Tales of the Aggronaut

Visions of Flailing

July 17, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. I have no clue what I am doing anymore. I have my first counseling session this afternoon so we will see how that goes. I am still having the minor hallucinations that my wife is still here in this home, but like it is more a feeling than actually seeing or experiencing anything. Many folks have told me this is normal, and honestly it probably is. My brain is hardwired to expect her to be here and that does not go away in a few weeks time. I also have a meeting with a financial advisor in a few weeks to talk about how best to handle a bunch of stuff that I am dealing with. Most of which is in a holding pattern until we have a death certificate. Everything needs a death certificate and I am mostly just trying to function until that point. Tomorrow I have taken the day off because I have to move everything out of her classroom, so that they can prepare it for another teacher to move in. Thankfully her teacher pals have offered to pack everything up for me, and it will just be a matter of trucking things home and stacking the boxes up in the garage for now.

This morning I am probably going to be wildly flipping back and forth between my real world stuff… and gaming stuff because that is effectively how my brain works right now. I am latching onto distractions like a life raft, and we got some good distractions in abundance this week. Guild Wars 2 released a reveal trailer for their upcoming Visions of Eternity expansion and it looks awesome. Whoever is responsible for the motion graphics for their expansion logos… they need a fucking raise because this one is the best yet. SOTO and Janthir Wilds were both awesome, but the story being told by this logo is freaking phenomenal. I am really looking forward to the updates to the Skimmer mount because right now… it is the one that I use the least unless I have to be doing underwater stuff. I’m also looking forward to more shenanigans with the Inquest because they are one of my favorite bad guy groups. I am not sure how excited I am for more Elite specs, because quite honestly… I rarely change my builds and something is going to have to be really freaking cool to get me to change things up.

Depending upon how the counseling session goes, I might be ready to dip my toes back into Thursday night nonsense in Guild Wars 2. I have not mentioned any of this to Ammo, Sol, Ash, Thalen, or Sita… but I might do that throughout the day. I know there are a bunch of weeklies that we would even work on, like I could tag up and run bounties to knock out that one. I am also down with more Fractals or Dungeons because there are so many of those that I have not run. I’ve come to realize that my go to for knocking things out in Guild Wars 2 is running rifts in the Janthir area, because they are so much easier to get to than the Rifts in the SOTO area. They area great way to knock out general kills, defiance breaks, combos, and a few other general things because when you start one up… you almost always have a large group. Quite honestly Rifts in general are one of the best things that they have added to the game because they are so easy to get going.

Over in Path of Exile I am still slowly grinding up levels. I dinged level 99 yesterday over lunch and am starting to chip away at the large grind towards level 100. For now I am just pouring my last few points into 5% life nodes. They are generically useful, give me slightly more righteous fire damage… and quite a bit of just general survival. I might do something more clever but I can sort that out once I am actually level 100. I am trying to decide if I want to make a second character or not. I was running up an Elementalist to play with the Golems and was contemplating doing a Penance Brand of Dissipation power charge stacker to see how that goes. I would like to have some sort of a bossing focused character just to rip through invitations faster than righteous fire. There are a ton of challenges that I still need to work on to get my sad little totem pole a bit bigger before the end of the league.

There are a bunch of challenges that are pretty close to wrapping up. Some of them I just need some luck, like finding Infamous Mercs that I can steal gear from that I have not already stolen. Then there are things like the fact that I need to do a Cortex where my merc survives, and I think if I switch to my tanky bossing merc I should be good there. Sanctified Scarabs is in theory just me running a bunch of scarabs from various different league mechanics on a map with a minimum of 80% item quantity which should be reasonable enough to do. My Einhar tree makes a pretty decent base for generic usage of other scarabs so I might start working on those tonight. Remarkable Realms is worse this league because it is 40 maps instead of running one of a specific set of maps. I think previously it was 18 maps in total… so I just need to churn through the maps that I have banked up in order to finish that one out. Either that or pick a map that is not heinous and run that one over and over. Most of the unique maps are annoying in one way or another. I should grab Kodra at some point and force him to run them with me so he also gets credit.

The other thing that I have contemplated… is streaming again. Mostly just as a way of interacting with other human beings while I am playing mostly single player gaming experiences like my beloved ARPGs. I have a pretty beefy gaming desktop and it would not be a big deal to stream while playing most of the games that I play. I used to really enjoy doing this, but it always got really weird and made me feel like I was making myself unavailable to my wife while I was doing it. Now that it is just me… I have lots of time to kill before sleep claims me. I can’t say that I would ever be a good streamer, and there is no way in hell that I will ever turn on a camera. Just thinking it might be something fun to dabble in again on the side. Mostly it is just one of those intrusive thoughts that has started appearing in my head and I am not sure if I am going to allow it to take purchase there or not. If I did stream it would be over on my sad little Twitch channel which I believe is still an affiliate. I streamed consistently enough during the launch of Elder Scrolls Online to actually qualify for that. Apparently I have $71.31 in payouts that I am due… that I sort of wish I could just send to a charity somewhere. Accepting subs always seemed really fucking weird.

I legitimately have no clue what I am doing half the time these days. I think once some of the looming things finally are dealt with… I will maybe begin to allow myself to develop a new normal, but right now everything is too damned fresh. I should really spend my weekends working through some of the things that I need to work through. One of my good friends mentioned a pen and paper game, so I might be tagging in on that soon. I also need to sort out a good place to paint and assemble some miniatures for that purpose. I just do not know what I am going to do long term with my life and I am trying to figure out a lot of things. Thanks for sticking around and reading my nonsense as I flail.

Unlocking the Rogues

July 15, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. I feel like I am starting to get back some of my gaming mojo. Since I do not really feel like running up a second character and gearing it… I am starting to invest some more effort into gearing out my Righteous Fire character. That said… you cannot stop me from being exceptionally cheap. One of the huge buffs would be to craft a helical ring… but in order to get a base that you can actually craft on that is not mirrored or split… they start at 110 Divines. I had not touched Heist in this league, but now find myself driven to start the process of unlocking things. There are honestly a bunch of really high dollar bases you can pull from grand heists that might make it interesting. A clean crafting base for a Simplex Amulet… is legitimately selling for a mirror for example. Basically it feels like it is time to start burning through my contracts and leveling up my rogues.

The problem with heist however is that I can never remember the rogue unlock order, so I am posting it here so I will have it in the future… and might end up throwing it over on my game tools page. Essentially you start out with three rogues Isla the Engineer, Karst the Lockpick, and Tibbs the Giant. Then in order to unlock the rest of the rogues you need to run contracts with specific ones in order to snag the next one. Isla is a dead end and unlocks nothing. Karts and Tibbs however each have their own trees to unlock so that you run a contract with each new rogue that you have unlocked until you finish out that branch of the three.

So last night I ran through the process of unlocking everything, and now I just need to level the rogues while collecting equipment. I could in theory just buy equipment from trade, but I am not even sure what I want. This is the piece where the depth of my heist knowledge falls apart because I have no clue what I should even be gearing them for. I think essentially skill speed is king, because the faster they can complete their actions the least amount of time that you need to stand around doing nothing. My friend Sloth recently did a stint on the heist crew of BPL so I might lean on his knowledge to help me get started.

Other than that I am still delving quite a bit. I still find this a terribly enjoyable mechanic where I can turn my brain off and soak in the experience points. I am getting really close to level 99, and since Delve is a pretty safe way of gaining experience I am trying to focus on getting that level before I do anything too outrageous. Essentially I am still slowly chipping away at the seasonal achievements and one of those will require me to hit level 100 to finish it off. I am slowly knocking out the infamous mercs achievement as I find them in maps. I have a big stack of Primordial Blocks maps that I am slowly working through using my Einhar tree with a Niko scarab. I am still hunting for that hideout, and I have seen it come up a few times on TFT but they always wanted 10 Divines for a portal. I keep hoping that at some point I will find it and I can be out of Primordial Prison. I legitimately would be rather running just about any other map… but I want that damned hideout.

Lastly I started trying to craft a new belt to replace my immortal flesh, and ended up settling on this one. Ultimately I would prefer to have one with level 22 enduring cry on it… but those are stupidly expensive and also hell to craft. I burned through a stack of resonators and fossils and about 6000 life essence before just sticking with this one and calling it good enough for now. I lost some regeneration but gained a heck of a lot of life thanks to that tasty 12% increased max life. This allowed me to pick up an abyssal jewel with corrupted blood immunity on it and drop the mastery from the tree that was giving me this. Which in turn allowed me to pick up another jewel socket on the tree and throw in another 8% Fire Multi/7% max life jewel this time with increased trap damage. I’m now over 7k max life and when I get my last two points I am probably just going for 5% life nodes on each of those and pushing that total up even higher.

I am also spending a little bit of time each day in Guild Wars 2, picking back up and working on my dailies and weeklies. I had fallen off the wagon hard with wizard chores before my world ended, so attempting to pick things back up. Guild Wars 2 similar to Path of Exile gives me little bits of focused gameplay and I appreciate that. I was in pretty much only long enough to knock out my fresh dailies yesterday, but in doing so I am starting to chip away at my weeklies. I might actually tag up one night and run bounties if there is not a group currently active to knock that one out quickly. Catching Of Mists and Monsters… and one that actually succeeds is going to be the challenge. Essentially my goal is to finish out my weeklies every week going forward, which means needing to start chipping away on them earlier than Saturday… since doing all of them in a weekend can often cause me to faceplant.

Anyways… I still am not okay, but I am maybe starting to get back into the swing of things. Yesterday was my first day back and it went okayish. Today is my first real day back in the office in five years… so here is hoping it also goes okayish.

Grief As A Personality

July 14, 2025 by Belghast

One of the curses of being GenX is that I often visualize my life through movie scenes. There is a scene in Heathers where the Dad is telling the entire funeral that he loves his dead gay son. For whatever reason this is the scene I think of when I think about being overwhelmed by grief. I am scared to death I am going to allow my own grief to become my personality. I’ve seen it happen too often, where memorialization of a dead loved one… becomes the driving purpose. I see that my blog has largely become me working through my feelings about what has happened… and am scared that I am starting to do the same thing. I also see the fact that I had a weekend where nothing much happened, because I lacked any drive to do things. Nothing really brings me any semblance of joy, so I kind of feel like I am just checking off boxes and doing the things that have to be done… until I can go back to sleep again where I blissfully am free of both grief and the need to think about anything.

All of this said… I also feel overwhelmingly guilty that I am even attempting to move on with my life. Today is going to be my first day back at work, and on some level I am looking forward to having something to distract me from the pain. However I wonder if I deserve to be distracted. This is not even two weeks old at this point… and I am just not sure how to exist in the world. I feel like my attempts to keep moving forward, are somehow an affront to the importance of the pain that I am experiencing. Everyone needs me to be this person who is feeling everything in the same way as they are… and I am not even sure entirely what I am feeling. I think on some level there are parts of me that have gone numb as a defense mechanism because the pain was just too much. The cats need me to keep functioning enough to keep feeding them and loving on them… and my body needs me to keep functioning enough to keep feeding it… and now my workplace needs me to function enough to be able to resume my job. The only way I know how to do all of these things… is to disconnect my brain from my heart… and just sort of do what needs to be done.

The thing that is killing me right now… is that I am having hallucinations. That is honestly too strong of a word for it, because it isn’t like I am seeing things in the world, but more that I am experiencing brief after images. Like for example I keep thinking she is in bed with me. I will turn over and swear she is beside me… only to realize that I am not hitting anything but empty space. Last night I had the overwhelming feeling that I needed to go down and check on her… which is a thing that I would often do after a few hours in my office. In fact that is the entire reason why I went downstairs on the night she died, was just that I had been by myself for awhile and figured I should check to see if she was okay. There are these burnt in pathways in my brain, and I swear I keep feeling like I am seeing the hazy afterimage of her still there… only to realize that it is just my expectations working against me. The only thing I can relate it to is the discussion of phantom limb syndrome, but in this case I am walking into a room certain that someone else will be there… but they are not. I know this is just the built up impulses after twenty six years in the same house… but this honestly is the thing I am struggling with the most.

Right now I am distracting myself with Path of Exile, Movies, and YouTube Videos. It isn’t so much that I am enjoying playing Path of Exile, but more that it is a familiar pattern that does not require too much of me. It is a thing I can do… that does not require me to spend too much time thinking about the situation I am going through. The thing is… I am getting zero joy out of it, but I am also getting no joy out of pretty much anything I do. I put in a request to our “Employee Assistance Program”, which I still feel like is a weird name for mental health assistance… and I am hooping that I hear something back. I am not sure how this process works, but I am hoping at a minimum that they can refer me to someone… preferably online so that I don’t have to deal with going into an office. Everyone wants to help me… but I am not sure what I need, or even how to explain what I am going through. I feel so fundamentally broken right now, and I am not sure what is even broken to begin trying to resolve this. I know this is just part and parcel of grief and loss… but I don’t want it to override what is left of my personality. Then again… I am still not even sure who the hell I am without my wife.

I’ve also been back in Guild Wars 2 some, largely because it is a good task based structure that I can focus on. It asks me to do certain things every day, and doing those… pushes me closer to some goal. I should in theory be cleaning out closets and preparing things to donate… but that is all too fucking heavy right now. I should really actually be working on thank you cards… but I am not even sure where the fuck to begin with that. I need to talk to the person who is working on setting up the scholarship fund and figure out what they need from me for that as well. There are a ton of donations coming in through the Church and they want somewhere to put that money. I recorded and edited AggroChat this weekend and also edited the church sermon… so that was some semblance of normal. I had to figure out how to get onto my wife’s facebook account so that I could grant myself access to the church facebook… because there were a bunch of things that she took care of after I had posted everything. However I think I more or less have a gameplan going forward, and next weekend I should be able to generate the powerpoint that she used to do for the church digital display that we bought.

Then there is the duality of people reaching out. On one hand I appreciate it greatly, because it is keeping me from falling too far into isolation. However on the other hand I am a massive introvert bordering on a hermit… and I just want people to stop intruding on my life. It feels like I am sitting in the living room floor, trying to rebuild a castle out of blocks… and then when someone forces their way into said living room… it all gets knocked asunder and I have to accommodate another human being inside my head for a bit. I can’t just be “chill” about other people in my space. That is not the default state of my existence. My wife and I pretty much spent countless hours with it being only the two of us in the house, and anything other than that just feels fucking weird. On some level I feel like I need time to acclimatize to it only being me… and I can’t really do that if people keep interjecting themselves. Like someone from the church brought food by yesterday… and it was very sweet of them… but it forced me to suddenly have to deal with not only a stranger existing in my world… but now trying to file away food for future use that I was not prepared for.

Like on one hand I just want to lock everyone out of my life until I am “better”, but I also have no clue when that will be… or if I will ever reach that point. Human beings doing human being things… stress me the fuck out. For most people… humans are comforting… for me… they are just chaotic variables in the equation of my life that I don’t quite know how to account for. All of this continues tweaking my fear that my personality is becoming one of grief and loss… and I will never be myself again. I am not saying don’t reach out and check on me… just do it in a way where my participation is optional. I love the people who text me, because that is something that I can answer at my leisure when I am up to it. I detest the people who call me… because it requires me to spackle over the gaping holes and force myself to be mentally well enough to have a conversation. The cardinal sin however is when folks show up at my doorstep unannounced because so much of me wants to hiss at them like a startled cat and run away into the darkness never to be seen again.

I am dreading going into the office tomorrow. I have a new employee starting and I need to be functional. I am not functional. I especially hate the thought of being forced into conversations by people who I have not been face to face with for roughly five years. I expect to bail early on the day, or at least as early as I can. I have no fucking clue how to do any of this. I just want the world to pause until I am well enough to exist in it.

AggroChat #530 – Stardew Pirates

July 13, 2025 by Belghast

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

Hey Folks. We start off with a pretty frank discussion as to why we did not record last week and the death of Belghast’s wife of almost thirty years. From there, we talk about what if Stardew Valley were a Pirates game with Seablip. Bel shares his thoughts about the overwhelming success of KPOP Demon Hunters. Kodra has reached the endgame of Minecraft Dungeons and talks about Apocalypse. The crew has been playing some Sunderfolk and talking about that experience, and Tam shares his initial thoughts about Sky: Children of Light. Grace makes us want to buy the second game of the podcast as they share thoughts about Cauldron. Tam has been brute-forcing his way through Guild Wars 1 Prophecies, and Bel has attempted to get into Borderlands 3 and still does not think that is a great game. Finally, Bel shares his first thoughts about the Superman movie and how you should ignore some of the bad press and go see it.