valentines day Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

LNR Channel Still Exists

February 25, 2026 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. Last night was “Sibling Time ™” and for the majority of the night, we were just hanging out on voice and talking. I was spun up and needed to vent my grievances towards the medical industry… and I am just getting started, but so fucking tired of everything. Later in the evening, we joined up in Enshrouded and ran around together. Ace is way further progressed than I am, and I abused some of their locations so I could see some of the late-game content. I also abused access to some significantly higher-level mobs to get some really fast levels. The irony is that the legendary gear that I am wearing is way more than capable of taking down these mobs that are roughly 10 levels higher than I am. I experienced my first frostbite, or whatever the effect is called, which threatens you with hypothermia. It was quite a bit of fun, even though it was a pretty short outing.

Ace also showed off this location on the map, where they had access to massive fields for growing crops. Among the gardens, they also created this awful bed of shroud plants, which sort of look like demonic wacky waving arm guys. You can’t get the full effect from a screenshot… but it looks so wrong to be standing here and letting them move around you. I am absolutely going to steal this idea from them for one of my forward bases so that I can use it for crops as well. I need to get more serious about progression in my world, rather than just completing quests. I’ve been so heavily focused on collecting all of the bits and bobs that the NPC crafters are acting for, and spending little to no time actually progressing the state of my world and collecting resources. I really wish the game had a better inventory and storage system, because I hate dealing with a bunch of random boxes full of stuff. I am sure I could, in theory, mod this problem away, but it won’t help me for my multiplayer shenanigans.

I seem to have settled in nicely with World of Warcraft, and I spent some time this morning working on my house. I have an octagon room that I have essentially subdivided into multiple rooms. This is more or less “my” room and represents things that I have collected in my adventures, with one side a small bedroom and the other side an office, that branches off this central chamber that is somewhat of a war room. I downloaded the Homebound addon, and plan on using it to back track and sort out what sorts of things I should go out into the world and farm. This essentially tells you every quest chain that unlocks some sort of housing resource. I will likely focus on the drops first since that is a bit more easily done than going and doing bullshit like the Green Hills of Stranglethorn.

I am also enjoying the content surrounding the guild village that I live in. There are specific endeavors that we can do each week to gain points for the guild, and we have already maxed out the bar as of this morning. It reminds me a bit of the Garrison system, but in the best possible way. I honestly wish they would have embedded some of that functionality in housing, to give us more to do here other than running around and collecting beans and luckydoos. Still, it sort of feels neat to have a village of our own. Coming back to the guild has been interesting because I have been gone for so long that, really… at the end of the day, it ceased to be the guild that I ran eons ago. There are a bunch of the same people, but also a ton of new people that I do not know at all. It will be interesting getting to know folks, especially if I stick around for a while. I might actually force myself onto Discord so I can hang out with folks and speed up the acclimatization process.

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time leveling characters, and of all of the random things, I am playing Lodin… who was my very first raid main. Hillariously this character is still in the Late Night Raiders chat channel, and I noticed yesterday that Kerrun was as well. It makes me wonder how many of the active crew are still in that channel. I would sort of expect that maybe Erixi and Kylana were both in it as well. I remembered the /chatwho command so I could list out who was in it. It is weird how many muscle memory things come back to you when you are dropped into a familiar environment with a familiar character. I am, of course, leveling Beast Mastery so that I can have two pets. I should, in theory, be pushing through the remainder of the War Within campaign, but I have been enjoying playing alt characters way too much to focus on anything much.

I’ve also spent a little bit of time over on my Horde main from Facepull, which is my Blood Elf Paladin. I was legally required to go over and set up his outfit so he would stop looking like a mismatched mess on my Warband screen. I have done a bunch of different outfits throughout the years, so I went back with this purple and green illidari theme. I swear I had a mace that worked better with this outfit, but when I was setting things up, I could not seem to find it. I wish the in-game cosmetic system allowed you to search by color palette. There is probably an add-on for this, but I could not be bothered to go looking for one. Chances are someone will respond in the comments with exactly the name of said addon if I wait long enough. I am not sure if I will level as prot like I usually do, or instead go retribution.

Technically, Midnight launches tomorrow if you bought in and got access to the head start. I did this thing, but I am uncertain if I will actually start the new content or instead wrap up the War Within. I know the main story beats so it is not like I need to see the content in order to understand it. This is not Final Fantasy XIV, and I am not waiting with bated breath on the conclusion of a ten-year saga. There has been way too much retconning going on in the World that is Warcraft for me to be super concerned about the purity of the story experience. So essentially, there is nothing much stopping me from diving straight into the new content. Both Belghast and Belgraven are sitting at level 80 thanks to the Twilight Highlands event. It is somewhat hilarious that I have two max-level characters… and they are both warriors. I guess tomorrow will see whether or not I join in the reindeer games.

All of this said… I am having a lot of fun being back in Warcraft.

Two Minutes to Midnight

February 24, 2026 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks! Well… I guess I am back in World of Warcraft for a bit. I originally installed it as a bit of a lark, to see what Housing was up to, and wound up getting back into the swing of the game. I missed the majority of the Valentines day event, but I did manage to get a few runs in, which was enough to get this shiny new mount that was apparently available this year. I am missing all of the other mounts, unfortunately. I never got my love rocket, and I never got the broom that they added either. This is not bad luck, however, for having run exactly two queues of the event, I was mostly queueing to see if I could get any of the new housing items, but alas, I did not. However, queuing for this event got me back in the swing of combat, which only further devolved me into the flow of the game. While I have been gone, though the game has been cooking, and it seems like World of Warcraft is in pretty good hands with the current dev team.

I, of course, did what I have always done… and ran a bunch of old raids for gear attempts. I remembered at one point they made it so you could collect transmog appearances from any role, not just the one you were currently on. This makes running these old raids feel significantly better, and all of the tokens that you get for gear sets are warbound and can be dropped in the warband bank. I will be using this later to help fill out missing set pieces on other characters. Yesterday I made quite a bit of progress on Warrior sets, having completed the Destroyer set and the Onslaught set, and then gained a few more pieces of Wrath. There was a time when I had the full Onslaught set, because I wore it back in the day, but apparently, the boots and bracers had gone missing from my bank before the appearance collection became a thing. I need to start working on the Warlords of Draenor sets, because they all looked pretty cool for warriors.

Running all of this content means I am now swimming in old materials and gear pieces. One of the points of realization that I learned in Guild Wars 2 is that the economy there is stable enough that I should really just sell everything and then buy back whatever I happen to need at any given time. Similarly, in Path of Exile, I have actually learned to really enjoy being a vendor and selling stuff to other players. Since World of Warcraft has a much updated Auction House system, I thought I would try my hand at being a vendor here. This largely involved installing and configuring TSM and the tool that stays active in the background and updates the auction house data. All in all, I think it was mostly a success, and on my first day of being a vendor, I sold something in the neighborhood of 28k in gold. This is a pittance compared to the gold that Stargrace brings in regularly, but she is also selling on all of her characters and has done this for a decade now. I am mostly only running auctions on this one character.

In other news, on my Dark Iron Dwarf Warrior named Belgraven, I finished The Ringing Deeps and am trying to figure out how to get the quest starter that sends me to the next zone. All told, the story for the zone was pretty good once I managed to get into it. This was part of why I bounced so hard at the launch of War Within, is that I got to this zone… which, quite honestly, the whole Earthen thing should have been the most “me” story ever, given how much I love Dwarves in general. However, I just struggled to attach to it, and I maybe should have just critical pathed the story rather than trying to do every single side quest in the entire zone. I have been playing too many games that are not World of Warcraft, and got used to the concept that I needed to do side content to progress, whereas this is more like FFXIV in that the side content is entirely for flavor only, and you will get enough experience by largely just doing the Main Story.

Another thing that I got caught up in was doing a meta achievement called Two Minutes to Midnight, which requires you to farm up nineteen rare bosses during the Midnight pre-event that is happening in Twilight Highlands. I was largely obvious to this whole thing and started fairly late in the night… which meant that I stayed up a bit longer than I normally would have yesterday. Essentially, it seems like the Twilight Highlands are on a clock, and every five to ten minutes, a new rare boss spawns, and they all spawn in sequence. So by hopping on this train, I was ultimately able to catch all nineteen of them. The only reason why I did not go to bed at my normal time… is that I did not want to try and coordinate hopping back on the train at exactly the right time. I still wrapped up by 10:30, which is not the end of the world, but it was a lot of flying around the zone and button mashing until I got out the other side.

The benefit of doing this event during prime time is that the bosses and adds go pretty quickly. You have a ten-minute clock that starts when the event spawns, and you have that long to kill enough mobs to trigger the event, then also take down three mini bosses, and the ultimate rare boss, before the timer is up. Each of the encounters has the chance of dropping a set of purple armor and various other resources, but I don’t entirely understand what to do with them yet. Hopping on the train, I was able to farm up every gear slot, plus a cloak, and a ring… and in theory, if the dailies are still available tonight, I will try and knock those out and hopefully pick up the other ring, and an amulet so that this character is relatively well geared going into midnight. Apparently, I purchased a cloak that was not flagged as part of the set piece… which seems like a bug… but if I have more resources left over I will purchase the correctly named cloak.

So at roughly 10:15 last night, I got my last named mob kill and finished the meta achievement. If I had been paying attention to this more I would have tried to run this on multiple characters. I remember an event like this happening in Silithis prior to Battle for Azeroth that effectively worked the same way. I was out there constantly to farm up full sets of gear for almost all of my Horde characters. Maybe it is a miracle that I came in at the last moment and got exactly one set of gear, because otherwise I probably would have burned myself out massively. Grinding is one of those things that I seem to be exceptionally good at, and when there is something like this going on, I can seem to put my head down and push through it. However, once I am finished… I have usually burnt myself out to the point where I just don’t want to play the game anymore, once I have lost that burning focus that was driving me. I seem to have a hard time finding a new focal point once I have accomplished my goal.

As to why I did any of this? A mount of course. You get this shiny new mech suit if you manage to take down all nineteen mini-bosses that are part of this event. I know the head start for the expansion is right around the corner, but supposedly, this event hangs around until the 2nd when the expansion fully launches. I think I will probably be spending that time trying to get through the main story quest rather than grinding up additional characters. I think I have the desire to actually try and play this expansion when it drops now. It is weird how I have gone from logging in on a lark to actually starting to mainline the damned game again. Damn you, Blizzard, for getting your hooks in me at least temporarily. I fully expect to drop this at least for the short term when Path of Exile Mirage launches on the sixth, but given how much I seem to bounce between games right now, and how I played Destiny Rising the entire time during the last league… I might find room for Warcraft as well.

Married at the House of Vacuums

February 14, 2014 by Belghast

Belgarde Keep

Over the last two days there have been a couple of significant patches to Landmark. You can check out the patch notes here… here for more information. The most exciting of the changes is the fix to the way trees/plants/rocks kept respawning on our claims with no real way to remove them. In previous shots of my forest keep the overall view had been obstructed by a couple of giant trees. Now you can see a fairly clear view of the place. I have given up on calling it a temple, because really it no longer looks anything at all like a temple. Instead I have officially renamed it to “Belgarde Keep”. Last night I spent quite a bit of work starting to flesh out the details. You can see in this image that we now have the wooden posts sticking out from each floor as though they were coming from the ceiling beams. Additionally I have started replacing my main columns with ones that include some inset stucco.

Another really cool thing of note last night is that with the patches Sapphire and Ruby have been more sane and rational to collect. In fact if you are lucky you can now find surface spawn nodes. Over the course of a couple of these nodes I managed to gather up more of each gem than I had gotten to date allowing me to finally craft the Indigo Pick. Of course I got a rather crappy one on my first attempt, but all the excess sapphires allowed me to craft another cobalt pick, and after a little bit of farming tonight hopefully I will make a second shot at the Indigo. While they have reduced the amount of burled wood you need slightly to convert from raw to the craftable material… this still seems to be the bottleneck in almost everything that I want to craft. I made another attempt at a better axe last night and managed to get one just slightly faster.

At this point my focus over the next few days is to attempt to get a better Indigo pick, gather the materials for upgraded machinery and continue to work on fine detail for the keep as a whole. I need to start gathering the tier 5 resources but to be honest I am not even sure what they look like at this point. Right now the biggest thing I am not quite happy with in my keep design is the single pillar that supports the balcony. I expect now that the tree is out of the way I will rework that design feature extensively. I might try a curved balcony, I have ideas in my head on what that would be to craft but not sure exactly yet now to go about it especially since I would need to curve both the railing and the flooring.

Toxic Love

Earlier in the week I posted about the ongoing Love is in the Air event happening right now in World of Warcraft to coincide with Valentines Day. I had pretty much ignored the event until the last few days because in general, I queue for the dungeon each day and I walk away each day with nothing but a stack of useless Love Tokens. In past years I have queued faithfully each day only to somehow miss getting any of the pets and mounts. So this year I was not any more expectant of something cool… but since everyone else was doing it I felt I should probably start running them each day on all 6 of my 90s.

Finally last night my streak of nothing changed… at least to some extent. While I did not manage to get one of the mounts, I did however get the toxic wasteling pictured above. I realize it is just a ball of slime, but I find it far cuter than the other oozeling that I have. This is one of the newer models and minus the insane eyes… it kinda reminds me of a ChuChu from the Legend of Zelda series as pictured on the right. At least I feel like this years queueing was not a complete and total waste. While I would love to get the a Swift Lovebird I simply did not start the event soon enough to gather up the needed 250 tokens.

I have to share this image really quickly that @ManaBrownies posted over on twitter yesterday of ALL THE LOVEBIRDS. The thing that tickles me the most however is not the fact that you have multiple love birds and mini pet versions… but instead their guild name. I love that name so much, and if you don’t get the reference… which is probably likely since it is totally esoteric. I suggest you watch Empire Records, which oddly enough is on the long list of favorite movies.

Married at the House of Vacuums

In honor of Valentines Day I have another related factoid. My wife and I were Married at the House of Vacuums. Before we get to that point I have to explain a bit about our wedding in general. All we ever wanted was a very simple wedding. In college when we began planning it, we pictured this simple outdoor wedding with just the immediate family. However over time this plan morphed to nightmarish proportions. My mother took ahold of the guest list and started wanting to add everything under the sun, including my fourth grade teacher.

Then there was the fact that an outdoor wedding was simply not good enough. Since I grew up catholic, apparently you are not really married in the eyes of the church unless it happens inside of a catholic church. So she wanted us to have two weddings… the real outdoor wedding and then another smaller service in a catholic church so we were “legitimate”. I have never been really big on rules and regulations, and there was no way in hell I wanted to have two separate weddings just to make some religion happy. Especially one that I do not abide by myself and have not been a member of since I had the freedom to choose my own path in life. She was getting entirely too involved in the process and planning something neither of us wanted.

Finally there was the issue of who to walk my wife down the isle. She is from a split household, one that split years after her birth. So she had two complete households and as a result two fathers. Her step dad was a quiet and unassuming man, and would do literally anything for her… often making excuses to plan a trip up to college to come see us for the silliest reasons. Her biological father at that point in her life was not terribly engaged, and while I have come to love him… was very pushy and brash. So her step father would have been quiet about it, but wounded for life if he did not get to walk her down the isle. Whereas her biological father would have made a grand scene likely disowning us if he was not the one to walk her down the isle.

We had set and unset the date many times, but as the three ring circus careened off in a direction we were not willing to go with it, we decided that we needed none of it. All that mattered was that we were together, and as a result we opted to elope. That conjures visions of romantically running away to some fabled location, but in truth we simply managed to run around town and gather all the necessary things to be legally married in one day. We found a little marriage chapel in town, that had an opening the next day. While we were not technically married at the House of Vacuums, the marriage chapel we went to was around the corner in the same strip mall. My cousins and our best friend at the time stood up for us as witnesses, and we had a nice simple wedding service presided by a female minister that I cannot for the life of me remember the name of any longer.

Parts of our family, namely my mother was I am sure pissed at me for years over robbing her of her big day. However like everything else in our lives we managed to get married “our way”. My wife and I are both very non-conventional and pragmatic, so eloping to the House of Vacuums was simply “our way” of dealing with the challenges at hand. There has not been a single day I regretted our decision, and now I have an interesting story to tell. At the end of the day that is worth far more to me than having been crammed into a tuxedo and forced to go through a series of events we didn’t really want in the first place. At one point her biological father offered us a large sum of money to elope… but he never actually made good on that promise. I guess it was a good thing we did it because we wanted to.