Raven Staves and Smashy Monkeys

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Good Morning, Folks! I’m in the recovery cycle after my last round of chemo. I got my pump disconnected yesterday and then went to sleep around 7 pm and stayed that way all night, with a few brief wakeups here and there. Normally, I crash after coming home from disconnect, but I had someone ring my doorbell several times… which was not enough to rouse me but was enough to break my sleep cycle and cause me to wake up about thirty minutes later. I love my sister-in-law but it annoys the hell out of me that she swung by unannounced. I don’t do drop-in visits that well, especially if I am not expecting someone. I also try to limit my exposure to people when I am in an immune system weak period, because catching something when my immune system cannot fight it off… would be extremely bad.

All of that aside, I am still playing an exceptional amount of Path of Exile II, and mostly swapping back and forth between it and Spirit Crossing for my main gaming time. My focus right now is getting one more level because it will allow me to upgrade my gems to level 19, and also start using the new unique The Raven’s Flock. I managed to pick up a relatively cheap copy of this staff and have been sitting on it, waiting for me to finally be able to use it. Essentially, this is the staff that will give me a righteous fire style aura, but it scales off of minion damage. I currently have +413% increased minion damage, so in theory, this righteous-fire-like aura should be pretty strong. I plan on mostly just swapping directly over to the staff and seeing how well that goes. I will lose a few minions in the process, as my sceptre is giving me quite a bit of spirit.

Other than that, I have really been enjoying working through a number of the atlas quests. My progression has been nowhere near as fast as it would be in POE1, but I am still making steady progress. I’m now up to t11 maps, which pushes me into red maps, and for the most part, everything is still holding up. When I hit 84, I can take all of my gems to 19, which should be a significant boost in damage. My survival seems pretty solid, with a decent amount of energy shield, life, and runic ward helping to keep me alive. I could definitely use more life; however, as I swap gear pieces out, I am going to look for some more T1 life rolls on it. The biggest upgrade that I need to make is swapping over to a minion splash belt, so I can remove that and add a stronger gem in its place.

I’ve also leveled a Spiriwalker through the campaign and am now supported by a big smashy monkey friend. I think this might be too passive for my tastes because right now, I am literally doing nothing other than hitting health potions. The smashy monkey and cocaine bear are doing all of the damage, and I am mostly just applying marks and pain offering as I think about it. This build is absolutely getting nerfed because you should not be able to passively play in a way that you can clear all of the content without actually doing anything. I am an enjoyer of Righteous Fire, but even there, I am constantly using abilities to curse, shield charge, and frost blink. Once you get your monkey… the campaign is a breeze.

The biggest thing that I need right now on that build is levels, and to replace one of my rare companions with something that gives me haste. I really want it to be a monkey, because the quadrilla model attacks extremely well, but haste does not give a clear visual aura, so I keep having to mouse over things… which does not always give me time to mark the beast with tame beast before the monkey kills it. The number of times I have watched the haste beast die before I can capture it… is significant. I wish Tame Beast were something I could throw on my Necromancer build, but unfortunately, I lack the dexterity requirements. So instead I have to wander aimlessly and hope to stumble onto just the right beast.

I have been having quite a bit of fun with this league, but I am really looking forward to the next POE1 league that should, in theory, land in July. I enjoy Path of Exile II, but still feel like Path of Exile is the better game. POE2 is probably better for new players, but if you have only played it, I highly suggest, at some point, trying a POE1 league after learning the ropes. Other than all of this, I really want to ease my way back into Guild Wars 2. I am also playing a bit of Destiny 2 since the recent patch dropped. I am sure I will talk about both of those in the coming weeks. I hope you have an excellent weekend, and drop me a line about what is eating up your gaming time.

Spirit Crossing is Great

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I’ve been a big fan of Spryfox games since I got hooked on Alphabear, and have played at least a bit of every game released since then. One of the games that I had looked forward to was Spirit Crossing, right up until the point that I found it was initially going to be mobile only. While I play games on my phone, I have no interest in playing a game as complicated as Genshin Impact on that device. So I waited and have apparently been rewarded with that patience, as you can now join the Steam Playtest. Mo was faster on the uptake on this one, but I joined in starting Sunday morning. Last night we played together during our regularly scheduled sibling time, and the game is a heck of a lot of fun with other players.

One of the first things that happens to you as a new arrival is that you are tossed straight into a storm. These are the only real dangeous encounters in the game, and there are these giant spirits that remind me of the Hollows from Bleach. Essentially, during a storm, your stamina does not regenerate, and I have not pushed my luck to see what happens if I stay out in the storm for too long. During this first storm, a spirit gets damaged, and your initial mission is to try to help her out by collecting fragments that were knocked out of her in the crash landing.

It would not be a Spryfox game if you were not immediately introduced to a rather losenge shaped bear. The lost bear ultimately becomes Roomie, your mildly curmudgeon room mate and guide to helping you figure out how to repair Maya. The only annoying thing about the game is that you are time-gated not only in the collection of resources, but also in questing. For example, I have a quest right now telling me to go somewhere…. but the somewhere is not available to me, and I figure logging back in today will grant me access. This is very much the sort of game where you want to play a little bit of it every single day. This is both a good thing and a bad thing, in that it ultimately limits how much time I need to spend in-game each day.

The collection mostly comes in the form of a harvest mini game, where a small ring will appear on the screen, and you are supposed to hit the E button when another ring appears within that space. Not all collection functions like this, for example, you can just pick up flowers and fruit, but ore and wood specifically require you to play this game. The more you harvest, the more skills you gain, allowing you to upgrade your tools and, as such, harvest more difficult things. The pickaxe and axe have upgraded rather quickly, but others like the shovels, machete, and shears have gotten almost no progress. I need to roam around aimlessly a bit more in the entry lands because I think there is more of the low-level vines that you use with your machete.

I am having a heck of a lot of fun. It very much lives in the “cozy MMO” genre like Pokopia and Animal Crossing. It seems like anyone can sign up for testing currently via the Steam page. However, if that changes, here is a sign-up code that I was able to generate from my account. If you are at all interested in this sort of game, I highly suggest checking it out. Weirdly, it reminds me of Guild Wars 2 if you took out the combat elements. I think this is probably the heavy reliance on gliders to get around, and the core focus on harvesting materials, both of which I do plenty in GW2. Clearly, I need more real-world friends in-game because there are things that need four players to optimize.

Probably my favorite aspect of the game is what happens when a storm comes into the wilderness. Players flock around a fire to wait it out, and inevitably, someone starts playing music. You can then join in with your own instrument and play a jaunty tune to pass the time. The players that show up as shadowy are folks you have not introduced yourself to. I’ve made it my mission to try to introduce myself to every player around the fires so that I can see more friends on the map when I am doing stuff. Making random friends is deeply charming. Eventually, you get the ability to trade gifts with other players, which will increase your friendship levels. What this actually means in the grand scheme of things, I don’t really know, other than some gifts are gated by this level.

Anyway, if anything I have said interests you, then I highly suggest you check out Spirit Crossing.

Accidental Starvation

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Good Morning, Folks. This is going to be one of my imageless real-world blog posts. It has been a bit since I last gave an update on the joy that is dealing with cancer. This has been a ride that I would not wish on anyone. So many of the issues that I have had have been hard to pin down the actual source. I dealt with blood pressure issues that caused me to drop down to round 70/40. I’ve struggled with anemia and, for a while, was being fed iron supplements that really helped quite a bit. However, my numbers came up, and my “dealers” cut me off. The constant through line, unfortunately, has been that I keep losing energy and stamina and feel like I can’t really do much of anything without long pauses in between activities.

My usual morning looks a little something like this. I get up and go to the restroom… then take a break before feeding the animals. Then I get up again and take my meds, fix a water, and then take another break. After that, I usually hit the shower, which will require pauses after getting out of the shower before getting dressed. Then another break before going into the kitchen and figuring out something for breakfast, and then finally landing on the sofa where I am parked for a bit and start doing work, or like this morning, banging out a blog post. All of this is stuff that used to be trivial to do, but now feels daunting. I hate the way that my body has betrayed me, but it seems that I have also betrayed myself in the process.

I was put on tirzepatide around the start of this process because losing weight would both help with complications from the surgery and also make it easier to deal with radiation. I have no clue how many weeks I have taken it, but today was an injection day, and I have effectively gone through one vial from the compounding pharmacy and eight vials from the drug manufacturer via mail order. So my guess is about 14 weeks, as I think I got six weeks out of that first vial of magical serum. My friend is also on tirzepatide and has had all manner of complications, but luckily, as far as I can tell, I have not… or at least they pale in comparison to what it is like to go through chemo. At this point, I have lost around 70 lbs, and need to lose at least 20 more before I am truly ready for radiation.

One of the things that you need to understand about tirzepatide is that you lose your concept of what hungry feels like. I do not mean to say that I don’t get hungry often, or that my hunger has lessened… but instead that the concept of hunger no longer exists in my world. I have no biological censor telling me that I should be eating food. Instead, I try to feed myself on a regimented basis to make sure that I do not miss a meal. I occasionally get cravings, but the problem is that I cannot eat anywhere near as much food as what a modern delivery meal ends up being. So instead, I carve that up into at least two meals, if not sometimes three meals. I tend to order something that I can eat on for a while and then ration that out into individual servings. For example, I have some large chicken chunks and potato wedges from my favorite chicken joint, and I will have a few chunks and a few potatoes and call it a meal.

The other thing that you need to know is that eating is physically painful for the first several days of a chemotherapy cycle. It isn’t that it causes indigestion or anything simple to fix like that… but instead that I have pretty severe jaw pain any time I attempt to eat or drink something. This means that when you combine it with my lack of hunger, I end up trying to eat the most nutrient-dense thing I can possibly scarf down so that I don’t hurt for long. Lately, this has been the humble protein/granola bar. I was eating these for most meals… which means that I was also not getting a ton of total calories for someone my size. I was trying my best to survive… but I have come to realize that I was effectively starving myself, which made the weakness and fatigue all the more awful. Once I started forcing myself to eat at least two decent-sized meals a day… my strength began to improve significantly.

So essentially, without meaning to, I have been starving myself. I need to sort out some options to have on hand that are more calorie-dense than a protein bar but equally easy to consume. I’ve contemplated leaning on my old friend, the humble oatmeal packet. I used to fix that for breakfast regularly, and was pretty partial to the brown sugar variant. I am also wondering if I need to start tracking my caloric intake, not from a dieting standpoint, but more from making sure that I am getting enough. I’ve been on tirzepatide long enough that the concept of hunger is a distant memory. It had some other benefits, like generally quieting my busy mind and letting me focus more deeply on things. As such, I am pretty sure I will be on this for the rest of my life. I just need to strike a better balance with figuring out what a proper portion of something looks like, because whereas I used to be on the side of eating too much… I am now apparently in the opposite extreme of eating too little.

Anyways, love you all and appreciate all of the support you have given me. I figured it was time for a proper update on life. I will begin my sixth round of chemo tomorrow, so keep me in your thoughts so that the side effects are not too awful this time around.

AggroChat #571 – Sad Cat Game

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Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks. We start off this week with a discussion about Life Below, which is an underwater building sim focused on coral reefs and maintaining them. From there, we talk a bit about another one of our patented 11 sads out of 10 games, where you try to keep the last cat in the universe alive. Spirit Crossing has launched on Steam and we are all pretty happy to see it being untethered from mobile-only.  We talk about all of the things that we saw at the Summer Games Fest, which are too many individual games to list.  We do focus in on one particular game announcement, however, which is Guild Wars 3, and we talk a bit about what we know so far, and more particularly, the fact that the studio released a video committing to keep developing all three games.  Kodra and Bel go deep down the rabbit hole of Path of Exile II build craft, and kind of forget that they are on a podcast for a bit.  Lastly, we wrap things up with some quick topics.

Topics Discussed:

  • Life Below
  • The Last Cat in the Universe
  • Spirit Crossing
  • Summer Games Fest 2026
  • Guild Wars 3
  • Path of Exile II Nonsense
  • Quick Topics

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