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Numb Christmas

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Good Morning Folks. Happy Day After Christmas or as my friend Ace refers to it… Super Xmas, aka the day that you get to chill out after the hustle and bustle of the holiday. I am working today because I did not take my two weeks off like I normally do. That was a thing I mostly did to spend time with my spouse, but now that she has passed… there just didn’t really seem like much of a reason to do it. That and a lot of the folks who report to me have younger kids and I wanted to make sure they could take time off. Other than a barrage of texts and calls I mostly spent the day with my folks. I snapped a photo of my high school car that is sitting there dying a slow death to rust. I kind of wish they had sold it or given it away rather than just letting it sit here and rot. The holiday was weird, and I did not break down like I thought I might. I think more than anything I just feel hollow and numb right now. In general that is my default mode of operation, because life just doesn’t feel like it really has much meaning without my wife. I am trying to find meaning in hobbies… but I will be honest it is hard to find much zest in anything I do. I am largely going through the motions.

One of the dumb things that I gifted my mom was this Gingerbread Star Destroyer that I printed out. Star Wars was always a massive thing in my life, and I will be honest… it was more something pushed by my folks after a point than by me. I think my mom honestly got into the whole search for figures as much as I did, and has always been a big fan of the movies. This print was too cute not to make one, and I even ordered some tan filament just to print it out. I was there most of the day yesterday and while I intended to arrive around 10ish… I made far better time than expected and got there around 9:30. The dynamic that feels the weirdest is when it comes to my inlaws. Like I called my father-in-law that evening and the way he talked it was like he was expecting me to come down for the day or something. I know that they need me around because it is a connection that they have to my wife… but also I have my own family. I do need to take a weekend and go down and spend it with them, but that whole relationship was always awkward. Her mom on the other hand, was super happy to get a call from me and is always chill about our interactions.

I guess while we are talking about 3d printed stuff, this is my next project. Essentially I have bunch of Lego Mini-Figures and I never really had a great way of displaying them. For awhile I was hooked on the blind bags and this is a really cool grand stand that I am printing out a part at a time that will in theory hold them. I am not sure if I will need more than one of these but for the time being this should be a good start. It is apparently scaled to fit a kallax shelving unit. I have this plan in the livingroom to erect a few lighted storage cabinets and in theory the minifigs will go in there. I need to get rid of a few things before I do this however. More pressing project is to clear off the table that I plan on setting up the paint shelves and get those moved into the house. I also need to order the paint sets, but have been putting that off because it will be a big chunk of cash outlay. I am getting to the point though where be it miniatures or things that I am painting that I have printed out… I need some way of painting things soonish.

Over in Path of Exile II, I have been poking around with a few different alt builds. The first being patterened off of the build that is the most meta thing right now, which is poison burst arrows pathfinder. This is essentially the thing that Fubgun is using to farm content, and while powerful…. it isn’t really my jam. I am not sure what it is about it but the playstyle just doesn’t feel good. I’ve never really been that big of a fan of poison builds, and this one essentially uses a one two playstyle of laying down toxic growth pods and then using poison burst arrows to trigger them. Mechanically it just feels a bit more fiddly than I want it to feel. Lightning Arrow as an abiltiy feels way better, but sadly it ate a bunch of nerfs. My favorite bow attacks are the ones that abuse the various ice explosion mechanics, but I think they are also nerfed. Mostly I made it to Act III, and could continue to push forward… but was just not feeling it.

Instead I rolled a new character last night and plan on going explosive grenade witchhunter for it. I am not sure what it is about the playstyle but this just feels better. I guess I like things exploding more than them withering and dying to poison damage. I’ve said it before, but given my druthers if I had to choose an element, I am almost always going to choose fire damage. I like watching things explode, and once you reduce the delay on explosive grenades it feels really good. I have no clue how much I will play it, because in truth I am still having fun with the druid. I just need a break from it occasionally. I should probably be popping back into Path of Exile 1 though and chipping away at challenges, either that or diving back into Guild Wars 1 or Warframe and progressing those. Path of Exile games in general though are just really good for audiobook time, and that is mostly what I did last night.

As far as my Druid goes, I have taken down Kulemak and Xesht and am working on farming up the splinters for King in the Mists and Olroth so I can progress those league mechanics. I am mostly just farming a bunch of t15s and trying to earn some currency. The next big upgrade I want to do to the build is to get a Defiance of Destiny, which will require me to swap around some of my resistances. I should be able to do this by just swapping my belt, but the extra survival of Defiance should make things more comfortable. Mostly I do plenty of damage right now, and any points that I spend will be going into survival. There are some points that increase my regen, so I am probably going to go down that path because again recovery makes things more comfortable.

The other big thing that I need to do game wise over the next few days is grind out a bunch of the sparrow racing event. Essentially I am down to just the brute force things, where I need to throw a stupid amount of snowballs, and complete some more races. I want the dumb snowmobile speeder skin. I know there is another phase of the event that is going to be happening around New Years, so we will see what that requires as well. The Dawning has been pretty great though, and all of the snowball fights and such are pretty fun. They revealed the next banner and it is effectively a mythic redo of Kabr, and I have to admit I am not terribly interested in him. They changed up his weapons from Pulse Rifle and Heavy Machinegun, to Scout Rifle and Linear Fusion Rifle… and I already have characters that fill that role that I like. Helhest is my precision character of choice, and when it comes to Scout Rifles I am likely going to play Umeko. So I might take a hard pass on this banner and just bank up pulls for whatever comes next.

Anyways! I hope you have a great rest of Christmas week and I will see you next week as we slide into the end of the year.

Burninating Red Maps

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Good Morning Folks! My build in Path of Exile 2 is in a pretty good state. At this point I have 75% to all resistances, even Chaos Resistance and am sitting at level 88 with most of the major passives taken. Anything after this point is mostly just window dressing, and will probably go towards survival if I can find something to pick up. I could in theory optimize my gear a bit more, and probably will do so as I continue to get more currency to spend. The build is a lot of fun, because I am mostly just leaping around the map causing magma fissures to errupt under things and dealing ignites that often finish anything in the pack that did not die immediately to the slam. Rares I either need to molten crash multiple times, or simply slam one or two times to chew through them. I’ve specced into Shrine generation on my atlas and most of the time that means I am running with a speed shrine which allows me to slam faster than my mana will keep up.

I upgraded my Cloak of Flames slightly to one that causes 15% of damage taken to be recouped as mana, which helps with the mana regen woes a bit. I’ve also swapped over to using Ngamahu’s Chosen which causes my rage to spike randomly when I take fire damage. The biggest problem with my build is that I am still using Xoph’s Blood because it gave me a ton of fire resistance, life, and reduced the fire resistance of things around me. However because of this I have somewhat painted myself into a corner because this one item is accounting for almost all of my Fire Resistance. At some point I want to swap this item out for a well rolled Defiance of Destiny which will massively improve my general survival… but I will need to shuffle a bunch of other gear slots in order to make sure I am still fire resist capped. I am far from having to worry about this because I do not have anywhere near enough Divines right now to fund this little swap.

As of last night I have finished the Corrupted Nexus grind and have my maps up to t15s, which represents the highest tier in the game that does not require corrupting maps. I need to work on the various bosses for other league mechanics so I can start unlocking those atlas passives, and I also need to buck up and get my third and fourth ascendancy done. I hate Trial of Chaos and Trial of Sekhemas… so I have been putting them off. If I were wealthy I would just pay for a trial carry, because I assume such things exist out there. I know I can probably easily do a T3 Sekhemas, because with the leap slam of fiery doom thing I have going on I should be able to shred any of the adds that spawn during the maps. I just hate how fiddly the whole process is, and I hate the debuffs that you ultimately rack up while making it across three floors. I think that is more than anything… I hate how long it takes to progress a Trial all the way up to the 3rd boss and 4th bosses. It is fucking miserable to have to do 30 to 40 rooms of a mechanic that you already do not like.

Over in Destiny Rising, we got together yesterday afternoon and knocked out the two strongholds we had unlocked for the guild. Then Ace and I stuck around and played some Morgran’s Hunt which just opened up again. We managed to grind out 14 of the gold chests, and then in theory will get together maybe tonight and grind out the last six. I like this event but the bonus is precision shots, which means our best pirate gal Maru is out of the question. Worse than that if you have a Maru that gets randomed into the group with you… they can royally fuck up you getting the precision objectives. This Maru was really trying super hard… which meant that we did not get any of the objectives met. We did however manage to pull 5 keys multiple times which is pretty wild because we have never gotten more than 4 keys at any point in the past.

I’ve really loved the Dawning event so far. The snowball fights are fun, and so is the sparrow racing. I did not expect the building a snowman thing to be so cute. These are the two stickers that I unlocked yesterday and they are both adorable. I love Skorri and Jolder doing the yelling at the cat meme thing. I also really love the whole Gwynn and Attal dynamic, which is super cute. For as shitty as the Halloween event was, I was worried that The Dawning would be bad… but it has been pretty amazing. I am wondering if this means that they took the feedback to heart on why Festival of the Lost did not work at all.

Other than that, Thalen talked about Warframe on the podcast Saturday, and as a result I logged in a few times yesterday and poked around. I have been working on leveling Mesa Prime and really need to just focus on something. I want to unlock the Excalibur Umbra, but am in a place where I don’t have the key relays unlocked that are required to get access to specific quests. This is the challenge with my account, is that because it is so damned old… I predate the current system of unlocking content, which means I have completely nonsensical missions completed. What I really need to do is just focus on unlocking the star map. I claimed I was good at grinding during the podcast, and I need to put my money where my mouth is and just throw on an audiobook and grind out the starchart.

So that is likely what I am going to be doing this week. I just got access to Mars Relay this morning so in theory I will at least work on grinding out access to all of the planets, which should in theory unlock access to the massive backlog of quests that I have waiting for me. I am not sure what has changed but I don’t find myself getting anywhere near as motion sick as I once did in this game. I am also not leaping around like crazy all the time and purposefully not doing bullet jumps… which itself is helping a bit. I would love to get into Warframe because I know it is very much like Path of Exile in that it has massive amounts of depth just under the surface. I would also love to start building out various prime fames that I have not yet collected the bits for, and know that I have enough plat saved up that I could in theory start buying bits for them from the open market. I would genuinely love for 2026 to be the year that I truly grokked this game.

Anyways. I am working most of this week, and I need to go do that. I hope you are all having a great holiday season.

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.