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.
The post Voxel Crafting and Headpats appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I don’t have a gaming post today because I really did not get up to much last night. I pushed corruption a bit in Last Epoch but spent the tail end of the evening hanging out with our neighborhood friendly feral cat that we call Greybie. Last weekend was the extended easter weekend industrial complex, and as a result I was off on Friday. Between the extended weekend and the weekend before that we worked on the backyard a bit and were able to get everything drug out of the garage and set up. Monday we had our first inaugural “Whataburger in the backyard” evening, which is the closest we get to cooking out. It is just nice chilling in the backyard. Really I need to do this more often and drag my Steamdeck or Switch out there, especially in the late evening.
My wife has been going out pretty much every evening and reading for awhile, and when she came in she commented that Greybie was hanging out in the backyard. I would adopt Greybie in a heartbeat but given how much he likes to roam… I don’t really think he would enjoy being cooped up in the house all the time. Instead he is my outdoor baby, and without a doubt… he is MY baby. So when I came out last night he was over on the deck and when I sat down he did this thing that just melts my heart… he started slowly walking towards me but as he got closer the walk turned into a trot which turned in eventually to a run. He has been living around our house since before the pandemic so it does not seem like he is going anywhere. Tripod the three legged Calico is also usually in the backyard, because she lives there full time… but yesterday the mowers came and she tends to get freaked out for awhile before returning.
I’ve been keeping tabs on the security camera to see if there were any Tripod sightings over night. She is sneaky as heck though and often times does not get caught by the camera. It is almost as though she knows it exists and is purposefully evading capture. There are times however that she will stand by the door to our bedroom and meow at us in the middle of the night… which I often wonder is what triggers Gracie and her late night screaming fits. I did catch another visit from Greybie around 2 am who appeared to just be roaming around in the backyard. I fed when I came outside last night, so he was probably visiting the bowl to see if there was still food. We often have Possums and Raccoons that visit the cat dishes on the front porch and backyard which is always entertaining.
So essentially… no gaming content today because I hung out with Greybie. I feel like this is the correct choice.
The post Greybie Not Gaming appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Yesterday was a really weird day. I was getting ready and my wife had just left the house… when the Tornado sirens blew. We had been watching the weather because we were under a Tornado Warning, but it had not turned into a watch yet. There was an area of rotation that was being tracked… but it was way further south of where we live and as such my wife left mostly because she was hoping to beat the rain because the storm had yet to actually arrive. I was still fighting an Asthma attack so a bit under the weather, which made scrambling around the house a bit onerous as I tried to coax the cats into the laundry room. Thing is by the time the sirens were blowing, the news was already reporting debris in the air effectively verifying that there was a Tornado on the ground. We are fine… our house is fine… this is not our neighborhood… but there is about an eleven mile path of damage that the EF1 Tornado did passing less than a mile from where we do actually live.
As soon as it was light, I went outside trying to see if we had any roof damage, because while the storm was passing… the wind was pretty freaking wild. I thought I saw damage and as such called the roofers that put on our new roof a few years ago. They just so happened to be running around and checking on damage so that they could schedule repairs and within 30 mins were at our house. What we both thought might have been damage from the ground… turned out to just be storm debris that had landed on our roof from who knows where. Thankfully everything on our own roof is structurally sound, and I was really impressed at how fast they responded. Tells me we picked the right company because the first roof we put on well over a decade ago… that company was pure hell to get in touch with. Yesterday was a wild day… and we are supposed to be having major storms all day today… but thus far no talk of Tornadoes.
I am not certain, but I think this might be the closest a Tornado has ever come to our house. The weird thing about it is that I expected that we would have been able to hear it. Folks always talk about it sounding like a train when it comes close… and while the wind was ferocious… it wasn’t any more so than I have heard before. We had some wild wind a few weeks earlier and in truth I had planned on having the roofers out to check our roof prior to the Tornado yesterday. There is some footage on Facebook of the tornado after it hit the Whirlpool plant, and that it essentially peeled back the roof entirely allowing rain to just come cascading in. The weird part about these videos however is how calm the workers seemed to be. This is all just part of the fact that this all hit without any real prior warning. The sirens blew… after the worst had essentially already hit. Do I think any of the delay was caused by the recent position cuts at NOAA… who knows… but I am certain it did not help.
Yesterday was sort of like I was walking through a dream and not really accessing everything that was happening. Life continued more or less like normal, and it seemed like maybe it shouldn’t have. That said I am pretty regularly sleepwalking through life as I just go through the motions. This morning I was filling my wife’s water bottle… got distracted and did a few other things… and then turned around and I had apparently already filled it in my whirlwind of activity. Thing is… I have no memory of having filled it. I feel like I push so much of my life to the territory of muscle memory, so I can devote my mental resources to thinking about other things… which only serves to create these weird moments where I legitimately have no memory of what just occurred. Fuck the last five years have been more or less one giant memory hole since the shift to remote work, because the sign posts that used to mark the passage of time… are just not quite as stark and clear as they once were.
Anyways. This is the sort of post that I am not going to advertise anywhere. I am fine. Our house and family are fine. Wife got to work just fine, and probably passed within less than a mile of the Tornado… which is its own brand of extremely frightening. It reminds me of the time I was driving home from work and watched a Tornado cross the highway five miles or so in front of me… and all of us drivers just kept going like nothing was happening. We don’t always react to stressers in rational ways.
The post Sleepwalker appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
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.
The post Snowmageddon and Ferals appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
