I personally dislike pizza as afterword I do not feel my personal best.

I agree with this so much. If I eat pizza, then my mood is low the next day. Many people get mad at me for disliking pizza and now I am vindicated.

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What's up with these bears? I found this photo on DPRK's KCNA news website. The article doesn't actually explain the photo and there's no explanation on western media.

http://kcna.kp/en/article/q/6de293cb62be1ed062acc2e46e69b6d8.kcmsf

This meme is really all over the place. It combines a 2014 meme format with a 2020 movie screenshot to reference a 2011 mixtape, posted in the year 2025. Fantastic. Excellent post.

Guys with Bryan Quinby, former cohost of Streetfight Radio, a podcast about different types of guys.

https://sites.libsyn.com/458346

In 1999, David Lynch directed a movie for Disney called The Straight Story. It's about an elderly man who doesn't qualify for a driver's license, so he drives his lawn mower 240 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin to reunite with his estranged brother. The movie focuses on conversations that he has with people he meets along the way. There is an absurdity in the long distance lawn mower travel, highlighting America's lack of public transportation and lack of care for the elderly.

I've seen some posts (not on hexbear) claiming that Elon was just playing poorly because he was distracted or playing on a laptop. Elon streamed his boosted Hardcore character on January 7. However, I first learned that Elon was paying someone to play for him on December 21.

On December 21, a user on the Path of Exile Reddit posted the following screenshots.

https://old.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/1hjbnw5/elon_musk_streamed_poe_2_from_someone_elses/

(these screenshots are dead links from the reddit post above. if you paste the dead url into your discord client the images still load.)

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Screenshot 1 shows a trade message sent to Elon's character at the time. This is an automated message generated by the Path of Exile website when you click the send message to player button, indicating that Elon's account language is set to Chinese. Also the screenshot tells us that his stash tab was named to "Sell出售".

Screenshot 2 shows the player in the hideout of Elon's character at the time, while also in the same party. In the top right corner of the screenshot, you can see the hideout is hosted on the Hong Kong realm.

I can confirm that this information is true. After I saw the reddit post, I decided to also trade the account. I saw a trade message that was also in Chinese and when I visited their hideout, it was also on the Hong Kong realm. Unfortunately I didn't save a screenshot of my trade because I had figured that the reddit post was sufficient evidence at the time. Then I made a hexbear post about it on December 22.

https://hexbear.net/post/4149503

I'm a long time player of POE 1 and I just hit level 97 in POE 2. I have not had any problems with sustaining maps.

I suspect that you are not crafting your maps. To sustain maps, you have to invest in your maps. A general rule of Path of Exile is that the more currency you spend into your maps, the more rewards you get out of it. If you invest nothing into a map, you might not get anything back. Currently I'm investing up to a divine in value into my juiced maps and I get multiple divine orbs dropping in 1 maps, my highest was 4 raw divines and around 60 exalted orbs.

A waystone/map item has 6 mods, which is 3 prefixes and 3 suffixes. The prefixes are loot rewards and the suffixes are difficulty and waystone quantity. You always want to have the map to have 3 prefixes and sometimes want it to have 3 suffixes. Suffixes will up the difficulty but give you more waystones back.

If you have a normal/white map, use alchemy orb to get 4 mods, then use 2 exalted orbs. You will find 2 more exalted orbs in the map. The cost sustains itself. If you have a magic map, augment to 2 mods and then regal for the 3rd, then exalted slam 3 times. If you reach a suffix that you can't run at any stage in this process, vendor the map for like 10k gold, you can gamble a ring at Alva.

The best 2 prefixes are "increased rare monsters" and "increased rarity of items found". If you get a t15 map with these 2 mods, people will pay upwards of 50 exalted orbs for it.

Once you have a map with 3 good prefixes, you can run it or you can craft it even further for more rewards. You can use a vaal orb on the map and it will either add more mods to the map, +/- tier of the map, change the map to all prefix or all suffix. All suffix is the worst outcome because it removes the prefix rewards. Second worst outcome is reduce tier. Extra mods and all prefix will give you extra rewards.

Another option for crafting your maps is to use "distilled emotions" fka oils. The 3 cheapest oils are Ire, Guilt, Greed. Ire gives increased magic monsters in the map, Guilt gives increase pack size, Greed gives increased Item Rarity. You can apply up to 3 oils to the map which will increase the map loot by ~25% and also make the map about ~25% more difficult. Guilt is probably the best one price wise for you. This will also make splinters drop in your maps that you can sell to recoup the costs of the oils. I currently use 3 Paranoia oils on my maps, which costs around 5 exalted orbs each.

I don't recommend corrupting oiled maps but it's possible if you are brave.

The next thing you can do is to utilize the towers on your atlas. You get these things called "precursor tablets" which you can put into the towers to buff your maps. I only use tablets which say "increased quantity of items dropped". You take the tablets that you already have and transmute + augment all of them for 2 mods. If it doesn't say "quantity of items dropped", then I put 3 to 1 in the reforge bench, until all of them have that modifier. I look for zones on my atlas which have 4+ towers close together so that the quantity stacks. Combined with the right atlas nodes, I've had maps with +300% quantity of items drop.

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From the interview with Jonathan and Mark

• Mark says that maps are expected to be 30% more rewarding.
• They talk about a dynamic between "large maps" and "small maps", saying players should learn to utilize map size for rewards.
• Mark mentions fixing the levers of Augury.
• They don't plan to increase waystone drop rate.
• Mark wants to add improvements to Expedition crafting system.
• Jonathan confirms that the corpse tower/citadel conspiracy theory is not real. Everyone laughs about this.
• Jonathan says citadels only spawn at a certain base distance from the starting location on the atlas
• The devs says that they are surprised that players were able to make builds with such high damage. Weird thing to be surprised by.
• Jonathan says that they have no plans to nerf player builds without a game economy reset. Mark says player builds may be nerfed if they affect server performance, example if your build reduces the server to 1 fps.
• Jonathan confirms that Early Access will have Leagues, ie Seasons.
• There were rumors that Path of Exile servers were hacked. Jonathan says that an administrator account on the Path of Exile website was found to be compromised through the Steam api. Jonathan says that 66 player accounts are suspected to have been compromised by the hack. There will be more information later, but he says there was no larger data breach.
• Jonathan and Mark say that they do not want to decrease the power of the Item Rarity stat. They confirm that Item Rarity increases the tier of currency items in POE 2, while in POE 1 Item rarity only increased the chance to find rare or unique gear items. This makes Item Rarity a much more powerful stat in POE 2.
• There's talks about buffs to the warrior class, but it is unclear to me.
• Jonathan mentions the possibility of reducing the number of monsters in the Breach mechanic in the future. They also mentioned improving the spawn rate of Greater Essences.
• Jonathan does not want to remove the 1 death per map limit. He says that 6 portal defense is too forgiving to players.
• They talk about increasing the difficulty of Pinnacle Bosses.
• "Map tab soon"
• Predictive mode will be available in the game settings later. The game currently operates in Lockstep mode.
• Spectre minion is being worked on and introduced soon.
• Search bar being added to the Atlas.
• They don't want rare monsters to have glow.
• Salvaging flasks for glassblower baubles.
• Alva gold gambling from the hideout.
• POE 2 will not have wow-like UI customization.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2351668694

There announcement was made in 2 parts, a 7 minute trailer and an interview with the lead devs.

The 7 minute video tells us:

• "Maps were made more rewarding", but he also uses the word "balance" which makes me think that some rewards have been reduced.
• There are now 5 possible tower map layouts instead of 1, 4 new layouts added and the original layout is reworked.
• Boss spawn rate has been increased with the intention of 1 boss per 4 maps.
• Introducing a Boss precursor tablet to add bosses to maps which do not have them.
• Strongboxes open more quickly.
• On death monster mechanics have been made more visible.
• Zoom out further on the atlas and faster atlas load time.
• Omen drop rate increased by 60%.
• Citadels are now visible through the fog by a beam of light.
• Arbiter of Ash boss now gives you 6 attempts to kill it per fragment set, previously 1 attempt.
• Copper Citadel boss has been made easier
• Buffing leveling unique items. None the previews they showed looked interesting.
• Fixed a bug where tier 5 unidentified rares were blocking some mods, such as max tier life on rings.
• Socketed runes in items can now be overwritten with other runes.
• Item filters are now available on console systems.
• Effectiveness of the armor stat has been improved.

There's certainly a lot of grinding in Path of Exile. The game company is even called Grinding Gear Games. However, being good at Path of Exile is about doing things in unintended ways. The game is very sandbox-like. The best in the world players figure out unintended ways to become unkillable or kill the hardest bosses in 1 hit. The devs have said that they want boss fights to last at least 1-2 minutes. The best players kill the boss in less than 5 seconds because they use clever unintended game mechanics to inflict lots of damage.

Also Elon's character is in Hardcore mode, meaning permanent death. If a character dies in Hardcore mode, it is removed from Hardcore mode. The game is very buggy right now and you can be killed in unexpected ways. Even like the people who played POE 1 hardcore mode competitively for cash prizes are struggling with POE 2 hardcore mode.

Compare Elon's gameplay to the videos on the channel below.

https://www.youtube.com/@Iva_m1/videos

He makes Path of Exile part of his twitter identity for some unknown reason. Maybe he feels the need to act like he's good at video games to relate to the crypto bros. Throughout the video he also says that he's playing from his internet company Starlink. Maybe it's all just a stunt to advertise Starlink.

“For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” -Chuck Schumer, July 2016

That was a clickbait story. In Path of Exile 1/2, if you click like over 10 times per second, you can get disconnected for performing too many actions. It's not anything serious. I've seen people bind left click to their mouse wheel to click faster and if you scroll too quickly then you get disconnected.

Elon bragged on twitter with a screenshot of this disconnect message from button mashing. It's not a ban, it just logs you out.

GGG said early access lasts 6 months to 1 year. The early access costs $30 to play. When POE2 leaves early access, it will be free to play.

There's supposed to be a next expansion (3.26) for POE 1 released in March 2025.

This is called SDH subtitles if you prefer this type of subtitle. Subtitles for Deaf and Hard of Hearing. It's made for people who have hearing disabilities.

The real story here is that North Carolina implemented Obama's 2010 Medicaid expansion in December 2023. Which means that North Carolina declined to take free federal money and let people die from lack of coverage for almost 14 fucking years. As part of the implementation, the government is paying off the medical debts of low income people accrued from 2014 to 2023.

Then in September, this company decides to "forgive" 11500 debts right after the government started paying off old debts. That seems suspicious. Why would this company turn down government money from old debts? Seems like the company was trying to scam poor people and realized that the government wouldn't pay the phony bills, so then the debt magically disappears.

Why is it in the news again after the CEO shooting when it happened in September? Because it gets clicks. It's coworker talk. "Hey Bob, ye heard the medical companies are forgiving debts after they got shots? haha"

Here's your build guide for swinging a big hammer as a woman character.

https://mobalytics.gg/poe-2/builds/slam-chronomancer-paintmaster

my new feed is half full of typical nazi propaganda youtubers

Here's a list of channels to avoid for political reasons.

Here's a list of channels that have good info. I copied this list and labeled some channels I recognize. As a rule of thumb, avoid channels with robot/ai voices.

BTW, the game starts at level 70 when you gain access to The Atlas. Everything that you do before reaching level 70 is only the tutorial for POE 2.

Unfortunately both ingame chat and forums/reddit

You can change your in-game chat channel. You type "/global #" into the chat but replace # with a number. I like channel 4040, which is a channel for achievement completion, but it always has the same group of people in there and there is friendly chatter. Channel 5055 is the designated reddit channel.