Real Life

Wild Wicked Weather

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Good Morning Folks. We’ve been dealing with a pretty outrageous spate of weather events over the last couple of weeks. This current batch started on Thursday night we had really bad storms and a few tornadoes that spun up… which are were thankfully not at our house this time. However that does not mean that we have not been getting quite a bit of hail. The worst of it was golf ball sized hail, but Friday afternoon my wife was in the backyard reading and captured this photo of a deluge of pea sized hail. Thankfully none of it lasted terribly long, and to the best of my knowledge we’ve had not damage to either our automobiles or roof. It has just been stressful to effectively be under constant watch for bad weather. We’ve been running the televisions pretty much 24/7 just in case the news cuts in with a tornado warning or something.

What we have been dealing with more recently however is flooding. After over a week of pretty consistent deluge the ground is just completely saturated. This means when it is raining we are highly susceptible to flash flooding.Luckily anything we have dealt with has been minor, and is largely in the form of large pools of standing water on our lawn. However the green belt behind the house is pretty full and all of the nearby lakes and rivers are beyond flood stage. There are several roads in my town that are blocked off from travel due to flooding. With this also comes several deaths as folks foolhardily drive into water flowing over the road. You learn the catch phrase “Turn Around, Don’t Drown” pretty early around here… and clearly these folks did not mind that lesson. We are all safe and well… but are absolutely hoping for a break in this nonsense. Sadly by the end of the summer we will be back in drought territory more than likely.

Ever since realizing that Ammo, Sita, and Sol are timezone compatible with me… I have been joining in their nonsense when possible. We made tentative plans during the day to work on some stuff in Monster Hunter Wilds and I logged in to patch up my machine and make sure everything would load fine given that I had not played it in probably a month. I had to rebuild my shaders, so was thankful that I did some prep work. Ammo unfortunately got caught in this cycle of rebuilding shaders and then crashing out… and in the meantime Sita and I were partaking of barrel bowling in the new grand hub. Then… about the time it seemed like Ammo was stabilizing… I lost my internet. I can technically tether to my phone, but the connection is nowhere near stable enough to actually play much in the way of online games. It came back a few times… but only temporarily and around 9:20 I gave up for the evening. Apparently it had taken Ammo another 30 minutes or so before her situation was straightened out so it seems as though the entire outing was a bit cursed.

I did get to unlock the Grand Hub which was pretty great, which then allowed me to view the new cat cooking animation. It isn’t so much a cooking animation but more a situation where the three adorable palicoes in Tomato hats do a speedy delivery of food from somewhere else. I was using a Kunafa village voucher so they delivered me a meal of cheesy bread. While I will probably forever miss the actual cat cooking animations from Monster Hunter World, this is at least better than cooking my own food. The Monster Hunter Rise scenes were pretty great as well, but World will always be the best. The new scenes though have a heck of a lot of charm so I will accept it.

One good thing did come out of the otherwise cursed evening. Ammo and Sita have the whole grouping together thing down to an art form. That has always been the problem with Capcom online games… is that they seem to have no fucking clue how people actually interact with each other. It is such a clusterfuck to actually get grouped with a friend… but this is essentially the process that Sita taught me, that I will now follow going forward. This requires you to share a squad with the person you are wanting to group up with, but from the start screen you choose Lobby Search and then Squad Lobby Search. Next you choose the squad you share and choose to join that lobby. This is going to give you a private lobby only for members of that squad. Then when someone posts a quest you can go to Alma and choose Lobby Member Quests and find the quest that was just posted. Following these steps made it relatively painless to get grouped up.

Hopefully the next time it is Monster Hunter Wilds night, things will go a bit better overall.

Voxel Crafting and Headpats

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Good Morning Folks. I’ve been intermittently blogging for the last few weeks, mostly because it just does not feel like I have a full compliment of stuff to talk about right now. I am still mostly mainlining Guild Wars 2, and chipping away at various achievements. I’ve stalled out a bit on the whole Vision track thing, but have pushed Tailoring up to 500 on the Necromancer, and Leatherworking to 470 on my Ranger largely so that I could consume down the various ascended materials that just sort of clog your inventory. At some point I should work on pushing Armorsmithing up to at least 450 so that I can craft ascended gear for every weight. I’ve made a decent amount of gold selling some Celestial gear that I made for leveling purposes, because the market still seems to be hungry for that. It makes sense given that there are so many do “everything with this build” guides that focus on the Celestial stat package.

My friend Zarly starting the game… has made me realize how much of the early experience from the standpoint of a brand new account… I just do not understand. I was going to start a series of getting started posts, but quite frankly… I have so much quality of life stuff on my account that I am not even sure if it would make sense. I’ve been kicking around the idea of registering a second Guild Wars 2 account from the standpoint of keeping it ENTIRELY free to play, just so that I can grasp what that later experience looks like. From that standpoint I could do a much better job of writing up guides, knowing exactly the limitations of what someone who has not dumped a bunch of money into the game has access to. Little things like explaining what the hell the parts of the UI are… would probably be valuable for someone just getting started. It seems like a heck of a lot of work, so I am not sure if I am going to go down that path or not… but it could be a valuable resource like some of my other getting started posts.

I think another part of my reluctance to blog is the fact that it is backyard time, which means I am spending at least a little bit of time each evening hanging out there. Greybie one of our outdoor feral cats has come to expect me to go out there pretty much every day. I will walk out the door and he will come running over expecting me to sit down so that I can pet him for awhile. I’ve charged up my Steamdeck and loaded it full of bite sized games with the eventual purpose of spending evenings out there with our retinue of ferals while my wife reads. This has not quite happened yet but probably will soonish. I need to find the battery pack that I have that connects up to the the steamdeck case so that I have a bit more longevity given that the device is a battery hog.

Over in Enshrouded, I have completed the obsessive building phase of my base and created floors all the way down as far as my current building limit will allow me. Towards the end I had the whole process of hollowing out the spawned earth down to a science. When I raise my base size limits again I will keep going down and I am just barely above this little plateau that I am likely going to build out to be a farming area. I built a temporary plank of stone so that I could take a single screenshot that encompassed the entire stack. So I will not start back up with an adventure phase next as I attempt to improve my base and rescue more of the craftspeople. Right now I have the Smith, Hunter, and Alchemist and am slowly working on getting all of their machines up and running. I need to craft some better gear, so that is likely going to involve some trips out to bandit towns to clean them out in order to get metal scraps that I can then convert into plates.

I did stub out my staircase upwards to the vertical limit and at some point when I want to go back into another building phase I will probably continue my stacks upwards. I legitimately have no use for most of the space that I am creating… but I just like having it anyways. My original thought was to take an entire floor and devote it to a single crafter, and that probably will be the direction I eventually go. Start building out the floors so that they have a little apartment area for the crafter and then a large open bay full of the crafting machines that they control, as well as rows of the conversion machines like the kiln to bulk generate a bunch of resources. Mostly this overbuild is in part because some of my previous builds just needed more space in order to operate at the level I wanted them to. Essentially I am viewing this world as my new forever world, that I will keep incrementing over time.

Lastly I have been poking around a bit with Lay of the Land, a new voxel crafting/building game that is in very early access. I had wishlisted it on steam some time ago, and recently watched a video from LevelCapGaming talking about their experiences with it. Right now you can gain access to the game through the $5 per month tier on the developer’s patreon which gets you access to various builds that they post. It is pretty robust but also… not exactly easy mode either. This game has a physics engine, which means you are almost certainly going to die the first time you attempt to fell a tree as it is very likely going to fall over on top of you. The crafting system works a little differently than Minecraft, but is also easy enough to grasp once you figure it out.

The game uses much finer resolution of voxels and as a result it can generate really interesting rounded prefab buildings. This however complicates the process of building a bit, but the game has functionality similar to some of the Minecraft modes that allow you to set a start point and and end point and will fill the space between with the same material. Crafting is also a bit different in that you throw items onto the ground and then hit R to pop up a menu of items that can be crafted with those items. It feels a bit odd but in practice it actually goes much faster than crafting the same type of object in Minecraft.

The only gotcha right now is that so far Lay of the Land is a single player only game… with a single map that gets generated and does not expand infinitely in any direction. I have no clue what the long term plan is for the game, but for now it is mostly just a neat single player experience. Just like I got in early with Minecraft, I figured I would go ahead and support this game and see how it develops. I am not sure I will keep the Patreon rolling indefinitely, but for the current moment it seems interesting enough to check out and see what I can do with it. The biggest difference between this game and Minecraft is that combat is actually pretty interesting. Mobs have attack patterns and do crazy stuff like throw bombs at you… which also means you are probably going to die a lot. I will of course talk about this game periodically to give you updates on my thoughts as it progresses.

Email of Destiny

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Good Morning Folks. I was sort of all over the place this weekend, dipping my toes in a bunch of different gaming ponds. However the absolute highlight of the weekend is attached to some deeply strange circumstances. On the 16th I got an email from Nintendo outlining how the Switch 2 Preorder lottery would work… and in it included the phrase “It’s your time to purchase” which it stated would be in the email you receive if you were chosen. Obviously I immediately turned around and searched for this exact phrase… and while I did not uncover an email from Nintendo it DID include an email draft that I never actually sent to a friend of mine… where I was sending them SWTOR patch notes. Thing is… this is a person that I used to talk to on a near daily basis… but had not talked to in years. We apparently had a brief conversation in 2021 but I have no working memory of this event.

We always had this weird tentative connection, and for the life of me I have no clue how we met because so much of my time in World of Warcraft is crusted with the dusts of time. However we sort of had this dynamic of being friends that went to different schools. Occasionally I would convince her to join in one of my mad schemes… or recruit her to join a raid here or there… but for the most part we operated in completely different circles. So completely out of the blue… and unlike myself.. I decided to email to see how they were doing. What shocked me the most is that I got a pretty quick response, which led to us chatting on Discord off and on throughout the day. I’ve lost contact with so many people over the years from leaving World of Warcraft to leaving Twitter, people who meant a lot to me and were really close friends… but also when it comes to online connections you never know how you are perceived in their eyes and how much of a friend they actually consider you. When I made a break from World of Warcraft I sort of put all of that in a box and shoved it into the back corner of a closet… and I am glad that I made enough of an impression for someone to be interested in reconnecting.

For other non-gaming related stuff, this was Eurovision weekend and it is always a highlight. Ace and I have been watching this for awhile… and then making random often snarky comments over Slack during the show. I feel like it was a bit weaker of a total show than some years, because there were way fewer “fun” acts and way more “serious” acts. It seemed to be the year of the torch song, and I was at least thankful if someone was going to go in that direction… that the best one won out. However the absolute highlight of the show was a collaboration between Kaarija and Baby Lasagna… the 2nd place but significantly better than the winner contestants from 2023 and 2024. They did this amazing fighting game mashup experience of their two fan favorite tracks… and then broke into a brand new song that they created together and dropped on the day the semifinals concluded. Unfortunately the ONLY way to see this if you are not in an EU country… is via this reaction video because the REAL video of the experience is region blocked.

Enshrouded dropped a massive patch that they are calling the Thralls of Twilight update. As a result Saturday I spent most of the morning playing a brand new character and new save file. There are so many immediately noticeable visual upgrades, but I have not really gotten far enough to experience many of the new content updates. I did something that I had never done before… which was place my original base flame on the edge of a cliff and then proceeded to build off the cliff creating a very defense-able location. My idea is that as I expand my base area… I can eventually build down into the shroud below. So instead of actually playing the game and progressing my character… I spent most of the morning carefully excavating the cliffs surface one 2×2 block at a time. I made a decent amount of progress and created this work platform down at the lowest point that the original blueprint of my base would allow. At some point I will start expanding down again to see how far I can get this time. As Ash stated during the podcast… I really am apparently a Dwarf because I do love hollowing out a mountainside.

Another game that I have been playing quite a bit of is Slormancer, which is a 2D ARPG with an art style and quirky animation style similar to Rogue Legacy. It is a really simplified version of the ARPG genre, and uses a dual stick style control scheme that would fit perfectly for a device like the Steamdeck. I’ve not actually tried it yet but that is on my list of things to do in the near future, because this seems like an ideal chilling in the backyard type game. It also has a bit of a feel of the 2D beat-em-ups like Guardian Heroes or Castle Crashers. I’ve not made it terribly far yet, but have gone far enough to unlock all of the characters and fight my first mini-boss. I think I probably prefer the knight to the huntress or mage, but have not really gotten far enough to unlock the various skill specializations. I know the mage got instantly better as soon as I specced into the ability that fires a second bolt after the first. Really cool game and I can see myself poking at it off and on for awhile.

I am also still playing some Last Epoch because every so often I just want to run a map. I feel like I am not engaged in Path of Exile for the moment, or at least not forcing myself knowing that when 3.26 drops I will be back with new force. Eleventh Hour Games keeps releasing quality of life updates, for example I noticed that when you click on an egg and search your bank… it highlights items with no legendary potential so that you can easily see which items that will work. More importantly though is the differentiation between the Tomb marker and the objective marker, making it much easier to complete maps in general. I know that my Not-Righteous-Fire Paladin is going to eat a nerf… because it is a bit too powerful… but I am hoping it lands in a still very playable state for next season. Though since they have already said Season 3 is going to be all about Necromancers… I am probably going to be playing one of those.

Guild Wars 2 lately has become my main game, and I am spending a lot of time in Dragonfall. I am not exactly sure WHY… but when trying to figure out my next project I landed upon Vision. This is an extremely long process that involves doing pretty much everything there is to do in the Season 4 zones, and yields a Legendary Accessory as a result. I figured I would start on the hardest of the zones… Dragonfall and have been slowly chipping away at various achievements. It might be easier to knock some of this out in WvW through using the Dragonfall Reward Track. Since I like WvW quite a bit… that at least gives me something to be working on again since I do not currently need another Gift of Battle. Probably the hardest sub achievement is going to be Championship Bout, which involves killing a laundry lost of bosses that spawn after you finish the zone meta event. In theory if there is a good commander and everyone is working together, you could probably get this in a single go. However without fail… the group fragments and folks start taking on random bosses meaning that no one group gets credit for everything.

I’ve made a lot of progress on various achievements though, and have used the Memory Essence Encapsulator for Dragonfall to finish that bit of the quest. This is going to be the hardest bit honestly, because buying each encapsulator costs a bunch of crafted resources… some of which I cannot make and will have to lean on the market board to pick up. The big problem is the Lesser Vision Crystal which requires 500 skill in either Armorsmithing, Leatherworking, or Tailoring… and I have not hit 500 in any of those. I guess that could be a side quest for awhile… to try and push one of those up. According to GW2 efficiency, my tailoring is the closest sitting at 465 currently. Since my friend that I talked about at the top of the post just started playing Guild Wars 2, and is playing a Necromancer… I might get some levels crafting them some gear which at least gives me a purpose behind spending the resources required.

Anyways… what matters the most though… is that I have objectives. That seems to be my key to sticking with any MMORPG is that I have some goal that I am working towards. When I achieve the goals I tend to fade away, so as long as I can keep grabbing a shiny new objective to work towards… I am way more likely to stick around for awhile. It was a good weekend, and I hope it is going to be a good week… though that is doubtful considering we have bad weather for the next several days. I am hoping no more tornadoes that come close to my house.

Greybie Not Gaming

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Good Morning Folks. I don’t have a gaming post today because I really did not get up to much last night. I pushed corruption a bit in Last Epoch but spent the tail end of the evening hanging out with our neighborhood friendly feral cat that we call Greybie. Last weekend was the extended easter weekend industrial complex, and as a result I was off on Friday. Between the extended weekend and the weekend before that we worked on the backyard a bit and were able to get everything drug out of the garage and set up. Monday we had our first inaugural “Whataburger in the backyard” evening, which is the closest we get to cooking out. It is just nice chilling in the backyard. Really I need to do this more often and drag my Steamdeck or Switch out there, especially in the late evening.

My wife has been going out pretty much every evening and reading for awhile, and when she came in she commented that Greybie was hanging out in the backyard. I would adopt Greybie in a heartbeat but given how much he likes to roam… I don’t really think he would enjoy being cooped up in the house all the time. Instead he is my outdoor baby, and without a doubt… he is MY baby. So when I came out last night he was over on the deck and when I sat down he did this thing that just melts my heart… he started slowly walking towards me but as he got closer the walk turned into a trot which turned in eventually to a run. He has been living around our house since before the pandemic so it does not seem like he is going anywhere. Tripod the three legged Calico is also usually in the backyard, because she lives there full time… but yesterday the mowers came and she tends to get freaked out for awhile before returning.

I’ve been keeping tabs on the security camera to see if there were any Tripod sightings over night. She is sneaky as heck though and often times does not get caught by the camera. It is almost as though she knows it exists and is purposefully evading capture. There are times however that she will stand by the door to our bedroom and meow at us in the middle of the night… which I often wonder is what triggers Gracie and her late night screaming fits. I did catch another visit from Greybie around 2 am who appeared to just be roaming around in the backyard. I fed when I came outside last night, so he was probably visiting the bowl to see if there was still food. We often have Possums and Raccoons that visit the cat dishes on the front porch and backyard which is always entertaining.

So essentially… no gaming content today because I hung out with Greybie. I feel like this is the correct choice.