One week, two trips: Catalina and the WMA.


Last year's Catalina crew got back together for another visit. It was thankfully not as hot this time and we had a better idea of what was good and what wasn't.

Town

Last year we were spread out across three hotels, so there was only interaction during activities (dining, diving, beach). So this year we booked a vacation rental and had a place for the kids to run laps. The full kitchen was nice to have as well.


We did the Descanso beach club thing again.

Diving

After years of using rental equipment and/or hand-me-downs, I finally got around to procuring my own dive fins. They're nothing special but proper fitment makes a huge difference.




There were four dives this trip:

1. A shore drive off Casino Point, self-guided because we've been there a time or two. I missed this one so that Jes could check out the spa.
2. A Casino Point night dive, led by a divemaster from the shop. I didn't bring the camera for this one, figuring that even with my ballmount dive light, focus would be a problem. In retrospect it probably would have worked. I recommend this dive: when darkness falls, everything goes hunting.
3. Boat dive #1, I think in the viscinity of Indian Rock.
4. Boat dive #2, somewhere around Starlight Beach.

The boat dives were geographically a lot like Casino Point but with different kelp forest densities and better visibility.


While the divers were out to sea, the land people hit the arcade, rented a golf cart, and checked out the kei truck scene:



We got home from Catalina with a few hours to spare before my redeye out to IAD to see J and family. Me and J have mostly been playing Steam games so it wasn't clear what we would try to conquer on the PS5. We decided on the Elden Ring DLC and the Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel Claptastic Voyage DLC (which we had only once played through).

Shadow of the Erdtree

The Shadow of the Erdtree is accessed via the Mohg boss arena - in keeping with the Soulslike aesthetic, getting to the DLC requires beating an optional boss who is not a cakewalk. And so our first challenge was to beat Mohg in J's playthrough since we'd only done it on mine two years ago.

Starting with Mohg was frustrating, particularly since it initially looked like we weren't going to be able to co-op him. Elden Ring prevents co-op matchmaking for characters that are too far apart in level, presumably to prevent 'taxiing'. It also has an (undocumented?) mechanic wherein you cannot summon a co-op ally if you've beaten the area boss. That, annoyingly, meant that playing through the main game we couldn't rush the area boss and then mop up dungeons and multitude of optional bosses. Or so it seemed at the time and then again when we tried to team up outside the Mohg arena. But then J turned off password-protected matchmaking to see if he could get some randos and, sure enough, both randos and I were available.

Getting co-op going (sometimes with randos) was only the first step. There was also:

• Realizing we left our characters configured for the final boss of the main game rather than their generalist or bleed-focused loadout.
• Relearning Mohg's attacks.
• Remembering that there is a special item to stun him.
• Remembering that there is a special physick ingredient to block his instakill between phases.
• Remembering you can do a ton of damage while he is charging his instakill, thereby minimizing his second phase.

After a few tries and one respec, we got him.

Honourable path? Clearly Leda does not realize that I am wearing my former friend's head.

With that settled, Leda invited us to the Realm of Shadow.


Shadow of the Erdtree is a lot like the main game: beautiful open fields, ample dungeons, NPCs of few words, bad guys big and small. So in a way it is perfect for someone - such as myself - who played through the main game just once and hadn't the stamina for another full run but kinda missed it after a couple of years. And while it is a lot like the main game, none of the critical elements (environments, characters, items) are - or feel - recycled.

SotE is not easy. Part of the difficulty, for us, was self-inflicted; we kinda charged through the overworld rather than fanning out from the start point. We also didn't read up on the new items and mechanics that make a difference.


From an early post on the main game:

Me	Invaders annoyingly love to hang out near NPC enemies so you have to fight both at the same time (and likely lose your runes in an inconvenient place). The even griefier ones simply run and hide, blocking your progress.

It's worse, now invaders are condensed into the smaller (but still quite large) real estate of the shadow realm. We've met a few that simply refused to depart the safety of some heinous NPC abush and others that would actually come and fight. But invaders are a constant annoyance for players interesting in a co-op PvE experience. It's gratifying to beat them though.

The Pre-Sequel

Wanting to diversify between slashing and shooting, me and J decided to play through the Borderlands Pre-Sequel Claptastic Voyage DLC. We had fond memories of the wonky Claptrap-oriented adventure we played many years ago on... XBox 360 probably?

Alas, the DLC starts at level 30 and we had no cross-save TPS characters. The Handsome Collection has a "start a new character at level 30" mechanic, but it requires one completion of the main quest. So we did that.


The game holds up. It wasn't perfect to begin with (especially Pickle) but it plays just as well as BL3 and has a more compelling Handsome Jack origin story.

PB

It had been far too long since I'd had Potbelly.

Don't die!

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Source.

Time for another brief installment in the series of posts on search, indexing, and Google Search Console. Last year I linked a post and some HN discussion about changes in indexing by Big Search. The discussion digressed into grievances about Google removing personal pages from its index. These were echoed in a more recent post that asserts that these observations indicate a new search strategy by Google.

Vincent Schmalbach

Google is no longer trying to index the entire web. In fact, it's become extremely selective, refusing to index most content. This isn't about content creators failing to meet some arbitrary standard of quality. Rather, it's a fundamental change in how Google approaches its role as a search engine.

The comments section pointed out the obvious:

crazygringo

This post seems to be based entirely on personal anecdotal experience. There isn't a shred of hard data to support the headline claim that Google now "defaults to not indexing content". Google never indexed everything, removing duplicates, blogspam, useless pages, etc. Maybe they've changed their thresholds or maybe not. But this post provides zero evidence of anything. It's pure speculation without any facts at all.

OP showed up to say, "you're not wrong, crazygringo":

Vincent Schmalbach

You're right, this post is based on personal anecdotal experience. I have access to Google Search Console data for over 100 websites, and most have many pages in the "Discovered - currently not indexed" and "Crawled - currently not indexed" categories, despite ranking well for some keywords and getting traffic. This wasn't the case 10 years ago. Regarding "Google never indexed everything" - I'd say it came close. They did manual de-indexing for heavy spam sites and would even send an email when they did this. Apart from that, nearly everything was in the index, including duplicates. De-duplication happened at the ranking stage, not the indexing stage.

Whether or not Vincent has accurately described Google's new strategy, crazygringo is denying an actual trend simply because there's no public announcement or leaked memo. In a way, this only matters to small-time web publishers and SEOs. And yet it's also just weird to think that this fixture of the internet could be moving from "index everything" to "America Online was right all along".

aiauthoritydev

I think the problem is not Google specific rather the internet has grown far too large with too much of crap floating around. Google, in my opinion has done the best job of getting relevant information followed by Reddit. While OpenAI etc. is pretty good (so does Google Gemini) what is OpenAI like interfaces prevent me from doing is to segue from a focused topic to related areas to discover knowledge on the periphery, which is the most important aspect of learning in my opinion which chatbots today are not able to do that well.

Moment of Zen

My web index pointed me to another Chris who also has a characters page.

I've hit the final act on my second playthroughs of Remnant II and BG3 where the priorities have hidden archetypes (R2) and reclassing (BG3). Mild spoilers throughout.


It'll be a little while before we can finish off Remnant II due to logistics, but the final boss is in mine and J's sights. Having gotten the Dreamcatcher melee weapon, we found our way to Bane to get the Invader archetype.

It's a bit of a shame to have picked up a bunch of new classes just before we probably put the game down, but I don't imagine a second campaign re-roll provides as much variety as the first.

Warning: blood.

The charisma build is going well; I can convince just about anyone of anything, like Ketheric to skip to phase two or his brother to get an everything-ectomy. On the other hand, 18-ish charisma cantrips do pitiful amounts of damage.


Apostle of Myrkul was quite a bit harder than on normal difficulty, though perhaps this was from my lack of ranged damage this time through. I couldn't do much damage to AoM and Dame Aylin (who must be freed to make AoM vulnerable) kept getting herself killed. My main could handle the melee heat but wasn't doing enough damage to make a strong case for soloing. On the plus side, Owlbear Jaheira and a pair of elementals (air, especially) were great at popping the zombie pods.

The tides turned when I read that blinding AoM was a viable tactic. Minthara was suddenly surviving. Aylin was suddenly surviving. We burned him down pretty quickly.


As it turns out, I had used this tactic on the Shadowfell portal, but that was to keep archers from wrecking my interdimensional hole. Then, much later, Sarevok for whatever reason simply would not enter my smoke cloud. This was very nice for a blind-immune Lae'zel.


Last time through I missed the Iron Throne area because I nuked the Steelwatch Foundry before pursuing the various questlines that go that way. The underwater prison's turn-limited scenario isn't easy, but it made for a good tactical challenge. I don't know about this lore though - a fantasy game with submarines and Zoom calls and neural robot datalinks? Why not, uh, just make D&D a sci-fi game?

Anyway, the submarining netted me one or two Gondian survivors and a robe that seemed perfect for all my lightning equipment - it heals the wearer when standing in water. This Wavemother's Robe would ordinarily be very situational or require consumables (spells, water flasks) if not for the Trident of the Waves that creates water on a melee attack (which is rather non-situational).

My blue (lightning) dragon main seemed like a candidate for this equipment, but I didn't want to mess with his very useful off-tank build. In fact, none of my characters seemed right for the build, in no small part because the robes provide a dexterity-based armor class and the trident is a strength weapon.

I hadn't actually tried reclassing before. I was aware of the mechanic but didn't look into it in my first playtrhough then sort of forgot about it in this one (I don't talk to Withers all that much). With a little reading, I found that aside from certain permanent buffs, there's no downside to reclassing other than the small cost.

Minthara: fighter, wavemother

The right number of paladins is zero and my squad had two, so Minthara got the nod for the rebuild. The highlights:

• I solved the strength/dexterity issue by maxing dex, ignoring str, and giving her Club of Hill Giant Strength to set her strength to 19.
• Holding a trident and club meant Minthara would need two-weapon fighting and dual wielder. I settled on reclassing to fighter for this and triple attack.
• And there's a bunch of other stuff (gloves, boots, rings) that provide shock damage and resistance.

It has worked out quite well, considering the risk of having a melee character not wearing armor. Minthara walks around, stabbing and shocking people, healing most damage by standing in the sparky puddles. What's more, she can fight side-by-side with my main because he's also lightning-resistant. She can go the full day since healing isn't a problem and as a physical damage build she doesn't rely on rationed spell slots.

Reclass everything

Since that experiment worked out, I did some more reclassing, mostly to shape my party to the best equipment I had.

• There are a bunch of poison-buffing items and it wasn't until Act III that I got the clubs that passively do poison damage. And so Halsin was reborn as a dual-wielding poison club smashy-guy.
• Since he's canonically charismatic and dramatic, I made Wyll a bard with high dexterity to take advantage of his rapier proficiency.
• Jaheira is now a sorceror which doesn't feel all that different from the other magic classes but I hadn't used it before.
• Having also never used unarmed combat items, I gave Karlach open hand monk duty.

It's great to have the ability to optimize team comp and finally make use of some of the gear that's gathered dust at the bottom of my warchest, but the reclass mechanic feels a bit too unrestricted. Anyone can reclass to anything. Shart (the delightful community nickname for Shadowheart) can have 20 strength, Gale can be made dumb as rocks while remaining hopelessly bookish in cutscenes.

Perhaps each character should have individual base stats for the sake of continuity and to gently nudge their rebuild options? Relatedly, part of the fun of FE:Fates was to develop builds around innate (and inherited) skills that had a traditional use and a few nontraditional ones. BG3 characters have immutable skills but they're largely not relevant to classing/combat (except the ones that push you toward the default class e.g. Halsin and Karlach).

I'm not sure how restrictive the D&D framework is, but imho classing would be best if it occurred once at recruitment and wasn't just a blank slate.

Ahhh spandex.

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