Bungie 30th Anniversary

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.

Goodbye Kenzie

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.

Bel Folks Stuff – Episode 8 – Featuring Grace

Good Morning Friends. Earlier this week I released the last of the original Bel Folks Stuff episodes again since the entire project predated me actually putting things on YouTube. The nasty secret however is that in January of 2020 I started the process of recording brand new episodes of the show. This has always been a little bit of a passion project for me and I enjoy these way more than probably the people listening to them. I want to do more of them and I thought initially by re-releasing all of the episodes it would kick start me back into scheduling recording dates and such and making it happen. I had two shows recorded that I have been sitting on for almost two years at this point and now feel like it is time to actually let the world listen to them. The pandemic wrecked a lot of us creatively, so it is a bit weird to be listening to this show knowing it was recorded well before most of us had to deal with lock downs, toilet paper shortages, or the fear of leaving the house. It is really hard to have “best friends” as adults, or at least it is something that I have struggled with personally… but if I were to try and sort out that thing Grace would absolutely be at the top of that list. In part I started this initiative up again with their show in part because I knew it would be relaxing and easy for me to get through. In truth all of these first episodes are me sitting down with various folks that I record AggroChat with so it would be low pressure. I was battling social anxiety pretty freaking hard when this all started and only recently have pulled myself out of that cycle. I hope you enjoy listening to the show anywhere near as much as I enjoyed recording it. So without further rambling I present you Bel Folks Stuff featuring my amazing friend Grace.
The post Bel Folks Stuff – Episode 8 – Featuring Grace appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Sticking the Landing

Well folks… once again I try my best to cherry pick a screenshot that doesn’t obviously show anything for a post as I am trying to maintain my stance of not spoiling anything. Yesterday I wrapped up the Endwalker Main Story Quest and let me tell you… it was a ride. With all certainty this is my favorite Final Fantasy XIV expansion and quite possibly my favorite MMORPG expansion of all time. Yesterday I talked a bit about the complicated emotions surrounding that notion, because this is a game that requires you to have lived through all of the hundreds of hours of content from A Realm Reborn to Endwalker to really appreciate the gravity of this situation. Friends… I cried so much last night, enough that my wife suggested that maybe I really shouldn’t be playing this game especially since my baby is still in the hospital right now and that has caused a massive dip in my emotions as well. They were not all bad tears…. and honestly a lot of them were the tears of remembrance and joy that you might have when visiting old friends. Endwalker is an expansion that does not go anywhere I might have expected it to go. It was an expansion where we knew four of the six total destinations ahead of time, but even then… there were so many revelations as I played through it. The remaining two “secret” destinations really are mind boggling and I am still reeling from the impact of some of the revelations that come from them. If I had a complaint it would only be that the sixth location arrived too late and was a bit too cumbersome to traverse. It played a key role in the story… but after the first interludes it was pretty certain the path before us… and then it just took a long time for it to actually play out along those lines. Essentially the pacing of the final chapter of the game was a bit monotonous for my tastes. That does not mean that the conclusion does not feel earned or meaningful, but those final steps as we got there were a bit cumbersome. That said I feel like they absolutely “stuck the landing”, and managed to drive home the actual final moments of the expansion. More important than the journey I just completed… I have so much hope for where we are going next. The game does a great job of teasing just how little of the world we actually know anything about and how many of the reflections we have yet to visit. I am extremely interested to see the next story and how it evolves over the course of this expansion and its patches. The only thing that I don’t fully know is the shape of the post patch content, because it honestly feels like we have tied up most of the loose ends associated with the “Ascian” storyline. In the past there has always been a dangling thread here or there that could be tugged upon, and we are really lacking that. I do wonder if they will spend the .1 through .55 patch really devoting it entirely to setting up the next conflict, instead of breaking that into an epilogue and prologue like they have done before.
Now we tread into some light spoiler territory, but Endwalker is an expansion that has made me care about every single character save one. I do not get Zenos existing past Stormblood in the Final Fantasy XIV franchise. I am uncertain if this character is just super beloved in Japan or something, but it is without a doubt the worst creation to come out of the Final Fantasy franchise. Even Kefka has more depth and he is just a murderous clown. Zenos being too painfully bored to care about anything is not interesting, and I feel like the fact that he had anything to do with Endwalker and Shadowbringers for that matter is a waste of screen time. My spoiler is this… they never manage to do anything interesting with Zenos and he is STILL the worst character. Even Fandaniel they manage to make me care about and add some depth to that character, but Zenos remains a one note tune that just has cool armor and weapons. Now I find myself terribly torn. I want to start working on the endgame, and want to start leveling additional characters… but I also sorta feel bad in doing so because maybe I should back the fuck out for awhile and let someone else have my slot. I did what I felt like I needed to do… I completed the storyline and now have experienced that emotional roller coaster. Now I want to make sure all of my friends have experienced it so that we can have the big spoiler show about it. The problem is… it isn’t like I can actually give my spot in the line to someone else. So I am in this weird territory where it almost feels like it is my duty to stop playing for awhile until everyone has caught up… but also I don’t want to. We will see how the weekend goes and I guess I am thankful that Kenzie being hospitalized has at least allowed me to stop trying to nursemaid her constantly so that I could finish things up.
Endwalker and its story has really been a godsend the last few days, and has kept my mind off the constant worry over my baby girl. There isn’t much that I can do right now and I have to have faith that the doctors are doing what they can while she is hospitalized. They are under Covid protocols still and it isn’t like I can even go see her right now. I am getting calls from the Vet a few times a day with status updates and things are still pretty touch and go. She is improving and starting to act more like herself but she is very much not out of the woods yet. Essentially they are fighting to stabilize her blood sugar while at the same time trying to control negative reactions happening in her pancreas and liver while also fighting a bladder infection that they feel probably triggered the entire cascade reaction. I talked to the Vet three times yesterday and the first one was pretty grim, but as he progressed through the day he got more hopeful in his voice. Essentially his focus is to get her well enough to come home, so that she can rest in her familiar environment and heal faster as such. In theory that should happen at some point this weekend. So I greatly appreciate all the thoughts and prayers I have gotten for Kenzie butt, and here is hoping everything continues to go in the right direction. The post Sticking the Landing appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.