus at least in the games blogging community. Each year I update my blogroll on the side of this blog with the current list of participants, and among that are a number of really great voices that are out there saying the things they think about games on a regular basis. While some folks view Blaugust as a race to be run, and stop being quite so active after August has passed. There are folks like Wilhelm with The Ancient Gaming Noob that you can almost set your watch by with just how frequently he posts. Similarly Roger is constantly spinning up discussions about how he feels regarding games and media on Contains Moderate Peril. Legitimately just go down the list from Scopique, to Tipa, to Nimgimli, and countless more you have a constant flow of posts coming from independent voices. All of which are more thought provoking than anything you would read on an industrial slop site.

Basically I am just trying to show you that there are options out there rather than supporting these sites that have proven year after year not to support their writers. The answer to “fixing the internet” is to take back some control, and that means adding a bit more intentionality into your media consumption. The content mills need our eyeballs to succeed, and ultimately it is our responsibility to take them away. Do I think this will change anything? Hell no… I am not that deluded. However I did feel like I had to say something.

Froggy and Capy Are Best Friends

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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.