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Existential Dread

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Good morning friends. Every so often on my blog I have a post that I put zero effort into syndicating. This is going to be one of those posts. So if you are here and reading it… that likely means you are amongst my most loyal and devoted readers. In the before times I was your average mild-mannered aging fat software developer and manager, working out of a maze of cubes just like everyone else. My team has NEVER needed to be in an office to do our work, but we existed in a culture that placed a high premium on “butts in seats”. When the pandemic hit we were the first team to go fully remote, and as such acted as the canaries in the coal mine to vet how well it would work. The thing is… it worked amazingly well and at least in part due to some planning and heavy use of the Teams environment… we sort of set the pace for the other teams as they went remote. Now we scan forward and I’ve been working fully remotely for over three years at this point. For a while, I tried to do a hybrid schedule of a few days in the office and the Lion’s share remote… but the days in the office were just giant wastes of time. I cannot really tell you when I last was in the office, but when I was it was for a very short in-person meeting before going right back to my home office. Next week however I am going to have to be present and in person for a training course that is only offered once a year. So that means I will be in a room with other humans from 8 am to 5 pm Monday through Friday… and I have to admit I am terrified of this. It is summoning forth so much anxiety that I have begun having “Return to Office” nightmares very obviously sparked by it. This morning I woke up about an hour before the alarm was set to go off and just could not go back to sleep. My mind reeling with all sorts of minutiae that I was trying to figure out how to deal with. The thing that is terrifying me the most… is knowing that I am going to have essentially all of my work peers in the same training class with me. They are all very extroverted folks and many of them have said more than once how much they miss being in the office, or how much they miss seeing me on the regular. The thing that terrifies me the most above everything else… is contemplating dealing with lunch. I know I will need to run away and hide by myself in order to calm down enough to confront the afternoon session. However once upon a time I was really good at masking my antisocial and introverted tendencies. I pretty regularly went out to lunch with coworkers, because it was the sort of thing that was expected. Working remotely for three years has caused me to jettison behaviors that were stressing me out all along… and I am terrified of what this week is going to do to me mentally. The thing is… it will probably be fine. I do this thing where I make problems out to be way bigger than they are out of the anxiety of actually doing it. The hardest part about attending anything… is getting out the front door. When I am in the situation I tend to relax into the environment and go with the flow, but I know it is going to be way more stressful than it used to be because I am simply not adapted to it anymore. Truth be told I barely leave the freaking house. On the weekend we make a few trips out for supplies, but during the work week, the furthest I am out of the house is hanging out in the backyard with Greybie. I’m trying to tell my brain to calm down and that everything is going to be fine… but my anxiety is working everything up into a frenzy. The other thing that is stressing me out is… normally next week would be the week I lock down everything into place for Blaugust but it is VERY unlikely that I will blog at all, given the tumultuous shift in my schedule. So I am trying to scurry around this week and make sure everything is finished because next week… is essentially going to be this void. I will come home from training every night and crash, and will likely be unable to summon cogent thoughts… let alone write something worth reading. Anyways… every so often I make one of these posts where I am brutally honest with my readers. I never syndicate them because it feels weird to let you all into my thought process, let alone publicly broadcast my weaknesses to the world. My blog is often times therapeutic. There is something about writing things down that allows me to turn them over in my head and process them a bit better. Usually, when I make one of these posts I start to feel better almost immediately, and I am hoping that this time it has that effect as well. I shared a picture of Josie in part because I felt the need to do something to apologize for this giant wall of text. Also, I sort of wish I had her life because she does not give a fuck about anything most of the time. Anyways… I’ve wound down this little written panic attack for now. Tomorrow I will likely write about game things. Today however is devoted to existential dread. The post Existential Dread appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Magic Blue Smoke

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Good Morning Friends. This is going to be a bit of a light spoiler day because yesterday I caught up with the last few Marvel movies that I had not seen. First I finally got around to watching Black Panther Wakanda Forever. I was not entirely certain how a film without Chadwick Boseman would go, but in the grand scheme of things I think it went pretty great. I’ve always liked Shuri, but what I really liked was the quirky scientist character she was allowed to be. Shuri as Panther was also enjoyable but did not feel as uniquely “her” for lack of a better term. I thought overall the film was enjoyable but lacked the clear focus that the first film had. I think that is the problem with the current crop of Marvel films… they feel like they don’t quite know what exactly they are building towards. The highlight of the film for me was further world-building and seeing both Namor and Talokan.
Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania was another big world-building movie bringing us finally to the Quantum Realm. Again I think that the movie itself was fun, but lacked a lot of the focus that the earlier outings had. It sorta felt like a D&D campaign where your GM just kept throwing new faces and locations at you without giving you much in the way of the backstory behind any of them. We know Kang is a big bad because we have been told over and over that he is a big bad, but it feels like it isn’t something that has necessarily been earned. For Thanos, we saw the effects of him long before he took the field, so, as a result, he was a bad guy that we fully grasped and respected without having to keep explicitly stating that “this dude is really powerful and bad”. I enjoyed the spectacle of the movie and the settings… but it doesn’t feel like we got enough time with any of it to really matter before booping us back to reality again.
In electronics work, there is a term called “Magic Blue Smoke” that happens when you phenomenally screw something up. There are usually some sparks, the air is filled with the smell of ozone, and a little puff of blueish-grey smoke billows up from the object. After this point, it is completely dead and no amount of poking and prodding is going to bring it back from the dead without replacing some major components. I feel like the Magic Blue Smoke has left the Marvel projects, and while they are interesting spectacles they are missing both the core focus that the pre-endgame sequence had and also missing a lot of the heart. I think this is what happens when you truly stick the landing and complete the story in a largely satisfying fashion, and anything more just ends up cheapening the experience. I’ve felt this a few times before with franchises, and I think Marvel as far as movies go is “done”. I still enjoy them for what they are, but the magic is gone and I am uncertain it will ever truly come back.
I feel similarly about Final Fantasy XIV and how Endwalker was the extremely satisfying conclusion to a ten-year journey. I’ve struggled with returning to the game because I no longer have that narrative driving me forward and making me want to crave more knowledge. FFXIV is still a technically competent game and I am sure will keep producing interesting content, but the journey I was on has finished. I am uncertain what the next journey is going to look like, but they will need to hook me in the same way they did with A Realm Reborn in order to get me to commit to following the next one. I’ve reached a level of maturity in gaming to understand that is what is happening, and not that the game is somehow “worse”. In fact the game is probably in the best state it has ever been in, but the adventure I was on has finished.
Looking back with wisdom… I think this is ultimately what caused me to peel away from World of Warcraft. At the end of Wrath of the Lich King, the story had reached a conclusion and we had dealt with all of the “big bads” left over from the Warcraft RTS lineage. I know I struggled with Cataclysm but was never entirely certain WHY I struggled with it so hard. It was an expansion of changing the base world and lacked the big adventure aspect of the other expansions of going someplace we had never gone before. More than that however it featured a central story arc that I did not care about in the least. I’ve never much cared about the Dragon storyline and Deathwing just seemed like a convenient reason to revamp some of the older zones that were showing age. Arthas and Illidan were what kept moving me forward into new content, and with them forcibly retired at the hands of the raiding players… it felt like I had reached the logical conclusion of the game.
I think we’ve reached this point at least with Marvel where the best stuff is happening on the smaller screens. Loki, Wandavision, Werewolf by Night, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, and event the somewhat maligned Moon Knight are doing extremely interesting things. The movies just seem to lack the same spirit and creativity that is being played out in short-run series form on Disney Plus. I mean Star Wars has also suffered from this problem for quite a while where the Dave Filoni-verse represented the best and brightest of what was available for that setting, and the movies were hollow shells. Disney will always chase big box office gold, but I think maybe that era is over. I find myself enjoying the more focused and personal stories of the series. For a while in the Marvel films I have been waiting for another conflict to erupt that feels as good as the sequence that ultimately ended with End Game, but I am no longer certain it is coming. I think maybe that was a once-in-a-lifetime event, and now that it is concluded the entire concept of what a “Marvel Movie” is needs to change. I’ve seen a growing dissatisfaction on social media for awhile surrounding the Marvel releases, so I am pretty certain I am not alone in thinking the original focus of the films is finished. I am not sad that I watched either the second Black Panther film of Quantumania, but neither made me necessarily excited for what is to come. I am sure I will keep watching these films in the future when they come to streaming media, but I think I am done with the “going to the theater” phase of the Marvel cinematic experience. I am way more excited about what is happening on the small screen than anything I know coming to the big one. The post Magic Blue Smoke appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Compartmentalism and Media

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This is going to be a bit of a charged topic that I tackle this morning. It is not going to be for everyone, but it is still something I feel like I need to talk about. Normally I break up my posts with a bunch of colorful screenshots and images, but due to the gravity of this topic, I am going to forgo that. Apologies for the “walls of unbroken text” that is to follow. I am an aging geek and grew up during the 80s and 90s as a result many of the things that I still love to this day are deeply tainted by issues with either the subject matter itself or the person who created it. For example, I grew up loving the Cosby Show and Fat Albert was deeply foundational media for me. I remember listening to Bill Cosby comedy tapes and even to this day I still have to stop myself from quoting random shit from all of those. Bill Cosby is a fucking monster, and aging in many ways is learning just how wrong you were about the people you thought were cool growing up. I have friends who can lop off the limb that was the love of whatever the thing was, and move on with their lives. I’ve never been able to do this, however, I also don’t want to support the thing anymore and end up holding all of these thoughts in a complex mental tapestry. One of my favorite novels of all time is Santiago by Mike Resnick. It is this great wild west in outer space read that predates Firefly popularizing that sort of setting. Resnick has some serious problems and maybe is not something that I really want to support any more. However, it does not stop me from loving Santiago and the shared universe that he created of outer space nonsense and fables. Similarly, Orson Scott Card is pretty fucking awful, and not the sort of person that I want to be supporting either. That does not stop the fact that Enders Game and the sequence of novels that followed it were deeply foundational to my young science fiction reader brain. Then there is my love of the Cthulhu mythos and having to contend with the fact that H.P. Lovecraft and his extremely disturbing views are embedded directly in that setting. My entire childhood when taken out of context is littered with moments that just no longer work or synchronize with my core beliefs. So many movies that I still hold close to my heart have deeply sexist, homophobic, or straight-up racist undertones that exist in the background. God forbid we go outside of my generation and start exploring the black-and-white era of film and the many issues with the themes and assumptions those films contain. I miss being able to feel pure joy about the things that I love, but that is also part of growing up and realizing that almost everything that you once cared about is tarnished in some way. I think there are essentially three ways to handle this conundrum. The first is to say you don’t give a shit and keep on consuming and ultimately funding the problem. The second is to completely wall yourself off from anything that has issues and exorcise those things from your life. The third path tends to be the one that I travel down. It is to appreciate the good of the thing, while also understanding the harm that it has caused and do your best to not actively support it. The third path is a bit hard to walk at times and often means you are going to stumble along the way but that you are still striving to “do no harm”. It is important that we understand and accept the problems with the things that we love, but I feel like it isn’t necessary to stop loving them. Now we zoom forward to the situation we find ourselves in, where J.K. Rowling is an awful human being that does real and tangible harm to my friends. However I still very much love Harry Potter and that setting and the novels are wrapped up in so many personal memories. I joined the series a bit late and the very first-midnight release that I remember attending was for Goblet of Fire. After that, it became a thing that both my wife and her sister that is no longer with us shared together. With Goblet of Fire we tried to share one novel between the three of us, and by the time Order of the Phoenix came out we were buying three copies so we could all start reading at midnight. I’ve got quite a bit of Harry Potter kitsch laying around the house that was accumulated over the years. However, once the great unmasking of J.K. Rowling as the serious villain that she happened, I stopped buying anything Harry Potter related. I shifted into the same mode that I have been with other problematic creators. I might purchase a book at a Thrift store where a charity is profiting from that sale, but would never purchase a new copy of anything from retail because I did not want to actively be supporting them. There are also times when piracy is the only ethical form of consumption, so that is also absolutely not off the table either. Whatever the case I did not want to be funding the creation of products and therefore lining the pockets of the creator who has shown themselves to not be worthy of our adoration. I am by no means perfect in walking this line, but I am going to do my best because, at the end of the day, it is more about my own belief structure than some performative action. I will admit, in another time and another sequence of events I would absolutely be playing Hogwarts Legacy. Everything I have seen about it in passing looks like it is a really fun game. However, I am not going to be playing it because I do not want to be supporting the monster that is ultimately getting large licensing payments as a result of it. I get that there are good people who created that game, and spent loving care placing those assets and writing those quests, but it is all too murky for me to be able to sift that from the fact that a bad person is directly benefiting from the licensing agreements. Moreso it is that those royalty payments will likely directly support causes that seek to do harm to my friends that are transitioning. This is a very real concern for me specifically as I live in a state that is actively attempting to outlaw the existence of transfolk, so it is not exactly a hyperbolic dog whistle where I stand. I will not be playing Hogwarts Legacy, and I firmly believe that you should not either. Will I cut you out of my life if I do? No, because it is not for me to decide your actions. I will however be disappointed in you. Ultimately your actions have to come down to your own personal beliefs and your own conscience. If you can keep actively supporting folks who do harm in the world, then that is on you and not on me. I’m never going to personally attack you over your actions, but I will remember them. Essentially every friendship you have is a weighing of the good attributes with the bad ones. There are times when you have a realization that a person is doing more harm than they are good, and ultimately cut them out of your life. I have lots of family members that I still love dearly, but that have unfortunate traits. My Grandmother was pretty fucking racist, but I still loved her with all of my heart. When someone says that they don’t want to have to care about “politics”, what they are really saying is that they don’t want to be judged for their actions and I am sorry… but we are all judged for our actions. No one gets a free pass, and just because something has no personal impact on you… does not mean that the action has no impact at all. If you are going to play Hogwarts Legacy, I would ask that you at least wait to purchase your copy until you can get one secondhand so you are at least diminishing the harm you are causing. I still do truly love Harry Potter and the story that I fell in love with all those years ago, but I’ve made the conscious decision to stop supporting it. I still own the novels and the movies from the “before I knew she was awful” times and even some Lego sets that I might one day get around to putting together, but I won’t be consuming anything new that gets released. I feel like I want to do as little harm as I can while I am on this planet. There are absolutely ways in which I am failing miserably at that. I know that and I own that… but I can give up playing this one game. I care about the safety of my trans friends more than I care about this one thing. The post Compartmentalism and Media appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Portable Temples

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Friends… I can be completely oblivious to things at times. This morning’s post is going to largely be the tale of me completely missing the point. In Path of Exile there are a large number of league mechanics that you can choose to engage with or mostly ignore. There are some that I completely love like Abyss, Heist, and Delve, and others that I have avoided for various reasons like Blight and Incursion. Yesterday I ran an Alva memory that caused the portals she opens to work backward, and instead of bringing you into the Vaal Temple, it summons the mobs from it to whatever map you are on. I lamented that I wished that there was a node on the Atlas tree that allowed me to make ALL Incursion encounters work like this. That node sadly does not exist, but I still think it is a cool idea for GGG to think about in the future.
I opened up the AggroChat slack and lamented how I wished Incursion worked differently, and how I avoided it because it broke up the flow of the game. When you complete a temple, it creates a map for you to run through that is way more complicated and involved than your average map. What I wished is that I could save off a temple layout similar to how I could with the Lake of Kalandra, so that I could run it later. At this point, Ashgar used up his daily allotment of “…” and told me that it did in fact work that way. This is the problem with coming into the game late and not really having a ton of explanation in how any of these features from previous leagues worked. I completely missed the button that shows up at the bottom of a completed temple labeled “Take Temple Chronicle”.
This does precisely the thing I was lamenting not being able to do. Again like I said I can be painfully oblivious to things at times. So since then, I have been working on burning through the over forty Alva missions I had racked up and been avoiding. Essentially what would happen is I would build a temple and then put off running it because it takes more time than a normal map. Now I can just save copies of past maps and keep running Alva missions until a time in the future when I want to run a bunch of Vaal Temples in a row. It also turns out there is a fairly brisk trade in folks selling Chronicles, and I find it weird that in all of the POE content that I have consumed… no one has mentioned this. I did run a temple yesterday and even managed to pull an Empower gem, which is something I had been needing for awhile now.
The other major thing that I knocked out yesterday was the Unique Realms challenge that I spoke of in the previous post. I ran through my Doryani’s Machinarium map and then picked up Vinktor’s Square off the market. Finishing them knocked out my T2 boots cosmetic and am one achievement away from getting the next helmet. I was completely oblivious to this fact but apparently, I also finished the Monster Massacre achievement and have now surpassed one million monster kills during this league. Many of the other challenges are going to require me to likely respec my tree a bit in order to increase my chances of completing them.
This revelation about Incursion has led me to once again do some shifting around of my Atlas tree. I removed some of the “dangling” nodes that were not absolutely necessary anymore that involved map duplication and moved them around to some of the incursion nodes. This greatly increases the amount of time I have in each incursion portal and allows me to almost guarantee that I clear everything before running out of time. Map duplication nodes were great while I was building out my Atlas but at this point, I am gaining way more maps than I can actually run, and even donated a couple of hundred maps to the guild bank for other folks coming up through the ranks. I don’t really care about getting into the bulk map-selling game, because it seems horribly tedious. I am getting enough decent drops that they are selling pretty quickly and I still have my resonator business to fall back on if I start running low on currency again. I have to admit one of the things I love about Path of Exile is how I can easily swap up what I am doing because of the extreme number of viable league mechanics out there. I am still kinda hoping that at some point we see the Lake of Kalandra make a return in some permanent form because, with the “sandbox” of this league, I think that entire experience would have been a lot more enjoyable. There are a lot of shorter-term mechanics that I wonder how they could remix and bring back in a new form. Anyways I hope you all are having a great week and enjoying whatever gaming nonsense you are finding yourself engaged in. The post Portable Temples appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.