hand cannon

Plastic Spaghetti

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Good Morning Folks! Today is my first day without steroids so here is hoping that I do not begin to backslide on my recovery. I am still going into pretty prolific coughing fits, but only really during exposure to cold air or strenuous activity. I will admit that I went into this weekend planning on spending the entire weekend playing Guild Wars Reforged. That did not happen, but I did at least get to level 9 in Seared Ascalon. Still enjoying myself but sometimes the heart wants familiar patterns, and as such I spent most of the weekend playing Path of Exile or fiddling around with my 3D printed nonsense. The ranger/elementalist seems to be working swimmingly, other than the fact that I am not really doing anything with the elementalist portion of it. I have too many good Ranger abilities that I want to use, and not enough hotbar space to use them all.

In Path of Exile I am focused on trying to get yet another character to level 100 without taking any deaths. I am sitting at 86% to 100 and am alternating between 250ish depth delving and them relatively chill mapping. I’ve gone hardcore into creating Alva temples, because each of them if crafted properly is worth roughly a divine and they sell almost instantly. They also produce entire rooms full of rare monsters which are pretty solid experience gained per map. I am mixing this in with Ritual which also produces quite a lot of mobs on the map and as such more experience gained. Occasionally I swap back over to my Ice Trap Elementalist if I want to do a Hive Fortress, because that build is way better at clearing the entire screen than Righteous Fire is. I am hoping that over the next few days I hit level 100 so I can at least knock that off my bucket list for the season.

I’ve been doing 7 million shipments in Kingsmarch rather than sending a bunch of little shipments, and managed to get my very first ever Mirror Shard. These sell for around 35 divines each, so it was a quick infusion of capital. It feels better to do this and save up materials until I have 250k Blue Zanthemum and 1 million Dust rather than sending 10k/30k shipments out constantly. Now that I know how well this works… I will probably take this strat for future leagues, because a single shard makes up for all of the effort and I have heard there are often cases where you get multiples at once. Regardless you always get 5 or 6 Divine Orbs in a 7 million shipment so they still feel better off than a bunch of small shipments that may or may not have anything in them. I really need one of my shipments to get interdicted so I can fight the sea captain and knock it off my achievement list. I might have to start running mappers to see if one of those can get captured, because I really just need one of the kingsmarch bosses.

Over in Destiny Rising we managed to get another three stronghold week with the guild, but are reaching the point where we just need more active folks doing dailies because we keep running out of the juice required to keep our “bitcon miner” going. If you dabble in Destiny Rising and need/want a guild and are doing dailies, please hit me up so I can throw you an invite. I managed to get Jaren up high enough to start doing big kid activities and he actually becomes really useful when combined with one of the season artifact abilities that gives you a significant damage boost when you blind enemies. His movement ability that always seems to be up blinds everything around him, which means he can keep buffing damage output and shred through packs quickly. I look forward to seeing what he plays like when we do our grandmaster activities night, because I think he will inevitably be in the mix.

I finished gluing up and hanging my “Lego” Christmas Wreath and I am pretty dang happy with it. I tried solvent glues but did not find anything that would work well with PLA in spite of other discussion about it. The plastistruct stuff does have a solvent effect, but not enough of one to actually allow the plastic to bond. You could probably use it for smoothing out some minor layer lines, but nothing extreme enough to properly “plastic-weld” things together. So instead I relied on good old fashioned superglue and just letting it sit for awhile to make sure it was properly bonded. I cut out felt strips for the back of the wreath and placed those on the 3 highest points so that it would keep things from banging a lot when I hung it. So far I am pretty damned chuffed by it, and can absolutely see creating variations of this for other holidays.

I also finished up printing my second cabinet, but ran out of black filament and had to substitute in something else. I MIGHT reprint that single top of the unit in black because I ordered some refills that should be coming in today. I don’t mind the white but do think I would rather have them all be black structure with colored shelves. I can’t look at anything red and white without thinking of Oklahoma University, which is a thing I already see way too often anyways. I’ve got a really pretty turquoise filament that I ordered that should also be arriving today. For the black I am using spool-less refills for the first time since I now have a decent assortment of reusable spools, so hopefully that goes smoothly. It takes the cost per roll down to around $10 instead of $16, which for a bulk color like black seems like a good option. Right now as we speak my printer is idle for the first time since I got it, mostly because I am waiting on the black filament before I dive back into another series of prints.

I exported one of the timelapse videos that the P1S makes all the time while printing. I’ve already reached the point where I greatly prefer the Sunlu filament to the default Bambu Labs stuff that came with the unit. The Sunlu just ends up with a better finish and it is so much easier to remove supports from it. I printed this little guy in the green filament that came with the printer, and getting the supports off was a pain in the ass. I had to actually break out nippers to cut loose some of the elements that were holding onto the backside of his teeth because I was afraid they would do damage to the actual structure. I am slowly building up a toolkit of things to deal with bad prints, and I feel like I need to search for some sort of a hooked tool that I can print for pulling on supports. I used bambu scraper without a blade in it, to a decent amount of luck to help break free some of the big supports. I think one of my next missions is going to be to start actually organizing my damned tools so I can find things when I need them, because I have decades worth of tools scattered around the house in four different places which is not useful at all.

I had my first print go completely off the rails. I had been trying to print some spindles for a spinning wheel that Ace uses, because I am sending them a dino friend and figured I might as well try printing off a few bobbins while I was at it. I successfully printed off one for their current machine, but when I moved on to trying to print one off for a machine that is currently backordered… things went sideways. I think there were a few things that happened. Firstly I think the part was a bit too fine detail and it maybe had some overhangs that auto supports were not taking care of. Then there was a problem where one of the parts that was very fine… popped up off the bed and then the printer got confused trying to chase it around as it moved. I had tiny bits of white filament everywhere… above the plate, below the plate, on the gantry tracks, at the back of the unit, and most concerningly around the vertical screw drives. I happened to catch it when I looked at the preview and cancelled the print and then cleaned everything up. I might give this another go but I think I will need to increase the wall size or something to make sure it is printing out slightly thicker objects.

I started a new book this weekend as well, but I admit I have not made it super far into it. In 2023, I read the first two books in this series back to back and enjoyed myself. However coming back they feel immensely dense, at least compared to the relatively light reads that I have been doing lately. It is a very Norse mythology themed series and everything has a bunch of hard to pronounce names to remember… and quite frankly the two chapter long rapid fire catch up preamble was a bit much to get through on its own to remind you of what happened in the previous book. I am going to push through this, because I do not want to have a “did not finish” on my list for the year, but it is going to be a bit of a challenge. It is weird how tastes shift over time, because I was fully on board with these novels the first time, but now that I am going back for book three it is a slog.

I am hoping yall had a wonderful weekend that was filled with something interesting. Right now I have used almost all of the superglue that I went out to get over the weekend and am waiting on some bulk shipments to arrive so I can finish putting some of the other projects together. I got an order of magnets and metric machine screws which will further expand what I can do with this nonsense. I still need to get a good set of calipers and might make a trip the next town over to harbor freight to pick up a pair there. I am having a heck of a lot of fun with 3D Printing, and it is way the hell more engaging than I even thought it would be.

Druids, Strongholds, and The Searing

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the league reveal for Path of Exile II 0.4.0 both known as The Last of the Druids and the upcoming Fate of the Vaal league. I took a late lunch break and watched the reveal and I have mixed opinions. 0.4.0 was originally announced as a massive endgame changing patch, and so far that is not really the case. There are improvements on the way but they were just not ready for this league. Remember the whole Settlers of Kalguur league lasting an entire year debacle that fueled POE1 on POE2 gamer tensions? Well GGG has made the decision that they are going to release new content for each game every four months and package up whatever the hell they happen to have ready at the time and call it good enough. As a result we are getting 0.4.0 without those sweeping endgame changes, but are instead getting a brand new Incursion adjacent league combined with a new class in the form of the Druid, which introduces our first Intelligence/Strength hybrid class.

I can’t say I am terribly excited for this league. I am sure I will play it, but Path of Exile II is already way less enjoyable for me personally than Path of Exile. Then you combine that with the fact that they keep implementing mechanics but making them cumbersome. We are getting Spell Totem support finally, but they are going to rely on some sort of a charge mechanic so it means you can’t just run around spamming totems like they work in Path of Exile… effectively making this classic build archetype dead on arrival. I am going to have to see how things shake out, because there were enough changes that it is going to be a pretty significant shake up. However they did not announce things like Life on the Passive Tree, or them removing all of the lower attack speed things from the Warrior area… so I am not sure if any of the things that I feel like the game desperately needs are going to be included. I will have to wait until the JSON file drops and the various folks datamine all of the tree changes before I can really tell what I want to play. I’ve never been that big of a fan of shapeshifters but I will probably play a Druid because it is the new thing, and potentially will have a thorns build option.

Ace and I did our Thursday night Calamity Ops reset thing and managed to get in four really good runs, one of which putting us just barely below the promotion line. So in theory we should be good for the rest of this two week period, but will have to probably keep an eye on things to make sure that we do not drop down out of the promotion zone. After that we just happened to align timewise with Ammo and the three of us knocked out the two strongholds that we had found already. Then this morning I uncovered a third stronghold and am going to start working on heading towards another one of those three clusters to see if we can maybe find a fourth this week.s It is good to get at least two of them done so we are not stuck on Saturday and Sunday trying to wrangle the troops to get everything done in a short period of time.

After getting hard carried in our best Calamity Ops run by a 72k Jaren on day one… I figured I should probably throw some points into this character and at least get him up to 65k which is the break point for big kid activities. Since we have shifted into Void and Solar territory, he is going to be pretty important and viable for all of the upcoming content I figure. What I am gated by at the moment though is freaking elemental fruit, which means I need to run a lot of Realm of the Nine in order to knock some of that out to keep upgrading him. I also need to target farm some specific artifacts that are useful for his build in order to bump those up as well. I spent my 4th weapon upgrade to take The Last Word up to level 85 just to get that bit of a boost in his power level.

What I am playing the most of right now is Guild Wars Prophecies. Reforged has been a wild ride and it is shocking how much better the game looks like right. I had rolled a brand new ranger earlier this year but did not make it terribly far, so I picked that character up and completed a slew of pre-searing quests. Essentially I completed a full set of Krytan armor, got a full set of Ranger skills, and then took the plunge and broke the world. I could have likely stuck around in Pre-Searing a bit longer and milked a bit more experience, but I got to level 7, which seems good enough. I decided to go with Elementalist as my second profession, largely with the idea of using elemental weapon buffs at some point. Nothing really fits perfectly well with ranger, especially if you are wanting to use bows.

What is wild to me is how much better the post searing world looks now. This was a god awful muddy reddish brown mess, and now has clear details. You can also scale up the UI interface on high resolution monitors without it becoming five pixels stretched to the size of fifty. More than likely this is going to be what I spend most of my time playing this weekend. It has been eons since I really got into Guild Wars, given that we played this as a bit of a pause after the release of World of Warcraft, and then I revisited it every so often when the mood hit me. I never really made it to the proper endgame on any of my characters, so there is so much of the game I have never seen. I’ve never completed any of the Eye of the North content for example. Maybe the graphical and client refresh will be enough that I am actually going to stick around and do that.

A Legacy Reforged

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the launch of Guild Wars Reforged, a client refresh for the aging original Guild Wars game. The thing is, this was one of those things where it mostly just happened automatically. if you already had the game installed it patched the client up to Reforged. If you downloaded the client the same downloader worked the same, and since I was on a brand new box… I had to download everything. Side note for anyone who does not know this, you can tag -image into the shortcut properties to force the game to download all of the files instead of just streaming them each time you load into a new area. This took forever because the game servers were getting hit pretty freaking hard, but as of this morning the 139KBs turned into something more akin to 1300KBs, which allowed me to zip through the updates that happened over night. Cool thing is if you ever owned any version of Guild Wars 1, you now own all three parallel content releases. You can also purchase the game on Steam if you so choose, but really you need to stick to the same ecosystem for linking accounts if you also play Guild Wars 2.

Reforged is mostly a facelift, with updated textures and updated graphical settings designed for more modern systems. It has been wild just how active the starter areas of the game are now. I logged in for a bit to play a baby ranger that I had yet to choose a subclass on, and am planning on going elementalist just for the weapon buffs. I figured it had been so long since I had really played through prophecies, the original release that I would make my way through that before venturing forth into either Factions or Nightfall. I still hate that I cannot jump with my characters, but that is probably always going to be a thing with the original Guild Wars. The world is definitely much easier on the eyes, even though the polygon count of the models is still woefully early 2000s. I did not play a ton last night because I was finishing up a book, but plan on diving into it more over the weekend.

In other news we got a new character drop in Destiny Rising this morning, and I managed to get him within 20 pulls that I had saved up. Up until this point we have not really had a good feeling Hand Cannon character, as Attal never really did much for me other than vaguely looking like Princess Leia because her helmet sort of has the Cinnamon Bun thing going on. Jaren is a proper Hand Cannon character with what feels like a much faster reload animation, and a kit of abilities that play nicely with this sort of run and gun gunslinger gameplay. Essentially one ability is a movement similar to Ning Fei’s but instead of cloaking he throws out a blind grenade and targets characters weak points dealing critical damage for a short period of time. Then there is an AOE ability that fires out a burst of six rounds that targets anything in the near vicinity also dealing critical damage. Lastly he has a take on Golden Gun from Destiny, but he fires multiple shots at once allowing for a really powerful burst super.

With him also came The Last Word, which is one of my favorite exotic hand cannons from both Destiny 1 and Destiny 2. Its big claim to fame is that you benefited from hip firing the weapon and got some bonus body shot damage. So this means you can very rapidly fire it without aiming down sights and still be effective. This all blends in nicely to the style of character that Jaren is, and makes the entire package feel really good. Will he replace Maru, Estela, or Helhest as my favorites? Probably not. However it does give me a character of the Hand Cannon archetype that I actually like playing. That said I am not sure when I would take him over other characters, but he is if nothing else an interesting option for speed running strikes, because he can move every bit as fast as Ning Fei can.

I managed to get him up to 56k light and will push him up a bit higher once I am no longer bottlenecked. Once again I need to farm up a stupid amount of elemental fruit, but am holding off on doing so because Ace and I have plans to do some calamity ops tonight and I don’t want to spend down my pinnacle rewards until we have already done that. I am probably going to spend some of the rare resources I got from the last round of Calamity Ops to push up his levels a bit. I also need to spend some time farming artifacts because right now the load out is less than optimal. I am pretty happy with the character overall and honestly way happier with it than I thought I would be.

Lastly the reason why I really did not play much Guild Wars last night is that I finished up The Shattering Peace. This is maybe my favorite book in this series. I always liked the character of Gretchen Trujillo in the other books, and I especially like the adult that she turned into. The way things wrap up are really freaking interesting, and I am hoping that we get more books in this universe given the world shifting changes at the end of this book. I am probably going to hold off a bit getting into the next book so that I can spend some nights playing Guild Wars 1, which requires me to read. I cannot read text and listen to audiobooks at the same time. It is like the narrative side of my brain can only process on input stream at a time. So for a little bit I am going to be devoting that processing power to questing in GW1.

Temu McCree

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Good Morning Friends. I am still dragging ass due to this impossible crud that I cannot seem to kick to the curb, however in roughly an hour I have an appointment with my doctor who will hopefully help with that. I’ve fallen back on the Audiobooks and Chill bandwagon but I will talk about the books portion of that in another post this week. Suffice to say I am mostly spending my time playing Path of Exile. I am still alternating between mapping on my level 96 Ice Trap Elementalist and then diving down into the mines for some relatively safe leveling as I push towards level 100. One of the things that I did not expect enjoying so much is that I have finally properly learned Incursion/Alva and have found great joy in building temples for profit. Essentially if you can craft a temple with a Locus of Corruption on it, you can sell it for a little over a divine, which is meager profit but more than enough to keep paying for the scarabs that I am running and still banking quite a bit for whatever my next project ends up being.

At level 99, I have properly entered the realm of never running without an Omen of Amelioration in my bags. These are going for roughly 120 Chaos at the moment, and is essentially paying for lost time. I took a really dumb death yesterday when I dove into the shadows… did not realize I was out of flares… and then was mercilessly killed by the hubris of using Forbidden Taste as my automated life flask. Thanks to the handy omen though, I did not lose much progress in the grand scheme of things, but any lost progress at level 99 is noticeable. Basically I am going to be pushing hard to hit level 100 so that I can knock another meta achievement off Gear Grinding Goals, and in truth I have hit level 100 in the last several leagues so it feels like a requirement for me to consider myself “finished”. I could buy some 5 way carries or something like that, but it always feels like the wrong sort of cheating. I will happily pay for a Maven carry each league because I fucking hate the memory game and have legitimately beat her myself more than once. Paying for carries for things I can easily accomplish on my own with enough applied time is just a bridge too far.

I continue to chip away at achievements however and knocked out Sinew Swarms yesterday, which required me to do 10 Hive Fortresses or Hive Colonies. This one took so long because they are that much rarer than the other in map breach events. Wierdly since I started running the Ritual and Incursion mapping setup, I have yet to encounter a King in the Mists invitation altar. I did buy an invitation so I have at least beaten him this league, same for Oshabi which I also bought the invitation for off the market. What I really need is a Trialmaster or an Olroth so I can get my last of the bloodline ascendency fights under my belt. I need to also see if I have any of the Vox bros Heist maps so I can knock them off the list of pinnacle encounters. Simialrly I am shocked that I have yet to encounter one of the Kingsmarch fights, which would knock another pinnacle off my list. I am happy to keep my head down and grind for the time being because it pairs so lovely with an audiobook.

Over in Destiny Rising there has been one of the silliest events yet available, called Iron Medley. Essentially it is Iron Banner or as this game calls it Iron Bar, but everyone has to play the exact same character… which produces some really weird end of match shots like this. Essentaily everyone is stripped down to a baseline version of the character with the exact same choices of weapons. In truth… I think this is a better match mode than the default Iron Bar, and should maybe be made into a permanent mode. It feels like running ARAM in League, where your sand off any of the possible advantages and just yolo your way through the matches. I really like when PVP modes in games normalize the advantage so it does not feel like you are getting stomped into the ground because you did not devote time and effort to a game mode that you are not maining.

There is a new character banner starting in roughly two days, and the trailer has been released. Essentially Jaren is just McCree from Overwatch, or whatever the hell they are calling that character these days. All that is missing is Matt Mercer doing the voices. He also gives me BraveStarr vibes, which is not necessarily a bad thing… but also makes me want him to have a talking cybernetic horse companion. My only real problem with him is that I am just not sure if Hand Canon and Shotgun is going to be a fun weapon combo to use. It is really doing to depend on how good the Hand Canon exotic that is going to inevitably come with the character. If the rumors are true… and he is getting Last Word which seems to have been shown during the trailer… he might be super fun. If nothing else this might also revive Attal from being a dumpster tier character for me.

In other news I finally pulled another mythic off the free pulls on the normal banner, and it ended up being my third copy of Tan-2. At some point I should probably build this character out, but I still really prefer Umeko to him. Then again if I am going to play a precision character I am almost always going to pick Helhest for the utility that she provides. I would have greatly preferred an additional copy of Ning Fei because he is up there in the list of characters that I am going to pump currency into to build out. I maxed out Helhests weapon damage, so now it is really just getting a final copy of her bow in order to push her to the same levels as Maru. I still want to build out Gwynn a bit because she is pretty useful when it comes to running limited content even though she is squishy as fuck. Ace and I are getting together to do Grandmasters tonight so we will see what that holds. Hopefully it is a better week than last week.

I am not playing anywhere near as much Destiny Rising as I was, but I am still enjoying myself enough to pop in and do some of the daily and weekly activities. Unfortunately our guild has grown too big for our britches and are no longer able to maintain the upkeep points to keep the “bitcoin miner” active. I wish I could coax a few more people into playing , because just with minimal play we could probably keep things humming again with maybe five more players. We had another really active player that came from the random clan that I was in first, but I think they have also fallen by the wayside. We have managed to find three strongholds for the last two weeks which has been really nice though.

Anyways. Time to get ready for the doctor visit and it is trash day so I have to deal with gathering that. I hope you all are having a wonderful week back, and hope that the doctor can give me something to make me feel less like ass all the time. I need a few days of feeling great so that I can whip the house back into shape, because I have not felt like doing much of anything lately.