I tell you friends… I did not expect the Path of Exile community to be as pure as it is sometimes. Time is immeasurable… but some time ago I played in a private league event that SirGog was organizing, and I set my global channel to the one that is used by the folks who played in that event. Thing is… I just never set it back to a different global so I have been there and active during several leagues. As a result my Path of Exile experience is a bit skewed from the standard one, and I have never met a more supportive group of strangers in my life. I’ve witnesses for ages when someone needs something, asking out to global and someone almost always fulfilling that request. So when I have found a rare hideout in one of my maps for example, I always message global to see if anyone wants it. The other day I got to within 3 maps of completing the final sub goal of Grinding Gear Goals and asked if anyone had three guardian/conqueror maps I could buy from them. Within seconds I got a few invites and the first person who got to me, would not even take payment for them. It was because of them that I finished this achievement so easily and I am immensely thankful.
As far as Unreal Undertakings… I went for one of the more annoying options but it did go along with something I was trying to do already. Essentially I ran five blueprints with four wings unveiled and in order to do that… I had to grind up a bunch of levels of various skills on assorted rogues. It went fast enough and I have effectively learned that it takes 4 Tier 4 Contracts to hit Tier 5 in a skill, so I could essentially pre-stage a bunch of stuff and have it ready to bulk grind through contracts. Once I finished leveling everything, it legitimately did not take me terribly long to chain through five sets of grand heists and finish up the achievement. However… I think I might have hit the wall on how much I am going to accomplish during this league. There are a few of them like the Infamous Mercenaries one that I will probably accidentally complete since I only have one of those left to find… but then there are others where I would have to devote more effort to completing them than I feel like it. I could pay for a bunch of uber carries to knock that one out… but also I am not sure I care enough about that.
In other news I finished up Space Oddity on Monday night, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I don’t think it is anywhere near as good as Space Opera was, but that is not for lack of trying. I think the narrative was just a bit messier than the first one, that had a fairly clear call to action and then a sequence of events that played out in a logical order. With Space Oddity, there was this whole messy middle of the book where things just felt like they flailed a bit… which only seemed to accentuate the “world salad” nature of this series where every sentence is desperately trying to be profound and funny at the same time. It did however stick the landing though and the end of the book was wonderful, so flailing aside it is still worth the read. I just struggled for awhile to push through it until I started the care about the outcome. Maybe if I had read it back to back with the first one like Thalen did, it would have been a different experience.
Last night I started Overgrowth by Mira Grant aka Seanan McGuire. I think what I have realized is that I just really love her writing style, because I would rank the Newsflesh series under the Mira Grant pseudonym and the Alchemical Journeys series among my favorite books ever. The characters in overgrowth feel familiarly adjacent to some of the characters that I came to love specifically in the Newsflesh series. I am deeply interested to see how things turn out when the invasion actually starts. I am not entirely certain how far I made it last night compared to the length of the book… which is admittedly the problem in listening to an audiobook being fed to me through my private plex server. It isn’t real great and indicating how much is left, but it feels like I am barely through the beginning of the book and sleep claimed me pretty freaking early last night around 9 pm.
In other news unrelated to anything to this point… I started playing Hell Clock which is what if Hades were actually an ARPG and not just an action game. So far I am really enjoying it and I love that it is so honest about difficulty levels and that if you are struggling on a boss… the game is not intended to be that way. I also greatly love that you can just disable the time pressure which is huge for me personally. I have a weird hang up about being timed while doing things, that dates back to third grade mathematics and these awful things called “mad minutes” that effectively ruined my brain for math from that point forward. You can just disable the 7 minute timer… and the game will STILL warn you when you are too poorly equipped to ride the ride. For example I got to a point in the first level where it warned me that even though I had disabled the timer… I should probably go back to town and buy some equipment before moving forward. I appreciate that level of bluntness greatly in a video game.
As far as other things in my life… I am just trying to seep back into a normal routine. I had one of my best friends that I consider my legitimate sibling offer to come stay with me this coming week. I cannot fully explain how much that means to me, but also… I would rather get together at a time when I was not actively feeling miserable. I am not sure I am capable of truly experiencing joy right now. I would rather get together at a time when I am not so broken inside.
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