Former PoE supporters: what have you been spending on?

Hope its value doesn't sink.

Eh? Eeeeeh?

Eeeeeehhhh.

Signed books are a funny thing. I have my share but for me they are mementos of having to meet the author in order to get rhem signed. So it's less about the signature and more about everything it signifies I guess. But in this case you are talking about a historical treasure, which is something else entirely. My dad has some boxing gloves *apparently* signed by some famous pugilist but I honestly couldn't tell his signature from anyone else's. And they're not exactly hanging on any of his walls or on a display case so I have my doubts. What he does display are little figurines from his various trips home to China, from that time back when that didn't sound like such an unthinkable notion. Again, physical reminders of an experience I suppose. Of no value to anyone but ourselves.

What sucks is when that experience sours and the power of these mementos shifts from inducing fondness to conjuring unpleasant memories. In some cases it's just a matter of discarding the items, but typically the transition from treasure to trigger is a complex one. This is the downside of being someone who attributes experiences to relevant items. I always assumed everyone did it but apparently there are some folks who don't get sentimental about 'things'. I suppose they have a much better memory for their own life events than me. (My memory for trivia and various 'focus subjects' is a whole other room in an otherwise dilapidated library.)

I have cut myself off from personal Facebook usage lately so don't be surprised if my posts here wax a little more contemplative than usual. I may have been a little paranoid or just egotistical but certain updates I'd make on there were just not being seen by pretty close friends, and I know the site's Algorithm plays games with manipulating users' feeds to minimise sad content, maximise uplifting but also aggravating content. That or maybe I just pissed off a bunch of them and was mass snoozed. Anyway, I figure there's no real point struggling against what seems to be an AI-driven curation method so fuck it. At least here rhe censorship is for the most part visible and logical.

I could just start a blog but I'm neither Somebody nor a Nobody with something inherently interesting to say on the regular.

Or maybe we will just keep talking about what we have bought. :)

Groceries yesterday; I do love that we can mostly just reorder the same shit week to week, weird product unavailabilities notwithstanding. Almost prebooked Dune tickets but when I checked seating there were plenty available. Spiderman on the other hand looks booked out for a good three or four days after its release mid December. That beast is gonna make so much money...

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

A digital omnibus of Wheel of Time, since my first Aus ed book 1 is MIA, and I only have 2 through 7 and then somehow 11 (?);

I feel you here.

I finally got around to buying some wood and putting together a bookshelf (All my books have been sitting in cardboard boxes since I moved house in 2019) and had the most infuriating moment when it came to my Wheel of Time set.

They are all there... except the eye of the world.

I have somehow managed to lose book one and literally none of the others during the moving process; I unpacked every single box of books, and it was nowhere to be found. I'll buy a replacement, but it's going to look massively out of place compared to the "much loved" spines of the rest of the series.

Oh well, it's an excuse to read the series again to get my new copy of book one back in shape.

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Total tangent, but the MTX buying addiction is still going strong. Maybe I just haven't hit the point yet where I feel jaded with the game. Each new league still sparks some excitement in me, but to be quite honest, that's all being held up by my friends now.

Back in years past, I could sit and play PoE for hours upon hours at a time by myself without a care in the world, but these days if there's nobody else who wants to play along, then my interest immediately falls to zero. I can only hope that eventually there is a genuinely strong competitor to PoE to give me my ARPG fix, but my expectations for that are set at a minimum.

As I have grown older, my hobbies haven't changed much. I play games, write, and read, and that's pretty much it. PoE has been pretty central to that for, what has it been, seven years now? Every three months, I take a little time off work, have a long weekend, and enjoy a few sleep-deprived nights with friends.

I want to believe that GGG can keep going on the straight and narrow, sticking to their principles as best they can, and not bowing down to Tencent. Still, to be honest, there's always the looming threat of a downturn in profit turning into pressure to add more aggressive monetisation from the higher-ups. I think I can safely say that I'll continue until the game reaches that point, and after that, it'll be time to say goodbye.

The Chinese PoE client is already a disfigured caricature of the game, and to be honest, it is kind of useful as a straight example of what PoE really shouldn't be. If anything, it'll be good to have something to compare to in order to decide if our PoE is on its deathbed.

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On a lighter note, your mobile game suggestions are always wack. To this day I STILL enjoy playing Buriedbornes after you recommended it years ago, so I'll have to check out one deck dungeon :D

I found a new hobby with the crypto market. It's really addicting. I don't like putting effort into playing market simulator or games like this, so when I game I prefer no economy at all anymore. If I'm gonna play economy, I can put the same effort it takes to flip stuff in this game and make money on crypto, or fractional stocks. I still game, but if a game has an economy or trading, then I might as well do that in real life. It's actually even less effort IRL, truth be told.

There's been talk of making games that use crypto as currency in game, so the game's economy revolves around real crypto currency you could use, and I'd certainly be open to that.

PoE is just way too effort intensive, and it's not rewarding.

So, any one of you big flippers here, maybe you should consider getting into cryptos, and fractional stocks. The later is way more risky than cryptos, and a lot of financial advisors give straight up bad advise, and I'd go as far as saying deliberately bad advise.

Look, I got around 63 BTC left, I'm a multi-millionaire in cryptos. That's not counting what I got in other cryptos. How? Because I got in on this early, when bitcoins were cheap, I'm talking really early. Then I more or less forgot about/ignored it for many many years, then I came to the realization that I was sitting on a huge amount of money. Bitcoin is gonna be 200k+ next year, and it's going to keep going up. By the time I'm old, I'm gonna be very wealthy.

I got even more tied up in other cryptos, and fractional stocks. I'm more or less testing the waters with fractional stocks, playing small ball in this category until I get a better feel for things. I can pretty much tell you all that it's a sure bet to bet on Elon Musk. He's gonna be the world's first trillionaire. And Elon Musk is into cryptos. As soon as Space X goes public, buy buy buy.

Buriedbornes was a one in a million game man. The dev's follow-up is nowhere near as good but it has his stamp all over it: a fast paced auto dungeon runner where you send this fallen angel into danger equipped with gear straight out of Buriedbornes. Its okay for what it is but Buriedbornes still exists and is still getting updates so why bother?

One Deck Dungeon is quite different. It's based on an existing board game and adapted for mobile by a group called (get this) Handelabra Games. They also did the really good Sentinels of the Multiverse mobile adaption that I played for a while until it went the typical boars game route of charging for every little expansion and added deck etc. Anyway ODD has a lot less of that and plays basically like a mix of Elder Sign and Talisman. As with Elder Sign you roll six sided ice and use outcomes to overcome challenges (not unlike Pathfinder now I think about it, although PF uses different sided dice) but as with Talisman your chosen class can affect those results dramatically. Melee classes get more combat dice, dex classes get more agility dice and so on. Gear gives more dice and skills found on each run allow you to modify the figures. It's all abstracted very well: for example, a skill called Crushing Blow converts one yellow (melee) die into a 6, while Ether Blast sacrifices one blue (spell) dice to reduce an enemy's armor (armor must be beaten before you can start assigning dice to damage and defence).

But that would be too simple these days so of course it has rogue like elements: you are racing against time as the dungeon deck runs out of cards, and each floor presents extra dice demands. The 'one' part of ODD indicates the quickness of a run: four floors, probably a handful of encounters per floor. Entire point of those encounters is to prepare for the fourth floor boss, who is...mean. Difficulty wise I'd put even the mid tier ones on Elder God from Arkham Horror level.

But even if you fail you get some xp to level your hero afterwards and be a bit stronger on the next run. There are, after small expansions, something like 12 or 15 heroes and I think as many dungeons/bosses.

So....yeah, it's a fucking monster of a game hidden in simple graphics and slightly clunky mobile mechanics. Ive probably played a good 20 hours and only just gotten the basic warrior up to where she can handle much more than the simplest dungeons on Normal. The warrior is a good start: hardy and her innate skill heals her when you descend a floor. My next class, the Archer, is instantly more difficult: she can sacrifice some time to roll extra black (omni) dice. But if you stay on a floor too long you take damage...so you see the tension there.

I imagine the board game is better since it has that tactile angle but I like it when mobile adaptions do the heavy lifting and do it much cheaper than physical components. ODD tabletop would be well over a hundred bucks in total...i think I spent 30 on the mobile game. And that was only after trying the cheap core game and knowing it was going to be worth the investment.

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Total pivot here. Dune finally came out in Australia, as I mentioned. It's funny. The Lynch version was deeply problematic but had an incredible soundtrack. The new one is the complete opposite: incredible but for a deeply problematic soundtrack. Zimmer needs to find his chill again. I miss his catchy shit like Driving Miss Daisy, The Lion King and True Romance. His sick obsession with bass drone ruins every movie and for some reason he keeps doing it to movies with amazing visuals and profoundly whispered dialogue.

If any movie doesn't need an oppressive drone and discordant chanting at every turn, it's a perfectly framed and shot Dune. I couldn't even hear the Litany Against Fear for all the noise, and noise is what it is when it obliterates everything else. My poor Dune virgin partner came out of the experience confused and angry. When part 2 comes out we will rewatch it with subs.

Kicker: we saw Hans Zimmer on concert a few years ago and also left that confused and angry: how did we go from Lisa Gerrard's sublime Gladiator score to Interstellar's heart-attack inducing bass blare? Oh well, at least we got Circle of Life in the mix.

Sooo being the uber nerd I am, I came home from Dune 2021 and watched the 1984 Lynch version immediately, because oh man does the new one leave a lot of crucial info out. BUT I stumbled onto something special in the process: a hi def fan edit on YouTube called the Spicediver mix. It's...about as good as that movie cpuld get. Fan edits are a guilty pleasure of mine and the really good ones are pure redemption. I had no trouble sitting through a 5 hour Hobbit fanedit once. Ah there's another set of movies that left the partner and me angry and confused...anyway Spicediver mix of Lynch's Dune. If you, like me, have a soft spot for that gross beast but want to see it conform to the book much more accurately. Much less voice over. Reduced cheese. Same amazing soundtrack and Lynchian madness. And pugs.

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I will grant you all a moment of schadenfreude: the uncertainty of O-mi-cron (latin choir intensifies) has decimated the value of my investments. Literally: 10% drop in share price. I know it'll bounce back (this is a long, long game that will surely outlive me) but it still bothers me with its sheer scope of volatility.

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I'm so glad I have a weekly TV show to enjoy again. It's WoT Friday! Man I want rhis show to get there. Reading it is such a slog because Jordan is just so damn pedestrian but I know under it all is a mass of gold and I know the showrunners know it too because they are speedrunning the first few books. And I'm at peace with the show's CG foibles: no amount of money can make up for Covid's effect on available time for post prod checks.

Anyway I went back and rewatched Game of Thrones episode 1. Yes: superior acting and visuals to WoT1....but damn rocky nonetheless. The kids couldn't really act, scenes were very small scale and you could actually see the budget. Not that I think the two shows should be compared rigorously -- i just wanted to see if after all this time GoT had as great a start as I remembered. Yes...and no. Sean Bean carried it hard. He knew exactly why he was there.

But good lord is the softcore porn/rape aspect of GoT dated now. Much prefer the consensual intimacies of WoT.

Anyway I know straight-played heroic fantasy is not everyone's cup of tea. Good thing Expanse is due back in a few weeks, eh?


Edit: as usual please excuse phone typos. :)

👋

Here’s where my money’s been going the last while;

• An acoustic guitar (Yamaha FG830, if you’re interested)
• Some single-sided colour paper for origami
• 1 Olympic barbell
• 1 initial set of Olympic weights
• 1 rack
• 1 set of adjustable dumbbells

I’ve been wanting some kettlebells, but the prices I’ve been seeing them at haven’t been reasonable at all. Might need to start paying more attention to the second-hand market for those…

Not sure what it is, but I just haven’t been spending money on games lately. I’m not playing games much (literally 0 hours, most weeks). I’ve been wondering whether it’s pandemic-related, or perhaps just me moving on somewhat. It was interesting seeing how many non-(video) game hobbies were listed here! That said, Darkest Dungeon II has been looking absolutely fantastic.

Oh - and I’m planning on getting the latest Raspberry Pi kit & setting up a Pi-Hole. I know it’s overspecced for that, but I’d rather pay more and maybe find other uses for it. :)

Holy shit, Sarno's an analog trog who even lifts, bro.

I love it.

DD2 and RL2 are both very much on my radar.

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...that last post made me seem really busy and outgoing but most of my time has been spent grinding Federation rank in EliteD. Decided to finally go for a Corvette.

Don't let me do this again.

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Sudden announcement of yet another Titty Quest expansion and much sooner than expected KoA:RR expansion has me briefly quite in love with THQ Nordic yet again. Not that I can play the PC only TQ xpack yet but Fatesworn is now mere days away.

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Was up way too late last night watching more Get Back and then foolishly deciding on 'a few quick games' of One Deck Dungeon. Derp.

DD2 looks good. I'm hoping the difficulty settings are done right, because as is, the game is too easy. I'm confident the final product will be great.

FFXIV... I'd love to say I'm enjoying early access, but right now, holy moly, is anyone not trying to log in and play? They are shattering concurrency records, and its not even fully out yet. The wait times are unreal.

I've also been catching up on Destiny 2. Bungie's 30th anniversary patch is coming next week, and their large expansion in February.

I will probably mess around with D3 season 25, Kotick fuckery aside, which means December will be packed for me.

My niece and nephew (10 & 8 respectively) have gotten really into the Switch recently, and this has been more rewarding than I thought possible seeing them enjoy the Nintendo library. Might be the most enjoyment I've gotten out of my gaming expenditures ever, and I'm not even playing, minus a Mario Kart stomping I hand out now and again :D

We are waiting on the Oceanic data centre for XIV. Amused by the stories of woe though. Totally unsurprising.

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Soooo I am totally shit at pvp games but hive me a fucking dragon simulator and I'm happy to eat dirt for hours. Century was on my radar but suddenly it's out on steam. 2022 for console. I will wait.

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WoT update. Finished second book last night. Meanwhile the show is pulling from several books and it's barely 5 eps in. This is a smart approach. Jordan is sort of like an overwhelmed, short-sighted archaeologist trying to extract an intact skeleton (to borrow Stephen King's analogy): fearing he might accidentally ruin it, he leaves way too much rock and debris in the way. The showrunner benefits from hindsight and can reproduce that skeleton in a much clearer sense.

In a way, adaptations are like really well funded fanfic. Successful ones capture whatever it was that made the adapter a fan in the first place but also show it in a different light, with different emphases. A mediocre adaption just sort of goes through the motions. And a bad one misses the point. Typically the successful one are done by directors and producers who are also fans, mediocre ones are simply briefed and bad ones are often but not always cash grabs.

And then you have Kubrick...

For the record, my favourite ever adaptation is Scorceses' The Last Temptation of Christ. Least favourite that I've seen? Have to go with The Hobbit. Took an incredibly finetoothed fanedit to salvage that bloated mess.

no big spending since we germans still jump from lockdown to lockdown :(

but bought a new pc keeping my old graphics card till prices get back to normal.

also decided to support ggg again after stopping at the 10c merger, had alot of fun in scourge and now delve and i'm grateful the game is still around to kill my time.

and i really wish to be able to resume traveling the world, the sooner the better.

What, you don't consider the pleasure you receive now your due for when you supported and weren't having fun? We surely are strange creatures.

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FEDERAL CORVETTE ACQUIRED.

Now to spend even more time engineering it to a fine tuned monster of annihilation and give those fascist Imperials what for...

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There is an anticipated surge in spending down here as people tap their so-called Covid savings. The possible mildness of Omicron and our near 95% vaccination figure have most people optimistic and eager to treat themselves. We shall see.

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Fresh vegetables delivery just arrived. It costs me less per week for all our vegetable needs than a single set of NON combined armour in Path of Exile: 30 AUD vs 50ish.

Our weekly grocery shop is just over a combined set of armour: 150AUD for our weekly grocery delivery vs 130 AUD for a 'top tier' PoE armour set.

I love that I of all people can make these comparisons and not be accused of being niggardly or selfish.

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The only sort of game where buying character skins makes even less sense than PoE, where you are zoomed out and said skin is obscured by a multitude of skill effects, is the first person shooter. What little I played of Overwatch shocked me with its ridiculous emphasis on skins. I understood the appeal when they were free on shit like quake 2 -- the gimmick of Homer Simpson fragging a crack whore was about as cheap as the price of downloading the skins -- but to successfully make that your f2p money maker when most of the game all you see are hands and a weapon? Simultaneously impressive and depressing.

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Which brings me to a related query. Division 1, set in post-pandemic New York, has utterly stunning character models but fairly drab environments. Division 2 is set in DC and has utterly stunning environments but extremely mediocre character models and physics.

Which is better? Sure, we spend longer looking at the environment, but these games also have a loooot of voice acting and in engine cut scenes. Needless to say, Division 1 had more and they really pulled me into the world. 2 tends to tuck its cut scenes behind optional lore object viewing. Not hard to see why.

Both btw have excellent gunplay and fairly realistic parkour although 2 just feels tighter minus some weird floaty jumps.