Good Morning Folks! Welcome to the second week in a row of this new series of Mixtapes. For those who have not followed this series, essentially the idea is that each Monday morning, I share a new mix of songs with you. Growing up, mixtapes were very important to my existence. I was blessed with a stereo that had a double cassette deck, and I quickly realized that I could remix my favorite albums into combinations that made sense for me personally. Later on, I would share these mixes with friends, and occasionally love interests… that rarely seemed to appreciate the gravity of what I was giving them. For me, each mix is like a little chunk of my soul that I am carving off to share with you, and everything about them was labored over, from the choice of songs to the order in which they appear. During the pandemic lockdown era I started sharing these takes with you, my readers, and more recently, while dealing with my “cancer boy” era, I have started this back up, and while I am sure I will miss the occasional Monda,y I am hoping to keep this feature of my blog rolling for a while. As of this morning, there are twenty-five different mixtapes available, and you can find all of them on the archives page.
25 – Some Jokes Kill
Oftentimes, one of my mixes starts with a specific song that serves as the anchor. I then built the mix around that song, with it buried somewhere in the middle. This week’s spark of inspiration is Heathens by Twenty One Pilots, and was heard on Edge 104.5 while running some errands. I’ve always liked this song because it was so interesting and largely denied trying to place it in any clean category musically. This made it all the more challenging to build a mix of songs that evokes the same sort of feelings, because it doesn’t neatly fit into a box. This song was used in the soundtrack for Suicide Squad, and while piecing this together, a subtheme of the Joker started creeping in around the edges. While I don’t exactly love the Jared Leto Joker, when I think of the Suicide Squad movie, I think of Joker as a character in general. When I think of The Joker, however, I think of The Killing Joke, which is what ultimately inspired the album cover for this one. At face value, this is a weird mix of tracks, but it flows together far better than it might seem. I’m pretty happy with the end result and proud of this one.
Two weeks in a row, friends… let’s see if I can keep it going for a third week. I’m never terribly great at keeping a feature going for the long haul. At some point, I tend to run out of inspiration, and I know that I will either be dealing with Chemo/Radiation or a Surgery soon… which will probably knock the wind out of my sails a bit. I have the first several songs for the next mix ready to go, because it was inspired by one of my friends. This one took a bit of doing to make it work, so I am hoping since I already have three songs that fit together neatly that the next mix will come together easier. If you are enjoying the return of Mixtape Mondays drop me a line below. If you have listened through all of my Mixtapes, pat yourself on the back for being a true pal… but still drop me a line because I am curious if anyone has done this thing. As always, you can find all of the mixtapes… often times ahead of my Monday morning post over on the archive. I tend to stage things ahead of time so I can share them with friends to help beta test them a bit.
Mixtape Mondays Archive
The post Mixtape Mondays: Some Jokes Kill appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are down a few people this week as we start up our show. Bel is in the process of trying to reboot “Bel Folks Stuff” and realized that he recorded an episode with Tam that never got released. We talk about this weird pre-pandemic time capsule. We discuss building a table for Infinity and how it is a game that wants something more akin to Mordheim. From there, Ash and Kodra discuss the Rabbit and Steel expansion and unlocking new content. We go down a bit of a continuation of a topic from a month ago as we discuss the games that we did not end up playing, and more specifically, Tam exploring what Ys has to offer. Ashes of Creation was one of the more successful Kickstarter MMORPGs, but that is no more, because the entire project imploded almost overnight. We talk a bit about that situation and also what goes wrong when trying to build a niche MMORPG for a limited audience. Finally, Tam shares some of his recent experiences learning to play Star Trek Online and trying to be successful at doing so.
Hey Folks! I am in the process of trying to reboot one of my favorite side projects, “Bel Folks Stuff”, and get into the swing of recording new episodes. However, it was in this process that I realized that I recorded a whole episode with Tam and never released it. What is wild about this episode is that it is a timecapsule from before the world changed. I think many of us were irreparably damaged by the isolation and changes to our norms that the pandemic and lockdowns brought forward. However, for some… the isolation of the pandemic completely changed their lives. This version of Tam that I interviewed was before he got into a lockdown relationship, which turned into a marriage, which ultimately led to him becoming a father.
The negative of this episode, however, is now that I listen to it… I remember why I never released it. I was trying to figure out how to fix the audio. I was dealing with some really frustrating coil whine happening in my microphone, and it just so happened to plague this episode. I think this might have been the point I realized it was a thing, and it took me months to figure out how to keep it from happening. So this episode was edited and ready to go… but just never got released, and I feel like it is unfair to leave this to the void. Some interesting conversations happen in the middle of this episode, and it is fitting that the broader world finally gets to listen to them.
Good Morning Folks. While I am not the biggest fan of the Gauntlet mechanics mixed in with Phrecia, I am still playing Path of Exile because I don’t have the mental bandwidth to pick up something else at the moment. My Servant of Arakaali Poison SRS build seems to keep trucking along swimmingly, and thus far feels like maybe one of the sturdiest builds I have played for minions save for maybe my Guardian from several leagues ago. That is one of the things that I love the most about Path of Exile is that you are constantly learning new tricks, and each build is better than the previous build because you have learned something in the process. For example I learned some tech that is new to me that I can see using in the future. Essentially one of the common things that you can do with a Rare Wand for minions builds is automate your desecration and offering via the enchant that auto casts whatever is socketed into your wand. However I am using a Unique weapon which takes away that functionality, but apparently you can do the same thing with a four socket arcanists brand setup. So now I have a little bit of tech in my back pocket for whenever I need it the next time to work around a constraint of a build.
Some big changes since the last time I talked about the build is that I managed to pick up a Covenant and then six linked it with a Black Morrigan. I am still using my Foulborn United in Dream with unholy might on it, which I picked up early in the league for a single chaos orb. Yesterday I bought a decent shield base with shaper influence and then threw reforge chaos harvest crafts at it until I lucked into a roll with recover life on block. This is not an amazing roll but was good enough to start using it, and at some point I will probably pick up another shaper influenced base and try and craft one with at least 5% recovery on it. This is one of the tricks that I learned over the last several leagues is taking the “good enough” craft and then replacing it with another craft later. I find that I enjoy my characters far better if there is always some upgrade that I can be working towards.
I had to respec my tree a bit in order to pick up Eldritch Battery so that I could afford the costs that The Covenant adds to all spell casts. I have enough life regeneration though to make it feel pretty comfortable. There are a lot of versions of this build that are going blood magic, and I did not really want to deal with the reservation nightmare or going low life. Low Life is fine and dandy if you are also going petrified blood, but I did not want to have to mess with that. I would far rather have my tasty 4500 life pool with good regeneration, and some defensive reservations. When I switched to Eldritch Battery though I dropped Clarity and replaced it with Tempest Shield for more spell block, and Flesh and Stone for more damage reduction.
I’ve also picked up my fourth labyrinth finally for Silk Dancer which causes webbed mobs to deal 20% less damage and have 20% less to all resistances. Since pretty much everything that my minions touch has webs via Aspect of the Spider, it means this is largely just a flat 20% damage reduction. I do not know for certain if this stacks since I believe you can apply multiple copies of the spider webs debuff to the same mob. Since I am doing nothing to scale duration though I am not sure how much overlap I am actually getting. I know that it is being applied constantly however because it has a very clear visual tell when a mob has webbing on it. I almost went down the path of summoning more minions, but since I am still running zombies, and am in the process of leveling a spectre and animate guardian gem to bring those online at some point soon, I am probably going to have more than enough minions especially when you throw in the four breach spider things that I get from doing offerings.
Defensively I no longer have a negative amount of Chaos Resistance, which already helps considerably. I am sitting at 73% attack block, and 65% spell block… which combined with a recover life on block shield feels pretty comfy. The thing is by not having to take Glancing Blows to get to this level of block, it means I am not giving up the complete negation aspect of that defensive layer. I need to get Aggressive Bastion on my necklace so that I can start picking up additional endurance charges which will go a long way towards feeling more defensively comfortable. Again these are all tricks that I have learned over the years by playing other builds that relied on block as a defensive layer. I am not sure who first made this comment but essentially defenses in Path of Exile are like slices of swiss cheese, and if you stack up enough of them you negative the impact of the holes in any one particular layer. Some people play glass canon builds and rely on six portals to succeed, but I really prefer to play builds that simply don’t ever die.
I have still not really made a ton of progress but have largely completed almost all of the white tier maps, and am about to start into yellow maps. With everything going on in my life I have not been able to give this the devotion that I normally I would during a league start scenario. However I am still having a lot of fun chipping away at progression. While the Gauntlet aspects still annoy me, I feel like I chose the right league start character for this event, because so far at least it is working beautifully. I might run into some roadblocks as I hit Red Maps, but I am hoping that spectres and animate guardian coming online around that time will help immensely. Right now my biggest challenge is that I just don’t have much in the way of currency. That will come over time from running more maps, but I could really use a few lucky divine drops to keep my progression from stalling out.
The post Web Slingers and Life Gain on Block appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
