Real Life

I Resolve to Live

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Good Morning Folks. I don’t normally write to you fine folks on a Sunday, other than to syndicate the weekly AggroChat Podcast. We did not record one of those for various holiday related reasons, and in truth the next big show we have… requires all seven of us. In theory we should return next week with our big two-parter Games of the Year show. This morning instead I am going to write a fairly personal an introspective post, the sort that I don’t normally syndicate widely and are just for the “real ones” who check my blog regardless of what fancy pictures might get posted on social media. So sit back and let me tell you a story.

Yesterday one of my friends asked me a very simple question, and I gave them quite possibly the heaviest answer that I have ever given to something so simple. Normally you say things like that you would like to lose some weight or exercise more, and both of those things are true… but I have a much more simple goal this year. Essentially it is my goal to start living life again. Since then death of my spouse I have been in a bit of a holding pattern, not entirely certain what to do with my life. Sure I went through the anguish and heartbreak… and still do from time to time, but replaced it more than anything was a growing sense of numbness. I have felt like I have been effectively sitting here waiting to die. Sure I did a few things to make that wait more comfortable… bought a new TV, organized the garage and set up a 3d printer out there, and even upgraded my gaming desktop. However in all cases they were more things to pass the time until I died myself, than anything resembling trying to do something specific with my life.

There is a kind of pain that no one will ever fully understand unless they have lost a spouse. You build this life with a person, and then they are suddenly gone… and it feels like most of you went along with them. I’ve told people that I died on July 2nd, 2025 and that is not necessarily hyperbole. The me that I was at that moment in time… did in fact die when my spouse passed away. I had a good life, and I got thirty years of it… but it felt like everything about that life was suddenly crashing down around me. In many ways I was wiped with a clean slate… not even really knowing who I was anymore. The me that existed before my wife… was such a fledgling thing. I think I was not really sure where to go from here. So much of what drove me, so much of what I did with myself… was in service of the life that I built with this other person and that is a life that is now gone.

There is something like a 90% increase in mortality for men who lose a spouse. In many cases this is exacerbated because in traditional relationships the woman is the caregiver, and the man… just does not have the survival skills to keep going. That was not the case for me, because in most ways I was the primary caregiver and I still technically have the skills required to keep going. The problem is… most of the time I didn’t really want to. I felt like I was a robot who had completed its task and was awaiting new orders, and as a result I just sat dusty in the back of some cabinet as my battery slowly drained. It is so easy to just give up. I did… for effectively the remainder of this year. I did not really care about much of anything other than the occasional bursts of phantom joy that I would get playing a game or talking to one of my friends.

I am not certain the exact moment… but in the time between Christmas and New Years I have decided that I am going to live. That seems like an odd statement, but it is something that I have had to consciously make. I am going to live my life and more importantly… I am going to move forward and move on past the death of my spouse. I’ve felt like on many levels the friends and family of my spouse have needed me to spend my life in contrite grief pining away for her… that somehow my wasting slowly as my battery runs out, helped them recover from the death more easily. I can’t be that person for them anymore. I am too fucking young and I have too much of my life in front of me. Best guess based on the how others in my family have gone, I probably have about forty years in front of me… and that is too long to slowly die. My grandfather died in his mid 90s and my Dad is still spry and kicking, so I can’t see that I will likely be much different. I need to make those forty years mean something.

One of the ways in which I have taken action, rather than letting actions happen… is I finally met up with my friend Aigie/Saracell for a meal. She has lived in Oklahoma for almost a decade at this point, but was always far enough way and the timing never seemed right… so we never actually met up. This is weird given, that this was a person that I used to talk to every single day without fail. Hell you can look at the first posts on this blog, and it was her commenting on them. We were great friends that time happened to… and we stopped playing the same games… and sort of faded apart. Thing is… someday never comes unless you make it happen. I always expected that eventually we would meet in person, but neither of us were making it happen so I did.

We met up for dinner yesterday and it was a lot of fun reminiscing about old times. The most hillarious thing is that prior to the meeting I was talking with my friend Tam, who was also in Late Night Raiders… and apparently he had zero clue that “Saracell” and “Aigie” were the same person. It makes sense, because really she did not come into her own until she became a healer and there was a massive boost in confidence that happened at the same time. Saracell the Warlock was somewhat quiet and composed and almost sheepish, but Aigie the braid twirling Dwarven Priest was a force to be reckoned with. I am not so certain about the place we met up to eat, but I am sure we will repeat the act of sharing a meal at some point in the future. It will take will and purpose to make that happen, and I will take that extra step to ensure that it does.

I’ve also been talking with someone new… that I met in the least likely of possible places. I’ve talked before by the thoroughly unlikely meeting of my wife and I and our introduction from a man in Belgium when we grew up 30 minutes apart… this one is almost as uncanny but only so because of the current state of the internet and how toxic it can be. I met a new friend on Reddit. I’ve hung out on Reddit for years, making random comments on random threads… and the algorithm fed me a thread and in that thread was a random person who made a sassy comment… and I responded. That led to chatting back and forth through the Reddit direct messaging system, and that sort of carried on for days… and then weeks. More recently we have transitioned to talking on Discord, removing another layer of anonymity from it. I don’t know where it is going, but it has been really nice… and I have spent an awful lot of the last couple of weeks watching the typing indicator with baited breath.

This may go nowhere… and that is okay. The important thing that happened though… is it taught me that I could in fact develop feelings for another person. I am not entirely certain what those feelings entail… but it isn’t the bleak numbness that I have felt since July. I can move on. I can potentially love again. I legitimately thought that side of me was dead. That I had lost the ability to feel anything anymore, and would effectively just sort of fumble through life from this point on like the shambling dead. The fact that I CAN feel anything… is a fucking miracle at this point. I am not going to push any pressure on this however, because things need to develop in their own course. They have asked nothing of me, and I am attempting to ask nothing of them. It is just really refreshing to have someone that I am nervous in the best possible ways to talk with each day.

I honestly was not sure if I would say anything here about it. We are going to call her “Ren” for the sake of this blog. She does not have the breadth of gaming experience that most of us do, and as such has never really had a fixed gaming handle to fall back upon. Nor does she really have much of a social media footprint either. She has used the name Ren before and it seems good enough for the sake of keeping things nice and anonymous. That is one thing I have always tried with my blog… is to boil a situation to the real elements but not share any of the hard details. I did this for decades as a safety mechanism to keep anything I did from blowing back on my teacher spouse. I will likely continue to do this thing, because it feels more comfortable to share the real emotions and thoughts of a moment, without necessarily all of the specific people.

This is a pretty heavy post I know. If you have made it to this point I applaud you. You are in fact one of the “real ones” as it were. I am going to live. Hopefully if I am lucky, I will love again. Regardless I am going to figure out who the hell I am, and how best to support that fledgling person left in the aftermath of my life. I appreciate all of you and how you have supported me over the years. Be gentle with me as I figure this out.

New Year, Hopefully New Me

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Hey Folks. I am doing a bit of a weird post because generally I take off holidays, and generally I blog in the morning. Neither of those are happening in this case. I went up to see my Dad this morning because it was his birthday and he had afternoon plans, so I am back at home and sitting down to write. Often times my blog doubles as my diary… just one that I happen to publish so the world can see it. There are days when I widely syndicate my posts, and other days where they are more private and only meant for the “real ones” as it were. This is one of those days.

It is not so much that I had a bad Christmas, but more a situation that I have been numb for most of this year. I’ve been going through the motions and doing the right things, things which should bring me joy… but they have not been. I get that a lot of this is the normal pathways of grieving. I took a major blow… and while not a physical blow… it still takes time for the emotions and mental state to heal. I am not sure if I will ever be fully healed if I am being brutally honest. I lost a critical part of who I was, that had been built up over thirty years. In many ways it feels like I have been restored to an earlier backup of who I was. Like once you took away the material that I had accumulated in my life, and the default reactions that were baked in for being part of something larger than myself… I am left with a me that sort of feels like the me that existed in college before my life 1.0 started.

It is a really weird reset. I am digging back into things that used to give me joy when I was in college. I am figuring out new things that I want to try now that I have effectively unlimited time and zero constraints upon me to accommodate another human being. I’ve gotten into the path of 3D printing, and I have a bunch of model paints on order which will let me start painting my Warhammer army. I completely reworked the garage and installed shelving in basically every place that I could install shelving. I replaced the downstairs entertainment setup, and at some point will attempt to use the PC that I have hooked up down there. I think I might need to resolve some residual wifi issues first, but I have a router and at some point that will be a project to try and do that and apply some repeaters so that the connection downstairs is faster.

I’ve also been able to lean on so many friends. There are my adopted siblings of Ace and Cyl that have meant so much to me during this time. There is an old friend that I have reconciled with and even have plans to meet for dinner on Saturday. There is my Librarian friend who keeps me engaged in things and the new group of people that i have met in the pen and paper game that we all play together on a semi-monthly basis. Then there is a new friend that I have been talking constantly that has been fun and interesting to get to know someone completely out of my depth. All of these have helped to rekindle a bit of a spark in me, and I am feeling joyful about things again.

A lot of this year has also been trying to make sure my health is doing okay. I had a few scares and have a few upcoming medical procedures. I am hoping I get a clean bill of health, but kind of my ongoing new years resolution is to eat better and force myself to get some more exercise. I am bigger than I have ever been at this point, and it is not comfortable. For me and for my general future I need to change that. I also really desperately want to travel and meet some of the friends that I have known for years around the country. In order to do that… I am going to have to make it to a point where flight is no longer as painful as it currently is. I will always have trouble ramming my lets under the seats, but once you combine that with being generally larger than I should be… it is just a recipe for disaster. Sure I can drive to a lot of my friends, but there will be some that have to be arrived at by plane or it just isn’t feasible.

I turn 50 in June, and it feels like that is a bit of a deadline. There are a lot of things that I have said to myself “I will do that in time”. The time is now. I need to stop waiting and stalling and just do things. It isn’t so much that I am running out of time… but I feel like I am running out of time. I need to make significant changes in my life because I am not happy with the null void that I have been feeling, and want to do things to fix that.I am feeling really good today, and have been feeling really good about the last several days, and I am going to start enacting more changes that keep me moving in the right direction.

Happy New Years All. Please let 2026 be a better one.

Numb Christmas

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Good Morning Folks. Happy Day After Christmas or as my friend Ace refers to it… Super Xmas, aka the day that you get to chill out after the hustle and bustle of the holiday. I am working today because I did not take my two weeks off like I normally do. That was a thing I mostly did to spend time with my spouse, but now that she has passed… there just didn’t really seem like much of a reason to do it. That and a lot of the folks who report to me have younger kids and I wanted to make sure they could take time off. Other than a barrage of texts and calls I mostly spent the day with my folks. I snapped a photo of my high school car that is sitting there dying a slow death to rust. I kind of wish they had sold it or given it away rather than just letting it sit here and rot. The holiday was weird, and I did not break down like I thought I might. I think more than anything I just feel hollow and numb right now. In general that is my default mode of operation, because life just doesn’t feel like it really has much meaning without my wife. I am trying to find meaning in hobbies… but I will be honest it is hard to find much zest in anything I do. I am largely going through the motions.

One of the dumb things that I gifted my mom was this Gingerbread Star Destroyer that I printed out. Star Wars was always a massive thing in my life, and I will be honest… it was more something pushed by my folks after a point than by me. I think my mom honestly got into the whole search for figures as much as I did, and has always been a big fan of the movies. This print was too cute not to make one, and I even ordered some tan filament just to print it out. I was there most of the day yesterday and while I intended to arrive around 10ish… I made far better time than expected and got there around 9:30. The dynamic that feels the weirdest is when it comes to my inlaws. Like I called my father-in-law that evening and the way he talked it was like he was expecting me to come down for the day or something. I know that they need me around because it is a connection that they have to my wife… but also I have my own family. I do need to take a weekend and go down and spend it with them, but that whole relationship was always awkward. Her mom on the other hand, was super happy to get a call from me and is always chill about our interactions.

I guess while we are talking about 3d printed stuff, this is my next project. Essentially I have bunch of Lego Mini-Figures and I never really had a great way of displaying them. For awhile I was hooked on the blind bags and this is a really cool grand stand that I am printing out a part at a time that will in theory hold them. I am not sure if I will need more than one of these but for the time being this should be a good start. It is apparently scaled to fit a kallax shelving unit. I have this plan in the livingroom to erect a few lighted storage cabinets and in theory the minifigs will go in there. I need to get rid of a few things before I do this however. More pressing project is to clear off the table that I plan on setting up the paint shelves and get those moved into the house. I also need to order the paint sets, but have been putting that off because it will be a big chunk of cash outlay. I am getting to the point though where be it miniatures or things that I am painting that I have printed out… I need some way of painting things soonish.

Over in Path of Exile II, I have been poking around with a few different alt builds. The first being patterened off of the build that is the most meta thing right now, which is poison burst arrows pathfinder. This is essentially the thing that Fubgun is using to farm content, and while powerful…. it isn’t really my jam. I am not sure what it is about it but the playstyle just doesn’t feel good. I’ve never really been that big of a fan of poison builds, and this one essentially uses a one two playstyle of laying down toxic growth pods and then using poison burst arrows to trigger them. Mechanically it just feels a bit more fiddly than I want it to feel. Lightning Arrow as an abiltiy feels way better, but sadly it ate a bunch of nerfs. My favorite bow attacks are the ones that abuse the various ice explosion mechanics, but I think they are also nerfed. Mostly I made it to Act III, and could continue to push forward… but was just not feeling it.

Instead I rolled a new character last night and plan on going explosive grenade witchhunter for it. I am not sure what it is about the playstyle but this just feels better. I guess I like things exploding more than them withering and dying to poison damage. I’ve said it before, but given my druthers if I had to choose an element, I am almost always going to choose fire damage. I like watching things explode, and once you reduce the delay on explosive grenades it feels really good. I have no clue how much I will play it, because in truth I am still having fun with the druid. I just need a break from it occasionally. I should probably be popping back into Path of Exile 1 though and chipping away at challenges, either that or diving back into Guild Wars 1 or Warframe and progressing those. Path of Exile games in general though are just really good for audiobook time, and that is mostly what I did last night.

As far as my Druid goes, I have taken down Kulemak and Xesht and am working on farming up the splinters for King in the Mists and Olroth so I can progress those league mechanics. I am mostly just farming a bunch of t15s and trying to earn some currency. The next big upgrade I want to do to the build is to get a Defiance of Destiny, which will require me to swap around some of my resistances. I should be able to do this by just swapping my belt, but the extra survival of Defiance should make things more comfortable. Mostly I do plenty of damage right now, and any points that I spend will be going into survival. There are some points that increase my regen, so I am probably going to go down that path because again recovery makes things more comfortable.

The other big thing that I need to do game wise over the next few days is grind out a bunch of the sparrow racing event. Essentially I am down to just the brute force things, where I need to throw a stupid amount of snowballs, and complete some more races. I want the dumb snowmobile speeder skin. I know there is another phase of the event that is going to be happening around New Years, so we will see what that requires as well. The Dawning has been pretty great though, and all of the snowball fights and such are pretty fun. They revealed the next banner and it is effectively a mythic redo of Kabr, and I have to admit I am not terribly interested in him. They changed up his weapons from Pulse Rifle and Heavy Machinegun, to Scout Rifle and Linear Fusion Rifle… and I already have characters that fill that role that I like. Helhest is my precision character of choice, and when it comes to Scout Rifles I am likely going to play Umeko. So I might take a hard pass on this banner and just bank up pulls for whatever comes next.

Anyways! I hope you have a great rest of Christmas week and I will see you next week as we slide into the end of the year.

Gracie Glowers

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Good Morning Folks. I had to go into the office yesterday so I skipped blogging, and then after all of the interacting with people that happened… I crashed early around 8pm. This is a photo of Gracie to make up for not having blogged yesterday. She does this thing where she sits on my router and screams at me… while staring awkwardly at me. She often does this when I have decided I cannot handle her crawling all over me and wallowing on me and need to push her off to get something done. I think this is her way of sulking. It generally cracks me up quite a bit when it happens, because clearly she is mad at me and wants me to know it… by going just far enough away from me that I will be certain to see her and the staring daggers. I am not a good daddy clearly.

I’ve finished the Path of Exile 2 campaign on my bear and am now in maps, and I have to say… this is the point where POE2 ceases to be quite as enjoyable. The campaign is a heck of a lot of fun, and mapping is not. Mapping just feels tedious, because all of the rewards for a given map are contained within a handful of rare spawns… and missing one of them, feels like you are missing most of the loot. So I always arrive at this point where I am roaming around the map looking for the last rare so I can go and beat the damned boss and move on with my life. It is one of those situations where a bunch of subtle decisions have gone into this game, and make it so that mapping is just not really any fun. Its the limited portals, the general lack of loot, the lack of a decade worth of leagues, and the fact that when I do die in POE2… it happens immediately and what feels like completely randomly. It feels like the only way you can make a character feel tanky… is by investing everything in energy shield, because all other defensive layers feel like shit.

Then there is also the problem that the league mechanic feels like crap. There are a bunch of think piece videos floating around about what is wrong with the league mechanic, but ultimately I think it boils down to something very simple. I spent a bunch of this past Keepers league in POE1 deep diving into the existing Incursion mechanic, and my core problem with it has always been that it takes you out of the flow of the rest of the game. What I wanted for Incursion 2.0 was for it to be less fiddly and faster to complete than the original. Vaal temples are not that, and they are way more fiddly and require way more care and feeding. We all sort of thought we could run 60 maps and then do all of those saved up mechanics in a single temple session, but it doesn’t really work that way. Everything is six token chunks and it always feels like I never have the right connectors to make things work in the way that I want them to work. I think ultimately this mechanic needs to be simplified so that there is a single pathway tile, a single power up tile, and having some measure of control over how much of the temple resets on an architect or atziri kill. Then there is the problem with the fact that the rewards were cool while leveling… but quickly feel like crap when compared to the needs of mapping. Hopefully they can fix it, but I figure it won’t be until well into the new year at this point.

In other news the Destiny Rising christmas event is a heck of a lot of fun. You essentially have a version of the crucible but you are throwing snowballs instead of using weapons, and effectively it feels like lobbing grenades at everyone. There is also a crafting mechanic where you build snowmen from the resourcces that you gain every day from doing snowball fight matches. At some point there is going to be a sparrow racing component that unlocks, but right now… this makes up for how shitty the halloween event was. I’m having a lot of fun just yoloing my way through snowball fights, and I would love for something silly like this to return more often in place of the existing pvp modes.

I am also playing some Diablo IV and having a lot of fun on the Paladin class. I am going all in on thorns damage, and I am not sure how long this archetype will hold up, but for the moment it feels great. I am nearing level 60 and will start working on paragon levels shortly. I’ve done one of the capstone dungeons and it felt like it was twice as long as it should be and sort of overstayed its welcome. I need to actually figure out my build, because at the moment I am not really focused on much of anything but leveling. The replacement for powers seems fine, mostly because one of them drops experience orbs which is helping me level faster. I love paladin and crusders in the Diablo franchise and the game immediately got better for me with the addition of this class.

Lastly I thought I would share a photo of the final state of my paint racks. I have been printing these for what feels like ages at this point and essentially this will provide storage for 80 pots of Pro Acryl paint. Each of them has a removable drawer for general hobby storage and are going to line the back of a table in one of the upstairs offices that I will be turning into a hobby room. Now I am going to focus on printing out some other general stuff, like I made a brush rack over night and will probably start working on printing out a wet palette today. At some point I am going to have to actually order the damned paints though, but am effectively doing the prep work for setting everything up. I am hoping to get a lot of the work done on the actual office over the christmas holiday days off. I am really happy with how good the cabinets look, and am going to effectively velcro them together I think so they don’t slide around.

I hope you are having a wonderful week. At some point I have to figure out this whole Christmas thing… because I have done next to nothing for the impending holiday. This year without my spouse it just does not really feel like it matters all that much.