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Compartmentalism and Media

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This is going to be a bit of a charged topic that I tackle this morning. It is not going to be for everyone, but it is still something I feel like I need to talk about. Normally I break up my posts with a bunch of colorful screenshots and images, but due to the gravity of this topic, I am going to forgo that. Apologies for the “walls of unbroken text” that is to follow.

I am an aging geek and grew up during the 80s and 90s as a result many of the things that I still love to this day are deeply tainted by issues with either the subject matter itself or the person who created it. For example, I grew up loving the Cosby Show and Fat Albert was deeply foundational media for me. I remember listening to Bill Cosby comedy tapes and even to this day I still have to stop myself from quoting random shit from all of those. Bill Cosby is a fucking monster, and aging in many ways is learning just how wrong you were about the people you thought were cool growing up. I have friends who can lop off the limb that was the love of whatever the thing was, and move on with their lives. I’ve never been able to do this, however, I also don’t want to support the thing anymore and end up holding all of these thoughts in a complex mental tapestry.

One of my favorite novels of all time is Santiago by Mike Resnick. It is this great wild west in outer space read that predates Firefly popularizing that sort of setting. Resnick has some serious problems and maybe is not something that I really want to support any more. However, it does not stop me from loving Santiago and the shared universe that he created of outer space nonsense and fables. Similarly, Orson Scott Card is pretty fucking awful, and not the sort of person that I want to be supporting either. That does not stop the fact that Enders Game and the sequence of novels that followed it were deeply foundational to my young science fiction reader brain. Then there is my love of the Cthulhu mythos and having to contend with the fact that H.P. Lovecraft and his extremely disturbing views are embedded directly in that setting.

My entire childhood when taken out of context is littered with moments that just no longer work or synchronize with my core beliefs. So many movies that I still hold close to my heart have deeply sexist, homophobic, or straight-up racist undertones that exist in the background. God forbid we go outside of my generation and start exploring the black-and-white era of film and the many issues with the themes and assumptions those films contain. I miss being able to feel pure joy about the things that I love, but that is also part of growing up and realizing that almost everything that you once cared about is tarnished in some way.

I think there are essentially three ways to handle this conundrum. The first is to say you don’t give a shit and keep on consuming and ultimately funding the problem. The second is to completely wall yourself off from anything that has issues and exorcise those things from your life. The third path tends to be the one that I travel down. It is to appreciate the good of the thing, while also understanding the harm that it has caused and do your best to not actively support it. The third path is a bit hard to walk at times and often means you are going to stumble along the way but that you are still striving to “do no harm”. It is important that we understand and accept the problems with the things that we love, but I feel like it isn’t necessary to stop loving them.

Now we zoom forward to the situation we find ourselves in, where J.K. Rowling is an awful human being that does real and tangible harm to my friends. However I still very much love Harry Potter and that setting and the novels are wrapped up in so many personal memories. I joined the series a bit late and the very first-midnight release that I remember attending was for Goblet of Fire. After that, it became a thing that both my wife and her sister that is no longer with us shared together. With Goblet of Fire we tried to share one novel between the three of us, and by the time Order of the Phoenix came out we were buying three copies so we could all start reading at midnight. I’ve got quite a bit of Harry Potter kitsch laying around the house that was accumulated over the years.

However, once the great unmasking of J.K. Rowling as the “serious villain that she is” happened, I stopped buying anything Harry Potter related. I shifted into the same mode that I have been with other problematic creators. I might purchase a book at a Thrift store where a charity is profiting from that sale, but would never purchase a new copy of anything from retail because I did not want to actively be supporting them. There are also times when piracy is the only ethical form of consumption, so that is also absolutely not off the table either. Whatever the case I did not want to be funding the creation of products and therefore lining the pockets of the creator who has shown themselves to not be worthy of our adoration. I am by no means perfect in walking this line, but I am going to do my best because, at the end of the day, it is more about my own belief structure than some performative action.

I will admit, in another time and another sequence of events I would absolutely be playing Hogwarts Legacy. Everything I have seen about it in passing looks like it is a really fun game. However, I am not going to be playing it because I do not want to be supporting the monster that is ultimately getting large licensing payments as a result of it. I get that there are good people who created that game, and spent loving care placing those assets and writing those quests, but it is all too murky for me to be able to sift that from the fact that a bad person is directly benefiting from the licensing agreements. Moreso it is that those royalty payments will likely directly support causes that seek to do harm to my friends that are transitioning. This is a very real concern for me specifically as I live in a state that is actively attempting to outlaw the existence of transfolk, so it is not exactly a hyperbolic dog whistle where I stand.

I will not be playing Hogwarts Legacy, and I firmly believe that you should not either. Will I cut you out of my life if you do? No, because it is not for me to decide your actions. I will however be disappointed in you. Ultimately your actions have to come down to your own personal beliefs and your own conscience. If you can keep actively supporting folks who do harm in the world, then that is on you and not on me. I’m never going to personally attack you over your actions, but I will remember them. Essentially every friendship you have is a weighing of the good attributes with the bad ones. There are times when you have a realization that a person is doing more harm than they are good, and ultimately cut them out of your life. I have lots of family members that I still love dearly, but that have unfortunate traits. My Grandmother was pretty fucking racist, but I still loved her with all of my heart.

When someone says that they don’t want to have to care about “politics”, what they are really saying is that they don’t want to be judged for their actions and I am sorry… but we are all judged for our actions. No one gets a free pass, and just because something has no personal impact on you… does not mean that the action has no impact at all. If you are going to play Hogwarts Legacy, I would ask that you at least wait to purchase your copy until you can get one secondhand so you are at least diminishing the harm you are causing. I still do truly love Harry Potter and the story that I fell in love with all those years ago, but I’ve made the conscious decision to stop supporting it. I still own the novels and the movies from the “before I knew she was awful” times and even some Lego sets that I might one day get around to putting together, but I won’t be consuming anything new that gets released.

I feel like I want to do as little harm as I can while I am on this planet. There are absolutely ways in which I am failing miserably at that. I know that and I own that… but I can give up playing this one game. I care about the safety of my trans friends more than I care about this one thing.

Portable Temples

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Friends… I can be completely oblivious to things at times. This morning’s post is going to largely be the tale of me completely missing the point. In Path of Exile there are a large number of league mechanics that you can choose to engage with or mostly ignore. There are some that I completely love like Abyss, Heist, and Delve, and others that I have avoided for various reasons like Blight and Incursion. Yesterday I ran an Alva memory that caused the portals she opens to work backward, and instead of bringing you into the Vaal Temple, it summons the mobs from it to whatever map you are on. I lamented that I wished that there was a node on the Atlas tree that allowed me to make ALL Incursion encounters work like this. That node sadly does not exist, but I still think it is a cool idea for GGG to think about in the future.

I opened up the AggroChat slack and lamented how I wished Incursion worked differently, and how I avoided it because it broke up the flow of the game. When you complete a temple, it creates a map for you to run through that is way more complicated and involved than your average map. What I wished is that I could save off a temple layout similar to how I could with the Lake of Kalandra, so that I could run it later. At this point, Ashgar used up his daily allotment of “…” and told me that it did in fact work that way. This is the problem with coming into the game late and not really having a ton of explanation in how any of these features from previous leagues worked. I completely missed the button that shows up at the bottom of a completed temple labeled “Take Temple Chronicle”.

This does precisely the thing I was lamenting not being able to do. Again like I said I can be painfully oblivious to things at times. So since then, I have been working on burning through the over forty Alva missions I had racked up and been avoiding. Essentially what would happen is I would build a temple and then put off running it because it takes more time than a normal map. Now I can just save copies of past maps and keep running Alva missions until a time in the future when I want to run a bunch of Vaal Temples in a row. It also turns out there is a fairly brisk trade in folks selling Chronicles, and I find it weird that in all of the POE content that I have consumed… no one has mentioned this. I did run a temple yesterday and even managed to pull an Empower gem, which is something I had been needing for awhile now.

The other major thing that I knocked out yesterday was the Unique Realms challenge that I spoke of in the previous post. I ran through my Doryani’s Machinarium map and then picked up Vinktor’s Square off the market. Finishing them knocked out my T2 boots cosmetic and am one achievement away from getting the next helmet. I was completely oblivious to this fact but apparently, I also finished the Monster Massacre achievement and have now surpassed one million monster kills during this league. Many of the other challenges are going to require me to likely respec my tree a bit in order to increase my chances of completing them.

This revelation about Incursion has led me to once again do some shifting around of my Atlas tree. I removed some of the “dangling” nodes that were not absolutely necessary anymore that involved map duplication and moved them around to some of the incursion nodes. This greatly increases the amount of time I have in each incursion portal and allows me to almost guarantee that I clear everything before running out of time. Map duplication nodes were great while I was building out my Atlas but at this point, I am gaining way more maps than I can actually run, and even donated a couple of hundred maps to the guild bank for other folks coming up through the ranks. I don’t really care about getting into the bulk map-selling game, because it seems horribly tedious. I am getting enough decent drops that they are selling pretty quickly and I still have my resonator business to fall back on if I start running low on currency again.

I have to admit one of the things I love about Path of Exile is how I can easily swap up what I am doing because of the extreme number of viable league mechanics out there. I am still kinda hoping that at some point we see the Lake of Kalandra make a return in some permanent form because, with the “sandbox” of this league, I think that entire experience would have been a lot more enjoyable. There are a lot of shorter-term mechanics that I wonder how they could remix and bring back in a new form. Anyways I hope you all are having a great week and enjoying whatever gaming nonsense you are finding yourself engaged in.

A Feast of Crows

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Hey Folks! I am continuing down this nonsense path of Summon Raging Spirits, and if this build continues like it has a strong likelihood of eclipsing my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. It isn’t that the Jugg is bad or anything, and it managed to get me all the way through T16 maps. The problem that I am having is that my gear isn’t quite good enough to make bossing feel good. I can absolutely get there, but the overwhelming popularity of the build has meant that anything RF Jugg friendly… is now ungodly expensive. I am wearing the wrong hat because I could not touch something with the same explicits on it and of the right armor base for anything short of 20 divines. This gets into the problem I have talked about before of the league tending to consider “less than 100 divines” as a “light investment”. I saw my very first raw divine drop yesterday… on the SRS Necro.

I have most of the build locked in so far and am about to build into my first large cluster. For the most part, it was easy to find the pieces that I needed because I am not sure if the league has caught onto how powerful this build really is. There is a poison variant that Balor has been shopping around that is catching steam, as well as a number of the meta-exploration videos have brought it up as a contender. The thing is I think most folks built into RF Jugg based on the statistics and it is probably unlikely that they are going to be building something else. While I enjoyed the RF playstyle, it feels like it is balancing a bunch of plates in the air when it comes to regeneration and elemental resists. If anything negative impacts either, you are sorta fucked. It also never really felt great up against bosses and felt awful in the Sanctum.

Last night I spent about 100 chaos upgrading items for my SRS Necro and I am getting close to what appears to be an endgame viable build. The thing is… this gear is functionally better for what it is than a lot of what I am wearing currently on my RF Jugg. The key difference being it cost me 100 chaos instead of the 200 divines or so it would cost me to kit myself out in equivalent gear designed for Righteous Fire. The market meets the demand and this league folks have demanded gear for the Pohx Juggernaut variant. I am simply not good enough at crafting to really be able to homebrew the gear that he is outlining, which means I have had to rely on the trade boards and those prices really reflect its popularity. I have the wrong Eater implicit on my gloves currently but that is just because I ran out of orbs and will keep chipping away at that as I do more blue altars. My hope is that I can start using the SRS Necro soon to do those for hopefully better results.

As far as defenses go I am in a decent enough state for early mapping, namely that I can easily soak up another 30% nerf from the second Kitava kill. I need to spend some effort fixing my Chaos and right now I have neck and helm to work with that are not yet upgraded. I should be able to find a better Amethyst ring that should help some as well, but I went with something I had vaulted during my RF Jugg leveling process. Luckily the anoint that this build once is cheap enough and I should be able to pick the Grave Intentions notable up relatively quickly after I upgrade my amulet. That leaves the helm as the trickiest piece that is very likely going to be a crafting project. I have a white-quality helm from the base type at level 88… and I just have to go through a bazillion orbs until I get both +2 minion gems and some sort of resist on the same item. I have enough Harvest materials to swap a resist out if I have to.

I do however think I probably want to start running some maps before I invest much more in this build. As of last night, I am sitting in Act 10, and in theory, after I beat Kitava and see where my resists are sitting I am going to dive into my bulk maps and see how well this performs. The Raven MTX though makes the Summon Raging Spirits all the more enjoyable.

Goodbye Link Tree

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The crap we are going through right now with Twitter has made me re-evaluate a lot of the things that I use in my life. One of these is Linktr.ee a site that I have used for several years as a catch-all for all of the various social and project links associated with me. I’ve owned the domain Belgha.st and Belghast.com and for eons I simply had an apache redirect pointing at my Link Tree page. It gave me a clean and simple way to link someone to all of my things at once in a very mobile-friendly format. However, if tomorrow it vanished… I would honestly have trouble cobbling together all of the links again because that has been the place where I have largely stored them.

This idea of hosting my own links page had been living rent-free in my head for a while now, but never really coalesced into action until I saw this video from EposVox. While he provides a number of solutions that would be fine including just firing up a NeoCities website to host all of your content. It was not however the solution I was looking for. One of the things that I always enjoyed about Link Tree was just how fast I could add links to it, and how everything had a nice clean look and feel. This sent me down a rabbit hole of searching for solutions and I think I landed upon something. I even went so far as to share the solution I found with EposVox who has since created a Shorts video about it as well.

The tool that I landed upon is called LittleLink Custom and it is essentially a self-hosted version of Link Tree. It took all of a few minutes to set up the website, and by default exists in a multi-user mode so you could allow other friends to sign up for their own faux link tree pages that you were hosting. I did not necessarily need that functionality which is cool because it allows you to configure it in a way to automagically redirect people to a single profile. I already had space carved out for Belgha.st and Belghast.com, so I removed my .htaccess file that was bouncing people to Link Tree and started installing the software.

The most basic version of the site requires Php 8.0 or higher and SqlLite which is fine for a smaller install. It also supports MySQL if you want a more robust multi-user environment. I think the longest part of the setup was actually uploading the files to my host. There are a LOT of files, so I would highly suggest uploading the archive and then going through your host’s backend to extract those files otherwise you will be FTPing like 8000 tiny files forever. After minimal fiddling, I was in and configuring my link page. All that was left was for me to pick a theme I liked, install it, and then start adding all of my links.

One of the things I specifically dig about Littlelink custom is that it has support for a wide variety of options already out of the box, but you can easily configure custom links as well. I wish there was a bit more support for adding custom quick icons but I have faith that over time this will be adding more features. For what I really need, which is the ability to add headings, and sets of links… this will do swimmingly. Now the real hard part is going to begin, which is finding every place I had linked to my Link Tree and replacing it with the new Belgha.st link.

Since the software technically supports many different “users” I went ahead and created one for AggroChat and have migrated the Link Tree I had for the podcast over to it as well. Mostly this is just a place to keep a running list of all of the podcast mirrors as well as the most basic social information. I’ve even created a “Bel Gaming” one where I am going to experiment with using it as a dumping ground for the various video game-related profiles and accounts to make it easier to link up with me. This is very much a work in progress as many of the platforms don’t really have a profile page you can link to. You can add blocks of text to your link page, which is handy but I am going to have to fiddle with how that actually looks in practice.

The slow death of Twitter has really made me evaluate the tools that I use on a daily basis. I think we are heading towards me potentially just paying for a server somewhere out in the cloud and migrating all of my resources to that instead of paying for piecemeal hosting. It would be a big change, but it is one that I think is on the horizon. I am just not sure how much I want to trust “free” services anymore. This could of course be a wild overreaction, but it would be nice to feel like I have a bit more control over the fate of the things I enjoy. Even if it isn’t a scenario where a rich manchild destroys it… it could be something as simple as Google deciding the product is no longer viable. We started out on the internet with needing to host everything for ourselves, and I wonder if I will be moving back to that again.