Good Morning Friends! I finished up the quest for the Zephyr last night and while I absolutely hate the design… it is cool to have a stasis element sword. I am not sure what it is about the whole Dawning design ethic, but it is awful. Like I get what they are going for… a sort of new years festival thing that isn’t dominated by either the Red/Green Christmas colors or the Red/Gold Lunar New Year designs. However there is just some about the shapes of the items that I don’t really like that much. I’ve never really cared for the “Nine” themed items either, and these absolutely seem to share a similar design ethic. I kinda wish you could create weapon skins similar to how you can create universal ornaments for armor, so I could just swap this to a weapon I don’t hate.
I am slow rolling my way through leveling my light, or whatever they call it currently. I am old… I will probably never stop calling it light level. Mostly I have been getting in, knocking out a few objectives and then calling it good for the night. I still really enjoy Gambit probably the most of all of the available modes. There is something about its specific blend of elements that I really enjoy greatly. Essentially I am getting daily bounties for Dawning and then trying to figure out who I can accomplish them the easiest. Last night I had Hive and Scorn bounties and thought since you get both of them regularly in gambit… I might be able to kill two birds with one stone. Unfortunately I wound up finishing the Hive one on Tangled Shore, and the Scorn one in a Dreaming City Lost Sector. Still having a lot of fun but very much not taking anything seriously.
Back over in Final Fantasy XIV, like I have said a few times I have been purposefully avoiding the login queues by playing other games. However I think either over the next few days or over the weekend I am going to start fighting my way in again. I have some dungeons to run that I have unlocked but never done before, and I think my friend Grace also has them unlocked as well. I figure it might be good shenanigans to run around and do them together and then loop in anyone else in the free company who wants to go along as well given that we have tank and heals covered for easy queues. The above image is not a story spoiler but makes me exceptionally happy because so much of the moon is pulled straight out of my Final Fantasy IV nostalgia.
I did stumble across something pretty cool last night if you are looking for something to watch. There is a multi-part docuseries on YouTube about the origins of the Xbox and the various travails that the console went through during inception as well as various missteps. This is edited in the format of a Netflix multi-part documentary so that it almost feels like something created by No Clip. They even got Laura Bailey to do the narration for the series which makes it feel all the more legit. While watching it you almost forget for a moment how brilliant this piece of marketing actually is. It is absolutely evangelism for the Xbox brand and paints it in the light of being this scrappy “by gamers for gamers” rebel. I was not an Xbox gamer, I jumped straight from Dreamcast to playing PC MMORPGs with a brief revisit in PlayStation 2 land. I do remember my friends getting super into it however and my neighbor across the street being extremely into Halo.
I am on part four right now of what is currently a six part series, and it is just self deprecating enough to feel fair. It would never do anything to paint Microsoft in a bad light, because it is produced from within the bowels of Redmond but it does let down the guard more than a few times in very strategic ways in order to feel like the behind the scenes story. Truth is I know a few people who worked on the original Xbox and this syncs up with some of the stories they had told me. I’ve actually seen one of those original metal Xboxes that they show off in the series in person. However never forget that this is absolutely brilliant marketing. I mean I just bought an Xbox Series X which means it is working, because Game Pass and XCloud really are phenomenal deals and my old school 90s VCR model Xbox One needed and upgrade.
The post Man on The Moon appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I have to admit I had completely forgotten about the Dawning Festival being a thing, or how generally satisfying it is. For those who have not experienced it, this is a weird festival where you shoot bad guys to collect materials… to make deeply questionable sounding cookies. You then hand those cookies into people in the tower and other destinations… for reward packages that include in them a bunch of Dawning specific weapons. It ends up forming this really enjoyable loop of “do some stuff”, “get some stuff”, and then ultimately “get big rewards”. For me who is currently grossly under-geared, it also serves as the impetus to actually be doing some grinding which helps to remedy that situation.
Given my present mental and emotional state, this all seems to fit right now. I know I should be fighting through the FFXIV queue and working on collecting some bookrocks, but that right now seems so cumbersome and instead I shoot some dudes for a candy like explosion of materials. It is about all I can really handle engagement wise at this very moment. I am in a very active clan, but I can’t really bring myself to engage much in that either. I know activities are happening on the regular but the emotional toll of losing Kenzie I am afraid has caused me to slip back into turtle mode. I will dig myself out at a later date but for now I am sorta trying to heal.
I am slowly working on a series of dawning quests, and for right now the only weapon that I have unlocked is the Glacioclasm. I am not the biggest fan of fusion rifles, largely because of the very small ammunition pool. At some point Bungie made a massive quality of life change and made all primary weapons have unlimited ammunition reserves. This means I can just run around effectively forever with “white ammo” weapons and just not care about ammunition at all. This means I am way the hell more likely to use double primary instead of a primary/secondary load-out. I did however use this to knock out a few bounties and the weapon is “fine” but probably not better than my Cartesian Coordinate.
The item I think most of us are seeking is a good role of the new Stasis element sword that was introduced with this event. Slowly but surely I am working my way through that quest and once completed I can purchase packages that give me an increased chance of getting more copies of it to drop. For the moment this all seems to be right down my alley and I am going with it. I’ve not abandoned FFXIV or even New World to be honest… though I am mostly in a holding pattern on the later to see if they pull their head out of their ass. With Final Fantasy XIV I am waiting for queues to die down to rational levels to where I can realistically choose to play the game and get in within thirty minutes instead of needing to play my entire day around it.
The post Dawning Time appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Friends, I have been struggling to attach to games this week… and honestly last week as well. Having finished Endwalker, I have been purposefully staying away from that game in my small way of trying to help with congestion so that more people can get through it. I get that I am just one person… but if more people took a step away for a bit, more folks would get to experience that great expansion. In the meantime I have been floundering a bit to find new purpose and booted up Destiny 2 on a whim… and it more or less stuck. I think mostly my mental and emotional speed right now is “mindless shootymans game”. It doesn’t hurt that there is a 30th Anniversary event going on in game and with it a bunch of interesting drops.
The best of these for my purposes is the BXR-55 Battler which is essentially a pulse rifle patterned off of the Battle Rifle from Halo. The default load out has it burst firing, but I have slotted in a mod that shifts mine to full auto making it a pretty great primary weapon. What I really dig about this weapon is the accuracy and range and the ability to hip-fire it reliably. Which effectively gives me a single weapon that can be scoped for something akin to a scout rifle for picking off targets at range, or hip-fired to give me something that feels like an auto rifle. I have this sneaking feeling that this is going to eventually get nerfed because it seems to be dominating the meta a the moment.
There are a whole slew of other weapons that are in honor of past Bungie games. If you were more of a Covenant person, you can pick up the Retraced Path which is sort of themed after the Carbine. It also serves as the first legendary quality trace rifle, with the rest of weapons in that category taking up your exotic slot. If the Energy Sword was more your jam, the game has two “half” energy swords that make me wonder if we are eventually going to get an exotic quest to join them into the true Energy Sword equivalent. I never played Marathon because I did not have access to a Mac, but apparently the shotgun that drops is in honor of that game. There is a grenade launcher dropping and I have no clue what it is themed after other than it bears resemblance to the Mountain Top.
The new game mode that drops most of these weapons is called Dares of Eternity and is a weird “game show” hosted by the Starhorse and Xur. Essentially you spin a wheel and this chooses what type of enemy you face during that round. You battle your way through multiple rounds and then face a classic Destiny 1 boss at the very end. There is a scoring system which allows you to complete bounties for the Starhorse, and a more general series of bounties that you can complete for Xur. You win at least one key per round and can also get Strange Coins from doing other activities during the Anniversary Event that you can turn in for more keys or other items. If you unlock enough caches and save up enough keys you can earn things like ships or sparrows as well as I believe a full armor set.
All in all it is some “big dumb fun”, and I think that is what my brain needs right now. There is a new DLC dungeon that I would love to get a group for at some point so I can pick up Gjallarhorn which is tied to completing it. Additionally there is a quest chain that unlocks an exotic sidearm that is based off of the pistol from Halo that I would like to get as well. Mostly I am spending my time doing Dares of Eternity over and over, but I have started knocking out some weekly rewards to try and get my light level up there. It is still not the best system in the world, but after New World I know that it could be so much worse.
The post Bungie 30th Anniversary appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends. If you have followed me on twitter, you probably already know that I am in a pretty broken state right now. I’ve talked a bit on this blog about the recent challenges with Kenzie and I figured I owed it to anyone who ONLY reads my blog to give an update. Kenzie was diagnosed with diabetes in 2017, and from that point forward we have had a nightly routine of “pill and poke” where I feed her some anti-anxiety meds and also give her the nightly shot of insulin. I am so thankful that she took it well throughout the years, because it is hard to fully explain how much of “my” baby Kenzie was. For most of her life she was my partner in crime and was with me constantly. She trusted “daddy” explicitly and knew that I would never do anything that wasn’t extremely necessary for her own benefit. So giving two insulin shots a day, often times caused dirty looks but never any real resistance.
Statistically once a cat is diagnosed with diabetes, the average life expectancy is three years. We managed to get a bit more than four years with Kenzie and I have to say every moment of it was worth it. She was still very much “herself” until last week. I woke up Monday morning and knew something was wrong but wasn’t quite sure what. At first I thought maybe Kenzie was just having a bad day, and she spent most of it curled up in my office. Tuesday she was even more sluggish and we made a doctors appointment for her to be dropped off Wednesday morning. From that point forward she was essentially in hospital care. We don’t know what happened first but theory is… her blood sugar was just a bit off which lead to a bladder infection… which led to diabetic ketoacidosis… which lead to pancreatitis… all of which stressed her liver.
She was starting to go the right direction… when tragedy struck Saturday afternoon and she suffered some form of stroke causing a major setback. At the same time she was going into liver failure and ultimately had to make the call no one ever wants to make. Thankfully I got to snuggle with her one last time, but the entire time she was making these little pained noises while still trying push her head underneath my hand. I am just so heartbroken right now. I’ve lost many animals in my forty five years, but Kenzie meant so much to me that it is very hard to fully express in words. She was a mess… but she was my mess. I had never had a cat that played fetch before, and many a Sunday morning while I was editing AggroChat she would be meowing insistently for me to throw a hairband which was her fetch object of choice. As we started doing telework, she spent so many hours curled up beside me on a PC Case box that I let sit there long enough that she started to use it as a place to sleep.
Right now I am also a bit concerned for Josie, because Kenzie and her were buds. Kenzie had never liked another cat before Josie joined our family. She was part big sister and part surrogate mom to Josie and it was not that unusual for them both to be snuggling on my legs while I sat and played on my laptop. Kenzie and Mollie however did not get along at all… and part of the reason why Mollie tiptoed throughout the house is to skirt the attention of Kenzie. So it will be interesting to see what life is like with Mollie in the coming weeks, and if she may come a bit out of her shell. I’ve had both of them snuggling with me during the weekend because I think they can tell that I am not quite right. Cats seem to know when you need them the most. Losing an animal is never easy, but losing Kenzie is extra hard.
The Vet fought a hard fight over the course of several days and I am extremely thankful for everything they were able to do. I have no clue just how much this bill is going to be yet, but I would have probably paid any amount to keep her safe and at my side. I keep going through this cycle of trying to figure out if I could have done something different, second guessing every decision I made over the past week. The Vet has tried to assure me there wasn’t much else that I could have done, but I also sorta feel like that is part of their job to try and assuage fears. There will always be part of me that feels like I failed to keep her safe and happy, and it even hits home more so since so much of my daily routine centered around trying to keep her alive. I think I am going to be broken for a long while, but I am very thankful for all of the support that you gave me. I do sorta think things have to scab over a bit before I can really engage fully with the world again.
One thing that does bring me no small amount of joy is the fact that Kenzie is permanently part of my blog’s Masthead. When I was playing Monster Hunter World I tried my best to pattern my Palico after Kenzie and named her as such. The truth is that the options were completely incapable of capturing her, so when I asked my good friend Ammo to create artwork of my MHW character, I got her to draw the Palico to look a bit more true to the actual Kenzie. So every time I make a post I will have Kenzie up there, preparing to go to space in her adorable Baan armor set. Goodbye baby, you were a goofball but you were my goofball. I miss you so much.
The post Goodbye Kenzie appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Belghast 
