Real Life

Phasing

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There are times when I don’t have much to really talk about. One of the problems with doing a daily blog is that you need a daily churn of exciting things you are willing to expound upon. Right now I am in a bit of a betweensies phase for gaming. I’ve wrapped up Blast from the Past and gotten out of it what I wanted, and I am largely in a holding phase until we start “Bel League” with 3.23… which of note will have its theme, teaser trailer, title, and start date announced today. When I am in one of these periods I tend to allow myself a bit of navel-gazing and reminiscing. I have no clue why I barged into a thread and dumped a bit of a soliloquy on it…. but it happened nonetheless. For those who don’t know my social media of choice these days continues to be Mastodon and I help run a server called Gamepad.club if you need a good home.

Anyways in the thread that I barged into… I sort of force-dumped this whole bit about how my life has gone through various phases that have shaped me into the person my readers know. I thought this morning I might expand upon this theory into a proper blog post. This will likely be a deeply personal post, the sort of thing that I feel weird about widely syndicating. One of the rules I set forth for myself when I began this blog so many years ago… is that I would try my best to show the real me… just occasionally omitting names and specific details for the protection of others. If you are so inclined, feel free to join me on a bit of a trip down memory lane.

Baby Bel Watches Star Wars

A very small simulacrum of Belghast hugging his Dad's neck... which what I am guessing based on the wrapping paper was for a father's day? Small blonde haired child in bed with father both wearing pajamas

I don’t have a lot of photos of tiny proto-bel at the ready, but I think this one is pretty great. I am guessing based on the wrapping paper that this is maybe a Father’s Day. My best guess is this is me circa age 2 or so… I have questions as to why my parents had Disney pillowcases… but whatever. One of the earliest memories that I have is of watching Star Wars at the local drive-in theater. I was around two when it came out, and that movie rocked my world. I was obsessed with it in a way that I have probably never really been obsessed with anything since. I apparently went around quoting or more likely misquoting lines from the movies and was most obsessed with Darth Vader… or “Darfa Bader” as my parents said I called him.

I think more than anything Star Wars lit a spark in me that has never really been quenched and set me down a path of consuming pretty much all things Science Fiction and Fantasy. It also ignited my obsession with toys… and more specifically anything that is at the 3 and 3/4ths scale figures. Star Wars faded to GI Joe which faded to He-Man… but all the while that obsession was ignited by being very small and very amazed by the wonders that I was seeing on the big screen while sitting in my Dad’s truck. The problem with early memories is that you can never for certain really know if you are actually remembering things or if it is a construction based on photos you have seen and stories that you have been told. I remember a lot of birthday parties… all themed over whatever fandom I happened to be obsessed with at the time.

Bel Gets an Atari

Atari 2600 Console with classic black and wood grain appearance. Two cartridges shown... Pac-Man and Super Breakout

While technically my first gaming experiences were with a Sears and Roebuck Pong Clone console that my parents bought… my real addiction to video games began when my Mom brought me home an Atari. The Pong console never really got used because my Uncle borrowed it… hooked it to my grandparent’s TV… left it on all night and ruined their expensive Zenith console television with screen burn-in making EVERYONE paranoid about that. She was a school teacher and one of her students was selling it… so for $50, we got the console, several controllers, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 games. This was the era of “video games are ruining the youth” so it was a rare occasional that my folks actually let me play a stand-up arcade game, let alone go to an actual arcade… but when I got a home console I could play as much as I wanted.

Sure this led to the memorable Christmas of 1987 when I got my Nintendo and countless consoles after that as I picked up each new generation… and quite honestly still do even though I am not much of a console player. This moment ignited my obsession with video games as a whole which has never quite left me. It was a simpler time, to be honest, and I miss some aspects of being able to stick a cartridge into a system and immediately play it. Sure I long ago abandoned physical media for the convenience of digital downloads and having my entire game library “on tap” to be played on a whim. The thing is though that I have never engaged with games as deeply as I did back then. It would take several months’ worth of allowance saved up or ratholed Christmas/birthday money to buy a single cartridge… and once purchased I knew I had to make the best of it. There are a lot of games that I am personally nostalgic about only because I bought it and then was effectively stuck to make the best of it.

Bel Discovers Pen and Paper

Being a teacher’s kid came with few perks, and a lot of downsides including having to spend way too much time at school. One interesting perk though was something that happened at the end of every school year… that was like Christmas morning for the teacher kids. Essentially the rule was that anything not removed from your locker by the final bell on the last day of school was subjected to being thrown away. The janitors would pull everything out of the lockers and dump them in the aisle, and then we would rummage through it looking for anything interesting. It was on one of these treasure trove days at the end of my first grade year… that I found my first beat-up, slightly water-damaged copy of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook. Access to this arcane tome, forever altered my destiny.

I only knew of D&D from the Cartoon but was immediately enamored by this larger world that I had just opened the door to. A few of my friends attempted to “play” not realizing that we were missing an entire set of rules in the Dungeon Masters Book, but we made it work enough to decide we liked it. This was the height of the “Satanic Panic” unfortunately… when Mazes and Monsters aired as a “movie of the week” we were sort of fucked and overnight several otherwise complicit parents shut that shit down. I pivoted to something less controversial and as a result, I have a deep nostalgia for the Marvel Superheroes System from TSR. My friends would keep their dice at my house because my parents were largely cool with it and supported my obsession. Many years later I was introduced to the Palladium system and wound up in a regular campaign run by the much older brother of one of my childhood friends. Throughout High School I always had some sort of campaign going for me and my friends alternating between me running something and my friend Jason running something… eventually built our own system that we called “Infinite Earths” which was a mishmash of things we liked from pop culture and things from books we dug.

Bel Gets a Computer

There are a lot of phases in my life that I am probably glossing over… but this is the story of what shaped the “Bel” that you know today and is just sort of skipping over the threads that didn’t really lead to anywhere. I don’t have the same tale that a lot of computer-focused GenXers have… our family did not get a computer until 1989 which was a generic clone 386 SX 16hz with 2 meg of RAM and a 90 meg hard drive. Eventually, we upgraded to a palatial 4 meg of RAM, but the system had no CD-ROM as it was a generation too early and no sound card… though later I picked up this weird hybrid device called the Disney Sound Source that hooked up through the parallel port. The weird thing is… I had actually gone to a computer camp before this point and learned how to program in BASIC on a Trash 80 (TSR-80). My family just never decided it was a thing they needed until this point. I wish I had grown up with the Commodore 64… and learned to program when I was much younger but alas that is not my tale.

When we got a computer… My Dad’s friend may have snuck some sharpie labeled diskettes home with him which gave me access to a smattering of games. I remember playing Maniac Mansion in that initial round of games. Later I found this bookstore in the mall that would sell 5.25-inch floppies with assorted shareware on it… which is where I found Wolfenstein 3D. This is also where I found the assorted shareware tools that let you edit levels… which led to a new obsession with modding my games. There was a little computer lab off my mom’s classroom, and at lunch, we would build entirely new campaigns for Wolf3D and then challenge each other to play them. Years later when Doom became the new hotness, I similarly got obsessed with creating WAD files and building new sprite artwork for them. I had this entire Shattenjager campaign that I wish I still had a copy of… that was a proto-hexen thing. I am sure it was primitive as hell… but it was at least cool in my memories.

Bel Gets the Internet

In High School, I got into a pretty bad car accident… enough so that I got a fairly heft “pain and suffering” settlement from the insurance company. Most of this money was put aside “For College” but one of the things that I was allowed to buy was a new computer given that my intent was to go into that field. I ended up getting a Pentium 90 Packard Bell, that got Frankensteined a few times to add some graphical functionality and a scanner. More important than anything else… it was a computer with a 14400 baud modem. Like so many folks of my age… my first experience with the internet was through America Online. The thing is… neither I nor my parents understood how the internet worked and more importantly that it was just a normal phone call. So after racking up a few $500 phone bills… the internet was canceled for a while.

It was a bit later that we found out that you could pay $20 a month to the phone company to get unlimited calls to an adjacent area that had the dial-up numbers… and then $40 a month to get unlimited internet via Trumpet Winsock. Essentially once I found out there was a “real and unguarded” internet that existed beyond the gates of America Online… I had no interest in doing anything else. Mostly I used the internet for downloading stuff, finding my way into usenet and reading assorted video game newsgroups. This was 93/94ish and I began to learn how to make websites and hosted my first ones on the space provided by my ISP which also ran a BBS I believe called Darkstar. I also remember playing some of my first online games through a TCP/IP to IPX/SPX emulator called Kali. In college, I got an Amiga 3000 because it was used in my coursework, and I played some Super Air Warrior a bit on GEnie because the guy I bought it from gave me his account.

Bel Becomes an IRC Junkie

I had messed around a bit in AOL chatrooms before that service went away due to the astronomical phone bills… but I had no clue what IRC was until my freshman year in college. In an attempt to save money… I commuted from home and pieced together a two-year degree from attending essentially four different campuses and two different universities. Because of the weirdness of my schedule, this meant that I had an afternoon course in C++ and then a couple of evening courses… and about a three-hour lag between the two of them. This meant I spent copious hours killing time in the computer lab, which had a few rows of internet-enabled machines. Everything about the internet was novel at that point, and no one seemed to think spending time hanging out in IRC chatrooms via mIRC was a waste of resources. So I learned the finer points of IRC from some fellow computer lab rats… and it was not long before I had snagged the software and was connecting to it from home.

I was a denizen of the Undernet and was a regular in a number of gaming channels… as well as a handful of less-than-reputable channels that shall not be named. Undernet was far less advanced than DalNet, and if you wanted to maintain any semblance of control over a channel you had to employ a bot to which you would give Operator status, and then it could “Op” users when they joined the channel if they were on the approved allow list. I spent time working on these bots, and more specifically the ancillary bots that were used for filesharing or in my case… roleplaying. I wrote a number of bots that would maintain character sheets, handle dice rolls, and such to support a few Vampire and Werewolf channels that were active because at this point… I was obsessed with the World of Darkness like the wannabe goth that I was.

Bel Meets His Wife

The thing about the bots… is that they require a lot of maintenance and periodic configuration. I was running a file serve bot for a friend who ran a less-than-reputable channel and needed to perform maintenance. So I was sitting there logged into the bot via SSH while also sitting in the channel in mIRC. I had the bot configured to execute a /WHOIS command and echo it to the console as folks joined. This was somewhat useful for when an issue happened and when I had to ban a user I already had that information in the log to craft a netmask. The thing about the early internet and more specifically early IRC… is folks tended to be logged in from their universities that configured the shell-based IRC clients. This meant you learned to decipher their connection information and recognize the folks from local schools. Very late one night… technically early in the morning… I was slaving away on updating this bot when I saw a university that I recognized pop into the channel.

Not remembering where I was… what I was locked into… I pinged them with a hey. Turns out… my wife and I had this mutual friend out of the Netherlands and she knew him through some Christian channel. He had originally gone there the first time to troll them… and stuck around and chatted, eventually becoming a regular. He had apparently dared her to join the “questionable” channel, and it was moments after making good on this dare that some random stranger clocks her university and starts messaging her. Admittedly it was not a good look, and I am sure that I came across as the biggest creeper ever. My wife said there was a flurry of side conversation that essentially amounted to “Who the hell is this creep?” and thankfully I was vouched for as “chill” and “safe”.

This set up an regular series of conversations whenever we saw the other was online, eventually realizing that we grew up 30 minutes apart from each other. Meeting your IRC friends was a bit of a thing at that point, and we decided to meet up on easter weekend and go see a movie together. It was purely platonic, and eventually, I started “dating” a friend of hers… as much as you can really refer to being IRC steadies as dating. About a year later I was in the process of transferring from my assortment of 2-year schools to the University she went to in order to finish up my 4-year degree. It was only after being around each other more regularly that things evolved into something more than platonic. However without IRC… and a random dude that we both lost touch with from the Netherlands we would have never met in spite of after the fact… knowing a lot of the same folks.

Bel Lured into Everquest

MMORPGs are very important to me and have honestly introduced me to most of my long-term friendships over the last several decades have ultimately been forged in some game or another. It all began for me however with a single moment… when my wife was out of town and a friend of mine coaxed me over to his house to help him with an Everquest raid. His guild had been planning on trying to take down Vox and as we were closing out the work day he got a text message saying that she had spawned. He was a dual boxer and ran a Monk and a Druid together… but was being asked to pull the raid and knew that there was no way he could reasonably do both roles. I got a five-minute explanation of how the game worked, and how to play a druid… and was set to the task of nuking and healing.

I held in for quite a bit of time, but at some point wiped… when my friend realized this he is yelling at me to “mem” a spell and get back into the fight. I am butt naked because that is how Everquest worked… you lost all of your gear as it was sitting on your corpse. I memorized something that looked like a powerful spell… and then fumbled my way through the caverns leading up to Vox. Something you have to know about me… I have no sense of direction. So it is a sheer miracle that I made my way back to the chamber after having exclusively followed other players to get there. I get into the room, throw a few spells and actually manage to land the killing blow. I was hooked… by the end of the weekend I had picked up the base game, Kunark, and the brand new Velious expansion and was leveling Exeteroth Iceforge the Dwarven Cleric that became lovingly known as “Tiny Elvis”.

It was not all happiness and sunshine, however… and Everquest leaves a very bad taste in my wife’s mouth. The amount of time that the game required… was extreme and the fact that I could not realistically stop what I was doing at a moment’s notice. There was legitimately one point at which my wife pulled the ethernet jack out of my computer because she was tired of me saying “just a minute” when trying to get to a safe place to log out. There was also the fact that I would get called at all hours of the night, begged to log in, and come somewhere to resurrect someone… because they lost their level. As we find ourselves in the revival of “games with consequences” this is part of the reason I am not exactly signing up on that particular nostalgia train. I have great memories, and Everquest ultimately led to so many other games that respected my time a bit more… but it also has a gulf of frustrations if I am honest about it.

Bel Becomes Belghast

For most of my internet existence, I was largely known as “eXeter”… yes I legitimately used to type it just like that. Even with World of Warcraft, it was my intention that Exeter my Dwarf Paladin was going to be my main and it was only a death in the family that caused me to fall behind my friends that led me to start Lodin my Hunter that eventually became my raid main. When WoW Launched I founded a guild named House Stalwart, in part because I had some baggage from Everquest when guild leadership goes wrong. It just so happened that one of my friends from the guild started a raid group called the Late Night Raiders. He needed a few more hunters that he could rely on for tranq shot rotations… and given that I did complete heal rotations in Everquest… that was something I was more than prepared to orchestrate. This group is super important to me, in large part because so many of my current friend group either stems from that group itself or branch out from it. On the AggroChat podcast that I record every week… Tam and Kodra were both members, Thalen was in another raid but occasionally subbed in on our raids, and Ashgar came from the guild that came AFTER that raid broke apart that Tam led. Even Ammo the artist that does all of my stuff… has ties to the server we all raided on.

I never wanted to be a Hunter. It was just something that knew I could solo and use to catch up with my friends. I am not a DPS at heart and do not care one bit about how much damage I am dealing. What I care about is tanking… similarly, my friend Finni decided that she didn’t really want to play a hunter anymore either but instead wanted to be a Priest. Leveling a Warrior and a Priest sucked in vanilla Warcraft, so we decided to level together as a tag team allowing me to play as Prot and her to play as Holy… and then chew our way through the quests rapidly. Now I had used the name Belghast before in Dark Age of Camelot as my Celt Champion and in Everquest as my Froglok Warrior, so when I went to create a Human Warrior in World of Warcraft I kept that naming scheme. With the great reset of that game with Burning Crusade, I used it as my opportunity to shift mains, and from that point forward I was known as Belghast to most folks.

As LNR failed to survive the transition from 40-player raids to 25-player raids… I bounced around tanking for a handful of other raids before finally banding together with Thalen and a priest friend named Elnore to start the “Duranub Raiding Company”. Shiana the leader of LNR used to refer to our raid as a “Durable Pack of Nubs” and we just sort of shortened that sentiment. He left the server to play with another group of friends… House Stalwart was supposed to be a dual guild with one half on Alliance and one half on Horde, and a significant chunk of folks that we had played with in City of Heroes ended up preferring the Horde side better. I just became known on Argent Dawn as Belghast it was the character that I wound up taking to raids most often, and when I eventually started a blog the name was forever cemented in time as I started signing up for social media accounts under that name.

Bel Starts a Blog

Friends… I started this blog under the hubris of feeling like I knew something about both Warrior tanking and leading a raid. The name Tales of the Aggronaut was referring to a tank as someone who holds/navigates aggro… aka an Aggronaut. I was inspired by the blog “The Wordy Warrior” and thought that maybe I could do something similar. Little did I know that I had essentially painted myself into a corner feeling like I needed to talk about playing a Warrior in World of Warcraft and more specifically talking about leading a raid as a Warrior. What did not help is the fact that Wrath of the Lich King was very much a high point of the game for me but a crushing low point. I went through one of the worst depressions I have ever experienced in my life and there were a few times I came close to acting upon it. It did not help that I felt like I was failing whatever audience I might have… but not keeping up with the rigors of actually making posts.

As The Cataclysm expansion decimated Duranub… with the shift towards rewarding guild-based raiding… I found myself out of sync with the guild as a whole and enjoying raiding significantly less. When Rift came out, I used it as a lifeboat and an excuse to go elsewhere… and with it, I shifted focus to that game. I went through a rebranding of the site and everything… new logo, a new chibi Bahmi version of my character from the game adorning its masthead. As I once again found myself out of sync with that game… I realized that doing this every time I jumped ship was going to get extremely tiresome. While the name of the blog became increasingly incorrect… I needed to shift its focus to just being about me and my adventures.

In 2013 I started what I then called the Grand Experiment, where I forced myself to write something every single day regardless of what it was. The idea was simple… I was essentially trying to desensitize myself against the anxiety of hitting that publish button and feeling like I needed to wait for something truly profound before posting it. A year later… with much hubris again, I decided to challenge other bloggers to do the same… at least for a single month. Timing just so happened to land around August so I mashed the word Blog and August together in my head and wound up with the term Blaugust… only to find out years later that someone had already started something of the same name back in 2010. Now I have become known for running this event and in the broader blogging and social media community as being a pillar of the game blogging community… but really I am still the same idiot that used to flood forums with inane banter.

Admittedly I am feeling rather exposed and stupid for writing all of this nonsense and forcing it upon you all. I have no clue WHY exactly I did this other than a lack of other things to talk about. As I have written today it just sort of developed a life of its own. If you’ve made it to this point I thank you greatly for sticking around. There are a lot of things that I have skipped over… I generally don’t talk about work stuff on my blog for example. Other things I have already talked about here like my skater phase… but really this is the progression of events that more or less led you to be reading me today.

Old Men Warring

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Good Morning Folks! I had a bit of a crazy day yesterday. I took the day off from work, but it was to ferry my dad around to some doctor’s appointments which meant a lot of rushing around and a lot of driving. When I got home I opted to crash on the couch and return to my audiobook while playing some Path of Exile. This really is my happy place, and I am glad to be returning to it because there is just something about listening to an audiobook while plugging away in an ARPG. It also helped greatly that shortly after I nested downstairs with my laptop, I had Josie join me and snuggle up beside me, and then shortly after that Gracie came and laid on my legs. Legit… not sure there is a more perfect evening that could have been had.

I’ve been working my way through the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi. I think for most folks this might have been the first series they read from this author, but for me… that honor goes to Kaiju Preservation Society earlier this year. I definitely like the author and the style of writing, so I had been holding this series in reserve for something to dive into when I had time to focus on it. So far as I commented on Bookwyrm last night, I think I enjoyed this second book much better than I did the first. The first novel in the series spent a lot of time building the world, and this novel spent a lot more time living in it. It does not hurt that the novel focuses on one of my favorite characters from the first, and continues to flesh out the world of special forces known as the “Ghost Brigades”. It is always hard for me to judge a single novel in a series because my mind tends to focus on the totality of the experience. I love Avengers Endgame for example, but that movie wouldn’t mean anything were it not for the 30 or so odd movies that came before it.

I wrapped up the second novel last night and immediately started my way into the third. This series is doing something that I love when a book series does it. Namely, each book takes a viewpoint from the previous book and pivots to where that is now the primary perspective. This was my favorite thing about the Santiago series from Mike Resnick, in that it would focus on a side character and elevate them to the primary focus of another book. The positive here is that Scalzi does not appear to be a shitbird, and is at least an author I can feel a little bit better about reading. In the first book, we focused on the perspective of a Colony Defense Force Recruit, in the second book the perspective of Special Forces, and this third book is shifting down planet side to the perspective of the Colonials. I only made it I think four chapters in before turning in for the night, but I fully expect tonight to return to my perch on the sofa and pick back up where I left off.

This brings my total books for the year up to twenty-eight, even though I am likely the only one counting. I’m continuing to use my Bookwyrm user profile to track my progress. The original goal that I set for myself this year was twenty books, and I am well past that. I believe there is a third book in Lindsay Ellis’ series coming soon as is I believe another John Gwynne novel and a sequel to Legends and Lattes. I vaguely remember all of these landing around October along with another James Butcher novel. I also have a fat stack of things that I should read, and I am sure I will finish out the year with plenty to do. I took about a three-month gap, but it feels good to be back in the swing of things.

Gracie’s New Trick

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This is Big Boy… though technically, his name is Tigger, but we did not know that then and can’t seem to shift gears. Big Boy doesn’t really know where he belongs, so this morning when my spouse went outside, he was on the roof of her car. We’ve seen cat prints for years on our vehicles but never really knew who it was. Part of Big Boy’s confusion is that his original family moved away and while our next-door neighbors have officially adopted him, he still spends much time in our front yard. He is a sweet baby and will headbutt your hand, but he can also be a bit of a bully to the other outdoor cats so I’m not nearly as fond of him as I used to be. He still has a home, but it just isn’t the same home… and he still comes and goes as he pleases which I question if that is the best idea. However, there are times when he acts like he wants us to be his family.

In other Cat-related breaking news… Gracie has learned a new thing. When she figures out how to do something, she obsesses over that new thing until she gets bored and moves on. This particular new thing is that she has learned that she can easily jump up on top of the fridge in the kitchen, and since yesterday has just spent a decent amount of time up there chilling. She of course figured out she could knock magnets off the fridge door from this vantage point… so they have all been redistributed to a position slightly lower than her paws can reach. She is terribly proud of herself and feels like you should be proud of her too. I am dreading when she figures out how to get on top of the entertainment center, as we have tended to use that as a “Gracie-free zone” for anything she needs not to play with.

In Path of Exile news they have buffed the Trial of the Ancestors significantly. For example in the above image, that shows my opening round rewards and there is one opponent who would give me nine raw Chaos Orbs for winning that round. Unfortunately, the stacking seems to be that the best rewards offer the least favor with the various opponents, so you can take some short-term gains… but at the cost of overall progress in the tournament as a whole. If you are playing to win, you would take the 19 Jewelers Orbs as that option gives you the most favor with the individual factions, which would in turn allow you to buy more units. I’ve won enough matches that I have pushed up my ranking over 200, which in theory means I should start seeing even better rewards… but also the combat has become rather brutal.

There had been a degenerate strategy centered around Empire’s Grasp and Quill Rain, and involved creating totems that would indefinitely knock back the guards allowing you to just walk around and capture the totems. This briefly saw the price of Empire’s Grasp shoot up from a 1 Chaos Orb item to over 50 Chaos Orbs. I managed to monopolize on this and sold the pair I had sitting in my vault for 50 Chaos Orbs yesterday before the price started to come back down… and thanks to the emergency patch fixing this interaction has plummeted back down to the expected 1 Chaos Orb territory. If you are curious about what this looked like, Zizaran released a video explaining the strategy yesterday that has now been fixed. GGG has come out and said that they are not going to claw back any of the loot that was gained through this exploitative interaction, so as is often the case… the answer is to exploit early and exploit often. I opted not to chase this because I figured it would get patched out quickly, and would prefer to learn how to do the tournament correctly.

Most of my effort has been towards trying to set up and prepare my Righteous Fire Juggernaut for the endgame. I’m now in Act 9 and should wrap up the character today. I had been holding onto a reasonable Opal Sceptre base and performed some quick essence crafting and landed a +1 to all fire spell skill gems which will benefit both my Righteous Fire main link and my Fire Trap helmet link. As for helmets I held onto a good fractured base and then threw some essences at it until I wound up with something that had some decent resistances. The other interesting item that I am using currently, and will likely need to toss aside is a Pyre ring that I picked up on my journeys. I am not really using much in the way of cold damage other than Frost Blink, and mostly I am using it for the bonus burning damage and pretty solid resistances. Honestly, I will likely end up using this Sceptre for quite a while given that I am just realizing while writing this that I can bench-craft on Minion damage to get even more of a boost.

I did have to spend a bit of time running maps yesterday in order to gain some more currency, as I bankrupted myself trying to help Thalen get the same items I talked about picking up yesterday for his Righteous Fire build. In my travels, I managed to pick up my first Divine Orb of the league so that was exciting. My happy place I think is going to be using my Lightning Arrow Raider for mapping and then swapping over to my Righteous Fire Juggernaut to spend all that sweet sweet sulphite to Delve up some goodies. I’ve probably missed Delve the most and while technically the Lightning Arrow Raider can do some of that… the second a mob down there looks at me crosswise I evaporate. The Raider is amazing for brute forcing a lot of AOE damage all over the place… but not that great at anything that requires survival or scenarios where I can’t leech a lot of life and mana. However, occasionally swapping in a totem support for my Lighting Arrow has opened up the ability to run reflection maps with impunity which is nice.

Anyways! Time to wrap this up. I had a power outage in the middle of writing this which caused me to have to re-write quite a bit after the “blink” was over. I hope you all are having a wonderful week and I am hoping to wrap up my Juggernaut today.

A Packed Weekend

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Screenshot from Path of Exile showing a Righteous Fire Inquisitor firing off Scorching Ray with the Shaper Beam Micro-transaction.

Good Morning Friends! Today is the first day of the new school year for my wife, and as a result, much of the weekend was centered around preparing her for that. However, I did manage to get a bunch of gaming in around the margins. I’ve been playing an RF Inquisitor as a test character to decide if I want to go down that path or stick with my Juggernaut shenanigans. In truth, the final decisions will be made when the patch notes drop in Friday and we see if Juggernaut and Righteous Fire spring forth unscathed. One of the things I am playing with as I level this character is relying on Scorching Ray instead of Fire Trap for single-target damage. There are definitely some positives being that I can burn through rare and unique monsters much faster. The glaring negative however is that I have to remain stationary while channeling it, which means there are going to be times when I cannot realistically stop to cast it. I wonder if I can create a linkage that could support both Fire Trap and Scorching Ray without greatly hampering either of them… because it sure would be nice to have both available.

A screenshot from Sir Gog's review of recent 3.22 Path of Exile spoilers showing off the Unending Nightmare atlas passive node.

Sir Gog released a video talking about the spoilers that are being released this week for Patch 3.22, and of them, I am greatly interested in Unending Nightmare. Essentially I have always wanted the ability to just not have Delirium Fog clear on its own. I get that for Delirium farmers this is a bad thing, but for me who only ever dabbles in most of the league mechanics it would be pretty great to have the option of simply clearing the entire map before it ends. Similarly, the Expedition node that gives you one big explosion has been something I have often wished existed. If this new Atlas Passive Tree gives me a node that just turns every Alva into the Inverse Incursions from the Memory maps… I would be in heaven. So far it feels like I am getting a lot of the things that I have wanted to exist, so maybe just maybe there are going to be a few more of them.

My Baldur's Gate 3 Party does a murder of some Gnolls

Most of my weekend gaming was spent playing Baldur’s Gate 3, which is likely no shock to anyone. The game as a whole has had a peak concurrency on Steam of over 800,000 players and it has yet to release on Consoles. I thought I had screwed up my current playthrough because I missed a key character when I could first talk to them. However last night I managed to sort out a sequence of events that had them come to seek me out in my camp, so I have now picked up Karlach and Wyll and shuffled my party around to allow room for both so I can give them a shot. I can already tell that I am going to love running around with Karlach. BG3 is one of those games where you think you are playing for thirty minutes but have wound up playing for four hours. It has been a while since a game has caused this much time dilation for me, but I am enjoying it.

Screenshot from the Code: Action mini game in Honkai Star Rail where I have created a movie poster themed after The Matrix called "Super Hacker" featuring Blade as Neo and Silver Wolf as Trinity.

There is a cute web-based game called “Code: Action” going on in Honkai Star Rail where you retell the stories of Blade, Kafka, and to some extent Silver Wolf. The end result is you create these cute movie posters based on the characters. It is largely fluff, but each of the six posters gives you a chunk of currency in the game so if you have fifteen minutes it is well worth doing. I am slowly chipping away at leveling some more characters. I think I have unlocked enough on my Luocha to where he is undeniably the correct choice for party healing over Natasha. Next up I am probably going to start working on kitting out Himeko because I really like her follow-up attacks. Still enjoying myself but this game is very much in maintenance mode for me where I play thirty minutes a day and feel happy doing so.

A screenshot from Palia Beta showing off my plot and the fact that you can have multiple storage chests.

I did not really get into Palia much more over the weekend, but I did test a theory. The first chest that you place gives you 400 storage capacity, and if you place additional storage chests on your property it just keeps giving you an additional 400 capacity in one large shared bank. Given that I gathered a ton of resources clearing my plot I decided to go ahead and craft a few spares. The grid view is really nice and allows you to align things much more cleanly than you can while placing things in the third person. I sorta wish housing systems like FFXIV had an over-the-top grid view like this for placing objects and aligning them to grid lines.

A screenshot from The Witcher Netflix series during happier times in Season One with Geralt and Yaskier/Dandelion

I also finished Season Three of the Netflix Witcher series. I had been avoiding it because the first half of this season was pretty awful, and I was afraid it would go even further off the rails. I’ve chosen to use an image of happier times when the series was more closely following the actual source material. Essentially The Witcher is a wobbly cart, and the first season had a few rough moments but largely lifted scenes directly from the novels or short stories. In the second season… the cart began to shake itself violently with the mischaracterization and subsequent murder of the beloved Eskel. In Season Three… the wheels have fallen off and the series has been drug along the path on the backs of the still rather excellent character actors. I’ve come to really like the actors playing most of the roles, but instead of doing justice to original property be it the novels or the games… we are just sort of in David Hasselhoff Nick Fury movie territory.

Photo of me and Greybie our Tigerstripe Grey Tabby Stray "Community Cat"

Lastly, to end on a positive note, I spent some time last night hanging out with our community cat Greybie. He has pretty much moved to our backyard permanently along with Tripod. I’ve been going out and loving on him each day when I put down food and water, but he has been mournfully meowing at me for not sticking around and staying a bit. He likes to hop up in my lap while I am sitting in my chair, and it has just been too hot to do this lately. However given that yesterday was the first sub-hundred-degree day in over a week, I figured I needed to go out and indulge the sweet baby. Sadly Tripod is still completely skittish, but at least hangs out… from afar… when I am out there.

I hope that you all had a great weekend. I hope my wife has a great start to the new school year today. I look forward to playing a lot more Baldur’s Gate 3 this week and getting a bit further in my RF Inquisitor test build.