Good Morning Friends! This year I have been more than a little bit scatterbrained and unfocused. As a result, many things have slipped… not the least of which is realizing that it is apparently anniversary time. For whatever reason I tend to start a lot of things in April and both the anniversary of Tales of the Aggronaut (April 17th, 2009) and our AggroChat Podcast (April 13th, 2014) landed this month. Then there was April 26th of 2013 when I started what I called the “Grand Experiment” of forcing myself to blog every single day which lasted a little over three years before landing on something more manageable of “every weekday unless I really don’t feel like it”. You could say that this also ultimately led to the creation of Blaugust because I personally found a lot of success in forcing myself to blog damn the torpedos.
In the grand scheme of things the key to longevity for me, was to shift my focus of this blog as a vehicle for some specific planned idea… and instead just make it about whatever I happened to want to be talking about at the time. This is my blog… the Bel does dumb nonsense blog… and if you are along for the ride awesome. If this is not your jam, that is also awesome because I realize I am very much an acquired taste. I don’t have an overwhelming number of readers to be honest, but the ones I do have… end up being exceptionally loyal. Most of them are people that I legitimately consider friends… which is why in part the whole recent verbiage of “Good Morning Friends” is not inherently dishonest. I realize I am mostly talking to a circle of friends that occasionally has some rando stumble into that conversation. The thing is… those randos are also more than welcome to hang out and become friends too.
When I post on social media that I am not making a post for a given day… it isn’t out of some ego trip because I know the world continues to tick along just fine if I have not extruded words. I do it because in the past when I have skipped a day… I had a lot of folks checking in on me to make sure I am okay. I do it out of a sense of not wanting to make this community of friends that read my ramblings worry about me. Honestly, my favorite part about joining the Fediverse and leaving Twitter has been just how many new faces I have seen join the ranks of people who appear to be consuming my nonsense each day. I want you all to feel welcome, but also I am still mostly writing these posts like I am talking to myself so… sorry for not being more interesting.
So if you have been reading my blog for a bit, you will probably be familiar with Tripod… the admittedly horribly named three-legged feral calico cat that lives in our backyard. I’ve not talked about this situation lately because it honestly really depressed me. Roughly a month ago… two dogs got into our yard under the front fence and seemingly chased her off. We’ve been watching anxiously hoping for any signs of her, checking the video camera feeds multiple times per day hoping for a glimpse of her. We were starting to worry that something had happened to her. The next-door neighbor saw the dogs chasing her, but also that she got away from them and they did not follow. However, we’ve learned from experience in the past with other backyard ferals… that when they disappear they are often gone permanently.
However last night while my wife was sitting on the back patio reading, she showed back up. I went out and put some food out but she was too skittish to come over and eat. My hope is that once my wife went inside she fed, though I did not notice her on the camera. That said she is also pretty damned good at avoiding detection algorithms. This morning she was milling around the little house we have in the backyard for her, so my hope is she spent the night there. When I go out to feed in a few minutes I am hoping that she comes out and eats. I mean it isn’t like she is defenseless and I am certain that she is more than capable of catching a meal… but she also looks way thinner than when we last saw her. I cannot explain fully what a gift it is to see her again because we were overwhelmed with concern for the last several weeks. So much so that I just could not bring myself to write about it.
In other nighttime visitor news… we have a few adorable Raccoons and at least one very chubby Possum that come by. I really should start uploading to Catfriend Television again, my dumb YouTube channel that I started during the pandemic where I uploaded clips from our security cameras of cats and other visitors. There is one video clip that I have somewhere that shows two raccoons up on the porch, and another few waiting in the wings on the sidewalk. I feel like some people would have a drastically different reaction than I do… but so long as they are not causing a mess I am more than happy to have them visiting. When I was a Scout camp counselor, I remember some raccoons getting into my igloo cooler and stealing my dry Gatorade powder. Maybe I should put some out for them and see if this group likes that too. I know it was a raccoon because there were sticky red paw prints leading out of my tent.
Lastly, I recorded another one of my dumb videos yesterday. I have been running up an alt in Path of Exile and was amused at just how easily Toxic Rain Ballista/Caustic Arrow deletes mobs. I was talking to my friend Ace about it and decided to record a video showing it off. Granted this is just the campaign and I have no idea if this will continue into mapping… but I am probably going to do a follow-up video once I have verified that it still remains good. Like always I mostly record these for me, or for some other purpose than to ever get YouTube viewers. I enjoy making these short dumb videos, and just like with my blog… am perfectly fine if no one actually consumes them.
Anyways! I am officially in my fifteenth year with this blog and I just want to thank you all for following me on this journey. At this point, daily blogging is so ingrained in my person that I am pretty sure I will be doing this 25 years from now as well. The slow death of social media has only served to drive home just how important it is to me to have a place on the internet that I can call entirely my own.
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Good Morning Friends! I just realized this morning how long it has been since I did one of my “Book Talk” round-up posts. Originally I had set myself a goal of reading Twenty books this year, and I have long since blown past that. I credit easy access to books through the Library system as the thing that spurred off this renaissance of catching up on books that I had intended to read but never got around to doing so. In a normal year I would read somewhere between two to five books, and this year… has been considerably more focused than that. I’ve been tracking my journey over on Bookwyrm, a federated book tracking site along the lines of Good Reads that is part of the Fediverse and plays nicely with Mastodon. This morning I am going to catch the thread up of sorts and talk about the books I have read over the last month.
The Hunger of the Gods – John Gwynne
I’ve technically written a bit about this book in the middle of another blog post, but I opted to go ahead and include it in this run-down since it never quite made its way to a Book Talk series post. Once again I had every intention of starting the next book in the Iron Druid Chronicles series when I last posted in the Book Talk thread, but then my hold on this book came open and I dove straight into the second part of this series. It is rare that the second book in the series is better than the first, but I consider that to be the case with Hunger of the Gods. I think maybe this is a side effect of so much of the first novel setting the stage for the central conflict and introducing all of the characters, and this novel just being wall-to-wall plot navigation. Once again if you played a Nord in Skyrim… and really really enjoyed it… then this might be a book series for you. The third book is supposed to be coming out in October… as is seemingly EVERY series I am waiting on a book from. I know without a doubt I will be picking up the series and continuing forward with it. Highly recommend it, but it is a bit of a dense read given how much specific language is associated with their world, which you may not be familiar with unless you have a Norse fetish.
Legends and Lattes – Travis Baldree
Then after finishing Hunger of the Gods, I finally got that “light read” that I felt I needed to recover from the density of that world. Legends and Lattes is maybe my favorite book that I have read this year so far. It is a story of an Orc Warrior that decides to hang up their sword and introduce the world to coffee… a gnomish invention that no one has really heard of up to that point. A delightful read about friendship turning into family and whether or not destiny and luck are really forces in the world or something we just imagined along the way. Again the next book in this series I believe is coming in October, and of the wealth of things that I will have to choose from that month… this series is going to take precedence over everything else. I would die to protect Thimble, and after reading this… you probably would too.
Broken Earth Trilogy – N.K. Jemisin
A few AggroChat’s ago we had a quick topic at the end of the show discussing some of the books and series we had been reading. I talked about the Bloodsworn series and Legends and Lattes and Thalen talked about the Broken Earth series that he had started. His description was enough to interest me, and that night after the show I dove into the series and did not surface until I had finished consuming all three volumes. This is the story of an apocalypse, lived out through a culture… that is used to having apocalypses happen on a fairly regular basis so much so that they have a term for them… The Fifth Season. There are certain aspects of the series that remind me of Dune, or more specifically the Bene Gesserit but if they were denied their basic humanity and treated as property. The novel deals with some really dark themes about humanity, and what happens when a society ostracises an entire group of people.
The Fifth Season is one of those books that I feel like maybe it was originally going to be a singleton, and about halfway through the first novel it was turned into a series. The totality of the series was phenomenal, but only really the first book stands on its own as a complete work. The second and third outings only really serve to fill in gaps from the first novel and move the wider global story arc forward. There is a trick that the first novel does of shifting between timelines, and it was maybe the single best use of that mechanic… but also a trick that only really works once. The second and third novels are considerably more straightforward in the way that the narrative unfolds but ultimately needs to be. This is an exceptionally dense read, but once you get five or six chapters your brain adapts to its patterns. This book deserves the time you devote to it, and will ultimately pay you back for that attention.
Redshirts – John Scalzi
After reading through three dense novels… I once again needed a bit of a break. I had been holding Redshirts by John Scalzi in my back pocket for such an occasion and dove in happily. By the title and branding… you know without a doubt this is going to be a bit of a parody of Star Trek. I was expecting something light-hearted along the lines of Galaxy Quest, Orville, or even The Lower Decks cartoon. I did not expect this to be one of the weirdest meta-narrative rides taking common Science Fiction tropes and taking them in some truly odd directions. Like I finished the novel section… and it was pretty great… but then I read the Codas and lord some stuff happened. I enjoyed the book immensely but also I am not entirely certain this is going to be for everyone.
The Power – Naomi Alderman
Some time ago one of my friends suggested this novel, and I added it to my Library hold list. It was described as a novel where Women suddenly develop superpowers, which leads to a bit of a gender-flipped Handmaid’s Tale. They also warned that the novel was rather graphic at times… and I was thankful for that the first time I encountered a rape scene. I have to be honest… I am not sure if I enjoyed this novel or not. That is not to say that I don’t believe that it was worth reading, but it also isn’t going to be something I probably actively suggest to anyone who is not already prepared for this. There is an Amazon Prime series that is actively releasing episodes currently, and I expect that it probably going to sanitize things a bit. There are a lot of messages that one can take from this novel, but I think the most important would be that Power Corrupts, and Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely. Twisted abuse of power is not an inherently gendered thing, just that one gender has traditionally held the locus of power in our society.
No Predictions
I wrapped up The Power last night, and usually at this point I would make some prediction about what novel I am going to start next. So far this has been wrong each time I have done so, and as a result, I am just going to skip this practice. I figure by tonight I will have chosen something, and that will be entirely dependent upon my options at the time and how fleeting they might be. Right now I am leaning towards Old Man’s War, but who knows where I will be by the end of the day. I am still wishing I had sorted out my Library Card and easy access to digital lending years ago because I have greatly enjoyed this year in reading so far.
The post Twenty-Five Books appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! It is another morning and another post about assorted Path of Exile nonsense. Last night I managed to get up to the point of fighting the Searing Exarch and the Eater of Worlds, which means I am effectively at the same point I closed out the last league with two void stones collected. I made attempts at Uber Elder but failed miserably in the last league. Effectively to get the next two void stones I will need to beat Uber Elder and then take down Maven with her memory game. I remember limping across the finish line in both Searing Exarch and Eater of Worlds last league, but I defeated both without taking any deaths this time around.
I think the key difference is that my defenses are just much stronger this league than they were last. I am sitting at 90% fire resistance which combined with the rest of my defensive layers allowed me to just stand in most of the mechanics during the Searing Exarch. There is a phase in the fight where you have to dodge a bunch of incoming fireballs. I was too busy paying attention to the fight to take a screenshot, but here is one that I found online. In my current defensive posture… I could just stand there and ignore the fireballs entirely letting them hit me and explode without taking anywhere close to fatal damage. I figure if enough of them had hit me directly at the same time it might have knocked me out, but I at least dodged around enough to make sure I was only getting hit by one or two at a time.
The best-laid plans sometimes fail miserably… and for me, it was the fact that I thought I would be able to use the “no life modifiers” passive with my Brass Dome. It turns out that the negative life modifier of losing health from strength… knocks that chest piece out of the running. This means in order to use it… I am just going to lose some regeneration and total life. Here is what my defenses look like after the swap of some gear around losing some overcap fire res, some raw regeneration, and some raw health… but gaining permanent 90% physical damage reduction and crit immunity. In truth it isn’t really something that I notice so long as I am not eating some sort of degeneration effect, and across the board I just feel like my health bar almost never moves.
While making some gear swaps, I decided to get myself a budget pseudo-six-link helm. Traditionally for this play, you want level 20 Burning Damage and Concentrated Effect, but those helms are a bit out of my price range with the worst options sitting around 2 Divine Orbs and the best option available at 50. What I did instead is go for the arguably worse but still valid Less Duration, and I was able to pick up the helm shown above for 5 Chaos Orbs. I had to adjust sockets, chrome, and link it but I did so easily with the bench craft socket recipe. This gear swap takes the damage calculation in POB for my Fire Trap from just under 500 DPS to right at 1 million DPS. This was immediately noticeable and since I only really use Fire Trap during burn phases or while circle-strafing a boss… the spammy nature of less duration doesn’t really bother me.
One of the things I do each league is set aside the first white socketed weapons that I get for the purpose of “muling” gems in my secondary weapon slots. Last league I found a six-socketed white staff which was nice, and this time around I happened upon a pair of 3 socketed one-handed maces. It doesn’t really matter what you use, but I find white sockets handy for swapping up whatever gems I happen to want to level. Yesterday I finished my first project which was leveling 6 Righteous Fire gems to 20… doing the vendor recipe to swap them for 20% quality level 1 gems… and then level them again and corrupt them. I lucked out and managed to get 2 of the level 21 20% quality gems that I was seeking, and now have started “muling” some Fire Trap gems to hopefully do the same. I could in theory just buy the damned things, but this is simple enough and I kill more than enough mobs to level the gems pretty efficiently.
I think the next big project for me is to try and find a Sceptre base with a good Crucible tree… and then attempt to craft myself something with +1 gems and all of the assorted fire stats that I care about. Before then I might be shopping for some slightly better resist rings and attempting to use those to gain some more health and regeneration. Now that I understand the basics of a build, I am finding I enjoy the little project aspect of the game as I try and improve various weaknesses of my build. Right now I am trying to figure out how to deal more damage without giving up the tanky nature that I crave so much.
The post Two Voidstones Down appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I always feel bad when I have to miss a day of my normal posting schedule like I did last Friday, but it was needed. I hinted a bit about this on my Gamepad.club account but essentially we had a routinely scheduled downtime go south on Thursday night, which led to some corruption and caused us to have to restore the machine from backup. This meant I was on a call until after 1 am and then up again at 6 am on another call… leaving me completely dead to the world and largely monosyllabic all day long. I am so not used to late nights like that and generally speaking I am heading to bed around 9:30 pm during weeknights and while I occasionally fuck around on my phone until midnight… there is a significant difference between that and being “on a call”.
Apparently, it was an international “set up your backyard” weekend because I saw several folks talking about working on theirs in my social feed. We drug out our patio furniture and set everything up this weekend. We even had lunch out on the patio just off our bedroom on Saturday and it was delightful. For whatever reason… last year we never really spent any time in the backyard. I think in part it was due to us getting a late start in setting things up and also the heat starting super early. We’ve had the two resin rockers for a half dozen years, but they are still extremely comfortable to sit out there and chill in. My wife spent a decent amount of time out reading, but I of course spent most of my free time over the weekend playing Path of Exile, but in theory, I could probably set that up on the Steam Deck and do that from the back patio as well.
As far as progress goes in Path of Exile, I have now completed all of the normal maps and am missing eight unique maps. I am going to try and get these through Kirac missions if I can, but eventually, I will get tired of waiting and just buy them from the market. I have to say this season was my absolute smoothest path through T16 maps. I think in total I took 3 deaths in ALL of my mapping… which is damned impressive given how in previous seasons I have barely limped across this line. I feel like I am finally getting a grasp on how exactly to make a build feel the way that I want it to feel, and I was shocked at how quickly I assembled a workable Righteous Fire build this time. Granted most of that knowledge does not directly translate to any other build, but it is nice to feel like I can solve my own problems finally. In theory, I also feel like I could probably build RF Juggernaut without following a guide at some point in the future given how far I have veered off the template at this point.
This is what I look like currently with my defensive layers in place… namely my armor flask and molten shell active. I finally have all of my flasks configured to use automatically when full, and with me regenerating 3 charges each time I get hit, they are rolling the majority of the time. The thing that I really want to work on is getting my life regeneration higher, so as I now start swapping out some of my gear for better options I am going to prioritize getting that a bit higher. Being wildly over-capped on resistances is in part due to the fact that I am running Purity of Elements. I am continuing to do this only because I have not wanted to solve getting immune to all of the elemental afflictions on their own. That is probably a calculation I will eventually work towards so I can run auras that increase my damage rather than quite as many defensive layers. I am running Defiance Banner right now only because I had the reservation space and my Stone Golem got to the point where it could no longer stay alive for more than a few minutes at a time.
I am about to make some shifts in my gearing that are going to add some significant benefits, like being at 90% physical reduction without buffs active. The Brass Dome has been nonsensically priced in this league given the popularity of RF and other tanky builds. I picked up this 4% max resistance version for 1 Divine and then spent about 150 Chaos Orbs in Jewelers, Chromatic, and Binding Orbs to get it to six links and the right colors. Still, this is a massive bargain as compared to the 10.5 Divine Orbs that an equivalent six-link in the right colors is going for right now. Essentially I am waiting to swap until I have finished level 95 and have another talent point to allocate. Right now if I made the swap I would lose more life regeneration than I am comfortable with until I can afford to allocate the “+15% life if no modifiers on chest” which should give me around 750 more life, and with that make up the difference in regen. At that point, I will swap over to a level 21/20% Righteous Fire instead of the Vaal Righteous Fire that I have been using.
I think once I am rocking my Brass Dome, the next major swap I am going to do is start shopping for a pseudo-six-link helm for Fire Trap. At the moment I am running a helm with “Socketed Gems Deal 30% more Burning Damage” and a shitload of armor. This is fine but I have one banked that I am working on getting chromed to the right colors that have level 20 Burning Damage and level 20 Less Duration, which should be a massive boost to my fire trap damage. The problem is I will need to replace my 30% reservation efficiency with Purity of Elements enchant from Eternal Labyrinth… and we all know how much I hate running that place. So essentially this is going to be one of my pet projects, but in truth, I would take Vitality or Determination reservation enchants as well. Those would probably be the better option given that at some point I hope to stop running Purity of Elements. Regardless it means I am going to have to start getting over my aversion to running the Labyrinth.
All of this… fiddling with numbers and stats and gear… is I think why I enjoy Path of Exile so much. I always loved gearing in MMORPGs and one of my favorite things to do back in the day was create a “hit list” of things that I wanted to farm up for my characters. Path of Exile absolutely scratches that itch for me and as I am getting items… I am often finding things that make me want to roll new characters to take advantage of that good luck. Now that I have a build that I thoroughly love in the Righteous Fire Juggernaut, I have this feeling that I am going to be starting with that for as long as it is not nerfed into the ground. Then from there, I will branch out into other builds like the Toxic Rain Pathfinder I am working on. I figured I would close out the post with this truly nonsense unique map drop from the other day. I specced my Atlas Tree into the node that duplicates map drops… and as a result, I have filled the guild bank up with unique maps to help anyone coming along behind me.
I hope you all have an excellent week, and I am sure I will be bringing even more Path of Exile nonsense.
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