I'm league starting Toxic Rain Pathfinder this time. It's Path of Evening's build, and their guides are good, but they're written for reading, not for glancing at between zones. I want to blast through the campaign without stopping to think about what comes next.
It takes the build from a fresh level 1 Ranger in Lioneye's Watch to endgame, act by act, and tells you exactly when to change things:
Every passive tree step. Each one has a running point total, so you can compare it to what you've spent and know whether you're ahead or behind. It also lists the small nodes you path through, and calls out the three respecs (Primal Spirit in Act 7, the projectile nodes in early maps, and two more at endgame).
Every gem pick and swap. Which quest reward to take, what to buy from which vendor, and the full set of links by gear slot at each change: level 12, 24, 33, early maps and endgame.
Gear goals. The Tarkleigh regex for green 3-links, the 4-link hunt from level 25, a Sapphire Ring before Merveil, Kintsugi, the Porcupine bow craft, flasks and the 37–43% area of effect target for maps.
Labs and pantheon. Nature's Reprisal, Nature's Adrenaline, Master Surgeon, then Nature's Boon, with when to run each one, plus Brine King, Ryslatha and the later swap to Lunaris.
Every quest skill point, so you're never two points short and wondering why.
All of it comes from Path of Evening (Llarold and Sunset): their poe-vault guide, their Mobalytics guide and the Path of Building both of those link to. The gem rewards are cross-checked against the exile-leveling quest data. Their Path of Building only shows the tree at checkpoints (Act 1, 3, 5, 7, 10, early maps, endgame), so the order inside each chunk is my own. I picked it by point cost and by what the build wants first, like rushing Primal Spirit for mana. If you're a couple of levels behind, a step just slides into the next act.
How to use it:
Tick things off as you go. Your progress saves in your browser.
Use the filter chips to show only tree steps, only gems, and so on. Hide done keeps your current spot at the top.
The regexes have copy buttons, so you can paste them straight into the vendor and stash search boxes.
Pair it with Exile Speed Route for the zone-by-zone path. That one tells you where to go, and this one tells you what to change when you get there.
Built with Claude Code, same as the others. All credit for the build goes to Path of Evening. If something's off, blame me, not them.
Every new Path of Exile league means running the same ten acts of campaign one more time. Every league I forget something. A skipped side quest here, a trial I walked right past there, and then I am staring at the passive tree at level 70 wondering why I am two points short.
It is the whole Act 1 through Act 10 campaign for Path of Exile 1, cut down to the critical path plus the stuff you actually cannot afford to miss:
All 24 quest passive points. Every Book of Skill quest, the bandit point (kill all three), and the two points from An End to Hunger at the very end.
All 12 Trials of Ascendancy and the three campaign Labyrinths, placed where the speed route actually runs them.
Every Pantheon soul, plus a reminder to actually open the Pantheon after the Brine King.
Both Kitava resistance penalties, flagged so you swap in resist gear before they bite.
What it skips: respec point quests and anything that only hands out gems. If a quest does not give you a point, an ascendancy or a permanent buff, and it is not in the way, it is not on the list. The two Quicksilver Flask detours in Acts 1 and 2 are on there but marked optional, because honestly you want that flask.
Each step has hints for where things usually are: which way the exit tends to be, which corner the trial likes to spawn in, which of the two wagon paths in the Lunaris Temple is the right one. The zones are randomized, so treat the hints as tendencies. When the minimap disagrees, the minimap wins.
How to use it:
Tick steps off as you go. The bar at the top counts your passives, trials and labs, and your progress saves in your browser.
Hide optional strips it down to the bare route. Hide done keeps your current spot at the top.
Type /passives in game chat any time to double check which quest points you already have.
The route order follows the community speed-leveling route most racers use, with the quest point and Pantheon data cross-checked against Maxroll and poedb. Built with Claude Code, same as the others. Good luck with the league start, and tell me if I got a direction wrong.
Back in the early iPhone days there was a whole little genre of neon bounce-and-grow games that ate an embarrassing number of my train rides. I missed them. So I built my own, and I named it after the thing that keeps pulling you back in: a gravity well.
You have a cannon at the bottom of the screen. Aim, fire a spark, and watch it ricochet around the field until it runs out of steam. When it stops, it swells up into a bubble and keeps growing until it bumps into a wall or a neighbor. Every bubble takes three hits. Cyan means fresh, amber means hurting, pink means one more and it pops.
Here is the part that makes it dangerous: chain reactions. When a bubble pops it throws off a blast, and everything inside that blast loses a hit. Anything that drops to zero pops too and throws its own blast, and so on down the line. Line up a cluster of pink bubbles and one lucky bank shot can wipe out half the board. Each pop in the same shot is worth ten more points than the last, so a long chain adds up fast.
The catch is the dashed pink line near the cannon, the Kármán line, which is where space officially begins. If a spark ever falls back below it, it burns up on reentry and your run is over. Every shot is a little negotiation between greed and gravity.
Things to fiddle with on the menu:
Screen: Vertical gives you a tall phone-shaped field. Full screen fills your whole monitor, which is a very different game.
Bubble shapes: Circles, Hexagons (they pack together like a honeycomb), or Mixed, which deals out triangles, squares, pentagons, hexagons and circles. Triangles are sneaky. They are smaller than they look and they bounce sparks off at angles you will not expect.
Rewinds: Turn these on and you get three do-overs per run. Lose a spark past the horizon and you can rewind to just before that shot and try again. Purists can turn them off.
It also has a soundtrack: a chiptune rock loop with a driving bass, crunchy power chords, an 8-bit lead and rock drums. There are no audio files. Every note is synthesized in your browser while you play. There is a music button and a volume slider if your coworkers object.
And there is a world high score board. Type in a pilot tag of up to ten letters and your best score goes up against everyone else who has played, with a separate top ten for every combination of settings. The board is empty as of tonight, so right now the top spot belongs to whoever bothers to finish one run. Go get it.
How to play:
Mouse: aim by moving, fire by clicking.
Touch: drag to aim, lift your finger to fire. It plays great on a phone.
Keyboard: arrow keys aim, Space fires, Esc pauses, M toggles the music.
Built with Claude Code, same as the others, and it lives in the Coding Projects box on the left. Give it a spin, post a score, and tell me what breaks.
The Finger Drummer turned out to be a lot of fun to bang on, but if you have never played drums, sixteen pads is a lot to stare at. So I built it a teacher.
Thirty lessons that take you from zero to hero. You start with two pads, a kick and a snare, and a slow steady beat. Every lesson adds one new technique and builds on the last one, and every chapter unlocks more of the grid until you are playing all sixteen pads.
Chapter 1, First Taps (2 pads): strike and lift, the backbeat, boom-bap, alternating hands, your first syncopation.
Chapter 2, The Hat Hand (4 pads): steady hi-hats, your first rock beat, open hats and two-finger sixteenth rolls.
Chapter 3, Groove & Feel (6 pads): stacked sounds, house offbeats, ghost notes and double kicks.
Chapter 4, Swing & Ride (8 pads): the ride cymbal, jazz swing, the shuffle, reggae's one drop and a Latin clave groove.
Chapter 5, Toms & Fills (12 pads): walking the toms, four-bar phrases, crash landings and linear grooves.
Chapter 6, Full Grid Hero (16 pads): FX pads, trap hat rolls, 808 bass melodies, drum and bass, and a four-bar final boss.
How it works:
Watch plays the pattern for you. Wait mode has no clock at all: the pads you need glow and it waits for you to find them.
Practice loops the pattern at any tempo. Turn on Auto speed-up and every clean loop nudges the tempo up until you are at full speed.
Take the test scores your timing to the millisecond. 60% gets you a star and the next lesson, 93% gets you three stars, and three stars opens a Hero test at 125% speed.
A ring shrinks onto each pad right before you need to hit it, a strip above the pads shows the whole pattern, and a little meter tells you if you are rushing or dragging.
Play with your computer keyboard, a touch screen, or plug in a MIDI pad controller like an MPC or Maschine.
Your progress saves automatically, and the Save & sync button gives you a cloud code like KICK-SNARE-GROOVE-4821 so you can pick up where you left off on another computer. There is also a transfer code and a backup file if you would rather not use the cloud.
Finish all thirty and you get a certificate declaring you a Certified Finger Drumming Hero. Suitable for framing. Probably.
Built with Claude Code, same as the others. It is also in the Coding Projects box on the left. Give it a spin and tell me what breaks.
Two new things to play with on the site this week. Both run right in your browser, nothing to install, nothing to sign up for. They are also in the Coding Projects box at the top of the left column.
A drum machine you play with your fingers. You get a 4x4 grid of pads and 18 kits to pick from, everything from Arena Rock and Jazz Club to 808 Electro, Trap, Metal, Reggae Dub and 8-Bit Arcade. Every sound is synthesized on the spot, so there are no samples to download.
How to play:
Keyboard: the left-hand block 1234 / QWER / ASDF / ZXCV is the pad grid. The right-hand block 7890 / UIOP / JKL; / M,./ plays the same pads, so you can drum with both hands. The number pad works too.
Mouse or touch: click or tap the pads, or hold and drag across them. It works on a phone.
Gamepad: buttons, triggers and the D-pad are all pads.
Space plays a demo groove for the current kit so you can watch which pads light up and play along. Kick is bottom-left, snare is right next to it.
T starts the loop recorder. You get a four-click count-in, then you play, and it loops. Press T again to stack another layer on top. You can save the result as a WAV.
When you get comfortable, turn on Expert mode in the top-right corner. That adds lessons that teach you each kit's beat one part at a time, tap tempo, note repeat, a bass line and chords that follow along, a stage view, and saved beats.
The classic bluffing game. Everybody rolls in secret, then you take turns bidding on how many of a face are on the whole table, something like "five 4s". Every bid has to raise the last one. When you think the player before you is full of it, call Liar. Whoever is wrong loses a die, and the last player holding dice wins. 1s are wild, until somebody is down to their last die.
How to play:
Set up 2 to 10 seats. Each seat is either a person (pass the device around) or a computer player.
The computer players come in flavors: Aggressive, Passive, Random, Poor, Expert, or Mystery, which picks one in secret. You do not find out who was who until the game ends, and they talk trash while they play.
New to the game? Hit How to play for a short practice round against two friendly computer players, with tips at every step.
There is an optional Exact house rule: call Exact if you think the bid is dead on. Get it right and you win a die back.
Both were built with Claude Code over a few evenings. Give them a spin and tell me what breaks.
First new post here in, oh, fourteen years or so. Figured I should come back with something loud.
This is my HDR Jamboooooree, and the fun part is how it got made. No film crew, no edit bay, no band. Just me, a pile of ideas, and four tools doing the heavy lifting:
Claude Code was the shop foreman. It wrote the scripts, wrangled the files, and kept the whole pipeline glued together when I kept changing my mind.
Suno is the band. Every note you hear came out of it.
Blender did the 3D work, driven by scripts instead of me clicking around for weeks.
Midjourney supplied the artwork and the look.
If you have an HDR screen, watch it there and turn the brightness up. That is the whole point of the thing.
A few years ago any one of these pieces would have been a month of evenings. Now the hard part is deciding what you want to make. Wild times.
I had a an absolute blast at Orion Festival in AC yesterday. Mostly I wanted to just absorb all the great music but you know I couldn't resist taking a few pics along the way. For that, my little Sony NEX-5n is so so so so good!
It remains my favorite little cam for walkabouts and ESPECIALLY concerts.
You can't use it expecting to make ultra sharp images every time but with the right lighting and a little luck you can make some very nice concert pics. And security never bat an eye at it thinking it's a DSLR...
I was literally less than 8 rows deep in the middle of a surging crowd, people were moshing it up, crowd surfing and generally going insane. Then the lead singer of Cage The Elephant decided he was going to join in!
For Metallica tho I was a little too far back to get any real details, but the lasers and showmanship were amazing!
Crowd surfing is not all fun and games tho, here's the proof: The most brutal picture I've ever taken =)
Was glad to see that it didn't get cancelled, but let's put this one in the "Learning experience" column for the new organizers.... They need to coordinate with the auxiliary and get some ideas on how to make it a bit less chaotic next time!
