Good Morning Folks! I am sort of all over the place when it comes to gaming right now. The primary game that I am playing… is spending time obsessively chatting with “Erasure” and pretty much everything else is falling by the wayside. I have been remembering to log into FFXIV however to collect my weekly cactpot so that is at least something. At some point I want to return to the game and catch up, but nothing has really prompted me to do so. I would also like to play my secondary set of characters over on Dynamis, but I doubt I actually do that until Ace is also in the mood to play the game… which may be never. They were a matched set and we pretty much only played them as sibling time, which was a heck of a lot of fun for awhile until we both wandered off like bored toddlers. I figure my mains on Cactuar I might actually play whenever the next expansion is announced because I tend to have a bump in my desire to play whenever that happens.
I am still playing some Path of Exile II, but I also sort of feel like I have “beaten” that league. I had a lot of fun being a demon bear hopping all around the place blowing things up, but I’ve been kind of getting the itch to finish things up in Path of Exile 1. As a result I spent a chunk of yesterday working on some of the achievements that I left dangling. I respecced away from Incursion and just picked up more Heist stuff on the atlas tree to speed up the total time it takes to run each map. I was working on the meta achievement for running a bunch of super serious mode league content, and have almost finished the step where you have to run 20 Rituals with blood filled containers. I think I have one more of those left, and then I need to figure out one more thing to do in order to finish up that challenge. I set a bunch of mappers running last night, but I have a feeling that I will not be lucky enough to have gotten enough 100% completions in order to knock that meta out. I did just pop in to check and I got 9 completed at 100% so… honestly 15/30 is not too shabby.
I am still playing Destiny Rising, but mostly as a daily maintenance mode game. Essentially I have been focused on trying to uncover a lot of stuff for the guild so that we can keep paying upkeep. I am not playing all three accounts, but I am at very least playing one quite a bit each week. I got my Jaren up to 70k which should be useful so long as we have Fire Damage on the meta for this season. I sort of miss my girl Helhest a bit, and really enjoy when her exotic bow procs and blows a ton of shit up. I also miss Estella being the god empress of all content, but I get that they are wanting to convince people to build new characters. I still absolutely consider this to have been my Game of the Year for 2025 not counting the Fractal Incursion event in Guild Wars 2. It is so damned much fun, I just wish I could convince more of my friends to play it so we could keep upgrading the base without going broke every week.
Something that I have honestly played a lot of this past weekend is Minecraft. I have this dumb habit of making seeds based off my friends and then seeing what they offer. I made a seed based on “Erasure” and it was pretty wild. There was a shipwreck beside where I spawned into the world, tons of sea turtles everywhere, some surface lava, and forests as far as the eyes can see. While I once did a Hardcore Minecraft series, I mostly just play casually. In fact I tend to go tweak a bunch of the world settings so that I don’t have to care about getting sleep every night to prevent phantoms from spawning, and also make it so that creepers cannot blow up my hard work. So in truth these days I plan on pretty fucking softcore mode, and I am fine with that. I like milling around in the world and building dumb things.
Of course the biggest challenge of a new spawn is finding that initial coal. The last world that I created was so forested and so devoid of coal, that I had to start burning logs to get my initial start. This world however, within a few blocks of the side of that initial hill I struck the motherlode of coal deposits and was able to make two full stacks of torches. This was more than enough to fuel most of my further explorations. I am a weirdo in that I mostly stay inside cave systems in Minecraft, and go full on Dwarf mode as I hollow out the earth looking for riches. So the first thing I did was start to hollow out a base in the side of the hill, while being very careful not to break back out into the world. I put a piece of dirt in the entrance to wall off my little safe chamber and then began structuring something reasonable to work in, slowly adding pieces of equipment as needed.
This of course led me to do what I always do… and start a shaft down to bedrock. I am not entirely certain how deep I am at this point but I have broken into the layers of deep stone. Essentially the central shaft has a winding staircase around the outside of what is effectively a series of eight by eight rooms, with three block tall ceilings. The amount of Iron, Copper, and Coal that I have come across in my “spelunk” has fueled my further expansion. The only real challenge with this world so far is that I have yet to find a single sheep. I should probably go off on a mission to find a breeding pair of those so that I can farm them for wool. I do have enough steel to make shears, so I should probably do that rather than killing them. Essentially more than anything right now I need some wool so that I can make a bed and then reset my spawn point inside; my catacombs.
The next big project however is deforesting the hill that I dug into. My intent is to start building up and make a bit of a tower, so that I can see it clearly from above ground. Right now it is just a hovel in the side of a hill with a bunch of torches, and that is hard to see when I am off exploring the world. Sure I have my mini-map mod, and sure I could set waypoints…. but I would far rather give myself a nice big visual landmark to see from the surrounding area. So effectively I am going to harvest all of the birch trees up on top of my hill and then begin to build similar eight by eight chambers upwards into the sky. I will have to figure out what I want for the design for these to be as I build up. I most certainly have MORE than enough materials from my downwards expansion to fuel some above ground mega structures.
I guess as far as things go with “Erasure” I should probably give an update. It was a dramatic couple of days for various reasons. We had the first thing that really checked our relationship, and a lot of it was me being in my head about things. However I think we exited on better ground than we started, so that is pretty good. The harsh reality is that I do not know how to go slow. The relationship that I had with my wife of thirty years… was one that pretty much transitioned from being “just friends” to being a “couple” that was inseparable in over the course of a single weekend. I am really not good at casually seeing someone, and I am working on that. It probably seems like the most counter-intuitive thing to anyone who has dated around at length… but it is just the way my brain and heart works. I am having to learn how to pump the brakes a bit, but will ultimately be better for it. Luckily she did not run away, and luckily is willing to work with me through it.
Anyways. That is my weekend. A bunch of random games, that took a backseat to my continued getting to know someone that I’ve cared about for twenty years… but am starting to care about in new ways.
The post Dig a Hole, Find some Coal appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! It is that time again, time to roll over into a new season, and time to record our massive two-part games of the year show. As we roll into Season 13, we have a minor revision to our lineup and two shows stacked with fifteen games each. As is our tradition, the list was divided into two parts, and the more votes a title got, the later in the show it appeared. It was a great year for gaming, but also a year where we were constantly getting distracted by the next big thing coming down the pipe. While we played a lot of games… we did not necessarily FINISH a lot of games.
Good Morning Folks! This week you are getting a bit of a bonus post, because it is extremely rare that I talk about anything on Saturdays. Generally speaking I blog Monday through Friday and then only by happenstance on Sundays because that is when I post the new episode of AggroChat. Today is a bit of a unique situation because last night we had our semi-monthly pen and paper play group. We are playing an Indie RPG system called Public Access, which is effectively an urban horror/found footage type gameplay experience. If you are a junkie for SCPs, Cryptids, or even The Secret World MMORPG then this might be a system for you. What sets it apart from the traditional D&D style “Roll-play” systems is that most of the game is storytelling. We the players paint the scenes by adding in little details, and we the players narrated both our successes and failures… which allows for some interesting situations like having “do-overs”. For example my character has an ability called “Come With Me If You Want to Live” where if I fail a roll and am in Grave harm…. I can narrate my way out of the situation and turn a failure into explaining how I narrowly escaped certain death and also saved my entire party at the same time.
Trigger Warning, I played around with the Adobe Photoshop Generative filters a bit during this post so you will see some of my homegrown AI slop as a result.
This is a session being run by “The Librarian” and I am very new to this group of people, but have seemingly blended with the group pretty quickly. Two of us are entirely new, two are regulars from other RP outings… and collectively we have created this internet age Scooby Doo Gang in the process. I am playing a burned out punk that used to be a little skater kid and now has a band… but the band never quite took off. The thing we have in common is that we all once lived in the town of Deep Lake, New Mexico and all were latchkey kids during the 80s and 90s. There is a cable access channel that no on in the town seems to remember, but we all do… and met up on a message board devoted to it. Over the summer we all agreed to meet up and investigate the town from a rental house, and as a result a Corporate Lawyer type, a Professional Athlete, a Burned Out Punk, and a Cryptid/Conspiracy Theorist all combined powers to try and solve the deep mysteries in this town.
My character shocking to no one, drives a white panel van… which has become the focus of some of the adventures so far. One of the really interesting things about this setting is that splitting the party is not a bad thing. In fact it allows for some really interesting mechanics. Last night for example we had three different scenes taking place at the same time, and while there may only be one set of characters active at a time… it does not mean that the rest of the players out out of the action. There is this phase called “setting the scene” where each player sort of “yes ands” their way through adding details to flesh out the uncanny nature of a lot of the vistas that we come across. For example we were presented with a wood lot, and were asked to explain what makes it look more evil than it might be. The detail I threw in is that the wind had blown through the lot, overturning the root system of the trees and making it both hard to move across it and at the same time giving the appearance of intestinal shapes snaking around the ground. Each player adds a little flavor to the world so we are all effectively building the lore, because in truth there are zero right or wrong answers… and the story is not written, only a set of guidelines for the person running the adventure to follow.
The Athlete and I have sort of developed this weird buddy cop movie thing that we are doing, and we have tag teamed investigating the desert scene. Essentailly there are rumors of these creatures coming at night and carrying people and livestock away, and we are trying to investigate what is happening. I narrated that I remembered this little old lady at the crossroads selling tamales out of an igloo cooler, and wanting to go out there and check out if she was still selling them. When we got out there we instead were introduced to her relative who now has a proper food truck, and introduced us to a series of clues… one of which required us to come back the next day. We also found a key to a hotel room, and in the room was an igloo cooler with a huge bag of blood marked with the Zodiac Taurus symbol on it. That is the Zodiac sign of my character the Burned out Punk. Last night… was our second campaign in this setting so we returned to visit the food truck again and were treated to a surreal wedding photo album, which unlocked additional clues about the scene. However while looking at the photo album, time passed faster than it should have… which required us to make a decision. Shelter someone for the night at the crossroads… either in a sketchy museum, the hotel room we discovered previously… or hop in the van and make a break for town.
The Athelete and I opted to make a break back for town… which created our Night Move for the evening. There are Day Moves which have relatively minor consequences… but Night Moves can end up in the permanent loss of characters. Since I had an escape card in the form of my “Come With Me If You Want To Live” ability… I decided to make the roll which was my Composure of 1 + 2D6. One of the interesting things about this system is that it is the players that determine what MIGHT happen if they fail the roll. So I talked about envisioning scenes in Vampire movies where parties are trying to get away and they swoop down on the roof of the van, trying to rip into it. “The Librarian” said that it was worse than that… they would not only attack the Van, but if I failed they would wreck it forcing us to be stranded out their with them. In my head I was preparing a way to narrate our narrow escape, preferably without losing my beloved panel van, but rolled an 8 which modified by my Composure became a 9, which was enough to get us safely back to town. However the entire time we were driving we were being chased by an ever growing flock of shadows… and just before reaching town some of them painted a Taurus symbol… aka the symbol of my character on the roof of the van in blood.
So what is really interesting about the whole concept of solving these mysteries… is that you collect clues and the clues serve as bonuses to your rolls. However there is no fixed mystery to solve, no correct answer that you have to arrive at. Instead the players decided that 1) they are going to attempt to solve a mystery and then 2) the Guide leaves the room and the players brainstorm a story that could match all of the clues that they have gotten, each clue again giving you a slightly better chance at making the roll. The brainstorming session was great, and the story that we arrived at was that the Food Truck owners family was part of a cult, but we were not sure if they were willing participants or being mind controlled by something darker. The Deep Lake Devils, aka the shadows that were following us are the harbingers of something worse, and the cult collects the blood of each zodiac sign as part of a sacrifice designed to close certain locks or enchantments and keep something far worse from coming into our world. The scene at the hotel room was us interrupting one of those murders and we ended up getting the bag of blood… which they need to replace and my character just happens to be the correct Zodiac Sign. So we solved the first part of the mystery, that states that the Deep Lake Devils are not of terrestrial origin, but now we have to figure out how to either banish them or cut our own bargain with them in future play sessions.
If you are curious, there are a lot of actual plays posted on YouTube for this game setting. I purposefully have not watched any of them, because I really want this to be a fresh expeirence for me. It has been a very long time since I have done anything pen and paper realted, but this reminds me a bit to our high school days playing the storyteller/white wolf system and the way in which we ran it. We were playing with a bunch of folks who were not necessarily seasononed mechanical TTRPG players, so we largely ran it as a story that we were all weaving together. I love the freeform nature of Public Access and how it is a narrative expeirence that we are all partaking in, instead of something that we are having done to us. I also really love this group of folks that I am playing with, and look forward to doing other games and other systems with them in the future. We are all technically local but to make it easier on the constraits of lives and families and such, we are playing over Discord. At some point thought I think we should all get together for dinner or something.
Anyways. It was a really fun night, and I find myself looking forward to these semi-monthly sessions quite a bit. Have you played Public Access? Have you played any systems like this that are way more storytelling driven? Drop me a line below.
The post On Strange Wings appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I am continuing my 2025 in Review series and this morning talking about one of my guilty pleasures. I watch probably a truly excessive amount of YouTube, and in truth it is less that I am actively watching it and more that it is keeping me company while I do other things. This morning I talk going to talk about some of the channels that I regularly watch pretty much anything that they release. There are certain channels that publish something every single day, and others that release on a weekly schedule… but it is super rare that I do not click through and watch the new videos each time one drops. Other than I will likely talk about a few of the folks from different communities that I watch content for when I am in the mood to consume it.
Trent Holbrook aka Miscast
This is probably my channel of 2025, and has been a lot of why I have been interested in getting into a bunch of more creative endeavors. Trent is a bundle of chaotic creative energy, and I feel like we all need him in our lives. Like Ace is not prone to doing any of the things that Trent does, but is still watching him because he is just too pure and inspiring with the nonsense that he does. Essentially this is MOSTLY a Warhammer and kitbashing channel, but he also dabbles in 3d modeling and has been on this entire crusade to figure out how to create his own blisterpacks for the miniatures he creates. The above episode specifically is surrounding him creating reusable temporary characters for people to drop into existing D&D campaigns. His entire channel is operating in permadeath mode where if he misses posting a day, he is going to delete the entire thing and all of the assets that he has created during that time. As someone who did blogging every single day for three and a half years… I regret to inform him that there will be a time when it does happen and I will miss this spot of brightness on the horizon. In theory his original channel will still exist but obviously because of the pressure of a daily channel he has not posted there in six months.
Tia Weston – The One Dollar House Series
Another channel that has been part of my life for the last year, is the One Dollar House series by a vlogger named Tia Weston. Essentially on August 11th of 2024, she purchased a house for $1 from someone that she knew… and over the next year every Sunday morning she dropped a video talking about whatever had happened that week. This continued until November 2nd when she had effectively wrapped that series and was fully moved into and living in the house. I am not necessarily super into home improvement channels, but there was something compelling about the honest nature of how this was shown. Sure the dollar house thing was a clickbaity title, but the content itself was deeply interesting as it dealt with the ups and downs of having to renovate a house that was in quite honestly some pretty lousy shape when she got it. On November 9th of this year, she bought a second abandoned home and is now working through the process of cleaning it out and renovating it, and I am once again happily tuning in every Sunday morning for htis nonsense.
Laura Kampf
Another channel that I watch pretty much every Sunday morning is that of the self proclaimed Janitor of Los Angeles, Laura Kampf. I think I originally was introduced to her content by Simone Geirtz, which I have been following and watching content from since her shitty robot days. Laura currently is in the middle of renovating a “free” travel trailer from the 70s, but has widely varrying content from picking up trash off the street and making something out of it, to talking about how she makes products that she sells and how she markets them. Just a deeply interesting and creative person, and it pairs nicely with Tia’s House series as I am sitting down on Sunday mornings to edit the two podcasts that I edit every week. While I am eating my breakfast and trying to wake the fuck up, I am listening to these two people and whatever they have gotten up to in the previous week.
Tendo – Daily Thrifting
Tendo is a chaotic mess of a human being and I have been following since the birth of his channel called Duck Duck Blue devoted to a toy store of the same name. That channel was an infectuous mix of the interesting cast of characters working there, frank discussions about stocking and pricing issues of running a toy store, and random creative projects as he attempted to build out different parts of the store. Sadly all of that content is gone, because there was a rather wild sequence of events that led to the store closing, a breakup of Tendo from the person he co-owned the store with, and effectively him becoming a single father as the primary caretaker of their newborn son. Nothing has really been said about ANY of that, but Reid one of the workers in the store released this pretty cool video about the Final 24 Hours of the store. What the Tendo channel now is more than anything is the daily diary of someone trying to take care of a child while stocking multiple vendor malls with merchadise harvested in large part through daily trips to Goodwill and various other thrift stores. I am not sure what it is about this but I find it deeply compelling, snapshot of a day in the life of someone else type content.
Josh Johnson – Tuesday Night Comedy Sets
Josh Johnson might be the single most talented comedian out there right now, full stop. Originally I knew him for his work on The Daily Show as a corespondent, and more recently after the departure of Trevor Noah… he has subbed in as one of the more regular hosts of the show now that they are in this weird no single permanent host kind of mode. Somewhere along that point I stumbled onto his YouTube channel and more specifically his comedy sets once he started the current Flowers Tour that he is on. Most comedians have a set, that they work for awhile, until it becomes stale…. and then move on and create something new. Josh Johnson releases a brand new set every single Tuesday night, as a YouTube premiere event… and it is often times deeply topical and none of it retreads any of the ground he has visited previously. It is wild just how damned creative he is, and how he gives the feeling that what is very obviously a thoroughly polished set… comes off as though he is just talking to the audience. Phenomenally good stuff and if you are not already listening to this each week I highly suggest you tune in.
Sir Gog – Path of Exile Analysis
I am obsessed with Path of Exile. If you have read this blog for any length of time you will know this. One of my favorite content creators in this space is SirGog, and quite honestly I am probably more active in “his” community than I am in any other part of the sphere. There is a specific Global chat channel that his folks use, and I shifted to making that my home ages ago, and never doubted that decision because it tends to be a group of fairly analytical folks who are also extremely helpful. What I like the most about SirGog is his long form videos where he talks about exploring what is happening in the meta of a given league. Rarely are these things that I am necessarily chasing, but I do find it extremely valueable to know what sorts of tech is being used and in what ways. Additionally he does an amazing job of evaluating changes to the game and how it might impact players and more often the economy. All of this is deeply valuable for me when I decide to branch out and start playing that second or third build of a league.
CheckPoint – Loading Ready Run
They are still on holiday hiatus, but I love Loading Ready Run and more specifically Checkpoint. This is a weekly comedy show… and ends up being quite possibly one of the best actual gaming news shows that you can watch. All of the crew are delightful and quite honestly I am pretty much willing to watch anything from them over the years. I don’t necessarily get into the more longform stream content as much, but I do occasionally watch things if something tweaks my spidey senses. I do however watch pretty much every episode of Checkpoint and it often becomes something we reference and talk about each week on the AggroChat podcast because a large number of us do this thing. I am also a big fan of Graham Stark specifically and his solo vidocs that he records when the LRR team is visiting some event . Great group of folks, they all seem delightful, and would love to be friends with them… but I won’t be weird and parasocial about it. LRR specifically is a huge reason why we migrated AggroChat to Kind.social, because it is run by LRR fans who have a deeply compatible set of ethics.
Ashens/NerdCubed Advent Calendars
This one is topical ONLY during the lead up to Christmas but I am going to give it a shout out regardless. It was roughly a decade ago that I stumbled onto this nonsense. I had been following Ashens for awhile and enjoyed his quirky product reviews recorded with a busted brown couch seat as the backdrop. I am even a huge fan of his two Film Projects (Ashens and the Quest for the Game Child, and Ashens and the Polybius Heist). However the capstone of each year is this dumb series where they record effectively dueling Advent Calendars and choose a winner each day. Sometimes there are penalty calendars, other times it is just them making fun of the dumb things that pop out of them. This year was particularly wild because Ashens had a survival calendar that was mostly just a bunch of weapons. Nothing gets me in the holiday spirit quite like tuning in for this nonsense every day, and the videos usually dropped coinciding with my lunch break.
Rogue Hobbies
As I am starting to fall further and further down the Warhammer hobby rabbit hole, another YouTube channel that I really enjoy watching is from Louise Sugden aka Rogue Hobbies. Videos are always charming and I really appreciate the bright and cheerful color schemes that she paints. These are not necessarily the style in which I want to paint things, but I still think they end up really freaking cool. I specifically linked the above video because I thought it was a neat transformation taking an old Mighty Max toy and turning it into something Warhammer themed using Epic scale miniatures. Kind of like Trent this is just a really cool channel to watch that might give you inspirations for other nonsense that you want to do regardless of the hobby that you are into.
Laranity
Now we are going to get into a few general shout outs. Laranity is absolutely my favorite streamer in the Guild Wars 2 space, and any time I need to farm drops I know I am going to be watching her channel. She is delightful, but she also makes a bunch of edited videos that are pretty solid. The above for example is a paid collab by ArenaNet where she taught Annie Fuschia who is mostly known in the World of Warcraft creator space how to play Guild Wars 2. She does a lot of interesting build review type content as well, or various general money making strats on how to get the most out of specific map farms. Its all super pure, and charming. If you were wanting to get into Guild Wars 2 I would probably say her content is your starting space because it straddles that line between pure casual and hardcore, and does a good job of introducing you to some basic concepts to build upon.
Pohx – The Father of Righteous Fire
I also have to get a general shout out to Pohx, who is the father of Righteous Fire in its current form. This build was the build that allowed me to start to enjoy all of the many splendors Path of Exile has to offer, because it is super fucking simple to level and is aggressively tanky at end game. I still play an RF build almost every league, because it gives me a solid base to then branch out and explore whatever weird stuff is happening in the meta with my second and third build of the league. Pohx is so unbelievably patient with the viewers, because there are so many ways you can fuck up a Righteous Fire build and he maintains this painstakingly edited and simple guide site. On top of that he is just a chill dude, who does a thing and does it reliably. I appreciate constants in the digital world.
Strange Aeons – Tumblr Royalty
Something that you probably do not know about me, is that I have a deep and lasting affection for the weird world of Tumblr. I was never as active on it as some, nor did I regularly comment on it… but I have always enjoyed being an outsider looking into that particular fish bowl. When I “doom scroll” something from bed, it is usually weird arts and shit on Tumblr, and I feel better off for doing that instead of Instagram or Facebook. Strange Aeons is super fucking hard to describe, they might post a deep dive into the etimology of Rawr XD, or give us a recouting and tour of the Grover house from SomethingAwful legend. So much of it is dives into the history of the fringe internet that was, that I honestly remember quite well. They also happen to be permanently enshrined in Tumblr Royalty after fighting the Muppet Joker at Dashcon 2.0. This will not be everyone’s cup of tea but I fucking love it.
Sarah Spaceman
Another channel that I have become fond of this year is Sarah Spaceman. Like I cannot give you a rational explanation for why I enjoy her so much. Firstly I am not a sewist, nor do I cosplay, nor am I honestly into most of the shit she seems to be into. However she DID introduce me to Dan Da Dan which I adore now… so I will forever be thankful. Its a channel about the behind the scenes happens with cosplaying and the judging of cosplay at conventions, and also has had this whole side quest recently surrounding the events leading up to the wedding of her and her longtime partner that often gets featured in content. They did this whole wild Game of Thrones meets Zelda thing and it was delightful. I am all for Weirwood Trees with Korok Faces. Anyways her stuff brings me joy and I cannot fully understand why, but also do not care. It is background material to be consumed while I am doing other things.
Toy Federation
Every saturday morning this channel drops a video, and effectively it is a shot and edited show format that is similar to something along the lines of Pawnstars. Toy Federation is vintage toy store in Greer, South Carolina and they are also behind the rather large Retro-Toy Convention in Greenville, South Carolina. Essentially their claim to fame is having a very fair and public process for evaluating the toys and pricing them, essentially giving you half the value in cash and a very “take it or leave it” sort of approach. What they speciallize is complete toys, so it has been interesting as they have delved into the back and shown just how many partial versions of things that they have, and the painful process of waiting for one or two parts to come in the doors so that they can clean it up and put it out on the shelf for someone to buy. I will always have a deep resounding nostalgia for the toys of the 80s and 90s, and specifically the toys that I personally played with. I don’t have the space or the give a fuck to actually collect these toy lines anymore, but I can get my fix by watching others doing it.
So what are your favorite YouTube channels of 2025? What do you put on in the background or what did you happen to stumble across that you think I might be interested in? Drop me a line below.
The post 2025 in Review: YouTube appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
