Cats

The Evil Lemon

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Good Morning, Folks. I am on day two of the evil lemon, which is hooked up and feeding me poison over the course of 46 hours. I had been warned that the negative cold reactions from the Oxaliplatin escalates over time, and so far that is absolutely a thing. Essentially, any time I touch anything metal… or something that is even coated with rubber over top of metal… I get this tingle sensation in a bad way. I am hoping that it phases out around Thursday like it did last time, because so far it is not fun at all. I’ve cranked up the temp in the house, and it does not seem to be helping at all. Last round of chemo I struggled with sorting out my blood pressure, and that seems to be stable this go round, so I am hoping I will have an easier go for this first week. We had some pretty awful tornadic storms last night, so I really did not sleep terribly well. I might end up taking off the afternoon and trying to catch up on sleep. I am at least getting a bit more used to sleeping with this dumb bag hooked up to me, because from midnight on, I think I got pretty solid sleep until 5:30 or so.

I figured I would share another picture that I took the other day, prior to starting chemo. This is “Splotchie”, and he has been hanging out lately. The positive is that, for being a grizzled tomcat, he seems to get along well enough with Greybie and does not abuse him. I am not sure if I have ever shared a picture of Splotchie on the blog, but he is not friendly, unfortunately. He tolerates me being around, but will not let me get anywhere near him. I love his markings, though, they always remind me of a jaguar. I keep thinking that at some point, he will be willing to let me pet him. There is also another tomcat from a few doors down that is a tux, who will let me pet him, but I have not caught a photo of him. He belongs to this little kid down the street, but he sneaks out and comes to visit. So long as they all leave Greybie alone, I am fine with as many visitors as they want.

In gaming news I have been poking around in Last Epoch again. On the podcast this past weekend, Tam was sharing how broken Fire Aura was, and I noticed that Maxroll seemed to have a pretty solid build for it. I have taken a relatively crazy path through the campaign, with jumping on the first two dungeon skips and then leveling up through Majassa. In lieu of the final act, I started working on Monoliths but I might go back and finish the ancient timeline just to get the bonus points. All in all this build is nonsense, and you can legitimately run around similar to Righteous Fire and just let your Fire Aura burn through most of the trash mobs. The specific version that I am running converts fire to frost damage and freezes targets, which is a thing that I have always thought would be an interesting alternate version of Righteous Fire.

I just got high enough level to be able to equip a lot of the gear that I had been holding onto. There are several pieces that I need to convert to legendaries, and I need to sort out how best to deal with the rest of my resistances. Overcapping Cold Resistance is a thing that buffs Fire Aura, so I am trying to stack that on as many pieces as I can. One of the things that I am seeking the most is a 2lp or better version of the Mad Alchemist’s Laddle. Similarly, I would love to find a 3lp or better Transcriber’s Gavel. I am also always on the lookout for better versions of the Last Nomad rings. What will really help is getting an Omnis amulet because it comes with a ton of resistances. That is going to rely on farming a bunch of 200+ corruption Shade of Orybuss, and unfortunately, as many of these as I have killed… I have yet to see a single one drop. I could also farm Confluence of Oblivion, Woven Echoes, but I am not sure how many of those I currently have.

I came really close to downing Aberroth the other night, with a wipe at 4%. The problem with doing harder content is that I am just too disorganized right now. I think in the meantime, I am going to focus mostly on knocking out monoliths that I have not unlocked on my Spellblade. This will get me some more levels and potentially more gear, and then when I get up there in levels, I might make a shot at Aberroth on the spellblade. I did tweak my Forged Weapons build and dropped the forged armor pet, and picked up holy symbol instead for some additional damage output and survival. That seems to have been a generally positive shift, and was what led to getting Aberroth to 4%. In theory, I probably need to try and get a better two-handed weapon, since the forged weapons inherit those stats. Volcanus has been great, but mostly I just need to craft a better version that has some more base damage stats on it.

I am also poking at Path of Exile still. I am 87% through level 99, am effectively 2 pips and some change to go until level 100. I’m running my pretty chill Delve tree, and gathering up a couple of maps worth of Sulphite before diving down into the mines to burn through it. Delve is shockingly good experience gain, especially around the 250-300 depth realm. This also really does not require much out of me, and I can turn my brain off and just grind. At the very least, it requires way less forethought than Last Epoch does at the moment. That is one of the things I love about Path of Exile, is that it feels like it has way more reliable defenses than Last Epoch does. Sure, there can be some spikes in damage, but it feels like it happens way less often in POE. I think more than anything, I just really want to hit level 100, so that I can go back to some spicy mapping to knock out some of the other challenges.

I am doing okay, and other than the worse spikes in cold reaction… this round of chemo seems to mostly be going more smoothly. I think a lot of the troubles that I had last round were blood pressure related, and I have mostly sorted that out. I look forward to getting unhooked from the evil lemon tomorrow, and will hopefuly be able to get proper rest again.

Yon Bus of Struggle

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I am getting around to posting a bit later than normal today, because I am a bit sick and fighting some generic respiratory crud. I think it is largely allergies because we are in Ragweed season… and it is by far my worst allergy. I also kicked up a bunch of dust last week in the garage and think I am paying for it. I am struggling a bit right now and find myself in a bit of a funk where nothing seems to “fit right”. I am certain I am dealing with a depression, because how could I not after losing my spouse earlier this year. There is likely no way I got out of that without mental and emotional baggage that I am dealing with pretty regularly. My emotions feel like a scalded tongue… that I cant quite taste things in the way that I used to before. Joy is hard to find… and I keep wandering back and forth between things without much luck. The other day Tipa commented “I don’t know how you fit so much into your day!” and the secret is… I keep bouncing around like mad between a dozen different things and never really making much traction in any of them. I also have no other human to suggest that I do something other than desperately look for something to kill the time.

I am still popping into Destiny Rising each day to play some of the various daily activities, but this is honestly a game that I find myself enjoying the most when Ace and I happen to connect with our schedules at the same time. I am doing the thing that is very familiar in Gacha games where I am trying not to spend any currency and bank it up, so that when the next character banner drops I can immediately purchase a bunch of pulls for it. I am 16 away from the five star choice on the default banner, and whenever I hit that, I am likely going to choose Ning Fei so I have an Arc Champion that is actually pretty decent. Mostly I am chipping away at various lore tasks from different champions and forcing myself to do the planetary dailies on Ikora just to get them done. I think my favorites are still Jolder and Estela right now… with Gwynn and Umeko being close in the running. Wolf has sadly been relegated to the sidelines, and I actually started playing some Tan-2 to get used to the way that he plays a bit.

In Diablo 4 I have officially respecced to the proper endgame build, but am still lacking some of the components. It gave me a bit of survival so that Torment III is now as comfortable as Torment II was previously. Bossing on T3 is still a bit of a crapshoot and depends upon the type of damage that a given boss is dealing. My resistances are still complete crap, and I should probably work on that. The biggest challenge that I am having at the moment is that everything I am doing… feels like a complete waste of time. I need two things… an Ancestral Vasily’s Prayer, and an Ancestral Tibault’s Will. The first comes specifically from Echo of Varshan which means I need to be running Whisper caches to get keys for that. The second is a general drop unique and can come specifically from anywhere… but specifically is apparently on Andariel and Harbinger of Hatred loot pools. The challenge in both cases is that it feels like Ancestral gear drops so freaking infrequently. The above image shows a T3 Beast in the Ice drop pool… with zero ancestrals dropping which is pretty much the norm.

Mostly I have been focused on chipping away at various seasonal trappings like the challenges, battlepass, and the Reign of Chaos quest chain. The amount of farming required to finish the last bit… seems excessive. I feel like Blizz has made the determination that they need to slow things down… to eek more player engagement out of a season, when in truth Season 7 was the best… because it felt like a really fun weekend, similar to how Diablo III seasons used to feel. The game is not detailed enough to be played in a manner like Path of Exile… so any slowing of things down just feels like overstaying its welcome. Wouldn’t you rather have your players saying “wow that was a blast, can’t wait for next season” instead of trying to decide if they give a crap enough to keep grinding. I am rapidly the approaching the point where I am questioning how much I still care.

Legion Remix starts next week on the 7th, and as a result I have been trying to poke my head back into World of Warcraft in an attempt to get into the swing of things. Friends… I really want to finish up the War Within campaign but I am finding it so hard to care about anything that is going on. I tried again last night, and I was just checking boxes off a spreadsheet in the way that I was engaging with the content. I am playing my Dark Iron Dwarf that I rolled during the Pandaria remix event, and honestly… I like playing a defensive warrior about as much as I like playing anything else. The combat though… just feels so much less interesting than it does in Guild Wars 2, which is the game I have mostly been mainlining in the MMORPG world for awhile. I think mostly movement just feels bad, since at its core… World of Warcraft is just prettier Everquest and there is not any real action elements of my movement that factor into how combat resolves. So long as I am in rage of the target and my bounding box is connected to their bounding box… mashing a button makes a thing happen. It does somewhat make me worry how Legion Remix is going to land… but regardless I am still going to give it a shot I think.

In other things happening on the 7th… the Monster Hunter Wilds crossover event is opening in Final Fantasy XIV. I thought this might have been a good signal to get back into the game and quest through things… given that I have not really played actively other than logging in to keep my house active since the patch that dropped the Arcadion. As a result I am fully decked out in that gear… but am going to be yet again… too short to ride the ride since the Guardian fight is going to require 725 gear. This is the thing that I always hate the most about playing Final Fantasy XIV, is that when it comes time for a new expansion… my gear is never good enough to make it through all of the content without either grinding a bunch… or buying my way out of the problem. I hate having to buy a crafted set from the auction house to bail my ass out for having not played reliably during the patch cycle. Since Stormblood… I have basically been a player that plays heavily at the beginning of an Expansion, and then returns at the very end of one… and it is honestly a play pattern that feels like crap because of the required catch up. Even Gacha games every so often throw you a bone with a full set of gear that is good enough to do whatever the latest content drop is.

Since you have made it this far, and listened to me whine about my frustrations and struggle to get attached to anything right now… I will reward you with another photo of Gracie. So often when I am gaming anymore, she will crawl up on the headrest of my new office chair and complain that I am not giving her attention. I am just looking for anything right now that gives me some focus.. and ultimately delays me thinking about the fact that my human is gone. I could be out doing things with friends… but I feel way more “alone” when I am out in public than I do when I am finding something to distract me at home. I spent a lot of time alone since shifting to remote work… but I almost never left the house without my spouse. So going into the world… makes me realize all that I am lacking and missing. There are a lot of things that I want to do around the house, but I end up in ADHD logjams while trying to do them. Mostly I am just trying to keep moving the needle forward with small amounts of progress every single day.

Anyways… if you have made it this far. Thanks for reading.

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.

Snowmageddon and Ferals

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Good Morning Folks. Today is the launch of the Legacy of Phrecia event in Path of Exile, and I will be participating this evening whenever I get a chance to log in. However this morning since I don’t have much gaming wise to talk about, I am going to share the current state of my world, which is effectively snowbound. On the 18th starting at roughly 9 am in the morning we started getting ice which then transitioned into snow, and effectively did not stop until the morning of the 19th. I do not for certain know how many inches that we ended up getting, but it was a very dry snow and as such blew everywhere forming some pretty significant snow drifts. My wife made a valiant attempt to keep the front porch clear… which would last for maybe 20 minutes before it was fully covered again. Side note… there is an over 2 foot drop off our porch and you can barely tell it in this photo.

When it gets cold like this, our immediate concern is the little tribe of feral cats that call our neighborhood home. We have a box in the front and a box in the back… and at least one of them took advantage of this momentary respite. We also have a large deck in the backyard that we have created some artificial breaks along the edge of so that they can get out of the wind. There is also a series of rabbit burrows under two bushes in the backyard, which is I think where at least one of them goes when it gets super cold. Basically we were super worried because for the 18th and the morning of the 19th we saw zero sign of feral activity. There was a brief blip on the camera where we saw one of them jump into the above box… and I have to admit I was scared to death I would find a body in there in the morning when it got down into the negatives.

The first to make her way out was Tripod, the three legged calico cat that calls our backyard home. We cannot get anywhere near her, but she was hungry enough that her fear went out the window as she approached me to get at the pile of food. She meowed at me to go back inside and I obliged so that she could eat in peace. We had swept a little clear spot so that we could feed, and the wind had died down yesterday so that we were not getting quite the amount of drifting. She came back and visited a few times eating most of the pile of food.

What she did not eat… went to the birds. It was not until I started putting food out for the ferals that I realized just how much the birds also love cat food. My wife gets annoyed at the influx of birbs, but I have zero problem feeding them as well. Our backyard is full of songbirds during the springtime as a result of our home being a regular unintentional feeding ground. Thankfully it looked like Tripod got most of the food, and the birbs just came down and vacuumed up what was left over. Birds do not care about food getting wet, so they serve the important role of cleaning up anything that the cats don’t want to eat. Negative side effect however… is we do have to clean bird droppings off our lawn chairs.

Shortly after Tripod made her appearance in the backyard, Greybie made his presence known in the front yard. Basically I am waiting for them to make an appearance before putting out food, and if today follows the pattern that yesterday did I will be feeding them around noonish when the sun comes out and is warm. Greybie spent most of the day lounging on the sisal rug and soaking up the rays, and I was surprised that I did not see the little black void cat that also frequents the front porch at the same time. We tried putting out on of the fleece warming pads that the indoor cats use… but he wanted none of it and started laying on the cold rock until we went back out and retrieved it. Mostly each time we went out he just wanted some pets, because while skittish… he is the one feral that we can actually touch. I doubt we could ever bring him inside though… because periodically he still runs like hell from us.

It was not until yesterday evening though that the void cat made her appearance known. She is so close to being friendly… she occasionally dive bombs my legs while I am feeding them but also runs if she notices me giving her attention. She will stand off the porch and meow at me which I take is her quietly asking me to go back inside so she can eat in peace. We saw all of our feral babies yesterday, so we know they all managed to find someplace warm enough to get through the cold night. Last night was colder, so once again I am sitting here fretting and worrying. So I hope they follow a similar pattern to what they did yesterday and we start seeing them around noon. I will be periodically checking the cameras so that I can pop out and give them some food whenever they make their presence known.

We did not really get any significant melt yesterday, but it is supposed to be nice and sunshiny today so at some point we need to go out and help the cars get cleared so that we can get out if we need to. I work remotely pretty much every day, but my wife has been remote most of this week as well. Technically we could probably go well over a month without leaving the house between the fridge, freezer, pantry, and chest freezer in the garage. So it is not like we are desperate for anything, and we did a minor bit of stocking up right before this hit. We were given plenty of warning and also given that the estimates were everything from 4 inches to 14 inches… we had no clue what it would end up looking like. For you northern climates… you have to understand we have zero infrastructure for this sort of thing as it maybe happens once every five years. I don’t even own a snow shovel, because I have never needed to regularly clear my driveway. Generally speaking any time we do get snow… within 24 hours most of it will be gone. This whole staying around zero for multiple days in a row thing is relatively rare.

By next week it is supposed to be back in the 60s and 70s… so Snowmageddon will be a fading memory. I am sure I will be sharing notes throughout the day as our Ferals come out and start moving around. Until I see them though I will still be worried that they made it through the night okay.