November 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

Been crazy here this month, and next month will be just as crazy. I really thought that spreading out this move over a couple months would make it easier and in a lot of ways it does, but it means instead of one absolutely crazy moving-week we’re experiencing weeks and weeks of moderate craziness. But things are coming along and we’re pretty excited about the new place. We’ve made two trips there so far. The first was brutal, the second much easier which was interesting because I think my body is actually just growing stronger that quickly. Or more flexible anyway. Whatever the reason, hauling boxes of books up and down stairs didn’t take nearly as much out of me during the second trip.

Somehow I’m still sneaking in a fair amount of gaming, but I’m going to rip through all this pretty quick cuz…. boxes need to be packed!

Playing

Wuthering Waves: Shelved for now. I did a couple of months of the subscription thing (where you get premium currency every day) and the paid version of the battle pass thingie. Made good use of both of those but, as is VERY typical for me, they also made the game feel a bit like a chore. When I started playing a swore to myself I’d just play for the main story line but alas, that was dropped in favor of logging in every day and doing all the things that give you battle pass progress and stuff. I did get in something like 150 hours before burnout hit though so… not a bad run.

My Time At Sandrock: I started this a year or so ago right after finishing My Time At Portia but soon realized I needed a break between two titles that are so similar. Glad I did because I am HOOKED on Sandrock now. If you’ve never played a “My Time At…” game they’re a lot like a Harvest Moon or Stardew valley, except in 3D and they take place in a post-apocalyptic world. But a pretty, mostly friendly, post-apocalyptic world. The tension is between two factions, one that shuns technology since it ruined the old world, and one that wants to rediscover technology to make the current situation better. You kind of straddle that line and mostly spend your time harvesting, building, farming, mining, fighting and trying to befriend the natives. It’s pretty casual and stress-free in site of all that stuff you have to juggle. One setting that I can’t remember if Portia had is the option to slow down time so each day goes by more slowly. I turned that down so I could just putter around without a lot of time management stress.

Ball X Pit: I wrote a post about this… still playing!

Winter Burrow: Wrote a post about this too. Also still playing. This one has turned out to be a bit harder than I thought it was going to be due to the lack of a map and the ‘cold’ mechanic that means you have to be careful of how far you wander from home. Also your inventory is pretty small. It’s cute as heck but that doesn’t mean it’s super easy, as it turns out. Or maybe I’m doing something wrong which is always possible.

Octopath Traveler: Picked this up on sale and I’m playing it on the Steam Deck in the evenings when we’re at the new place. Very early days and everyone interested in this game is familiar with it, so just sticking a flag in the sand to say I’m playing.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage: This game follows Bassim who was in AC Valhalla and I did NOT like him in that game so I had no plans to play Mirage. But then it hit Game Pass so I figured “What the heck.” I’ve barely gotten started on it, though.

That’s too many games to be juggling, isn’t it? Sandrock is by far the title I spent the most time on this month.

Watching

Nobody Wants This S2: This is the Kristen Bell sitcom about her dating a rabbi and all the trouble that causes because she is not Jewish. Loved S1, loved S2. Can’t wait for a Season 3 which I assume is coming.

Talamasca: This is set in Anne Rice’s vampire mythos. It was a PartPurple pick. The Talamasca is a shadow organization that keeps tabs on supernatural goings-on and in this show a new recruit is sent in to spy on an ancient vampire. It was actually pretty good, but I’ll never admit that to Purple.

The Witcher S4: I didn’t really miss Henry Cavill so much, though PartPurple did. We’re in the part of the story where a lot of the emphasis is on Ciri anyway. I enjoyed it but it is VERY similar to what I remember reading in the books. Almost too much so since I know what was going to happen next every step of the way.

Tales from Woodcreek: This is a D&D Campaign hosted by Deborah Ann Woll on YouTube. This is the 2nd time we’ve watched one of her campaigns (the other being Relics and Rarities, also on YouTube) and we really enjoy them for a few reasons. First, each episode is a manageable length: about an hour. Second, she brings in guest players, often ones who’ve never played D&D before, and generally her guests are actors. It’s fun watching the regulars help the newbies and being actors, the newbies tend to really get into their characters. Third, her campaigns tend to be really interactive with props and such. In this one she actually leads the party to new physical locations to set the scenes and such. Now I do not play D&D so I can’t speak to how authentic this all is, but it’s really fun to watch.

Reading

The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories — A collection of Isaac Asimov’s short stories, mostly written in the 1970s. Lots of robots. Lots of concerns about AI that seem pretty similar to the concerns we have today, for reals.

microserfs (Douglas Coupland) — A novel in the form of a journal. The narrator is a 20-something Microsoft employee and super-nerd, living in the 1990s when working 100 hour weeks was considered slacking. He and his colleagues decided to leave and start a company making a Lego-like videogame called Oop. (Oop, as described, seems a little bit like Roblox, though the game isn’t the focus of the story.) I really enjoyed this though it is hard to quantify why. In the end there isn’t much story there; it’d be like, well, reading the journal of any mostly ordinary person. I lived through this era so there was a lot of nostalgia for me. The team going to visit 3DO HQ, or going to CES and seeing the Ninteno VirtuaBoy. I was at that CES so, y’know, maybe brushed shoulders with these ficticious characters. It came out in 1995 but looks like it was re-issued at some point [Amazon link]. If you enjoy ‘nerd culture’ you might enjoy it. [I found this while purging to move and intead of sending it to the donation bin I held onto it to read.]

Old science fiction and fantasy magazines: I found a cache of these in the back of a closet. Most of them are from the 1990’s which means I’ve lugged them through 3 or 4 moves. Now I’m finally reading them and they’re pretty fun since in a lot of cases their “future” is our present and boy did they get a lot wrong (and some stuff right).

It’s strange to be reading physical magazines again! Remember “Continued on page 104…” WHAT? Why do I have to jump around you crazy editors!

OK, back to moving and by the time the December recap rolls around we should be (more or less) settled in our new dig! Happy Holidays!

First “MicroMove” Day

Posted on by Nimgimli

Since we have such a long overlap on our two leases, we decided to move as much of our stuff as possible ourselves rather than paying the moving guys. (Even with that, the moving estimate is $2500). Might have been a mistake. 🙂

We took a load of ‘stuff’ down Monday morning to the new place; it’s almost exactly 2 hours one way. We picked up the keys (key codes actually, there aren’t any physical keys). Did a walk-through. Made note of stuff that needs to be addressed (nothing too major). Meaning SHE did the walk-through while I unloaded the truck and her car. Mostly we brought down boxes of books and movies just to get them out of the way, but they were also heavy as heck. We brought almost no furniture.

We wildly underestimated how bad the lack of seating was going to impact us. We had a camp chair and a stool. We took turns with the chair trying to get rested. The floors are vinyl with no carpet so just crashing on the floor was out of the question.

Mattress was supposed to be delivered Monday afternoon but didn’t show so we had to sleep on an inflatable mattress which was NOT designed for two people as round as we are. It was just laying on the floor (no frame) and you should’ve seen us trying to get up between it being so low and so ‘squishy’ and us both being super-stiff from hauling stuff. And my gout was flaring up big time to make matters worse.

We had no internet and the wireless signal was terrible so I had to… *gasp* read something. She forgot her purse at home so had no driver’s license with her, no credit cards. And we brought no food so I had to go do some shopping, which was the first time I’ve been in a grocery store in years. Had Jersey Mike’s Philly Cheesesteaks for dinner.

But yeah, not a great night’s sleep. My gout was screaming at me and every time one of us moved we basically bounced the other off the mattress.

I unpacked books so we could bring the empty boxes back and re-fill them, but had nowhere to put them so they’re just stacked up everywhere, no doubt in the way of later trips.

Today was better. Internet guy came and we discovered that the place is wired for ethernet but he could only enable 2 ports since the modem he installed only had 2 jacks. I’ll have to do some research on how to set these up since it’d be easy enough to add a switch and wire up more rooms if we need them, but at least both our offices have a wired Ethernet connection. Otherwise he have a couple of “Plume” WiFi hubs, one on each floor.

While that was happening the mattress showed up. Dude basically dropped it in the street and left and I had to hump it up the stairs which just about ended me. All over the box were warnings of it being heavy and a 2-person item for moving. Reminder that I am 1) in terrible shape and 2) a senior citizen. I am not made for carrying mattresses alone. I ended up standing it on one end (it was one of these foam mattresses that comes tightly rolled up) and just lifting it up the stairs, one by one, like it was a telephone pole or something. Caber tossing? Then I slid it along the floor once it was on the 2nd story.

We didn’t bring anything to sit on but we did bring the fake Christmas tree which she set up while we were waiting for the Internet guy. It looks tiny (see image at the top of the post). In our current place the star almost brushes the ceiling.

In spite of all this bitching, the place should be pretty nice once we’re settled in. Or at least compared to our current “built in the 1980s and never really upgraded” place. We have high ceilings, ceiling fans, 2 zones for A/C, as mentioned the place is wired for internet. There’s a hose and electric hookup outside in both the front and back. The kitchen is pretty nice with an induction stovetop, a built in microwave, a fridge with an ice maker, and a nice sized island with power outlets and what SEEMS to be actual granite. The toilets are modern and don’t use 5 gallons per flush and when you flush them they work. Our current place the toilets are generally 2-flush systems or they get clogged. Hoping this means our water bill will be lower.

The area seems pretty nice, too. People seemed friendly enough although when I was in Jersey Mike’s, out of about 7 people waiting in line 2 (neither of them obvious officals or police or anything) were wearing sidearms which was a little alarming for me, but no one else gave them a second glance.

The only real downside to the apartment itself is the complex is pretty compact. We have a tiny patio outide in the back but it’s maybe…75 feet to the patio behind the next row of buildings. And in the front the windows are RIGHT on the sidewalk and then there’s a narrow street and then the front windows of the next row over. But we don’t spend much time outside anyway.

But crikey am I beat. I am TOO OLD for this stuff! Plan is to go down again Friday with another load, and come back Saturday, giving us Sunday as a recuperation day before going back to work. Pro movers come on Dec 11th so once that happens we’ll for real move down there. Hopefully the next trip will be better. We’ll have Internet, we’ll bring some furniture to sit on, we’ll have a bed.

And most importantly there is now beer waiting in the fridge…

Winter Burrow Early First Look

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Earlier this week Winter Burrow hit Game Pass and launched on Steam the same day. I’d seen previews and it was so darned cute I had to try it right away.

So far at least, it’s been a fairly typical survivalbox game, only this time you’re a mouse so everything is on a tiny scale. You’ve returned to your childhood home to find it in a state of disrepair; first order of business is to fix things up! You need to go collect twigs and pebbles to make tools and effect repairs. Then you need to use the tools to harvest better materials to make better tools in order to fix more things. It’s a familiar loop that we’ve all done many times and by now you probably know whether or not you enjoy this kind of game.

Aside from the cuteness, it’s the winter setting that makes the game a little different from most survivalboxes. In addition to gauges for health, hunger and stamina, you have a cold meter that is always dropping when you’re outside. You can knit (SO ADORABLE, your little mouse self sitting there knitting) warmer clothes to mitigate this, and there’s a day/night cycle as well. Colder at night of course.

A tiny mouse in his burrow knitting warm clothes
Knitting some warmer clothes by the fire

It’s billed as a cozy game but the cold mechanic kind of invalidates that designation to me, because you do frequently have to run home to warm up or you’ll start taking damage, and as far as I can tell there’s no map, so you can get lost and freeze. In the name of epic journalism I stayed outside in the cold until my health hit zero. When that happens you ‘pass out’ and somehow ‘stumble home’ to the burrow [aka you respawn at home], but you drop any items other than tools that you were carrying. You can go back to the spot of your misfortune and re-collect what you’ve dropped, though, so it isn’t a harsh penalty.

A tiny mouse outside the door to his burrow. The screen is feezing up!
The colder you get, the more the frost encroaches on your window into the game world. Better get inside!

In addition to gathering/crafting there’s some farming elements as well.

There’s also combat and hunting. So far I’ve attacked passive beetles to get meat that I can roast, and once been attacked by a different kind of beetle that was aggro. There’s also a setting in the options to toggle spiders on or off for folks with arachnophobia so expect some 8-legged enemies at some point.

I’ve only played for a couple of hours but wanted to share my very early thoughts, particularly for Aywren who was curious about the game.

So far I’m really enjoying it but have to stress the cuteness is the real hook here. Being a little mouse wearing snowshows and a yak beanie is just so adorable and did I mention the knitting?!

I’ll circle back once I get further in, but the initial TLDR is, not super original in the gameplay, but the aesthetics are keeping me engaged for now.

Two tiny mice having a chat
You’re not completely alone in the world!

Ball X Pit – Weird and Addicting

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I was really late to the Vampire Survivors party. By the time I discovered it, it was old news. If you haven’t played it, it’s a top down APRG where your character auto-shoots. All you do is steer around. You level up quickly and as you do you get a choice of power-ups to choose from and in so doing put together a build for that run. When you die, you hit a store to buy upgrades to make you stronger, then you try again. It doesn’t sound like much, but the sheer number of enemies on screen, each of which drops a bit of exp when they die, make it like a constant dopamine drip.

Anyway, now we have Ball X Pit which is scratching the same kind of itch. This time the gameplay feels like the love-child of Vampire Survivors and Breakout. The main gameplay has you in a tall narrow corridor with enemies marching down the screen from the top while you fire balls at them to destroy them. Both enemies and you have a health pool and generally one hit from a ball isn’t enough to destroy a baddie. If the bad guys reach the bottom of the screen they smack you for a chunk of your health, and some fire arrows or other projectiles at you as them make their way down the screen.

Meanwhile the balls you fire bounce around like they do in Breakout, the major difference being that you can aim them fairly precisely, and if you want you can hold them and then fire. There’s also an “auto-fire” mode that makes it a lot more Vampire Survivor-ish and it is how I usually play. But just like in Breakout if you can sneak a ball to the back of the enemies it will careen around and hit a ton of bad guys, doing a lot of damage.

I feel like a video will be a better explainer than I ever will be:

There are different kinds of Balls. Hero balls, and baby balls. Baby balls are weaker little projectiles that you don’t really control. Hero Balls come in a number of flavors. Fire balls cause enemies to burn for a bit (doing DoT). Earthquake balls cause area damage. Vampire balls heal you when they kill an enemy. And so on. You can hold 4 types of Hero Balls at once, and 4 passive powerups that offer bonuses like faster movement or enhanced damage when you hit an enemy from behind.

As in VS, every enemy leaves a gem which gives you experience. You have a variety of stats (Strength, Intelligence, Dexterity) and when you level up one or more of those get bumped up a point or two, and you get to pick a ball or a passive to add to your quiver or level up. Every so often (haven’t figured out what triggers these) you’ll get a little glowy thing spawning. When you pick one of those up you get some boon. Sometimes it’s random level ups for your existing skills, and sometimes it’s the chance to combine Balls into something new. So maybe you fuse a Fire ball with a Vampire ball and you get, well, a Fire X Vampire ball that both burns and returns health, and when these two fuse you now have an open slot to add something new.

Anyway eventually you die or beat the boss which ends a level. Then you go to your village. Here you can spend your rewards to buy farms and buildings and so on. Farms (wheat, forest, stone) just give more resources to buy more buildings. Houses (which you need to find a blueprint for in the ball-busting part of the game) unlock new characters, and combat buildings (eg Barracks) make your characters start the next run stronger.

But even in your village the ball motif continues. Once you place your farms and buildings and such, you have to aim and fire your characters at them in order to collect, and these characters bounce off things like your balls do. To build a building you have to hit it x times (5 maybe? I never counted). To harvest a farm  you have to fire a worker over it. And so on. Once you’ve built and harvested, it’s back to the pit for another run.

Here is what that looks like:

>/div>

Runs take about 15 minutes once you get a little ways into the game and have leveled up a bit (very early you might die much more quickly). This makes it a great game to drop into when you don’t have a lot of time but just want a gaming fix.

Anyway, I’m finding this one really addictive.  It’s available on Steam (Steamdeck Verified), Xbox and Playstation and it’s $15 everywhere. There’s a demo on Steam as well, and it has an overwhelmingly positive rating on Steam with over 6,000 reviews.

Moving is Hard Work!

Posted on by Nimgimli

I mentioned the other day that we’re moving. We’ve lived in our apartment for a stupidly long time (12 or 13 years). PartPurple says it’s the longest she’s ever lived in the same place, and it nearly is for me as well. Certainly the longest since I’ve been living on my own.

As we are old and out of shape we’re taking it slow. Also it was challenging to get things to line up. We have to give our present landlord 60 days notice of termination and if we leave before the lease is up they charge us a full month’s rent as a penalty. Trying to find a new place to rent more than 60 days ahead of it being available is tough and we’re not daredevilish enough to just put in our notice and assume we’ll find a place in time. In the end we decided to just double rent for a while. It turned out to be about 6 weeks. This worked out OK since we’re just letting this lease run out, so we don’t have to pay that 1 month penalty, meaning we’re effectively (sortof) only paying double rent for 2 weeks, and we have the security of knowing our new place is locked in.

We pick up the keys to the new place the Monday before Thanksgiving, but we don’t have the movers coming until mid-December (and our old lease doesn’t end until 1st week of January). We’re going to make a few trips back and forth in during that gap, taking little stuff with us just to try to cut down the moving cost (though I wonder if we’ll end up spending more on gas than we’re saving on moving). We’re doing it this way partly beause we don’t want to be mid-move for Thanksgiving (we’ll celebrate that in the old apartment) and partly because we feel like spending some time in the new place will give us a better idea of what needs to go where. Purple has an app that maps the whole place out but once you are THERE in the location things can feel different.

We’ve started packing and purging and man, nothing is easy. We had a bunch of physical media we wanted to get rid of and NO ONE wants this stuff. We put boxes and boxes of DVDs out with signs inviting folks to help themselves and eventually that got rid of the DVDs but we started that back in September and we JUST got rid of the last one. But books? You literally can’t give away books without it becoming a huge production where I’d have to take a day off work and make an appointment somewhere for them to see what they wanted and what they didn’t.

In the old days you could find donation bins everywhere but not anymore. Libraries will potentially take some of them if you make an appointment and if they happen to be in one of their ‘we accept donations’ phases. Even then they apparently don’t add them to the stacks; they just wholesale them to someplace.  It’s not worth their effort to process the books,  I guess. In the end I found a single donation box about half an hour a way. We took a load of books over and I saw that it was a school of some kind, so I think they want kids books but we left what we had.

Then a lot more purging happened and I had the back of my pickup full of bins of books (5 big plastic bins that I could barely lift). I was desperate to get rid of these things so, after hours, we went back to that donation bin and filled it up with books they probably don’t want. I was kidding about us being arrested for reverse burglary or something. Illegal dumping? But we’re finally almost through the book cases. One to go and it has mostly trade paperbacks that, if we don’t want them, I’m just going to chuck into the recycling bin. Which feels awful but… I gotta get rid of these things.

But man, it makes me sad that giving away books is so hard. In the past people have generally been eager to get free books to sell or distribute!

Mind you we still have boxes and boxes of books packed up that we’re not ready to get rid of.  Twelve currently and probably 3 or so more by the time we’re done. We have too many books considering we both prefer reading on Kindle due to eyesight issues. (Long day? Set the font to ‘HUGE’ and enjoy your book.)

Meanwhile the movers are scheduled, to the tune of $2,500, and we’ve paid the security and other stuff on the new place (another $4000) so now we’re even more poor than we used to be. In theory we should get our security deposit back from the current place but we’ll see. Honestly the current place in fairly bad shape, not really due to us but just due to them being old apartments that were never meant to be lived in for this long. Utilities are scheduled to switch over ($150 deposit for water) and happily there’s a place that offers fiber Internet in the new place. I’ll be sad to leave Google Fiber behind but they don’t service the new area.

Speaking of the new area, we’re moving a couple hours south (after talking for years about wanting to go back north) but also we’ll be MUCH closer to the coast and I’m really looking forward to going to the beach semi-regularly. It’s a 30-45 minute drive to the ocean from our new place, so it won’t be something we do every day but we could go once a week if we wanted to. And the nearest city is Wilmington, NC which is a seaside town with a lot of history, as well as board walks and such. I think we’re going to enjoy just going into town to wander around and get an ice cream or something.

We’re really excited because for all the time we’ve living in Raleigh we’ve never really made much use of the city. I just don’t find it very interesting. If I were younger and into going out to clubs and bars and for dinner frequently I’d probably feel differently but as an old penny-pincher there’s just not much of interest there. I’m hoping being near Wilmington and the water will get me out of the house a lot more. Since we lost Lola I can go weeks without leaving the apartment complex, and days without leaving the apartment. My body is starting to pay the price for all this…sitting.

I’m filing this post under Pointless Rambling because wow, if ever a post was pointless, it’s this one. I think I only wrote it to give myself a break from packing. Now to go fill another cardboard box with books I’ll probably never read!

 

 

 

 

The End of Social Media? (For Me, I Mean!)

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Man, I miss the old days of Twitter. Before it became a hell hole, and even before it became a giant advertising venue. When it was just a bunch of nerds talking about random stuff all day, every day. It was like a community snowball. You’d have a few people you followed and then you’d follow some of the people they followed and pretty soon you had this nice community of folks to talk with.

Then Ashton Kutcher discovered Twitter and that was the start of the end. Soon the rest of hollywood was there, then the politicians, then every brand had a twitter handle and the noise level grew and grew. And then, y’know, Musk.

I’ve tried other services and the only one that really stuck was Google Plus, but then Google shut that down. The rest all seemed transitory or made finding a community so hard it wasn’t worth the effort.

Eventually I settled on Mastodon, and that was good for a while until my interests diverged from that of ‘the gang’ I was following. It was the sin of finding AI fun and interesting that did it. No longer did I feel comfortable talking about things I was interested in. I’m adding AI to religion and politics as the topics you should never discuss in public!

So I moved to Bluesky and using that has been pretty much like shouting into the void. Very few people respond in any way. There are maybe 3 or 4 people I interact with their every so often. Maybe its me? Maybe I’m not putting sufficient effort into making connections?

Oddly the one place I now use more than anything else is Facebook. I wound up there through a round-about path. One of the generative AI services I use gives your free credits if you post your creation on Instagram, so I started doing that even though I don’t actually use Instagram. But I didn’t realize posting to Instagram also posts to Facebook. I’d forgotten I even HAD the Facebook account (created when I got Quest VR and it required a Facebook account). But folks I’ve known for decades started reacting to my posts so I went over there to respond and find I actually have more interactions there than anywhere else (tho still not much).

Still, it’s nothing like the old Twitter. I remember joining others in live tweeting events like gaming dog and pony shows or infamously bad movies like Sharknado. It was like watching something in an auditorium with a bunch of friends shouting comments to each other while somehow not distracting from the main stage.

Anyway, I guess we’ve moved on from those times. And maybe it’s OK. I probably spend my time more productively now than when I was heavily into social media. I watch a lot of informational YouTube, or do online classes and things like that. Or I code on hobbiest projects. None of these are earth shattering changes but I guess they feel slightly more productive (though not as fun) as talking with friends.

Anyway, on the off chance anyone has noticed that I don’t post often on ‘the socials’ these days, now you know why. But I am good, things are good. We’re excited about the upcoming move. We still miss our Lola but other than that, knock on wood, we are doing pretty well all in all. And PartPurple is still on Mastodon so if anything dramatic happens to us she’ll probably share it.

In the meantime I’ve moved my AI and tech discussions over to my other blog, Smith Talks Tech. Since I know AI upsets a lot of people I figured it made sense to separate it from my gaming talk here at Dragonchasers.

I’ll resist the urge to add an AI generated image to the top of this post out of respect for anyone on Mastodon who happens to follow the link here, since I do think I’ll share this post over there as a kind of official “So long, thanks for all the good times, see you again when the wheel turns.”

October 2025

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Happy Halloween, Hapy Samhain, Happy Too Much Candy Day. Whatever your denomination, happy end of October. Now we can say summer is truly gone and I no longer fear my electric bill (the air conditioner is finally silent). We’re all ready to receive our average of approximately zero trick-or-treaters. But that’s OK, PartPurple did a great job decorating and several neighbors have come by to compliment her display. Our new place has a much smaller entryway so I think going forward any decorations will have to be much more modest. So one last “it should be visible from space” decorating hurrah seemed appropriate.

I messed up this month. I went the whole month without taking any kind of notes on what I’ve been playing or that we’ve been watching. I’m going to have to rely on memory, which is never my strong suit. With the move coming up fast I’ve spent more time chorin’ and less time doing fun stuff anyway, so it might be there’s not that much for me to remember.

Playing

The Outer Worlds — I finished this and… it left so little an impression on me that I can’t really remember how it ended. I do know I got to an ending though. The sequel is out now but I haven’t tried it. At some point I will, just to see if they’ve made any quality of life improvements, because QoL was what really bothered me about the first game. But I talked about all that last month so…

Wuthering Waves — After being well and truly hooked on Wuthering Waves for a good long while, I think I’m ready to take a break from it once my Lunite Subscription (via which you get a daily login reward of premium currency) ends. I still really enjoy the game it’s just that sometimes familiarity breeds contempt and I just need to step away for a bit. I did pull Zani last night though and I really enjoy her so maybe I’ll spend some time building her to see how she plays. Currently my main team is Havoc Rover, Carlotta and Shorekeeper, though none of the three are 100% built yet. Those talent trees take a while to complete.

Little Rocket Lab — THIS has been my obsession lately. I find myself playing it any time I had at least 10-15 minutes free. I talked about it in a mid-month update but as of last night, I finished it. 🙁 I might actually play through it again. Once you finish the game once you unlock “Hard Mode” which could be interesting, or I could just impose some rules on myself to make a 2nd run-through a different sort of challenge.

Answering a few questions I had in my Mid-Month post, you never really are gated by a lack of resources, though one or two are slower to gather than the rest. There doesn’t seem to be any time limits so you can just play around and do whatever you like. There are Seasons but really they’re just cosmetic and they advanced based on you finishing certain tasks rather than being based on the number of days that have passed.

The team is still working on the game, adding QoL improvements and they’ve teased new features in a very vague way. So I’ll probably set it aside for now and revisit after some updates. There WERE, to be fair, parts of the game that felt sort of half-finished. For instance there are stores but I never really felt a need to use them. I did jobs to earn money to unlock some upgrades (there are only 3 of these) but once those were unlocked I had no use for money. There are also plants and shells and things that you can collect but I never found a use for them. I think you might be able to give them to villagers as gifts but I’m not sure what the point of that would be.

But just building conveyor belts and machines to process goods and to constantly tweak things to optimize the delivery of rocket parts and such? That was fun even though my setup was the mechanical equivalent of spaghetti code by the time I was finished!! So yeah, another play-through to be faster, neater, and more efficient is kind of appealing.

Screenshot from Little Rocket Lab showing a chaotic mess of conveyor belts
It just kind of evolved into this…

I was surprised to learn, when the credits rolled, that this was built by a very small team. Two programmers are listed, and one of them is also the game’s designer. There’s considerably more people in QA and localization but I’m guessing that the core game was just the two people.

Watching

Invasion (Apple TV+) — We finished our rewatch and the new season. Liked it all quite a bit. Season 3 put less of an emphasis on the kids, which I appreciated because some of the kids [looking at you, Luke and Sarah] were really annoying. Season 3 ended in such a way that it was a satisfying ending if there isn’t a 4th season, but there’s a few cracks that they could tease a new plotline out of if they did want to come back for Season 4. All in all I find it to be a good, not great, sci-fi show.

Foundation (Apple TV+) — Foundation is dense but really good. You probably don’t want to watch it casually but, if you decide to watch, give it your full attention. I’ve somehow never read the books and I think I might have to do that. I liked this one a lot, but my sense was that PartPurple wasn’t as thrilled with it and I think that’s because she constantly multitasks when we watch shows and I think she just missed stuff.

Interview With the Vampire (Netflix) — This one was for her. She loves sexy vampire stories so… I thought it was OK but she really enjoyed it.

Nobody Wants This (Netflix) — Season 2 of the Kristen Bell romcom hit Netflix earlier this week and we’re in the middle of it. Loved the first season and I might like S2 even more. I feel like the secondary characters are getting a lot more of the spotlight and I’m coming to enjoy them every bit as much as the leads.

Reading

Not much. In the middle of packing I found a copy of Isaac Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories” and I’ve been reading that. It is kind of eerie how many things he got right about AI and robots and future society, given that he was writing these stories in the 60’s and 70’s.

And that’s October in the books. I don’t know if I’ll do a November recap just because our plan is to do a kind of slow-motion move starting right before Thanksgiving and ending in mid-December, so it remains to be seen whether I’ve got my stuff together enough to write a post in the middle of that. We’ll see.

Mid-Month Random Mutterings!

Posted on by Nimgimli

Felt the itch to write a blog post so…. here’s a blog post!

I’m not sure where I’ve said what these days, but we’re getting ready to move from Raleigh, NC, to the suburbs of Wilmington, NC. So after years and years of talking about moving North to get to cooler weather…we’re moving south about 2 hours. So it’ll be even hotter! BUT, we’ll also be about 30 minutes from the beaches and even closer to Wilmington and its boardwalks and fun-seeming things to do. We’ve lived in Raleigh for 13 years, on the outskirts, and have gone into downtown Raleigh about 3 times. It just holds no appeal for me. But Wilmington is a bit tourist-y, and there are rivers and bays and oceans to explore if I don’t mind driving for 20-230 minutes. So I’m hoping I’ll become a bit more active. Since our doggo Lola passed I barely move and it is starting to have a real impact on my health and energy. I watched both my grandmother and mother lose their mobility by doing exactly what I’m doing (ie sitting indoors all day every day) and I don’t want to follow in their footsteps (none of the men in my family lived long enough for this to be an issue).

Anyway, we’re excited, both for the new locale and for going from a 2 bedroom to a 3 bedroom townhouse. This means 1 bedroom to use as a bedroom, then we each get an office/cave. I’ll finally have my own space again!! Right now we share an office and Ms Crafty McCrafterson has it PACKED with crafting tools and supplies to the point it’s hard for me to even get to my PC. But now I’ll have a nice gaming space with star-babe posters on the wall and open space for doing some VR and stuff. Woot!

But the actual process of moving is daunting for us, as we’re old and un-fit and every time we do something we have to take a day to recover from the exertion. I suppose we’ll get in shape during the process (our lease doesn’t start until just before Thanksgiving so we have over a month to prepare). We’ll hire some young strong folks to move the big stuff but hope to move a lot of the boxes and things ourselves, but we’ll see how that works out and if the economics make sense.

But yeah, big exciting changes coming up!

Gaming Updates!

Meanwhile, maybe partly due to having all these moving-related issues in my brain, I’ve been gaming quite a bit once again. Two games in particular have grabbed me.

The first is Little Rocket Lab which I tried on a whim, not expecting to really play it (it was on Game Pass and I needed to play a Game Pass game for MS Rewards Points and this was a small download). I LOVE it. It is basically Stardew Valley only instead of farming you’re manufacturing stuff. Initially you’re banging rocks with a hammer but you very quickly move on to automated drills, conveyor belts, machines that assemble things, machines that move items, and so on. I’m still early days so I don’t know how complex it gets. It’s a game that doesn’t appear to have any time pressure. You get quests and stuff but (so far at least) no deadline for getting them done. Like Stardew Valley it runs on a ‘day’ system where you eventually collapse if you don’t get to bed in time, but there’s no stamina meter or anything like that.

Resources do run out and I wonder if that will be a kind of gating mechanism eventually, but there seem to be ample outcroppings of iron, copper, rock and coal available, which is all I’m working with so far. And we just repaired a port and are importing container ships full of old computers and stuff. We’re going to be recycling the circuit boards from these if I ever figure out how to use a crane to unload the boat. But I wonder if we’ll get other materials from recycling, too.

Anyway I’m finding it a delight. It’s on Game Pass but also on Steam; there’s a demo on Steam and right now it’s on sale for $15. If you like Stardew Valley and are interested in, or curious about, automation games, I think this might be a must-play. Extra bonus points for me: it’s a “Play Anywhere” title on Game Pass so I can play at the PC or from the couch on the Xbox, and work on the same save.

The other game I’m really sucked into is Wuthering Waves. I finally got some characters to level 90, and I’ve been playing through the main story quests in an attempt to catch up. Those quests are long though, and feel like they’re best consumed in a single sitting. This has kept me up much too late for more than one night! And I’m still quite a few updates behind even though I’ve clocked 150 hours or so, I would guess.

I also completed the Pioneer Podcast (their version of a Battle Pass) last time around and I’ve got a good start to doing so again. It’s week one and I’m already to level 20 (of 70) so I feel good there. I start each night working on Daily and Weekly Pioneer Podcast tasks, which includes burning through the day’s stamina (Waveplates, I think Stamina is called) and I use the goodies I get from doing that for improving character and slowly building up some new characters I have in the works, after some lucky pulls.

My current team is Havoc Rover, Carlotta, and Baizhu (spelling?). I’m working on Shorekeeper to replace Baizhu on healing/support duties. I’ve gotten pretty good with Rover in terms of dodging, blocking and using her abilities, to the point where if I’m really in the grove I can beat an early-game boss without ever switching to a different character. I button-spam with Carlotta and every time I fight with her I think “After this I have to go through her tutorial to learn how to play her” then promptly forget to do that. She’s uses a gun and jumps around like Yoda so I’ve been doing OK button-mashing with her. But I should really learn to play her better.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on around here in the middle of October. Exciting changes afoot, exciting games being place.

[Note on the images used in this post:  Images are screenshots from Little Rocket Lab or Wuthering Waves. The image at the top of the post was modified via AI to remove UI components from the shot, which is why it has a Gemini watermark in the bottom corner.]

Microsoft Changes the Game Pass Game

Posted on by Nimgimli

Microsoft just changed the price of Game Pass fairly substantially and as far as I can tell, with no warning. Prices jumped as much as 50%, with Ultimate going to $30/month, which feels pretty darned steep to me.

But that’s not all they’ve done. A lot of us frugal types tend to stack-up game pass subscriptions via Microsoft Rewards points, particularly during sales. Microsoft seems to be making that harder. You can no longer spend Rewards points directly on Game Pass. Instead you have to trade in points for Gift Cards and then spend that money on Game Pass. Why does this matter? Because as far as I can tell (someone please correct me if I’m wrong) you can’t extend your membership using cash, unless of course it has expired or is coming due.

From a pop-up on https://rewards.bing.com/

[Important update] Changes to Rewards Catalog
Starting October 1st, you will no longer be able to directly redeem your Rewards points for Xbox Game Pass subscriptions. To continue enjoying Xbox Game Pass using your Rewards points, you will need to first redeem your Rewards points for an Xbox gift card and then redeem your Xbox gift card for your desired Game Pass subscription, as follows:
Step 1: Visit the Microsoft Rewards catalog.
Step 2: Redeem your Rewards points for an Xbox gift card[TD1] in a denomination that is sufficient to cover the cost of your desired Game Pass subscription. If you do not have enough Rewards points for the desired Xbox gift card denomination, you may use an alternative payment method to cover the rest.
Step 3: Use your Microsoft Account balance from your redeemed Xbox gift card to purchase your desired Game Pass subscription. If your Microsoft Account balance is insufficient to cover your desired Game Pass subscription, you may use an alternative payment method to cover the rest.
When your Game Pass subscription expires, you can buy another Game Pass subscription by either (i) repeating Steps 1-3, above; or (ii) using an alternative payment method to purchase a Game Pass subscription.

As of right now you can stil purchase Game Pass gift cards from retailers like Amazon, so you can spend rewards points on an Amazon gift card, use that money to buy a Game Pass gift card, and then apply that to your Game Pass account, but we’ll see how long that lasts.

Or maybe this is temporary and once the pricing settles they’ll bring back direct redemption for Game Pass.

Another big change I don’t see talked about is that Microsoft is now capping Rewards Points at $100/year. Or at least that’s how I’m reading this:

Ultimate subscribers can now earn up to $100 per year (100k points globally) in the Store just by playing games.

I’ve never stopped to do the math, so before I get out my pitchfork and torch I should do that. I feel like I earn more than $100 worth of points per year, though. But it could be that $100 is the mathematical cap if you do all the quests they offer.

In any case it looks like the golden age of Xbox Game Pass is coming to an end. And PSA: You can still buy 3-Month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate gift card for $60 on Amazon so if you want to stock up, now is the time to do so.

September 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

September is such a cruel month here in North Carolina. All the advertising and marketing people start their campaigns about “Now that the weather is getting cooler…” and showing folks in sweaters taking comfortable walks in brisk Autumn weather, and here it’s still in the 90s, at least some of the time. The nights are cooler, so that’s something. But damn do I miss a proper Autumn walk!

Anyway I actually played a few games this month!

Playing

The Outer Worlds — A few months ago I decided I should finally play through this, what with the sequel coming soon and all. And I did, finishing it just a few days ago. Honestly, I did not like it very much, but I think that was because I played on console. The combat was fun, and the humor was OK, but Quality of Life issues on console frustrated me. Inventory management was a nightmare between huge pop-ups (needed since we’re reading from across the room) that would obscure most of the inventory, and having no way to sort or filter what you had in order to figure what was worth keeping and what was junk. There was also too much of it, with every location you went to filled with containers holding a few coins, or one of a zillion foods/drinks, many of which did the same thing and most of which I never needed to use. It’s funny how I used to think RPGs with tons of containers to rifle through [looking at you, Elder Scrolls games] were pretty cool, but now it just feels like needless busy work. I’m hoping the sequel is easier to play in terms of console user interface, because the actual GAMEPLAY was pretty good.

Vampire Survivors — Late to the party on this one but now I get it. If you’ve never played this game it’s basically an auto-battler where you control the character. You just steer it around, the character attacks automatically, and when it levels up you pick what skill you want to improve. And that’s it, but the game throws SO many enemies at you once it gets going that it’s like a constant dopamine drip since everything you kill drops an experience gem. Hard to describe, and it’s really slow to start, but once you’ve done some runs and earned some gold to buy perks you’ll start going farther and farther and the gameplay gets more and more insane. Fun stuff when you want something that’s basically casual but still satisfying.

Wuthering Waves — This is where I spent the bulk of my gaming time this month, logging in every day to get my goodies and do dailies. My intent was just to beeline my way through the main story quests but wouldn’t ya know it? I got hooked. Now I’m actually following a guide of sorts (<– link to a google doc made by someone else; I think I found it on reddit) so I can play through the Companion, Exploration and Side Quests in some kind of logical order to maximize story enjoyment. In the meantime I’m making a real go at completing the battle pass thingie. If my math is correct I’m going to make it. Woohoo! At the rate I’m going I’m not sure I’ll catch up on content before I inevitably get distracted, but we’ll see.

Watching

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Paramount+) — I guess maybe some folks didn’t like this season as much, but I still did. Sad it’s over but on the other hand now I’m not giving CBS any money, so that’s good.

Invasion (Apple TV+) — The end of Season 2 of this series was a gigantic cliff-hanger, then it took 2 years for Season 3 to arrive and it is…. weird. Instead of picking up at the end of S2 it jumps ahead 2 years. A lot of characters are just gone and (so far at least) we don’t even know exactly what happened after the cliff-hanger. It almost feels like a kind of reboot? The season isn’t done yet so maybe they’ll find a way to wrap it all up and have it make sense but I’m not hopeful. Also all the kid actors are growing like weeds of course so look nothing like they did when the show started. Maybe that’s why they did the time skip? We’re going to finish it, but sadly I’m not sure I can really recommend it.

Warehouse 13 (Amazon Prime) — We always watch some older, comfy show during lunch. Something we’ve already seen since often work interupts and we don’t finish an episode. This month we picked Warehouse 13, and it turns out that we never finished the series when it was initially on, so that was a delight. Finding new episodes we hadn’t watched, I mean. I have to say, I REALLY love this show. Maybe more now than when it first came out. Just the chemistry between the characters feels so genuinely warm and family-like. The last season is short and I didn’t realize it was and when the final episode ended and I realized the show was over, I was genuinely sad, and I don’t say that too often. If for some reason you’ve never watched it, it’s currently on Amazon Prime Video in the US. Check it out. It’s a weird, silly concept with a great cast. [After it ended we moved on to Haven so maybe I’ll have something to say about that re-watch next month.]

 

And that’s September. If things work out right, we might be moving in early December, which means we’re going to start packing pretty soon. That might impact October some, but it’ll probably be November before things get chaotic. But if I fall off the face of the earth it’s probably just because I’m too involved in moving headaches to post stuff.

[The Header image is a partial screenshot from Wuthering Waves. I used Flash 2.5, aka “Nano Banana”, to strip some UI elements out of the image. Ergo the Gemini watermark in the bottom right.]