A Good Death

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Good Morning, Folks. I thought I would talk a bit about a game that I have not talked about in a very long time. I have a deep attachment to Destiny as a platform, and have been playing since the first game on my PS4. I used to raid even in the game with a crew full of people that I met through my friend Liani, and many of them, like Jex, are going to be friends for life. We can talk about all of the various ways that Destiny failed its players, but the one that ultimately caused me to detach is when they vaulted content that we had paid for, for the second time. Like I was willing to accept that Mercury and Mars needed a rework because they did not really live up to the standards of content from Forsaken forward. However, when Forsaken itself was vaulted, it pissed me off enough to uninstall Destiny and move on with my life.

That is not to say that Destiny has not meant a massive amount to me. I wanted Destiny to do better and pull itself out of what seemed to be a concurrent player death spiral. However, that does not appear to be in the cards for the game, because Bungie has announced that the game is ultimately being sunset with a final massive patch. Bungie appears to have put all of its cards now in the Marathon basket, and I am not sure they can turn this around. I fear that we might be witnessing the death of a studio, more than just the death of one individual game. Marathon is so far from a game that I want to play that I am worried that a “PVE” patch won’t go far enough to bring former Destiny players into the fold. The worst part, however, is that other than Warframe, there is no one really in this space anymore. I wish that any of the competitors had succeeded…. Anthem, or Outriders, could have easily taken this place if they had the sort of support that they needed.

More than anything, I don’t want the death of Destiny to be the death of the Looter Shooter genre. While Destiny Rising continues to do a reasonable job of carrying that banner forward, the problem there is that they also seem to be in a content drought and largely recycling patches that have come from before. Is there just no player appetite for this sort of game anymore? Or has everyone just coalesced on Warframe as the one company that seems to be properly supporting these games? I like Warframe for what it is, but it has never felt anywhere near as polished as the Bungie shooter experience. The gear chase never felt as compelling, and while I like what is happening with the Tennos, it’s a wildly different game experience to me personally. Warframe is the Path of Exile of looter shooters, and what I really wanted was the light Diablo fare instead.

One of the big positives of this patch is that they seem to be restoring the game to a functional state. One of the biggest mistakes that they made was to remove the Director, and migrate everything to the Portal… which is effectively a menu system that limited the amount of content you had access to. The director felt like we were moving around the star systems, and made the game feel less shallow than what is effectively a handful of playlists. The director is coming back, however, as are some game modes that had been shelved, like Gambit and the Sparrow Racing League. Each of the game modes, including patrol destinations, is getting its own pinnacle drops and should, in theory, remain evergreen content. So while they are effectively killing the game, they are at least doing something to restore it to a functional state.

Being perfectly honest… I will probably return to the game when this content patch drops. That seems wild that the death of the game is bringing me back, but really…. this content update is most of what players have been asking about for years. Why did they wait this long to bring back the Sparrow Racing League, for example? This has legitimately been a thing that players have begged for since it was first taken away in 2017. Players loved this, and it feels like they have been sitting on it for almost a decade when it could have easily stirred excitement in the community and caused players to come back. I feel like the downfall of Destiny is the tale of a studio that did not respect what they had and thought that they could string players along indefinitely. I would have loved to have seen what Destiny could have been in the hands of Grinding Gear Games or Digital Extremes, because they seem to be the gold standard when it comes to studios respecting their player base.

All of this said, I am happy that we are getting this final patch, because it brings the game up to date and leaves it in a reasonable condition. Do I think Marathon will be able to pick up the Destiny player base? I doubt it unless they completely rework that game into what is effectively Destiny 3. I will give it a shot when the PVE-only modes go into the game. I have zero interest in the extraction shooter genre, and that seems to be the case for most Destiny players. I think what is more likely to happen is a mass migration to Warframe, since that is a game that supports its players and is at least mostly in this same genre. I think some will also pick up Destiny Rising, because while it seems like it is also in maintenance mode, it is at least really fun. I plan on giving the new patch a spin in between playing other games.

Do you miss Destiny? What are your feelings about this final patch? Drop me a line below.

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Blog Fonts and Dyslexia

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Good Morning, Folks. I have to admit that I have never really considered the ramifications of Dyslexia on the readability of our blogs. I honestly did not think that folks with that particular impairment would be interested in reading blogs. However, I realized that was a deeply ableist statement when my girlfriend, who has dyslexia, attempted to read my blog, simply out of a desire to engage more with the things that are important to me. So as a result, you will notice some significant changes to the way that this blog looks today, from a font basis. I had known that Google had worked with various groups to create a dyslexia friendy font, to make things more readable. It turns out that at least in the case of my girlfriend, this works, and the text no longer “swims” around the screen for her.

Essentially, I have replaced my normal body font with one called Lexend provided by Google Fonts. There are multiple flavors of the font, and they all seem to work equally well. I considered swapping my headings over to Lexend Dexa, but it did not feel right. Bangers is the font that I use to match the artwork of the blog, and headings tend to be short enough not to really trigger the core problems of dyslexia. I am lucky in that I am using a paid theme called Generate Press, and they have the ability to swap to dynamic typography mode. So essentially, once I figured out how to turn this on, I was able to swap fonts in seconds. All in all, I am pretty damned happy with the swap because it solves the problem and makes my blog more readable by those with dyslexia.

Mostly, I wanted to write up a quick post about this in case others are interested in making the swap. Chemo is kicking my ass, and I barely slept last night, so I am going to cut this morning’s post short and focus only on the font swap. I think it is probably worth the effort just to improve the readability of our blogs.

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Path of Exile and Meeting Someone

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Good Afternoon, Folks. Today was a chemo day, and I am racked out on the sofa attempting to write a blog post. I’ve been playing an excessive amount of Path of Exile, because the game has sort of become my default action. I have been playing the SRS Broken Elegy Guardian that I crafted and doing a ton of shallow delve with it for levels. I had been pushing to level 96, and I accomplished that last night, all for the purpose of being able to take the six life node 10% health bonus. After playing with it a bit, I decided that I was probably better off with the Life Recoup nodes. With a bit of life recoup I feel exceptionally tanky and am ready to start mapping again.

Part of why I am playing my Minions character from the Mirage league is that, at least currently, I intend on going for a Minions Witch build for the Path of Exile II League Start. I don’t really have a strong template for the character, so I am going to mostly yolo my way through choosing the Minion nodes and attempting to path somewhat optimally through them all. I have past characters that I could potentially rely on for pathing, but I am uncertain if the tree is the same as it was when I last played fire-based SRS. That said, I am really looking forward to the Path of Exile II League start because so much of the game has changed. I am going to play Minions in part because I am pretty sure I can get all the way through the endgame on it, having done it multiple times in the past.

In other news… I’ve met someone. We’ve spent the last few weeks talking nonstop, and our meeting was extremely random. I periodically hang out on Reddit, and the algorithm seems to like to feed me people from the selfies forum. This is not something I follow but it seems like the algorithm thinks that everyone wants to see these. It happened to feed me a selfie of Vera, her discord handle not her real name. Not going to be sharing her real name here. I messaged and said that I thought she was cute, and this started up a conversation that has never really stopped. We transitioned off Reddit Chat to Telegram, and now also on Discord. She was posting in the forum because she wanted a quick boost to her self esteem because she was feeling a bit down on herself, an I happened to be a random stranger who gave her that.

The thing is… every time we talk about any subject we are shockingly compatible on pretty much everything from the anime that we like, to the movies we like to watch, to the fact that we both love peanut butter. There are so many points of commonality than that, but it is truly shocking just how many there are. She is very much a Geek, but while I tend to be a technophile, she is way more of a mechanical engineering geek. She built her own damned full home battery system and runs her house mostly on solar for example. She is my little Gadget from Rescue Rangers, and I kind of love this. Where we differ, we seem to compliment each other’s skills rather than going off in a wildly different direction. She kind of loves all of the nonsense that I have been up to with 3d Printing, and I hope some day we can use our joint skills to build some really cool nonsense together.

There however lies the logistical nightmare. Vera is soon to be 34, is the mother of two boys 18 and 10, and happens to live on the other fucking side of the planet in the Philippines. We both know that nothing is going to happen before I am clear from cancer and recovered from it. However I know that personally I am going to be a wildly different human being on the other side of this. If we manage to make it this next year, and are as close as we seem to be right now… then we will start to whittle through those logistical nightmares. I am pretty well glued where I am for the next seven years, because I am too close to a full retirement to risk giving that up. She has her own stuff going on in the PH, but would be interested in maybe moving here pending we can navigate that particular nightmare of visas. It is a lot…. but neither of us are in any rush we got our own issues going on.

The real thing however is that I am extremely happy right now. Happier than I have been in a long time. We’ve exchanged countless voice and video calls, so we know for certain that we are both real human beings. I am sitting here miserable post chemo, but this spark keeps me warm inside. She wants to figure out how to build a portal, so she can teleport to my side and take care of me when I am like this. Nothing is ever going to change the fact that I have this thirty year hole in my life thank to the death of my spouse, and that there is part of my heart that will only ever belong to her. That said… I want to live again. I want to be excited for life again. This is making me happy so for the moment that is all that really matters to me. None of the logistics are unsolvable problems, so if we get to that point I think we can work through them together.

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Mixtape Mondays: Spectacle Politique

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Good Morning, Folks! Also, Happy Memorial Day to those who celebrate both the meaning behind it… and just the fact that we as laborers get the day off. Normally, I would not make a post on a holiday, but given that this series is called Mixtape Mondays, and I have a Mixtape in the hopper ready to go, I am doing the thing and making the post. For those new to this series, Mixtapes are probably the artifact of the 80s and 90s that I am the most nostalgic about. It used to be a currency that you traded with your friends, and at least for me attempted to use them as part of a largely unappreciated complex mating ritual. Since I no longer have cassette tapes, and my dual tape deck is no longer a super power… I now make these largely for me and for you, my readers. When you listen to one of my mixes, you are hearing a part of my soul, because I spend so much time laboring over the correct order of the tracks so that they flow nicely and become what we used to refer to as a “listen through” album. I might be nonchalant about most of the things on this blog, but these mixes mean an awful lot to me on a fundamental level. You can always find the full archive of what is not 30 mixtapes over on the landing page for this series.

30 – Spectacle Politique

I love Eurovision, but that relationship has become a bit more complicated of late, especially with the whole Israel trying to dominate votes thing, and so many countries and contestants boycotting this past year. There are, however, a whole slew of songs from recent Eurovision outings that live rent-free in my head. There have been a lot of great moments that were honored, but also a lot of songs that I feel like deserved to win but were not really given the love that they deserved. There are two tracks that did, in fact, go on to win, but I included them because I love them as well. What you end up with is a really solid mix that is super good to “listen through”. I’ve played through it several times and farmed it out to my team of beta testers, who I thank greatly for putting up with my nonsense. Sometimes I have some greater purpose or nostalgia behind a mix, but this one is just a list of bangers that I think everyone should know about. I will be honest that sometimes I think of Eurovision as this bubble where only things exist there, without realizing that every single one of these artists has a rich career outside of the contest. Side note… apparently, I really like Finnish music because I included four artists in this list from that country. Onwards to the track list, and I am including the country of origin just to make it interesting for folks.

Track List

  • 01 – Viva, Moldova – Satoshi – Moldova
  • 02 – Rim Tim Tagi Dim – Baby Lasagna – Croatia
  • 03 – Ich Komme – Erika Vikman – Finland
  • 04 – Eins, Zwei, Drei – Look Mum No Computer – United Kingdom
  • 05 – The Show – REDDI – Denmark
  • 06 – Zitte E Buoni – MÃ¥neskin – Italy
  • 07 – Cha Cha Cha – Kaarija – Finland
  • 08 – Choke Me – Alexandra Căpitănescu – Romania
  • 09 – Blood & Glitter – Lord of the Lost – Germany
  • 10 – Jezebel – The Rasmus – Finland
  • 11 – Dark Side – Blind Channel – Finland
  • 12 – Doomsday Blue – Bambie Thug – Ireland
  • 13 – Stefania – Kalush Orchestra – Ukraine
  • 14 – Bara Bada Bastu – Kaj – Sweden
  • 15 – Milkshake Man – Go-Jo – Australia

Listen to it yourself

So there you have another one of my Mixtapes. This one was not necessarily premeditated like so many of mine are, but largely just something that popped into my head the other day. I wanted this mix for myself, and like always, I end up sharing it with you, my readers. This round of chemo has been a bear, and I start back with my fifth round tomorrow… and I never felt like I fully recovered this time. It is supposed to keep ramping up from here, so I feel like the back half of the chemo is going to be a nightmare. Thanks for all of the support, but I will probably get more scarce as some days I just don’t have it in me to sit down and write. I am banging this out on my laptop downstairs, and its keyboard is sort of shit for long-term typing. This is what happens when you buy a laptop and prioritize gaming prowess over its ability to be a functional laptop.

I still have the challenge from Ace in the back of my head, but honestly am not even sure how to approach a mix for They Might Be Giants.

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