S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl

Stalker 2 is my favourite kind of game. The kind that features long stretches of relative quiet and tense exploration, punctuated by brief moments of decisive violence. Schlepping around, hunting for artifacts, and slamming energy drinks to keep my stamina up while trying not to get in the middle of a firefight between two opposing factions is the name of the game.

Feeling Dour About Troubadour

I primarily play a Mesmer in Guild Wars 2. While it seems like the overall reception to the newly revealed elite specializations has been positive, I am less than enthused about the mesmer’s spec, the Troubadour.

I am usually pretty actively turned off by the archetypal fantasy of “defeat your enemies with music!” that most bard-type representations fall into. The moment-to-moment gameplay in Guild Wars 2 is second to none—so maybe if the gameplay is fun, perhaps I can look past my own biases? While I haven’t tried one yet (the beta hasn’t started at the time of writing) I’m not very optimistic because . . . 

There.

Are.

No. 

Clones!

What the fractal! This is now two elite specializations in a row (virtuoso from End of Dragons, and now troubadour) that have dispensed with the mesmer’s main profession mechanic, its shtick, its gimmick, its raison d’être—clones! Of the four mesmer elite specialization, half of them don’t use clones! The last mesmer elite specialization to make use of clones was Path of Fire’s mirage, and that was released eight years ago. That’s more than half the game’s lifetime at this point.

I like Mesmer clones. I like them being the mesmer’s thing. I like watching a small army of them running all over. I like watching their visual shatter effect get bugged and remain on screen for an entire encounter! Not having access to them makes me feel weird, like I’m forgetting something, or like I’ve forgotten to put pants on before leaving the house.

Variety is good, and so I think that having a spec without clones is probably fine. Virtuoso isn’t my favourite elite spec, but I do think it has its place. That said, I really do think it should be the clone-less mesmer spec, and adding a second one really bums me out. There are eight other professions in Guild Wars 2, and all of them offer a clone-less experience if one so desires.

I think that there are plenty of ways that we could have had a troubadour that retains clones. One initial thought was using clones the way a musician might make use of looping live instruments (like Mogwai) or playing multiple instruments at once (like Djunah¹!) to build and layer different abilities the way those musicians do with their sounds. Even though that’s not what we’re getting, I can still dream!

Clone-enabled Troubadour Idea?

The Band Plays On (or maybe I’m With The Band?) (Minor Adept trait):

Your clones remain active as long as they have boons, regardless of whether or not they have a target. If their target dies, they will retarget the next enemy engaged by the mesmer.

Gain access to troubadour chords, which replace your mesmer shatters.

Chords do not destroy clones. instead, they trigger effects based on your clones’ active boons.

Power Chord (F1): Redistributes boons from clones your to nearby allies.

Drop Chord (F2): Converts boons on your clones to conditions, and sends these conditions to your target.

Dischordant (F3): Consumes boons to daze target. Defiance damage is based on the type and duration of the consumed boons.

Distorted Melody² (Major Adept trait):

Whenever you gain distortion, extend the duration of all boons on yourself and your clones by X seconds.

I feel like this brings some new things to the table while retaining what makes messers unique. Your clones can stick around in open world, even without a target! You’re not actually blowing them up constantly! You start fights with shatters instead of ending fights with them! You still have clooooooooones!

The Armed

Would have loved to have heard “Fortune’s Daughter,” but this set felt fresh and the band took to it with reckless abandon. ⋈

Setlist

1. “Well Made Play”
2. “Kingbreaker”
3. “ALL FUTURES”
4. “Night City Aliens”
5. “Grace Obscure”
6. “Do It Yourself” (PUNCH cover)
7. “Broken Mirror”
8. “I Steal What I Want”
9. “Purity Drag”
10. “BIG SHELL”
11. “Somewhat Damaged” (Nine Inch Nails cover)
12. “Liar”

Deafheaven

Setlist

1. “Incidental I”
2. “Doberman”
3. “Magnolia”
4. “Brought to the Water”
5. “Sunbather”
6. “The Garden Route”
7. “Heathen”
8. “Amethyst”
9. “Incidental II”
10. “Revelator”
11. “Dream House”
12. “Winona”

Better iOS Logseq Quick Capture With Bebop

I use Logseq for all sorts of things, and one of them is collecting and saving links to various internet items of interest. This is pretty easy on desktop—a couple quick copy and paste operations and I’ve got whatever link I want saved to my current journal page.

Things are a little different on iOS. The Logseq app does show up in the share sheet as a destination, and sharing URLs to it from Safari ostensibly adds it to my Logseq graph¹. But, if the Logseq app wasn’t already open and in the background, it doesn’t work. And if the Logseq app was already open and in the background, then sharing to it just adds the shared content to whatever page is frontmost, which I almost never want. I just want my quick captures to go to whatever my daily note was for that day. I believe there is a way to designate a specific page for all quick captures to go to, but that’s not quite it—I just want them to go to whatever today’s page is.

I discovered Bebop (no, not that Bebot!) while looking for a simple, quick launching, disposable scratchpad.² I found myself agreeing with a lot of the thoughts that the developer, Jack Cheng, outlined on his website. When I share to Bebot, I get a nice prefilled bit of text ready to be saved, and when I tap “Save Note” the sliding panel gets out of the way and I don’t have to futz with it very much.

Bebop saves these little bits of text in a folder of your choice. I save my Logseq graphs to a local folder on my iOS devices, and use a combination of Syncthing and Möbius Sync Pro to keep everything synced up.

With all these different pieces, hooking them all up to work together is actually pretty seamless. Normally, when one shares something to Logseq, the content is sent to the app, which then adds it to a page, which then saves it by writing those changes to the file in question, then that syncs. This method basically does it in reverse—Bebop is going to write those changes directly to a file, and those changes will be picked up by Logseq the next time it opens that file.

I have Bebop configured to:

• Save files to the /journals directory in my Logseq graph directory
• Name these files according to my existing format of YYYY_MM_DD.md
• If a file with the same name already exists, append the content to it, rather than creating a new file

The last bit is crucial, because if I’ve already created journal page in Logseq, or already saved something from Bebot, or done anything else that might have already created the file, then it’ll simply add to what’s there. If not, it creates the file instead. Nice!

I also took advantage of Bebop’s ability to apply a custom template to the notes so that they match the formatting of Logseq’s regular quick captures:

- **{{date:hh:mm}}** [[quick capture]]: {{content}}

The leading - is important because Logseq formats everything as a Markdown list under the hood, so we need to add the bullet point for it to look normal when we look at it in Logseq. Wrapping “quick capture” in brackets will create a link to the quick capture page, essentially acting as a tag to collect all my captures.