Good Morning Folks. I hope you had a most excellent weekend. Things are a bit weird here because things have taken a turn towards the cold. While I did not get any, my folks who are a bit further north got some snow yesterday. I am still in a holding pattern, but rapidly running out of time. This coming Thursday, I am scheduled to get a chemo port installed, and as a result, I am losing hope that there is a “surgery only” path forward. As a result, I have been in a fairly dour and sedate mood, and this week’s mixtape fits that pattern. I continue to confront the concept of my own death because the thought of being severely immunocompromised, on top of my normally malfunctioning immune system, is some scary shit. I know I can make it through this, and I have started making plans for some things I am going to do when I am on the far side of this. For example, I have a group of friends in the Chicago area, and I want to make a pilgrimage up to see them. I also really want to make the trek down to see “Erasure” in the Houston area, but that was already on the table since that trip got cancelled due to all of this bullshit happening. I figure so long as I can keep some good plans in my mind, I can focus on those while I deal with whatever awful crap I have to deal with in the coming weeks.
28 – Mired Moody Mindset
This mix largely exists because of an anchor song, like these mixtapes often start. I was sitting in the car listening to the radio before going to a doctor’s appointment, and “Sultans of Swing” came on, and I stalled long enough to listen to the entire song. I’ve always liked Dire Straits and specifically that song, and it made me realize that I had not really dived into a lot of the more moody and almost wistful in a melancholic manner style of music that I really seem to love. For example, up until this point, there was not a single list that I felt I could really place Big Dipper by Cracker on, or the song that always brings me to tears… Jimi & Stan by Strand of Oaks. These mixes show you a piece of my soul each time, and this one… drills straight through the core of me. It is through these mixes that I have also found a lot of community with people who have listened to them and struck up conversations about songs that they have not thought about in decades. If I am going to get through this, I am going to need a lot more of that community, which is a challenge given how fucking awkward and introverted I am. Thanks for being here throughout the years, and if you regularly listen to these mixtapes… thanks for sharing in my nonsense. I guess I will stop stalling and get to the track list.
Track List
01 – (Don’t Fear) The Reaper – Blue Öyster Cult
02 – The Chain – Fleetwood Mac
03 – Heroes – David Bowie
04 – Sultans of Swing – Dire Straits
05 – Message in A Bottle – The Police
06 – Who’ll Stop The Rain – Creedence Clearwater Revival
07 – Gimme Shelter – The Rolling Stones
08 – Little Wing – Jimi Hendrix
09 – Big Dipper – Cracker
10 – The Night We Met – Lord Huron
11 – Red Hill Mining Town – U2
12 – Here Comes Your Man – The Pixies
13 – Cherry Bomb – John Mellencamp
14 – Jimi & Stan – Strand of Oaks
15 – The Waiting – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
It feels like I am working through the stages of grief in mixtape form recently. I just might not be going through them in exactly the same order as normal. I might be in a bit of the bargaining phase because I have been doing a bunch of things in the hopes of improving my success through chemo. I know the Tirzepatide that I am on causes muscle loss, so I have started doing a bit of light weight training, and on some level, I am hoping the universe notices that I am trying and gives me a fucking break. It is weird how fast this mix came together, honestly, because some of the songs are ones that I have not really thought about in years, but suddenly popped into my mind as I was assembling this. For example, Red Hill Mining Town is phenomenal, but I had not thought about that since the album it came out on was on regular rotation for me. Similarly, Cherry Bomb by John Mellencamp is a phenomenal track, but it had not popped into my head in decades. I have decided that I will be disowning “The Librarian” though because he referred to this as “Yacht Rock”, and I present that there is not a single Christopher Cross or Michael McDonald track on this list. This is way more thoughtful than that particularly vapid movement of music.
I have a few more posts that I know I want to make this week, including talking about a book that is sort of awful but at the same time thought-provoking enough that I want to talk about it. As always you can see the full list of my mixes over on the archives.
Mixtape Mondays Archive
The post Mixtape Mondays: Mired Moody Mindset appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week we started off with some discussion about ITER-8 a Tower Defense game that has a bit of a different spin. From there Tam talks about The August Before and how it is essentially the reverse of Packing. We reprise our Pokopia topic from last week and talk about how Tam’s kid is probably in for a sad revelation as she desperately hunts for the missing humans. Bel figured out what is missing from Last Epoch and we talk a bit about the importance of a seasonal journey of some sort in forever games. Tam realizes that he has solved Star Trek Online and how it is way less fun for him now. Finally we talk a bit about Path of Exile and specifically Kodra’s journey into winging a build by trying to figure out which skills work with Holy Strike.
I love Last Epoch, but one of the things that I have lamented for a while is that there just does not feel like there is enough to do in the game. So as a result, I have a couple of good weeks and then bounce because I run out of things that I actually care to do. On Tuesday nights, Ace and I have what we refer to as “Sibling Time” and more often than not lately it just ends up with us hanging out and chatting while we are doing out own things. Ace has been enjoying Path of Exile more than normal, but also was talking about how much they were looking forward to Last Epoch. At this point, I dug out my old lament, which led to us trying to dissect why it is that Last Epoch does not have the staying power that Path of Exile does. After some back and forth, I think we landed on the “why” behind this statement.
Ace and I have had a lot of bonding moments over the years. There is a natural back and forth between a tank that I always played and a healer that they always played. There is also the bonding of growing up in oddly similar circumstances, despite being in wildly different states. However, I would say probably our most pivotal bonding experience was a shared love of Diablo, and quite frankly, were it not for them and the fun that I had playing Diablo III Seasons, I would probably not be the ARPG junkie that I am today. I will always be deeply thankful for them indoctrinating me into the cyclical nature of Diablo III Seasons, and quite honestly, it was an event that I looked forward to more than pretty much anything else on the gaming calendar. I cannot say with any certainty which season was the first season we did this ritual together, but it became sacred.
So much of this experience centered around the Diablo III Seasons Journey, which was a series of achievements that ultimately unlocked some sort of cosmetic item. Generally speaking, this was some sort of a pet or a portal effect, and in the grand scheme of modern MTX, it was rather meager. What it did more than anything was give us something to focus on other than just grinding mobs and explosions of loot. Sure, we only got a week or two out of a Diablo III season, and by the end of that first weekend, we would have 90% of the list checked off, but it did force us to do some outliers in order to complete everything. This is what Last Epoch is missing, some sort of long ranged goal that we can focus on during the season and that pushes us to do specific content in order to knock out individual achievements.
I’ve also realized that is really what changed regarding my interaction with Path of Exile. Starting with the Sanctum league I started caring about trying to complete league challenges. This was an easy carryover from Diablo III, since I was already in that mindset, and for each league from that point forward, I have purposefully tried to get enough challenges completed to earn the little totem pole for my hideout. It started with just attempting to get one at all, to now where I am specifically trying to finish at least 34 of 40 each league, so I can earn the same size as I have in the last several leagues. I’ve never actually completed 40 of 40, because it involves doing a bunch of bossing, which is not really something I enjoy, given that bossing characters are different from mapping characters. It still gives me something to focus on and has pushed me outside of my comfort zone and forced me to learn a bunch of leagues’ worth of content that I had never interacted with previously.
Even Diablo IV has something similar in the form of the battlepass, and while I have issues with its specific implementation… it still gives a long tail to the league. There are specific things that you can focus on doing in order to unlock a sequence of cosmetic items. They made it worse since, in order to do most of these, you have to pay money to unlock them, but it still exists in one form or another. Last Epoch does not have something like this. Sure, Last Epoch has a ladder, but I am not the sort of competitive player who gives a shit about this sort of thing. What it is missing is some sort of long grind that has a destination in mind and rewards some sort of bauble for doing so. There is a certain measure of bragging rights in being able to show off your pet from a season, years later, after it is no longer available. Not that Last Epoch MTX are generally that great… it still would give me a bit more focus towards pushing down to specific levels in the Monolith, completing dungeons, or something that would push me out of the standard practice of playing for a few weeks and then going right back to Path of Exile.
Right now, the closest thing that Last Epoch has is the Forgotten Knights path of killing Harbingers and fighting Aberroth. However, this is often something that you can do in a single weekend with a good enough build and does not really require you to go out of your way in order to accomplish it. I feel like this is the equivalent of unlocking your Atlas and Voidstones in Path of Exile, and less a destination and more the starting place of the “true” endgame. I feel like Last Epoch really needs something that will take a few weeks to chip through in order to keep us grinding well past the natural expiration date of one of their seasons. I’ve jokingly said that I really like grinding and loot explosions, but it seems like the thing that really keeps me engaged is a series of tasks to tick off. I think this is in part why I love daily quests so much, because it gives me a reason to play the game and something specific to focus on without having to make any real decisions for myself. Similarly, this is why I have engaged in so many Legendary gear grinds in Guild Wars 2, because it gives me an overarching goal to focus on. Last Epoch really needs something more than trying to get slightly better gear, and I am hoping that, at some point, they give us some equivalent to all of these systems that I talked about today.
All of that said, I am still really looking forward to the launch of Last Epoch Season 4 when it drops on the 26th of this month. However, I still expect to mostly play for a few weeks and then go right back to Path of Exile.
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Good Morning Folks. Last night I fell into a book and sort of forgot that the world existed. The book is a complete and total mess, but it is a compelling one… that I might talk about at some point. I spent the night largely playing Path of Exile, and attempted to go downstairs in the hopes that I would have cats snuggling with me. Gracie took the bait, but sadly, Josie did not. I’ve been careening towards destiny when it comes to the medical side of things, and I think I am just about out of hope that we have a shot at the easy path. I will probably talk more about this in another post at some point, once we have a predetermined path that I know for certain we are going down. However, today I am going to an orientation class on chemotherapy, and how to take care of the port they will be installing into me… so none of these things are doing especially good things for my current mental health. Neither is the book that I am consuming, but at least by falling into another world, I am not having to think about myself and my issues.
Yesterday, one of the big changes that I made with my character was that I replaced all of the jewelry that I had been wearing in order to fix my glaring Chaos Resistance problem. Since I got a +2 gems corrupt on my books, that took away my reliance on needing All Skill/All Fire Gems on my Necklace, allowing me to open up the suffixes to get some chaos resistance on it. Mostly, I needed Dex, Int, and Chaos Reists and was willing to sacrifice just about anything else to get them. One of the rings comes with some downsides, but since I do not care about evasion rating, and that is a negligible amount of phys damage that I am adding to anything hitting me… it was worth it to get the massively elevated stats the ring otherwise comes with. This also pushed me to 400 strength, which is the next breakpoint of the increased damage per 100 strength implicit on my gloves.
Another big change that I made yesterday was that I swapped the colors on my helmet and switched over to the new Searing Bond of Detonation gem. This is pretty interesting and I patterned my gems off some of the other people playing this ability. I really need to swap my helm at some point for one with Burning Damage on it, but for the moment thing seem to be pretty solid. The place that I really notice this is clearing in Delve because I am constantly dragging laser beams behind me that deal burning damage to everything that gets close to them. Bossing also seems much faster than with Fire Trap, because I set down six totems and they all explode at the same time. I am not entirely certain this is going to have the top end that Fire Trap can reach, but it is certainly fun to play with for the moment, and it is easy enough to recolor my helm if I want to swap back to Fire Trap. I went with Less Duration for the imbue mostly because it was one of the cheapest options that actually did anything. Since I am self exploding the totems by oversummoning them, it isn’t like the duration actually does much… but the more multiplier does.
If nothing else, it is entertaining to see all of these totems making cool patterns as I run around the map. Searing Bond, in general, is such a weird ability, and the fact that they all explode means I no longer really have to care about totem placement. I think with the normal version of this, you want to create a crisscrossing box pattern so that the beams hit as many targets as possible. All I really care about is that every third summon, I am causing all six to explode. The baked-in negative of this abiltiy however, is that I am lifetapping a heck of a lot of damage, which is a noticeable hit when I summon something. Once I pushed up into the 6k for max health, this cost seemed far more negligible and seemed perfectly fine. Unfortunately, the jewelry swap, though, was a hit to some of my total regeneration, but I could upgrade my immortal flesh to get that back.
All in all, I am pretty happy with the state of the build, but that said… I am feeling a bit of wanderlust, and I think before long, I will probably roll a second character of the league. I am not entirely certain what I want to be playing, but I will sort something out. Holy Hammers still is calling my name.
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