In the upstairs bathroom, there are two tiny windows in the room with the shower… and Josie loves them. She has long since stopped fitting into these windows but this does not stop her. She always looks so damned uncomfortable, but if there is ever a time when I cannot find her… I will find her in these windows especially as the sun streams through them. The quality of the photo is pretty shitty because I was using the digital zoom for fear that she would hop down when I came into the room. I love her, and I wish she was as snuggly as she was when she was a kitten, but I try and give her the space she needs. I am wondering how her personality is going to change… and honestly how the personalities of the other two girls are going to chance now that there is no momma and it is just daddy. Cats are effected in unpredictable ways by life changes.
I am so exhausted at a soul deep level. I got something resembling normal sleep last night. I rush ordered a box of zzzquil and it was sitting on the front door step when I got home last night. So I indulged in that and slept pretty much from 9pm until 3:30 and then got up for the bladder alarm and took shorter naps from 3:30 until 5:30 when I officially crawled out of bed. All told I think the stuff worked pretty great and hopefully it can help me through this transition between sleep patterns not working, and normal sleep. Though the more I read up on it… it seems like it is essentially the same as my old trick of taking two benedryls. I knew I needed rest going into today and was willing to carve it out however I could get it. The problem with all of the methodology is that I never sleep the entire night when I am taking something to induce a sleepy state.
Yesterday was the viewing and I got over there around 10:30… saw my wife for the first time… had a mild freak out because she looks nothing like the woman I married. Realized a large part of this is because I had forgotten her glasses and then rushed back home to get a pair. This is what held me up for a bit as I had to wait on a bunch of geese to cross the road. There are around 15ish of them that frequent the small ponds in our neighborhood and they feel like they own the town. So essentially all traffic stopped while we waited on them to cross… at which point I could scramble through the house trying to decide which glasses to grab. She had so many pairs, because she essentially two strengths… readers and then normal progressives and kept them pretty much everywhere she might need to make the transition between the two. I grabbed a brand new pair she had picked out but never really started wearing. Figured she might as well get to wear them, and they also complimented her.
So when I say she looks nothing like my wife. The funeral home did their best, but they had been working on her for an hour without any luck… pumping air into her lungs without any air escaping, and it was just obvious that she had a very rough time. I personally think she died in the driveway of my house and was gone from that moment forward, and all of the trip to the hospital emergency room… was just in vain. On some level seeing her like that helped me more than I realized, because it allowed me to draw this line in the sand that she is no longer there in any form. That she had been gone for a very long time. They nailed her hair though, and I give them mad props for that. The funeral home tried really hard, but when a body has had a traumatic last moments… it shows, and she looks exceptionally rough. I tried to give some of the people she was especially close to a bit of a warning that she as going to look rough.
That was probably the hardest thing about yesterday. I was friends with most of the people who cared about my wife the most from the teaching community. Many of which I have been in text messages off and on since the event happened. Seeing them dealing with the levels of pain I dealt with in those first few days was so hard. All I wanted to do was take the pain away from them and protect them from the feelings I knew all too well. I gave so many hugs, and they were big and lasting and I let so many of my wife’s friends pour tears into my shoulder. I joined most of them in tears, but I had the benefit of this being way more real for me than it had been for them. I watched my wife dying, and I saw her husk sitting on a gurney in the emergency room. They had not seen her… so within moments the battering ram of crushing grief claimed them… and all I wanted to do was lessen their pain.
The day was more physical exhausting than anything, because I kept trying to give time and attention to everyone that showed up for us. I just kept flipping between groups of people as they came in, because everyone wanted face time with me to offer their heartfelt condolences. I shifted into host mode, and while I broke down several times… the action of trying to make everyone understand that they were appreciated kept my mind busy. Everyone was worried about me, but I was way more worried about all of them. The few of us that were in the emergency room that night, had already been through the phases that they were going through. It isn’t easy… I am still very much not okay… but yesterday made me realize how much more okay I am than I was. My friend Vid introduced me to the Ball in a Box metaphor for grief… and I don’t necessarily think that my ball has shrunk yet…. but I do think the momentum has slowed.
All of that said… all bets are off for today. Today is the funeral, family luncheon, and then graveside portion and will similarly consume all day. I left the house around 10 am yesterday and other than the frantic rush back for glasses… I did not make it back home until almost 8 pm. At which point I pretty much scarfed some food that a neighbor had brought me the day before and then collapsed into bed while being swarmed by cats since I was not around all day. Today is going to be exceptionally hard, and I am probably going to go with the more comfortable of the clothing options I was thinking about… because I know it is going to be a long hard day. It was also sweltering yesterday… before the sun heated up the funeral home it was actually somewhat chilly but in the depths of the 90 degree day… I was a mess. The nice shirt that I was going to wear today is a light color, and I am absolutely going to spend the entire time sweating through it. So I feel like I probably need a darker color to at least diminish the impact.
While I wonder what changes my cats are going to go through… I also wonder what changes I am going to go through. I’ve always been a secret hugger, but been to self conscious and awkward to regularly engage in them. Yesterday I hugged so many people and it just became my most natural form of self expression. There was a student that my wife had recently taken under her wing, and I have been texting back and forth with her because I knew she was going to take this exceptionally hard. Shelli had become a bit of a surrogate mother to her over the last few years since she had graduated, because she needed someone like that in her life. Yesterday she told me “i felt a piece of her when i hugged you it truly felt so calming for the first time since this all happened.” and that made me very thankful that I cast aside those self conscious tendencies and just gave into the hugs.
Maybe I change through this. Maybe I become less conscious about who I am and the space that I take up in the world. I am a giant… and I have always been trying to take up less space. I move my way through life like I am just about to upset the balance and knock everything over. Maybe I accept the fact that I will never take up less space in the world and give into being the person that I actually wish I could be. If you are still reading I thank you for coming along on this journey.
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Good Morning Folks. So I have talked about the fact that I feed several feral cats in my neighborhood… one of which that lives in my backyard and another couple that frequent the front porch. Around 8 pm last night I ducked into the backyard to see if Tripod was around with a full scoop of food… bumped my arm and spilled some of it and thought nothing about it since I knew the birds also liked to eat the cat food. I did not realize just how many birds I was feeding. I had to put out some more food just to bait them away from the backdoor so we could open it again without the fear of getting a bird in the house. This capture from the security camera does not account for all of them… there were so many birds swooping down and looking for cat food. Like I usually feed away from the back door so I was never really seeing the full effect. This is honestly a bit concerning… so I might need to get a bird feeder that I can bolt to the deck further away from the door.
I skipped yesterday blogging because I did not feel like I had much to say, but since then I have made a few swaps and figure I will go ahead and talk about them. Since I have most of my gear crafted, I have decided to drop Harvest from my Niko tree and instead turn it more into a “strongboxes matter” tree with map effect and map drop sustain taking the “high hat” and the “low hat” as a result. This combined with taking all of the quant wheels and all of the shrine nodes, lets me farm niko juice while running strongbox scarabs for fun and profit. Opening strong boxes, and forcing them onto your map with the map device is a heck of a lot of fun. I only have my five way device as I have not run a T17 yet so right now I am running three of the generic ambush scarab, and one ambush scarab of hidden compartments to crank up my chance of being able to open the same box more than once. The ambush scarabs are around 2 chaos each, and the hidden compartments 1 chaos… then combined with the 3 chaos map device craft… it is costing me 10 chaos per map.
I am extracting WAY more than 10 Chaos worth of goods out of each map. Granted I rarely get raw divine drops like in the above screenshot, but running orange altars means that I am often getting a large amount of raw chaos effectively sustaining this process. I am getting way more other things that I could be selling, but I am exceptionally lazy when it comes to liquidating my stash for the purpose of profit. According to Wealthy Exile I have 54 Divines worth of saleable things in my stash and that is up from 34 on Monday around when I swapped to a strongbox strategy. Now some of the raw divines that I have been getting are coming from 500k shipments of Blue Zanthimum to Kalguur which often returns at least one Divine Orb. The more important thing however is that running strongboxes is just plain fun.
This is also serving a larger goal that I have… which is to get that damned Primordial Blocks hideout. I have been running t16 maps that are NOT Primordial Blocks while having it set as every map favorite slot… causing me to produce quite a few drops. Essentially my goal is to farm up 30-40 maps and then chain run them so that I can really get the engine going of swapping back and forth between Blocks and Shipyard. I was doing a bit of this… but it was going much slower than I really wanted and was having to flip flop between map layouts more than I would prefer. My ideal scenario is that I am running 30 or more of the same map layout in a row so that I can turn off my brain and just farm before switching maps and zoning out while doing a different layout. Quite honestly I have to say… Shipyard is a way better map than I originally gave it credit for. Initially it was chosen as the best of the worst maps connected to Primordial Blocks, but in truth… I think I really like it.
The other thing that I am really enjoying is the fact that I am essentially getting two of my favorite classes… at once. Consistently the two builds that I have enjoyed playing the most are Bows either played with Lightning Arrow or Elemental Hit of the Spectrum and building it as tanky as I can reasonably do so while using a Headhunter. The other build that I love and keep going back to is Righteous Fire Chieftain, because it feels so good to zoom around the map with impunity while shit explodes around me. Running a bow merc… essentially gives me both playstyles at once as I get that good off screen clear that bows gives you, and RF explode for the packs that I dive into. The only negative is that occasionally my merc dies to random stuff, because it is more squishy than I am. I would be way closer to the “run 100 t14 maps with a merc” achievement if I could keep it alive 100% of the time. I am having a lot of fun, and essentially building out two characters at once… has tamped down my desire to run up an alt.
Speaking of achievements, I am currently sitting at 17 of 40 and have a bunch of items that are pretty close to finishing up. I am about to spend some time farming uber lab to quality up my gems because I have a stack of goddess tokens, and I am really cheap and do not want to buy gemcutters prisms en masse. In theory I might be able to knock out the 75 Divine Founts achievement this league, and given that I am sitting at 96 and making decent progress towards 97 I should be able to hit 100 to finish that thing. The one that is going to suck is Remarkable Realms. Instead of requiring you to do specific unique maps… it now just requires you to do 40 of them which is way more than previously required. I am sure they did this to keep Doryani’s Machinarium from kneecapping everyone… but as a Delver that was a good chunk of my profit selling those things. I think without those… almost all of the profit from delve relies on finding Aul and either getting the 26 Div Crown of the Tyrant or a well rolled Aul’s Uprising aka Haste, Grace, Purity of Fire, Envy, etc.
Speaking of Delve, I have not necessarily been pushing super hard but when I farm up a bunch of sulphite I tend to shift gears and then burn it down in the mines. I am farming around 160 depth and slowly descending, but not necessarily finding any real reason to push it. I can get all of the cities at this depth and am mostly descending diagonally downwards when given a chance. I’ve yet to find an Aul, but I have fought the Vaal and Abyss bosses a few times each. What has surprised me is how much better of a source of gold the mines are than they were previously. I ran a few nodes last night and before I knew it… I was up over 100k again. I am spending it down pretty frequently to keep my town running so that I can keep doing shipments and keep growing crops. When I am flush with gold I run mappers for awhile to burn through my stash of lower tier maps, but given that Kodra is playing now I will probably dump some of those in the guild bank for him.
Anyways… me and Tunnel Bear are having a grand ole time. I’ve enjoyed this league quite a bit, in spite of the weird connection issues that GGG seems to be having. They blame it on DDOS attacks, and I believe them… but it still sucks and unfortunately there isn’t much you can reasonably do to stop that. I am not sure if it is some fan base outside of Path of Exile that is angry… or if maybe it is the POE2 player base that feels ignored now that everyone has gone back to POE1 for awhile. Whatever the case I am mostly getting by just fine, but I hear it is really bad for the European players. The problem with this league however is that I am mostly doing a lot of the things I have done before… and really don’t know what new information I can pass along that might be helpful. Keeping my head down and farming lots of content seems to be my modus operandi right now.
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Good Morning Folks. We’ve been dealing with a pretty outrageous spate of weather events over the last couple of weeks. This current batch started on Thursday night we had really bad storms and a few tornadoes that spun up… which are were thankfully not at our house this time. However that does not mean that we have not been getting quite a bit of hail. The worst of it was golf ball sized hail, but Friday afternoon my wife was in the backyard reading and captured this photo of a deluge of pea sized hail. Thankfully none of it lasted terribly long, and to the best of my knowledge we’ve had not damage to either our automobiles or roof. It has just been stressful to effectively be under constant watch for bad weather. We’ve been running the televisions pretty much 24/7 just in case the news cuts in with a tornado warning or something.
What we have been dealing with more recently however is flooding. After over a week of pretty consistent deluge the ground is just completely saturated. This means when it is raining we are highly susceptible to flash flooding.Luckily anything we have dealt with has been minor, and is largely in the form of large pools of standing water on our lawn. However the green belt behind the house is pretty full and all of the nearby lakes and rivers are beyond flood stage. There are several roads in my town that are blocked off from travel due to flooding. With this also comes several deaths as folks foolhardily drive into water flowing over the road. You learn the catch phrase “Turn Around, Don’t Drown” pretty early around here… and clearly these folks did not mind that lesson. We are all safe and well… but are absolutely hoping for a break in this nonsense. Sadly by the end of the summer we will be back in drought territory more than likely.
Ever since realizing that Ammo, Sita, and Sol are timezone compatible with me… I have been joining in their nonsense when possible. We made tentative plans during the day to work on some stuff in Monster Hunter Wilds and I logged in to patch up my machine and make sure everything would load fine given that I had not played it in probably a month. I had to rebuild my shaders, so was thankful that I did some prep work. Ammo unfortunately got caught in this cycle of rebuilding shaders and then crashing out… and in the meantime Sita and I were partaking of barrel bowling in the new grand hub. Then… about the time it seemed like Ammo was stabilizing… I lost my internet. I can technically tether to my phone, but the connection is nowhere near stable enough to actually play much in the way of online games. It came back a few times… but only temporarily and around 9:20 I gave up for the evening. Apparently it had taken Ammo another 30 minutes or so before her situation was straightened out so it seems as though the entire outing was a bit cursed.
I did get to unlock the Grand Hub which was pretty great, which then allowed me to view the new cat cooking animation. It isn’t so much a cooking animation but more a situation where the three adorable palicoes in Tomato hats do a speedy delivery of food from somewhere else. I was using a Kunafa village voucher so they delivered me a meal of cheesy bread. While I will probably forever miss the actual cat cooking animations from Monster Hunter World, this is at least better than cooking my own food. The Monster Hunter Rise scenes were pretty great as well, but World will always be the best. The new scenes though have a heck of a lot of charm so I will accept it.
One good thing did come out of the otherwise cursed evening. Ammo and Sita have the whole grouping together thing down to an art form. That has always been the problem with Capcom online games… is that they seem to have no fucking clue how people actually interact with each other. It is such a clusterfuck to actually get grouped with a friend… but this is essentially the process that Sita taught me, that I will now follow going forward. This requires you to share a squad with the person you are wanting to group up with, but from the start screen you choose Lobby Search and then Squad Lobby Search. Next you choose the squad you share and choose to join that lobby. This is going to give you a private lobby only for members of that squad. Then when someone posts a quest you can go to Alma and choose Lobby Member Quests and find the quest that was just posted. Following these steps made it relatively painless to get grouped up.
Hopefully the next time it is Monster Hunter Wilds night, things will go a bit better overall.
The post Wild Wicked Weather appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I’ve been intermittently blogging for the last few weeks, mostly because it just does not feel like I have a full compliment of stuff to talk about right now. I am still mostly mainlining Guild Wars 2, and chipping away at various achievements. I’ve stalled out a bit on the whole Vision track thing, but have pushed Tailoring up to 500 on the Necromancer, and Leatherworking to 470 on my Ranger largely so that I could consume down the various ascended materials that just sort of clog your inventory. At some point I should work on pushing Armorsmithing up to at least 450 so that I can craft ascended gear for every weight. I’ve made a decent amount of gold selling some Celestial gear that I made for leveling purposes, because the market still seems to be hungry for that. It makes sense given that there are so many do “everything with this build” guides that focus on the Celestial stat package.
My friend Zarly starting the game… has made me realize how much of the early experience from the standpoint of a brand new account… I just do not understand. I was going to start a series of getting started posts, but quite frankly… I have so much quality of life stuff on my account that I am not even sure if it would make sense. I’ve been kicking around the idea of registering a second Guild Wars 2 account from the standpoint of keeping it ENTIRELY free to play, just so that I can grasp what that later experience looks like. From that standpoint I could do a much better job of writing up guides, knowing exactly the limitations of what someone who has not dumped a bunch of money into the game has access to. Little things like explaining what the hell the parts of the UI are… would probably be valuable for someone just getting started. It seems like a heck of a lot of work, so I am not sure if I am going to go down that path or not… but it could be a valuable resource like some of my other getting started posts.
I think another part of my reluctance to blog is the fact that it is backyard time, which means I am spending at least a little bit of time each evening hanging out there. Greybie one of our outdoor feral cats has come to expect me to go out there pretty much every day. I will walk out the door and he will come running over expecting me to sit down so that I can pet him for awhile. I’ve charged up my Steamdeck and loaded it full of bite sized games with the eventual purpose of spending evenings out there with our retinue of ferals while my wife reads. This has not quite happened yet but probably will soonish. I need to find the battery pack that I have that connects up to the the steamdeck case so that I have a bit more longevity given that the device is a battery hog.
Over in Enshrouded, I have completed the obsessive building phase of my base and created floors all the way down as far as my current building limit will allow me. Towards the end I had the whole process of hollowing out the spawned earth down to a science. When I raise my base size limits again I will keep going down and I am just barely above this little plateau that I am likely going to build out to be a farming area. I built a temporary plank of stone so that I could take a single screenshot that encompassed the entire stack. So I will not start back up with an adventure phase next as I attempt to improve my base and rescue more of the craftspeople. Right now I have the Smith, Hunter, and Alchemist and am slowly working on getting all of their machines up and running. I need to craft some better gear, so that is likely going to involve some trips out to bandit towns to clean them out in order to get metal scraps that I can then convert into plates.
I did stub out my staircase upwards to the vertical limit and at some point when I want to go back into another building phase I will probably continue my stacks upwards. I legitimately have no use for most of the space that I am creating… but I just like having it anyways. My original thought was to take an entire floor and devote it to a single crafter, and that probably will be the direction I eventually go. Start building out the floors so that they have a little apartment area for the crafter and then a large open bay full of the crafting machines that they control, as well as rows of the conversion machines like the kiln to bulk generate a bunch of resources. Mostly this overbuild is in part because some of my previous builds just needed more space in order to operate at the level I wanted them to. Essentially I am viewing this world as my new forever world, that I will keep incrementing over time.
Lastly I have been poking around a bit with Lay of the Land, a new voxel crafting/building game that is in very early access. I had wishlisted it on steam some time ago, and recently watched a video from LevelCapGaming talking about their experiences with it. Right now you can gain access to the game through the $5 per month tier on the developer’s patreon which gets you access to various builds that they post. It is pretty robust but also… not exactly easy mode either. This game has a physics engine, which means you are almost certainly going to die the first time you attempt to fell a tree as it is very likely going to fall over on top of you. The crafting system works a little differently than Minecraft, but is also easy enough to grasp once you figure it out.
The game uses much finer resolution of voxels and as a result it can generate really interesting rounded prefab buildings. This however complicates the process of building a bit, but the game has functionality similar to some of the Minecraft modes that allow you to set a start point and and end point and will fill the space between with the same material. Crafting is also a bit different in that you throw items onto the ground and then hit R to pop up a menu of items that can be crafted with those items. It feels a bit odd but in practice it actually goes much faster than crafting the same type of object in Minecraft.
The only gotcha right now is that so far Lay of the Land is a single player only game… with a single map that gets generated and does not expand infinitely in any direction. I have no clue what the long term plan is for the game, but for now it is mostly just a neat single player experience. Just like I got in early with Minecraft, I figured I would go ahead and support this game and see how it develops. I am not sure I will keep the Patreon rolling indefinitely, but for the current moment it seems interesting enough to check out and see what I can do with it. The biggest difference between this game and Minecraft is that combat is actually pretty interesting. Mobs have attack patterns and do crazy stuff like throw bombs at you… which also means you are probably going to die a lot. I will of course talk about this game periodically to give you updates on my thoughts as it progresses.
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