Death Stuff

Ineffective Cosplay

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Good morning folks. This is going to be one of those blog posts that does not get syndicated widely, because it is going to be a bummer. Last night I fell asleep on the couch around 7ish… went to bed around 8pm… and then slept until almost 7 am. This represents probably the longest I have slept in years. I feel like the wheels are falling off now. Technically I am still functional. I am getting up and showing, feeding myself, doing responsible work things, and making sure the house stays at moderate levels of cleanliness… but I feel like I am not really living. I am still chipping away at the giant mess in the garage, and am about halfway through. Essentially the north side is finished with cabinets set up and things moved into them… and I need to attack the south side and effectively do the same. I have a pile of shit in the garage that at some point I will call the folks to haul away. I can’t say with all certainty that nothing brings me joy… but more… I have forgotten what joy feels like. I feel like I have been cosplaying someone who has their shit together in the whole “fake it until you make it” genre… but I am just not sure if I will ever get there. This week is hard. It is fall break for all of the schools in Oklahoma, and I did not even know this until a coworker asked for it off to spend time with his family. This was always a big week for us and we almost always had some sort of project going on that we would complete. If nothing else it was a time when I took off from work and we spent quality time together. We would often go for trips elsewhere like down to Dallas, up to Kansas City, or over to St Louis to visit friends. I could do all of these things… but I just don’t really feel like doing so. Last Friday was really hard too, because there was a cookout essentially in honor of my wife… but not having her… made the social interaction almost unbearable. People talk about having emotional support animals… but my wife was my emotional support human and I miss her greatly. No matter how uncomfortable a situation got… I always had her, and I always knew that she understood that my skin was crawling and that I wanted to run into the night screaming at the top of my lungs. How do you condense 30 years of moments shared… into even beginning to rebuild that connection with anyone else? I feel like my life is over… and I am just this shambling husk that remains, because all of the good that was in me was sucked out the night I came out of the bathroom and found her making that awful gurgling noise on the couch. My life ended on July 2nd… and everything that I am doing now… is just a vague attempt at distracting me from that fact. Another thing that is really hard… is that in theory they should have installed the gravestone last week. There is a certain finality in that act. Like until that happened it almost wasn’t “really real”. I’ve not gone up to check, because its a two hour drive away, and I am not even sure if I should be doing that drive by myself. I had been waiting on a call from the funeral home to let me know that it was installed… but they have also been pretty much incompetent at every step of this process. They did not tell me when the death certificates were available, did not tell me when the final death certificates were available, and did not tell me when they had a mock-up of the tombstone ready for me to review. If I did not have a “fuck this is taking forever” moment at each step… I would not have gotten any of the information. So basically… I have Schrodinger’s tombstone right now… and the only way I am going to know for certain is if I make the drive. I’ve not gone to the grave site… since the day we buried her because… there has never felt like much of a point. She is not there anymore. My wife herself firmly believed that, and thought the whole visiting graves thing was a bit weird. I mean if she is anywhere… she would be here since she died in the driveway. Not that I understand the mechanics of hauntings mind you… but it would seem like the place someone dies would be more potent than the place where their remains end up. I know at some point I will need to go. I will need to at least for the sake of her family make the effort of decorating her grave, since they all seem to care deeply about that sort of thing. I am agnostic at best… and atheist at worst… and I have always struggled with the rituals of a predominantly evangelical society. I know I have people who are willing to be there for me… but what they can offer me… isn’t what I need. I need my wife back. I have friends who are pushing me to get back into therapy. Essentially how the free therapy works is that you get five sessions per instance. In theory I could just keep making up a reason for why I need therapy, because it is only ever dealt with at the inception of the therapy… and not during the sessions themselves. It did help… but only those first three of five sessions or so. I think I might just be going through a low spot with the changing of the seasons and the coming of the season of darkness. I’ve never had seasonal affective disorder… my wife had that… and I have always cursed the existence of the sun. However maybe I do need to get out more and at least pretend I am a daywalker. I am trying to get out and about more on the weekends, but mostly just because I have things I need to get done. I know today I am going to run to the recycling place because it was entirely too full on Sunday, and I never unloaded the boxes from my truck. Maybe I just needed to cry for awhile. I have been doing so while I write this post, and am honestly feeling a bit better as a result. Unfortunately crying is not one of those things that you can just sort of force to happen. Maybe I needed to get some of the sadness out of me. I will say that I would be completely lost if not for Gracie and how needy of attention she is. So many of the things I did… because I was trying to take care of my wife. Without her… it just doesn’t feel like there is a point to doing any of them. I have mostly been going through the motions because the routines are familiar… but there is no passion behind it anymore. I think I am going to cut this blog post off, because if you have read down to this point… you are a real one. I am not sure if I have been lying to you… when I say that I am fine… or if this week just got to be too much and I fell apart. I am broken, and I have to admit that I am broken. I just am not sure if I will ever be fixed. The post Ineffective Cosplay appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Yon Bus of Struggle

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I am getting around to posting a bit later than normal today, because I am a bit sick and fighting some generic respiratory crud. I think it is largely allergies because we are in Ragweed season… and it is by far my worst allergy. I also kicked up a bunch of dust last week in the garage and think I am paying for it. I am struggling a bit right now and find myself in a bit of a funk where nothing seems to “fit right”. I am certain I am dealing with a depression, because how could I not after losing my spouse earlier this year. There is likely no way I got out of that without mental and emotional baggage that I am dealing with pretty regularly. My emotions feel like a scalded tongue… that I cant quite taste things in the way that I used to before. Joy is hard to find… and I keep wandering back and forth between things without much luck. The other day Tipa commented “I don’t know how you fit so much into your day!” and the secret is… I keep bouncing around like mad between a dozen different things and never really making much traction in any of them. I also have no other human to suggest that I do something other than desperately look for something to kill the time.
I am still popping into Destiny Rising each day to play some of the various daily activities, but this is honestly a game that I find myself enjoying the most when Ace and I happen to connect with our schedules at the same time. I am doing the thing that is very familiar in Gacha games where I am trying not to spend any currency and bank it up, so that when the next character banner drops I can immediately purchase a bunch of pulls for it. I am 16 away from the five star choice on the default banner, and whenever I hit that, I am likely going to choose Ning Fei so I have an Arc Champion that is actually pretty decent. Mostly I am chipping away at various lore tasks from different champions and forcing myself to do the planetary dailies on Ikora just to get them done. I think my favorites are still Jolder and Estela right now… with Gwynn and Umeko being close in the running. Wolf has sadly been relegated to the sidelines, and I actually started playing some Tan-2 to get used to the way that he plays a bit.
In Diablo 4 I have officially respecced to the proper endgame build, but am still lacking some of the components. It gave me a bit of survival so that Torment III is now as comfortable as Torment II was previously. Bossing on T3 is still a bit of a crapshoot and depends upon the type of damage that a given boss is dealing. My resistances are still complete crap, and I should probably work on that. The biggest challenge that I am having at the moment is that everything I am doing… feels like a complete waste of time. I need two things… an Ancestral Vasily’s Prayer, and an Ancestral Tibault’s Will. The first comes specifically from Echo of Varshan which means I need to be running Whisper caches to get keys for that. The second is a general drop unique and can come specifically from anywhere… but specifically is apparently on Andariel and Harbinger of Hatred loot pools. The challenge in both cases is that it feels like Ancestral gear drops so freaking infrequently. The above image shows a T3 Beast in the Ice drop pool… with zero ancestrals dropping which is pretty much the norm.
Mostly I have been focused on chipping away at various seasonal trappings like the challenges, battlepass, and the Reign of Chaos quest chain. The amount of farming required to finish the last bit… seems excessive. I feel like Blizz has made the determination that they need to slow things down… to eek more player engagement out of a season, when in truth Season 7 was the best… because it felt like a really fun weekend, similar to how Diablo III seasons used to feel. The game is not detailed enough to be played in a manner like Path of Exile… so any slowing of things down just feels like overstaying its welcome. Wouldn’t you rather have your players saying “wow that was a blast, can’t wait for next season” instead of trying to decide if they give a crap enough to keep grinding. I am rapidly the approaching the point where I am questioning how much I still care.
Legion Remix starts next week on the 7th, and as a result I have been trying to poke my head back into World of Warcraft in an attempt to get into the swing of things. Friends… I really want to finish up the War Within campaign but I am finding it so hard to care about anything that is going on. I tried again last night, and I was just checking boxes off a spreadsheet in the way that I was engaging with the content. I am playing my Dark Iron Dwarf that I rolled during the Pandaria remix event, and honestly… I like playing a defensive warrior about as much as I like playing anything else. The combat though… just feels so much less interesting than it does in Guild Wars 2, which is the game I have mostly been mainlining in the MMORPG world for awhile. I think mostly movement just feels bad, since at its core… World of Warcraft is just prettier Everquest and there is not any real action elements of my movement that factor into how combat resolves. So long as I am in rage of the target and my bounding box is connected to their bounding box… mashing a button makes a thing happen. It does somewhat make me worry how Legion Remix is going to land… but regardless I am still going to give it a shot I think.
In other things happening on the 7th… the Monster Hunter Wilds crossover event is opening in Final Fantasy XIV. I thought this might have been a good signal to get back into the game and quest through things… given that I have not really played actively other than logging in to keep my house active since the patch that dropped the Arcadion. As a result I am fully decked out in that gear… but am going to be yet again… too short to ride the ride since the Guardian fight is going to require 725 gear. This is the thing that I always hate the most about playing Final Fantasy XIV, is that when it comes time for a new expansion… my gear is never good enough to make it through all of the content without either grinding a bunch… or buying my way out of the problem. I hate having to buy a crafted set from the auction house to bail my ass out for having not played reliably during the patch cycle. Since Stormblood… I have basically been a player that plays heavily at the beginning of an Expansion, and then returns at the very end of one… and it is honestly a play pattern that feels like crap because of the required catch up. Even Gacha games every so often throw you a bone with a full set of gear that is good enough to do whatever the latest content drop is.
Since you have made it this far, and listened to me whine about my frustrations and struggle to get attached to anything right now… I will reward you with another photo of Gracie. So often when I am gaming anymore, she will crawl up on the headrest of my new office chair and complain that I am not giving her attention. I am just looking for anything right now that gives me some focus.. and ultimately delays me thinking about the fact that my human is gone. I could be out doing things with friends… but I feel way more “alone” when I am out in public than I do when I am finding something to distract me at home. I spent a lot of time alone since shifting to remote work… but I almost never left the house without my spouse. So going into the world… makes me realize all that I am lacking and missing. There are a lot of things that I want to do around the house, but I end up in ADHD logjams while trying to do them. Mostly I am just trying to keep moving the needle forward with small amounts of progress every single day. Anyways… if you have made it this far. Thanks for reading. The post Yon Bus of Struggle appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Bears and Blunderbusses

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Morning Folks. It rained most of the day and so far it seems like the fix from the roofers is working. That said, it has only ever leaked when it was torrential rain, and instead we got a light drizzle. I finally washed the towels, but here is a picture of Gracie guarding against leaks. Yesterday was a lot. Not only did I have the fasting blood draw that I talked about yesterday, but I was trying to deal with a bunch of “death stuff” as I collectively call it. Namely I have had a few checks come in that were in my spouse’s name… after I had done what I thought was the right thing and removed her name from our banking accounts. It seems as though I will have to file a case with the probate court and create an “estate” account in order to cash these now… something that at a bare minimum will cost me $200 just for file the paperwork, let alone whatever I will need to pay a lawyer to draw up said paperwork. Thus far the checks don’t even total $100… so this is not likely something I will be doing. I dealt with a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff yesterday, including calling the medical examiner to see if they have finally given a proper cause of death…. which they have… but now I am waiting for official death certificates. All of this… extremely fucking draining.
The absolute high point of my evening was hanging out with my virtual sibling Ace and doing some Destiny Rising. We essentially hung out together and ground out a bunch of strikes, until we were both completely out of pinnacle currency… and then ran a few after that for good measure. For whatever reason we seemed to keep getting The Pit over and over, and stumbled onto a weird glitch in the matrix. It seems that if you have gone down the path of becoming a Mentor… your light requirement is higher for queuing for heroics than when you were a “New Light”. This seems exceptionally lame, and led to a scenario to where they could not queue as anything other than Estela, the champion that they have most recently poured resources into to bump up. This was a bit annoying when one of the dailies involved killing things with a void champion, and they could not play one.
My highest light champion is Jolder, which I am largely still maining. However Estela, Wolf, and Umeko are all pretty close in ranking. I’ve still not really found an Arc champion that I enjoy very well, and I am hoping that maybe the next premium banner will bring one that is a bit more enjoyable to play than anything I have gotten so far. Ace pulled the Arc Staff guy and said that so far they seem pretty fun. I am not too far from the Mythic choice pity on the normal banner, so in theory I will likely pick him as my choice when it comes down to that. I really wish that the banner was just for pulling additional copies of champions for powering them up, and that there was a way to unlock every champion by default through a quest chain or something. It really feels like that sort of thing would better serve a game like Destiny Rising, where so much of the game is based on team composition.
Yesterday was the launch of Diablo IV Season 10, and I rolled a new character to see how the game has progressed since I last paid attention to it. I’ve sat out the last few seasons and for the most part… everything is perfectly cromulent. I heard that the pulverize druid was really strong, so I ended up rolling one of those. I think the challenge that both Druid and Barbarian have is that they feel sort of awful to play early game… but become godlike in the late game. So you have to suffer a bit until your build comes online. I am very thankful that at some point in the past I spent money on a nice looking cosmetic set… because the base druid vibe is not really my thing. I wish there was a way to just run around in Werebear form all of the time, because that shit is awesome. I feel like this is missing out on something significantly here. The game would be better if you could just always be Werebear or Werewolf.
I have not made it super far, but I am also not really rushing it. This morning my build started to come a bit more online and the Druid as a whole is feeling much better as I am now in my 20s. I figure this is going to be something that I poke out off and on until I hit the level cap and build a reasonable build. That said… when a new Path of Exile season drops I am abandoning this. Additionally I know that Legion Remix is happening early in October and it is likely that if I have not hit the level cap and am farming the endgame by the time that comes out… D4 is also getting dropped in favor of that. I’ve contemplated firing up World of Warcraft and trying to get caught up on the story there, but it still just doesn’t really feel right. I am interested in a lot of the things that are going on in that game, but am not sure I am really in the mood for a traditional MMORPG experience.
New World on the other hand seems to be clicking pretty well. I’ve swapped back to my level 65 main on Pangaea and spent a bit of time just roaming around and getting used to the combat again. Mostly it is muscle memory that came back extremely quickly. One of my favorite aspects of the game has always been roaming around and harvesting resources, and I am starting to do that again. I did figure out how to upgrade gear, but the process is confusing and arduous and nowhere near as clear as it used to be. I think Amazon Game studios suffers from some poor game design at times… and there are weird gates for things that should be more accessible. The whole concept of needing to craft dungeon keys for example seems to still be a thing, and it is weird that you would not want your players just playing your content all of the time. This is especially fraught given the great experiences we have had recently with the Fractal Incursion event in Guild Wars 2.
All of that said, there are some pretty solid crafted gear options and I think in the short term I am going to focus more on leveling up my tradeskills. Ultimately I would need to push things up to 250 in order to craft the best stuff, and a lot of my harvesting abilities are already climbing past 200. I am in no rush to do any of this, but I am interested to see what the new content that drops looks like. The biggest problem I have had with the evolution of New World, is that it has removed zones from the game in order to rework them as something else. I am hoping this new zone is actually that… new territory to be explored that has never existed in the game before. That is not to say that I don’t think that the reworked zones are not good steps… but games need to expand… not just be revised to death. Anyways. That is my yesterday. Today I am back at work like normal and will probably futz around with Diablo IV some more this evening and see if I can get closer to the level cap. The post Bears and Blunderbusses appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.