The crap we are going through right now with Twitter has made me re-evaluate a lot of the things that I use in my life. One of these is Linktr.ee a site that I have used for several years as a catch-all for all of the various social and project links associated with me. I’ve owned the domain Belgha.st and Belghast.com and for eons I simply had an apache redirect pointing at my Link Tree page. It gave me a clean and simple way to link someone to all of my things at once in a very mobile-friendly format. However, if tomorrow it vanished… I would honestly have trouble cobbling together all of the links again because that has been the place where I have largely stored them.
This idea of hosting my own links page had been living rent-free in my head for a while now, but never really coalesced into action until I saw this video from EposVox. While he provides a number of solutions that would be fine including just firing up a NeoCities website to host all of your content. It was not however the solution I was looking for. One of the things that I always enjoyed about Link Tree was just how fast I could add links to it, and how everything had a nice clean look and feel. This sent me down a rabbit hole of searching for solutions and I think I landed upon something. I even went so far as to share the solution I found with EposVox who has since created a Shorts video about it as well.
The tool that I landed upon is called LittleLink Custom and it is essentially a self-hosted version of Link Tree. It took all of a few minutes to set up the website, and by default exists in a multi-user mode so you could allow other friends to sign up for their own faux link tree pages that you were hosting. I did not necessarily need that functionality which is cool because it allows you to configure it in a way to automagically redirect people to a single profile. I already had space carved out for Belgha.st and Belghast.com, so I removed my .htaccess file that was bouncing people to Link Tree and started installing the software.
The most basic version of the site requires Php 8.0 or higher and SqlLite which is fine for a smaller install. It also supports MySQL if you want a more robust multi-user environment. I think the longest part of the setup was actually uploading the files to my host. There are a LOT of files, so I would highly suggest uploading the archive and then going through your host’s backend to extract those files otherwise you will be FTPing like 8000 tiny files forever. After minimal fiddling, I was in and configuring my link page. All that was left was for me to pick a theme I liked, install it, and then start adding all of my links.
One of the things I specifically dig about Littlelink custom is that it has support for a wide variety of options already out of the box, but you can easily configure custom links as well. I wish there was a bit more support for adding custom quick icons but I have faith that over time this will be adding more features. For what I really need, which is the ability to add headings, and sets of links… this will do swimmingly. Now the real hard part is going to begin, which is finding every place I had linked to my Link Tree and replacing it with the new Belgha.st link.
Since the software technically supports many different “users” I went ahead and created one for AggroChat and have migrated the Link Tree I had for the podcast over to it as well. Mostly this is just a place to keep a running list of all of the podcast mirrors as well as the most basic social information. I’ve even created a “Bel Gaming” one where I am going to experiment with using it as a dumping ground for the various video game-related profiles and accounts to make it easier to link up with me. This is very much a work in progress as many of the platforms don’t really have a profile page you can link to. You can add blocks of text to your link page, which is handy but I am going to have to fiddle with how that actually looks in practice.
The slow death of Twitter has really made me evaluate the tools that I use on a daily basis. I think we are heading towards me potentially just paying for a server somewhere out in the cloud and migrating all of my resources to that instead of paying for piecemeal hosting. It would be a big change, but it is one that I think is on the horizon. I am just not sure how much I want to trust “free” services anymore. This could of course be a wild overreaction, but it would be nice to feel like I have a bit more control over the fate of the things I enjoy. Even if it isn’t a scenario where a rich manchild destroys it… it could be something as simple as Google deciding the product is no longer viable. We started out on the internet with needing to host everything for ourselves, and I wonder if I will be moving back to that again.
The post Goodbye Link Tree appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I talked about setting forth on a dumb adventure that was trying to brute force my way to farming a Tabula Rasa. For those unfamiliar with Path of Exile, the Tabula is essentially the perfect starter item that you can equip at level one and has six linked white gem sockets, allowing you to basically get your spell links faster than usual. The catch however is that the item has no stats on it other than the six gem links. There are a number of ways to farm one of these up but I specifically chose Blood Aqueducts zone because Waterways is not in the Atlas this league and Waterways the other map that can drop it is a tier 13 and I’ve yet to see one. Blood Aqueducts is also largely a straight line, which means I can zip through there relatively quickly making the total clear time of each reset extremely fast.
I set down this path initially because I wanted a Tabula to start the Toxic Rain Trickster that I am working on. However, what set me down that path was picking up a Replica Quill Rain from a Grand Heist. However, while farming the Blood Aqueducts I managed to pick up a legitimate Quill Rain that is probably better for the build overall due to the higher attack speed. Both are currently five-links, so will take some effort to push them to six-links. I have to say I got a shocking amount of loot from farming this one map over and over. In total, I found four six-link chests, one of which will do nicely for the Toxic Rain build once I get it high enough for that to matter and one that would work well for the character that Ace is leveling and that Thalen is leveling. I’ve also filled the Guild Bank with minor uniques that I had already seen a drop, probably the most significant that I got was a Call of the Brotherhood which is not expensive but is used by a number of builds.
So around 7:20 yesterday evening I got my last Humility card to drop as pictured in the first screenshot. In total it took me somewhere around four hours to farm the remaining Humility cards, but I went into this adventure having already found three of them in my travels. Had I started with none, it probably would have taken me somewhere in the neighborhood of six hours total. So I guess the question is which is worth more to you… the six hours of farming or the ten chaos that the item regularly seems to cost. I mostly did the farming method so that I could prove to myself that it was something that could be done relatively easily. Additionally, it is also something that you can do without having a maxed-out character that is heavily geared. You essentially have to get a character to act nine and then can farm this up freely. I personally used the time to work on leveling a set of 3 Fire Trap and 3 Righteous Fire gems for attempting to corrupt later for a level 21 gem of each.
As far as Toxic Rain Trickster goes… it is weird and is going to take some getting used to. Essentially the bulk of my damage comes from the spectral archer that hangs out attached to my head raining down bad stuff on the baddies. So I have to stop and channel for a moment to begin that process and then can run around like crazy avoiding taking damage. I’ve picked up a second copy of Toxic Rain that I have kitted out with Balista Totems so that I can drop those as well for additional unattended damage. Mostly I went down this path because I had already done an Explosive Arrow build and wanted to try one of the other “archer” staples. This also allows me to knock out a few achievements because I have never played a Shadow of any kind before. As of this morning, I am level 15 and have completed Act 1 entirely, and am moving on to Act 2. This is very much going to be a side project when I don’t want to do serious content on the RF Juggernaut.
The post Tabula Rasa Farmed appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Welcome to the week that heralds a bit of a break for me. As it stands I have today and tomorrow and then I am off until the third. I am hoping you all can have a solid break this holiday season as well. I am still irrationally engaged with Path of Exile as one does… which honestly has not left much time for anything else in my life. We did manage to take care of some big purchases which move me closer to actually being prepared for the holiday, but at some point, I am going to have to stop playing… and finish things up. Having a non-zero amount of gifts purchased is doing better than our usual track record, so I am going to count that as a win for the moment. In the game, my big achievement is that I now have my resists to a point where I could drop the Purity of Elements aura and still maintain caps. I am still so far from being chaos capped but sitting at 25% is better than a negative resist!
Progress on the Atlas has slowed a bit. When I last checked in I was sitting at 43 of 115 and now am at 68 of 115. Basically, I am having trouble getting maps to drop to fill the slots that I am missing in the yellows and reds are always going to be a massive pain in the ass to get. At the moment I am paused from doing any hardcore mapping because I really want to ding level 90 since I am so close again. The last time I was this close I had the bright idea of running a T14 map… that I had corrupted to get credit for it… and got some bad resists on it. I watched my level go from roughly 85% of a level down to less than 20% of a level as I died my way across the zone failing to get credit for the final boss who was effectively one-shotting me. I still have no clue what exactly was causing me to take that much damage but alas the complete and total lack of logs often makes that a problem.
As far as my Atlas Passive tree I don’t so much have a strategy other than “I would like to see more of these things” with those things being breaches, essences, lockboxes, heist chests, and going extremely heavy into getting Ritual Altars. I’ve had a lot of good luck with Ritual this league in getting cool stuff and I know the last league I managed to pull a few divines in this manner so I figured I would focus on improving those. I’ve also put some points into making god-touched mobs show up a bit more frequently and have a chance for killing large packs to spawn beyond mobs. I am sure there are much better options on the whole but I am happy enough with what I have seen so far. I did have some points invested in Kirac missions but in truth… now that I am in red maps those become way less viable given I have to have a corrupted map to get credit.
One of the nice things that I pulled from a Ritual Altar was one of the tokens required to run Labyrinth for the fourth time and finish out my Juggernaut passive tree. It seems like there is a bug happening where the trials are not spawning in higher-tier maps unless you specifically get a Kirac mission that forces one to spawn. Luckily I encountered one of these Kirac maps as well, so since I one-shot my fourth “Lab” I chucked the spare token into the guild bank to help pay it forward. I am hoping this bug gets fixed posthaste because it will be really annoying for everyone coming up behind me trying to finish out their passive tree. I shifted things up a bit toward better survival since it didn’t feel like I needed the slight DPS boost of Unyielding quite so much. I’ve also been encountering a lot of maps where mobs steal endurance charges… which limits the effectiveness of that trait.
Last night I set forth on a nonsense mission as I often do. I’ve been wanting to roll an alt this season, specifically a Poison Toxic Trickster. I’ve been sitting on a 5-link Quillrain and a 5-link Replica Quillrain and I thought, the one thing that would go really well with this plan… is a Tabula Rasa. I had 3 of the 9 cards needed to get one, and I thought I would try my hand at farming one. Basically, you can run Blood Aqueducts, which is a pretty chill zone, and occasionally one of the cards will drop. After a few hours of chill farming while watching stuff on television last night I am up to 5 of 9 cards, so I feel committed to the nonsense at this point. It is also causing me to flood the guild bank with spare uniques because I am getting a truly shocking number of them… occasionally more than one per clear. They are all fairly low-tier uniques but I might start selling the extra extras… once I have a copy in my bank and a copy in the guild bank… then I guess I might as well try and flip it for chaos.
I’ve been spending quite a bit of time in Heist, clearing out my lower-tier maps as well just to keep those from stacking up quite so high this season. I’ve unlocked all of the companions and I think I have all of them at least to rank 2 in their abilities. This mission honestly started because I began getting a few of the “green” missions that you can’t remove from your inventory that I did not have the skill to run yet. This started me down a path of running lower-level missions in order to buff up those stats so I could clear the missions out of my inventory. They do serve as an excellent source of small currency and the occasional chaos. I really like heist and it is probably my single favorite game mode. I need to spend a night working on Delve however because I am once again capped on the magic dust required to make that mode work.
I am having so much more fun than I had in the last league, and a large part of that is how good the Pohx Righteous Fire build is. I still need to invest some more currency into it, but I am at the point where any further gains are going to be extremely expensive. There are a few things that I could potentially craft but I am going to need to get deeper into the Atlas tree before I start getting the currency I need for those crafts. The other thing I have shifted up recently is I have begun to see the wisdom in Pohx running Shield Charge over Leap Slam. Leap Slam scales off attack speed, and I just do not have any real sources of that in my build… which means Shield Charge can move so much faster than I can with Leap Slam especially when mapping. Especially now that I am farming Blood Aqueducts for cards I am able to move so much faster through the packs of mobs than I could with Leap Slam.
Path of Exile continues to be a complete nonsense game, but I kinda love it. It however is the sort of game that I would never really recruit someone else to play. You have to have the strong desire to play it on your own first in order to make your way through the absolutely obtuse processes required to actually figure things out. I get that GGG does this on purpose, but I do with it was a little more friendly to new players.
The post In Search of Humility appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! The gang is all back at the same time… just in time to take a break effectively until after the new year. Because of how the holidays fall this year, we will not be recording shows for the next few weeks and returning after that with our usually two-part Games of the Year show.
This week we talk about more Twitter Madness and the time when a journalist misread the now-banned JoinMastodon account and created a fictitious person named John Mastodon that runs Mastodon. From there we talk about Tam’s epic journey in trying to find some way to comfortably use a push-to-talk key while playing games on a controller. We talk a bit about a few 2D games on the Steam Deck specifically Ghost Song and Salt and Sanctuary. After that, we talk about our progress in the Path of Exile Forbidden Sanctum league and just how much madness is associated with learning that game in general. Finally, we talk about playing Justin Roiland’s High On Life, a game about talky gunfriends.
