Audiobook

Oops an Audiobook

by

I woke up this morning and as I am oft to do… I sat in bed for a moment and scrolled through email to see what came in over night. I saw a charge from Audiobooksnow the site that I tend to buy my audiobooks for that was $9.99, and had a mild freak out. Did my account get hacked? Did I accidentally sign up for some auto purchase club book thing? NOPE! I apparently pre-ordered Brigands and Breadknives by Travis Baldree and completely forgot about it. So at some point today I will be starting that, and pretty much mainlining it until I finish. Audiobooks are really the perfect compliment for grinding in Path of Exile, and I am very much in head down grind time. Today is a holiday for me, and I have an appointment at 9 am in town, but once I get back from that… I will likely be starting the audiobook and snuggling with cats while POEing it until my brain bleeds. I should probably pick up the house before I dive into that… because everything needs to be cleaned and vacuumed.

Essentially I have reached the point of the league where I need to start chipping away at the various Challenges. Most of them are not that hard, for example I need to unlock 3 Minor Pantheons, and I have plenty of Divine Vessels to do this. I just have not. I did not even fully unlock the one that I am using because the second trait is not really all that important for my build. However there are some that suck… like for example I am going to have to consume a Divine Orb either by using it directly on an item or using it in a craft. I still do not have that many divine orbs to my name, so each one feels like it is precious beyond words.

I have made a handful of Divine Orb sales over the last few days, and I really dig the Sales History tab that got built into the new trade system. The shield I sold for 2 Div was a crafting experiment where I happened into another Shaper shield and I threw purple juice at it until I hit 5% recover on block. The Cloak of Flame is essentially just the first one that I linked using a Black Morrigan that I recently replaced with a corrupted chest with 5% less Fire Damage taken on it. The Stygian Vise was just me flipping a base that I got as a drop that was Hunter Influenced. The gloves were some failed tree tree crafts that were really well rolled, but not good enough to replace my current gloves. While this is still poverty league, some things still sell pretty well.

I am spending most of my time down in the mines still, because there is a brisk business in fossils and resonators, especially now that you cannot passively earn azurite. I expect these to go up in price the longer the league goes, and essentially right now I cash them in whenever I need more divines to buy something. I guess I should figure out what I actually care enough about to buy going forward. I have started doing some heist in the vague attempt that I can get a good ring base to craft on. My rings are not in the best shape, so that would in theory be the next thing I tackle gear wise. Everything else is good enough… or that the upgrade would be 20+ Divines to replace. You quickly reach a place where all of the cheap and easy upgrades are gone. I should in theory start working on replacing my gems with awakened versions.

Over in Destiny Rising, I bumped my Maru high enough to start doing Grandmaster content, and Ace and I got together last night to run through four of our keys. I played Maru one round and Helhest the next round, and then we alternated as we did a few strikes. We tried Gauntlet Blitz, but it was super painful… and scarred us to the point where we did not want to try it again. I think maybe the Grandmaster mode of the new Blitz encounters are a bit overtuned. We got the one where you fight the giant eyeball and we just could not chip away at its health, and everyone kept dying. Strikes on the other hand felt WAY easier, so we instead did two of those and called it good.

I actually managed to get two exotic weapon mods that matched the perks of the Grenade Launcher that I have been using. This is definitely a massive boon for Maru, but will also pull my wolf up a bit as well since I have swapped to using Sweet Business on him instead of the Grenade launcher. I ran out of resources but at some point I will hopefully pull this the rest of the way to +10 on each of the mods. My next step is probably to push the primary weapon slot grenade launcher to 85, as I really like playing Maru. I know she is the new hotness, but I am having a lot of fun and she lives in this weird happy place between how sturdy Jolder is and how squishy Helhast has been. The on demand shield ability helps a ton when it comes to staying alive during content.

After grouping together I went downstairs and started up Delicious in Dungeon/Dungeon Senshi on my television and watched several episodes while playing Path of Exile. I had made it pretty far in the series watching the subtitled version, but decided to restart it entirely with the dual language version. I’ve basically decided that unless I cannot get the english language version of something… I am always going to wait for it because seemingly most content gets released in both languages anymore. I know there are purists out there, but really… I would prefer to not read television if I can help it. It also means that if it is a language that i understand, I can play games while watching it. This series is pretty great, though I have to admit I do prefer the Japanese language voice actor for Senshi. The rest of the actors though I prefer the English language interpretation.

Anyways wrapping this up because I have stuff to do, so that I can get ready for my appointment in town at 9. I hope you have a most wonderful day.

Forever Shifting Focus

by

Good Morning Friends! Sometimes in my life, I fall into a virtuous pattern in life that makes me immensely happy. I am still deeply engaged in Path of Exile, but it is more than just that. Since coming back from the holiday break I have been spending my evenings futzing around in Delve while listening to an Audiobook. So many of the games that I play are mechanically enjoyable but not necessarily narratively engaging. So it has long been my habit to be doing two things at the same time. Often this is listening to a YouTube video, specifically a long-form pseudo-documentary but more recently it has been consuming books. I talked awhile back about the Libby App, and granting me easy access to digital books and in my specific case a trove of audiobooks.

Since starting this new trend I’ve consumed three books and am nearing the end of the fourth. So much of me wants to say “read” because that is normally how you talk about a book. I don’t have a great vernacular for audiobooks because “listening” to a book seems not quite right for the process. Essentially my focus is entirely on the book that is playing out in a wonderful radio play style audio drama, and the game itself is just something I am also doing with my time. Not listed above is Skin Game also in the Harry Dresden series, which I had purchased when it came out and had laying around. I never got around to catching up and am doing so now. I’ve got holds in place for the next Dresden novel Battleground as well as one for Nona the Ninth the next book in the Locked Tomb series. I am uncertain which one of those will land first but whatever the case I think I am enjoying this process I am engaged in.

I was talking about this last night over on Mastodon/Fediverse and my friend Victor chimed in that he did not understand how I could do this. I don’t necessarily understand either to be truthful. I’ve never really been able to do just one thing at a time. If I am watching television I am also playing a game on my laptop. If I am reading, I am also listening to music or something of the sort. Part of why I hate going to the theater is that I feel like I need to be doing something else while watching the Movie. It is like I need to be doing one thing that has my focus, and another thing that is consuming all of my fidgety energies. Even if it is just running around in circles, that second activity is almost always going to be a game. As a result the games that I play the most, tend to be the games that are most mechanically focused and less focused on narrative and story. Sure I will go on a kick of playing a bunch of narrative games in a row, but my more common happy place is to be playing a game that I have shifted to muscle memory while doing something else with my greater focus.

My happy place of late has been Delve, which is a game mode within Path of Exile where you go diving down tunnels looking for treasure as you move from node to node on an underground map. Last night I found this amazing cluster of cities including three boss nodes, two of which I completed before running out of sulfite. Instead of shifting over to my mapping/bossing character, I opted to start working on a Toxic Rain Raider which is intended to be the eventual replacement for the Trickster variant that I started a while back. In both cases though, these are things that I know extremely well and understand the patterns that I need to follow, and as such, I can shift my attention to something else like the book I was “reading”. This is unfortunately just how my brain processes data best. Growing up I used to doodle incessantly to the chagrin of my teachers… who did not understand that doodling was actually allowing me to consume the content more completely.

For me, if I am “only” listening or “only” watching… I tend to zone out and lose track of what I am doing. I get bored because I am not as engaged as I want to be. There are some activities that I can’t do at the same time. For example, if I am writing I can’t listen to anything with words… because my “word center” is having its attention split between actively writing and trying to understand the words. As a result for times when I need to focus on something that is text-based… I have a stock of orchestral soundtracks to listen to. Admittedly all of this as a side note, is why I greatly prefer “dubbed” Anime because I can’t read television at the same time I am playing a video game. I am not sure if anyone else is regularly doing two or three things at the same time, but it is the thing that works for me.