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Oops an Audiobook

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I woke up this morning and as I am oft to do… I sat in bed for a moment and scrolled through email to see what came in over night. I saw a charge from Audiobooksnow the site that I tend to buy my audiobooks for that was $9.99, and had a mild freak out. Did my account get hacked? Did I accidentally sign up for some auto purchase club book thing? NOPE! I apparently pre-ordered Brigands and Breadknives by Travis Baldree and completely forgot about it. So at some point today I will be starting that, and pretty much mainlining it until I finish. Audiobooks are really the perfect compliment for grinding in Path of Exile, and I am very much in head down grind time. Today is a holiday for me, and I have an appointment at 9 am in town, but once I get back from that… I will likely be starting the audiobook and snuggling with cats while POEing it until my brain bleeds. I should probably pick up the house before I dive into that… because everything needs to be cleaned and vacuumed.
Essentially I have reached the point of the league where I need to start chipping away at the various Challenges. Most of them are not that hard, for example I need to unlock 3 Minor Pantheons, and I have plenty of Divine Vessels to do this. I just have not. I did not even fully unlock the one that I am using because the second trait is not really all that important for my build. However there are some that suck… like for example I am going to have to consume a Divine Orb either by using it directly on an item or using it in a craft. I still do not have that many divine orbs to my name, so each one feels like it is precious beyond words.
I have made a handful of Divine Orb sales over the last few days, and I really dig the Sales History tab that got built into the new trade system. The shield I sold for 2 Div was a crafting experiment where I happened into another Shaper shield and I threw purple juice at it until I hit 5% recover on block. The Cloak of Flame is essentially just the first one that I linked using a Black Morrigan that I recently replaced with a corrupted chest with 5% less Fire Damage taken on it. The Stygian Vise was just me flipping a base that I got as a drop that was Hunter Influenced. The gloves were some failed tree tree crafts that were really well rolled, but not good enough to replace my current gloves. While this is still poverty league, some things still sell pretty well.
I am spending most of my time down in the mines still, because there is a brisk business in fossils and resonators, especially now that you cannot passively earn azurite. I expect these to go up in price the longer the league goes, and essentially right now I cash them in whenever I need more divines to buy something. I guess I should figure out what I actually care enough about to buy going forward. I have started doing some heist in the vague attempt that I can get a good ring base to craft on. My rings are not in the best shape, so that would in theory be the next thing I tackle gear wise. Everything else is good enough… or that the upgrade would be 20+ Divines to replace. You quickly reach a place where all of the cheap and easy upgrades are gone. I should in theory start working on replacing my gems with awakened versions.
Over in Destiny Rising, I bumped my Maru high enough to start doing Grandmaster content, and Ace and I got together last night to run through four of our keys. I played Maru one round and Helhest the next round, and then we alternated as we did a few strikes. We tried Gauntlet Blitz, but it was super painful… and scarred us to the point where we did not want to try it again. I think maybe the Grandmaster mode of the new Blitz encounters are a bit overtuned. We got the one where you fight the giant eyeball and we just could not chip away at its health, and everyone kept dying. Strikes on the other hand felt WAY easier, so we instead did two of those and called it good.
I actually managed to get two exotic weapon mods that matched the perks of the Grenade Launcher that I have been using. This is definitely a massive boon for Maru, but will also pull my wolf up a bit as well since I have swapped to using Sweet Business on him instead of the Grenade launcher. I ran out of resources but at some point I will hopefully pull this the rest of the way to +10 on each of the mods. My next step is probably to push the primary weapon slot grenade launcher to 85, as I really like playing Maru. I know she is the new hotness, but I am having a lot of fun and she lives in this weird happy place between how sturdy Jolder is and how squishy Helhast has been. The on demand shield ability helps a ton when it comes to staying alive during content.
After grouping together I went downstairs and started up Delicious in Dungeon/Dungeon Senshi on my television and watched several episodes while playing Path of Exile. I had made it pretty far in the series watching the subtitled version, but decided to restart it entirely with the dual language version. I’ve basically decided that unless I cannot get the english language version of something… I am always going to wait for it because seemingly most content gets released in both languages anymore. I know there are purists out there, but really… I would prefer to not read television if I can help it. It also means that if it is a language that i understand, I can play games while watching it. This series is pretty great, though I have to admit I do prefer the Japanese language voice actor for Senshi. The rest of the actors though I prefer the English language interpretation. Anyways wrapping this up because I have stuff to do, so that I can get ready for my appointment in town at 9. I hope you have a most wonderful day. The post Oops an Audiobook appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Onslaught with Friends

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Good Morning Folks! Last night I had quite a lot of fun running around in Destiny Rising with Ace and Ammo. Since we had last grouped Ammo had managed to finish up the main storyline which opened access to a whole slew of new activities. She had not experienced Gauntlet Onslaught, aka the raid at all and after taking down the Stronghold we had uncovered for the pack, we queued one by one through all of the parts of it. We also did all of the new Gauntlet Blitz modes that are being previewed right now, and have guaranteed weapon drops associated with them. It was a heck of a lot of fun, and while we struggled a bit with Issakkis, in finding a group that could do the mechanic… we cleared everything without much issue. We did fail once at breakin, but shifted our strategy to make sure that I was on the first bridge crew, and Ace was on the last bridge crew… because we had someone take a key on that last round and just mill around killing random stuff.
The big highlight of the night is that I finally pulled the Renegade ghost shell on my main account, which drops from the raid. I also pulled a second copy of Izanagi’s Burden, which will allow me to progress that weapon at some point for Tan-2 and Umeko. Though to be honest, if I am going to play a precision character I am almost always going to be bringing Helhest. I really love Maru the new champion and am working on leveling her up so that she can become one of my mains for progressing content. I needed someone that I really liked that could handle spread shinkas and she does so masterfully. I think Ace and I are going to hang out tonight and do some of the weekly reset content, and maybe tomorrow during the day a bit since I am off due to the holiday. I have business to take care of in the morning but should be home by noon and ready to roll.
Over in Path of Exile, it was a weekend of finishing things up. I ended the weekend with 115 of 115 maps completed, my four voidstones, and all of the map favorites unlocked except Sirius and the Feared. At some point I will run Sirius, but I have not done enough maps to gain the fragments yet. I just bought fragments for the other ones, and I guess I could do the same for Sirius but it did not feel that pressing. I’ve also completed a t17 which unlocked my six socket map device, and have started running proper maps loaded with scarabs and everything. Right now I am alternating between Shipyard and Toxic Sewer, because both are fairly decent maps for the type of gameplay I play… and not too bad honestly for the breach mechanic. They both offer at least some modicum of bottlenecking for the times when you have to defend Ailith.
When I dinged 96, I devoted some time to running through a bunch of boss encounters and I completed the pinnacle fight for Breach, where you fight both Not-Tul and Not-Esh together. I am not sure if it is always Tul and Esh or if you sometimes get the other combinations of the Breachlords that are not Chayula. The story of this Breach league is really interesting and I love how it is essentially setting up the events that ultimately lead to the coming of Xesht in Path of Exile II. I would love it if we got more of these betweener leagues that move the story forward for each league’s content. For example I would love an updated version of Abyss that brings us closer to what it is like in Path of Exile II, because it is SO MUCH better than defacto Abyss that we currently have. The only league I am scared about them changing is Delve, but that is mostly because I love it so much that I do not want them to fuck it up and make it no longer fun for me.
I’ve been slowly working on my build while leveling my character towards 100, and I picked up a Foulborn Red Dream jewel, which is helpful this league for stacking life. As a result I have almost 8000 life, and there are some other things that I could do to push it higher. Pohx showcased a version of his build running 10k life, and I effectively need to swap from Immortal Flesh to a well crafted Stygian Vise to get there. This was a rather costly swap because the jewel itself was 2 divines, and then each of the five tattoos needed was around 70 chaos. That said… I’ve never run Righteous Fire with this much health so it is at least worth doing for the time being. I feel a bit squishier than I have in previous incarnations of RF, and I am not entirely certain what is going on there. It might be that I currently only have 30% reduced crit damage. I am contemplating swapping in a Taste of Hate to also get more phys to elemental conversion.
I am also still working on getting some better gear upgrades. On the Tree Tree I am working on crafting a new pair of gloves, because while my current ones are pretty solid and I have yet been unable to replace them… I could also have way more life on them. I am still fairly proud of the Archedemon Crown and Shaper Shield that I crafted. I bought a new sceptre which I picked up fairly cheaply, and recently swapped over to a Cloak of Flame with more ignite duration, more fire resistance, and 5% reduced fire damage taken which is super useful. At some point I would love to get a good corruption for Annihilation’s Approach boots, but the best one is super expensive thanks to Pohx’s video about them. My amulet and rings are all sort of trash and could be improved greatly, but it really depends upon how much currency I want to pour into them. Now that I am delving around 200 depth reliably and running t16s easily, I can start generating way more currency.
The other thing that I added was a Light of Meaning, buffing fire damage. I lost some damage in the swap to the Red Dream jewel because I had to give up a jewel with fire multi on it. This single jewel swap pushed me well past where I was originally with the damage and took the entire build up into the 1.5 million-ish range, making the boss fights way more comfortable and the general mapping and delving way faster. Right now I have a jewel with Fire Multi and Max Fire Res on it, and swapping that for one with max life would be helpful… but those are running around 10 div at the moment and I do not have that. I tried the Sir Gog method of crafting Jewels with the Tree Tree for a bit, and didn’t have much luck. I have way more luck printing gloves, so I am back on that path for now. Essentially I am looking for gloves with 21% regen, 100+ flat life, 45+ fire res, 58+ dex… and then anything else that is useful life. I’ve gotten close a few times and have sold the failures. If I get a 21% regen fractured roll I might try either fossil crafting or harvest crafting to get the rest of the way there.
I am basically at the point in the league where I need to start chipping away at achievements so I can get my totem pole. The build is stable and reliable, and I can pretty much do any content on it. I am fishing for an Aul in Delve, but have not had much luck. One thing that I have noticed is that I think they have killed the curse on hit rings from Delve, either that or made them extremely uncommon. I’ve cleared a bunch of the elemental nodes down there and not seen a single one yet. I always beeline for these because they also reward elemental fossils, which I find way more useful than any of the loot other than the curse rings. According to the trade site, they still exist… but have either had their rarity cranked or my luck has just been shit. The death of Hexblast Mines though, pretty much decimated the market for these so it is not like they were selling well anyways. I used to throw 20c on each of them in the hopes that maybe one of them would move, but given the deflation of this league it seems like they are all around 1c each.
In other unrelated news… I have been watching Frieren for the last few weeks and finished up season one on Saturday. This show is extremely delightful and I highly suggest giving it a watch if you like that D&D party vibe. I would say it has thematic notes aligned with Delicious in Dungeon/Dungeon Meshi except it is effectively the tale in reverse. Frieren was the Mage for a party that defeated the Demon King, and a huge part of the show is going on another adventure to somewhat retrace the steps that the first party made. Elves are effectively immortal in this universe, so the march of time just works differently for her… and the decade spent partying together… felt like a brief interaction for her. Through retracing the steps she is effectively realizing what she missed. You would think this would make the show deeply melancholy but it isn’t really, and through retracing the steps… she realizes how special the first journey was. Super charming honestly, and well worth a watch of the first 28 episodes. I will be anxiously awaiting the drop for season 2. The post Onslaught with Friends appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

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.