Wind-chimes and Heat

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Good Morning Folks. I had grand plans for all of the things I would do this weekend, but largely spent the weekend being super lazy. One of the things my wife bought me at the beginning of the summer was a set of wind chimes, and it was one of those things that I never quite got around to taking care of. I bought a bracket for them and everything, but it just never seemed terribly important. While she can no longer enjoy them, I am hoping I do especially as things begin to cool down a bit. I had these grand ideas about all of the things I would do over the weekend, and accomplished very few of them because it was too freaking hot to be outside. There are a bunch of things that need to be done, and I struggled to bring myself to do any of them.

I had this idea that I was going to go out on a photo shoot somewhere, but again with the heat I just could not bring myself to go out and do it. I did however get everything all set with my camera and the new USB C charging battery works beautifully. I went out into the backyard and took a few photos which you will see throughout the rest of this post because I wanted to test both the battery and a sd card adapter that I had never used with it. My camera is over a decade old at this point but still seems to do a pretty admirable job capturing shots. It isn’t a full frame digital slr, but does a pretty good job and the only real annoyance I have with it is that I like using this hand grip, and I have to take it off in order to get to the battery compartment. I’ve got my backpack packed with everything I need to go out on adventures and I think I am going to start throwing it in my vehicle when I go anywhere just so it is available if the inspiration hits me.

I need to figure out what I am going to do with the library of books in my wife’s office. I really would like them to go to some measure of use, but I am not even certain where to start with that. I have toyed around with the idea of just getting a storage building so that I can put all of that stuff in it until I have a better idea of what I want to do with it all. Storage units are much cheaper than I realized they were, but that also seems like a hassle to move them somewhere else. I need to get out into the garage and organize and clean some stuff out there as well, but again… the heat is the problem. I am hoping once we get into September that things calm down a bit on that front. I know there is a bunch of stuff in the garage that I just need to have hauled off. There is a local group we have used before that if I can make a big pile, they will take it all at once. I have a bunch of boxes for larger electronics that I need to break down, but then there is the problem of what the heck to do with the Styrofoam inside of them. I could in theory save it for building wargaming terrain or something… but that also seems like a massive pain in the butt to find a place to store it.

What I really need to do is move everything from one side of the garage over to the other side of the garage so that I can put up shelving units properly. There is this giant cat toy thing that my father-in-law made which was lovely… but like 300% larger than it needed to be so that it took up MOST of our livingroom. It is just sitting there and has been sitting there for over two decades, and I think it is a candidate for the “haul pile”. We have a couple of rugs out there as well that I have no clue why we saved… other than it was just too much of a pain in the ass to deal with them at the moment we swapped. Basically I need to spend some time building a pile so that they can come haul it away and clear up more swap space for me to organize things. There are some cheap shelving units that you can get at Sams that seem pretty sturdy and my goal is to put those in pretty much every place where I can in the Garage just to get more stuff up off the ground and usable.

We have this giant workbench thing out in the garage that blocks access to the breaker box… which generally sucks because I have to climb up on the thing if I need to deal with them. However it would make a really great base for setting up both a FDM Printer and Resin Printer out in the garage. Even in the winter months, our garage stays fairly warm because our insulation between the laundry room and the garage is kind of shit, so everything directly up against the house rarely gets low enough to matter. After reading and watching so much stuff on the toxic chemicals that they give off… I am legitimately concerned about the cats when it comes to fume off-gassing for either process. This is especially true with resin, but seems to be also mostly true with FDM as well. There is plenty of room to set everything up out there pending I give it a good cleaning and de-clutter. I have a good concrete slab on the north side of our house that I could start piling up things for the eventual dump run.

Another thing that needs to be dealt with sooner rather than later is the little tree/bush/whatever that is growing on the deck off our pool. I have not really spent a ton of time in the backyard this summer due to the extreme heat, and I am sure this is something that my wife was going to take care of eventually as she spent countless hours reading in the backyard. However it has grown up enough now that it is going to be a bit of a pain in the ass to deal with I think. The vine that we have been fighting for two decades… is back with a vengeance this summer and I just do not care enough to deal with it right now. It seems to be grown all in throughout the boxwood that has long since outgrown the bounds of what a boxwood should be. Everything is just so much more difficult when there is only one person. All of the things that I need to do… are things that the two of us would have tag teamed until we got them finished. I miss my wife for all of the normal reasons but especially because I miss being part of a team.

Anyways…. I have rambled enough for a blog post, but I did share random photos with you for your time.

AggroChat #533 – Greg Universe Equivalent

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Featuring: Ammosart, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! We are back after a week off, and like always, when that happens, we come back to a large stack of topics.  We start off talking about Hellclock and Grimshire, two great games that Grace has been playing quite a bit of.  From there, we discuss Kodra’s adventures in GenCon as he talks about the various LARPs he played in and some exploration of the Starfinder 2 system.  Bel talks about how he has come to understand eSports through Path of Exile and discusses a bit about The Gauntlet event that is wrapping up.  Bel also talks about effectively trying to speed run several decades worth of advancements in wargaming as he juggles trying to figure out what paint range to invest in.  We briefly discuss our non-spoiler thoughts about The Fantastic Four movie, and then a few updates on the books we have been reading.

Topics Discussed:

  • Hellclock
  • Grimshire
  • GenCon
    • LARPS
    • Starfinder 2
    • Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast
  • Understanding eSports
  • Path of Exile and The Gauntlet
  • Speed Running Three Decades of Wargaming
  • The Fantastic Four was Good
  • Book Updates

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Illusive Mollie Snuggles

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One of the strange occurrences that I have wanted so bad to message my wife about… is the changed behavior in Mollie our most skittish cat. She can be an extremely sweet cat, but also runs like hell at the slightest unexpected motion. She has been forcefully snuggling with me when I first crawl into bed, and gripes at me when I am not already in place when she expects me to be so. She runs away when Gracie decides it is time to come to bed, but for about thirty minutes at the start of every sleep cycle, she is there with me while I am fiddling around on my phone and doing dailies in the few mobile games that I play. I’ve attempted to get a photo of this, and so far this is the best one not only because I am laying down and attempting to take it… but also because the lights are off and the only light is from the television. It has only taken a decade to get this far… but she will headbutt me so freaking hard before she eventually settles down snuggling up against my side.

I did not join in the reindeer games in Guild Wars 2 last night because I was emotionally exhausted. I had a good therapy session, but it was a tiring one and after finishing that up… and doing the various nightly processes I just was out of it and fighting sleepytime. I stayed up until around 9:30 which is my normal bedtime, but was way too out of it to have joined in on any group activities. Instead I did some Audiobook and Path of Exile time as I started on Dead Country by Max Gladstone which is a new series with the flagship character of the Craft Sequence that I read over the last few years. There were six books in that series and I highly suggest all of them. What is awkward about those books is that they collected the first five into a single volume… then I guess Max decided to write a sixth book, and it makes my eye twitch that the artwork does not match the first five books at all which have a similar theme. Anyways looking forward to this new trilogy of which I think only two books are out.

One of the things that is not really being talked about right now in Path of Exile is how profitable Delve has been this league. It is a combination of the fact that there is no league specific crafting mechanic, and that the return of Kingsmarch has made gold fairly valuable because people want to run those big shipments for a shot at getting back mirror shards. Delve, Heist, and other second any secondary non-mapping content provides a pitiful amount of gold compared to juicy mapping. The common wisdom has been to focus on mapping and as a result… everything that comes from other mechanics has gone up in value. I put up a bunch of rare fossils for sale last night before I logged out to go to bed, and decided to take a screenshot when they had all sold showing you the sort of money I can pull in quickly. Divine Orbs are also really weak right now and only trading for 130 Chaos, meaning that converting up from Chaos is really valuable. I spent a lot of currency kitting out my Toxic Rain character and have made most of it back.

That said I spent a ton of currency this morning buying Awakened gems and 21/20% gems for the things that I could afford. I will likely never buy an Awakened Greater Multiple Projectiles as those go for like 300 Divines, but I did bump up everything that I could. Making this swap is always immediately noticeable in the speed at which you clear, and this was no difference because t16 mapping now feels extremely trivial. Mostly I am still in the process of pouring on levels so that I can get the passive points to finish out with a medium cluster and then unlock all of the jewel sockets that I have available to me so that I can start putting life and chaos damage over time multiplier in all of those slots. I have my health over 4000 which gives me a bit of a buffer and usually enough time to hit my life potion in time to keep from taking a death when my evasion fails me. I am still not great at keeping a life pot running at all times to mimic the effects of leech or regeneration. This is essentially the strength of a Pathfinder but I am bad at hitting the button all of the time.

The Mercs league had already slowed down considerably, but it is about to grind to a halt as Path of Exile II spoiler season has officially started. SirGog released a video this morning about the above spoiler posted on Twitter, and I mostly agree with him that this feels Harbinger Adjacent. I just hope they do not screw the mechanic up and make it worse… like they have for other mechanics implemented in Path of Exile II style. I am still not hugely supportive of the direction this sequel has gone so far, but I also know that large swaths of the community care about it and it will begin to drain attention from Path of Exile. Path of Exile II drops on the 29th, but it will have to wait until I have burned through the content in Last Epoch which drops before that on the 21st.

Four Winds, Toxic Rain, and MyMiniFactory Sale

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Good Morning Folks. Right now the Festival of the Four Winds is going on in Guild Wars 2, and with it comes the tradition of cashing in your troves of raw resources into loot boxes… and then being sad when you get nothing good from it. Zephyrite Supply Boxes can be purchased from several vendors on the docks of Labyrinthine Cliffs with pretty much every raw unprocessed resource in the game. Likely the most efficient option is globs of ectoplasm which net you 7 boxes each. People gamble on these because you can potentially get a super rare infusion worth around 10k gold. More than likely however you are going to get four jute scraps or something similarly useless. I cashed in pretty much everything I had, and did not walk away with anything other than stacks of festival tokens and quartz crystal. The tokens I spent on some of the homestead patterns, and the crystals I am going to keep in my inventory for daily conversions to charged crystals so that I don’t forget to do this.

Yesterday’s dailies included one of my least favorite options, which was to craft an item in the Mystic Forge. Generally speaking I do the Mystic Clover recipe, which is to combine 1 Obsidian Shard, 1 Mystic Coin, 1 Glob of Ectoplasm, and 6 Philosopher’s Stone in the mystic toilet with a roughly 33% chance of getting a clover. The cheapest option is to throw 4 random blue items into the toilet and get a random item back out with a 20% chance of upgrading its rarity. Unfortunately I noticed this long after I had already consumed all of my unidentified items and salvaged them. I could have run another event and just hit up the toilet afterwards… but I was mostly trying to knock things out so I could move on to some Path of Exile so I paid the tax for my hubris and made a clover.

Over in Path of Exile I have been leveling on my Toxic Rain character that I started last weekend. I think I have more or less gotten past the ugly duckling phase and while I am still exceptionally squishy… my damage output mostly makes up for this. I picked up a new Merc to run with it, namely the “Manyshots” variety that comes with related ice attacks to freeze things… giving me some more wiggle room while avoiding bad stuff. I have spent way the hell too much currency on this character because at this point I have probably dropped 70 Divines in total on gear. This is the problem with an alt is that you go through this phase where you have nicer gear than you should for a level and it feels bad for it to be so damned squishy as a result… when in reality you just need lots of levels before it starts to feel better. If you are curious this is where things are currently with this character.

Earlier in the league I was rotating between Primordial Blocks in my eternal search for the hideout, and Shipyard which is a nice big open layout map that happens to be attached to it. In case you do not know this… if you want to sustain maps SSF style, you set all of your favorite maps to the same map… and then exclusively run maps attached to that map in the atlas. There is a natural desire for maps when they drop, to be one of the maps attached to the map you are running. So by having a lot of favorite slots you can put your thumb on the scale and force the odds. It is not a 100% of the time thing, but it works well enough to produce a lot of the same map. When you switch the maps you are running, you flip all of your favorites to the other map you are running and essentially ping pong back between the two. I am running Shipyard at the moment because I had too many to store in my maps tab, and also they produce Blocks maps very quickly that I will run on my real character.

In other news… MyMiniFactory is running a summer sale right now and I am probably going to go shopping. I really do not love the current state of Games Workshop Dreadnoughts, so I am absolutely going to use a proxy for my budding Space Wolves army that I will be building. Namely I plan on picking up this Asgardian Dreadnought from Atlan Forge which I think will be a better stand-in for Bjorn the Felhanded than the current plastic dreadnought options. There are probably some other options that I will pick up like some of the base troops so that I can con my friend into printing some off for me to paint up as proxy Space Wolves until I figure out what recipe I am going to go with for painting that army. Once I figure out the scheme that I like I mostly want to follow that so that I have something very repeatable for doing the rest of the army. I’ve picked up some reasonable sable brushes, cheap synthetic brushes, and cheap drybrushes to get me started in this journey. In theory my painting box out in the garage might have all of my old brushes in it… but after sitting out there for thirty years they would likely need a lot of conditioning to get them functional again.

I’ve also contemplated picking up the Primal Hounds line from Greytide Studios because they seem to have a lot of really useful Space Wolf adjacent bits for modding things. At an absolute minimum I will probably pick up the base toppers, because I really dig these. All of this might actually get me to shift my opinion as to which flavor of 3D Printing I went into first… Resin seems like a massive mess but in theory I could convert my upstairs bathroom into a work room for this. It has a massive counter top that is largely being not used for anything currently. The thing that worries me though is ventilation, which in theory I could have in my wife’s office but that is going to take much longer before I could set up anything in there. In the Bathroom I at least have access to two sinks and running water and plenty of counter-space to set up a curing station. My friend has made the offer to print me stuff, but at some point that will be cumbersome for both of us.

Anyways. I think I am done writing for now. I mostly pushed myself to actually make a post today rather than waiting for tomorrow because of Blaugust and trying to get my post count up to a point where I don’t feel ashamed of it.