Unlocking the Rogues

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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

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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

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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.

Topics Discussed:

  • Death of Bel’s Wife
  • Seablip
  • KPOP Demon Hunters
  • Minecraft Dungeons Apocalypse
  • Sunderfolk
  • Sky: Children of Light
  • Cauldron
  • Guild Wars 1 Prophecies
  • Borderlands 3 is Not Great
  • Superman Is Great

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Blaugust in Another Castle

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Good morning folks. I am slowly getting back to my normal self. It is going to be a long road… covered with many potholes… but bit by bit I am returning to some resemblance of the person I was. I got a second good night of sleep, and probably would have gotten more hours were it not for the fact that my mom called as I was heading to bed… and then talked for an hour and a half. I love her… but she has never known social queues and also has zero chill when it comes to not telling me everything that she is thinking at that exact moment. She like everyone simply cares about my well being and is worried about me. Legitimately… I never knew this many people actually cared. I’ve mostly thought of myself as background noise most of the time, but apparently I am noticed and appreciated.

My friend Krikket has gotten the ball rolling on the Blaugust 2025 festivities with the traditional Blaugust is Coming post detailing all of the information. My mind went in a bajillion directions when my wife passed away, but one of them was to go into the mentor area of the Blaugust discord and admit to them that I could not do this. Krikket was the first person to offer to take up the mantle, but almost immediately everyone chimed in and just ran with it. This is the most beautiful thing for me because I wanted to build some semblance of a community that could exist without me… and apparently I did just that. I think it was Wilhelm/TAGN that created the logo… which admittedly captures the essence of pretty much every logo I have ever created. They busily planned in the mentor channel and I sort of let it all wash over me, not really paying much attention until yesterday when the announcement post went live.

I cannot fully express in words how thankful I am that this is going to happen, and that I am not having to touch anything. I am still trying to keep the media kit page updated, since that page gets a lot of hits during the event. You can find relevant things like the sign-up form and links to the various social accounts and discord. I am not 100% sure how much I am going to participate in Blaugust proper but I am signing up. It is going to be interesting taking a backseat to this event, but quite honestly… I am very happy I am not having to drive. That was honestly a thing that I learned with the guild that I lead in World of Warcraft… I mad everything too personal to my vision. In truth with Blaugust I wanted to create something that was malleable and could be formed into whatever vision it needed to take that year. As such I tried my best to keep a light touch on the steering wheel so that if I ever needed to jump from the moving vehicle I could, and let someone else take over. Apparently that more or less has worked.

Rebuilding Normal

I’ve had this string of big deep emotional posts lately, but I am not sure what new revelations I have for you this morning. I’ve come to realize that I was not the one mangling our sheets… because making the bed each morning is as simple of an act as pulling up the corner I turned down. I’ve also decided that laundry is super simple since I almost entirely wear dark colors, and can simply chuck things directly into the washing machine until I have enough to run a load and then run it regardless of what day of the week it is. I ordered a whole mess of Chinese food last night so that I can eat on it for most of the weekend. Other than that I am just trying to carve out something resembling a new normal. I need to talk to my boss this morning and find out how Human Resources wants me to codify all of the time I have been taking. I made some early inroads for dealing with some of the financial and insurance things, but quickly came to the point where I am going to have to have final death certificates before I can actually wrap any of that up.

I desperately need to go out into the garage and clean, so that I am going to have room to stack the things that will be coming from her classroom. Essentially on the day of the visitation, her teacher friends offered to pack up her room for me and separate what were educational resources and what were personal effects into different sets of boxes. The thing is… my wife would have wanted to pack everything up herself, but I am just going to allow them to help me with this thing. My vehicle can hold a lot of stuff and it will be easy enough to drag things home. I just need to clear out some of the boxes that I have not broken down yet, and take a load of cardboard to the recycler in order to make room to stack this new stuff. The ideal time to give away teachers resources is right now, just ahead of a new school year… but I am not sure I am going to have it in me to deal with any of it this year.

She also took up 80% of our closet and I intend to go through all of that at some point and find some organization to donate it to. There is always a high demand for professional clothing that fits larger women’s sizes, especially among the whole “pathway to work” type organizations. So I know at some point I would want to donate that, because there is no use in any of the clothing effective just rotting in my closet. We already regularly donated quite a bit of stuff so I have zero qualms about this being the avenue she would have wanted. Her dad was saying something about selling things… but he has always focused on the money and for me… it is more about helping others than trying to profit from this situation. Sure we spent plenty of money over the years on nice things… but I largely view that as the cost of existing as a human and not something I am going to ever attempt to recoup.

There are things that I want to do… but I have to reach the point where I don’t feel guilty for doing them. Like we had talked about getting rid of the nasty loveseat in the loft, so I am absolutely going to do that. I am however probably going to replace it with another comfy couch option and set up my consoles out there. Originally we had planned on turning it into a reading nook for her to curl up, and that would have been lovely… but that is also not necessarily me. I prefer reading from bed when I am reading books, and then more often tend to consume books in audio book form while I am playing games. So I am will be taking the initial inspiration and then just shifting it to make sense for me. I still want to maintain the living room as a more generic space and don’t want all of my consoles hooked up out there. I have my Switch 2 hooked up but that is about it, and that is also a pretty lightweight affair.

Whenever I deal with giving away the educational resources in her office… I am probably going to start shifting that space into more of a hobby room. I used to love painting miniatures, and I just never really maintained that hobby throughout the years. I liked painting way more than I actually liked playing the war games associated with it. I’ve always wanted to get into 3D Printing, so I am thinking her office might be the ideal place to set that up. Again… I am going to have to reach an emotional point where I can deal with even going into her office… let alone packing it up and giving it again… but someday. I feel guilty even thinking these thoughts. I don’t want to erase my wife from this house, but it also seems silly to have entire rooms of the house that are no longer functional because they were devoted to a thing that will never happen again. She was way less emotional about everything than I am… so I would like to think she would want me to re-engineer the spaces to fit my needs. Its just really fucking hard.

She was always the person who kicked me into action on all of the little ideas that we had. I was the one who was mostly happy with the status quo, because the status quo was simple. I am going to have to channel my wife if I ever want to get anything done. I miss her so god damned much. I am so angry that this happened and I am not sure that will ever change. She was my person, and I never imagined a world without her. Now that I have to deal with that reality… I am trying my best to cope with it. One life ended on July 2nd at 8 pm… and out of the ashes of it I have to figure out how to build a new life.