Good Morning Folks. I am slowly climbing out of the abyss that is whatever the hell crud I ended up getting. What is remaining is a cough and congestion. I started taking some over the counter fake dayquil to help with some of the symptoms and that has improved my general quality of life. I am hoping between today and tomorrow I will have kicked it enough to feel comfortable trying to be around folks for Thanksgiving. Which will probably just mean that I catch something else… but that is the life of someone without much of an immune system. I still have no clue what exactly I have had since it came on Thursday afternoon, and still has held on with a vengeance all weekend long and into this week. Since I tested negative for Covid and Flu, I am guessing just some sort of a random viral infection.
Since I was pretty out of it, and honestly continue to be… I spent a good chunk of yesterday watching some shows. I burned through all of Season 4 of the Witcher and it was “fine”. The storyline continues to be a complete and fucking mess, at least compared to either the books or the games… but the characters are mostly on point and I have to just treat this as its own thing. Liam Hemsworth honestly might be doing a better job of Geralt of Rivia than Henry Cavill did, which is probably a good thing considering I personally gave some major stinkeye at this actor swap given how invested Cavill was in the show. I think he was fundamentally pissed at how much they strayed from the material, and Hemsworth is doing an adequate job of being properly Geralt-ish. It feels like they are attempting to tell the storyline leading up to the second game, more or less, but a lot of the scenes differ wildly from either the book interpretation or the game interpretation, which are themselves two different things. Its fine… and was very watchable, but you have to put that lore accurate side of your brain asleep when dealing with this project.
I also started To Be Hero X, which is a Chinese Anime that I had heard really good things about. Essentially it is a world where everyone has something akin to the social credit score and if this gets high enough, you start to develop super powers. However those super powers are directly influenced by the way that people feel about you. If effectively social media feels that you are super handsome, you will legitimately keep getting more and more handsome. Its a weird concept but the art style is freaking amazing. It flows between at least three drastically different art styles as it tells various stories centered around effectively normal folks who were thrust into the life of a hero. I am not sure how far I am from the end of the series but there definitely have been set up a bunch of interesting background elements and I am curious how some of the plot threads are going to wrap up.
Over in Path of Exile I am still alternating between mapping on my Ice Trapper and then Delving on my RF Chieftain. I thought I would take a moment and talk through what I am running for Scarabs. The goal is just to add additional mobs to the map, which makes my Ice Trapper level faster and also provides for a bunch of potential drops. I am running Alch and go copies of Tropical Island which I am oversustaining, but recently swapped all of my favorite slots to Strand with the goal of eventually flipping between those two maps. Wide open layouts really favor the area of effect of the ice trap lifestyle. Then I add in Two Scarab of Monstrous Lineage, Two Scarab of Adversaries, and One Scarab of Hunted Traitors to add a bunch of extra mobs to the map, while running with my Niko/Betrayal/Beyond atlas. All the while I am running blue altars with support on the tree so I can knock out that 100 maps achievement, and then I will probably swap up what tree I am using and go with something that can do red altar support so I can knock out another one.
One thing that I have been doing that I think I am going to stop doing… is running the 10,000 Blue Zanthemum strategy. I’ve been sending it with 250k dust and occasionally this produces divine orbs, but it does not feel like it does so often enough to make it worth my time. I am probably instead just going to save up enough materials for one of the multi-million shipments and see if I can get mirror shards instead. I’ve not touched mappers, but I have heard they are producing a lot of good stuff this league, however the gold cost is just outrageous. I am not mining at all because mining generlaly produces gear, and at this stage in the game… especially with the addition of the tree tree… I have no interest in random gear. Basically my last few days have been super chill mapping while watching something on the television, and that is about as much activity as I can really take.
Tonight I plan on doing some Grandmaster activities with Ace in Destiny Rising so hopefully I will remember to take some screenshots of our shenaningans.