ffxiv

Windswept

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A very groggy morning to you all. Wait maybe not everyone is sleepwalking through the morning. We had a big wind storm last night, enough so that we got alerts on our phones about it. This happened around 1 am and I managed to sleep through the first wave of it. The second wave around 3 am woke me up, and enough so that I did not manage to get back to sleep until maybe 4:30. Even then I am not sure if I actually slept or if I just laid in bed thinking thoughts with my eyes closed. I will have to do the walk around the house to check for damage later, but my wife sent me this photo as she was leaving for work with some damage at the rental house across the street. We didn’t lose power, but around the time I went upstairs at 3:30 we lost internet and I spent a truly dumb amount of time cycling the modem before it came back. The cable company website claimed everything was fine, but I assume in truth… something happened due to the storm damage. It is back currently and I am hoping it stays that way.

I spent most of my weekend screwing around with my Lightning Arrow Raider build, but I’ve written two other blog posts about that which each come with their own companion video. I am really looking forward to Friday, and hopefully, I don’t jinx it… but I went ahead and took the day off work. I know this is usually a bad idea when a game launches… but generally speaking a Path of Exile League Launch has been smooth as butter. I’m really looking forward to seeing how well the early mapping goes with this build. If evidenced by the red maps, I think it is going to be really solid and should give me enough time to look for upgrades along the way. Fixing my resists is probably the thing that I am the most worried about, that and trying to find a Vaal Lightning Arrow early. If I can solve those problems… I should be good to go with this build. Thankfully the colors that I ultimately need on the bow should be pretty straightforward to hit.

At some point yesterday afternoon I took a break from ARPGs to pop into Final Fantasy XIV and do the seasonal quest. There is no way I was going to turn down having a Power Ranger outfit. More specifically I think this is going to be my monk Transmog from this point forward. You have to dye it green, however, because everyone wants to be the green ranger. I guess I could go for Ninja as well and then try and find some daggers that look like the Green Dragon Dagger. I wish I could get back into this game. I saw my friend Bear had created a new character, and I contemplated doing this just so that I could get back into the swing of the game. I need to figure out what content I need to complete to unlock the newest Deep Dungeon.

Other than that I am still screwing around a bit in Diablo IV Season of the Malignant. While I am still pretty nonplussed by the seasonal mechanic, the state of the game does feel considerably better than it did. I am now mostly just trying to figure out an easy path to level and then I can complete the keystone dungeon and move to World Tier III. At that point, I will feel like I have at least progressed a bit further and can start doing Helltides. I am trying to catch the World Boss whenever I can, but in truth… it doesn’t seem like it rewards that much experience, and anything I get loot-wise is going to be upgraded rapidly. I seem to be having way more issues maintaining a good amount of gold than I did previously. Not sure if they rebalanced gold drops, but it feels much tighter than I remember it being.

Apart from the storms last night… it was a pretty solid weekend overall. I am really happy about the state of Lightning Arrow and looking forward to the league start on Friday. I have not really been in the mood for Baldur’s Gate 3 lately… mostly because it requires more thought than I am willing to give it at the moment. I’ve needed gameplay that I can mostly turn my brain off for, which for me is ARPG gameplay in general. Anything that I can commit to muscle memory and instinct… allows me to free up the rest of my brain to consume content on the side. I think more than anything that is the part of this league I am looking forward to the most. I’ve stalled out super hard on book consumption over the last few months, and listening to an Audiobook while playing Path of Exile is sort of my happy place.

I hope you all have a great week ahead of you, and I hope that we don’t have anything much in the way of damage from last night’s storm.

It’s Glorbin Time

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If you have not been following the saga of Glorbo, you might be confused when I posted a random comment last night like “Praise Glorbo”. Essentially fans have been trying to trip up AI-generated content on less-than-reputable websites… and likewise trying to see who will just run with it. The first instance I am aware of, and the one that made gaming press news… is a Reddit post about the introduction of Glorbo to World of Warcraft. This spawned a number of AI-generated articles including the one above that is archived here. A few days ago the Destiny 2 Community got in on the fun and spawned their own AI-Generated article about how tough the new Glorbo fight is to beat and even a post featuring tips and tricks.

So with the FFXIV Fanfest and ExileCon both taking place this weekend… I thought it was fertile ground to fuck with the AI a bit more. Yesterday I contemplated writing up a blog post talking about how Glorbo had leaked just ahead of Fanfest or ExileCon and then trying to spread it on Reddit. So far various fandoms have been more than willing to play along, and it would have been very believable for something to leak just ahead of a presentation. However, at the end of the day, I decided against it. Firstly I was not certain that I wanted the spotlight shone on my blog, or the server load. Secondly, I was not sure I wanted to be involved in the spread of disinformation… even if it is just to fuck with some AI scrapers.

This morning I realized that I could join in with the nonsense in a relatively harmless manner. A while back I went through the process of getting Stable Diffusion models up and running on the tensor cores of my graphics card. This has provided me with some weird hours of fun from time to time, feeding prompts and going down rabbit holes trying to produce something interesting from the madness. This morning I decided that I would ask the mechanical hivemind what Glorbo looked like. So we start off with probably my favorite… and easily the most whimsical that was generated off the prompt “Introducing Glorbo”.

Next up I decided to vary that prompt a bit and feed it “Glorbo the Movie”. My favorite part about this one is how confidently the digital toddler produced something that looks like properly formed words but is complete gibberish. It definitely feels like we are going in a “Pokemon” direction with this one. I am not sure what is more troubling… the fact that his hand just disappears in the fur of whatever is going on with the left creature… or the very human hand on the shoulder potentially emanating from the large-toothed beachball thingy.

Next up I decided to go down a rabbit hole of trying to ask the art mangling machine what Glorbo would look like when he arrived in Path of Exile. This one specifically is off the prompt “Glorbo The New Uber Boss from Path of Exile”. Any combination of Glorbo and Path of Exile seemed to produce this wizard-like dude with very chunky man-nips. This is the most work-appropriate version of the various images that it generated. There were a handful that looked like Vladimir Putin with very aggressive nipples, and I will spare you the damage to your sanity. That said… other than the inexplicably blue beard… I could see passing this image off as something coming to Path of Exile.

The little engine that could completely derails however whenever I started trying to get it to show me Glorbo from FFXIV. This monstrosity is from the prompt “Glorbo Riding a Chocobo”. Like I have no clue what is going on…. with this Horse/Chocobo hydra being ridden by another Chocobo chicken thing.

Even after trying to do a few generations of steering it away from the void… it just kept getting worse. This was honestly the “best” version of what I was able to get from the nonsense machine. This is some kid riding the Human-Centipede version of a Chocobo… while inexplicably wearing what looks like stilts that have a pair of shoes on them. So I am deciding my friends… This is Glorbo. This is Glorbo in all his glory when it lands in Eorzea.

Anyways thanks for indulging me in this madness. I hope you all have a great weekend. Next week starts Blaugust and I figure we will also have plenty to talk about coming out of both Fanfest and ExileCon.

AggroChat #423 – Why Is Bel Laughing?

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, and Kodra

Tonight we have a bit of a short show as we had to punt several topics to next week since Tam and Thalen were out.  Bel talks about his recent adventures since the beginning of the year with the Library system and the Libby App.  From there Ash shares his experience using Character Questionnaires to drive character development in a tabletop pen-and-paper game.  Kodra talks about streaming a day of Celeste Strawberry Jam and his experiences playing the game with a pillowcase on his head.  Bel talks about what happens when a large Mastodon instance closes and over 17,000 folks have to relocate at once.  Bel also talks about his experiences helping to administrate Gamepad.club. Finally, we talk about times when games decided to break their world or remove large chunks of content and why it didn’t work.

Topics Discussed

  • Adventures with the Library System
    • Bel gets a Library Card
    • The Libby App
    • Gideon the Ninth / Harrow the Ninth
    • The Last Watch
    • Catching up with Dresden
  • Character Questionnaires are Amazing
    • Using a questionnaire to help build character development in tabletop games.
  • Celeste Strawberry Jam
    • Beginner Lobby
    • Kodra plays with a Pillowcase on their Head
  • The Death of an Instance
    • What happens when a large Mastodon Instance closes
    • Bel helping admin Gamepad.club
  • Breaking the World Does Not Work
    • Guild Wars 2 Living World Season 1
    • World of Warcraft Cataclysm
    • Evequest 1 to Everquest 2
    • Destiny 2 Removing Content
    • FFXIV ARR did Work However

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Yup Books and Games

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One of the challenges with this whole “goes super hard on books” pattern that I seem to be in, is that it does not exactly translate to an easy steady drip of content to write about. It feels really weird to sit down in the morning and essentially say “yup books”. From the standpoint of “talking about them when I’ve finished them” is great, but the whole me being in mid-flight thing is not exactly a delightful spectator sport. At this point, I am about half the way through Lies of Locke Lamora and it has grabbed me enough to make me want more. However, I also don’t really want to talk about the book as I am experiencing it, and rather will just batch up those thoughts once I have finished it.

One thing I did find out is that apparently there is an order of operations that must be maintained within Bookwyrm, and if you want a book to count towards your reading goals it has to hit the “read” shelf at some point. I ended up moving Nona the Ninth to my “Books of 2023” shelf and then “finished reading” and it completely skipped the goals queue. I had to do a bit of backpedaling and “finish” the book again to get it properly slotted as my 7th book of the year in my “20 books” goal. Other than that general weirdness, I am enjoying Bookwyrm quite a bit however I wish its federation worked a bit more as I was expecting. I thought maybe I would be able to follow my Bookwyrm account and then boost the comments that I leave when I finish a book. However while I am following myself, I never see any updates even when I drill down into the profile. A friend suggested that I check out Storygraph so I might dive into that at some point because it seems like it would potentially be a good recommendation engine.

I am trying to branch out a bit of late and do things that are not “Path of Exile Delve” while consuming an audiobook. So far doing events and map completion in Guild Wars 2 seems pretty drift compatible for the sort of interaction that I am looking for. Essentially an activity that flows nicely with listening to an audiobook needs to be one that is mechanically satisfying but asks nothing really of me to grasp narratively. Working on the main story or expansion quests doesn’t really fill this role, but all of the assorted drop-in group activity does beautifully. I’ve been trying to get into the habit of doing Tequatl at a minimum, and then knocking out my daily objectives and farming the three guild halls worth of resources as well as my home instance. For a long time, I have felt like I really wasn’t making much progress financially in the game, but there is a neat add-on for BlishHud that tracks “coin” earned during your session and it seems like every night I am clearing about 5 gold in an hours worth of time.

I’ve also been trying to ease back into playing Final Fantasy XIV more frequently. What I really need to do is get started on leveling my crafting or working on beast tribe quests again… but what I am actually doing is running retainer missions and fucking around liberally. One of the giant obstacles in front of me is the fact that I need to spend some serious time cleaning out my retainers and sorting out the gear that I actually might want to keep for cosmetic purposes from the dross that I should just turn in for company seals. I also noticed that apparently, I am no longer the highest possible rank in my grand company, so I guess I need to sort out how to change that. There are weird minion boxes that I cannot seem to purchase.

What I REALLY need to do is get into the Hunt Train nonsense, because they are super lucrative and also just enough activity to feel like I am doing something meaningful in the game. I have greatly enjoyed this activity in the past, and I need to probably ease back into doing it more often. It might even be a reasonable option for leveling alternate jobs. I only actually leveled Paladin to 90, but did manage to pull everything up to 80 before burning out in 2021. Hunt trains are a great way to get some gear to level those classes up easily as maxed Crystarium gear will pretty much hold you until you hit the level cap.

All of that said… I still actually am playing a lot of Path of Exile. I find the mechanical loop that I have fallen into deeply relaxing. I play the Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer until I fill up my sulfite and then play my Righteous Fire Juggernaut down in Delve until I run out of that resource again. I continue to periodically liquidate cool things I found down in the dark for profit and as a result, I have over 7000 Chaos Orbs and another 20 or so Divine Orbs. That is without me really going out of my way to do much other than these two activities, and passing up a ton of smaller trades because I am busy and don’t feel like stopping what I am doing for 5 chaos. I think more than anything I learned a lot about the trade economy in this league and feel like there will never be a point in future leagues where I struggle to gear myself.

With all of that… I somehow managed to cobble together a blog post on a day when I was not feeling particularly like blogging. Sometimes in life, you just need to start writing and eventually, it will coalesce into something hopefully worth reading. That I guess is the benefit of Tales of the Aggronaut being a blog about “me”, and less about any one particular subject. Hopefully, yall are having a delightful week out there, and if so… I hope it keeps on that trajectory until the weekend. If you are not, I hope whatever stresses are haunting you, ease the fuck up.