pooepw

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in and out the door on hearthstone

Beginning of Play

I was bored this past week and decided to finally relapse on playing Hearthstone. In December of 2023, I uninstalled it and never looked back until last week when I had a craving to play some Dungeon Run. I played through a bit of Dungeon Run on the first two days I had it and had a blast doing so, but the experience seemed rather unchanged, which is strange because there were so many expansions that had come out since the last time I played. While those cards were not directly in the pool of cards the player could put into their deck, the ability to generate the new cards should have made for a more different experience, but those cards did not really change the experience I had.

Bringing Me To Uninstall

What made me uninstall the game once more was the experience I had on Monday. I decided to veer off course and see the experience of Battlegrounds, wondering if anything massive had happened to impact the experience. As it turns out, the experience was pretty much the same.

Battlegrounds

In the one and a half years of not playing Hearthstone, Battlegrounds pretty much remained the same, only worse. The game mode did not have much of a change in terms of mechanics, even down to the types of minions the player could play. They never added a new subtype in the form of the Draenei, which released last year, the tacked on system was the same trinket system from before, and many of the characters seemed to be the exact same. The only thing different were the minions in the pools. The usual shifting of what the different minion types do had occurred, which is to say that the minion types still followed their motifs, but the words on the cards were changed a bit to follow their motifs. For instance, I saw a new Murloc card that summoned itself from hand at the beginning of combat and saw that Pirates gained even more effects involving gold. Nagas became more reliant on spells, even incorporating tavern spell bonuses right into their mechanics. With these things said, the house wrecker of the game mode was the massive elephant in the room of the token system (or whatever it is called). This system was released when I quit Hearthstone with obvious reason; the feel of the game trended toward a microtransaction filled mess in terms of vibes. In playing Battlegrounds this time around, it felt even more like a microtransaction hell. The new thing they decided to do (or at least it was new to me) was show what heroes you COULD play if you paid for the pass. And each hero had the shiny new reroll button attached to them, beckoning the player to use their pay to win coins. I played through the entire battlegrounds game with this immediate sour taste the game mode gave me. After winning the one game I played, I decided to never experience the game mode again. Which brought me to the new arena.

New Arena

I do not like the new arena. I played the new Underground Arena, and it was not a good experience for me. The game gave me a no duplicates start, and I was forced to pick a duplicate, which made me immediately retire that run. Then, on run two, I immediately went 0-2. This was when I realized that I just simply cannot play Hearthstone. There is simply too much luck based mechanics within the game. I was playing a Death Knight deck with the deck just playing good stuff, but one card that rotted in my hand until the very end was a newer card that resurrected a Deathrattle minion and had reborn. I wanted to get value out of the card, but in drawing half my deck, I saw 0 of the Deathrattle minions, showing how bad my luck is. Then, in game 2, my opponent played Priest, and he immediately started constantly emoting, which made me want to die. After squelching them, I still got trounced due to luck because my opponent was on a luck heavy deck. It made me really fucking hate Hearthstone. What I realized soon after was that the new arena format was another way for Blizzard to put more microtransactions into the game because the seemingly infinite Arena tickets I had before were now incredibly finite because arena runs are much shorter. The decks that are in arena are now more powerful than ever, a microtransaction vibe has been tacked on the experience, and Hearthstone is still Hearthstone, so RNG is fucking bullshit. I cannot believe they ruined Arena; what's next? Tavern Brawl?

The Pack Pulling Experience

This is the final part of this hate rant, in which I talk about my pack pulling experience. In playing Dungeon Run, the only experience I slightly liked, I got "catch-up" packs. On the day that I decided to try Battlegrounds and other things, I opened the packs and discovered that the packs do not catch up the player to play the game. I had not played in a year and a half, and the pitiful 30 cards the game decided to give me did not make up the difference. I didn't even get a Legendary card! It was so bullshit to see the legendary glow on the packs only to get 2 Epic cards. One of the packs didn't even have epics. On top of this, I had four other packs, and those packs did not have anything in them. Just the bare minimum. This kick to the teeth preceded the microtransaction hell that was Battlegrounds, so this brings me to the final conclusion.

The Returning Player Loop

As a returning player, I am now going to establish the loop that I experienced, which other players could possible also face when trying to play Hearthstone again.

The player logs in to play Hearthstone again after so long. They get the quest for catch up packs. They may not even play the game of Ranked Hearthstone, so this does not matter.

They play whatever game mode they wanted to play, in my case it was Dungeon Run. The quests get completed because Dungeon Run does count. (The quests are very generic).

They open the packs they get, getting nothing but unplayable garbage. Decks right now in Hearthstone require very specific Legendaries to play, so players move on to step 4.

They play one of the other game modes, like Battlegrounds or Arena and get blasted by the microtransaction stench that surrounds those game modes. Step 4 might be repeated.

The player uninstalls the game again.

And this is all such a shame for me because I was a casual Hearthstone player for a long time. I started playing the game in Classic, when I was a young teenager, right before Naxxramas came out. I never got too high up on the ranked ladder, but I had a good time making decks and playing them for fun. Now I see a game mired with microtransactions and other unfun things. I don't care too much that the game becomes better about the things I laid out in this rant, but I felt like writing this as a send off to a game ruined by the new management behind it.

Fuck you Microsoft, ya piece of shit company.

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new video

posted a new video today where i broke the youtube generative ai

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Plant Blog #3

Sorry for taking a long time again. It has just been really hard for the pumpkins I planted... and unexpectedly easy for pumpkins I did not plant. Starting with the bad, many of the pumpkins I planted perished. The one-two combo of the wind being really bad this year alongside the bugs instantly eating into the stems made many of them wilt. I now only have two. None of the pumpkins I planted in the ground from my sister sprouted either, which was confusingly devastating. When I dug them up, the seeds had opened, but there was no sprout coming out of them. This gave me an understanding that the area I chose to plant them in was probably not too arable.

In terms of pumpkins that have been growing in an unfettered manner, the tomato plot has been fully invaded. Last year, after Halloween, we left the pumpkins to rot in one of the garden boxes. These were full pumpkins, untouched by our hands. To my surprise, some of them survived over the winter. The seeds have grown to a massive size, much larger than even the plants I planted the year before. I do not know if they will produce pumpkins or fail like last year's.

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the next video is out

I ranked every mainline pokemon game by their opening. I didn't say it in the video, but the guideline I am realizing now that I used to determine if it was a mainline game was whether or not the game was used in Pokemon VGC.

Please enjoy at your leisure.

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God I hate how normalized not being in control of your own devices has become. My phone updates in the middle of the night without asking me shit or getting my consent for anything and its like "Oh hi I'm your new AI, please enjoy this forced overlay that you can't exit out of until you go through my tutorial"

"Great fuck you, I would like to uninstall you" "Oh I'm sorry you can't uninstall me! I'm a core system application and if you uninstall me your phone won't function correctly despite the fact that I did not exist yesterday and your phone worked fine" "....." "You can disable parts of my functionality but I will always be here and I will pop up notifications asking you to re-enable me unless you figure out how to disable those too! Then I will still show up in a different color at the top of your settings application telling you that you need to 'fix" a 'problem' with your phone, that problem being that I am disabled. Does that help?"

Like, you know what I can do on my desktop? "sudo pacman -Rdd linux" , this will just fucking remove the entire linux kernel. Fundamentally breaking my computer until I boot up a live disk and chroot in and reinstall it or whatever, and the computer will go "Are you sure (y/n)" or whatever and i'm like "y" and it will just go "Ok you got it boss"

But its mine, I get to do what I want with it. I control the computer, the computer does not control me. I refuse to cede control to my phone or anything else. The thing is a lot of people will joke that like "Oh I love just letting the machine tell me what to do, I don't know what I'm doing, it knows best" or whatever but the thing you have to realize is that when you say that you are abstracting away that "the phone" or whatever is not some value neutral logic driven robot like from sci-fi, it is a collection of the the capitalistic and fascistic desires of the tech oligarch fuckwits that are burning the world to the ground right now. You aren't submitting to the phone, you are submitting to Musk, Bezos, Nadella, Pichai, Cook and all those other evil bastards.

Fuck them, fuck their little AI toys, and fuck this.

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plant blog #2

Sorry for not posting in a while about the plants. It is just that it has mostly nothing worth noting or bad news.

Bad News

The bad news is that some kind of creature has been murdering my sunflowers. I am down to half of one as it stands. I say that it is a creature and not a bug or insect because the sunflowers are not getting eaten at the leaves; it is that the sunflowers have been pulled out/cut. It may have been a bird's doing or some other larger animal, but it is clearly not due to the local bugs. The other bad/nothing? news is that the other pumpkin seeds that my sister brought have not been growing. I did plant them in the ground, but I chose a location where plants have not regularly grown before in my backyard. I am still slightly surprised/perplexed that they have not sprouted in any capacity. I probably have to hoe down the area again.

Good News

The pumpkins I planted in the box are growing well. They are jacks iirc.

Hopefully, I will get pumpkins out of these.

In Other News

I recently discovered that a Cardinal has settled into the flower bush growing on the fence. There is a nest there, and the babies hatched recently. Hopefully, the local house wren will not hassle them.

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I've decided to bring back the gardening blogs since it is now time for the season.

Here is the current pumpkin progress:

I also decided to grow sunflowers as a means for generating sun- I mean defending my pumpkins. The idea is that pests will choose to eat the sunflowers instead of my pumpkins

The pumpkins I'm growing this time around are normal sized pumpkins rather than the usual baby boos

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TODAY

I AM JOKERFIED

or

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i'm never getting this achievement

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today is the day

i have finally released my family guy stardew valley content mod. it is very small.

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🏁Nightmare Kart: The Old Karts🏁

Free expansion DLC coming soon!

💉 New mini campaign! 🏎️ New racers & karts! 🗺️ New tracks! 💥 New power ups & game modes!

Press kit here patreon bluesky Music by The Noble Demon VO by Tom Schalk

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resolution

now that we are 1 month and 1 day into the new year, i will now inscribe my resolutions for this year:

easy

clear out more and more of the game backlog

doables

read 1 whole book (not manga)

go through japanese textbooks to refresh kanji knowledge

make and release 1 software

make more substantial videos

wishful thinking

read 2 whole book

go to japan (straight to okunoshima)

learn tagalog

get more followers....

make a website (due to costs)

i originally placed this post on bluesky, but i realized that i had more to add to it. tumblr allows for longer posts, so here it is.

edit: forgot some stuff

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Yakuza 0: One-Eyed Wonder

i love 24 hour cinderella

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Stardew Valley: Helping Out The Ninjas + Ginger Island

continuing the ridgeside village questline and more of ginger island also, the meg population has been culled

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Retro Gaming: Myst III - Book 2

i've decided to return to posting streams to tumblr since yesterday. this is because i am simply not someone who uses social media

😰

anyways, today i am back on the saddle of myst iii trying to get through book 2. the tags are on this post because tumblr asked politely for me to put them on there :()()()()()

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alright, i have decided to stop limiting my mediums for stream posts. i am just going to start posting everywhere. maybe I should make a multiposting application or smth. today, I continue elden ring

Elden Ring Convergence Mod: Bone Zone twitch

youtube

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fallout 3 really is super mid

:P

Ain't it though?