Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week we talk about Episode 500 and the ramifications of recording that many shows. From there Ash talks a bit about Unnamed Sound Voltex Clone and Beatmania SImulator on his further descent into rhythm gaming. From there we talk a bit about Beastieball’s early access as it steps ever closer to the full release. Dragonquest 3 HD-2D is out and we talk a bit about the changes to the game. A bunch of us got more keys to hand out for Soulframe and as a result way more folks have had a chance to play it. So we talk some more about how weird of a game it really is. Lastly, Tam shares with us that there is in fact a happy ending to the Rogue Trader CRPG… just not in the way you might think.
Folks… I have completely fallen off the wagon this year when it comes to books. I finished Apostles of Mercy in August and then just have not kept up with things. It really fell apart during my lead-up to Dawntrail in Final Fantasy XIV since my chosen vehicle for consuming books is playing an audiobook in the background while I grind away at an ARPG or similarly narratively vacant game. Playing anything with a lot of focused stories completely destroys my ability to listen to anything else of substance. Since I am back in Path of Exile for a bit, I really need to get plugged back in and consume literature again. I think my methodology of essentially chainsmoking Sanderson where I lit the next book off the dying embers of the previous, took a lot out of me. I would like to hit that goal of 50 books for the year, which means I need to get through 12 more books before 2025. I kind of doubt that is going to happen.
As far as Atlas progress goes in Path of Exile, I am up to 70 of 115 and have plenty of uncompleted maps to keep churning forward. I’ve still made almost zero progress on any further gearing goals, but am realizing that… honestly I don’t need it. This baseline version of the Righteous Fire Chieftain can absolutely complete the atlas and probably get my first two keystones without much issue. Given this is a limited event, in spirit if not necessarily in time constraints… means I am probably okay if I never get past the “starter” build. Optimization and climbing the ladder is really for a proper fresh league.
I specced out my second Atlas tree for Niko, Scarabs, Shrines, and Strongboxes and it also seems to have the side effect of producing a lot more raw map drops than my very focused Einhar, Beyond, and Ritual build did. I will probably run this for awhile alternating between mapping and delving until I finish out my atlas. Then once I have gotten through the t16 maps I will shift back over to the Einhar/Ritual build in a further attempt to farm one of the two things that can get me an easy Six-Link. I am fine operating in this Semi-SSF mode where I am mostly getting my own stuff. I am however selling a lot of things through the currency exchange to build up a stockpile of currency for when I decide I care about some of the upgrades.
Hoping this weekend to get back engaged in a book and go back to that normal mode of ARPG plus Audiobook. I am not entirely certain what path I am going to go down. I did pick up a copy of Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, and I would like to make my way through that at some point. I am just not usually one for non-fiction so we will see how well that works. I also have a Cyberpunk 2077 novelization in my back pocket for when I want something that is not too bogged down. Then again I could dive into the next book in the Stormlight Archive series, but I also know that is going to be a major commitment timewise because once I start I am going to burn through it until I complete it.
Anyways. I hope you all have a delightful weekend. I will let you know Monday if I actually accomplished any of the things I hope to going into my weekend.
The post Failing Some Goals appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. We had one of those weird early morning deliveries before I woke up, and I was too slow removing the box from the bar after unpacking it. As a result… Josie now lives here. I spent most of last night snuggling with this goober while Gracie was on my legs. Especially now that it is getting colder, as soon as I sit still for more than a few minutes I end up with a cat. I am perfectly okay with this reality because truth be told I could use snuggles. Mollie pretty much lives in my office and when I got upstairs this morning she was ready for attention and is now sitting beside me. I feel like there is a periodic cat tax that must be paid on this blog and you can never say I did not provide.
I had every intent to spend my evening continuing the process of unlocking maps and progressing my way through the atlas in Path of Exile. That did not happen, because we had an extended maintenance as they attempted to roll out their new account system. This did not go smoothly. Essentially the QA process did not notice that once they expanded the length of accounts… by adding a numerical bit on the end of them for differentiation purposes… it would then jam up the login process that was strictly limited to 27 characters. I greatly appreciate the level of transparency they gave us in this post, and apparently, they are going to make another run at it on Sunday/Monday. These are all requirements for the eventual start of the Path of Exile 2 Early Access next month.
Instead of playing Path of Exile, I fell back into Veilguard and thankfully quickly sorted out what I was doing the last time I played. I did a round of cleaning up companion missions and then played through the Arlathan Forest main story quest that I had been avoiding. This produced the cutscene that I was expecting where essentially I got prior notice that we were just about to reach the point of no return. I’ve always been thankful when a Bioware game gives me one of these not-subtle reminders that I better do anything I might want to do before going into a big world-state-changing sequence. Of course… immediately following this a whole new round of companion quests opened up which will keep me busy for another night or two.
In other news, Guild Wars 2 released this banger of a trailer coinciding with its release on the Epic Game Store. It feels weird that they are specifically launching on the EGS after having already launched on Steam, but hopefully, they are getting some of that sweet sweet Tim Sweeny payola for going through the effort. Regardless of how I feel about the EGS… this is a fucking amazing trailer. This is how they should have sold the game years ago. It really nails the high points of the game as it is today and if I was not already a player… this would have been the sort of thing that would have inspired me to give it a shot.
They also released the trailer for the next content drop called Godspawn. The big part of this that I need to start prepping for is doing dailies in order to build back up my Wizard Chore currency so that I can hopefully buy another legendary weapon box when the store refreshes on the 19th. I had fallen out of the habit of doing dailies, but I really should get back into that habit in the coming week. The currency builds up really freaking fast so I should be able to buy that box pretty quickly after its release. At this point, I have crafted four legendary weapons, and this content drop releases a new Legendary Spear which I am interested to see what that requires.
Other than that… I might be backpedaling on nuking my Twitter account. My friend Ashgar raised a valid point yesterday, and I have until the end of the month to decide one way or the other. Essentially over most of the last decade, I have used Twitter as my defacto home on the internet. As a result, my blog is littered with references to my Twitter account. This means that I need to sift through 3700 blog posts and their duplicates on AggroChat and replace all of those links… or just turn back on my account and lock it down in a state of dormancy. I am not sure which option I will go with yet. My twitter profile has enough search engine traction that it is not unlikely for someone to snag it and put annoying bullshit on it. Apparently, this happened to a bunch of artists when they left twitter and their accounts got snagged by crypto-scammers. This is not a thing I want associated with my name, even on a platform I have moved past.
The post Cats and Companions appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
There is a certain irony in the fact that it took me this long to actually go through with deleting my Twitter account, given how much effort I put into my final days of properly using the platform in trying to convert folks to Mastodon. I stopped regularly using the site in 2022 and even went so far as to deactivate my account… up until the point where folks warned me that after a certain period of days, anyone could claim my handle. This caused me to reactivate it, and let the account sit in a dormant state for the last few years. I didn’t want to be Belghast on Twitter anymore, but I most certainly did not want someone else to be either. In truth I would periodically check in to see what was going on over there… only to find that my feed was essentially the same two or three people talking all the time. Maybe I had some hope that things might change… that Elon might pawn the service off on someone else who could turn it around again. I have a lot of good memories from my time spent on the site and the people that I met through it.
There are so many people that are actively important to my life, that I never would have met were it not for that platform. I got into it during the Blog Azeroth/WoW Blogosphere era and just kept branching out and meeting new people. I was introduced to the concept of a “textrovert” the other day, and really I think that is where I live. I am outgoing and engaging… when it is all in text but deeply introverted when it comes to in-person anything. The thing I am probably most known for… Blaugust… never would have probably gotten off the ground or grown to the size it is were it not for Twitter. However, as of last week, I am permanently closing that chapter in my life. It feels like I went “away to college” in 2022 and am now finally moving out. I don’t mourn what the site is today… It has long stopped being something I care about engaging with. I mourn what the site used to be and what it used to mean to my circle of friends.
In January Gamepad.Club will ring in its second anniversary and while we never grew to be a massive server, it is a comfy space to hang out with my friends. I was an early adopter of Mastodon when it came to the concept of Twitter Exodus, first finding my way there back in 2018 and keeping a relatively active presence there on one server or another ever since. The thing is… Mastodon requires too much effort for most folks. It is not a direct plug-and-play replacement for Twitter. It has its own culture that I greatly appreciate, but not everyone does. It is a delightful place of weirdos and anarchists… and I love it with all of my heart. If you asked me where my home on the internet is, it would be Gamepad and the group of friends I have made on the Fediverse. However, it was about a year into the first major Twitter Exodus that I realized that Mastodon would probably never be that for many of my friends.
Thankfully however there is another option that is pretty much a direct replacement for Twitter, called BlueSky. While it does not feel as comfy to me personally as Gamepad does, it is still a place I enjoy visiting. I’ve had a presence on the site for a while now, and was user number 159,880 from June 26th 2023 according to some promo thing they ran when they hit 10 million users. All of the folks who seemed to bounce immediately from Mastodon/Fediverse have seemed to find their home there. Over the last few weeks, there has been another mass migration away from Twitter and it is even feeling more lively. While I don’t necessarily agree with their stance on decentralization, and prefer the activitypub federation model, it is far better than anything Twitter has ever been.
The thing that I legitimately enjoy about BlueSky is that they are evolving the format with some really cool ideas. Probably my favorite thing about the platform is feeds, which is essentially a community-supported way of sharing a filtered collection of posts based around a specific theme. At its core, it is just a regex search, but it allows you to package it in a way as to share it and let other people use it. When I started on the platform there were not a lot of game-specific feeds so I took up the mantle of supporting several of them, and then roll a new one any time I find a game that I am interested in that does not already have a feed. For example, I have one for Guild Wars 2, Path of Exile, Last Epoch, Wayfinder, and created one in support of Blaugust this year. This functionality is there to allow you to connect up with folks that share your interests, without having to know a bunch of account names.
In a similar vein, Bluesky has added a concept called a “Starter Pack” which allows you to create a list of users that you feel like people might want to follow. Think of the concept of Follow Fridays… but actually supported with systems around it. You can find your way to a friend’s starter pack and with a single button press follow all of the people on it. I am contemplating rolling a few of these… namely one for the AggroChat hosts attached to my AggroChat account, and maybe one for Blaugust members to make it easier to connect up with folks who participate in that event. Most people are using them as a way of creating an easy-to-use list of people that they think are cool or that others should follow. One of my acquaintances created one that curates folks who either currently work on Guild Wars 2 or have worked on it in the past.
Leaving Twitter at least spiritually over two years ago… was one of the best decisions that I have ever made. I could see the downhill slide that the platform was going through, and it seemed as though that only escalated after I was out the door. Essentially it is always the right time to leave Twitter. I had reached a point where I was okay with the friends I lost by closing that door, knowing that oftentimes I have a habit of finding the same people again later. While I would have loved that comfy home to have been Gamepad, for many it just was too much work to get engaged in that platform. I am booned by the fact that I keep seeing more familiar faces showing up on BlueSky, which in itself makes the platform that much more enjoyable to use. There were many folks I knew that had a public Twitter account and a private twitter account, and I guess in many ways that is how I use the two networks. Mastodon is where I am most myself, and BlueSky is where I put on a more carefully crafted guise.
I hold out hopes that at one day the AT Protocol which BlueSky runs upon and the ActivityPub protocol that Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse use will be fully integrated. In the meantime however, there is Bridgy which serves as a hacky way of federating an account between the two platforms. For example, if you follow the official Bridgy BlueSky account and my federated Gamepad Account on BlueSky, you will be able to have bi-directional interaction with my posts on the Fediverse. Following the Bridgy account will also then federate out your BlueSky account so that folks can follow you from Mastodon. For example, my BlueSky account shows up as @belghast.com@bsky.brid.gy on the Fediverse. I wish there was a way to connect my ACTUAL Bluesky account to my ACTUAL Mastodon account.. but baby steps. For the time being I am using both, but for slightly different purposes.
Anyway… if you are still hanging on to Twitter I encourage you to cut ties and move on with your life. BlueSky is legitimately a direct replacement and you are probably going to be able to find most of the folks that you used to follow over on Twitter. We are starting to see Brands migrating there as well, which is probably the final sight that it has been crowned the winner. I will keep using the Fediverse and namely Gamepad because I enjoy it the most, but I am more than happy to also hang my hat on BlueSky.
The post This Account Doesn’t Exist appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
