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Yesterday was a bit of a rough day, and as a result I poured myself into a very familiar pattern that was Diablo 3. I started the evening in deep turtle mode and then eventually added Grace in the hopes of getting her one of the pieces she was lacking, the Stone Gauntlets. These had dropped probably 30 times for me and I had sharded all but the best ones. Thankfully it was on the second or third rift that a pair dropped and also at some point during the evening I got my Compass Rose, which was the last piece I “needed” for the Immortal Kings Set dungeon.

The funniest part about that is that I ultimately did not end up using the travelers set, because I was struggling with cooldowns. I swapped in my ancient primal flavour of time and the ring of the zodiac I had been using, as well as rolling cooldown reduction on every piece that could support it. I managed to get my cooldown to somewhere in the 50% range and after that the set dungeon was a cake walk. Various guides had said this was the easiest of the Barbarian dungeons and I can believe it. Essentially it just requires you to have Wrath of the Beserker form active. The cooldown reduction allowed me to have this up way more often, and some careful pulling meant that I managed to knock out a few elites during each activation.

The funny thing with set dungeons is that when I ultimately set my mind to do them I ultimately finish them. However they tend to be the thing that I wait until the absolute last minute in a season to do. There is just something about being both on a timer and having to do a bunch of gimmicks that sets my brain into panic mode. There are stories as to why I am the way I am with being on a timer that I won’t go into again, but suffice to say if you tell me I am being times I will do 300% worse. If you quietly time me while I complete something that I think I am just under normal conditions, I do as well as I ever do. So basically I have to trick myself into not really paying attention to the timer, which is exceptionally hard.

At this point in the season I am down to just needing three conquests. In season 21 I have the following to choose from:

• Curses! – on Torment X get 350+ kills during a cursed chest event
• Sprinter – Complete the entire Diablo 3 campaign mode at level 70 in less than an hour
• Avarice – Get a 50 million gold streak in some place other than The Vault
• Thrill – Complete a Greater Rift 45 without wearing any set gear
• Speed Demon – Beat a Torment X Nephalem Rift in less than two minutes

The ones that involve completing something within a time limit would probably be doable but my anxiety would be at a 45 out of 10 the entire time. Curses is pretty straight forward and we have managed to accomplish this on several seasons so that is a no-brainer. Avarice is similarly a no-brainer and I have even written how to go about accomplishing that in the past. That leaves the only one I have not actually accomplished before being Thrill, where you have to complete a GR45 which I believe is Torment X equivalent without wearing any set gear.

Right now I have been playing with a bunch of options, but in reality the true limiter is that I have not spent time leveling my Legacy of Dreams gem at all. This gem effectively makes each legendary you have equipped work a lot more damage, and after level 25 this goes doubly true for ancients. I want to get this up to around 30 and then give it a shot. I’ve found a bunch of build options for this, and tried an earthquake build last night that I did not love. I figure I will swap over to a Hammer of the Ancients build and give that a shot this evening after have I poured some levels into the gem. After that I just need to find a time and some people to do Curses and finally spend a weekend grinding for bounty chests. Given that I can do T16 pretty easily will need seven rounds of bounties. This will give me the fuel to knock out the final goal… which is to cube 40 items… and I am already at 20.

Because of the weird times that we are living in, we decided to do the normal Blaugust event in April and call it Blapril. The hope was to get our minds off of everything that was going on in the world with Covid 19 and in theory give folks something good to focus on during that month. At that time I think a good number of us expected that by the ACTUAL Blaugust time frame that events would have gotten more or less back to normal. I at least was wrong about that and we are still very much dealing with the world created by living in a pandemic.

As we near the time frame of “actual” Blaugust, I still wanted to do something to mark the event. I think it is WAY too soon to do another “31 posts or bust” type event. Instead I put on my thinking cap and tried to devise something that would be more of a drop in/drop out nature. If you have been around the internet for awhile I am certain you have seen one of those events that involves posting or drawing something based on a fixed number of prompts. Those are cool and all but I had this brain storm… what if we turned something like that into a “pub crawl” of sorts.

What Is Promptapalooza?

The idea is that each day during the Month of August there will be a different writing prompt presented by a different blogger. I think it was Roger who suggested that we are doing a “Blog Relay”, because the second part of this is that each day the person posting the prompt will also indicate who is next in sequence for tomorrows prompt. There is a good deal of flexibility in this, and I am trying to set it up in a way so that you can either supply your own prompt that you want people to create content based on, or we can supply one for you to post.

What we really need is more sites participating, because currently I am roughly half the way to the thirty bloggers I need to carry this event off. I had been keeping it on the down low up until this point as I tried to work out the logistics, but I now believe it is time to do a finish push and get the rest of the participants signed up. Really at the end of the day all that is asked is for you to take a day and at the bottom of your normal post include the prompt that will be used for the next day along with a link to the next person in sequence providing a prompt.

So in theory it would work something like this:

• On July 31st I would provide prompt number 1 and link to the person posting prompt 2
• On August 1st someone would provide prompt 2 and link to the person posting prompt 3
• On August 2nd someone would provide prompt 3 and link to the person posting prompt 4

This in theory accomplishes a few things. Firstly it provides a constant stream of potential topics for folks to write about. You can pick and choose the ones that interest you and incorporate them organically into your content creation stream. You can also completely ignore their existence and just sit back and consume the content that is coming out of it. The second thing is that highlights a different blog each day and hopefully gets traffic to that blog, letting a chunk of the community see what they have been doing.

My intent as the ring leader is to advertise the person who is providing the daily prompt. Since time zones are a bit of a butt this is why we are advertising the topic for the next day. My hope is that in the case of our Aussie and Kiwi friends that they will be able to snag that topic and still make it work. There are other details I am sure we will have to work out logistically as we go. The event at its heart is a way of prompting folks to create content and also serve as a showcase for the various blogs in our community.

What Promptapalooza Is Not

Blaugust Promptapalooza is not the normal Blaugust. We did that back in April with Blapril and this is an attempt at creating something new to take its place this year. It is not a mission to write 31 blog posts during a month, but if that is something you really want to do then by all means go for it. It is a more low key event designed to allow you to cherry pick the prompts that most interest you and also serve as a bit of a way to help spark creativity and inspiration. We are not running a marathon, but instead sorta having a big virtual block party… with social distancing of course.

There will not be medals based on participation. There will however probably be some sort of thing you can dump in your side bar to show that you were a participant if you so choose. This is not a contest but instead is a community appreciation event, that also includes a feed of new writing prompts. This might get integrated into the normal Blaugust event in the future depending on how well this goes. Just to make absolutely certain everyone understands, there is no expectation of trying to write 31 posts during this August. The world is entirely too weird right now for us to try and pin ourselves down like that.

How Do I Participate?

Right now I just need more bloggers to sign up. Once I get the number needed I will be working out a calendar and indicating which bloggers are to post prompts on which dates. These can absolutely be composed ahead of time and just posted on a timer. Additionally the form goes into detail about wanting to know what dates you can’t post on… and I will be using this information to attempt to create something that works for everyone. I think this could be really cool, but I need some more volunteers.

• Promptapalooza Sign-Up Form

Apologies that a post never actually happened yesterday. It was one of those mornings that after waking up and showering I checked my phone only to see that I had missed a bunch of emergency texts from work over night. Basically the entire morning was spent dealing with issues that had come up, some of which threatened potential litigation. The level of stress that I have been under over the last three weeks has been indescribable as so many things have gone wrong in sequence that I am no longer shocked by them. The biggest challenge for me is that I am stressed beyond the point of being able to actually find relief.

Traditionally my prime outlet is gaming, and I have been in this funk of sitting at my machine and largely staring blankly into oblivion. Yesterday for example I was technically off the clock at 9:51 in the morning having worked my maximum allowed hours for the week. However instead of firing up a game and doing something that I would enjoy, I mostly just browsed the internet or watched YouTube videos for a solid four hours before doing something with any meaning behind it. I did have an enjoyable evening finishing up objectives in Destiny and slowly catching up on She-Ra. It is such a phenomenal show, and I highly recommend it to anyone.

I finished everything on the Huntress for the week, so I am now moving on to the next character in pecking order and going to at a minimum work on Iron Banner for the Warlock. I am not sure how much I will get accomplished over the next several days given that Diablo 3 seasonal start is tonight, but going to at least make an attempt to push. Grinding random stuff in Destiny and watching things on Netflix seems to be a pretty good stress reliever for me right now.

I can’t really handle ONLY watching video these days so I tend to be playing something on my 43 inch 4k television while watching netflix over on my 1080p side monitor that I have turned portrait mode. This generally contains whatever I happen to be watching, twitter and the various chat programs. That said I seem to be very bad at watching things like Discord while I am also watching something on Netflix. Apologies for all of the ignored messages last night. I am in a much better headspace than I was yesterday so whatever it was that I was doing seemed to help.

Blaugust Secret Mission

Now this next bit is going too be purposefully obtuse, but I am in need of about 30 volunteer bloggers for a secret mission. We had the normal Blaugust style festivities this year in April, and we’ve talked about doing something to mark the traditional event. I have a plan and I am in need of volunteers for shenanigans. It won’t require much effort out of any one blogger, and I can even assist with some of it. I will go into further details in private, but I am wanting to more or less keep this secret until I am ready to announce the plans… which means in order to do it I need those 30 volunteers. You all have about a bajillion different ways to contact me, so if you are interest in this quest hit me up and I will fill in the details further.