Good Morning Folks! One of the things that I have talked about before is how much of a happy place it is for me to be playing a mechanically interesting game… that is devoid of narrative, so that I can sit there and listen to an audiobook while I play. I seem to forget how much I enjoy this from time to time. I was doing really good this week until March… when I completely fell apart when it came to books. Then I picked back up a bit after the passing of my wife, because I needed anything to take my mind off what I was going through, but again paused in August for a bit. Then recently Brigands and Breadknives was released by Travis Baldree and I felt bad for not having read it yet, so I chained through a bunch of books that I had gathered up waiting for me to give them attention. I am back in the swing of things and over the course of the last week and a half or so I have gone through three books and am chipping away at a fourth, with a fifth absolutely prepped and waiting. I figured this morning I would talk a bit about each of them.
First up we have Brigands & Breadknives which is the third book in a series of books centered around the universe first created in Legend & Lattes. Though technically this book is much more of a direct sequel to Bookshops & Bonedust, which itself serves as a bit of a prequel to Legends & Lattes. It centers around the character of Fern, a bookseller from a seaside town that has recently accepted an offer from Viv the central character of the first book to move operations to the city of Thune and next door to her Coffee shop. However Fern suffers a midlife crisis and a totally different sort of adventure ensues. I love this series of books and I love its characters… and this book introduces yet more characters that I have fallen in love with like Zyll the Goblin fugitive and Asteryx the Elven bounty hunter. This book is phenomenal… right up until the end… when it sort of goes off the rails. The ending Fern receives is not the ending I expected… nor even an ending I even feel comfortable with. Ace is re-reading the book to see if they feel any different about the ending knowing where things are going… but I somehow doubt that will be the case. There are essentially multiple paths laid out in front of Fern, and she chooses the most boring option. What I want now however is a book centered on Zyll, because she absolutely deserves a prequel treatment like Bookshops & Bonedust was for Fern.
In 2023, on a complete lark, I read The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna, and fell in love with it. I have no recollection of HOW this book crossed my eyeballs, but I am very glad it did. From that point forward I had been waiting for a sequel and thought I had one when A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping was released earlier this year. It is not a sequel, nor is it even set in the same broader world… but thematically it very much fits the same sort of pattern that the first book did. This is the point where I have realized that I actually quite enjoy a romance novel so long as the romance elements are not the central plot point, and the book in general has some sort of fantasy or science fiction setting. They are really nice cozy reads, and I highly enjoyed this one. I do wish that Sangu were building some sort of broader universe with all of these individual vignettes, but I am not going to hold that against them. The main reason why I can tell they are absolutely NOT connected is that the hierarchy of magical societies in the books are wildly different. It was well worth the read though, especially if you enjoyed the Harry Potter series before we realized how much of a harmful person the author is.
Another series I have deeply come to love is the Sworn Soldier series by T. Kingfisher. I’ve not read anything else from them, and admittedly was originally drawn to this series by the striking cover art. Then I found out Ace was reading them and also loved them, so that sealed them deal when it came to me giving them a read as well. Essentially this whole series is in the vein of gaslight horror, similar to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The first book in the series, What Moves the Dead, is somewhat of a re-imagining of Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher. From there each of the book dives into almost cosmic horror elements in different settings, and What Stalks the Deep specifically centers around an inherited coal mine in West Virginia and a series of disappearances. I love the character of the Gallacian Sworn Soldier Alex Easton and their companion Angus and the various misadventures that they get involved in within the course of the books. Each of the books is pretty short and more novella than novel, so similar to the Murderbot Diaries you can rip through them in pretty short measure. I HIGHLY suggest this series if you like gaslight era horror or cosmic horror themes.
Another book that I had been holding onto, but had not started was The Shattering Peace by John Scalzi. Firstly I love Scalzi and pretty much everything I have read from him. In 2023 I ripped through the entire Old Man’s War series, so it has taken me a little bit to reactivate the pathways in my brain that remember what the final events of The End of All Things were. This book specifically is told from the perspective of Gretchen Trujillo, best friend to Zoe Boutin Perry, and a former member of the ill fated Roanoke Colony. Twenty years have passed since the events of the Roanoke colony and now Gretchin is in the diplomatic corp, and called forth to assist in another series of pivotal events centered around a colony that has up and disappeared. So far it has been a fun ride, but like I said I am having to active memberberries for where things left off in the previous books since a few years have passed since I read them. I am enjoying it quite a bit and also finding it hard to stop at a reasonable hour. Last night I had multiple cats reminding me that it was well past my bedtime and I should really come to bed.
So that is where I am currently with my reading. I am hoping I can stay on the wagon a bit longer because I have several books that I want to consume. Once I wrap up Shattering Peace, I am likely rolling into Fury of the Gods by John Gwynne which is the third book in another series I really have enjoyed, that I got turned onto by my friend Cuppy. What have you been reading? Is there anything that you think I would enjoy based on the assortment of books that I talked about here? Drop me a line below.
The post Climbing Back on the Wagon appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends. I am still dragging ass due to this impossible crud that I cannot seem to kick to the curb, however in roughly an hour I have an appointment with my doctor who will hopefully help with that. I’ve fallen back on the Audiobooks and Chill bandwagon but I will talk about the books portion of that in another post this week. Suffice to say I am mostly spending my time playing Path of Exile. I am still alternating between mapping on my level 96 Ice Trap Elementalist and then diving down into the mines for some relatively safe leveling as I push towards level 100. One of the things that I did not expect enjoying so much is that I have finally properly learned Incursion/Alva and have found great joy in building temples for profit. Essentially if you can craft a temple with a Locus of Corruption on it, you can sell it for a little over a divine, which is meager profit but more than enough to keep paying for the scarabs that I am running and still banking quite a bit for whatever my next project ends up being.
At level 99, I have properly entered the realm of never running without an Omen of Amelioration in my bags. These are going for roughly 120 Chaos at the moment, and is essentially paying for lost time. I took a really dumb death yesterday when I dove into the shadows… did not realize I was out of flares… and then was mercilessly killed by the hubris of using Forbidden Taste as my automated life flask. Thanks to the handy omen though, I did not lose much progress in the grand scheme of things, but any lost progress at level 99 is noticeable. Basically I am going to be pushing hard to hit level 100 so that I can knock another meta achievement off Gear Grinding Goals, and in truth I have hit level 100 in the last several leagues so it feels like a requirement for me to consider myself “finished”. I could buy some 5 way carries or something like that, but it always feels like the wrong sort of cheating. I will happily pay for a Maven carry each league because I fucking hate the memory game and have legitimately beat her myself more than once. Paying for carries for things I can easily accomplish on my own with enough applied time is just a bridge too far.
I continue to chip away at achievements however and knocked out Sinew Swarms yesterday, which required me to do 10 Hive Fortresses or Hive Colonies. This one took so long because they are that much rarer than the other in map breach events. Wierdly since I started running the Ritual and Incursion mapping setup, I have yet to encounter a King in the Mists invitation altar. I did buy an invitation so I have at least beaten him this league, same for Oshabi which I also bought the invitation for off the market. What I really need is a Trialmaster or an Olroth so I can get my last of the bloodline ascendency fights under my belt. I need to also see if I have any of the Vox bros Heist maps so I can knock them off the list of pinnacle encounters. Simialrly I am shocked that I have yet to encounter one of the Kingsmarch fights, which would knock another pinnacle off my list. I am happy to keep my head down and grind for the time being because it pairs so lovely with an audiobook.
Over in Destiny Rising there has been one of the silliest events yet available, called Iron Medley. Essentially it is Iron Banner or as this game calls it Iron Bar, but everyone has to play the exact same character… which produces some really weird end of match shots like this. Essentaily everyone is stripped down to a baseline version of the character with the exact same choices of weapons. In truth… I think this is a better match mode than the default Iron Bar, and should maybe be made into a permanent mode. It feels like running ARAM in League, where your sand off any of the possible advantages and just yolo your way through the matches. I really like when PVP modes in games normalize the advantage so it does not feel like you are getting stomped into the ground because you did not devote time and effort to a game mode that you are not maining.
There is a new character banner starting in roughly two days, and the trailer has been released. Essentially Jaren is just McCree from Overwatch, or whatever the hell they are calling that character these days. All that is missing is Matt Mercer doing the voices. He also gives me BraveStarr vibes, which is not necessarily a bad thing… but also makes me want him to have a talking cybernetic horse companion. My only real problem with him is that I am just not sure if Hand Canon and Shotgun is going to be a fun weapon combo to use. It is really doing to depend on how good the Hand Canon exotic that is going to inevitably come with the character. If the rumors are true… and he is getting Last Word which seems to have been shown during the trailer… he might be super fun. If nothing else this might also revive Attal from being a dumpster tier character for me.
In other news I finally pulled another mythic off the free pulls on the normal banner, and it ended up being my third copy of Tan-2. At some point I should probably build this character out, but I still really prefer Umeko to him. Then again if I am going to play a precision character I am almost always going to pick Helhest for the utility that she provides. I would have greatly preferred an additional copy of Ning Fei because he is up there in the list of characters that I am going to pump currency into to build out. I maxed out Helhests weapon damage, so now it is really just getting a final copy of her bow in order to push her to the same levels as Maru. I still want to build out Gwynn a bit because she is pretty useful when it comes to running limited content even though she is squishy as fuck. Ace and I are getting together to do Grandmasters tonight so we will see what that holds. Hopefully it is a better week than last week.
I am not playing anywhere near as much Destiny Rising as I was, but I am still enjoying myself enough to pop in and do some of the daily and weekly activities. Unfortunately our guild has grown too big for our britches and are no longer able to maintain the upkeep points to keep the “bitcoin miner” active. I wish I could coax a few more people into playing , because just with minimal play we could probably keep things humming again with maybe five more players. We had another really active player that came from the random clan that I was in first, but I think they have also fallen by the wayside. We have managed to find three strongholds for the last two weeks which has been really nice though.
Anyways. Time to get ready for the doctor visit and it is trash day so I have to deal with gathering that. I hope you all are having a wonderful week back, and hope that the doctor can give me something to make me feel less like ass all the time. I need a few days of feeling great so that I can whip the house back into shape, because I have not felt like doing much of anything lately.
The post Temu McCree appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving break if you celebrated it. I had a decent enough day but it pretty much wore me out completely. I am still fighting some illness and I have a doctors visit scheduled for in the morning where I am hoping going to get some help. I feel like I have something akin to “walking” pneumonia because I can function well enough… but just have zero stamina and devolve into coughing fits on the regular. We did not record AggroChat yesterday in part due to we were down a bunch of folks, but on my side… because I did not really feel like pushing it. Suffice to say that Friday when I set up my brand new 3D Printer… it took multiple passes before I had the stamina to get everything done. In truth I had done 90% of the things in a single pass, and had I ONLY dealt with the printer I would have probably been fine. However before hand I set up my last of my shelving units, and routine the power cord for the printer over the top of the door leading into the house from the garage. So by the time I actually got around to unpacking the unit I was already running low on juice.
I partook of one of the recent deals through Bambu Labs where I got their P1S printer, the AMS 1.0, and a couple of partial spools of filament for roughly $500. I realize that the P1S has recently been replaced by the P2S, and the AMS has also recently been replaced by a newer AMS 2.0 model. However I figured this was a good set up to get me started in my adventures in FDM printing. Truth be told I had been researching different printers for the better part of the last year, and this setup appeared to be the least painful and was as close as you could get to a truly out of the box turnkey experience. Truth be told other than a few hiccups where connectors popped off during assembly, and a single jam feeding filament with the AMS, it has been a pretty flawless experience. I would absolutely recommend this setup for anyone wanting to dabble in such nonsense.
As is fortold by the printer gods… the first print is required to be a Benchy. It also ships with the printer on the SD Card and was readily available. By around 2pm on Friday afternoon I had printed it out and for the most part everything seemed to be working just fine. This was with the default settings and long before I had dabbled in installing Bambu Studio or tweaking any of the parameters. My second print was a scraper, which honestly I am not sure if I am actually going to use because I am not too keen on metal blades on my textured printing plate. Instead after a bit of research I picked up some plastic razor blades which arrived yesterday and are seemingly going to work beautifully without leaving any scratches. I am well and truly knee deep in the eternal scope creep of hobbies, and I have a cooking torch on its way arriving today so I can burn away stringing when it happens.
The third print was a model designed by Miscast that is part of his permadeath vlog series. The models he has been releasing as part of this series are specifically designed to be a bit chunky so that you can print them without much issue on an FDM printer. For most miniature scale printing you really need resin printers, which is a thing that I am planning on getting into at some point but figured FDM was the better starting place. I attempted to use some of the auto settings in Bambu Studios, and was the first time That I actually laid parts out myself on the plate… and lets just say… it is also the model that made me realize I was going to need to start tweaking some of the settings. This is absolutely usable, especially when you consider that it is largely designed to be a base for kit-bashing… which is going to require a lot of post processing anyways.
So what did I do? Jump into my most ambitious print yet of course. This represents a plate of legally distinct Not-Space-Marine Not-Space-Wolf chapter base toppers. I cranked up the quality as best I could and let these stew for 14 hours, as effectively the last thing that I printed on Saturday. While they need some cleanup, and removing some support material that I had to add to deal with some of the floating aspects of a few of the designs, I think they are absolutely serviceable for the purpose of miniature bases. I printed off 25 of these in total, and for the most part I am pretty happy with them. Again I will absolutely spend a bit of time fiddling with them and smoothing out a few spots where there are textures that I did not want but they should paint up just fine when an official GW Space Marine is standing on top of them.
The first print of the day on Sunday was a set of filament clips, because I had ordered some specific colors of filament for the next big project. After doing a bunch of research I landed on this design which seems to work beautifully. Essentially I needed to eject the lime green and neon orange filament that the unit came with, so that I could load up new spool of SunLu Matte Green, and SunLu Matte Red high speed PLA. I put the other green and orange in baggies and put dessicant sachets in there as well, which is a thing that I am going to need to start saving from pill bottles. In theory you need to keep your Filament as dry as possible, and while we do not really struggle with high levels of humidity that often, apparently once it goes bad it stays bad and there is not much you can do to save it. There is a whole system that you can print out to put in the AMS 1.0 to solve this problem, which I will spend some time doing at some point.
The next project is something that I had seen somewhere along the way either on Instagram or Facebook or something of the sort. Essentially someone had the idea of making a “Lego” Christmas Wreath, and within a few minutes of searching I found several sources. I largely wanted the most simplistic design that only used the “leaves” and the 1 unit caps as berries. First off I have to say how much I love the fact that this printer has a camera. Sure I wish it transmitted at a reasonable framerate… but just having some ability to check in on your print is phenomenal, especially since I am usually upstairs in my office and the unit is humming away on a workbench out in the garage. My sibling Ace has been living vicariously through me and I have been flooding their messages with lots of progress shots as we went along.
The leaves came out beautifully and each one of them took about an hour and a half to print at the ttweaked settings that I had finally landed upon. I am not sure how much is the settings that I tweaked and how much is the fact that I swapped filament, but so far I really like the Sunlu stuff. I got it purposefully since I had heard lots of good things from folks about it specifically, and so far I agree with their assessment. It is cheap enough at $14 per 1kg spool, and in printing off six of these I barely made a dent in the spool as a whole. It took around and hour and a half for each leaf to print, and then some additional time to let the plate cool down to around 35c so I could remove it without fear of anything warping. Over the course of the day I printed all six leaves required to make the wreath and then set up a plate full of the 1x caps in Red filament to churn away while I slept.
When I got up and around this morning, I dry fit everything together and this is the result. I am not 100% sure if I like the arrangement of the caps yet, but I am pretty happy with the end product. There was some stringing down inside the red caps but it isn’t noticeable at all since they are going to get seated down on top of the leaves. I’ve heard that Plastruct works beatifully as a solvent glue to weld together PLA and I am contemplating a trip down to a local hobby shop to see if they have any over lunch. I would probably try it first with the Miscast limo to glue it up and make sure it did not destroy everything in the process, before touching this effectively final and perfect print. I could always use CA/Super glue, but I have always preferred “welding” plastic together when an option, and would love to find a viable solution for that with the ubiquitous nature of PLA.
Today however I need to sort out a better system for poop management. Essentially each time the unit clears the extruder head or switches filament color… it poops out a little bit of material down a chute in the machine that leads to it just sort of spilling out randomly onto my workbench. There are dozens of different systems that people have devised, but I am going with effectively a pretty straight forward bin that just sits up against the back of the machine to catch things as they drop out. I am holding onto this for the moment because if Plastruct works… I might try and create some sort of equivalent of “sprue glue” with it for smoothing out rough surfaces similar to how you can use it for gap filling styrene models. These remnants will also be great for testing with just to see how it works. However I did have the funny idea that if you had enough of these, they would probably make a great replacement for packing peanuts.
That was my weekend and my first steps into the 3D Printing world. Expect to see more of this nonsense in the coming weeks, and at some point I fully expect to get into resin printing as well.
The post Adventures in Plastic Poop appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
