Good Morning Folks! Hopefully yall are surviving Snowmageddon 2026. For the most part I have stayed in out of the mess. I had plenty of food, and so long as power stayed on I was going to be good. We got somewhere in the neighborhood of eight to ten inches. The snow was so dry that drifts were pretty rampant so it was really hard to tell an actual estimate, but I know when I was clearing my jeep yesterday and making a path so I could get out today for an appointment, it was coming up to mid calf high at times. I cleared the front porch enough that I could start putting food out for the outdoor kitties as well. I’ve not seen Tripod, but in the past when we have had cold snaps like this she has an underground borough system that she crawls down into. For years we had bunnies in our backyard prior to Tripod taking up residence there, and I think she has been using their underground warrens.
Things have mostly been okay… save for the fact that it has been raining in my livingroom. This is a problem that I had hoped we solved about three months ago when the roofers came out to work on the flashing at the top of the roof. My guess is that the snow sitting up there has basically been on top of wherever the leak starts, and then heat rising up through the roof is melting it. Essentially as far as we have been able to guess it runs down under the shingles and then finds a way into the house in the middle of the livingroom, dripping out onto this cross beam, and then down onto the ceiling fan before ultimately hitting the floor. Sadly the leak does not come down in a single spot, so essentially I just have to put towels out. It had stopped mid day yesterday, but then started up again late last night as things started to re-freeze and was still going whenever I went to bed. It stopped at some point over night because it is not going this morning. I’ve called the roofers to be on the list for after this is all over, but for now there is not a whole hell of a lot I can do. I have some IKEA bathmats and some towels down to soak up the water…. which I will run a load in the washer once things have chilled a bit.
My folks I think got it worse north of me. This is their front yard and you can barely make out the wheelchair access ramp. My dad of course had already trudged a path out to his shop, because he spends most of his time there. I think more than anything he was checking on the cats, who stay overnight in there with a heater on. I never knew my Dad was as big of a softie for strays as he is, until later in life. Maybe I get my own attachment to street cats by genes. I got out yesterday and cleared the cars and a path out, and then was wondering why the hell everything hurt today. These are all activities that I do not normally have to do, so I guess it makes sense that everything feels like it aches in my chest and arms. I don’t even have a proper snow shovel, because this happens so infrequently. My old shovel was rusted through so I tossed it, and had not gotten around to getting a new one. I guess I will make that a bigger priority. Essentially I cleared what I cleared with one of those giant plastic yard rakes and a nylon bristled broom.
This weekend I spent a lot of time snuggled with cats and watching movies downstairs on the television. I will probably make a post tomorrow about some of the things that I watched. “The Librarian” reminded me that I have a Letterboxd account so if you do that thing feel free to follow and I will likely give you a follow back. I like keeping track of media consumption and previously my plex server log was the most reliable method up until this point. However that was flawed because when I was pulling together my movies of the year post… I completely somehow missed the existence of Sinners. I figure I will try and keep up with this similar to how I do Storygraph and Bookwyrm. Speaking of those two I really need to get back in the swing of reading, or at least listening to an audiobook while I do other things. I figure on the 29th with the launch of the Phrecia league it might be a good time to get back engaged.
Speaking of gaming… I played a heck of a lot of Destiny Rising this weekend. I was trying to keep all three accounts active, because we were having some bad luck finding strongholds. Yesterday morning we cleared the three that we had access to, but did not find the third until we were already logged in trying to clear the other two. Thanks to Jade Rabbit I have been playing Umeko a lot more on my alt accounts, and apparently doing well enough to regularly get MVP when I run some strikes. Essentially I am trying to get account two high enough so that I can get 3 charges of Iron Commander and can get my 60 Pinnacle done without running any strikes. Account three… at some point I just need to put my head down and push through the campaign because I have not even unlocked the second planet.
Last night I played a bit of Path of Exile II, especially since Kodra has been talking about it quite a bit. I know come the 29th I will be over in Path of Exile and playing the new Legacy of Phrecia event, but in the meantime I am hopping around and making things explode in POE2. For Phrecia I am all over the place on what to play. Right now I am looking at either doing something akin to my Ice Trap of Hollowness build, a Blind Prophet bow traps, or Poison Minions. Pohx is going for a life stacking Righteous Fire build, but it is going to require a lot of gear to make it work. I had fun with RF Scavenger last time but I also needed a mageblood to make it work, and I am not sure if I want to push that hard. It sort of annoys me that there has not been a lot of fresh theorycrafting for builds within the POE community. Everyone seems to be focused on currency strats… which will fucking sort themselves out pending you have a good build.
Anyways! I hope you have fared well during the winter onslaught. I hope my livingroom rain comes to a close finally, and I hope todays tests go well and they don’t find anything else wrong with me. I am deeply scared about everything that is going on right now with cancer diagnosis and still not having much information. I will hopefully make it through this however.
The post Snowmageddon and Livingroom Rain appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ace, AmmosArt, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Tamrielo
Good Morning Folks! We are running things a bit differently this year. Due to unforeseen reasons, Thalen could not join us this week. As such, we paused our games of the year show to record a brief intermission show. This week, we talked about Star Citizen, Pokémon Legends Z-A, Hytale, OrcaCon, Starfinder, Void Miner, the Amazing World of Retro Handhelds, and Kodra finally enjoying Path of Exile II. We ran a bit longer than normal and, as such, cut the show a bit more abruptly than usual. Pretty packed show for being something we pulled together on the spur of the moment, and also bumped a bunch of topics for our show after we wrap the games of the year.
Good Morning Folks. I hope you had a most wonderful extended holiday weekend. I had to work on Friday, which interrupted an otherwise solid weekend. My neighbor down the street also lost their mother and I have been helping out with some photo editing and stuff to prepare for the eventual memorial service. As far as gaming goes I spent a good chunk of Saturday grinding out things in Destiny Rising. We had a large cluster of potential strongholds and I ran all three accounts trying to utilize their map turns to unlock them. We got three and then ran them as a group on Sunday morning. The other focus of grinding was to finish out the sparrow event so that I would be caught up and ready for the next New Years event that starts in a few days. I unlocked the special sparrow and discovered that you can put stickers on your sparrows… and decorated my snowmobile with a sticker of the cutest couple Beleaguered Gwynn and a very sleepy Attal.
Other than that I have worked on my Jaren a bit and unlocked Gold Medal Certification, pushing him up into the hierarchy of my characters. This is one of those characters that grew on me the longer that I had him. Effectively for me he is sort of a better version of Ning Fei, because he has the same speed boost tech but then a whole kit that makes body shots behave like precision shots. This means I can take him into any encounter with precision shinkas without having to play a fiddly sniper character. Other than that I also finally got off my ass and ran a Legendary Mission with Wolf so that I could push him up to gold medal certification as well, which has now officially unlocked the last two ranks of perks. Any ascension points after this is just gravy because everything is now unlocked that can be unlocked currently.
The next banner has been announced and it is a bit of a dud. They are introducing an alternate universe version of Kabr, likely the one that dies in the Vault of Glass in the Destiny 1/2 timeline. As a result he has a completely different kit which I believe is Scout Rifle and Linear Fusion rifle. The thing is… I already have precision characters that I like… namely Umeko and more importantly Helhest. We are supposed to be getting a free copy of this character, so as a result it is HIGHLY unlikely that I spend any pulls on this banner. I will just bank them up and save them for a future banner. There is also nothing particularly special about the 4 stars on this banner either. Why they keep putting Ikora on these banners is beyond me, because feels like four in a row or something dumb like that. I wouldn’t mind more copies of Attal, but very much not a priority for me since she also comes from the blue perm banner.
I am not sure if I talked about it here or not, but I now have all four ascendancies unlocked on the Bear Shaman. Instead of going down the Furious Wellspring path, I opted instead just to pick up two nodes that were useful on their own right, but did not significantly tweak the way the character performed. If I had gone down the furious wellspring path, I would have likely needed to do way more gear swapping to include a Crown of Eyes to make the Druidic Champion ascendancy notable pay off. I’ve already struggled with resistances a bit and the thought of losing another slot and with it even more armor… is a bit rough. What makes it even worse though is that the Crown has -10% Fire Resistance that I do not believe can be removed by any method. It is probably the more powerful path but I like Turning of the Seasons for free exposure in presence range, and Wisdom of the Maji for essentially extra life and mana on all of my sockets.
I did do a bunch of gear swapping though to fit in a Defiance of Destiny. I picked up a cheap one with only 21% life recovery on it… which I then boosted to 25% with catalysts. This tiny bit of defiance effect was more than enough to effectively make my build feel immortal now for mapping. When you combine this with the physical damage shifting of Cloak of Flame and then combine that with Elemental Damage soaked by armor… it feels like no amount of damage is really that big of a deal for long. I am now putting more points into life regeneration on the tree since I feel like I deal more than enough damage when I go try hard and push all of my buttons. Simply bouncing around the map with molten crash is more than enough damage to comfortable clear all t15 waystones and I am sure t16s even thought I have yet to do one of those. I think really the only upgrade that I might focus on now is trying to get a new version of Fury of the King with a level 19 or 20 copy of Molten Crash in it.
I spent a decent chunk of last night trying to unlock these two mansions that are showing on the map. I think these nodes might be bugged because while I found what feels like more than enough stones in the surrounding maps, the pathways to either of these never seem to unlock. I did find a weird bug though, where because I failed one of the maps with a stone in it… it made EVERY subsequent map that unlocked by clearing one of the other maps… show up as though I had failed it, and not allow me to use tablets on it. Essentially when you are doing this thing where you are chasing stones, it can cause new nodes to appear on your atlas until you eventually uncover three stones and unlock the hidden pathway into the mansions. These nodes however appear to be imprinted based on the first one, so failing one, means you fail all of them. There are still a handful of nodes that MIGHT have stones in them, so I might as well burn through those and see if I can unlock both of these.
I’m also finally starting to try and care about the Vaal Temple. Apparently if you set it up correctly you can use it to print currency, but as Mathil says in a video that he released this morning… that is just the path to disappointment. Trying to compare your own drops, to an edited demo reel of the highest juiced content is always going to feel bad. Ultimately I arrive at this point every league where I have more than enough currency to do anything that I actually care to do with it. I’ve had decked out “Mageblood” characters and I did not enjoy them any more than I do my characters that I push just to the point of being functional. Sure having a headhunter for example is a lot of fun, but only if you also have a character build that can make the best use of it. I’ve learned that I don’t really love the blaster archetype character templates and instead like the quirkier builds that are way more tanky.
By not desensitizing myself… I can also still enjoy drops like this. Sure those exalted orbs have little value against he Divine Orb but it still feels nice when you see a bunch drop at once. Path of Exile 1 and 2 are the sort of games where you have to make your own fun. I am having a lot of fun with my Demon Fire Bear that runs amok bouncing all over the place, and that is good enough for me. However at some point today I need to stop avoiding the things that I don’t want to deal with… like the filament jam that I have in my AMS unit. I also need to spend some time properly setting up the hobby area in the other office now that I have most of the parts either printed or delivered and ready to go. I got a big self healing cutting mat yesterday so I need to clean off the existing area and start setting things up, and then figure out if I want to order one of those magnifying lamps or not.
Anyways. I hope you have a most wonderful week. I have to work today and tomorrow before being off weds… and having to work thurs and friday. Hopefully you were wiser and took most of the time off.
The post Impossible Mansions appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! It is that weird time between holidays, and we are down about half of our folks for various reasons. We push forward and record a pretty focused show around a few topics. We start off discussing Q-Up, a game that effectively has a lot of things to say about League of Legends, and also discuss other games like Rabbit and Steel that are themselves commentaries on other games. From there, Kodra takes Bel to task about Path of Exile II, and mostly how the game seemingly has no interest in making sure you can beat Act 1 with any build and player experimentation. Thalen has been back in Warframe and attempts to recruit us all to the fold, and honestly… it is working. Lastly, we wrap the show with some discussion about the genre that evolved out of MMORPGs… where the games are far less massive, but still sort of feel like they are a multiplayer experience in spite of only focusing on a handful of players.
Topics Discussed:
Q-Up
Path of Exile II Still Uninterested in Experimentation
