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.
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.
The supporting characters in S2 of Nobody Wants This are so strong and have such good storylines it kind of made me forget whose show it was supposed to be at times. Doesn’t help that Adam Brody’s Noah seems to get blander by the episode. He strikes me as one of those people who’s repressing so much emotion he could snap at and go on a killing spree at any moment. Only that would make him interesting, which is something he’s never likely to be.
I read a lot of Asimov as a teenager but only because I was reading my way throuigh the entire SF collection in the local library and I’d read all the good stuff. I thought he was dull then and I’ve never attempted to re-read him because of it. Maybe I should because if anything his reputation just keeps increasing, something I find really hard to square with my memory of how flat and lifeless the books were.
I saw your post on Nobody Wants This but since we haven’t finished the season quite yet, I skipped it for the time being. We just watched the Valentine’s Day episode. Esther in particular I’m really like, particularly how she handles the relationship between her husband and Morgan.
These Asimov stories are generally pretty sure which maybe makes him read ‘livelier’ than his novels. I can’t actually name one of his novels that I actually read, now that I think about it. Which is not to say I didn’t read any, just that I don’t remember them.
But remember when you COULD read the whole sci-fi section of a library? For me it was some little nook in the corner of the Mysteries room or something.
You needn’t hunt up the Foundation books; the TV show is nothing like them. The books are told in a series of vignettes that take you through the collapse of the Empire and the gradual rise again. Think of the whole Hari Seldon thing as a way to tie together a series of standalone short stories, which is how they were originally published.
I loved S2 of Nobody Wants This 🙂
I had no idea that was the case (about Foundation)!! Thanks!