Good Morning, Folks. This is Ginger, and we became friends yesterday, while I spent an hour milling around at my mother-in-law’s house waiting for someone. I had an exceptionally busy day that involved travelling about two hours away to sell my RV… that had more or less been sitting and rotting in my mother-in-law’s yard for the last decade unserviced. That was a phase in our lives, largely dictated by my wife and wanting to spend time with her sister… but when said sister passed, we just never used it anymore. Given that my mother-in-law had passed along several suitors looking to buy the RV, I took the hint that she wanted to get it out of her yard. It needs four new tires, a new battery, two new skylights, a resealing of the roof, and probably some work on the slideouts… so I figured I should probably get what I can while I can. With everything else going on in my life, it was so inconsequential that I did not even think about it. I forced my mother-in-law to take a third of the money because she needs it more than I do, and I told her to call it “lot rent”. I would have given her all of the money, but I knew there was no way in hell she would have accepted that.
Last week, we had the Anaheim FanFest for Final Fantasy XIV, and with it came a whole slew of new announcements. The highlight of this, however, was the above cat race. I would love it if we could play as this race… but I sincerely doubt that will be a possibility. Just know that I love these critters and will be spending lots of time in their town. FanFest did what it needed to do and rekindled a spark in me for Final Fantasy XIV. Dawntrail was weird, because while I mostly enjoyed it at the time… the longer it has sat with me, the less I actually liked it. It felt too much like a beach episode in an Anime, because it was wholly disconnected from everything that we had cared about to that point. Maybe it is just that Endwalker stuck the landing so thoroughly that anything after that… was going to feel like a letdown. With the announcement of Evercold, though, we are returning to the FFXIV that I care about… nonsense surrounding the reflections, this time going to the world ravaged by Ice. I am super interested in this whole FFXIV meets Northrend vibe that it has, as well as the Shadow of Colossus thing going on with the Kaiju-sized Automatons roaming around.
Another highlight is seeing this Jollibee Lovely cosplay, which was amazing. I wish we had Jollibee restaurants around here because I have always wanted to try it. The closest ones are five hours away down in Texas. This means I will miss out on getting the charming “Eat Chicken” emote, unless I want to pay the scalpers on eBay who are selling off emote codes. I am really interested to see what the evolved form of the classes that I care about looks like, specifically Warrior. I am honestly kind of amped about the whole concept of only needing to care about item level for one class, but still being able to play all of the others. I always liked leveling all of the jobs, but hated the process of gearing them, so any streamlining of that is going to be phenomenal. The one thing that I did not hear that I wanted to hear badly… is that they were doing away with the way that glamouring currently works. I want a system that collects the appearance when an item drops and then allows me to get rid of it immediately so I can clear out my retainers.
I jumped back into the game and started working my way through the post-Dawntrail content. I have to say it doesn’t really land super well yet, mostly because I did not love the place where the expansion left off. I am hoping that given enough time, I will start to vibe with the content again. One of the things that shocked me, though, was how fast the muscle memory came back. I have not tanked anything since 2024, and after the very first pull in the first dungeon, I was immediately going through the rotations like I knew what I was doing. I guess once those mental pathways have been burned in thoroughly after over a decade of playing the game… they are stuck that way forever. This is going to be something that I poke at over the coming weeks and months because it is not like I am in a massive rush to finish things up, given that we have until January. I might, however, join in the shenanigans on Thursday nights as folks chase moogle tomes.
I’ve also started playing Pragmata, and my lord this is a charming game. Imagine Brock Sampson from Venture Bros… having to keep track of a very precocious child that is always getting into trouble. Essentially, it is the best Resident Evil game I have ever played… if you replaced the zombies with robots. I say that mostly because it is a game about managing resources. You are given very limited quantities of things that hit hard and can take out things quickly, and this is paired with a hacking mechanic that requires you to really think your way through combat encounters. Over time, you get tools to speed this up in the form of an overload that buys you some time to deal with the robots individually, and another mechanic eventually that allows you to autohack things, but this is less efficient than manually hacking. Before long, you are able to chain attacks on every single robot in the vicinity and effectively take them all down at once.
What makes the game so damned charming through is the whole father/daughter relationship that develops between Hugh and “Diana”. Every so often, Diana even draws you pictures of your adventures. In your conversations, there are various things that are said that Diana takes note of. Like one of the first things you teach her is that high fives mean you did a good job, and then from that point forward… she wants high fives after everything. There is also this whole side mission of collecting what are effectively STL files to reprint objects from Earth so that she can learn about them. She is a completely blank slate when you first find her, and through your interactions, she grows and becomes a way more potent teammate as you take down the constant cavalcade of bots.
There are a lot of hilarious moments. Take, for example, the way that Diana learns knowledge by biting down on what are effectively giant SD Cards. There is another thing that regularly happens where, during hacking sequences, Diana will scream a sequence of zeros and ones at the boss. It is a game that does not take itself terribly seriously, but is also quite a bit of fun to play. I think I am probably about halfway through the game, or at least based on the map shown in the game, I am halfway through the known destinations. There is a lot of extra exploration that opens up once you have cleared an area, and at some point, I want to go sweep some of the zone that I have already been through, looking for more collectables and STL files to print stuff for my base. Unfortunately, I am probably going to be putting this game to bed for a few weeks, because I think it will require too much dexterity, and I am going into another chemotherapy week.
With that… I have no clue what my posting schedule is going to look like over the next few days. Round Two was way worse than Round One… and tomorrow I start Round Three of Eight. I am HOPING that things don’t keep scaling as they did between the first two rounds. I know that I am also going to start getting Iron Infusions with every round of Chemo, which should, in theory, slowly improve the anemia. I just know that by Friday of the coming week, I am going to be dead to the world, and the worst days will be Saturday and Sunday…. and slowly I will begin to climb out of that hole next week. I did everything I needed to do to batten down the hatches for another week of lethargy, and I am running out at lunch today to pick up some fresh goods for the coming week. I guess I am saying… I will see you when I see you.
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Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Thalen
Good Morning Folks! We are down a Tam this week and had some topics that were sitting on our list for a bit. We start off talking about the official end of Anthem and the Mark Darrah video that effectively provides an autopsy for the game. Loosely related, we talk about the impending death of New World in January 2027. This forces us down the path of talking about what the heck even makes an MMO anymore, and how we largely agree that it requires random interaction with other players to count. We decided that the lobby-based games are PSOLikes since the first game we can remember that was that way was Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast. From there, we talk a bit about Shape of Dream,s another Roguelike that Ash and Kodra have been playing. Bel shares his thoughts on Legacy of Phrecia 2.0 in Path of Exile, and Kodra shares his endgame thoughts about Path of Exile II. We wrap the show up talking about the impending patch in Guild Wars 2 that is going to add quickplay for raids and the new Fashion Plates adjacent system.
Good Morning Folks. This has been a really weird week for Destiny Rising. Yesterday was “sibling time” and Ace and I did our normal Grandmasters and Hang thing… but it was far less chill than normal. We started the evening with another attempt at Calamity Ops, but still could not get out of the relegation zone. We had what felt like a perfect run, or as close to perfect as we were likely going to be getting… and still came up short of progressing. So in theory on Thursday we will drop down a rank, but so long as we both drop at the same time life should be fine. Hopefully we can have a really good double progression during the next two week period and move back up again. We struggled a bit with our Grandmaster Strike after that but it was nowhere near as bad as our worst week ever so we were doing pretty good. Mostly we both just came off as exhausted and spent the next hour or so chatting while doing random stuff in game.
We’ve also had a really weird week when it comes to the Pack Hunt map. Thankfully we have another guild member that has been helping us out. However until last night, every single three node that could be a stronghold has not turned into one. A few weeks back Ace came up with this theory on how to move around the map and we have been continuing to test that theory, and for the most part I think it works. I can’t say for certain we understand every aspect of it, but there does seem to be a method to the madness when it comes to moving around the map and avoiding large obstacles like mountain ranges and lakes. This is in large part why you see such weird patterns of movement that we have made on the map, because there are a limited number of total moves that we get during a week, so want to try and make as much progress as we can with those.
So essentially the theory is this… the nodes that reward 1000 Energy are always going to lead you in the right direction. This could be just towards a potential stronghold objective, or towards a break in an obstacle wall. if you see 1000 Energy available as a node reward, far as we can tell you ALWAYS want to take it. Next up is if you see three resoruces being rewarded at the same time… this seems to signify one of two things. Either you are going to get a combat node, which often times serve as breaks in obstacles like mountain ranges or lakes… or you are going to for certain uncover a stronghold when you get to a three node block. What you want to avoid however is 500 Energy nodes and single resource nodes, because these often are indicators of a mountain range or another obstacle, or that you are heading towards one. Essentially there seems to be this minesweeper type logic that you can follow to figure out how to route around the map. Sometimes you are going to have to just yolo it and try a node, hoping you find one of the breadcrumb nodes later however because there is not always a good node up to follow.
I have multiple accounts set up for Destiny Rising, in part to help us unlock nodes on the Pack Hunt map, and also gain energy to keep funding the “bitcoin miner” in our guild hall. I spent a good chunk of last night while hanging out and talking with “Erasure” trying to get my second account set up to the point where I have three Iron Commander missions every day, so that I can get an easy 60 pinnacle rewards done for daily progress. At some point I really need to get my third account through the main story so that I unlock more options there as well. I wish we could recruit more people to the cause, so that neither Ace or I felt the need to run alt accounts…. but alas this seems to mostly be a sibling endevour. So long as we can technically keep making things happen with just us forcing it, I am okay with that.
In other news I am probably going to be trying to ease back into Final Fantasy XIV soon. “Erasure” never got through A Realm Reborn, and I have been drafted to the cause of helping her get through some of the content, specifically the content that does not have trust support yet. Some of this is probably going to be doing a bit of nerves bolstering as we queue together for Crystal Tower, so that I can hang out on voice and explain some of the mechanics to make it a bit less fraught. My hope is that this gets me back into the swing of playing my Warrior main, and can start chipping away at the post patch content for Dawntrail. I’ve picked up some gear so that I can move forward in the MSQ, but just need to get back to the point where my muscle memory will take over again.
Anyways. I hope yall are having a most excellent week. I am starting to get worried for next week because I am out due to a colonoscopy, and it is my first one…. so yeah a bit worried about how that will go. I am not sure how much blogging will happen, because it will ultimately depend on where I am both nerves wise and health wise throughout the week.
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Good Morning Folks! I am sort of all over the place when it comes to gaming right now. The primary game that I am playing… is spending time obsessively chatting with “Erasure” and pretty much everything else is falling by the wayside. I have been remembering to log into FFXIV however to collect my weekly cactpot so that is at least something. At some point I want to return to the game and catch up, but nothing has really prompted me to do so. I would also like to play my secondary set of characters over on Dynamis, but I doubt I actually do that until Ace is also in the mood to play the game… which may be never. They were a matched set and we pretty much only played them as sibling time, which was a heck of a lot of fun for awhile until we both wandered off like bored toddlers. I figure my mains on Cactuar I might actually play whenever the next expansion is announced because I tend to have a bump in my desire to play whenever that happens.
I am still playing some Path of Exile II, but I also sort of feel like I have “beaten” that league. I had a lot of fun being a demon bear hopping all around the place blowing things up, but I’ve been kind of getting the itch to finish things up in Path of Exile 1. As a result I spent a chunk of yesterday working on some of the achievements that I left dangling. I respecced away from Incursion and just picked up more Heist stuff on the atlas tree to speed up the total time it takes to run each map. I was working on the meta achievement for running a bunch of super serious mode league content, and have almost finished the step where you have to run 20 Rituals with blood filled containers. I think I have one more of those left, and then I need to figure out one more thing to do in order to finish up that challenge. I set a bunch of mappers running last night, but I have a feeling that I will not be lucky enough to have gotten enough 100% completions in order to knock that meta out. I did just pop in to check and I got 9 completed at 100% so… honestly 15/30 is not too shabby.
I am still playing Destiny Rising, but mostly as a daily maintenance mode game. Essentially I have been focused on trying to uncover a lot of stuff for the guild so that we can keep paying upkeep. I am not playing all three accounts, but I am at very least playing one quite a bit each week. I got my Jaren up to 70k which should be useful so long as we have Fire Damage on the meta for this season. I sort of miss my girl Helhest a bit, and really enjoy when her exotic bow procs and blows a ton of shit up. I also miss Estella being the god empress of all content, but I get that they are wanting to convince people to build new characters. I still absolutely consider this to have been my Game of the Year for 2025 not counting the Fractal Incursion event in Guild Wars 2. It is so damned much fun, I just wish I could convince more of my friends to play it so we could keep upgrading the base without going broke every week.
Something that I have honestly played a lot of this past weekend is Minecraft. I have this dumb habit of making seeds based off my friends and then seeing what they offer. I made a seed based on “Erasure” and it was pretty wild. There was a shipwreck beside where I spawned into the world, tons of sea turtles everywhere, some surface lava, and forests as far as the eyes can see. While I once did a Hardcore Minecraft series, I mostly just play casually. In fact I tend to go tweak a bunch of the world settings so that I don’t have to care about getting sleep every night to prevent phantoms from spawning, and also make it so that creepers cannot blow up my hard work. So in truth these days I plan on pretty fucking softcore mode, and I am fine with that. I like milling around in the world and building dumb things.
Of course the biggest challenge of a new spawn is finding that initial coal. The last world that I created was so forested and so devoid of coal, that I had to start burning logs to get my initial start. This world however, within a few blocks of the side of that initial hill I struck the motherlode of coal deposits and was able to make two full stacks of torches. This was more than enough to fuel most of my further explorations. I am a weirdo in that I mostly stay inside cave systems in Minecraft, and go full on Dwarf mode as I hollow out the earth looking for riches. So the first thing I did was start to hollow out a base in the side of the hill, while being very careful not to break back out into the world. I put a piece of dirt in the entrance to wall off my little safe chamber and then began structuring something reasonable to work in, slowly adding pieces of equipment as needed.
This of course led me to do what I always do… and start a shaft down to bedrock. I am not entirely certain how deep I am at this point but I have broken into the layers of deep stone. Essentially the central shaft has a winding staircase around the outside of what is effectively a series of eight by eight rooms, with three block tall ceilings. The amount of Iron, Copper, and Coal that I have come across in my “spelunk” has fueled my further expansion. The only real challenge with this world so far is that I have yet to find a single sheep. I should probably go off on a mission to find a breeding pair of those so that I can farm them for wool. I do have enough steel to make shears, so I should probably do that rather than killing them. Essentially more than anything right now I need some wool so that I can make a bed and then reset my spawn point inside; my catacombs.
The next big project however is deforesting the hill that I dug into. My intent is to start building up and make a bit of a tower, so that I can see it clearly from above ground. Right now it is just a hovel in the side of a hill with a bunch of torches, and that is hard to see when I am off exploring the world. Sure I have my mini-map mod, and sure I could set waypoints…. but I would far rather give myself a nice big visual landmark to see from the surrounding area. So effectively I am going to harvest all of the birch trees up on top of my hill and then begin to build similar eight by eight chambers upwards into the sky. I will have to figure out what I want for the design for these to be as I build up. I most certainly have MORE than enough materials from my downwards expansion to fuel some above ground mega structures.
I guess as far as things go with “Erasure” I should probably give an update. It was a dramatic couple of days for various reasons. We had the first thing that really checked our relationship, and a lot of it was me being in my head about things. However I think we exited on better ground than we started, so that is pretty good. The harsh reality is that I do not know how to go slow. The relationship that I had with my wife of thirty years… was one that pretty much transitioned from being “just friends” to being a “couple” that was inseparable in over the course of a single weekend. I am really not good at casually seeing someone, and I am working on that. It probably seems like the most counter-intuitive thing to anyone who has dated around at length… but it is just the way my brain and heart works. I am having to learn how to pump the brakes a bit, but will ultimately be better for it. Luckily she did not run away, and luckily is willing to work with me through it.
Anyways. That is my weekend. A bunch of random games, that took a backseat to my continued getting to know someone that I’ve cared about for twenty years… but am starting to care about in new ways.
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