Good Morning Folks. I wish my Canadian friends would come collect their geese. We have a gaggle of them that roam around my neighborhood and this past weekend they straight up blocked my progress trying to get back home. I slowly had to ease up on them and they eventually parted and let me through. I got out of the car and tried to wave them away… but that only caused them to hiss at me and stand their ground. If you have been reading the blog for awhile you will know that they also blocked my progress when I was trying to get back to the visitation for my wife because I forgot to bring her glasses. Last night they also briefly blocked my progress when I was going to a dinner thing. It seems like they exist to be a roadblock for whenever I need to be somewhere.
Yesterday was a lot. It would have been my wife’s 49th birthday and as a result we planned on having a dinner thing at 7pm at one of her favorite restaurants. She was basic and loved Olive Garden… what can I say. I think her ACTUAL favorite restaurant was Desi Wok an Indian/Desi place in Midtown Tulsa, but it has a super small dining room and could not have supported the big group that we had last night. I am not sure the actual headcount but it was somewhere around twenty people and I mostly did okay. In truth I was way more stressed by being around that many people at one time, but I took it in good spirits. I did not get out of there and back home until around 10ish… so I was exhausted and pretty much went straight to bed. My children aka the cats were super grumpy that I had been gone all night, but quickly assumed snuggling postures with me in bed as I did my dailies in the few mobile games that I play before falling asleep.
One of the things that I need to do is come up with a reason for me to get out of the house more, and honestly be more active. I am pretty damned sedentary and have been over the five years of remote work. One of the things that I used to do with my wife was go off on camera shoots, looking for various interesting things to photograph. I am a bit fan of urban decay and turning benign subjects into abstract ones through the photo lens. One of the things I hated about this however was the weird proprietary chargers that we had to use with our canon cameras. So I started out looking to see if anyone made a version of the chargers that used USB C. Instead I found something way more cool. These are some replacement batteries that you just hook up with USB C as though they were a power bank. I bought a pair of them to try out and maybe this will jump start my desire to get out and take some photos.
My friend from High School that keeps tabs on me has also said that they want to go out and shoot photos more so I might be able to convince them to join in the madness. There are a few places that I would not mind revisiting. For example Downtown Coffeyville Kansas was really cool the weekend we took a trip up there circa 2014ish. There is also plenty of stuff in and around Tulsa to take photos of that is interesting. I remember we made a trip out to Guthrie and that was pretty great as well. Mostly the camera was a good reason to go somewhere other than my home, and while walking around looking for things to take photos of… I completely forget that I am walking around and end up putting on a bunch of steps that I am unaware of until get home and realize how tired I am. I need distractions I think and this seems like a reasonable one.
Another distraction that I am heading towards is starting up collecting and painting Warhammer 40k miniatures again. I’ve missed this but have not really had the space for it. At some point when I find someone to donate the library of math books that my wife collected over the years, I will probably start turning her office into a hobby room. At some point I envision having 3d printers set up in there and a painting desk. In the short term though I have been watching stupid amounts of videos trying to determine how best to ease back into things. The same friend from High School has said we need to do a few painting nights rather than me making a rash decision with which of the dozens of paint lines that I want to buy into. They have a smattering of various paints so that I can get a feel for how each of them works. The hobby industry has expanded significantly since I last paid any attention to it… which was around the release of Warhammer 8th edition.
Prior to that I was a Rogue Trader through 2nd edition Warhammer 40k player back when we were in High School. I grew up daydreaming about having access to all of the things that I saw in White Dwarf magazine. We did not have access to a GW store of any sort, with I think the closest one being over five hours away in the Dallas Metroplex. What we did have access to were woefully incomplete product lines at various small comic shops, but we made the best of what we could get and had a lot of fun painting them. Quite honestly having a paint night with this friend is going to be a massive throwback to our high school days where I would go to his house and abuse the large collection of apple barrel paints to paint up my squads of beakie space marines from the 30 count plastic box.
I played some more Titan Quest 2 yesterday and rolled another melee character, this time going warfare and earth instead of warfare and storm. There is significantly more synergy there and I went hard on doing a fire based whirlwind character like I have done so many times in Last Epoch. It works well enough, but still feels a bit more clunky than I would have liked it to be. However I do think a lot of what I am reading as clunk is just the slower pace of this game as compared to Path of Exile or Last Epoch. There are two problems that I need to solve with this build, the first being mana regeneration and the second being some sort of either life leech or regeneration that will keep my health topped off when I encounter status effects that I will not be able to easily avoid since I am up in the face of everything I am fighting. My goal with any build is to make them so they are self sustaining in way that I never have to hit the health potion, or at least not without me taking some massive spike of damage.
One of the things that still annoys me is how there are cases where you do not care at all about the early tiers of abilities for a specific mastery. For example I rushed pouring my divinity points into Earth so that I could pick up the aura that would make every melee attack that I do deal fire damage, because the two spells that were in the first tier were useless for the sort of build I was going for. This is sort of the thing that I was saying when it did not feel like there was much synergy between abilities. Some abilities have ways to mutate them into other types of attacks… for example you can make Lightning Bolt be a spear attack which is cool… but it would have been cooler if you could have just made that work with ANY weapon attack. Part of the reason why Path of Exile 1 is so awesome, is that in most cases you can use any attack or spell with most weapon setups, giving you some really broad freedom in how you build your character. There is more flexibility here than in Path of Exile II for example… but it also really feels like they have a build in mind for each of the trees.
Anyways. I think I am tired of writing for this morning. I am still sort of exhausted from last night, not so much sleepy tired… but emotionally drained. I told my folks when I got home that it was awfully “peopley” in there, and my Dad laughed who is also a confirmed curmudgeon. I now need to figure out what all I missed yesterday while I was not working, and figure out how to pick up where I left off from Monday. I hope you all have a wonderful day and I will figure out something to talk about tomorrow morning.
The post Of Geese, Cameras, Wolves, and Whirlwind appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
