Real Life

Blaugust in Another Castle

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

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

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

Rebuilding Normal

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Quiet Begins

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Morning folks. I had the first decent un-medicated sleep I have had since this all began. I know I fell asleep shortly after the 10pm evening news started, but since I remember nothing about the broadcast… I am guessing it was really quickly. I was woken by my bladder alarm around 4:30 at which point I snuggled with the cats until 5:30 when I finally got out of bed and showered. Yesterday was the funeral and I survived it, and today is the first day that I do not have an itinerary. I feel like today is probably going to be the hardest since I don’t really have much of anything to distract me. Knowing this… and knowing I would need all the support I could get… I got up and went to the “fancy” donut place and got a cronut and a sausage roll to bolster me as I star this day. I am sure I will have people checking in on me today… but really this is the point where my next life truly begins.

Yesterday I decided to categorize the post as “My Life 3.0” because really… that is what it feels like is happening. My first life was before I met my wife of almost thirty years… at that point another life began and it was a great life. Now I am beginning a third life and I have no clue what the future holds. When my brother-in-law lost his wife of an almost similar scope… he went off the deep end, and I now understand why he did more than I ever thought I would. He has reached out several times to act as someone to talk to since he has been exactly where I am now. My wife’s sister was the glue to not only that family… but our entire family as a whole… and everything was just different after that point. I’ve already made plans with our friend to go spend Thanksgiving with my wife’s mom this year because generally speaking it was only my wife that would be there.

We had gotten in the lazy habit of what we called “divide and conquer” where I went to my folks for Holidays and she went to her mom knowing she would be the only person there. It allowed us to spend the entire day with the respective parents, but in truth… we probably should have been just making it work so we saw both sides. I know I am going to have to step up and be there for her mom and I have already let my parents know that they are going to have to start sharing me on the holidays again. Her dad and step mom were often just calls that we made, but I know I too will have to start visiting them as well. I am expecting that I will be held onto by many in her family… because I am the last vestige of the person that they knew and loved. It was almost thirty years that we had been together, attending the same family gatherings… so it makes sense. I was as much of a fixture as she was.

So one of the things that my wife and one of her good friends did regularly… was attend the funerals of folks in their church… and then critique what went wrong on the drive back. In this light… the funeral was a horrible mess… but that was honestly sort of perfect because my wife would have been cracking up the entire time. First off it was extremely well attended. I was in too much of a fugue state to really grasp the scope… but my friend who attended estimated there were 300-400 people. Essentially it was in a high school gymnasium that had three sides for seating. The family was in the floor and there were over 100 of us there… and then two of the three seating areas looked to be fairly full. I know from my office along just being there for me… there were like a dozen people. Pretty much everyone that I met with was crying as well, or had been… so I guess the service was meaningful.

Basically I had spent so much time planning… only to hand it over to folks who had no clue what they were doing. Essentially the flow of the service was supposed to be a bunch of blocks where there was a sermon delivered by the pastor and then a musical break where a slide show played. Then another sermon break, and then the slide show would pick up again as another part of the photo slide show played. There were roughly 120 images in the slide show… and I will be charged like $150 for this video to be created… which is something that I could have done trivially and have done before. Essentially… the entire time the service was going on, a windows 11 desktop was being broadcast to a screen… with all of the lights on, so you could barely see what was going on. They eventually realized they should probably dim the lights… but that only happened after the first musical interlude.

They played the wrong songs at the wrong time… realized their error and then played the right song. There was a point where they were supposed to play a video, but somehow played the wrong video. Then when that video finished… they played the same video a second time only realizing it was a dupe after probably 3 minutes. Then clearly getting discombobulated by all of this… they started the slide show over again from the beginning rather than picking up where they had left off. Basically… nothing went according to plan, but I am not sure how many people in attendance actually realized this or if it was just me who had painstakingly helped them plan and organize all of the media for this thing. Essentially I should have just made the videos for them… so I had one set of images synchronized to a song and then labelled all of the videos 1, 2, 3, 4, etc so that no one had to think. I would say I have learned my lesson… but also this is not exactly the sort of thing you get a do-over for.

Everyone kept saying what a touching service it was… but all I could see were the glaring technical and execution errors. I tried… but someone without the rigor I would apply to the process was the one executing it. The part that was the worst however was the fact that the microphone that the pastor was using kept cutting out. Eventually they swapped mics… but not before someone from the venue had walked out onto the podium and fiddled with it three times. I was laughing from the floor… which prevented me from crying. I have worked in IT my entire life… so this honestly was fitting. I know if something CAN go wrong it often does. I just felt so awful that maybe I could have done something to make it work more smoothly… that if I had done their jobs for them… it would have gotten done right. I know my wife specifically had wanted her funeral done by this funeral home… because it is folks who go to her church. However that said… I will be planning my own funeral elsewhere for certain.

I was too exhausted to be outraged honestly… and at this point it is done and behind me and nothing I can do can fix it… so all I can really do is laugh. The entire day yesterday is a blur. I hugged so many people… and I believe thankfully I was able to summon forth the correct name for each of them. It was a long day. I did not get home from the entire proceedings until around 5:30 pm, and at that point I was so past going. I took off all of my sweaty clothing… piled it in the washing machine and will be going down in a bit to start that. Every part of me ached… physically and emotionally. I eventually made it to the couch where Gracie snuggled with me so deeply that it soothed away all of the frustrations. Even thinking back upon that morning… it felt like it had happened days ago. The entirety of the day… felt like it spanned a week of time. So many things happened, so many people seen, and greeted… to give them the opportunity to carry on their own individual grieving process by offering condolences.

I was told that I was loved so many times, and offered back my own love in earnest countless more times. Then also had folks checking on me throughout the night. I spent time hanging with my non-biological sister regaling them with the days events… only to have to bail because the neighbor down the street was at my door checking in. Her kids were delivering a gallon jug of Milo’s Sweet Tea and Milo’s Lemonade since we had a bunch of drinks left over, and I said that was the one thing that I would not mind having. I successfully dodged taking home all of the left overs, because I said that I would rather the church had a meal after services this Sunday in memory of her. I need to figure out how I am going to work the logistics of the sermon, because I still plan on editing it and maintaining their website. Basically my normal Sunday flow was to edit AggroChat and then when she got home from Church edit the Sermon, and I plan on keeping that rhythm. The irony of all of it is that I am very much not a religious person… but also knew how important it was to my wife, and I supported her in all endeavors.

I think I am going to clean a bit today. The cats have continued to remove greenery and flowers from the arrangement that my good friend Cyl sent me, which also thankfully are the only flowers that I ended up taking home. The rest went to other family members who are more floral motivated. We did not have a ton of flowers because we were trying to redirect everyone to just donate to the church in lieu of sending them. My wife’s teacher partner in crime for years is also working on setting up a scholarship fund, and the church has already said that they planned on making a sizeable donation from the funds that were incoming. That isn’t exactly how I expected that money to be spent… but I am not going to argue with it. They spent the five years or so we did the podcast and website, trying to pay us for doing it. We kept refusing it, because we viewed it as just supporting the church with our actions. I still do not plan on accepting a dime from them going forward, because really… that is precisely what she wanted.

Right now I think I am targeting maybe going back to work on Monday. I have a new employee starting this coming week, and if nothing else would like to be there for him. I still feel like I am completely unmoored, and maybe some of the regular features of a work schedule would help with that. Right now… I am just bone weary tired… so at least in the nearest interim I am going to rest. The last week took a lot out of me. If my math is correct, I unintentionally lost around twelve pounds. Starting tomorrow though I am probably going to begin getting up first thing in the morning and walking for a bit. I still want to travel more… and in order to do that… I want travel to be less physically painful for me. That means I need to figure out how to drop a bunch of weight so that I can maybe ride on a plane without feeling like it is going to break my legs.

I am sorry if all of this is too raw… and if it seems weird that I am working through such private emotions in a public venue. My blog is more a dialog with myself than a dialog with the world. When I write it… it is essentially like I am talking to myself and then find it odd that anyone is actually reading it. I do however appreciate all of the support I have gotten both through this blog and through all of the other online methodology that exists for me. Yall have been amazing as I have struggled with this.

Aggressive Hugging

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In the upstairs bathroom, there are two tiny windows in the room with the shower… and Josie loves them. She has long since stopped fitting into these windows but this does not stop her. She always looks so damned uncomfortable, but if there is ever a time when I cannot find her… I will find her in these windows especially as the sun streams through them. The quality of the photo is pretty shitty because I was using the digital zoom for fear that she would hop down when I came into the room. I love her, and I wish she was as snuggly as she was when she was a kitten, but I try and give her the space she needs. I am wondering how her personality is going to change… and honestly how the personalities of the other two girls are going to chance now that there is no momma and it is just daddy. Cats are effected in unpredictable ways by life changes.

I am so exhausted at a soul deep level. I got something resembling normal sleep last night. I rush ordered a box of zzzquil and it was sitting on the front door step when I got home last night. So I indulged in that and slept pretty much from 9pm until 3:30 and then got up for the bladder alarm and took shorter naps from 3:30 until 5:30 when I officially crawled out of bed. All told I think the stuff worked pretty great and hopefully it can help me through this transition between sleep patterns not working, and normal sleep. Though the more I read up on it… it seems like it is essentially the same as my old trick of taking two benedryls. I knew I needed rest going into today and was willing to carve it out however I could get it. The problem with all of the methodology is that I never sleep the entire night when I am taking something to induce a sleepy state.

Yesterday was the viewing and I got over there around 10:30… saw my wife for the first time… had a mild freak out because she looks nothing like the woman I married. Realized a large part of this is because I had forgotten her glasses and then rushed back home to get a pair. This is what held me up for a bit as I had to wait on a bunch of geese to cross the road. There are around 15ish of them that frequent the small ponds in our neighborhood and they feel like they own the town. So essentially all traffic stopped while we waited on them to cross… at which point I could scramble through the house trying to decide which glasses to grab. She had so many pairs, because she essentially two strengths… readers and then normal progressives and kept them pretty much everywhere she might need to make the transition between the two. I grabbed a brand new pair she had picked out but never really started wearing. Figured she might as well get to wear them, and they also complimented her.

So when I say she looks nothing like my wife. The funeral home did their best, but they had been working on her for an hour without any luck… pumping air into her lungs without any air escaping, and it was just obvious that she had a very rough time. I personally think she died in the driveway of my house and was gone from that moment forward, and all of the trip to the hospital emergency room… was just in vain. On some level seeing her like that helped me more than I realized, because it allowed me to draw this line in the sand that she is no longer there in any form. That she had been gone for a very long time. They nailed her hair though, and I give them mad props for that. The funeral home tried really hard, but when a body has had a traumatic last moments… it shows, and she looks exceptionally rough. I tried to give some of the people she was especially close to a bit of a warning that she as going to look rough.

That was probably the hardest thing about yesterday. I was friends with most of the people who cared about my wife the most from the teaching community. Many of which I have been in text messages off and on since the event happened. Seeing them dealing with the levels of pain I dealt with in those first few days was so hard. All I wanted to do was take the pain away from them and protect them from the feelings I knew all too well. I gave so many hugs, and they were big and lasting and I let so many of my wife’s friends pour tears into my shoulder. I joined most of them in tears, but I had the benefit of this being way more real for me than it had been for them. I watched my wife dying, and I saw her husk sitting on a gurney in the emergency room. They had not seen her… so within moments the battering ram of crushing grief claimed them… and all I wanted to do was lessen their pain.

The day was more physical exhausting than anything, because I kept trying to give time and attention to everyone that showed up for us. I just kept flipping between groups of people as they came in, because everyone wanted face time with me to offer their heartfelt condolences. I shifted into host mode, and while I broke down several times… the action of trying to make everyone understand that they were appreciated kept my mind busy. Everyone was worried about me, but I was way more worried about all of them. The few of us that were in the emergency room that night, had already been through the phases that they were going through. It isn’t easy… I am still very much not okay… but yesterday made me realize how much more okay I am than I was. My friend Vid introduced me to the Ball in a Box metaphor for grief… and I don’t necessarily think that my ball has shrunk yet…. but I do think the momentum has slowed.

All of that said… all bets are off for today. Today is the funeral, family luncheon, and then graveside portion and will similarly consume all day. I left the house around 10 am yesterday and other than the frantic rush back for glasses… I did not make it back home until almost 8 pm. At which point I pretty much scarfed some food that a neighbor had brought me the day before and then collapsed into bed while being swarmed by cats since I was not around all day. Today is going to be exceptionally hard, and I am probably going to go with the more comfortable of the clothing options I was thinking about… because I know it is going to be a long hard day. It was also sweltering yesterday… before the sun heated up the funeral home it was actually somewhat chilly but in the depths of the 90 degree day… I was a mess. The nice shirt that I was going to wear today is a light color, and I am absolutely going to spend the entire time sweating through it. So I feel like I probably need a darker color to at least diminish the impact.

While I wonder what changes my cats are going to go through… I also wonder what changes I am going to go through. I’ve always been a secret hugger, but been to self conscious and awkward to regularly engage in them. Yesterday I hugged so many people and it just became my most natural form of self expression. There was a student that my wife had recently taken under her wing, and I have been texting back and forth with her because I knew she was going to take this exceptionally hard. Shelli had become a bit of a surrogate mother to her over the last few years since she had graduated, because she needed someone like that in her life. Yesterday she told me “i felt a piece of her when i hugged you it truly felt so calming for the first time since this all happened.” and that made me very thankful that I cast aside those self conscious tendencies and just gave into the hugs.

Maybe I change through this. Maybe I become less conscious about who I am and the space that I take up in the world. I am a giant… and I have always been trying to take up less space. I move my way through life like I am just about to upset the balance and knock everything over. Maybe I accept the fact that I will never take up less space in the world and give into being the person that I actually wish I could be. If you are still reading I thank you for coming along on this journey.

Birbsieged

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Good Morning Folks. So I have talked about the fact that I feed several feral cats in my neighborhood… one of which that lives in my backyard and another couple that frequent the front porch. Around 8 pm last night I ducked into the backyard to see if Tripod was around with a full scoop of food… bumped my arm and spilled some of it and thought nothing about it since I knew the birds also liked to eat the cat food. I did not realize just how many birds I was feeding. I had to put out some more food just to bait them away from the backdoor so we could open it again without the fear of getting a bird in the house. This capture from the security camera does not account for all of them… there were so many birds swooping down and looking for cat food. Like I usually feed away from the back door so I was never really seeing the full effect. This is honestly a bit concerning… so I might need to get a bird feeder that I can bolt to the deck further away from the door.

I skipped yesterday blogging because I did not feel like I had much to say, but since then I have made a few swaps and figure I will go ahead and talk about them. Since I have most of my gear crafted, I have decided to drop Harvest from my Niko tree and instead turn it more into a “strongboxes matter” tree with map effect and map drop sustain taking the “high hat” and the “low hat” as a result. This combined with taking all of the quant wheels and all of the shrine nodes, lets me farm niko juice while running strongbox scarabs for fun and profit. Opening strong boxes, and forcing them onto your map with the map device is a heck of a lot of fun. I only have my five way device as I have not run a T17 yet so right now I am running three of the generic ambush scarab, and one ambush scarab of hidden compartments to crank up my chance of being able to open the same box more than once. The ambush scarabs are around 2 chaos each, and the hidden compartments 1 chaos… then combined with the 3 chaos map device craft… it is costing me 10 chaos per map.

I am extracting WAY more than 10 Chaos worth of goods out of each map. Granted I rarely get raw divine drops like in the above screenshot, but running orange altars means that I am often getting a large amount of raw chaos effectively sustaining this process. I am getting way more other things that I could be selling, but I am exceptionally lazy when it comes to liquidating my stash for the purpose of profit. According to Wealthy Exile I have 54 Divines worth of saleable things in my stash and that is up from 34 on Monday around when I swapped to a strongbox strategy. Now some of the raw divines that I have been getting are coming from 500k shipments of Blue Zanthimum to Kalguur which often returns at least one Divine Orb. The more important thing however is that running strongboxes is just plain fun.

This is also serving a larger goal that I have… which is to get that damned Primordial Blocks hideout. I have been running t16 maps that are NOT Primordial Blocks while having it set as every map favorite slot… causing me to produce quite a few drops. Essentially my goal is to farm up 30-40 maps and then chain run them so that I can really get the engine going of swapping back and forth between Blocks and Shipyard. I was doing a bit of this… but it was going much slower than I really wanted and was having to flip flop between map layouts more than I would prefer. My ideal scenario is that I am running 30 or more of the same map layout in a row so that I can turn off my brain and just farm before switching maps and zoning out while doing a different layout. Quite honestly I have to say… Shipyard is a way better map than I originally gave it credit for. Initially it was chosen as the best of the worst maps connected to Primordial Blocks, but in truth… I think I really like it.

The other thing that I am really enjoying is the fact that I am essentially getting two of my favorite classes… at once. Consistently the two builds that I have enjoyed playing the most are Bows either played with Lightning Arrow or Elemental Hit of the Spectrum and building it as tanky as I can reasonably do so while using a Headhunter. The other build that I love and keep going back to is Righteous Fire Chieftain, because it feels so good to zoom around the map with impunity while shit explodes around me. Running a bow merc… essentially gives me both playstyles at once as I get that good off screen clear that bows gives you, and RF explode for the packs that I dive into. The only negative is that occasionally my merc dies to random stuff, because it is more squishy than I am. I would be way closer to the “run 100 t14 maps with a merc” achievement if I could keep it alive 100% of the time. I am having a lot of fun, and essentially building out two characters at once… has tamped down my desire to run up an alt.

Speaking of achievements, I am currently sitting at 17 of 40 and have a bunch of items that are pretty close to finishing up. I am about to spend some time farming uber lab to quality up my gems because I have a stack of goddess tokens, and I am really cheap and do not want to buy gemcutters prisms en masse. In theory I might be able to knock out the 75 Divine Founts achievement this league, and given that I am sitting at 96 and making decent progress towards 97 I should be able to hit 100 to finish that thing. The one that is going to suck is Remarkable Realms. Instead of requiring you to do specific unique maps… it now just requires you to do 40 of them which is way more than previously required. I am sure they did this to keep Doryani’s Machinarium from kneecapping everyone… but as a Delver that was a good chunk of my profit selling those things. I think without those… almost all of the profit from delve relies on finding Aul and either getting the 26 Div Crown of the Tyrant or a well rolled Aul’s Uprising aka Haste, Grace, Purity of Fire, Envy, etc.

Speaking of Delve, I have not necessarily been pushing super hard but when I farm up a bunch of sulphite I tend to shift gears and then burn it down in the mines. I am farming around 160 depth and slowly descending, but not necessarily finding any real reason to push it. I can get all of the cities at this depth and am mostly descending diagonally downwards when given a chance. I’ve yet to find an Aul, but I have fought the Vaal and Abyss bosses a few times each. What has surprised me is how much better of a source of gold the mines are than they were previously. I ran a few nodes last night and before I knew it… I was up over 100k again. I am spending it down pretty frequently to keep my town running so that I can keep doing shipments and keep growing crops. When I am flush with gold I run mappers for awhile to burn through my stash of lower tier maps, but given that Kodra is playing now I will probably dump some of those in the guild bank for him.

Anyways… me and Tunnel Bear are having a grand ole time. I’ve enjoyed this league quite a bit, in spite of the weird connection issues that GGG seems to be having. They blame it on DDOS attacks, and I believe them… but it still sucks and unfortunately there isn’t much you can reasonably do to stop that. I am not sure if it is some fan base outside of Path of Exile that is angry… or if maybe it is the POE2 player base that feels ignored now that everyone has gone back to POE1 for awhile. Whatever the case I am mostly getting by just fine, but I hear it is really bad for the European players. The problem with this league however is that I am mostly doing a lot of the things I have done before… and really don’t know what new information I can pass along that might be helpful. Keeping my head down and farming lots of content seems to be my modus operandi right now.