I really wanted to steal Tipa’s “I Know What I Did Last Weekend” title but that would be gauche.

I have fond memories of quite a few outdoorsy 4th of July celebrations from the days when I lived on Long Island. We’d get up early, set up a water smoker full of savory treats, then head to the beach for beer and surf. Late in the afternoon we’d come home to more beer, slow-cooked barbeque, and croquet matches that lasted until bedtime.

Life in the south is different. It is hot. Hotter than I can take for any length of time. This 4th in particular was brutal (actually more so up north than it was here). So I stayed indoors and played video games for all three days.

See, if AI wrote these posts it wouldn’t add all that superfluous prelminary junk. That’s how you can know I still write my own posts!

Anyway, yeah games. A LOT of games. Neverness to Everness is in a bit of a lull for me until the version 1.2 update (which is out this week). I still logged in and spent my daily ‘pixels’ and such, but with all the quests done and the ‘battle pass’ thingie completed there wasn’t a ton to do. I still had the gacha itch, though, so I patched up Wuthering Waves.

Ohhh, they know how to getcha, these gacha folks. Now I have a whole “Returners” event in Wuthering Waves to work on. Daily login rewards and a mini battle pass thingie. It took a while to adjust back to WW after playing NTE. It helped to re-do key bindings to match (something I’m getting better about generally) and then a little help from Gemini to get my bearings, and WW was once more a fun time. Now how on earth can I balance two gachas at once? NTE is still my current darling and I am SUPER pumped for version 1.2 and the game-inside-the-game known as 999 Nights. (Which you’re supposed to verbalize it as “1000 Minus One Nights” for some reason.)

Meanwhile. progress is being made in Octopath Traveller. I beat that boss I had blogged about and found a shrine that lets me stack jobs. Apparently there’s a shrine for each job (each of the 8 characters has their own associated job) and once I started multiclassing everything got MUCH easier (and more interesting…figuring out the best pairings). Now I’ve found 3 shrines so I need to be on the lookout for the other 5. Game is getting more and more interesting though, even though the story beats are still far apart in terms of time played. It’s been a while since I stuck with a turn-based RPG for this long (I guess Persona 4 was the lat time) and its been a nice change.

I recently purchased an Ultimate GeForce Now subscription so I can stream games rather than running them locally. Why? Once again, heat. My office gets so warm and having a PC running hot to play games makes things worse. Plus a side-order of “My hard drives are full of large language models and I have no room for games.” Anyway, fired it up to test and what was the most popular game that I had in my library? Diablo IV. So I started it up. There’s a new expansion and new classes and they were offering a 7 day trial of the new classes. I picked a Warlock and started a new campaign (I TRIED to skip the campaign but my soul just wouldn’t let me.)

About 20 minutes later I was redeeming Microsoft Rewards points for a $50 gift card and buying the Diablo IV Expansion, Lord of Hate (or something…everything in Diablo IV seems to be called {something} of Hate which gets confusing). I never stick with D4 very long because the Seasons bug me. Because they exist it seems “wasteful” to play my Eternal (non-seasonal) characters even though I never come CLOSE to completing a season. I’m being my own worst enemy here and should embrace the Eternal since I’m not a die-hard player. With all that said, the Warlock is hella fun so far. GREAT skill effects. My favorite is a giant red etheral hand that comes out of the ground and drags baddies away from you.

Last but not least, I’m still playing Solarpunk. I’ve gone from burning wood to burning wax briquets to using solar power. Now I’m building batteries to store excess power, and I’ve researched windmills though haven’t built any yet. I’ve also unlocked switches and some logic tools which I’m just beginning to experiment with. All these fancy items require silicon and cobalt which are the latest resources to get unlocked and I’m also still working on getting production of those up and running. Solarpunk has been one of the more pleasant gaming surprises I’ve had recently. When I first booted it up I never would’ve dreamed I’d still be playing it weeks later.

I ALSO fired up Star Wars Outlaws, liked what I saw, but realized this was NOT the time to add yet another game into my ‘currently playing’ list, so I quickly bailed on it so it would feel ‘fresh’ when I eventually circle back to it.

And now it’s Monday and back to work and no extra time off until Labor Day in September. How am I going to manage to keep up with all these games? Something is going to have to fall away. Probably Wuthering Waves since, again, two gachas is probably one too many.

I guess if nothing else, spending 4th of July weekend playing games in the A/C is better for my waistline and my liver than those lost weekends of beer and barbeque that we used to enjoy. [I DID manage a morning walk each day just to get SOME exercise in.]Cheaper too, come to think of it.