Life Post-Cohost

Cohost has been gone for more than a month at this point. Soon enough, it will be two. A fair amount has changed since, and maybe I should put some of my thoughts down, if only so I can justify having this blog.

First, I spent a decent amount of time playing Dragalia Lost (Dawnshard server) before ultimately falling off. It was a fun distraction for a while, and a nice way to relive the only gacha to ever truly grab me. I am reminded of why Dragalia was and will forever be the only good gacha, especially since I've also been playing Granblue Fantasy, although even that's faded by now.

My anniversary was on the 29th of October. I'm officially 28 now. Every day I get closer and closer to the big 30, and I still feel like I have no idea what I'm doing in my life. People tell me that's normal, a lot of them didn't figure out what to do until their forties, if not later. While I appreciate the sentiment behind that, it isn't a comforting thought. After all, I'm still 28, and I'm still relatively healthy. How will I cope in the future, when I am no longer as healthy, when my body is still decaying and I am stuck inside of it, when the climbing costs of keeping me merely functional will drive down whatever income I have - will I even have enough income to be able to keep up, considering I still don't have a career?

Speaking of moneymaking, I got a job. It's retail. It's hell. The customers are the least bad part. I already broke down crying because of this job. I've been here a month. At least the pay helps, even if my financial situation is still not great.

Working on a 5x1 schedule is also inhumane, but at least the Brazillian government is currently debating a bill that would make any work schedule with only one break day a week illegal. The goal is to enshrine a 4x3 schedule in the constitution but I'll be happy with 5x2. Speaking of politics, our rightoid mayor won the election against the leftist candidate. With Trump being back in the White House over in America, I am going to brace for Bolsonaro to come back in 2026. Unfortunately, there's a decently documented causal chain between Trump's election and Bolsonaro's election.

And before any Americans get any ideas about being snippy with me: Voting is compulsory in Brazil under penalty of a fine, so yes, I voted. It's the absolute minimum I could do.

Most of my time on social media has been spent over on the Website League, which is an incredibly promising project. The herculean effort put forward by the Stewards, under no pay, feels like a tiny miracle happening in real time.

It's also already had its first defederation incident, so y'know. It's almost like ASSC wasn't kidding when they said that running a social media is Hard™. But what do I know.

I spent a long while, before Cohost's read-only mode and honestly even now, hoping that there would be some sort of second wind, a miracle for the good things in the world. I even mentioned as much in the Dying of the Light. But out of the four members of ASSC, Kaara got a new job before Cohost even hit Read-Only, jkap mentioned in her blog that she got herself a new job more recently, one of colin's more recent blog posts is at least in part about how he never wants to work in social media again (and already wasn't posting on cohost for six months pre read-only) and as far as I can tell, aidan went AWOL from the internet. ASSC still exists until all the papers for dissolution are filed, but it basically only exists within those papers now. Everyone seems to have moved on with their lives already.

Again, there is no miracle, only people.

Bluesky has solidly won the Twitter Wars and is proving to be Exactly As Bad As Pre Elon Twitter. Twitter has become worse with Elon making the block button just a mute under a different name. Dreamwidth is a shitshow run at least in part by a woman who is bold enough to spend two 100+ tweet threads amateur-lawyering her way into taking a gigantic shit on Cohost's reputation while actively calling Bluesky better than Cohost and still wishing "warm welcomes" to Cohost users trying to find a new home during our exodus. The fediverse is still the fediverse. 

Honestly, it's no wonder so many people have entirely quit social media after Cohost. It really was The Only One.

Anyway I've also been spending a decent amount of time playing Starcraft 2's Co-Op. I tried to go back and get all campaign achievements, but honestly All-In Brutal is the last thing between me and 100%'ing Wings of Liberty and it's kicking my entire ass. I tried to use GiantGrantGames' little cheese trick of giving Kerrigan a hat but some of the information provided is straight up wrong so w/e.

Mostly I've been playing P1 Raynor. I used to main P0 Kerrigan but doing anything above Normal Difficulty feels like a chore on her, since my Mastery Level is still so low. Sometimes I play around with P0 Karax to level him up on Dead of Night. I'm still only level 8, so I haven't actually hit Karax's Critical Mass yet, but it's quite fun.

P1 Raynor though, now that's a funny little build of a character. 100% more HP on all of my Biological Units means that I can (and kind of *have* to) make an army dedicated entirely of Tier 1 Units. This means that the only unit-producing structure I make is, of course, the Barracks. I make a Factory because that's a requirement for an Armory, and an Armory is a requirement for 2/2 and 3/3 upgrades, but that's it. A fully upgraded bioball of an army is stupidly resilient, with your Marines gaining 117HP and your Marauders hitting 325HP. Between a quick and cheap 3/3, Raynor's permanent 15% Attack Speed boost and basically-permanent Stimpack, my damage output is silly. My army is also ridiculously resilient, in large part, I'm sure, because of the medics I put alongside them all. 

P1 Raynor's major weakness is splash damage, since bioballs are made up of a lot of small units instead of a smaller army of Big Units, but because of the 100%HP bonus, healing and damage reduction from the medics' healing, the bio ball can survive a surprising amount of stuff. it won't survive a Baneling bust, but they can stand inside of a Psionic Storm and be fine. Since they're all t1 units, they're also all cheap as fuck. Fully saturating the main and the expansion means I am going to flood minerals and gas really hard, which I can use to make more Orbital Commands to have a million Scans and more Barracks so I can remax stupidly quickly in case I lose a lot of units - something further helped by Raynor's Orbital Drop Pods.

It also means I don't have to care about MULEs, which is a bit of macro stupidity that I'm just not good enough to do.

P1 Raynor is funny, because it's simple, it's easy, and it's surprisingly powerful. I know that Co-Op in general is pretty easy once you understand it, and that the difficulty comes not from Brutal but Brutal+, but I am having fun playing Raynor.

Which only makes it even more annoying to learn that Starcraft 2 is in Maintenance Mode, and has been since 2020. No game modes outside of competitive get any updates anymore, and this is despite the fact that co-op has a reoccurring bug that happens about once a month where every commander becomes level-capped at 5. 

Even competitive isn't in a great shape. Tournaments aren't hosted by Blizzard anymore, and are instead handled by a third party. Map Pools are chosen by a competition, also handled by third parties. Balance patches happen about once a year and are handled by a "Balance Council" of players that is so hilariously lopsided towards Terrans you didn't even need a leak to realize that - although, such a leak does exist.

The game has been, to put it bluntly, abandoned. Which is kind of incredibly fucking annoying when they're still selling microtransactions on it. The campaign collection goes on sale periodically, but everything else - including the Co-Op commanders, which yes, are paid content - is going to stay at full price forever.

It is insulting, annoying, and it should, frankly, be goddamn illegal.

Anyway I think I'll end the blog post here. If you want to see more of me, you can check out the Website League where I mostly am. Part of me wants to figure out how to do comments on this blog post, but I am seriously not in the mood to handle the inevitable stream of bullshit.

(Minor Edit: I went to play a match of Starcraft 2 Co-Op after finishing this post and the Commanders-Are-Capped-At-Level-5 glitch has hit again. You can't make this shit up.)