Good Morning Folks. I want to start out this week’s posts by giving a rousing round of applause for the Blaugustans who just finished participating in Blaugust 2025. This event would not have existed were it not for the wonderful community of mentors that have volunteered for that role over the last decade. Specifically I want to recognize Krikket who was the first to take up the mantle and acted as defacto leader of this event. Yesterday she made the summary post talking about the participants and handing out of awards and I highly suggest you stop reading this and go check that post out. This is a year that I could not have handled the rigors of running this event, and while I will be happy to take up that mantle again in the future… the success of this event goes out to the crew that helped make it happen while I could not. This is legitimately the largest event that has ever been run, and I was shocked to see the final tally of almost 170 participants. 2024 was previously the largest year with 116, and this 2025 represents roughly 30% growth rate between the two most recent years.
The wildest thing about this event is that we had people participating that did not know until the very end what the event even really was. They just viewed it as a hashtag that got popular on the fediverse and tagged along. In many ways the event has long since outgrown me and my meddling and just become this fixture of our small corner of the internet. I will always think of it as this small game blog thing… but that stopped being true many years ago. The Blaugust discord is super active all year round, but is especially so during the event. The Welcome channel is full of people signing up for the very first time and it has been cool to watch. Watch from the corner of course because everything about the activity levels of the discord now triggers the fuck out of my introvert tendencies… so you only really see me speaking when spoken to directly or talking to something in the super secret mentor channel. This is sort of the way of things that I start… they get bigger than my anxiety can reasonably handle and I get quiet. Folks either tend to view me as aloof or stoic… but in reality I just can’t handle that many people at once.
In other news I have been playing quite a lot of Destiny Rising and am shocked at just how good this game is. That said it has made me contemplate clearing up some disk space to reinstall Destiny 2 so I can have a more direct comparison, since it has been ages since I last played it. The story has been great in Rising, but I am not the biggest fan of the way in which it is doled slowly. You have to do a bunch of different activities to unlock the next bit of story, and my preference tends to be to mainline the story so that I can spend more time enjoying the endgame activities. I know this method is an attempt to keep people engaged longer, but it goes against my natural instincts for this sort of experience.
One of the things that has been really impressive is the breadth of activities and how different they feel. You still only really get a limited amount of activity currency each day in the games pseudo-stamina system, but in truth I am not mainlining the game so it has been more than enough to do anything I might want to do in a single day. If you are playing this game you should absolutely friend me and my code is 20953603268. I attempted to create a version of Greysky Armada but it ultimately timed out. You have 24 hours to get 6 people signed up into the guild (Wolf Pack) in order to create it, and I could not hit that number. If we manage to get enough people playing I will make another attempt at it, because there are a lot of cool things to do in a pack. I joined one of the temporary ones and have been enjoying the weird little missions that open up as a result.
Over in Path of Exile II, I have made it up to level 87 and am capable of pretty comfortably running t15 maps. With that I have unlocked all of the +5 atlas point nodes through cleansing corrupted nexii. Now I am mostly hunting out various unique maps which themselves reward 2 additional points for completing them. I am not sure if there is a place where I can see a total tally of the number of unique maps that I have run, but I think I have done four of them so far. The Lake of Kalandra one is my favorite, but mostly because I love the look of that area. I thought it was cool during the Kalandra league and I still think the effect is extremely slick.
The only problem that I am having right now is that after beating the campaign, and unlocking most of my atlas points… I sort of feel like I don’t have much of a reason to keep playing. I could always keep improving the gear on my character, but it works well enough to do the hardest mapping content, and since I never really care much bout bossing… I sort of feel like I have beaten this league. That is the same problem that I had with Last Epoch, is that after I unlocked all of the Harbingers and took down basic Aberroth I felt like I had accomplished everything that I wanted to accomplish. What makes this game more challenging though is that I keep struggling with technical difficulties. Firstly I cannot watch youtube on my second monitor while playing this game because while the audio keeps playing… the video playback always freezes. Secondly the game crashes constantly, and while I can log right back in where I left off… this eventually grates on you after awhile given that I can only finish one or two maps before the client dies on me. Lastly Path of Exile II as a whole is just not as performant as Path of Exile 1, and even when it is not crashing… there are weird hitches and stutters happening all the time. Supposedly most of this is because I have an intel processor… but still it makes the entire thing eventually not worth fighting with.
In another completely different news… on a whim yesterday afternoon I decided to record myself telling the tale of when I saw a Bigfoot in 1986 and 1995 and then turn this into a video. I’ve written about it here before on the blog, but it always feels like the written versions never really do it justice, because I feel like I am having to go into way too much background information. I did not script this take and as a result it is about 25 minutes of me talking through the story and how it relates to some other sightings in my neck of the woods. I also attempting to illustrate the tale a bit with some google maps shots and various other related images. This will not be everyone’s thing, and it does not fit the rest of my YouTube channel but for some reason I felt like I needed to say it all.
