fediverse

2025 in Review: The Books

by

Good Morning Folks. As I often do, the start of a new year is a time for reflection back upon the previous one. While I never can seem to keep exactly the same rhythms anymore, I figured I might branch out and start what are hopefully a new series of yearly “in review” posts. 2025 was one of those years where I had to lean on distractions heavily, and those distractions came in many forms. Some of them were comfort gaming, others experiencing new anime, and an awful lot were the books that I read. This morning I am going to talk about some of the more significant books that I enjoyed. I set my goal for 30 books and ended up reading 38. For those curious, I use both Bookwyrm and Storygraph to track my reading journey. Bookwyrm is a federated client so it is very easy to share on Mastodon if the mood strikes me and I want to write a proper review of a book. Storygraph I mostly use because it has a really good recommendation algorithm, that has fed me a few books that I otherwise would not have paid attention to.

My Best Friend’s Exorcism

Probably my favorite single book of the year was My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix. This was my entry into this author’s work and at some point I want to check out more books. I read Witchcraft for Wayward Girls and it did not quite land the same for me. I think that might be in part because so much of this is my adolescent years bottled and packaged up into a novel form. It takes place in the 80s that I remember so vividly, and the pair remind me a bit of two of my friends who were always together but similarly somewhat mismatched. There is a made for amazon movie for this book… but I could not get through it. It just did not capture any of the magic of this book for me about demon possession and undying friendship.

Dungeon Crawler Carl

If we are not talking about single books, then my highlight of the year is reading the entirety of what has been published so far in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. This was my first foray into RPGLit and while I loved it… I am not sure if the larger genre is really my thing. In truth it takes a few books for this series to really reach its stride, and I think part of that is Matt Dinniman shuffling off the normal constraints of the genre and leaning into the best aspects of this cast of amazing characters. Specifically I LOVE the voice acting of Jeff Hayes, and if you have read these in text form, you owe it to yourself to listen to the audio books as well. Right now A Parade of Horribles is supposedly slotted for release in May and I am literally almost thrumming with excitement for it.

Murderbot Series

Another series that I fell in love with this year is Murderbot. In the months ahead of the release of the television series, I burned through these books and they are really comfortable reads. Each of them is very short and very focused, with a fast moving narrative that is just a delight. This will be another one of those series that I consume happily whenever a new book comes out, and at some point I should really dive out into the other things Martha Wells has written. Reading these books has made me realize that I might be slightly on the spectrum, just because the running internal monologue of Murderbot feels so god damned familiar to me.

News Flesh Series

In the column of… I should have read this decades ago… we have the Newsflesh series. Legitimately I remember seeing Feed at borders so many times and almost picking it up. I love Seanan McGuire, and I had no clue that Mira Grant was a pen name until earlier this year when I dove down this rabbit hole. This series is so damned good that it is almost painful that I did not read it before now. So many great characters delivered with only the level of sass that Seanan can. At some point I am going to start the October Daye series, because I am fully on board with anything crafted by this author I think. If you like zombies and honestly a kind of fresh spin on them, or at least fresh for the time in which these books came out. I highly suggest giving these a read. They go pretty quickly.

In the biggest disappointment or the year… we have Space Oddity by Catherynne M. Valente. I loved the adventures of Decibel Jones in Space Opera last year so freaking much, that I was rather excited to read this sequel. The problem is… this book is a bit of a meandering mess. It eventually does find its heart and lands the plane safely… but holy shit are you going to have to wade through a lot of nonsense to get there. More than anything it feels like this author was pressured to write a sequel and had zero fucking clue how they wanted to do this thing. The entire first half of the book could essentially be removed and you would still have a reasonable plot. It just sort of feels like stalling until inspiration hit and then rushing to the finish line.

Camp Damascus

Camp Damascus from Chuck Tingle is the book that almost broke me. I had never read a Chuck Tingle book before, but this is very much not the usual “pounded in the butt by” book. This book is bleak… really fucking bleak. It is extremely well crafted and does a phenomenal job of exploring the themes of “gay conversion” camps through the lens of horror. Sure this is horror and sure there are fantastical elements, but the core of this narrative is all too real. It is well worth a read but it was a bit of a suckerpunch that left me reeling for awhile. I finished the book on March 27th, and it was not until July 23rd that I even attempted to read another book. Sure I had a really fucking bad July… for reasons I have gone into at length in so many posts… but this book drained me of the will to keep reading for awhile.

Sworn Soldier Series

Another series that I really enjoyed last year was the Sworn Soldier series by T. Kingfisher. Essentially this is the Gothic horror of Poe, Shelly and Stoker for a modern audience. Each of these books is pretty short, similar to the Murderbot books and are extremely easy reads. What Moves the Dead is effectively a re-imagining of the Fall of the House of Usher, and from there we get more interesting snippets of nature gone wrong, and eldritch horror in the other two novels. Alex Easton is an immediately likeable protagonist, and the books are just enjoyable. Well worth your time if you enjoy unknowable horrors.

Cerulean Chronicles

At least for me, as I have found out what a regressive shitbag that J.K. Rowling has turned out to be… I struggle with the Harry Potter series. I will always love the characters because those books meant so much to me as I was reading them, but I want zero of my dollars to ever go toward supporting her quite frankly evil causes. I’ve read that TJ Klune set out to write the Cerulean Sea series as an unabashedly clear wizarding tale, and one of love and warmth and acceptance. They succeeded in this and the two books are a joy to read. I happened to be turned onto this series just as the sequel was coming out, so I was able to read them back to back. The first novel is really tight and clearly focused, but the second one takes a little bit to get started but has a rousing finish. If you crave some intentionally queer friendly wizarding worlds… I suggest you also dive into this series.

You can always see the full list of everything that I read in 2025 over on my Bookwyrm goals page, as that is probably the easiest and most concise way to see it. You can also follow me on Storygraph to see what I am actively reading there. I occasionally write reviews there, but fairly rarely as most of my content ends up here on the blog. What were some of your favorite books that you read in 2025? Would love to hear of anything that you think I should read so I can add it to my 2026 list.

Sitting In The Waiting Room

by

Good Morning Folks. Waiting Room by Fugazi is not only my favorite song from that band… but one of my favorite songs of all time. Right now I am very much sitting in the waiting room, waiting on the Last Epoch servers to come up and the Tombs of the Erased season to start. I did a very dumb thing. I took the day off work, which almost certainly means that the game is going to be unplayable for large chunks of the day. This is pretty much the rule of game launches… that you never take time off for it. However in this case I have a backup plan, or at least some chores that need to get done around the house. So once I wrap this post I will be going in the backyard and continuing the leaf removal process that we have been doing for the last few days so that we can properly open the back yard and set up the patio off our bedroom.

One of the productive things that you can do while waiting on the servers to come up, is to fiddle around with your loot filter. This is legitimately one of my favorite parts of Last Epoch is that I can customize my filter until my heart is content, and honestly… it is way more straight forward than you might think. It seems like each new league I greatly simplify my process and filter out more chaff. This is essentially the base version of my filter and they are applied from the bottom up so you sort of have to remember the order of operations. As the league progresses I will tighten my filter but right now going into the league this is what I am going to be running with.

Since they get applied from the ground up, here is a brief explanation of what each filter does:

  • Starting at level 5 I am going to hide all Normal aka White Items
  • Starting at level 15 I am going to hide all Magic aka Blue Items.
  • Starting at level 40 I am going to hide all Rare aka Yellow Items… and at that point I will probably delete the first two rules to free up some space. Later I will tweak this rule to remove the level requirements and start hiding Purple items.
  • The next rule is to hide all Idols, because most of them are absolute trash.
  • The next rule is a Recolor rule, which will show and color any Idols with at least two affixes that I care about on them. I trigger the Emphasis bit which puts the item names in all Caps so that I can know for certain it was triggered by a rule and that it did not just somehow slip through the cracks of my hide rules.
  • The next rule I am looking for any item that has an affix that I care about coloring it blue. This is my shard fodder rule allowing me to build up crafting resources that I need through salvaging items.
  • Next up I am looking for any item that has at least TWO affixes that I care about on it and then coloring those purple.
  • Lastly is my “good item” rule where I am looking for any item with at least 3 affixes that I care about and a total item weight of at least 20 tiers which I color Red.

You can do a lot more but for the time being this is what I am going to roll into the new season with. As the season goes on I will start caring about only wanting specific base types which will further limit the visual clutter from mapping.

In other filter news… Neversink/Filterblade has been updated with a brand new theme called Cobalt. I spent some time last night running with it and I really like it quite a bit. Sure it is going to take awhile to train my brain on what is and what is not something that I care about, but the colors that are being used feel fresh and new. This is in honor of the 10th anniversary of Filterblade, which really is the site you should be using for your item filter needs in Path of Exile and Path of Exile II. In a perfect world I would have EHG hire this team to rework their own item filter visualizations. The thing I miss most when playing Last Epoch is the “tink” sound from a great drop.

I’ve made it to T10 maps after spending two days hunting for another nexus of corruption. I’ve also started to actually see this again, since the T10 mobs are a bit rippier than the T9 and below ones were. I am wondering if I need to tweak my gear to add on more survival bits, or if this is just the point at which armor begins to be ineffective against damage. I’ve tried to do my third ascendancy a few times and I just can’t. Either I need to spend time farming lower tier Sanctums looking for honor resist idols, or I need a really good run of RNG in the Trial of Chaos. If I can get my next two points I can buff all of my resists up to 89. The thing that is super brutal though is there are these plants that spawn from certain monsters that throw out a ton of chaos balls… and they will just fucking rip through you and if there is too much mob density on screen you cannot even see them.

In totally not ARPG news… my friend Mog/Astella has had the foresight to create a Fediverse Hunter Squad for Monster Hunter Wilds. Since you can seemingly be in a bunch of different squads I joined this morning, and it is going to be an excellent time for anyone on Mastodon/The Fediverse that is also playing the game. Essentially you can search for the squad via the id TA8E48PM and then request to join. Mog had already thrown me an invite so this process was greatly simplified for me. Also side note if you are tired of trying to be normal on social media and want a place almost exclusively populated with fellow weirdos… then check out the Mastodon Server that I help administrate. Right now I am on Bluesky and Tumblr, but the real place I consider my home is The Fediverse aka Mastodon aka Gamepad.club.

Anyways! I really hope today’s launch of the new Last Epoch season goes really smoothly. They are getting a ton of press from various ARPG streamers, so I am hoping it pays off massively for them.

Two Years of Gamepad

by
Gaz celebrating the second anniversary of Gamepad.club

Good Morning Folks! The weird thing about having a fixed schedule for your blog posts, is that you feel really weird changing it. As such I contemplated making this blog post over the weekend on Saturday, because the 25th was the second anniversary of Gamepad.club the Mastodon/Fediverse server that I assist with. That sounds rather clinical, but in truth Gamepad has become my home on the internet and the local feed and various other folks on the “Fedi” my extended family. Thankfully Gaz was better about posting at the appropriate time than I was. This little project continues to be one of the things that I am most proud of… which sounds weird considering that this was mostly Gaz’s doing and I have just helped out a bit behind the scenes along with Scopique and Aywren. In truth the last two years have been pretty damned smooth save for a few cases where we had to mass defederate some spammer sites.

non-public information blurred out as well as someone’s account that was labeled “secret” just in case.

I was actually the second account signed up on this server and joined January 25th, 2023 at 3:36 PM my timezone. This was roughly 20 minutes after Gaz created his own account. Scopique came along on the 29th which is I think the day we went public with the server. We did a few days of burn in before properly promoting it and opening the floodgates. We’ve not grown to be a massive server, but managed to stay comfortably in the 120-150 active accounts range during the entire time. There are a little over 300 total accounts on the server, but as is the case with many new platforms… not everyone finds their home right away. Truth be told the Fediverse is too “DIY” for a lot of folks who just want a direct drop in replacement for Twitter. That said it has also been the only place I have ever truly felt 100% comfortable to let down my guard and be my exceptionally strange self. If this Tales of the Aggronaut blog is my true home on the internet, then Gamepad is my Neighborhood… in that old timey way of having block parties, potluck dinners, and such.

I had great hopes for the Twitter migration, and that we would end up enthralling a bunch of folks converting them to the way of Mastodon. That never quite worked out for various reasons, but for me it was an easy change. I had been screwing around with the Fediverse since 2018, so that in 2022 when I felt like it was time to separate myself from Twitter… I knew precisely where I would end up. That said… I bounced around quite a bit between sites, and it was only really when Gaz asked me about helping him with Gamepad.club that I found a permanent home. Essentially he wanted to create a safe harbor for our friends that were leaving Twitter, and he learned a lot of lessons while hosting the ill fated MMORPG.social knowing we could create something better this time around. I’m happy to say that two years later we have this very stable community, and it is a freaking delight to participate in it.

All of that said… I’ve reached the point where I am no longer attempting to recruit people. I spent the last year I was active on Twitter effectively making nothing but “come to mastodon” posts with primers and information on how to get started. I am sure everyone got more than sick of that. Folks have largely ended up over on Bluesky, which is a perfectly cromulent social platform and was effectively a direct cut and paste for Twitter. It took me a long while to realize it, but no one was really looking for a more open platform other than me and others that were like minded. I wanted a social network that I had more control over, and that was not going to blow away in the wind at the whims of some Oligarch. I feel justified that the continued downfall of Twitter has proven my viewpoint to be correct. That said… most folks just want something painfully simple that has the majority of their friends on it… and do not really care who is running the platform so long as they don’t have to pay for it.

The thing that is super interesting however is for the folks who actually care about having a more open and stable platform… they are also willing to chip in to help support it. In Gaz’s post on the anniversary he indicated that we have 25 folks who are supporting the Gamepad patreon. Which I believe is bringing in enough funds to pay the bills and keep the server up and running. Additionally recently there has been a call for a Merch shop of some sort, and we talked a bit about that over the weekend. I would not be opposed to such nonsense pending we can find a platform that effectively runs itself and drop ships items on our behalf. That would potentially be another avenue for supporting the server when there are overages in the various cloud hosting bills. I support the server by helping to admin it, but also chip in $10 per month because you can’t keep the lights on with good intentions. I’ve been thrilled to see so many folks who are similarly civic minded and want to help make this site available for everyone.

I think the era of Twitter is finally coming to an end… years later that many of us who fled to Mastodon/Fediverse predicted. Unfortunately the platform of choice turned out to be Bluesky, which puts the continued fate of the platform in the hands of more would be tech Oligarchs. If the entire Fediverse went to shit, Gamepad could effectively disconnect itself and remain stable and viable. If Bluesky goes to shit… it is dragging everything down with it. All of that said the platform seems reasonable for the time being and that is definitely where the folks looking for a direct Twitter replacement ended up. I kind of use Bluesky as my “public facing” account and Gamepad as my private account. While I federate my Gamepad account with Bluesky, I prolifically use the “followers” visibility to keep posts I want more “private” from going across that wire.

I am hoping that two years is only the beginning for this platform. Thanks to Gaz for kicking off this project, and thanks to everyone who has joined over the years and been active. I love you dearly, and look forward to hanging out with you in local over the coming years. Mastodon/Fediverse sadly feels like insider tech, that only some folks are really going to “grok”… but those who do… seem hooked for life.

This Account Doesn’t Exist

by

There is a certain irony in the fact that it took me this long to actually go through with deleting my Twitter account, given how much effort I put into my final days of properly using the platform in trying to convert folks to Mastodon. I stopped regularly using the site in 2022 and even went so far as to deactivate my account… up until the point where folks warned me that after a certain period of days, anyone could claim my handle. This caused me to reactivate it, and let the account sit in a dormant state for the last few years. I didn’t want to be Belghast on Twitter anymore, but I most certainly did not want someone else to be either. In truth I would periodically check in to see what was going on over there… only to find that my feed was essentially the same two or three people talking all the time. Maybe I had some hope that things might change… that Elon might pawn the service off on someone else who could turn it around again. I have a lot of good memories from my time spent on the site and the people that I met through it.

There are so many people that are actively important to my life, that I never would have met were it not for that platform. I got into it during the Blog Azeroth/WoW Blogosphere era and just kept branching out and meeting new people. I was introduced to the concept of a “textrovert” the other day, and really I think that is where I live. I am outgoing and engaging… when it is all in text but deeply introverted when it comes to in-person anything. The thing I am probably most known for… Blaugust… never would have probably gotten off the ground or grown to the size it is were it not for Twitter. However, as of last week, I am permanently closing that chapter in my life. It feels like I went “away to college” in 2022 and am now finally moving out. I don’t mourn what the site is today… It has long stopped being something I care about engaging with. I mourn what the site used to be and what it used to mean to my circle of friends.

In January Gamepad.Club will ring in its second anniversary and while we never grew to be a massive server, it is a comfy space to hang out with my friends. I was an early adopter of Mastodon when it came to the concept of Twitter Exodus, first finding my way there back in 2018 and keeping a relatively active presence there on one server or another ever since. The thing is… Mastodon requires too much effort for most folks. It is not a direct plug-and-play replacement for Twitter. It has its own culture that I greatly appreciate, but not everyone does. It is a delightful place of weirdos and anarchists… and I love it with all of my heart. If you asked me where my home on the internet is, it would be Gamepad and the group of friends I have made on the Fediverse. However, it was about a year into the first major Twitter Exodus that I realized that Mastodon would probably never be that for many of my friends.

Thankfully however there is another option that is pretty much a direct replacement for Twitter, called BlueSky. While it does not feel as comfy to me personally as Gamepad does, it is still a place I enjoy visiting. I’ve had a presence on the site for a while now, and was user number 159,880 from June 26th 2023 according to some promo thing they ran when they hit 10 million users. All of the folks who seemed to bounce immediately from Mastodon/Fediverse have seemed to find their home there. Over the last few weeks, there has been another mass migration away from Twitter and it is even feeling more lively. While I don’t necessarily agree with their stance on decentralization, and prefer the activitypub federation model, it is far better than anything Twitter has ever been.

The thing that I legitimately enjoy about BlueSky is that they are evolving the format with some really cool ideas. Probably my favorite thing about the platform is feeds, which is essentially a community-supported way of sharing a filtered collection of posts based around a specific theme. At its core, it is just a regex search, but it allows you to package it in a way as to share it and let other people use it. When I started on the platform there were not a lot of game-specific feeds so I took up the mantle of supporting several of them, and then roll a new one any time I find a game that I am interested in that does not already have a feed. For example, I have one for Guild Wars 2, Path of Exile, Last Epoch, Wayfinder, and created one in support of Blaugust this year. This functionality is there to allow you to connect up with folks that share your interests, without having to know a bunch of account names.

In a similar vein, Bluesky has added a concept called a “Starter Pack” which allows you to create a list of users that you feel like people might want to follow. Think of the concept of Follow Fridays… but actually supported with systems around it. You can find your way to a friend’s starter pack and with a single button press follow all of the people on it. I am contemplating rolling a few of these… namely one for the AggroChat hosts attached to my AggroChat account, and maybe one for Blaugust members to make it easier to connect up with folks who participate in that event. Most people are using them as a way of creating an easy-to-use list of people that they think are cool or that others should follow. One of my acquaintances created one that curates folks who either currently work on Guild Wars 2 or have worked on it in the past.

Leaving Twitter at least spiritually over two years ago… was one of the best decisions that I have ever made. I could see the downhill slide that the platform was going through, and it seemed as though that only escalated after I was out the door. Essentially it is always the right time to leave Twitter. I had reached a point where I was okay with the friends I lost by closing that door, knowing that oftentimes I have a habit of finding the same people again later. While I would have loved that comfy home to have been Gamepad, for many it just was too much work to get engaged in that platform. I am booned by the fact that I keep seeing more familiar faces showing up on BlueSky, which in itself makes the platform that much more enjoyable to use. There were many folks I knew that had a public Twitter account and a private twitter account, and I guess in many ways that is how I use the two networks. Mastodon is where I am most myself, and BlueSky is where I put on a more carefully crafted guise.

I hold out hopes that at one day the AT Protocol which BlueSky runs upon and the ActivityPub protocol that Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse use will be fully integrated. In the meantime however, there is Bridgy which serves as a hacky way of federating an account between the two platforms. For example, if you follow the official Bridgy BlueSky account and my federated Gamepad Account on BlueSky, you will be able to have bi-directional interaction with my posts on the Fediverse. Following the Bridgy account will also then federate out your BlueSky account so that folks can follow you from Mastodon. For example, my BlueSky account shows up as @belghast.com@bsky.brid.gy on the Fediverse. I wish there was a way to connect my ACTUAL Bluesky account to my ACTUAL Mastodon account.. but baby steps. For the time being I am using both, but for slightly different purposes.

Anyway… if you are still hanging on to Twitter I encourage you to cut ties and move on with your life. BlueSky is legitimately a direct replacement and you are probably going to be able to find most of the folks that you used to follow over on Twitter. We are starting to see Brands migrating there as well, which is probably the final sight that it has been crowned the winner. I will keep using the Fediverse and namely Gamepad because I enjoy it the most, but I am more than happy to also hang my hat on BlueSky.