Ineffective Cosplay

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Good morning folks. This is going to be one of those blog posts that does not get syndicated widely, because it is going to be a bummer. Last night I fell asleep on the couch around 7ish… went to bed around 8pm… and then slept until almost 7 am. This represents probably the longest I have slept in years. I feel like the wheels are falling off now. Technically I am still functional. I am getting up and showing, feeding myself, doing responsible work things, and making sure the house stays at moderate levels of cleanliness… but I feel like I am not really living. I am still chipping away at the giant mess in the garage, and am about halfway through. Essentially the north side is finished with cabinets set up and things moved into them… and I need to attack the south side and effectively do the same. I have a pile of shit in the garage that at some point I will call the folks to haul away.

I can’t say with all certainty that nothing brings me joy… but more… I have forgotten what joy feels like. I feel like I have been cosplaying someone who has their shit together in the whole “fake it until you make it” genre… but I am just not sure if I will ever get there. This week is hard. It is fall break for all of the schools in Oklahoma, and I did not even know this until a coworker asked for it off to spend time with his family. This was always a big week for us and we almost always had some sort of project going on that we would complete. If nothing else it was a time when I took off from work and we spent quality time together. We would often go for trips elsewhere like down to Dallas, up to Kansas City, or over to St Louis to visit friends. I could do all of these things… but I just don’t really feel like doing so.

Last Friday was really hard too, because there was a cookout essentially in honor of my wife… but not having her… made the social interaction almost unbearable. People talk about having emotional support animals… but my wife was my emotional support human and I miss her greatly. No matter how uncomfortable a situation got… I always had her, and I always knew that she understood that my skin was crawling and that I wanted to run into the night screaming at the top of my lungs. How do you condense 30 years of moments shared… into even beginning to rebuild that connection with anyone else? I feel like my life is over… and I am just this shambling husk that remains, because all of the good that was in me was sucked out the night I came out of the bathroom and found her making that awful gurgling noise on the couch. My life ended on July 2nd… and everything that I am doing now… is just a vague attempt at distracting me from that fact.

Another thing that is really hard… is that in theory they should have installed the gravestone last week. There is a certain finality in that act. Like until that happened it almost wasn’t “really real”. I’ve not gone up to check, because its a two hour drive away, and I am not even sure if I should be doing that drive by myself. I had been waiting on a call from the funeral home to let me know that it was installed… but they have also been pretty much incompetent at every step of this process. They did not tell me when the death certificates were available, did not tell me when the final death certificates were available, and did not tell me when they had a mock-up of the tombstone ready for me to review. If I did not have a “fuck this is taking forever” moment at each step… I would not have gotten any of the information. So basically… I have Schrodinger’s tombstone right now… and the only way I am going to know for certain is if I make the drive.

I’ve not gone to the grave site… since the day we buried her because… there has never felt like much of a point. She is not there anymore. My wife herself firmly believed that, and thought the whole visiting graves thing was a bit weird. I mean if she is anywhere… she would be here since she died in the driveway. Not that I understand the mechanics of hauntings mind you… but it would seem like the place someone dies would be more potent than the place where their remains end up. I know at some point I will need to go. I will need to at least for the sake of her family make the effort of decorating her grave, since they all seem to care deeply about that sort of thing. I am agnostic at best… and atheist at worst… and I have always struggled with the rituals of a predominantly evangelical society. I know I have people who are willing to be there for me… but what they can offer me… isn’t what I need. I need my wife back.

I have friends who are pushing me to get back into therapy. Essentially how the free therapy works is that you get five sessions per instance. In theory I could just keep making up a reason for why I need therapy, because it is only ever dealt with at the inception of the therapy… and not during the sessions themselves. It did help… but only those first three of five sessions or so. I think I might just be going through a low spot with the changing of the seasons and the coming of the season of darkness. I’ve never had seasonal affective disorder… my wife had that… and I have always cursed the existence of the sun. However maybe I do need to get out more and at least pretend I am a daywalker. I am trying to get out and about more on the weekends, but mostly just because I have things I need to get done. I know today I am going to run to the recycling place because it was entirely too full on Sunday, and I never unloaded the boxes from my truck.

Maybe I just needed to cry for awhile. I have been doing so while I write this post, and am honestly feeling a bit better as a result. Unfortunately crying is not one of those things that you can just sort of force to happen. Maybe I needed to get some of the sadness out of me. I will say that I would be completely lost if not for Gracie and how needy of attention she is. So many of the things I did… because I was trying to take care of my wife. Without her… it just doesn’t feel like there is a point to doing any of them. I have mostly been going through the motions because the routines are familiar… but there is no passion behind it anymore. I think I am going to cut this blog post off, because if you have read down to this point… you are a real one.

I am not sure if I have been lying to you… when I say that I am fine… or if this week just got to be too much and I fell apart. I am broken, and I have to admit that I am broken. I just am not sure if I will ever be fixed.

AggroChat #542 – Oh, It’s Brat

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Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! We start off the show with a discussion about how we all dogpiled on Discord and attempted the pre-release version of the MIT Mystery Hunt… and for those completely lost about the show title, one of the clues to one of the puzzles… was just the specific color of the Charlie XCX Brat Album. From there, Bel talks a bit about the Halloween event in Guild Wars 2 and how some folks take the Mad King’s Labyrinth way the hell too seriously.  Tam discusses what seems to be a complete rework of how the factions work in Infinity, and Bel discusses the launch of World of Warcraft Legion Remix.  We talk a bit more about Hades II, and more specifically playing the game AFTER beating Cronos.  Finally, Bel talks just a little bit about his early experiences in Blue Protocol, where he is trying to find the fun in the game.

Topics Discussed:

  • AggroChat vs Mystery Hunt
  • Mad King’s Labyrinth in GW2
  • Infinity Major Factions Update
  • World of Warcraft Legion Remix
  • Hades II
  • Blue Protocol

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tricks and Treats

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Good Morning Folks. Last night I officially started the Mad King festivities as we spend our normal few hours of guild nonsense running around the labyrinth. It was a pretty fun time, and eventually we largely followed around a tag. However not before some random idiot seemed to take very hostile offense to us having our own private tag since we outgrew the size of a normal party. I mean we could have dogpiled on the other tag… but technically we were there first, and also after a point it became about the principle of the situation. We were calm and reasonable in map chat, but this other person was actively cursing us out… which does not befit the chill that Guild Wars 2 normally has. I would blame this on the folks filing in from World of Warcraft… but this dude had the God Walking Amongst Mortals title… so they were a special brand of asshole.

That said… it did not really put a serious hamper on our fun, because the biggest component of Guild Wars 2 Thursdays is hanging out on discord and talking about all manner of nonsense. During which Sita the robot… relayed to us some concerning details that deeply concerned me… but then again… that is every week. Joking aside though it is a heck of a lot of fun just to hang out for a bit and do some relatively low effort gaming. This is the part of MMORPGs that I had been missing, and I am glad that I finally got off my ass and tried to wrangle folks to do something together. It doesn’t necessarily happy EVER week, but more often than not we are doing fractals or something similar in Guild Wars 2 every Thursday. If we had more folks… we would try strikes or something that requires slightly more effort. However for now… the Labyrinth was exactly the right amount of nonsense.

Prior to Guild Wars 2 shenanigans I spent a bit trying to catch AFK Journey up on the quest chain. While I don’t talk about it very often, I tend to play this game every night before falling asleep at least enough to do some of the dailies. However I tend to batch the story up and grind it all down in a single go, or in this current case a series of attempts. I think I am nearing the end of this current storyline and I have to say this is one of my favorite so far. I really like the character of Gala and I will kill anyone who threatens to harm her. I’ve started running AFK Journey on the same MuMuPlayer that I use to play Destiny Rising, and it is pretty great for batch doing auto battles to raise various ranks. If you play this game feel free to friend me up and my ID is 39949620.

Yesterday was the release of a new 5 star banner in Destiny Rising, and I had been banking up my pulls for this event. I had phenomenal luck and also spent a little money… and managed to pull 3 copies of her, and 2 copies of the new 4 star which seems WAY harder to get than Umeko was. They also threw Finnala and Ikora on the same banner… which means you are going to get way more copies of them as a result. Sadly neither of them are terribly useful characters other than our PVPVE nonsense. Maybe when we finish with the Ikora madness we should do Nala matches instead. The new champ is pretty cool is both 5 star and 4 star represent the very first bow characters. Thankfully you can pull an Exotic bow, the Trinity Ghoul off the battlepass which greatly improves their functionality. Helhest is ALMOST a great character… but unfortunately the normal drones don’t follow you around. Still it is a solid arc champion that has the ability to make heavy weapon ammo out of thin air… and represents a pretty great support character.

Another cool thing that I think went in with this update, is there are not a ton of outfits available for purchase with ONLY bright dust. This might have been a thing before, but up until this point I thought they required both bright dust and silver. As a result I snapped up outfits for all of the characters that I play regularly. I specifically love this Estela outfit, since green is already one of my favorite colors and green and red is the combination that I tend to build around in Guild Wars 2. My guess is that we were just interpreting the cost of these outfits incorrectly, because I cannot see that so many people spent silver on the green Tan-2 as I have run up against doing events.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in the Chaos Trials of the Nine, because I desperately need an Exotic Artifact for the fourth slot. This is essentially all that is standing between me and getting my Jolder to gold, and unlocking the next batch of ascension points. I’ve refactored all of my exotic artifacts to 2500+, and I think at this point the process is just wasting resources to go any higher. Essentially I am only getting an upgrade when I max out the pity luck on the refactors. If I had ONE more exotic artifact I could push it up to 2500 as well and get across the finish line. The other thing that is actively hurting me is that I am not using an exotic weapon on Jolder, and have not found any Exotic weapon mods that will fit into the submachine gun. All of the rapid fire mods that I can pull from the mod choice engrams… seem to only want to be slotted into the Autorifle.

Even if they did not make the changes to bright dust in this patch… I still feel like they are getting less stingy with alternate outfits in general. I pulled this alternate outfit for Jolder off the normal banner, and then this alternate outfit for Helhest off the new limited banner. I am not the biggest fan of the yellow and grey look for Helhest, but I love the Pink and Purple Jolder and am pretty much using that all the time now. I would love to pull an updated shield to match it at some point, especially given that Jolder right now is my main character that I am playing. It is weird how I originally thought Wolf was so cool, and then as I have played more of the game I have effectively completely abandoned him for greener pastures. I think the thing that could improve Wolf is if they would do the thing that the Mihoyo games do and allow you to change up his element and weapon loadout. If they made it so Wolf could learn how to use any weapons and any element… it would make them way more useful in the long run.

I’ve got a cookout thing going on tonight, so I am realistically not going to get much in the way of gaming. I also have an in person all day event going on at work, so I am going to be exceptionally work out from the combo of both of those events landing on the same day. Tomorrow I need to get up relatively early and run some errands, but after that I am probably going to grind Realm of the Nine until my eyes bleed… or I get an exotic artifact for the fourth slot. Other than that I fully expect to spend some time doing the Labyrinth grind in Guild Wars 2 and maybe try and knock out some of the other seasonal events. I’ve never attempted the jumping puzzle… so I might give that a spin even though I hate jumping puzzles. Sadly I don’t think you can do the teleport to friend nonsense to bypass this one.