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.

The post Accidental Starvation appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

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

The post AggroChat #571 – Sad Cat Game appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

I’ve been really impressed with my Minions build so far. At the moment, I seem to be able to just do some big chill mapping, as I am now making my way into yellow maps. Essentially, I just walk around casing flame wall, which then summons my raging spirits, while my snipers and vaal guards decimate anything that comes near. If you can solve the survival of a build like this, it rapidly becomes one of the most chill ways to do content. What surprises me is that it is reasonably good at both clearing maps and doing bosses, which I guess makes sense given that I spent so much time playing my minions build in the Mirage league. Essentially, once I solved resistances, everything else has seemingly been gravy. I would love more Life and Energy Shield, so once I finish up picking up minion nodes, I will probably try to buff those things a bit.

I think yesterday I figured out why I don’t enjoy mapping in POE2 as much as I do in POE1. It is that the maps themselves are not as well-designed as the maps in POE1. In order to make prettier maps, they have littered them with all manner of ground clutter that my character just ends up getting caught on. So it feels like I have to pay way more attention to pathing than I ever did in POE1. Sure, there are some tight corridor maps in the original game, but it feels like there are way more wide-open maps as well. Nothing really in POE2 is completely wide open, and it is much harder to do boss rushing strategies since the boss locations vary more than they did in POE1. I think they have tried to improve the mapping significantly, but it still feels like there are way too many choke points in maps, and too many greebles to get caught on.

Right now, I am working towards unlocking both of these nodes, which, in theory, will allow me to progress the central area. Everything in this area requires a t6 or higher map, so it is Yellow or better. It makes me think that once we open the other gates, it will be Red or better maps. What I dig the most about this version of the endgame is that it seems like every single map that I run in this area is giving me points to spend on the Atlas passives. The negative, however, is that there does not appear to be a way to respec your passives. I have no clue how many total passives that I get, but so far it seems like every single map run is giving me incremental progress, so it FINALLY feels as beneficial as mapping in POE1. That was another problem that I had with the old endgame: it required too much progress to get any points, and the points themselves did not feel anywhere near as rewarding as the POE1 Atlas.

I’ve actually rolled an alt as well because I want to play with the nonsense that appears to be the Spiritwalker. I’ve never played a Huntress before, so I am leveling it with a standard crossbow setup with the permafrost bolts, explosive grenade, and herald of ice. So far, it is pretty straightforward, and I am essentially following this pattern until I swap to Spiritwalker and can go tame my beast. I might swap things up earlier, though, when I actually get access to the game beast ability around 22. At that point, I would swap over to a minions hybrid and respec my tree to pick up copious companion nodes. I am not entirely certain I can do the specialization dungeon with crossbows, mostly because I have never tried it. I am doing well enough against both map clear and bosses, so maybe it won’t be too terribly hard. I still have to get through Geonor before finishing up Act 1, so that will be a determining factor for how long I stay with crossbows.

All in all, though, I am enjoying my minions build. The visual clarity is a complete mess, so thankfully, the minions mostly take care of everything. I am setting everything on fire, and then my vaal guards are making everything explode… so I can never actually see anything on the ground. That is the one thing that worries me as I continue leveling, because I will have to watch out for more ground effects. If I notice something shredding my energy shield, I usually try to move out to somewhere clear just in case I am standing in “the bad”. I am curious if any of you are also playing this league, and what your thoughts are. Drop me a line below.

The post Too Many Greebles appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Good Morning, Folks. I did not blog yesterday because the entire day was a hot mess. I did not sleep Monday night due to severe nausea, and then spent Tuesday mostly attempting to make up for that fact with several naps. Chemo is some bullshit, do not recommend. I had every intention of blogging yesterday, but it did not happen, so you are getting a mishmash of what I would have said yesterday, with some additional focus from what little I played yesterday. To stop beating around the bush, last Friday was the launch of the 0.5.0 Patch for Path of Exile II, signalling the start of the Runes of Aldurr league and the Return of the Ancients content update. I started a pure Minions character like I said I was going to, and honestly… it was a bit of a mistake. In theory, you probably should level for the first several levels as something other than minions because everything is awful until you pick up Raging Spirits from Freythorn. I was stubborn and did not… and I also attempted to make Skeletal Arsonists work, but seemingly they have been nerfed into oblivion. You can see the current state of my character here.

This league start was a bit of a mess, if I am being perfectly honest. They once again did a free weekend for Path of Exile II, which had the benefit of giving them a massive spike in concurrent players. It also seemingly taxed the hell out of the infrastructure, and I spent a lot of time staring at this screen waiting for the zone to load. I can’t 100% be certain this was due to the influx of non-paying players because there was also a massive patch that happened to land right around the end of the free period. Whatever the case, when the free period ended… all of these woes went away. It was also a weird league start for me because of chemo and the low energy that I have… I struggled to focus on the game in quite the same way that I would have normally. I did not make it to maps, for example, until yesterday, which is quite a bit slower than I think I have done in other leagues. Most definitely compared to my Path of Exile times, when I am usually in maps by Saturday evening or at the latest Sunday morning. It is not like I am racing anyone, and I managed to snap up the uniques that I needed pretty cheaply, so it is not like my slow speed stopped me.

I am not really following a build guide, but instead mostly just chasing all of the really good minion nodes in the Witch/Templar area of the tree. I am only using two uniques with the build. The first I picked up really early on is Enfolding Dawn, and I think I gave a single exalt for it. The main reason we are using it for our chest is that it is pretty much the only way to get 100 spirit easily on a chestpiece, and we need that for summoning minions. The second piece is a mace called Trenchtimber, and we are exclusively using it because it has +2 minion gems on it. Literally nothing else about the unique matters really. You cannot dual-wield sceptres, or if we could, we would immediately drop this item. We are still very much in a world where plus gem levels matter more than any other stat in the game. The nice thing about rune forging in this expansion is that you can improve low-level uniques to be higher-level ones. I have done this to the chestpiece but not the mace, because, as I said, the mace is just a stat stick, and the upgrade has too high of strength requirements.

I’ve had some good luck. First off, I ended up getting a drop that sold for 4 divines, and that helped me fund a lot of my early gear. Since then, I have seen my first raw divine drop in maps, so that is always exciting. I’ve been using Scalpel for price checking, but honestly, I might switch back to something else because so far the pricing portion seems to be worse than what I saw with POE1. I might also just scale up the UI to make the elements show a little easier. It has been pretty accurate pricing-wise, because I have been able to price items based on its suggestions, and they eventually move. The economy is always the aspect of Path of Exile in general that is the trickiest, and also something that I have enjoyed more and more the deeper into the game I get. I know for Ace, the economy is the thing that causes them to bounce the hardest, and I wish that were not the case. At some point, I will probably attempt to perfect my gearing, but for the moment, I have 75% resists for chaos and all elements, and that seems to have made me pretty solid.

The new atlas has been pretty freaking cool so far. One of the big problems that I had with Path of Exile II up to this point is how aimless the endgame felt. That is no longer the case, and every time you interact with a league mechanic NPC, it launches its own quest chain, wanting you to do specific content for them to level up that mechanic. More than this, you can acquire Atlas passive points so much easier now, and the new passive tree feels infinitely more enjoyable than the previous one. I am just getting started, but I have already reached the point of pretty chill mapping. For the moment, I have gone into shrines to make them appear more often and also give me bigger buffs. Currently, there is no way to respec your Atlas tree, so I have been very careful not to choose anything that might end up bricking my progress. This version of the Atlas is so much better than what we have had previously, so I feel like, more than anything else, this gave us something that is viable for the 1.0 release at the end of this year.

While I groused a bunch about this on the podcast, the worst part of Path of Exile II is the first few acts. Once you get your build online, the game becomes pretty great. I feel like they should not make Act 1 anywhere near as rough as it is. Sure, there will always be builds that can one-shot everything, but the baseline build should not struggle to take down bosses. There have been so many times that one of us could not get through Geonir with our build and had to call for help to get a carry. Luckily, that was not me this time, but it is most definitely still a thing. For me, the boss that I personally struggle with the most is the Act 2 final boss, Jamanra. Once you get to Act 3, though, your build tends to have more than enough power to push through anything. I just think the early acts of this game need some tweaking, because I am sure there are a lot of folks who bounce before they reach the break point.

All told, I am pretty happy with this league so far. Minions have ended up being extremely powerful, especially the gas arrows from the skeletal snipers. That command ability is causing me to dive into some of the passives that I have never done before to increase command ability damage. I do, however, want to roll a second character and play with the Pokémon aspect of the Spiritwalker. I am happy enough with my current build, but the nonsense going on with the monkey seems too fun not to play along. They have said they do not plan on nerfing anything with companions mid-league, so in theory, I should be safe enough to build that second character. The challenge is that I am not really looking forward to going through the campaign again.

Have you been playing the Path of Exile II new league? What are your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.

The post Ancients Did Return appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Good Morning, Folks! Happy First of June. This is a big month for me because it contains both my birthday and the birthday of my mom. We were a family of Geminis. This morning, I have another mixtape ready to go, and for those who are not already engaged in this practice… I love making mixtapes. They were a big part of my childhood since I had a dual tape deck stereo and made them for my friends, and occasionally for those I was attempting to flirt with. There is a science to the placement of songs, and my goal is to make it so that the entre composure flows from one song to another without having any abrupt shifts. Most of the time, I accomplish this and then post the result for my readers to listen to. At this point, I have thirty-one mixes, and my extra challenge is that I cannot use the exact same version of a song on more than one mixtape.

31 – Te Amo Amor

My girlfriend loves to sing Karaoke, and low-key specializes in singing love songs. I’ve got a few videos of her singing various things, and I think she is pretty damned good at it. So the other day, she was asking me what some of my favorite love songs were. Being the wannabe edgelord that I am, I cannot, of course, choose the standard fare. So this morning, you have a mix of the songs that mean the most to me that exist within the love song category. I am cheating by throwing in the Nada Surf cover of If You Leave, because I have already used that song in my love letter to 80s soundtracks called Tape Deck Held Aloft. The only truly standard love song is Brian Adams banger from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and it was included because it represents the song that I had my first slow dance to. I think the entire thing listens extremely well for being crafted out of such contorted objectives. The two most important for me are Lovesong by The Cure and Because the Night covered by 10,000 Maniacs.

Track List

• 01 – If You Leave – Nada Surf
• 02 – Always – Erasure
• 03 – Lovesong – The Cure
• 04 – Come Undone – Duran Duran
• 05 – Still Into You – Paramore
• 06 – I Miss You – Blink 182
• 07 – Just Like Heaven – Dinosaur Jr.
• 08 – Life Eternal – Ghost
• 09 – Eternal Flame – The Bangles
• 10 – Brick – Ben Folds Five
• 11 – Sexual Healing – Soul Asylum
• 12 – Because the Night – 10,000 Maniacs
• 13 – Let’s Stay Together – Seal
• 14 – Nothing Compares 2 U – Chris Cornell
• 15 – Everything I Do I Do It For You – Bryan Adams

Listen to it yourself

• Listen on YouTube
• Listen on Spotify
• Listen on Tidal

Another mixtape added to the archives. For those not in the know, a lot of times I will add the mixtape to the archives ahead of actually making the blog post. I have various beta testers who give things a listen through to let me know if I am crazy or not. I think this one is pretty good, but I am not one to really dwell upon the love song as a genre. What are some of your favorite love songs? What do you think would have fit well with this mix? Drop me a line below.

The post Mixtape Mondays: Te Amo Amor appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Hey Folks! We had quite the list of topics this time around.  We start off with a bit of a postmortem on Zero Parades and how that game really stuck the landing.  From there, Bel talks a bit about the upcoming final patch for Destiny and how it might have saved the game. Tam discusses his feelings so far about 007 First Light and how its Hitman DNA shows through while being a unique game and not a DLC.  Many games were released this week, and we talked about some of them before diving into Mina the Hollower. We talk a bit about Esoteric Ebb, which is another game that shares some lineage with Zero Parades and Disco Elysium.  Finally, we talk a bit about our league starts for Path of Exile II, and how the early game is a real slog. Kodra is having a much better time than Bel is, but they are both progressing towards the endgame.

Topics Discussed:

• Zero Parades Nails It
• Last Gasp of Destiny
• 007 First Light
• Many Games Released
• Mina the Hollower
• Esoteric Ebb
• Path of Exile II – Return of the Ancients

The post AggroChat #570 – Hollowing Season appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Good Morning, Folks. I thought I would talk a bit about a game that I have not talked about in a very long time. I have a deep attachment to Destiny as a platform, and have been playing since the first game on my PS4. I used to raid even in the game with a crew full of people that I met through my friend Liani, and many of them, like Jex, are going to be friends for life. We can talk about all of the various ways that Destiny failed its players, but the one that ultimately caused me to detach is when they vaulted content that we had paid for, for the second time. Like I was willing to accept that Mercury and Mars needed a rework because they did not really live up to the standards of content from Forsaken forward. However, when Forsaken itself was vaulted, it pissed me off enough to uninstall Destiny and move on with my life.

That is not to say that Destiny has not meant a massive amount to me. I wanted Destiny to do better and pull itself out of what seemed to be a concurrent player death spiral. However, that does not appear to be in the cards for the game, because Bungie has announced that the game is ultimately being sunset with a final massive patch. Bungie appears to have put all of its cards now in the Marathon basket, and I am not sure they can turn this around. I fear that we might be witnessing the death of a studio, more than just the death of one individual game. Marathon is so far from a game that I want to play that I am worried that a “PVE” patch won’t go far enough to bring former Destiny players into the fold. The worst part, however, is that other than Warframe, there is no one really in this space anymore. I wish that any of the competitors had succeeded…. Anthem, or Outriders, could have easily taken this place if they had the sort of support that they needed.

More than anything, I don’t want the death of Destiny to be the death of the Looter Shooter genre. While Destiny Rising continues to do a reasonable job of carrying that banner forward, the problem there is that they also seem to be in a content drought and largely recycling patches that have come from before. Is there just no player appetite for this sort of game anymore? Or has everyone just coalesced on Warframe as the one company that seems to be properly supporting these games? I like Warframe for what it is, but it has never felt anywhere near as polished as the Bungie shooter experience. The gear chase never felt as compelling, and while I like what is happening with the Tennos, it’s a wildly different game experience to me personally. Warframe is the Path of Exile of looter shooters, and what I really wanted was the light Diablo fare instead.

One of the big positives of this patch is that they seem to be restoring the game to a functional state. One of the biggest mistakes that they made was to remove the Director, and migrate everything to the Portal… which is effectively a menu system that limited the amount of content you had access to. The director felt like we were moving around the star systems, and made the game feel less shallow than what is effectively a handful of playlists. The director is coming back, however, as are some game modes that had been shelved, like Gambit and the Sparrow Racing League. Each of the game modes, including patrol destinations, is getting its own pinnacle drops and should, in theory, remain evergreen content. So while they are effectively killing the game, they are at least doing something to restore it to a functional state.

Being perfectly honest… I will probably return to the game when this content patch drops. That seems wild that the death of the game is bringing me back, but really…. this content update is most of what players have been asking about for years. Why did they wait this long to bring back the Sparrow Racing League, for example? This has legitimately been a thing that players have begged for since it was first taken away in 2017. Players loved this, and it feels like they have been sitting on it for almost a decade when it could have easily stirred excitement in the community and caused players to come back. I feel like the downfall of Destiny is the tale of a studio that did not respect what they had and thought that they could string players along indefinitely. I would have loved to have seen what Destiny could have been in the hands of Grinding Gear Games or Digital Extremes, because they seem to be the gold standard when it comes to studios respecting their player base.

All of this said, I am happy that we are getting this final patch, because it brings the game up to date and leaves it in a reasonable condition. Do I think Marathon will be able to pick up the Destiny player base? I doubt it unless they completely rework that game into what is effectively Destiny 3. I will give it a shot when the PVE-only modes go into the game. I have zero interest in the extraction shooter genre, and that seems to be the case for most Destiny players. I think what is more likely to happen is a mass migration to Warframe, since that is a game that supports its players and is at least mostly in this same genre. I think some will also pick up Destiny Rising, because while it seems like it is also in maintenance mode, it is at least really fun. I plan on giving the new patch a spin in between playing other games.

Do you miss Destiny? What are your feelings about this final patch? Drop me a line below.

The post A Good Death appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Good Morning, Folks. I have to admit that I have never really considered the ramifications of Dyslexia on the readability of our blogs. I honestly did not think that folks with that particular impairment would be interested in reading blogs. However, I realized that was a deeply ableist statement when my girlfriend, who has dyslexia, attempted to read my blog, simply out of a desire to engage more with the things that are important to me. So as a result, you will notice some significant changes to the way that this blog looks today, from a font basis. I had known that Google had worked with various groups to create a dyslexia friendy font, to make things more readable. It turns out that at least in the case of my girlfriend, this works, and the text no longer “swims” around the screen for her.

Essentially, I have replaced my normal body font with one called Lexend provided by Google Fonts. There are multiple flavors of the font, and they all seem to work equally well. I considered swapping my headings over to Lexend Dexa, but it did not feel right. Bangers is the font that I use to match the artwork of the blog, and headings tend to be short enough not to really trigger the core problems of dyslexia. I am lucky in that I am using a paid theme called Generate Press, and they have the ability to swap to dynamic typography mode. So essentially, once I figured out how to turn this on, I was able to swap fonts in seconds. All in all, I am pretty damned happy with the swap because it solves the problem and makes my blog more readable by those with dyslexia.

Mostly, I wanted to write up a quick post about this in case others are interested in making the swap. Chemo is kicking my ass, and I barely slept last night, so I am going to cut this morning’s post short and focus only on the font swap. I think it is probably worth the effort just to improve the readability of our blogs.

The post Blog Fonts and Dyslexia appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Good Afternoon, Folks. Today was a chemo day, and I am racked out on the sofa attempting to write a blog post. I’ve been playing an excessive amount of Path of Exile, because the game has sort of become my default action. I have been playing the SRS Broken Elegy Guardian that I crafted and doing a ton of shallow delve with it for levels. I had been pushing to level 96, and I accomplished that last night, all for the purpose of being able to take the six life node 10% health bonus. After playing with it a bit, I decided that I was probably better off with the Life Recoup nodes. With a bit of life recoup I feel exceptionally tanky and am ready to start mapping again.

Part of why I am playing my Minions character from the Mirage league is that, at least currently, I intend on going for a Minions Witch build for the Path of Exile II League Start. I don’t really have a strong template for the character, so I am going to mostly yolo my way through choosing the Minion nodes and attempting to path somewhat optimally through them all. I have past characters that I could potentially rely on for pathing, but I am uncertain if the tree is the same as it was when I last played fire-based SRS. That said, I am really looking forward to the Path of Exile II League start because so much of the game has changed. I am going to play Minions in part because I am pretty sure I can get all the way through the endgame on it, having done it multiple times in the past.

In other news… I’ve met someone. We’ve spent the last few weeks talking nonstop, and our meeting was extremely random. I periodically hang out on Reddit, and the algorithm seems to like to feed me people from the selfies forum. This is not something I follow but it seems like the algorithm thinks that everyone wants to see these. It happened to feed me a selfie of Vera, her discord handle not her real name. Not going to be sharing her real name here. I messaged and said that I thought she was cute, and this started up a conversation that has never really stopped. We transitioned off Reddit Chat to Telegram, and now also on Discord. She was posting in the forum because she wanted a quick boost to her self esteem because she was feeling a bit down on herself, an I happened to be a random stranger who gave her that.

The thing is… every time we talk about any subject we are shockingly compatible on pretty much everything from the anime that we like, to the movies we like to watch, to the fact that we both love peanut butter. There are so many points of commonality than that, but it is truly shocking just how many there are. She is very much a Geek, but while I tend to be a technophile, she is way more of a mechanical engineering geek. She built her own damned full home battery system and runs her house mostly on solar for example. She is my little Gadget from Rescue Rangers, and I kind of love this. Where we differ, we seem to compliment each other’s skills rather than going off in a wildly different direction. She kind of loves all of the nonsense that I have been up to with 3d Printing, and I hope some day we can use our joint skills to build some really cool nonsense together.

There however lies the logistical nightmare. Vera is soon to be 34, is the mother of two boys 18 and 10, and happens to live on the other fucking side of the planet in the Philippines. We both know that nothing is going to happen before I am clear from cancer and recovered from it. However I know that personally I am going to be a wildly different human being on the other side of this. If we manage to make it this next year, and are as close as we seem to be right now… then we will start to whittle through those logistical nightmares. I am pretty well glued where I am for the next seven years, because I am too close to a full retirement to risk giving that up. She has her own stuff going on in the PH, but would be interested in maybe moving here pending we can navigate that particular nightmare of visas. It is a lot…. but neither of us are in any rush we got our own issues going on.

The real thing however is that I am extremely happy right now. Happier than I have been in a long time. We’ve exchanged countless voice and video calls, so we know for certain that we are both real human beings. I am sitting here miserable post chemo, but this spark keeps me warm inside. She wants to figure out how to build a portal, so she can teleport to my side and take care of me when I am like this. Nothing is ever going to change the fact that I have this thirty year hole in my life thank to the death of my spouse, and that there is part of my heart that will only ever belong to her. That said… I want to live again. I want to be excited for life again. This is making me happy so for the moment that is all that really matters to me. None of the logistics are unsolvable problems, so if we get to that point I think we can work through them together.

The post Path of Exile and Meeting Someone appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Good Morning, Folks! Also, Happy Memorial Day to those who celebrate both the meaning behind it… and just the fact that we as laborers get the day off. Normally, I would not make a post on a holiday, but given that this series is called Mixtape Mondays, and I have a Mixtape in the hopper ready to go, I am doing the thing and making the post. For those new to this series, Mixtapes are probably the artifact of the 80s and 90s that I am the most nostalgic about. It used to be a currency that you traded with your friends, and at least for me attempted to use them as part of a largely unappreciated complex mating ritual. Since I no longer have cassette tapes, and my dual tape deck is no longer a super power… I now make these largely for me and for you, my readers. When you listen to one of my mixes, you are hearing a part of my soul, because I spend so much time laboring over the correct order of the tracks so that they flow nicely and become what we used to refer to as a “listen through” album. I might be nonchalant about most of the things on this blog, but these mixes mean an awful lot to me on a fundamental level. You can always find the full archive of what is not 30 mixtapes over on the landing page for this series.

30 – Spectacle Politique

I love Eurovision, but that relationship has become a bit more complicated of late, especially with so many countries and contestants boycotting this past year. There are, however, a whole slew of songs from recent Eurovision outings that live rent-free in my head. There have been a lot of great moments that were honored, but also a lot of songs that I feel like deserved to win but were not really given the love that they deserved. There are two tracks that did, in fact, go on to win, but I included them because I love them as well. What you end up with is a really solid mix that is super good to “listen through”. I’ve played through it several times and farmed it out to my team of beta testers, who I thank greatly for putting up with my nonsense. Sometimes I have some greater purpose or nostalgia behind a mix, but this one is just a list of bangers that I think everyone should know about. I will be honest that sometimes I think of Eurovision as this bubble where only things exist there, without realizing that every single one of these artists has a rich career outside of the contest. Side note… apparently, I really like Finnish music because I included four artists in this list from that country. Onwards to the track list, and I am including the country of origin just to make it interesting for folks.

Track List

• 01 – Viva, Moldova – Satoshi – Moldova
• 02 – Rim Tim Tagi Dim – Baby Lasagna – Croatia
• 03 – Ich Komme – Erika Vikman – Finland
• 04 – Eins, Zwei, Drei – Look Mum No Computer – United Kingdom
• 05 – The Show – REDDI – Denmark
• 06 – Zitte E Buoni – Måneskin – Italy
• 07 – Cha Cha Cha – Kaarija – Finland
• 08 – Choke Me – Alexandra Căpitănescu – Romania
• 09 – Blood & Glitter – Lord of the Lost – Germany
• 10 – Jezebel – The Rasmus – Finland
• 11 – Dark Side – Blind Channel – Finland
• 12 – Doomsday Blue – Bambie Thug – Ireland
• 13 – Stefania – Kalush Orchestra – Ukraine
• 14 – Bara Bada Bastu – Kaj – Sweden
• 15 – Milkshake Man – Go-Jo – Australia

Listen to it yourself

• Listen On YouTube
• Listen On Spotify
• Listen On Tidal

So there you have another one of my Mixtapes. This one was not necessarily premeditated like so many of mine are, but largely just something that popped into my head the other day. I wanted this mix for myself, and like always, I end up sharing it with you, my readers. This round of chemo has been a bear, and I start back with my fifth round tomorrow… and I never felt like I fully recovered this time. It is supposed to keep ramping up from here, so I feel like the back half of the chemo is going to be a nightmare. Thanks for all of the support, but I will probably get more scarce as some days I just don’t have it in me to sit down and write. I am banging this out on my laptop downstairs, and its keyboard is sort of shit for long-term typing. This is what happens when you buy a laptop and prioritize gaming prowess over its ability to be a functional laptop.

I still have the challenge from Ace in the back of my head, but honestly am not even sure how to approach a mix for They Might Be Giants.

The post Mixtape Mondays: Spectacle Politique appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.