Hey Folks. I am sorry that I stopped blogging for awhile. I had been struggling with figuring out what I wanted to talk about for the last few weeks, and then my world effectively ended on July 2nd. Around 8pm my wife passed away suddenly an very unexpectedly, and I lost touch with reality. I am not okay, and quite honestly I am not sure if I will ever be okay again. I am however forcing myself to attempt to keep some semblance of a rhythm and put one foot in front of the other over and over until I get through this. Today is the visitation and tomorrow the funeral, and I have done my best to do her justice. There is honestly nothing that I could ever do to truly do that. She was an amazing woman and I am sorry I never shared her with you other than little snippets here or there.
She dedicated her life to education, and teachers live under a microscope, especially in my state and the current political climate. I was always terrified that something I did or something I said would negatively impact her or her career, so I only really talked about her in generalities. Know that she was my whole world. My mission in life was to do whatever I could do to enable the great things she was doing in the world. Nothing I did was terribly important compared to the impact she had on countless lives. I may have groused from time to time, but I always understood the importance each time I was “voluntold” to do something for her and her classroom. I have a lull this morning so I am sitting down to talk to you all… but quite honestly I have no clue where I am going to go with this. I guess I will start by sharing a snippet of the obituary I wrote for her.
She devoted her life to the power of education, particularly in the field of mathematics. A passionate and lifelong learner, she earned her Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Education from Northeastern State University in Tahlequah in 1998. Throughout her 26-year teaching career, she inspired thousands of students, primarily at Jenks Public Schools in Jenks, Oklahoma, and more recently at Collinsville High School in Collinsville, Oklahoma.
At the time of her passing, She had just completed the coursework for her Master of Education, majoring in Curriculum and Instruction with a specialization in Math Education. She was set to graduate with honors from Southeastern Oklahoma State University.
Her love extended far beyond the classroom. She was devoted to her family, her friends, her students, and her church. A woman of deep faith, she lived her beliefs with action, compassion, and integrity. She was an active and beloved member of Dalton Hill Baptist Church in Owasso, serving in numerous roles, including most recently as song leader.
Her dedication to math education led her to travel widely, including presenting at an international conference in Portugal. She was a respected member of countless educational communities, both in-person and online. She also had a deep love for books and knowledge; in another life, she might have been just as at home in a library as she was in the classroom.
Its weird because even now… I feel this visceral instinct to protect her anonymity. While pasting that… I could not stop myself from lightly editing out her name. I think part of this is because she quite possibly is the only person on the planet with her name. She had an unusual spelling and that made me hyper vigilant. I just wanted to protect her… and still do… but was completely useless in the end. She was claimed by biology and there was nothing at the time that I could do other than sit and watch and hope that they could save her. I miss her so much. Everything in the world feels wrong right now. I am not sure if anything will ever feel right again.
I am not sure what the future of this blog is. It all feels so hollow and useless. I am terrified for today, because it will be the first time I see her since the emergency room. I am also terrified at all the social interactions that are going to be needed to get through the day. I’ve been thankful that family on both sides has done a lot of texting, and limited dropping in… because on some level I just need time by myself to process this. Everyone in my larger social network has been great, and I appreciate all of you. I’ve been talking some in semi-public messages over on my Gamepad account, usually content warning them with “Sad Bel Days”. I don’t want to trauma dump, but it also gives folks a way to check in on my mental state without pestering me. I will say I am at the very least still making the bed every morning, which was a little thing that was super important to my wife.
I am terrified for the ordeals to come. 90% of everything in her classroom is something that we had bought, so it will fall upon me at some point in the very near future to go up there and pack everything up. More than that there will be month after month of various legal processes that have to take place as I update everything from medical insurance to car titles. Functionally I know I will be fine, but I am also terrified financially because I don’t know what the future looks like. I knew what reality looked like with two incomes, but I have zero clue what things are going to be like with one. I feel fucking guilty that I am even thinking in those terms. My brain keeps latching onto random threads because the more analysis that I do… the less processing power I am giving to my emotions to completely crush me. I’ve felt the pain of losing someone before, but this is so fundamentally different that it might not even be thought of as the same thing. It legitimately feels like half of my being was ripped away from me… and I have no clue who I am anymore in any capacity.
My social tagline was ordered on purpose. Husband comes first in the list of non-age-based descriptors because that is where I placed that role. Whatever she needed of me I was there without question. I took care of things. I dealt with the financials, restocked the house with groceries, did the laundry… etc etc… all so she could focus on the important work of making the world a better place through education. Now that she is gone… I just don’t know who I am anymore. Like there are people in this community that think I have shit figured out, but my entire life revolved around my wife. Anything I did on the side felt thoroughly unimportant and meaningless next to the great things she was doing constantly. Maybe it is because I grew up with a mom who was also an educator, but I treated that role as sacred.
Anyways I am mostly posting because I am not sure what my posting schedule is going to look like. I figure there are people out there who may not follow me on social media and may not know that my world ended. I am still out here. I have so much support. I just don’t know who I am anymore, and it will take me a bit to figure that out again.
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Good morning folks. I share with you a picture of Mollie… defending her spot. If you do not know anything about Mollie, she is the weirdest cat in our household and even though she has been with us over a decade at this point… she is still super skittish. She can be extremely sweet at times, but mostly… she just fails at being a cat in most ways. She gets stuff stuck in her head and right now… she lives on this pad in the bedroom. For years she lived on a pad beside me in my office, but for whatever reason she has switched locations. So much so that if we do not get up from the bed fast enough, she will come scream at us until we make the bed and put the pad in the center of it like she wants. She does not sleep with us at night, even though we leave the pad on the bed between us.
She is an incredibly smart cat for as weird as she is. For example if I am sitting on the toilet… and she has decided that her water dish in the kitchen is not full enough… she will hop up on the bathroom counter and start furiously headbutting the water faucet. She has figured out a way to communicate that water comes from the tap and she needs some. I’ve turned on the bathroom faucet and she does not want to drink it from that… so it is clear that she is using the faucet as a placeholder for her water bowl. I love her muchly, but all attention has to be on her terms. If I dare to pick her up, she will freak the fuck out so I just stopped over the years. Now if she crawls over onto me… it is okay because she started the action but she will also still bolt at moments notice when things get too real for her. That is the thing with cats and honestly people too… you figure out how to work around their little idiosyncrasies.
I’m in a weird place right now where I am finding it hard to summon forth the desire to blog in the morning. For a few months I have missed at least one post each week. Then last week I pretty much took the entire week off. It isn’t like I have swapped blogging for some other form of communication. I’ve been pretty radio silent on social media as well. I think I just feel like I don’t have much to say that means anything. Maybe this is a side effect of everything that is happening in the larger world right now… or maybe it is tied to the fact that after five years of being fully report… we are being summoned back into the office one day per week, but it is the same day for everyone. Maybe it is just that I feel like I am not really doing anything anyone would actually care about. I’ve been blogging for sixteen years… and semi-daily for twelve of those… and it is like I have run out of things to say.
None of this bodes terribly well for the impending arrival of Blaugust, when I am supposed to be a hype machine for blogging as a concept. I have done absolutely NOTHING yet to plan for this… and July 8th is when I have to start going back into the office on the regular… so that is not going to help at all either. Blaugust is this thing that I am known for… but I feel like a bit of a fraud right now since I struggle to type words into a box on my screen these days. Again this is probably not the sort of post that I am going to promote widely, because “Bel has an existential crisis” is not exactly great material for social media. So if you happen to stumble onto this… I guess that means you are a regular reader and I apologize for letting you down. I have no clue what I am doing right now, or how best to do it.
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Sometimes a blog post happens without me really intending it to. This morning my friend Cliff posted a relatively harmless poll on the Fediverse about whether or not we are a morning person. I have to admit that yes… I am one of the foul accursed beings… but it is not like I ever intended to be. Essentially if there was an “It’s Complicated” choice I would have gone with that. Effectively I am a nightowl that through a series of unfortunate events… has become a daywalker. I was enough of a “not-a-morning-person” growing up, that it was a subject of humor among my parents. I was essentially non-verbal before 9 am… and would stare at whatever morning cartoons happened to be on the television while failing miserably at remembering to eat my breakfast. In High School it got worse, and I suffered some pretty epic bouts of insomnia where I just could not sleep at all. Taking a nap… would effectively reset my biological clock and make it think that it had a full nights sleep causing all sorts of problems that have only just finally as an almost 50 year old adult… resided to the point where I can actually nap again.
This not-a-morning-person nature was pretty freaking fatal when it came to standardized college admission testing. Living in a small town like I grew up in… it meant I had limited options for taking the ACT and SAT and in all cases… it was at eight in the morning. It was specifically my mathematical reasoning that took a hit, and I floundered massively on the first few that I took. It was only through a complicated ruse that I managed to score the 30 that I eventually called “good enough”. Essentially I completely screwed up my sleep schedule and got up super early in the morning so that my brain would think it was closer to noon by the time that 8 am exam happened. It mostly worked, and I did significantly better on the exam than I had up to that point… which was more than enough to basically get admissions to any university at the time.
I was living on a pretty steady dose or IRC and late night gaming for the first bit of college, with most of my coursing being in the evening… or at worst case around One or Two in the afternoon. I kept vampire hours and I like it… up until the point when I moved from my two year college… to a four year university. In my infinite wisdom I decided that I was going to be an art major, and there was one instructor that you could not get out without taking his lab classes. Every single one of them was at 8 am. So I had to not only become functional… but creative… five days a week at eight in the morning. This is truly the beginning of the end for me, and what started the pattern of leaving the comforting darkness behind.
It was not an overnight thing however. I had the misfortune of marrying a teacher… who has a pretty strict timetable that they have to report for work. They were on first shower duty and I was on second shower… and for the most part… it worked. Though my wife reports that she had to jog me from a stupor many times. Apparently I would get up, sit on the side of the bed… and then just sort of stare off into the distance without really knowing what steps came next. Even AFTER taking a shower… I would occasionally just blankly look at my socks, not quite comprehending the step that happened next. All this time I was trying to keep the hours of playing MMORPGs until 1 or 2 in the morning and then getting up at 6 am… and just deciding that it was fine to sacrifice my sleep in order to make this happen.
At the same time however I was noticing the benefits of starting my day early… because it would allow me to leave work early. I was destined for remote work, because the less time I am around other human beings the better… so getting into the office at 7 am let me accomplish a bunch of things before anyone showed up at the door of my office to ask me questions. Additionally tagging out at 4 pm felt great… because it allowed me to avoid that last hour of small talk with the extroverts that always happens in a physical work environment. This of course also got me in the habit of eating lunch at 11 am instead of noon… which has its own benefits of being able to get in and out of restaurants before the massive rush happens. Similarly driving into the office at 7 am and leaving at 4 pm… allowed me to skip the worst of the traffic, so shifting your time frame just outside of the norm had massive benefits.
I am not sure which came first… my poor sleeping habits catching up with me due to age… or the fact that I stopped actively raiding removing the excuse for staying up so late. Whichever the case I eventually got used to keeping more reasonable sleeping hours. Now I tend to go to bed around 9:30-10:30 each night… and am usually soundly asleep by 11. Which then causes me to wake up somewhere between 4 and 5… with me not actually rolling out of bed until 5:30 most days. Long ago I became the “first shower” and on the weekends I can no longer manage to sleep in any later than 6 am… with that last hour generally being me fitfully trying to get back to sleep and failing.
I am still not happy about my lot in life… and I still do not really feel like a morning person. I just feel like a series of coincidences occurred to shift me into the position that I find myself. There are people who welcome in the morning with great joy and gusto… and they make me sick. Some thirty plus years later… I am still not a fan of the Daystar… and I wish it would quit being so damned incandescent. Given my druthers I would still be a Night Owl… but sometimes shit happens and you just have to deal with the consequences of your actions. Maybe someday… when I have left the working world behind… if that ever actually happens… I can be an old grumpy fucker that wakes up at 5pm and curses the sun. We can all dream I guess.
So yeah… I guess I am a morning person. It happens to be the best of us. Getting old and conditioned to doing a thing sucks.
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Hey Folks. Well… I did not actually stop playing Path of Exile II. I am a deeply stubborn human being at times, and I kept pushing forward and have managed to get things into a semi-viable state. Warrior right now is probably the most functional class in the game. Until yesterday 9 of the top 10 spots on the Hardcore leader-board were playing the Smith of Kitava. Now several Lich builds have snuck into the top 10, now that the chaos dot contagion tech has become more common. Conversely there are only three Huntresses in the top 100, and the first one of those is sitting down at spot 21. Not that I play Hardcore, but you can generally use it as a gauge of the success and viability of builds more than you really can the softcore characters.
So how did I reach a point of viability with my build? Essentially it was the second set of ascendancy points that pushed me over the edge, and had I realized how much of a difference this would have made I probably would have chosen these as my first points. Basically I farmed a decent normal body armor from Act 3, and kept farming until I had enough socket and quality currency to attempt a corruption. I did not win the one in four, and got nothing added to my chest piece but it has still worked well enough. That 5% life generation was just enough to take the edge off my incoming damage and give me time to react with a health potion when I started taking shotgun damage. What has been frustrating however is just how much time I have spent vendor shopping for quality and socket currency. Essentially each time I ding a new level I bounce back to all of the act vendors looking for anything I can salvage… so I can hopefully set up for my next upgrade at some point.
This largely set me up to finish Act III, and in truth things were pretty easy from that point forward. That is not to say it was not tedious. Essentially my gameplay is Leap Slam and then when I land hitting Boneshatter to blow everything up. Now that I have some leech on my weapon I can sustain my mana reasonably well, and I am no longer having to survive on potions alone. That really is the point at which both Path of Exile 1 and 2 start to feel decent, is when you can automate your regeneration of life and mana to the point where you ONLY have to care about potions to deal with large hits. Potions are awful and have always felt bad, and I hate it when you are struggling and just have to keep downing one after every fight. Doryani took forever, but it was reasonably easy… so essentially my only real roadblock was Viper and once I had some regeneration I managed to push through that without much issue.
Last night I picked up a pair of Trampletoe boots off trade for one exalt, and I have been using these to pretty solid effect. Yes these were nerfed so that they do not do the massive chains that they used to. However this does not really matter because it gives me a second bit of explode so that when combined with my Herald of Ash it essentially blows up most packs. The only thing that I have to stop and fight is rare mobs, which mostly just mean I have to throw out a single perfect strike. I’ve managed to get into a pretty good rotation of leap slam/boneshatter repeated forever. The only things that I really have to watch out for are poison and chaos damage… both of which completely shred me because I have zero chaos resistance. At some point that is going to be something I focus on… hopefully with my next set of armor upgrades.
Now that I have gotten past some of the mechanical frustration… we are left with the loot frustrations. This game feels largely unrewarding. My POE1 brain gets excited when I see a rare chest in a zone… and then upon opening it all of the dopamine drains rapidly out of my system when I get two blues and 15 gold. Note… I am not filtering out any loot here. I am running Filterblade but was simply not getting enough loot that I backed off all the way down to the softest filter, which only serves to shrink the font size of items that it deems worthy of filtering out. When I killed Doryani at the end of act 3, he dropped 2 rare items, 2 magic items… and around 100 gold. The loot just feels so phenomenally throttled, that I am not sure what the heck is going on. This is why I hate magic find as a stat… because it is clear that the GGG folks are assuming that we are stacking it and throttling loot by default to make up for having this stat in the game.
At this point I am level 52 and heading off to Fight Count Geonor at the end of Act IV. I’ve been following a relatively generic boneshatter tree and at some point I will respec a bit to be able to pick up Giants Blood and go Two Handed Hammer and Shield. I am really interested in some of the build tech that OneManaLeft is using, that Carnarius also used a bit towards the end of last league. Essentially they drop Leap Slam and pick up Blink so that you can blink from pack to pack and then mace strike to explode the packs. You can check out Connor’s POB for the full version of the build. As I get more currency I am going to start shopping trying to pick up an Infernoclasp which I will eventually need to hit 90% fire resistance. If nothing else it will serve as a pretty decent belt for the time being… but as of right now the prices are all over the place.
Am I having fun yet? The jury is still out on that one… I am having less frustration than I was having so for the moment that has to count for something. I still feel like there are deep problems with the design of this game. Do I think it is as simple as Chris Wilson good Jonathan Rogers bad? No… not really. Games are not the product of a single person, and no matter how much the community points this out does not really make it true. It does feel like GGG does not understand their own game however, nor really understand what made Path of Exile so great. They are trying to build a different game, but right now… they are whiffing in empty air because this is not working. The longer the game goes on… the more it is clear that the original design is not going to be the thing people actually want to play for the long run. I fully expect that as soon as Last Epoch launches its second season… Path of Exile II is going to be a ghost town.
At some point today Zizaran is supposed to be sitting down with Jonathan Rogers for an interview about the Dawn of the Hunt league. I am going to be extremely interested to see how this shakes out, especially given that Ziz has rated this league 4 out of 10. I am hoping that GGG goes through with the interview because quite frankly, Ziz is probably the person who is going to be the most respectful towards them, and they cannot avoid the bad press if they were to cancel it. Tonight I will be wrapping up Geonor and moving on to Act 2 Cruel, so we will see if the “better” continues.
The post Better But Not Great appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
