First of Blaugust 2025

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The Blaugust Logo that I did not create for once!

Good Morning Folks! Today is the beginning of August and as such also the official beginning of Blaugust. It is weird to see this event happening and me not really having much to do with it after over a decade of scurrying around to get things up and running. Please note… this is a good kind of weird because it is a miracle that my community is running it for me, since I could not deal with it myself this year. Krikket’s blog has been the place were a lot of details are launching and if you are curious about the event you can check out the intro post and the calendar of events and prompts post to get more details. I am still not entirely certain how much I am going to actively participate in the event, but I am at the very least following the tradition and making a proper First of Blaugust post. Yesterday I posted about the other significance of today’s date so I am not really going to go into that.

Old Man Bel with a Knock-Off Gengar Beanie

Often times we do a bit of an introduction in these here first posts, so I figure I will follow that pattern as well. Hi I am Belghast or Bel as most people who have been around this community tend to call me. I was born near the Gen X/Millennial divide and have some traits of both factions. I started this blog in 2009 during the height of World of Warcraft and it evolved over the years through various games and eventually just became my online public info dump page. Often times my posts are me working through my feelings regarding some subject, and lately with the death of my wife they can be a bit raw at times. In 2013 I challenged myself to blog every single day, and managed this for about three and a half years before relaxing the rigor and just blogging when I am feeling like it… which is still most weekdays. In 2014 this turned into the Blaugust challenge and there has been only one year where I did not run the event prior to this current year where my gracious community is running it in my absence. Over the years it became less about the challenge of blogging every day, and more about giving the blogging community a booster shot to keep folks active the rest of the year.

Double Divine Drop in Path of Exile

Lately you will find me mostly writing about my adventures in various ARPGs like Path of Exile, Last Epoch, and Diablo games. I tend to get fairly deep into the weeks and write posts that will largely be incomprehensible to anyone who is not already bought into the nonsense. However on occasion I do write targeted posts designed at trying to onboard friends into the madness of whatever I am playing. I do my best to be fairly approachable and am willing to share whatever knowledge I happen to have about whatever games I am playing. No question is too silly, especially in a game like Path of Exile that requires serious commitment to actually push through the early hours and succeed. I’ve probably played well over three thousand hours at this point and still consider myself somewhat of a newbie.

Weekly Fractal Nonsense in Guild Wars 2

Over the course of this blog’s life I have devoted a lot of time and effort to various MMORPGs. Most recently that has been Guild Wars 2 because its a-la-carte nature fits my gameplay and mental state most clearly. Similarly I have also created getting started content for that game and many others, but a lot of my posts are recounting whatever stuff I have been getting up to either solo or with my friends. For example on Thursday nights I have been getting together with some of my friends and running Fractals or whatever happens to fit the menu for that night. In theory at some point if we ever gather enough people to do it, we might change these into Strikes which require 10 players instead of 5 players. Occasionally I will flip the script and go hardcore into another MMORPG for awhile, like Final Fantasy XIV or World of Warcraft… but that has happened considerably less frequently lately than it previously did. The forced grouping nature of a lot of those games are a real turnoff when I am deep in turtle mode and staying away from other human beings.

Weekly AggroChat Podcast Episode

In addition to the semi-daily blog, I also record a semi-weekly podcast with a bunch of friends on Saturday nights, and publish the episodes on Sunday. The crew assembled are all folks that I met through gaming including a bunch of people that I used to raid with back in the early days of World of Warcraft (Tam, Thalen, Kodra), and then some friends that I picked up along the way back when twitter was actually good… and not an awful mess. Ammo for example does all of the artwork on this blog and the masthead represents something like a dozen different individual commissions that I have composited together over the years. Grace is someone that I met through Twitter initially but over the last decade we have become close enough that we literally consider each other siblings. Ash is someone that I initially met through Tam but sort of fell in love with them and they are genuinely one of the best people that I know on the planet. Just like with the blog we do absolutely nothing to really promote or monetize anything, because quite frankly it is just a time each week when we set aside to hang out with each other… and a show occasionally happens.

My Delightful Mess of Children

I have three cats with wildly different personalities. Mollie is now our eldest and she has some problems… namely she doesn’t fully understand how cats should cat and is scared of everything. Though at some point over the last year she decided she now lives on the bed… and gripes at me until I make it every morning and put her self warming pad in exactly the right position. Josie is my sweet baby… that has no coordination and can’t quite figure out how to retract her claws at the appropriate time. She has gotten more leery of the world as she has aged, but is still an amazing snuggler when correctly motivated. Gracie is the baby in every sense of that word, and cannot fathom that anyone exists on the planet that does not love her with all of their heart. Especially with the death of my wife, she is pretty much glued to my side 24/7 and goes where I go. Mollie snuggles with me when I first get to bed each night, but runs like hell when Gracie shows up and claims daddy. Josie sadly has not slept on the bed in awhile, but will occasionally jump on my side for some serious head-scratches before wandering off wherever she has decided to go that evening. Josie especially loves windows and sleeps during the day in these upstairs bathroom windows that were about half the size they should be for a cat of her girth.

That’s it folks. That is what you are in for with this blog. I do dumb things and then write about them, and occasionally post cute cat photos. Fair warning there have been a lot of “Sad Bel Times” posts lately as I deal with the ramifications of my wife’s passing. Stay awhile and listen… or don’t… its your call.

Grief: Bummer of Friends

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You get a Gracie photo since this is a bummer of a post.

I know I talked the other day about not wanting to allow grief to become my personality, but it seems the longer this goes… the more of my personality that seems to occupy. I am immensely broken inside and I feel like the shambling dead moving through life on autopilot right now, trying to retain some semblance of normal out of the wreckage of my life. I don’t like this, not one little bit. However I also sort of feel helpless to do anything about it. My brain feels like it is stuck in this gouge that was placed in my life at the beginning of this month, and no amount of flailing about seems to be able to unseat me from this channel. I know grieving is a process that takes time, but I hate how much of my processing cycles it seems to be taking up. To paraphrase a quote attributed to Oppenheimer… I am become grief, the bummer of friends. I know I am a drain on the mental health of those around me… but I just don’t know how to exist in any other fashion right now.

I’ve spent a lot of time retreating into books and games, and that has helped considerably because I can temporarily place my mind in someone else’s life. I get that this is also not really me dealing with my situation, but I feel like I can only be me for so much of the day without it tearing me apart. There is this Catch 22 of the situation I am in where I have equal numbers of individuals who deeply care about me both wanting me to move on with my life, but also needing me to be the constant grieving husband. I am attempting to do both in equal measure, because I am both at the same time. I’ve made a bunch of largely meaningless changes that I could have done at any point… but never did until I just decided to do them. I’ve also done nothing at all to tackle the mount of stuff that I should find a new home for, that I will never actually use. The extreme heat has been slowing some of my progress… but also I think I mostly just need to set aside a project or two every weekend and push through them. I think one of the low hanging fruit is probably to go through her jewelry and package it up so that folks can go through it and see if there is anything that they want to keep before donating it somewhere.

I think the thing that I am struggling with the most right now… is the way in which my wife is being remembered. Like she was so many different things to so many different people. She was an extremely complex three dimensional person, and there were sides of her… that only I knew… that were combined with all of the different sides that she showed segments of the world. We were both pretty private people and had a bad habit of segmentation of ourselves… into the person that people wanted us to be in specific situations. So many of these people who are remembering her fondly… only know one small facet of who she was as a human being. They are mourning this person that they knew… as though it was the totality of who she was as a person, and there are times I want to shake them and scream at them… that this person they have invented didn’t exist… at least not in the way that they think it did.

There is this thing that happens when someone dies… that I have not so lovingly referred to as the canonization phase. Where they shed anything that might have been edgy about a person and only choose to remember the most positive of virtues… effective erecting a new saint in the place of the person. To her church family they all viewed her as this hyper godly woman… because it was the faithful aspect of her that she chose to show them. To her educational family they all viewed her as this penultimate teacher… because she spent countless hours in her office in self doubt stratifying her thoughts until they were razor sharp and ready to be presented to the world. To her family, specifically her sister and her closest friends she was this rock to lean on… always there with a kind word when you texted her… but that largely existed because she had numerous relief valves that allowed her to blow off any negative energy so she could keep up a positive facade to the world.

In the retelling of stories about my wife… I am seeing so much sanding off of rough edges and slowly rounding the narrative of who she was into the most readily accessible and digestible fable. That is not to say that she was not all of these things that people are saying and more… it is just that the totality of who she was is getting lost in the retelling. The totality of who she was… was probably really only known by me. It hurts so bad to see all the nuance being lost. It was that nuance and quite honestly flaws… that allowed her to be the person that she showed to the world. So I feel like I have to remember the real her, like it is some sacred mission that I must uphold and I am scared to death I will forget that nuance over time. I have a shitty memory if we are being perfectly honest. I am scared I am going to forget some key moment in this delicate matrix of who she was as a person… because I can’t lean on others to remember her correctly for me.

Tomorrow is the twenty seventh anniversary of our wedding, and I know it is going to be an exceptionally hard day for me. I took the day off work because I knew there was no way I was going to limp through a series of meetings. I should probably go do something… I just have no clue what I actually am interested in doing. I might stay here and work through some of the projects that I know need to get done. I might also just say “fuck it” and spend the entire day reading or playing games. I know I will break down several times throughout the day and that is okay. I’ve had many people offer to come over, but really… that would only serve to stress me out in different ways. The only person that I did not feel like I needed to put on a mask for was my wife. She was my person, and the only one I ever truly let me guard all the way down around. Ironically a lot of my friends that I made through gaming, and have never met in person… have probably seen a more genuine version of me than most of the people I know in person.

It does make me wonder how I will be remembered, and what edges will be sanded off when someone tells my tale. I largely think I will be forgotten, because I have been too weird and hermit-like for most of my adult life. Sure I have been the pillar of several gaming and blogging communities, but most of that doesn’t really translate to the real world. I play a fairly important leadership role in the workplace… but I also struggle to care about that right now. I have been trying to pour myself into work as a coping mechanism, but it has been hard. Nothing that we do there feels like it matters anymore, or at least not in the same way it used to when my wife was still around. There were so many things that worked, because I knew I had another human being that supported me at home. With that gone… I sort of don’t even know who I am right now.

None of this is a cry for help, or asking for someone to come along and fix me. I am going to have to make it to the other side of this chasm on my own. I am not one that accepts help terribly well, and even when given… it often stresses me out more than it actually resolves my problems. I have to figure this out on my own. I have no clue if I will make a blog post tomorrow, because I have no clue if I will actually get out of bed. We will see what tomorrow brings. I might go get cronuts from the fancy donut place in an attempt to start he day on good footing. Anyways if I do not see you tomorrow, think kind thoughts.

Guardian Maps and Plant Invasions

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I tell you friends… I did not expect the Path of Exile community to be as pure as it is sometimes. Time is immeasurable… but some time ago I played in a private league event that SirGog was organizing, and I set my global channel to the one that is used by the folks who played in that event. Thing is… I just never set it back to a different global so I have been there and active during several leagues. As a result my Path of Exile experience is a bit skewed from the standard one, and I have never met a more supportive group of strangers in my life. I’ve witnesses for ages when someone needs something, asking out to global and someone almost always fulfilling that request. So when I have found a rare hideout in one of my maps for example, I always message global to see if anyone wants it. The other day I got to within 3 maps of completing the final sub goal of Grinding Gear Goals and asked if anyone had three guardian/conqueror maps I could buy from them. Within seconds I got a few invites and the first person who got to me, would not even take payment for them. It was because of them that I finished this achievement so easily and I am immensely thankful.

As far as Unreal Undertakings… I went for one of the more annoying options but it did go along with something I was trying to do already. Essentially I ran five blueprints with four wings unveiled and in order to do that… I had to grind up a bunch of levels of various skills on assorted rogues. It went fast enough and I have effectively learned that it takes 4 Tier 4 Contracts to hit Tier 5 in a skill, so I could essentially pre-stage a bunch of stuff and have it ready to bulk grind through contracts. Once I finished leveling everything, it legitimately did not take me terribly long to chain through five sets of grand heists and finish up the achievement. However… I think I might have hit the wall on how much I am going to accomplish during this league. There are a few of them like the Infamous Mercenaries one that I will probably accidentally complete since I only have one of those left to find… but then there are others where I would have to devote more effort to completing them than I feel like it. I could pay for a bunch of uber carries to knock that one out… but also I am not sure I care enough about that.

In other news I finished up Space Oddity on Monday night, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I don’t think it is anywhere near as good as Space Opera was, but that is not for lack of trying. I think the narrative was just a bit messier than the first one, that had a fairly clear call to action and then a sequence of events that played out in a logical order. With Space Oddity, there was this whole messy middle of the book where things just felt like they flailed a bit… which only seemed to accentuate the “world salad” nature of this series where every sentence is desperately trying to be profound and funny at the same time. It did however stick the landing though and the end of the book was wonderful, so flailing aside it is still worth the read. I just struggled for awhile to push through it until I started the care about the outcome. Maybe if I had read it back to back with the first one like Thalen did, it would have been a different experience.

Last night I started Overgrowth by Mira Grant aka Seanan McGuire. I think what I have realized is that I just really love her writing style, because I would rank the Newsflesh series under the Mira Grant pseudonym and the Alchemical Journeys series among my favorite books ever. The characters in overgrowth feel familiarly adjacent to some of the characters that I came to love specifically in the Newsflesh series. I am deeply interested to see how things turn out when the invasion actually starts. I am not entirely certain how far I made it last night compared to the length of the book… which is admittedly the problem in listening to an audiobook being fed to me through my private plex server. It isn’t real great and indicating how much is left, but it feels like I am barely through the beginning of the book and sleep claimed me pretty freaking early last night around 9 pm.

In other news unrelated to anything to this point… I started playing Hell Clock which is what if Hades were actually an ARPG and not just an action game. So far I am really enjoying it and I love that it is so honest about difficulty levels and that if you are struggling on a boss… the game is not intended to be that way. I also greatly love that you can just disable the time pressure which is huge for me personally. I have a weird hang up about being timed while doing things, that dates back to third grade mathematics and these awful things called “mad minutes” that effectively ruined my brain for math from that point forward. You can just disable the 7 minute timer… and the game will STILL warn you when you are too poorly equipped to ride the ride. For example I got to a point in the first level where it warned me that even though I had disabled the timer… I should probably go back to town and buy some equipment before moving forward. I appreciate that level of bluntness greatly in a video game.

As far as other things in my life… I am just trying to seep back into a normal routine. I had one of my best friends that I consider my legitimate sibling offer to come stay with me this coming week. I cannot fully explain how much that means to me, but also… I would rather get together at a time when I was not actively feeling miserable. I am not sure I am capable of truly experiencing joy right now. I would rather get together at a time when I am not so broken inside.

Desperately Seeking Guardians

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Good Morning Folks. This weekend I mostly spent my time listening to an audiobook and trying to chip away at league challenges in Path of Exile. My sad little totem is slowly growing bigger as I knock things out. At this point I am sitting at 29 of 40 completed and quite possibly the largest sub item is that I managed to hit level 100. This is the fourth character overall that I have taken all the way to the maximum level, largely because it either requires a stupid amount of grinding… or paying someone to power level you. I would be willing to bet all of those level 100 squishy builds that you see on the ladder… paid someone to get them there because a single death can set you back several hours worth of progress. Once I clear level 98… I pretty much have an Omen of Amelioration on me at all times and if I take a death in a map… I abandon that map. I believe I hit level 100 on Friday when I was home sick and chilling on the sofa between moments when my body was actively trying to kill me.

I knocked a few achievements out this weekend, namely I bought a set for Uber Atziri and was able to knock that out without much issue. I had tried earlier in my leveling journey and she wrecked me at one point during the fight where I got clipped by two of her big rings at once. The other thing that I knocked out was Cross Contamination which involves doing two league mechanics at the same time, and the final one that I did was killing an Essence monster while being buffed by a tempest. I did the scarab that gives you a tempest on your map and a bunch of essence scarabs to force several and waited until I had the buff and then popped the essence monster and burned it down as quickly as I could. I think the highest I have ever gotten during a league is 34 challenges, and I hope to be able to do at least that well. I have no interest in running uber bosses, but given that I am sitting on a stack of currency I could probably pay for carries to get that knocked out.

The one that I am struggling through right now is gear grinding goals. Hitting level 100 was a bit part of that progress and the 1000 maps and 100 maps with a Mercenary I accomplished pretty easily just while doing other things. That left me with a few options. Since I am not well suited for bossing, the 30 uber pinnacle bosses was a non-starter. Similarly whiel I have a new appreciation for the Labyrinth after the shit show of ascension options in Path of Exile II… that does not mean that I want to run uber lab enough times to use the divine font 70 more times. That left me with Guardian/Conqueror maps and after burning through all of them that I had sitting in my bank I am at 40 of 50. My goal is to use my stash of scouting reports and the fat stack of saved up Kirac missions to fish for the last 10. The big problem here is that they have to be 80% quant or higher. This means that not only is a crapshoot that you find a guardian map on Kirac… but you have to find one with high quant that does not have a mod that bricks your build. I think I have 60 of the normal scouting reports, and 40 of the vaal ones… so in theory between those two stacks I should be able to find 10 maps that I can actually run.

The one that is quite possibly the hardest to complete is Infamous Instigators. This requires you to defeat 15 different Infamous mercenaries. I never run from fights, and I cannot remember the last time a Mercenary defeated me… so in theory my reputation should be just about maxed out. However I seem to find infamous mercs every twenty maps or so… and then it only counts if it is a version you have not already killed. In theory I could probably start banning specific types in the hope that maybe it might influence what I get next… but the problem is that it is not like all of the missing mercs are of the same type. I wish there was a scarab or a node on the tree that gave you a higher chance of encountering infamous mercs… but sadly that is not a thing. I just need to grind more maps in the rare hope of finding these stupid things so I can find my last three.

Another annoying one is Unreal Undertakings, which requires you to effectively do the rare versions of various league content. Defeating Settlers bosses was pretty easy because I have been running shipments trying to get divine orbs, and have had enough interdicted that I managed to kill several pirates. Breachstones similarly were super easy and I just bought five of the cheapest ones off the currency exchange. For Tier 4 Harvest Seeds I simply forced Harvest onto my map and then also ran a Harvest Scarab of Cornucopia which shockingly gave me more than one T4 beast per each harvest I ran with it. So between two of these scarabs I had knocked out the achievement. All of the rest of these kind of suck. Abyssal Depths for example there is no way to really force one to happen because you are going to get way more Spires than Depths. Domain of Timeless Conflict is an option but you have to run at least 4 emblems and two of the emblems are stupidly expensive. I finished a full Simulacrum without much issue and could in theory just buy 3 more and hope that I can run all 15 waves of them… but they take a stupid amount of time. I have been leveling my rogues and in theory I could run 4 wing Blueprints and probably knock that out pretty easily… but again it will take dedicated time.

The problem with all of this is that I am going to have to sacrifice making currency to finish these out. Right now most of the divines that I am making is through selling resonators and fossils and then converting that from chaos to divines. My preferred method of play is to alternate between filling up my sulphite on some maps, and then dive down into delve around 300 depth and burn it back down to zero before going up and mapping again. However nothing I am doing in delve… can really help me complete anything left on my list save for maybe Aul fights… which do count as pinnacle bosses. However I have only found two Auls so far this league, and it feels like they maybe made them a bit more rare to find. Normally going horizontal at 200ish depth will get you tons of them… and I am just not lucking out into much in the way of Primordial Cities. Mostly I am trying to wrap up whatever I can wrap before August 21st when the Last Epoch season starts, because from that point forward… it is going to be real hard to get me interested in Path of Exile grinding.

I am thankful though to have mindless things like this to focus on… because it makes me think less about the general state of my life. I have an appointment with a financial planner today, to help me sort out what to do with insurance and such and how best to handle it. This week and next week are going to be super fucking hard… because Friday is our wedding anniversary, and next week is her birthday. We have a thing planned for her birthday so I will at least be seeing other human beings that day. I plan on taking both days off from work because I will likely not be functional in either case. Anyways… the last month… has been fucking hard, but I am managing.