Good Morning Folks. Today is the launch of the Legacy of Phrecia event in Path of Exile, and I will be participating this evening whenever I get a chance to log in. However this morning since I don’t have much gaming wise to talk about, I am going to share the current state of my world, which is effectively snowbound. On the 18th starting at roughly 9 am in the morning we started getting ice which then transitioned into snow, and effectively did not stop until the morning of the 19th. I do not for certain know how many inches that we ended up getting, but it was a very dry snow and as such blew everywhere forming some pretty significant snow drifts. My wife made a valiant attempt to keep the front porch clear… which would last for maybe 20 minutes before it was fully covered again. Side note… there is an over 2 foot drop off our porch and you can barely tell it in this photo.
When it gets cold like this, our immediate concern is the little tribe of feral cats that call our neighborhood home. We have a box in the front and a box in the back… and at least one of them took advantage of this momentary respite. We also have a large deck in the backyard that we have created some artificial breaks along the edge of so that they can get out of the wind. There is also a series of rabbit burrows under two bushes in the backyard, which is I think where at least one of them goes when it gets super cold. Basically we were super worried because for the 18th and the morning of the 19th we saw zero sign of feral activity. There was a brief blip on the camera where we saw one of them jump into the above box… and I have to admit I was scared to death I would find a body in there in the morning when it got down into the negatives.
The first to make her way out was Tripod, the three legged calico cat that calls our backyard home. We cannot get anywhere near her, but she was hungry enough that her fear went out the window as she approached me to get at the pile of food. She meowed at me to go back inside and I obliged so that she could eat in peace. We had swept a little clear spot so that we could feed, and the wind had died down yesterday so that we were not getting quite the amount of drifting. She came back and visited a few times eating most of the pile of food.
What she did not eat… went to the birds. It was not until I started putting food out for the ferals that I realized just how much the birds also love cat food. My wife gets annoyed at the influx of birbs, but I have zero problem feeding them as well. Our backyard is full of songbirds during the springtime as a result of our home being a regular unintentional feeding ground. Thankfully it looked like Tripod got most of the food, and the birbs just came down and vacuumed up what was left over. Birds do not care about food getting wet, so they serve the important role of cleaning up anything that the cats don’t want to eat. Negative side effect however… is we do have to clean bird droppings off our lawn chairs.
Shortly after Tripod made her appearance in the backyard, Greybie made his presence known in the front yard. Basically I am waiting for them to make an appearance before putting out food, and if today follows the pattern that yesterday did I will be feeding them around noonish when the sun comes out and is warm. Greybie spent most of the day lounging on the sisal rug and soaking up the rays, and I was surprised that I did not see the little black void cat that also frequents the front porch at the same time. We tried putting out on of the fleece warming pads that the indoor cats use… but he wanted none of it and started laying on the cold rock until we went back out and retrieved it. Mostly each time we went out he just wanted some pets, because while skittish… he is the one feral that we can actually touch. I doubt we could ever bring him inside though… because periodically he still runs like hell from us.
It was not until yesterday evening though that the void cat made her appearance known. She is so close to being friendly… she occasionally dive bombs my legs while I am feeding them but also runs if she notices me giving her attention. She will stand off the porch and meow at me which I take is her quietly asking me to go back inside so she can eat in peace. We saw all of our feral babies yesterday, so we know they all managed to find someplace warm enough to get through the cold night. Last night was colder, so once again I am sitting here fretting and worrying. So I hope they follow a similar pattern to what they did yesterday and we start seeing them around noon. I will be periodically checking the cameras so that I can pop out and give them some food whenever they make their presence known.
We did not really get any significant melt yesterday, but it is supposed to be nice and sunshiny today so at some point we need to go out and help the cars get cleared so that we can get out if we need to. I work remotely pretty much every day, but my wife has been remote most of this week as well. Technically we could probably go well over a month without leaving the house between the fridge, freezer, pantry, and chest freezer in the garage. So it is not like we are desperate for anything, and we did a minor bit of stocking up right before this hit. We were given plenty of warning and also given that the estimates were everything from 4 inches to 14 inches… we had no clue what it would end up looking like. For you northern climates… you have to understand we have zero infrastructure for this sort of thing as it maybe happens once every five years. I don’t even own a snow shovel, because I have never needed to regularly clear my driveway. Generally speaking any time we do get snow… within 24 hours most of it will be gone. This whole staying around zero for multiple days in a row thing is relatively rare.
By next week it is supposed to be back in the 60s and 70s… so Snowmageddon will be a fading memory. I am sure I will be sharing notes throughout the day as our Ferals come out and start moving around. Until I see them though I will still be worried that they made it through the night okay.
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Good Morning Folks. We had one of those weird early morning deliveries before I woke up, and I was too slow removing the box from the bar after unpacking it. As a result… Josie now lives here. I spent most of last night snuggling with this goober while Gracie was on my legs. Especially now that it is getting colder, as soon as I sit still for more than a few minutes I end up with a cat. I am perfectly okay with this reality because truth be told I could use snuggles. Mollie pretty much lives in my office and when I got upstairs this morning she was ready for attention and is now sitting beside me. I feel like there is a periodic cat tax that must be paid on this blog and you can never say I did not provide.
I had every intent to spend my evening continuing the process of unlocking maps and progressing my way through the atlas in Path of Exile. That did not happen, because we had an extended maintenance as they attempted to roll out their new account system. This did not go smoothly. Essentially the QA process did not notice that once they expanded the length of accounts… by adding a numerical bit on the end of them for differentiation purposes… it would then jam up the login process that was strictly limited to 27 characters. I greatly appreciate the level of transparency they gave us in this post, and apparently, they are going to make another run at it on Sunday/Monday. These are all requirements for the eventual start of the Path of Exile 2 Early Access next month.
Instead of playing Path of Exile, I fell back into Veilguard and thankfully quickly sorted out what I was doing the last time I played. I did a round of cleaning up companion missions and then played through the Arlathan Forest main story quest that I had been avoiding. This produced the cutscene that I was expecting where essentially I got prior notice that we were just about to reach the point of no return. I’ve always been thankful when a Bioware game gives me one of these not-subtle reminders that I better do anything I might want to do before going into a big world-state-changing sequence. Of course… immediately following this a whole new round of companion quests opened up which will keep me busy for another night or two.
In other news, Guild Wars 2 released this banger of a trailer coinciding with its release on the Epic Game Store. It feels weird that they are specifically launching on the EGS after having already launched on Steam, but hopefully, they are getting some of that sweet sweet Tim Sweeny payola for going through the effort. Regardless of how I feel about the EGS… this is a fucking amazing trailer. This is how they should have sold the game years ago. It really nails the high points of the game as it is today and if I was not already a player… this would have been the sort of thing that would have inspired me to give it a shot.
They also released the trailer for the next content drop called Godspawn. The big part of this that I need to start prepping for is doing dailies in order to build back up my Wizard Chore currency so that I can hopefully buy another legendary weapon box when the store refreshes on the 19th. I had fallen out of the habit of doing dailies, but I really should get back into that habit in the coming week. The currency builds up really freaking fast so I should be able to buy that box pretty quickly after its release. At this point, I have crafted four legendary weapons, and this content drop releases a new Legendary Spear which I am interested to see what that requires.
Other than that… I might be backpedaling on nuking my Twitter account. My friend Ashgar raised a valid point yesterday, and I have until the end of the month to decide one way or the other. Essentially over most of the last decade, I have used Twitter as my defacto home on the internet. As a result, my blog is littered with references to my Twitter account. This means that I need to sift through 3700 blog posts and their duplicates on AggroChat and replace all of those links… or just turn back on my account and lock it down in a state of dormancy. I am not sure which option I will go with yet. My twitter profile has enough search engine traction that it is not unlikely for someone to snag it and put annoying bullshit on it. Apparently, this happened to a bunch of artists when they left twitter and their accounts got snagged by crypto-scammers. This is not a thing I want associated with my name, even on a platform I have moved past.
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Good morning folks. The last few days have been pretty hard to get through, and as such I have not blogged. I am still here and I am still okay-ish. I figured we could all use something cute, so I am starting off this post with my snuggling goobers. I’ve spent most of my time downstairs with my kiddos the last two evenings and it is not uncommon for them to arrange themselves in this pattern with Josie snuggled up against my arm and Gracie laying between my arm and over onto my chest. I always feel bad that I end up with two cats where my wife often has zero… but occasionally Mollie will get brave and go snuggle with her… which never lasts terribly long because Mollie is insane. I’ve said a few things on social media, but basically, my faith in humanity right now is non-existent and I am just trying to truck along.
One of the things that has swept through my friend group is Pokemon TCG Pocket, so I have been playing around a bit with that. Effectively this is the Hearthstoneification of Pokemon just like MTG Arena was mostly that for Magic the Gathering. Quite honestly though I feel like this is a more effective port to mobile because it fixes one of the problems that Magic and Pokemon both have. I’ve always hated how Land and Energy cards work mechanically, and I greatly preferred the Hearthstone mechanic of just getting one mana/energy per turn to use as you choose. I feel like Magic would be far better served by having a spells deck and a land deck, and you drew one card from each every turn. Anyway, the thing with Pokemon is that I largely missed out on it. I played a bit of the early WOTC days of it before the fad really hit, and have maybe 1000 cards or so lying around somewhere from those first four sets.
Pokemon was something that my Nieces and Nephews grew up playing, and less so something that I actually experienced myself. I played through Blue on a Gameboy Emulator in 1999 but had not touched another Pokemon anything until the release of X and Y. To this day I have still only ever beaten Blue, because I seem to care more about the acquisition of Pokemon than I actually do the battling system. Right now with Pokemon TCG Pocket for Android and Apple, I mostly seem to care about opening my daily packs. I have however played through enough battles to understand the flow of the game. I’ve made a few custom decks that perform well against the basic AI, but largely get ripped to shreds when I fight human opponents. Building a deck with only twenty cards is a bit odd mechanically, and I feel like I am missing a lot of cards that would allow me to bump things up a notch.
If you are playing around with this as well, you should absolutely friend me. I legitimately don’t fully understand what the benefits are other than you get some sort of currency when you interact with your friend’s stuff. At some point, the game is going to be adding trading support, so I think this will be much more interesting when that happens. For example, I have pulled four Charizard EX cards and I do not need them all. I would rather have Venasaur Ex as I am on the Bulbasaur team all day long. Pulling packs is a bit odd because each of the different package designs has a slightly different distribution of cards so it legitimately matters if you choose the Mewtwo, Charizard, or Pikachu design based on what you are trying to get. I spent a lot of time pulling for Grass Pokemon in the Mewtwo design, and have shifted to trying to get some Electric types out of the Pikachu packs.
Recently I was up at my folk’s house and they had unearthed these two M.U.S.C.L.E figures from the 80s. I am hoping that given time, they might uncover the rest of them because I freaking loved these things. “The Claw” as we referred to it was easily the most sought-after one in my childhood circles, and I am pretty sure there was another one that we referred to as “Human Hand” that was essentially just that. I also remember the Chibi ones being super popular, but mostly I would just love to see them all again. There are so many random artifacts of my childhood that remained in my bedroom… but my folks then mostly piled a bunch of other crap in there. They only had to start removing stuff because the floor literally started collapsing due to water damage. So I have no clue what was lost and what still remains unscathed. I’ve seen my long box of comics, and it seems to largely be intact.
I know I shared this on social media, but I am not sure I ever posted it on the blog. Another thing that I reclaimed was these skate decks. There is one missing from the bunch that I had, but I have no clue what happened to it. It used to be in the back of my Honda Civic, so at some point, someone might have relieved me of it. I would love to have a pristine copy of that Jason Jesse Neptune deck, but they are a bit too rich for my tastes as the re-released copy from a few years ago is rather expensive. It currently goes on eBay for around $700, which seems silly for something I am just going to hang on the wall. Instead, I am going to hang my extremely battered original deck somewhere in my office at some point.
Anyways… I figured two days off was way too long without some sort of a blog post. Not that I had a ton of things to say this morning, but I needed to get back into the rhythm of actually posting things.
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Good Morning Folks! I had a bit of a crazy day yesterday. I took the day off from work, but it was to ferry my dad around to some doctor’s appointments which meant a lot of rushing around and a lot of driving. When I got home I opted to crash on the couch and return to my audiobook while playing some Path of Exile. This really is my happy place, and I am glad to be returning to it because there is just something about listening to an audiobook while plugging away in an ARPG. It also helped greatly that shortly after I nested downstairs with my laptop, I had Josie join me and snuggle up beside me, and then shortly after that Gracie came and laid on my legs. Legit… not sure there is a more perfect evening that could have been had.
I’ve been working my way through the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi. I think for most folks this might have been the first series they read from this author, but for me… that honor goes to Kaiju Preservation Society earlier this year. I definitely like the author and the style of writing, so I had been holding this series in reserve for something to dive into when I had time to focus on it. So far as I commented on Bookwyrm last night, I think I enjoyed this second book much better than I did the first. The first novel in the series spent a lot of time building the world, and this novel spent a lot more time living in it. It does not hurt that the novel focuses on one of my favorite characters from the first, and continues to flesh out the world of special forces known as the “Ghost Brigades”. It is always hard for me to judge a single novel in a series because my mind tends to focus on the totality of the experience. I love Avengers Endgame for example, but that movie wouldn’t mean anything were it not for the 30 or so odd movies that came before it.
I wrapped up the second novel last night and immediately started my way into the third. This series is doing something that I love when a book series does it. Namely, each book takes a viewpoint from the previous book and pivots to where that is now the primary perspective. This was my favorite thing about the Santiago series from Mike Resnick, in that it would focus on a side character and elevate them to the primary focus of another book. The positive here is that Scalzi does not appear to be a shitbird, and is at least an author I can feel a little bit better about reading. In the first book, we focused on the perspective of a Colony Defense Force Recruit, in the second book the perspective of Special Forces, and this third book is shifting down planet side to the perspective of the Colonials. I only made it I think four chapters in before turning in for the night, but I fully expect tonight to return to my perch on the sofa and pick back up where I left off.
This brings my total books for the year up to twenty-eight, even though I am likely the only one counting. I’m continuing to use my Bookwyrm user profile to track my progress. The original goal that I set for myself this year was twenty books, and I am well past that. I believe there is a third book in Lindsay Ellis’ series coming soon as is I believe another John Gwynne novel and a sequel to Legends and Lattes. I vaguely remember all of these landing around October along with another James Butcher novel. I also have a fat stack of things that I should read, and I am sure I will finish out the year with plenty to do. I took about a three-month gap, but it feels good to be back in the swing of things.
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