Another mostly empty monthly recap, just for the sake of keeping the habit alive.
Playing
Fallout 76, pretty much exclusively. My new character is now level 220-225 (at these levels I kind of don’t pay a ton of attention) and I’ve got the Season Scoreboard thing (which started on June 12th), to about level 80. The way the seasons work is there is a new page of rewards every 5-10 levels up to 100, then there’s nothing new until level 150. Once you get to level 150 there are rewards you can claim over and over, and one of them is Perk Points which are my bottleneck. So I’m pushing to get as many of those as I can. Up to level 100 there is a repeatable “task” that fires every 10,000 experience points, so you can really ‘grind’ the Season Scoreboard up to 100. But after 100 there’s just a fixed number of points you can acquire each week. That’s why I’m rushing these first 100 levels…to have as much time left as possible to get to 150 and beyond (we don’t know when the season ends but I’m assuming sometime in September).
That said, my obsession with Fallout 76 is starting to falter a little, at least to the point where I’m ready for some variety. I’m planning on jumping into The First Descendant on July 2nd, but until then I’ve been back to dabbling in Diablo IV. I still haven’t completed the campaign so I’m doing that on the Eternal Realm. The idea is I’ll be ready to just jump in with a new character when the next season starts, but we’ll see. I’m not actually a huge fan of the ‘roll a new character every season’ system when seasons run constantly just because I never have time (not literally of course) to play my ‘old’ characters.
Watching
Sweet Tooth Final Season (Netflix) – We wound up really enjoying this show. It’s a weird one. From the thumbnail of a young boy with deer antlers, and the name of the show, you might think you’re in for some kind of Disney-esque story. Nope. Very much nope. This is a tale of an apocalypse. A plague is killing all the humans and at the same time, babies are being born which are animal/human hybrids. You can imagine how welcoming most humans are towards them. So it’s actually an often grim tale, and the ending will be either good or bad depending on your point of view. But since the writers knew this was the final season, it DOES get a proper ending, which seems so rare these days.
Night Sky (Amazon Prime) – I haven’t seen this one talked about very much. We liked it, but didn’t love it. Still it felt unique enough to be worth watching. It stars Sissy Spacek and JK Simmons as an elderly couple who just happen to have a portal to another world in the basement of their shed. They’ve kept this a secret all their lives, but now in their twilight years everything starts to change. I don’t want to say too much beyond that, but I’d suggest giving it a shot.
3 Body Problem (Netflix) – Another mind-bendy show that I don’t want to say too much about because discovery is half the fun. If the title means nothing to you (it didn’t to me) it’s a physics problem about predicting orbits in a trinary star system. Or at least that’s what I made of it all. One of the superficial things I liked about this show is that it is about very smart people who aren’t awkward nerds; I’m glad that stereotype was left behind for this one. Another show I would recommend, though I really hope we get another season.
Dark Matter (Apple TV+) – Yes, more sci-fi! I haven’t finished this one yet, but it’s about traveling to parallel universes. I first skipped this one because it sounded like it’d be too similar to Constellation (also on Apple TV+) but it isn’t. This is kind of a sci-fi mystery. So far I’m liking it but again, haven’t finished so can’t be completely sure about this one yet.
Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead (Crunchyroll) – Another one I haven’t finished yet, but that I’m enjoying so far. What happens if you are an office worker in an exploitative company, and you can barely force yourself to go to the office each morning… and then a zombie apocalypse breaks out. Well in this case, you get ecstatic because it means no more work! Akira kind of accepts that sooner or later the zombies will get him, but to maximize his time until that happens, he creates a bucket list of things to do while he’s still human. This show somehow manages to stay upbeat and fun even when so many people Akira meets end up getting eaten. I’m not sure how that works, but it does. I think it helps that the zombies tend to be covered with blotches of bright primary colors (that are never explained) which gives the whole art style an oddly happy tone for a zombie show. Pretty fun so far.
Reading
– Nothing. Stupid hot weather means my “sit under a tree and read while Lola lounges in the grass” time isn’t happening, and that’s when I’ve been doing most of my reading lately.
And that’s June. Hoping the July recap will have more than 1 or 2 games in it. Until then, try to stay cool and don’t think too much about that incoming electricity bill (ours is already double what it is in winter and it’ll just go up more for July and August).