Real Life

Bolstered Breachlords

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Good Morning Folks. Today we mostly return to our regularly scheduled gaming content. I’ve been playing an awful lot of Path of Exile, mostly because I feel like I am maybe done with Path of Exile II for the moment. My jumpy Fire Bear build works amazingly well, and has completed most of the content in the game except for the most tryhard hardcore content. I have no real interest in doing any of that, just like I have never had much interest in doing it in Path of Exile. So instead I have shifted gears to working specifically on trying to get 34 of 40 Challenges in the Keepers of the Flame league. Since my Righteous Fire Chieftain is pretty much as blinged out as I can get him…. I have opted to start working a bit on my Ice Trap of Hollowness Elementalist, which was not a thing… prior to me doing it I think. It has been freaking potent as far as characters go and I would honestly do this over and over if I had the option. Unfortunately a lot of the power of the build is coming from Foulborn Uniques, specifically the double explode Berek’s Respite. I hope this shit goes core.

I had been trying to finish the challenge that requires you to run 50000 quant worth of maps. However on a whim I decided to see just how well my Ice Trapper could do at the Bolstered Breachlords challenge. I had knocked out one of the three conditions, and I figured since I do so well at Hive Fortresses I might as well give it a shot. The thing about the Ice Trap build is that it essentially freezes the entire damned screen. You know what is really good defensively? Freezing the entire screen when you are facing a boss. Sure enough I was able to effectively keep the “It that was” bosses locked down for the entire fight and kept them from firing off any of the specific abilities that I was not supposed to get hit by. After my second hive brain, I managed to complete Bolstered Breachlords and with it my 34th challenge of the league. I am not sure if I am going to try and knock out any more challenges at this point.

The real thing that I am chasing is getting the same sized totem pole for my hideout. I have been collecting totem poles since the Sanctum league, and when Necropolis league happened I was able to get 34 of 40 challenges. After that it has sort of set a benchmark for me in my league journey, and now that is my ultimate goal is to be able to get the same size as I have previously gotten. I doubt I will ever be a 40 of 40 andy, at least not without paying for some of the ubers… which is not a thing that I want to do. Please note when I talk about paying for carries in Path of Exile, we are not talking about real world money. There is a thriving business of people who make bossing specific characters and then spend the entire league doing nothing but carries for Chaos or Divine Orbs. There are a lot of places where you can get access to this but the most common is The Forbiddden Trove discord. I specifically hate doing The Maven fight. I CAN do it… have done it more than once… but I hate the fucking “simon says” round and as a result I almost always pay for that carry to get my last voidstone.

In my travels of completing my last challenge of the league I happened to get a Hinekora’s Lock to drop, and these were at that time going for 147 Divine Orbs. I don’t really NEED the Divines right now since I am winding down the league, but I figured I would rather than the Divines in standard than the Lock. For reference at this point in the league a Lock effectively sells for Mageblood money. It is not like I need a Mageblood for anything however, because I do not want to shuffle the gear on either of my characters to try and make room for it. I still stand by my statement that a Mageblood is the least interest of the high priced items, because it mostly just allows you to cheat things on your build, and doesn’t really add anything interesting to the mix. Given the choice I will always build around a Headhunter instead, because it actually does something interesting mechanically. Though in truth I rarely play the type of builds that can benefit from either of those.

In other Path of News… we are getting a redo of The Legacy of Phrecia event and I am pretty pumped about it. Instead of using Standard as the baseline we are getting all of the bells and whistles that come with the 3.27 Keepers of the Flame league. Phrecia was one of my favorite events last year, and honestly it was hype enough that I put it on my games of the year list. Essentially every normal ascendancy is replaced by 19 new alternative ascendancies, and what is wild about this version is that we will also have the new bloodline ascendancies… which will create some truly wild combinations. I have no clue what I am going to be playing, because I am waiting on the patch notes to drop that explain some of the updates that rebalance the state of things in the last running of this event. Everyone is assuming this will mean some nerfs for Scavenger and Ancestral Commander because they dominated the last round. Scavenger for example made it trivial to get 90% of physical damage converted to elemental damage, because you could stack that cloak of flame node with an actual cloak of flame. Anyways this one starts on the 29th and I am fully expecting to be mainlining this event for awhile.

Last night I spent a bit of time in Destiny Rising, because due to all of the shit going on in my life we did not get to do our normal “Sibling Time” night on Tuesday. We knocked out a couple of rounds of Grandmasters, and unfortunately learned the lesson that you can in fact run with characters that have run out of stamina… but you do not get the Grandmaster rewards. We got enough to Calamity Ops to not be relegated, which we are calling good and then finished up with some Morgran’s Hunt. I will still need to do another 5 key run, but that should be easy enough before the reset. We have found two Strongholds for the week, but I know I have expended resources on three accounts… so that is probably all we are going to find. I know I need to spend some time running The Expanse this weekend so I can get some fruit and progress for the upcoming reset next week.

As far as the other news in my life… I greatly appreciate the outpouring of support that I have received. It is honestly overwhelming. I had a bit of a nervous breakdown yesterday at one point when out of the blue and without warning I was scheduled for two diagnostic tests that I do not remember the doctor mentioning. I of course immediately expected the worst… but then later called their office only to find out that no they did not have the biopsy results back and that these were just part of the standard procedures to look for anything else that might be going on. I still know next to nothing other than I have cancer, and at some point it has to be removed. I am just hoping that the snowmageddon we have barrelling down on us, is such that I can get out Monday for those diagnostic tests. I am trying desperately to hold my shit together in the meantime while my nerves eat away at me. I go between being largely fine and resigned to whatever is going to happen, to being a basket case.

Not Unscathed

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Good Morning Folks. The last time I wrote a blog post I was talking about the upcoming colonoscopy. I have survived but not entirely unscathed and I will explain why. First off as everyone said, the worst part was mostly the prep. I did a split two day prep so on top of not eating anything solid for a bit, I started my first round of prep around 3 pm on Tuesday, and that more or less lasted about three hours of hell. Then I got up pretty early and started my second round of prep around 5 am… and again it lasted around three hours of hell. My dad picked me up around noon and we made our way to the location… but google maps took us to the wrong place. It took us to apparently a health club run by the medical group, and the actual procedure was in fact in the hospital proper. Luckily we had about 45 minutes of lead time so were able to get over there and Dad chose to do the complimentary valet parking because the parking garage is pure butts for a full-sized pickup.

One of the first major challenge is that they did not have ANY of my medical history, so I had to speed run documenting all of that. Thankfully I have the habit of taking a photo of any medications that I take each time they change so I have names and dosage information readily available. The biggest concern for me was to make sure that they understood that I had a severe negative reaction to the specific anesthesia combination of Reglan and Robinul. Interesting tidbit of knowledge… I now understand what exactly happened back in high school with these two drugs. Apparently they triggered something called Tardive Dyskinesia specifically in my eyes and mouth. I had always just referred to it as seizure like symptoms, but the Anesthesiologist was able to fill in the details for me. I have no clue if I have a future ahead of me where I will not be able to control my facial expressions, but here is hoping it was a one time thing. Suffice to say I did not want to live through that again. The last thing I needed was another thing to worry about, but it is good to at least better understand what happened.

The worst lingering immediate issue of yesterday is the fact that the nurses beat the shit out of me trying to get an IV started. I was fairly dehydrated from the prep work, and I think specifically Tuesday I was not pushing fluids anywhere near as hard as I should have been, largely because I knew I would have a decent drive to the facility and did not want to have any potential accidents. I think it is a combination of one of the nurses had a shit technique… because the two times she attempted are bruised as fuck and very sore to the touch… so much so that I cannot really lay my arm comfortably on any surface. The second nurse made an attempt on the top of my hand and there is zero bruising from that, and finally they decided to go for the big vein in the center of my elbow pit, which I wish they would have done from the start. Essentially they would get it started just fine, but the vein would collapse on them due to the dehydration. So now I mostly just look like I was attacked by the chupacabra or something with two puncture marks and giant bruises that seem to keep spreading.

Once I got back to the procedure room, they directed me into a super awkward position… told me that they were starting the anesthesia and then next thing I know I am waking up. I remember briefly having a bit of a dream where “Erasure” and I were talking about the procedure, and if you had told me that they were not for some reason able to complete anything I would have believed you. I did wake up and hear one of the doctors in the room saying “… he claimed he did not have Sleep Apnea”. To which I asked the recover nurse about, and apparently I absolutely exhibited clear signs of Sleep Apnea during the procedure. So add that to the list of things I will need to get checked out. I have gotten used to sleeping on my belly because it stopped me from snoring, and it was the least I could do for my partner of thirty years to make her sleep life easier. I am wondering if that also mitigated the effects of Sleep Apnea, because she never reported me waking up and gasping for breath, and surely she would have noticed it at some point because she had just as fitful sleep as I do at times.

Now some of this information I pieced together from my brief conversation with the doctor in recover, and some of it from the conversations he had out in the staging area with my Dad who drove me. Positives… I had zero polyps that they needed to remove. I unfortunately inherited the Diverticulosis from my Father, but that none of the the areas seemed to have been inflamed and turning into Diverticulitis, so again not unexpected given how bad he has it… and generally good news that it has not progressed to a chronic situation. The very bad not good at all news… is that I have a cancerous tumor in my lower rectum. They took a biopsy and I should know within a few days if it was benign or malignant, but for my purposes it does not really matter because it has to come out regardless. It will cause more problems the larger it grows and I will have to have a surgery to remove a small chunk of my bowels, probably a three to five day in the hospital type scenario. The main question I asked is if this is a bad type scenario and he said no, that this is just something that they stitch back together and life goes on like normal, with the added unfortunate effect of needing yearly colonoscopies for awhile.

So yeah… I have cancer and the ramifications are the same no matter what. I have to get surgery and will be referred to a specialist. I was told that he believes we caught this early, and this is not a particularly aggressive scenario, so in theory if I was going to get cancer this is the best possible situation for it. I didn’t want to have cancer, but if I have to have it… I guess I will consider it Bel Luck triggering again that it seems to be as good of a stance as we could have. I have no clue what the time table for this looks like. I know it took me from early November to late January to get in for a colonoscopy, so getting referrals often takes seemingly forever. I am hoping this does not cut into my Easter plans to visit “Erasure” but if it does we will deal with it at that point. I of course let “Erasure”, my siblings, and “The Librarian” know yesterday… pretty much in that order, and then later in the evening messaged my boss to let him know what was up. I have no clue who he will tell. I am not exactly going to be secretive about it, because clearly I am using this blog post to let you all know.

I’ve always maintained a level of openness about my life for good or bad with you. I’ve said for awhile that these posts are largely me sitting down at the keyboard and talking to myself, and in many ways it does feel like that. However I do know that there are thousands of you out there that read this on the regular either through Aggronaut or the syndicated version that appears on AggroChat (which I still think I want to burn down that site entirely at some point). I’ve shared my life with you all for going on seventeen years, and while I left out some details for the protection of others that are not me… I shared the core of the reality that I was living. I will probably be talking more about my cancer journey here, but hopefully it will not dominate this blog. I still expect to mostly be talking about dumb video game shit, because it brings me joy. I do however appreciate all of you out there, and I know that regardless of what happens you will be pulling for me… because you always have.

Anyways… I made it through yesterday, just not entirely unscathed. However the only way out is through and I have to deal with this no matter what happens.

Reconciling Sins

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Good Afternoon Folks. This is going to be a bit of a trying week. Due to age and neglect… I have been dealing with a bunch of things all at once. When I made the radical decision around the start of the year to live my life, rather than simply waiting to die… that came with it a bunch of adult problems that I needed to deal with. Some of these were put in place well before now, for example last Friday I saw a Cardio doctor and while I will be doing a battery of tests in the coming weeks, was largely given a relatively clean bill of health other than high blood pressure. They made sweeping changes to my drug regimen and for the most part it seems to have wildly improved things. Today is the first day I am wearing some old man socks, aka compression socks in an attempt to combat one of the other residual effects that I had been dealing with. I would say not to get old… but the alternative is not great either. I think the better option is to not get old while fat and in relative disrepair.

Another thing that I have been dealing with this week is finally getting brave and going to the Dentist. It had been somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty years since I last went into the dentist for a routine cleaning. I’ve always been more than a little terrified of Dentists in general, and the longer I waited… the less opportune the end result was going to be. Bel luck prevailed however because apparently my teeth are still in pretty solid shape without yearly attention. However there are some problems that are going to have to be dealt with, like the fact that my lower front teeth have migrated all over the fucking place and should probably be aligned back up in some semblance of order. That will require some sort of dental appliance and time in order to get the desired results, and with that will come a heck of a lot of money I am sure.

The other big thing that I am dealing with this week… is another thing that was set in motion some time ago. I am going in for my first colonoscopy, and within a few hours I will be starting the prep work by consuming the first of two doses of what I have been told is truly vile liquid. After that I will become close personal friends with my toilet for a number of hours. Then I will have to get up in the morning and repeat the process. Once again… highly do not suggest this getting old thing. This is honestly what I am most terrified of, because I know they will be putting me under for it. In high school I had a sinus surgery and had some pretty negative effects of the anesthesia, so I guess I am sitting down to write this afternoon so that if something does happen you know what occurred. Since I keep my internet life and my real world life relatively separate, I have created some contacts for my folks to reach out to in the event of anything happening. They will I am sure get the broader word out.

I don’t mean to sound alarmist, but I also did not expect my spouse of thirty years to suddenly drop dead last year. That set me on this whole path of reconciling the sins of the past, and trying to take better care of myself. There is someone that I care about quite a bit, that is also part of the driving force of dealing with any lingering problems. I am hoping tomorrow goes quickly enough, and that nothing major is found. Given that my father has had a whole slew of digestive tract problems, I would not be shocked if I do as well. Hopefully they will all be things that can be mitigated, and nothing super serious. I am not the biggest fan of this whole aging thing, but I am trying to engage in better habits that will hopefully see me through for awhile. If I take after my Dad’s line, they seem to be pretty long lived… and with a bit of Bel Luck sprinkled in hopefully I will as well.

Basically I am writing today because I am not sure how much I will be able to write over the coming days. I have no clue how much of a toll this will take out of me. My dad was apparently loopy for over a day after getting out of his last colonoscopy. I know tomorrow morning I will be dealing with another round of prep, and then tomorrow night… I am probably going to be exhausted and hangry since I am on a liquid only diet currently. I sincerely doubt you will be hearing from me tomorrow, but I will attempt to make a post on social media when I am free and clear of it all. Thursday is a total crapshoot as of how I will be feeling. I am hoping I will bounce back quickly and will have things to talk about at that point. Regardless I feel the need to say that if anything happens to me, I have enjoyed our time together. It has been weird sharing my life with you all, at least in a limited fashion.

Hopefully I am remembered fondly, and hopefully all of this is viewed as being deeply dramatic. I would have rather said things and not needed to, than to have disappeared without a word. Yall have been a major part of my life for going on seventeen years at this point. Be kind to each other, because if nothing else I would like to be remembered as caring about so many of you.

On Strange Wings

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Good Morning Folks! This week you are getting a bit of a bonus post, because it is extremely rare that I talk about anything on Saturdays. Generally speaking I blog Monday through Friday and then only by happenstance on Sundays because that is when I post the new episode of AggroChat. Today is a bit of a unique situation because last night we had our semi-monthly pen and paper play group. We are playing an Indie RPG system called Public Access, which is effectively an urban horror/found footage type gameplay experience. If you are a junkie for SCPs, Cryptids, or even The Secret World MMORPG then this might be a system for you. What sets it apart from the traditional D&D style “Roll-play” systems is that most of the game is storytelling. We the players paint the scenes by adding in little details, and we the players narrated both our successes and failures… which allows for some interesting situations like having “do-overs”. For example my character has an ability called “Come With Me If You Want to Live” where if I fail a roll and am in Grave harm…. I can narrate my way out of the situation and turn a failure into explaining how I narrowly escaped certain death and also saved my entire party at the same time.

Trigger Warning, I played around with the Adobe Photoshop Generative filters a bit during this post so you will see some of my homegrown AI slop as a result.

This is a session being run by “The Librarian” and I am very new to this group of people, but have seemingly blended with the group pretty quickly. Two of us are entirely new, two are regulars from other RP outings… and collectively we have created this internet age Scooby Doo Gang in the process. I am playing a burned out punk that used to be a little skater kid and now has a band… but the band never quite took off. The thing we have in common is that we all once lived in the town of Deep Lake, New Mexico and all were latchkey kids during the 80s and 90s. There is a cable access channel that no on in the town seems to remember, but we all do… and met up on a message board devoted to it. Over the summer we all agreed to meet up and investigate the town from a rental house, and as a result a Corporate Lawyer type, a Professional Athlete, a Burned Out Punk, and a Cryptid/Conspiracy Theorist all combined powers to try and solve the deep mysteries in this town.

My character shocking to no one, drives a white panel van… which has become the focus of some of the adventures so far. One of the really interesting things about this setting is that splitting the party is not a bad thing. In fact it allows for some really interesting mechanics. Last night for example we had three different scenes taking place at the same time, and while there may only be one set of characters active at a time… it does not mean that the rest of the players out out of the action. There is this phase called “setting the scene” where each player sort of “yes ands” their way through adding details to flesh out the uncanny nature of a lot of the vistas that we come across. For example we were presented with a wood lot, and were asked to explain what makes it look more evil than it might be. The detail I threw in is that the wind had blown through the lot, overturning the root system of the trees and making it both hard to move across it and at the same time giving the appearance of intestinal shapes snaking around the ground. Each player adds a little flavor to the world so we are all effectively building the lore, because in truth there are zero right or wrong answers… and the story is not written, only a set of guidelines for the person running the adventure to follow.

The Athlete and I have sort of developed this weird buddy cop movie thing that we are doing, and we have tag teamed investigating the desert scene. Essentailly there are rumors of these creatures coming at night and carrying people and livestock away, and we are trying to investigate what is happening. I narrated that I remembered this little old lady at the crossroads selling tamales out of an igloo cooler, and wanting to go out there and check out if she was still selling them. When we got out there we instead were introduced to her relative who now has a proper food truck, and introduced us to a series of clues… one of which required us to come back the next day. We also found a key to a hotel room, and in the room was an igloo cooler with a huge bag of blood marked with the Zodiac Taurus symbol on it. That is the Zodiac sign of my character the Burned out Punk. Last night… was our second campaign in this setting so we returned to visit the food truck again and were treated to a surreal wedding photo album, which unlocked additional clues about the scene. However while looking at the photo album, time passed faster than it should have… which required us to make a decision. Shelter someone for the night at the crossroads… either in a sketchy museum, the hotel room we discovered previously… or hop in the van and make a break for town.

The Athelete and I opted to make a break back for town… which created our Night Move for the evening. There are Day Moves which have relatively minor consequences… but Night Moves can end up in the permanent loss of characters. Since I had an escape card in the form of my “Come With Me If You Want To Live” ability… I decided to make the roll which was my Composure of 1 + 2D6. One of the interesting things about this system is that it is the players that determine what MIGHT happen if they fail the roll. So I talked about envisioning scenes in Vampire movies where parties are trying to get away and they swoop down on the roof of the van, trying to rip into it. “The Librarian” said that it was worse than that… they would not only attack the Van, but if I failed they would wreck it forcing us to be stranded out their with them. In my head I was preparing a way to narrate our narrow escape, preferably without losing my beloved panel van, but rolled an 8 which modified by my Composure became a 9, which was enough to get us safely back to town. However the entire time we were driving we were being chased by an ever growing flock of shadows… and just before reaching town some of them painted a Taurus symbol… aka the symbol of my character on the roof of the van in blood.

So what is really interesting about the whole concept of solving these mysteries… is that you collect clues and the clues serve as bonuses to your rolls. However there is no fixed mystery to solve, no correct answer that you have to arrive at. Instead the players decided that 1) they are going to attempt to solve a mystery and then 2) the Guide leaves the room and the players brainstorm a story that could match all of the clues that they have gotten, each clue again giving you a slightly better chance at making the roll. The brainstorming session was great, and the story that we arrived at was that the Food Truck owners family was part of a cult, but we were not sure if they were willing participants or being mind controlled by something darker. The Deep Lake Devils, aka the shadows that were following us are the harbingers of something worse, and the cult collects the blood of each zodiac sign as part of a sacrifice designed to close certain locks or enchantments and keep something far worse from coming into our world. The scene at the hotel room was us interrupting one of those murders and we ended up getting the bag of blood… which they need to replace and my character just happens to be the correct Zodiac Sign. So we solved the first part of the mystery, that states that the Deep Lake Devils are not of terrestrial origin, but now we have to figure out how to either banish them or cut our own bargain with them in future play sessions.

If you are curious, there are a lot of actual plays posted on YouTube for this game setting. I purposefully have not watched any of them, because I really want this to be a fresh expeirence for me. It has been a very long time since I have done anything pen and paper realted, but this reminds me a bit to our high school days playing the storyteller/white wolf system and the way in which we ran it. We were playing with a bunch of folks who were not necessarily seasononed mechanical TTRPG players, so we largely ran it as a story that we were all weaving together. I love the freeform nature of Public Access and how it is a narrative expeirence that we are all partaking in, instead of something that we are having done to us. I also really love this group of folks that I am playing with, and look forward to doing other games and other systems with them in the future. We are all technically local but to make it easier on the constraits of lives and families and such, we are playing over Discord. At some point thought I think we should all get together for dinner or something.

Anyways. It was a really fun night, and I find myself looking forward to these semi-monthly sessions quite a bit. Have you played Public Access? Have you played any systems like this that are way more storytelling driven? Drop me a line below.