Blog Features

Biggest Blaugust Ever

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Good Morning Folks. I want to start out this week’s posts by giving a rousing round of applause for the Blaugustans who just finished participating in Blaugust 2025. This event would not have existed were it not for the wonderful community of mentors that have volunteered for that role over the last decade. Specifically I want to recognize Krikket who was the first to take up the mantle and acted as defacto leader of this event. Yesterday she made the summary post talking about the participants and handing out of awards and I highly suggest you stop reading this and go check that post out. This is a year that I could not have handled the rigors of running this event, and while I will be happy to take up that mantle again in the future… the success of this event goes out to the crew that helped make it happen while I could not. This is legitimately the largest event that has ever been run, and I was shocked to see the final tally of almost 170 participants. 2024 was previously the largest year with 116, and this 2025 represents roughly 30% growth rate between the two most recent years. The wildest thing about this event is that we had people participating that did not know until the very end what the event even really was. They just viewed it as a hashtag that got popular on the fediverse and tagged along. In many ways the event has long since outgrown me and my meddling and just become this fixture of our small corner of the internet. I will always think of it as this small game blog thing… but that stopped being true many years ago. The Blaugust discord is super active all year round, but is especially so during the event. The Welcome channel is full of people signing up for the very first time and it has been cool to watch. Watch from the corner of course because everything about the activity levels of the discord now triggers the fuck out of my introvert tendencies… so you only really see me speaking when spoken to directly or talking to something in the super secret mentor channel. This is sort of the way of things that I start… they get bigger than my anxiety can reasonably handle and I get quiet. Folks either tend to view me as aloof or stoic… but in reality I just can’t handle that many people at once.
In other news I have been playing quite a lot of Destiny Rising and am shocked at just how good this game is. That said it has made me contemplate clearing up some disk space to reinstall Destiny 2 so I can have a more direct comparison, since it has been ages since I last played it. The story has been great in Rising, but I am not the biggest fan of the way in which it is doled slowly. You have to do a bunch of different activities to unlock the next bit of story, and my preference tends to be to mainline the story so that I can spend more time enjoying the endgame activities. I know this method is an attempt to keep people engaged longer, but it goes against my natural instincts for this sort of experience.
One of the things that has been really impressive is the breadth of activities and how different they feel. You still only really get a limited amount of activity currency each day in the games pseudo-stamina system, but in truth I am not mainlining the game so it has been more than enough to do anything I might want to do in a single day. If you are playing this game you should absolutely friend me and my code is 20953603268. I attempted to create a version of Greysky Armada but it ultimately timed out. You have 24 hours to get 6 people signed up into the guild (Wolf Pack) in order to create it, and I could not hit that number. If we manage to get enough people playing I will make another attempt at it, because there are a lot of cool things to do in a pack. I joined one of the temporary ones and have been enjoying the weird little missions that open up as a result.
Over in Path of Exile II, I have made it up to level 87 and am capable of pretty comfortably running t15 maps. With that I have unlocked all of the +5 atlas point nodes through cleansing corrupted nexii. Now I am mostly hunting out various unique maps which themselves reward 2 additional points for completing them. I am not sure if there is a place where I can see a total tally of the number of unique maps that I have run, but I think I have done four of them so far. The Lake of Kalandra one is my favorite, but mostly because I love the look of that area. I thought it was cool during the Kalandra league and I still think the effect is extremely slick.
The only problem that I am having right now is that after beating the campaign, and unlocking most of my atlas points… I sort of feel like I don’t have much of a reason to keep playing. I could always keep improving the gear on my character, but it works well enough to do the hardest mapping content, and since I never really care much bout bossing… I sort of feel like I have beaten this league. That is the same problem that I had with Last Epoch, is that after I unlocked all of the Harbingers and took down basic Aberroth I felt like I had accomplished everything that I wanted to accomplish. What makes this game more challenging though is that I keep struggling with technical difficulties. Firstly I cannot watch youtube on my second monitor while playing this game because while the audio keeps playing… the video playback always freezes. Secondly the game crashes constantly, and while I can log right back in where I left off… this eventually grates on you after awhile given that I can only finish one or two maps before the client dies on me. Lastly Path of Exile II as a whole is just not as performant as Path of Exile 1, and even when it is not crashing… there are weird hitches and stutters happening all the time. Supposedly most of this is because I have an intel processor… but still it makes the entire thing eventually not worth fighting with.
In another completely different news… on a whim yesterday afternoon I decided to record myself telling the tale of when I saw a Bigfoot in 1986 and 1995 and then turn this into a video. I’ve written about it here before on the blog, but it always feels like the written versions never really do it justice, because I feel like I am having to go into way too much background information. I did not script this take and as a result it is about 25 minutes of me talking through the story and how it relates to some other sightings in my neck of the woods. I also attempting to illustrate the tale a bit with some google maps shots and various other related images. This will not be everyone’s thing, and it does not fit the rest of my YouTube channel but for some reason I felt like I needed to say it all. The post Biggest Blaugust Ever appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Low Stake Hot Takes

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Krikket was the first of the mentors to offer to run with Blaugust 2025 this year, and she has been doing a phenomenal job of things. One of the things that they have been cooking is a Community Builder group project trying to get as many people as possible to make a post today on the topic of “Low Stake Hot Takes” aka things that you feel very strongly about… but don’t actually really matter in the grand scheme of things. Since I have largely not been joining in the Blaugust Reindeer Games this year for obvious reasons… I figured I would come out of hibernation and join in this nonsense. Being weirdly opinionated about insignificant things is definitely on brand with my blog. That is of course if my blog stops acting up long enough to get a post out. My web host seems to be having problems this morning, and it took me significantly longer to log in than I was expecting.

Ketchup is a Good Base, but a Bad Sauce

I have very particular feelings about Ketchup, namely that it is a really boring sauce and that there are almost zero reasons why you should be using it. Essentially there are so many sauces that are just Ketchup but better. Barbecue sauce for example, just neatly slots into every scenario where you would normally be using Ketchup. If you are not that adventurous there is always Cocktail Sauce or Sweet and Sour sauce… both of which can be made off a Ketchup base. Hell just adding Sriracha to ketchup makes it instantly a better sauce combination. Barack Obama commented on a podcast once that “In my opinion, and this is controversial in my family, but you should not eat ketchup after the age of 8”. I agree with him wholeheartedly because it just is not a good condiment. Life is way too short to smear bland tomato paste onto your food, you deserve more flavor in your life. I am sorry Canadians… but Ketchup chips are mid as hell as well. It is the most boring flavor you could ever make chips out of. At least go with All Dressed where something more is happening. Barbecue chips are just Ketchup but better… and honestly same goes with something like Teriyaki where you can make a pretty good version of it if you use Ketchup as your base. I am just saying… Ketchup is incomplete homework. It is almost a good sauce but needs something more to make it work. Hell even the lowly Thousand Island Dressing… is a better Ketchup based sauce than Ketchup is. If you are still using Ketchup you need to expand your horizons is all I am saying. Shit you can just literally mix any other condiment you have in your house with Ketchup and almost instantly make it better. You are too good for Ketchup boo, you deserve better.

If It Makes it Two Years, It will Make it Twenty

So this is less a hot take and more just a guiding principal. Products fail for two reasons really… poor construction or mechanical failure of some critical piece. If I buy something and it survives two years, then more than likely it is going to make it for twenty years because it has left that window where the obvious failures are going to happen. I have an Alarm clock in my bedroom that I got when I was around twelve. That thing has been kicking for thirty seven years at this point and still functions every bit as well as it did when I was a kid. Maybe the buttons require a little more effort to push them, and maybe the plastic on the front is scratched up at this point, but it is a survivor and will likely keep ticking for another generation. Products are made more poorly now than they used to be, but generally speaking even in modern times… if a product you buy survives two years… it will probably just keep chugging along especially if there are minimal moving parts. There is of course a caveat in this statement that you should do your best to regularly maintain whatever it is. There are some things I do not give a shit about, and they survive almost to spite me. There are of course going to be cases where a power spike will fry something and release the magical blue smoke, that exists outside of this concept. However if you lucked into getting something that was reasonably well assembled and operates within the tolerances it was designed to operate in… it should in theory just keep doing that pending there is no mechanical failure due to stress. I have lots of old things that I just cannot be bothered to replace, and similarly have had situations where I thought I would replace something with a shiny new bauble… only to have to fall back on the reliable one when the new one fails. I think an addendum to this is… when possible buy things with a single function. The more shit you are asking an object to do, the more likely one of them will fail within those first two years.

Listening to an Audiobook Counts as Reading A Book

This one is very near and dear to my heart because I love Audiobooks and my un-diagnosed ADHD tendencies make it very hard for me to pay attention while reading a book. I can read books, I just do so far less frequently than listening to them. My mind wanders when I read a book and before long I realize I have not been paying attention for several pages and have to flip back and re-read segments of the text so that I can glean understanding from them, even though mechanically my brain was going through the motion of consuming it. So the reason why I feel like listening to an Audiobook counts as reading, is because it activates the same centers of my brain while I am doing it. One of my favorite things that I have talked about at length is to listening to an Audiobook while I am keeping myself mechanically busy playing a game that does not require a narrative component. For me these are either MMORPGs where I am just farming content and I have committed everything to muscle memory, or playing something like an ARPG where I am similarly relying on instinct. If I stop and engage with chat or read quest text… I instantly lose the ability to consume the audio that is going into my head and glean any meaning from it. Essentially I have through testing figured out that whatever part of my brain that does the mechanical motions of gaming, and the part of my brain that understands and engages with narratives… are completely separate. While I don’t have a brain scan or anything like that, I would be willing to bet that if you looked at my brain while reading text and while listening to text narrated… that they would be lighting up the exact same areas. When I shift that narrative processing away from the audio that is playing, the loss of meaning is instantaneous. The same thing happens when I am on a conference call, and a critical priority email comes through… I lose the meaning of what was happening on the call while I am reading that email. So basically my take is that listening is the exact same thing as reading for the purpose of consuming meaning. This might not be a thing for everyone, and maybe I am just wired in this particular way… but I honestly find that I listen better when I am doing something with my hands. I used to get in trouble for this all of the damned time while growing up because I would be voraciously doodling while listening to a lecture in class instead of taking notes. I would cross link the thing that I was drawing with the subject matter that I was learning, and it was almost as though one was encoded with the other. Similarly if I am having a conversation with someone… I will cross link whatever I was doing at that time with the conversation that I was having. As a result there are all of these inexplicable hot-wired subjects in my brain where I will be thinking about this things, and immediately jump to something totally unrelated other than at one point they were linked while listening to a conversation. Anyways the thing is… because of the way my brain works, I often just use the shorthand of “reading” a book instead of diving into the details that I actually listening to it for 10 hours while playing Path of Exile, because that is a thing that society understands more clearly. I gained the same understanding of the material that someone who read it did, and often times it is way more deeply lodged into my brain because I took away the nervous energy that was blocking my brain from getting into a flow state and listening more intently.

That’s All Folks

I think that is a sufficient amount of opinions for one morning. I have others that I could go into, but then you are getting more into the founding principles of my personality. Things like “never trust someone who does not like animals” feels like it is veering out of the “low stakes” nature of this prompt.
The post Low Stake Hot Takes appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Accidental Black Light

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Good Morning Folks. One of my coworkers really cares deeply about his teleconference background… and recently added these cool vapor-wave neon strip things which spurred in my brain… that I could do something cool with my lighting. I have a ceiling fan with three 60W light bulbs… and I got it in my head that I could give myself some cool bisexual lighting by buying a blue, pink, and purple led bulb. The pink was way the hell too overpowering so I ended up with only a blue bulb and a purple bulb and it works… giving me this cool two-tone lighting that is way the hell easier on my eyes than bright white light. However what I did not expect is that I accidentally created a black light, because everything in my office that fluoresces is now glowing like crazy. I feel like I need to lean into this and get some proper velvet black-light paintings up in here. The above photo does not do the effect justice… but you can definitely see that little Kenneth the robot’s arms and head are glowing.
I think at this point I am enjoying my Brand Elemenalist more than the Toxic Rain Pathfinder, because it has officially leap-frogged it in levels and I am pretty close to dinging 92. Everything always slows down at 95 and I am not sure if I have enough survival to really push much further than that but I fully expect to get there before long. The only problem with this build is that so much of my success with it… is entirely depended upon the negative lightning resistance setup I have on my mercenary. If I were playing an actually GOOD build… I can see how dumb this would be especially for bossing purposes. This combined with the Inpulsa chest are giving me some tasty screen wide pops at times that I was not expecting for a brand build. I am still sort of shopping for a better merc, but I really want the ability that causes consecrated ground to cover the screen and the “better” options I have found don’t have that or herald of purity. I wish POE.Ninja tracked Mercenaries so that I could flip through a bunch of different setups to see what people are doing with the Doryani setup.
So one of the battles that I have been having with this character and build is… what the hell to do with the shield. The build that I loosely patterned this one off of was using Aegis Aurora and it makes some amount of sense. It’s a good chunk of armor and decent energy shield, and also has the ability to recover 2% of energy shield on block. The problem with this however is that essentially this is only 96 Energy Shield per block… which is largely meaningless. For awhile I was running Emperor’s Vigilance which has even more armor and energy shield and would allow me to drop a node on my passive tree to keep Glancing Blows, but also has the double edged sword that any unblocked damage bypasses my energy shield. I played around with Rise of the Phoenix and it was fine… but did not have enough chance to block and dropped me down below the block cap. I even tried a solid 5% of life on block shield that has a pretty decent roll and it just did not feel as good as it does on my Righteous Fire characters… because it is only around 200 life recovered per block and the general line of defenses is nowhere near as strong. So I am stick with the Aegis for now, mostly because I am not sure what else to try.
I am ripping through Alch and Go t16 maps without any issue, and am mostly using this character to run Betrayal on Primordial Blocks still chasing that damned hideout. I have a whole new appreciation for Betrayal largely because I never realized exactly how bit of an experience boost it is over any other mechanic. I don’t even care about Safehouses, I am just clicking whatever option there is on every single person just to get the bump of experience. I get it that folks have said Betrayal is great early league, but I always assumed it was for the enchants and abandoned it entirely this league… but legitimately it is probably still worth doing to get a bump in levels quickly. I am sure those Veiled Chaos Orbs were more valuable at the start of the league than they are now as well. I’ve run so much Betrayal and at least a dozen safe houses at this point and have still not found a single invitation for Catrina. I do wish there was some better guidance as to what person does what in which position however, because I keep getting the damned crafting tables… and they are awful.
The other thing I am hunting while running maps is for the memory tears that unlock a sequence of maps. Right now it feels like I am pretty close to knocking out Eldritch Expeditions and will likely need two of these sequences to wrap it up. When I get one of these I pretty much just rip my way through it as RF so that I can knock it out quickly and then return back to chill Ach and Go t16s. I should probably be knocking out t17s as well but those are way less happy chill fun times, and I have not been in the mood for it. Yesterday was “a lot”, and I took the day off to deal with “death things” as I am starting to collectively refer to it as. I had to go back to the funeral home to pick up death certificates and then spent the rest of the afternoon dealing with various things that had been in a holding pattern waiting on them. I still need to make a trek Saturday morning over to deal with another thing related to this, because I was just too beat by the time I got back home yesterday to make another jaunt in the opposite direction.
I had made plans with a friend of mine, but had to beg off last night because I was just too out of it. Instead I sat downstairs on the sofa with cats snuggling tightly, and played some Path of Exile while listening to Wicked Problems by Max Gladstone. I did not expect to necessarily chain through these books but after the ending of Dead Country… I had to know what was coming next. While I loved the Craft Sequence… so far this Craft Wars Trilogy is way more tightly focused and I like it better overall. Tara Abernathy is the best character in the entire series of books, and we are spending way more time with her in this book than some of the other sequels from the previous series. The first sequence hopped around quite a bit between characters, and there were entire books that did not really involve her. This definitely feels like we are headed for some sort of an endgame and all of the best elements of the previous books are being revisited in this one tight narrative arc. Like I said if you have never read any of these books I HIGHLY suggest starting them and unfortunately I would also suggest reading the first six book series, because you will largely be clueless about the importance of some of the events in this trilogy. I am still functional… deeply low on spoons… but strugglebusing my way through the world. The post Accidental Black Light appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Illusive Mollie Snuggles

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One of the strange occurrences that I have wanted so bad to message my wife about… is the changed behavior in Mollie our most skittish cat. She can be an extremely sweet cat, but also runs like hell at the slightest unexpected motion. She has been forcefully snuggling with me when I first crawl into bed, and gripes at me when I am not already in place when she expects me to be so. She runs away when Gracie decides it is time to come to bed, but for about thirty minutes at the start of every sleep cycle, she is there with me while I am fiddling around on my phone and doing dailies in the few mobile games that I play. I’ve attempted to get a photo of this, and so far this is the best one not only because I am laying down and attempting to take it… but also because the lights are off and the only light is from the television. It has only taken a decade to get this far… but she will headbutt me so freaking hard before she eventually settles down snuggling up against my side.
I did not join in the reindeer games in Guild Wars 2 last night because I was emotionally exhausted. I had a good therapy session, but it was a tiring one and after finishing that up… and doing the various nightly processes I just was out of it and fighting sleepytime. I stayed up until around 9:30 which is my normal bedtime, but was way too out of it to have joined in on any group activities. Instead I did some Audiobook and Path of Exile time as I started on Dead Country by Max Gladstone which is a new series with the flagship character of the Craft Sequence that I read over the last few years. There were six books in that series and I highly suggest all of them. What is awkward about those books is that they collected the first five into a single volume… then I guess Max decided to write a sixth book, and it makes my eye twitch that the artwork does not match the first five books at all which have a similar theme. Anyways looking forward to this new trilogy of which I think only two books are out.
One of the things that is not really being talked about right now in Path of Exile is how profitable Delve has been this league. It is a combination of the fact that there is no league specific crafting mechanic, and that the return of Kingsmarch has made gold fairly valuable because people want to run those big shipments for a shot at getting back mirror shards. Delve, Heist, and other second any secondary non-mapping content provides a pitiful amount of gold compared to juicy mapping. The common wisdom has been to focus on mapping and as a result… everything that comes from other mechanics has gone up in value. I put up a bunch of rare fossils for sale last night before I logged out to go to bed, and decided to take a screenshot when they had all sold showing you the sort of money I can pull in quickly. Divine Orbs are also really weak right now and only trading for 130 Chaos, meaning that converting up from Chaos is really valuable. I spent a lot of currency kitting out my Toxic Rain character and have made most of it back.
That said I spent a ton of currency this morning buying Awakened gems and 21/20% gems for the things that I could afford. I will likely never buy an Awakened Greater Multiple Projectiles as those go for like 300 Divines, but I did bump up everything that I could. Making this swap is always immediately noticeable in the speed at which you clear, and this was no difference because t16 mapping now feels extremely trivial. Mostly I am still in the process of pouring on levels so that I can get the passive points to finish out with a medium cluster and then unlock all of the jewel sockets that I have available to me so that I can start putting life and chaos damage over time multiplier in all of those slots. I have my health over 4000 which gives me a bit of a buffer and usually enough time to hit my life potion in time to keep from taking a death when my evasion fails me. I am still not great at keeping a life pot running at all times to mimic the effects of leech or regeneration. This is essentially the strength of a Pathfinder but I am bad at hitting the button all of the time.
The Mercs league had already slowed down considerably, but it is about to grind to a halt as Path of Exile II spoiler season has officially started. SirGog released a video this morning about the above spoiler posted on Twitter, and I mostly agree with him that this feels Harbinger Adjacent. I just hope they do not screw the mechanic up and make it worse… like they have for other mechanics implemented in Path of Exile II style. I am still not hugely supportive of the direction this sequel has gone so far, but I also know that large swaths of the community care about it and it will begin to drain attention from Path of Exile. Path of Exile II drops on the 29th, but it will have to wait until I have burned through the content in Last Epoch which drops before that on the 21st. The post Illusive Mollie Snuggles appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.