May 2025

Right after last month’s recap, our beloved dog Lola died, and that definitely cast a pall over the month. After spending 15 years taking several walks per day with her, plus feeding her and various playtimes over the course of the day, we found ourselves kind of adrift and WAY out of sorts (and, of course, extremely sad). That led to a dip in doing things in the early part of the month, but then a spike later when I found that immersing myself in a game or something would take my mind off of missing her.

If you think that surely a month is enough time to get over the loss of a pet, I’m here to tell you that you are wrong, if it is a pet that you have a special bond with. Lola was our “heart dog” and the closest thing to a child we’ll ever have. We still shed tears most days when we’re reminded of her and the fact that she is gone.

Transitioning away from THAT sad topic… I don’t have much of a recap this month mostly because I’ve actually posted a few times about what I’ve been playing. But let’s dive in. Basically I’m in a quasi-holding pattern waiting for Death Stranding 2 to come out. Every year my brother sends me a check for my birthday and I used that to pre-order DS 2. With the massive bills we incurred at the vet, [the GoFundMe is still up if anyone with an excess of cash laying around happens to read this] buying new games is off the table for a while, but I figured birthday money was fair game.

Anyway point is, I’ve been sifting through offerings on Game Pass and PS Plus Extra (both of which were paid for last year) and picking games that are either short, or were generally disliked and/or didn’t sell well. The latter just because I’m always curious about why a game becomes widely disliked. My PS+ Extra sub ends in July and I can’t really justify renewing it so I’m mostly focused on that service. Game Pass gets paid for via Microsoft Reward Points, and anyway is paid up for like 2 more years still so I’m good there.

Playing

Dragon Age: Veilguard [PS+ Extra] finished after around 105 hours and wrote a post about it. It was OK but overly long, in my opinion.

Clair Obscura: Expedition 33 [Xbox Game Pass] is one of those games everyone loves but that I’m struggling with. (By the way I was playing this because it hit Game Pass on Day 1, NOT because it falls into that category of being disliked or not selling well; it’s well reviewed and seems to be selling great.) I enjoy the combat and find the world’s mystery intriguing, but the lack of a map and the fact that so many zones are so dark I can’t even navigate by sight has me playing it for very short periods of time before frustration sets in. Right now I’m trying to find 3 crystals for a friendly mob and the only way I can figure to do this is by constantly re-spawning enemies and hoping a crystal drops. So I’ve been fighting the same mobs for almost a week now. So far I have 1 crystal.

Screenshot from inside a dark dungeon. You can't see much
This is how I’ve been playing and I’ve been finding it pretty frustrating

So shortly after I wrote this, I had a super obvious A-HA! moment and logged back in and pushed up the brightness and gamma settings and voila! I could see what I was doing again. And I realized that I could get the crystals I was looking for just by smashing some; they didn’t have to come as drops from mobs. With that out of the way I finished Act I, finally. I still dislike not having a map. For instance at the end of Act 1 I was at a fork in the road. I started going one way but it seems like a long route and there were Save Points, so I figured this was the main path. So I backtracked and went the other way and nope, THAT was the main path and it ended in a boss fight and then me being whisked away to another part of the world and I can’t seem to fast travel back to see what I’m missed on the other path. That’s gonna bug me now.

Example of the turn-based combat screen
The turn-based combat is really satisfying

Inside [Xbox Game Pass] finished and I wrote about it. It was great! And delightfully short.

Planet of Lana [Xbox Game Pass] is a side-scroller that I’m still enjoying. It’s supposed to be short so I expect to finish soon. I wrote about it, too. [A shot from Planet of Lana is at the top of this post.]

Immortals of Aveum [PS+ Extra] I bailed on, and wrote about why. After I gave up playing I watched a YouTube video of all the cut scenes so I know what happens and don’t regret setting it aside at all.

Forspoken [PS+ Extra] is another game that got pretty blasted at launch, and I remember playing the demo and thinking “nope” but here I am playing it and honestly, it is growing on me. Frey is unpleasant and her companion (a magical bracelet) is grating, but a) there’s a setting where you can turn their banter off, thankfully, and b) Frey actually seems to be growing as a person and I love to watch characters better themselves. It seems like a huge open world game with WAY too much stuff to do, so I doubt I’ll finish it, but so far I’m enjoying myself. One last side note: I remember when this was called Project Athias and was used to show off how amazing Unreal Engine can look. That wasn’t THAT long ago, and already Forspoken looks a bit data. It’s astounding how fast graphics are improving.

Screenshot of the fingernail paint screen.
Whatever game do you know of that has magical fingernail polish!?

Saints Row [PS+ Extra] is another game that everyone seemed to hate, but that I’m enjoying. It’s pretty mindless and very ridiculous but it’s that kind of dumb fun that comes with mowing down enemies and creating good looking explosions and doing nutty stunts like jumping onto the back of a jet to get at the pilot. Again, not sure I’ll finish but I’m finding it entertaining for now.

Gliding over the city in a wing suit
You get a wing suit from the very start of the game, which doesn’t suck

That’s a lot of gaming without opening my wallet! And I guess it wasn’t all that short after all!

Watching

We subscribed to Max for The Last of Us S2 and while we had it, figured we’d binge on Max offerings this month.

The Last of Us Season 2 was way too short. I enjoyed it but they’re saying they’ll need 2 more seasons to finish the story and that sounds right to me. I felt like this season barely got into the meat of the game, though maybe I’m remembering wrong. With Max being so pricey we might skip Season 3 and re-subscribe when Season 4 is out and get it all in a 2-month sub.

The White Lotus Seasons 1-3 was.. a lot. I think I would have enjoyed these more if I’d put some time between seasons. I loved Season 1 (Hawaii). Season 2 (Italy) was mostly about watching the lovely Simona Tabasco as Lucia, if I’m being honest. Season 3 (Thailand) was pretty good mostly due to Walton Goggins & Aimee Lou Wood and their relationship. I’m the one person in the world who isn’t the hugest fan of Jennifer Coolidge — I like her characters (and she always seems to play the wacky character) in small doses but after a while I get tired of her — so her not being in S3 helped get me back into it. Oh and in case you’re not familiar, ‘White Lotus’ is a chain of luxury resorts and each season focuses on a group of generally entitled and obnoxious characters being pampered and acting terrible in front of the local staff. And usually there is murder mixed in… it’s dark comedy.

Dune Prophecy was one of those shows where I wanted to love it, but didn’t, and I can’t put my finger on why. It reminded us a lot of Foundation on Apple TV+ and of the Wheel of Time (the sisterhood in DP reminded us a lot of the Aes Sedai in WOT). I mean it was OK, but just OK.

Reading

Back to doing no reading since I used to do a lot of my reading while sitting outside with Lola. No Lola means no sitting outside, so far. I need to find a new reading time because I do miss it. It also seems like it has been raining the entire month which has prevented us from getting into the habit of getting out of the house.

So that’s May, overall one of the saddest months I’ve ever lived through. Hoping that June is a bit more upbeat!

April 2025

April has felt like a really long month at this point. We had a very stressful health crisis with Lola that felt like it erased a week of our lives due to sleep deprivation and worry. One of my best friends from high school died and that hit me really hard. And at work we’re in the middle of a huge transition between support partners so things have been crazy there, too. I was about to talk about how I hadn’t played much but thankfully I was keeping a list and in fact I finished two games before everything went to shit. It was just a couple weeks ago but it feels like months ago! (Lola seems to be on the mend now but she almost passed twice during the ordeal.) [Spoke too soon, as of this afternoon she is back in the hospital.]

Playing

I finished Death Stranding and really thought I had written a post about it, but I guess not. LOVED IT. In fact the only real reason I stopped playing after completing the story is that Death Stranding 2 is coming out at the end of June and I wanted to take a bit of a breather from wandering the wastelands before it arrived. I will be there Day 1 for Death Stranding 2, no doubt!!

A tallneck (from the Horizon series) hologram in Death Stranding
A tallneck (from the Horizon series) hologram in Death Stranding

I played through South of Midnight and that one I did write about. Really enjoyed it as well.

Dragon Age: Veilguard is still in rotation and I think I’m liking it more the longer I play it. Basically it took a while for my expectations to fade and for me to accept it for what it is. It feels like a game that would’ve done better if it had just been called Veilguard and they’d dropped Dragon Age from the title. I mean it takes place in the same world and all, but it doesn’t feel like a Dragon Age game to me. But it’s a decent enough action-RPG. The image at the top of this post is from Veilguard.

Oblivion Remastered hit Game Pass and I couldn’t NOT try it. It’s kind of my background game. I fire it up when I have 15 or 20 minutes and just putter around. I’m enjoying it. I never got very far into the game when it first came out. So far I’m ignoring the main story and just messing about in some small-ish town (Bruma??) I stumbled into.

Character sheet from Oblivion
Ready for some fisticuffs!

Clair Obscura: Expedition 33 also hit Game Pass. This is a turn-based RPG set in a really interesting (to me) world. It feels like Logan’s Run meets The Hunger Games or something. On this island, cut off from the rest of the world, an entity known as the Paintress writes a number on a monolith every year. When she does, everyone that is the same age as that number basically dissolves and is gone. Every year an Expedition leaves the island to try to stop the Paintress. The first Expedition was numbered 100 and they’re counting down, so there hasn’t been a lot of success, and no one returns from these expeditions. The world is really strange, the voice acting is top notch, the character models are amazing…there’s a lot to like about this one and I look forward to really digging into it. Semi-trying to finish Veilguard before I fully commit to Expedition 33.

Lune's character sheet from Expedition 33
Lune is a little worse for wear…been a minute since the team has had a chance to camp and clean up

Watching

Daredevil Reborn, which I wrote about.

Years & Years, which I ALSo wrote about.

The Last of Us season 2, which has only dropped 3 episodes so far but has been really good. It is different from the game, but I’m always fine with that kind of change. I’ve already experienced the story in the game; I’m fine with having a somewhat different story in the show.

The White Lotus came highly recommended and since we’d signed up for HBO the The Last of Us, we decided to give it a try. We’re mid-way through Season 2. I LOVED Season 1 but not loving Season 2 quite as much. But we’ll see; they could still turn things around. But Armond in Season 1 was just fascinating to watch… (The White Lotus is the name of a chain of resorts and the show is like a much darker Fantasy Island. Season 1 took place in White Lotus Hawaii and S2 takes place at White Lotus Italy.)

Reading

Still working through the pre-Shannara books, by Terry Brooks.

Finished The Elves of Cintra and started The Gypsy Morph. These books are really tightly coupled. Cintra just kind of ends and Gypsy Morph picks right up. We’re still trying to save the elves from the demons and once-men. Which won’t mean anything if you haven’t been reading the series. But I’m enjoying them well enough.

And that’s April in the rearview mirror. Here’s hoping for a quieter and less dramatic May. I’m ready to be back in a rut, bored by my routine. Never thought I’d miss that, but here we are!!

“Years and Years” Creeped Me Out

We recently re-subscribed to HBO for the new season of The Last of Us, and given how crazy expensive HBO is, I wanted to get Max (ha! see what I did there?) value out of it, so I went looking for other series to watch while the sub is active. That’s how I stumbled onto Years and Years. It’s a one season, 6 episode BBC show about, basically, the downfall of the way of life we’re all accustomed to in the West, and specifically in the UK.

The story starts in 2019, rapidly advances to 2024, and ends in 2028 or 2029. In it, the US starts a trade war and tanks the world economy. Russia invades and conquers Ukraine which causes a huge refugee issue, which leads to countries closing their borders. Climate change is wreaking havoc, and a pandemic grips the world. The governments start clamping down on the press, and sifting the truth from all the lies becomes more and more challenging.

Sounds familiar, right?

Here’s the kicker. The show came out in 2019. It really creeped me out how accurately the writers anticipated all the bad things that were about to happen. The only major thing they got wrong was how fast it would happen. In real life it’s all progressing more quickly than it did in the show. The show posits Trump being re-elected in 2020, and Pence (who is referred to as a Trump puppet) in 2024, so they got that wrong and STILL bad stuff is happening faster in real life than it did in the series.

Years and Years follows the lives of the Lyons family: Muriel and her 4 grown grand-children, their partners and their kids. All are living fairly comfortable (and in some cases VERY comfortable) lives as the story begins, but with all the upheaval happening that doesn’t last. The family tries its best to roll with the punches with limited success. One of my favorite lines is when a character says “I miss the days when the news was BORING.” Don’t we all, friend. Don’t we all.

I don’t want to go into too many details because that would ruin the fun (?) of watching and comparing this fictional future to our messed-up present. Personally I was just fascinated. And a little depressed. As mentioned, it’s on HBO in the US and maybe on the BBC in the UK? Not sure about that last bit.

Daredevil: Born Again — Spoiler Free Thoughts

Last night we finished up Season 1 of Daredevil: Born Again (Disney+) and I wanted to share some thoughts on it. Not a review but more like “this is the vibe I got”.

So first some background on my preferences. When Netflix was doing a slate of Marvel ‘street level hero’ shows, I really enjoyed most of them. Luke Cage, Jessica Jones and The Punisher were all really good, but Daredevil was my favorite. (Sorry Iron Fist, you don’t make my list…you staring at your hand all the time wasn’t that entertaining). Also I’m not a comic book reader so I don’t have any issues along the lines of “This is not who he is!” that I’m sure true fans of the original material might have had. This was all before Disney bought Marvel, which put an end to the Netflix shows.

It’s been a few years, but Disney decided to revive Daredevil. I don’t know if Daredevil: Born Again is the start of a new slate of shows or a one-off, but I was happy to see Charlie Cox return as Matt Murdock/Daredevil, and Vincent D’Nofrio as Wilson Fisk/Kingpin, because in my mind these two actors ARE these characters. Not to root for the bad guys but D’Nofrio just slays every scene he is in; he’s the best Marvel villain on video, in my opinion.

Anyway the season (9 episodes) was a little uneven for me. The premise at the start is that Matt Murdock has put aside the Daredevil gig in favor of helping people in his day job (he’s a lawyer). And while he was doing that bit, the show hit a bit of a lull for me, but towards the end it ramped up — as the title gives away, Daredevil is back, baby! — and the final episode left us on the edge of our seats and wanting more (a second season is coming).

Actually that’s not exactly true. It wasn’t so much that mid-season was a lull as more a change of focus on Fisk’s Machiavellian criminal dealings. I promised no spoilers and I’ll stick to that, except to say that the show kind of reflected real life is some pretty disturbing and obvious ways. The whole season felt like a long set-up to a new world for these heroes and villain to cavort in.

In addition to Daredevil and Kingpin, a few more characters from that universe pop up and I hope to see more of them next season. I mean what I REALLY want to see is a whole new set of shows focused on these characters, most of whom I find a lot more interesting and entertaining that Iron Man, Capt America and Thor.

Anyway, maybe I’ll circle back to this once the show has been out for a while and I feel more comfortable spoiling things, but for now I just want to say Daredevil: Born Again is in my opinion well worth watching. (The critics don’t seem to agree with me but what do they know, right!? Actually I dunno where I got that idea but after I posted I went off to read some reviews and they’re actually pretty good.) If you started but stopped partway through the season I’d urge you to go back and finish because it gets really good towards the end!

Kingpin and Daredevil profiles, back to back
Copyright: Marvel.com

March 2025

It’s the end of March and I still haven’t done my taxes. Adulting sucks! But here’s the recap. Short and sweet this month!

Playing

Death Stranding has been my ‘main game’ this month and I’m having a good old time just puttering about. I spend more time building up and maintaining the world’s infrastructure than I do actually moving the story forward. Eventually I will move forward though as I find it really compelling (and really weird). Death Stranding 2 will probably be a Day 1 purchase for me in June! I have a deadline to meet!

Deadman leaning close to Sam Porter Bridges to whisper to him.
“Death Stranding is NOT a walking simulator, Sam.”

Dragon Age Veilguard hit Playstation Plus and I started playing. I like it well enough but not enough to pull me away from Death Stranding when I’m playing on the PS5. I don’t honestly know if my issue is with Veilguard itself or just that I’m so hooked on DS. I’ll probably circle back to this and start over at some point, but it certainly didn’t hook me like Dragon Age Origins or Inquisition did.

Borderlands 2 is the one game I finished this month and I had a good time, but everyone has already played it and I already posted about it, so I’ll just leave it at that. If I had infinite time I’d replay it with a different class but there are SO many games to play!

Atomfall turned out to be a bit of a disappointment for me personally, but I already wrote about it. It is short enough that I figured “OK I can just plow through this.” but after a couple sessions of playing I thought to myself, “Why?” and uninstalled. I spent $25 or so to upgrade to the Deluxe Edition so I could play early and boy did I learn my lesson doing that. Honestly it’s a lesson I have learned before but every few years I seem to need to burn myself to remember why pre-orders and deluxe-versions are rarely a good idea.

Some kind of nuclear plant seen from a distance

 

Watching

Arcane (Netflix) was amazing. This animated series is based on League of Legends but you don’t have to know anything about the game to enjoy the show. It’s 2 seasons long. Season 1 is a relatively straightforward origin story for the characters. Season 2 gets pretty weird and is dense. I think I could watch Season 2 several times and get something new out of it each time. Which season is ‘better’ really depends on your personal preferences but both are really good. Heck it’s worth watching just for the gorgeous animation style (and the soundtrack is really good, too).

The Wheel Of Time season three has been really good so far, for me at least. I honestly am not a fan of the books since they just feel way too drawn out and Jordan re-used certain phrases so often I find it distracting. Or at least that’s how I remember them; it’s been a while. So this is a rare case where I enjoy the show more than the books, though PartPurple, who is in the midst of a re-read of the books, grumbles about how much is different. We went back and re-watched S2 before diving into S3, but now we’re caught up and waiting for more episodes to drop.

Reading

Armageddon’s Children — Book 4 of the extended Shannara series. It’s I think 60 years after the end of Angel Fire East and the apocalypse has arrived. The demons and once-men are working to exterminate the remaining people. We meet some new Knights of the Word and a group of street kids living in the ruins of Seattle.  I liked this one quite a bit but I do love a good apocalypse!

Elves of Cintra — Book 5, and oh guess what? Elves have been here all along, remaining hidden from humans. With most of humanity now gone, some of the characters from Children team up with the elves to try to save the elven race from the demons. But I’m not finished yet so not sure what is going to happen. Enjoying this one so far, too!

 

So yeah, that’s the March highlights. I’m taking a 4 day weekend in April and hope to spend those extra 2 days in a gaming stupor, yay! And I guess do my taxes. Oh and sign up for Medicaire which, omg I have been sent about 50 different junk mails with different companies wanting to be my Medicaire provider and I’m just so confused. Like I said, adulting sucks!

Sam Porter Bridges runs down a road with a person strapped to his back
This is what a Lyft ride looks like in the world of Death Stranding. Yes, that is a living person in a body bag that Sam is carrying; the bag is to protect them from TimeFall

January 2025

And there goes January, drifting off into the past. I was REALLY hoping to be able to talk about the games I’d finished in this recap, but in the end I didn’t finish any. Once again. I’m maybe destined to play the same games forever! Well at least I’m having fun. I just need a couple of clones so I have time to play all the games I want to get to!

Playing

Horizon Forbidden West is one of the games I really thought I’d get finished. And to be fair I DID finish the main game, but now I’m working through the DLC. Horizon Zero Dawn was one of my all time favorite games, but I haven’t found Horizon Forbidden West quite as compelling. It took me quite a while to put my finger on why that is but I think it finally clicked. The newer game has a more complex combat system that rewards using the right kind of arrow on the right enemy part to cause elemental explosions. It also puts an emphasis on shooting off specific parts that you can then use to upgrade your gear. On paper this sounds great but I find myself just plinking away with regular arrows most of the time since I found the ‘right way’ to be too fiddly. Because of that battles tend to take a long time, which in turn slows down the pace of the game. I was at around 100 hours when I finished the main campaign and most of the side quests. How Long To Beat has that content taking an average of 60 hours. So yeah.

They clearly plan for a 3rd game and I kind of hope they walk back the complexity of the combat. I love shooting off parts of machines and stuff but my weapon wheel is so cluttered and the machines turn so quickly it is just rare that I get the right arrow drawn at a time I have a visual on the appropriate elemental weak point. Plus I’ve never been one to use traps and stuff. I just want to let fly with a ton of arrows! This is for sure a “me” issue more than an issue with the game itself. Anyway hopefully I’ll have the DLC wrapped up in February!

Borderlands Game of the Year Edition is another title I thought I might finish in January but it is still rolling on. My character is level 30 now and since that triggered an Achievement I thought it might be cap and I might be nearly done, but it seems not. It isn’t a game I play every day, either, so I’ll keep plodding along. I’m determined to finish…for some reason.

Over in the MMO world, I started the month playing both Warframe and Elder Scrolls Online, but drifted away from both of them for no reason other than distraction and wanting to finish some finish-able games.

Our hero looks out over the remains of a buried town
Our hero looks out over the remains of a buried town

Atlas Fallen is a game I bounced off of, but then came back to. It has somehow become my after work palette cleanse. I never play it for long… 20-30 minutes/session. But I find the traversal systems really fun, between double jumping and air-dashing, and the snowboarding like sand-surfing mechanic. I find the world pretty compelling too. It’s post-apocalypse, but not of Earth as we know it. But there are ruins of HUGE ancient structures half-buried in the sand and the sense of scale is great. This is aided by an incredibly long rendering distance meaning you can climb up on some tall structure and see huge lumbering beasties way off in the distance. It’s pretty cool. The story and the characters I find less interesting and the combat was frustrating to me until I stopped being stubborn and turned down the difficulty. Now I can mostly button-mash my way through the combat, which is fine with me.

Screenshot of "The Herta" gacha character from Honkai Star Rail

Early in January Wuthering Waves came to Playstation and I’d read so many positive posts about it from Bhagpuss at Inventory Full that I knew I wanted to try it. What I found is a game remarkably similar to Genshin Impact, which led me to firing up Genshin again. Meanwhile Dusty at I’m Still Playing was talking about Zenless Zone Zero so I wanted to give THAT another go, and as long as I was gacha crazy I fired up Honkai Star Rail, too. I knew there was no way I could play all these games but I figured I’d settle on just one. In the end I kind of just burned out on gacha and the daily tasks they all ask you to do. If I ever decide to focus on one, I’ll talk more about it.

A group of characters from Eternal Strands showing a variety of species

Eternal Strands is the newest game in the recap; it just came out last Tuesday. It’s from Mike Laidlaw’s Yellow Brick Games. Laidlaw was Creative Director for Dragon Age over at Bioware back in the good old days of Bioware, so I was anxious to check this game out. It’s very early days but so far I’m enjoying it. You play a ‘weaver’ (a mage) who uses various elemental spells to fight and solve puzzles. (Though there is melee and bow combat as well.) It has an interesting cast of characters and a world that feels ripe for exploration. Part of the reason is that the game’s map is more of a sketch than a detailed map, and the first zone, at least, is pretty dense and complex. I found myself learning landmarks to help me find my way around, which is the kind of thing I enjoy. The compass is off by default, but you can toggle one on in the options, and there’s a “wisp” feature if you’re not the exploring type… you can follow the wisp to your next quest goal. But by ignoring those features and finding my way, I’m just having fun exploring so far. But again, very early days…at the time of this writing I just have a few hours into it.

Watching:

Nobody Wants This (Netflix) stars Kristen Bell so of course it was great. She plays a podcaster who, along with her sister, talks a lot about sex. She falls for a rabbi. His family is appalled because she is not Jewish and because of the tone of her podcast. Hilarity ensues, for the most part. It’s irreverent, sometimes heart-warming, often funny, often quite dirty. We really loved it.

Silo (Apple TV) – Season 2 had its lulls but overall it continues to intrigue us and we can’t wait for Season 3, which, along with a Season 4, is already greenlit. The show is based on a trilogy of books, I’m told. S1 & S2 covered book 1 and S2 and S3 will cover books 2 & 3 respectively. I hope things don’t feel too rushed. But overall, great show!

The Gentleman (Netflix) – When an army captain finds he has inherited his father’s estate and title, he learns there’s an underground marijuana farm that is helping to keep the estate afloat. His father had just kind of looked the other way but our new duke gets involved in an attempt to get the criminal element off the grounds. He pals up with the daughter of the drug kingpin who owns the farm. She gives off “criminal Emma Peel” vibes to me and I loved the character. Meanwhile the new duke’s brother, who is a hot mess, keeps causing trouble. I’ve never watched Breaking Bad but I’ve heard this described as “Breaking Bad meets Downton Abbey”. We enjoyed it, but since there’s a bunch of organized crime baddies running around, it can get pretty violent.

Reading:

A Knight of the Word and Angel Fire East – I’m continuing with my read-through of the Terry Brook’s “Pre-Shannara” series. So far they are just OK. I liked A Knight of the Word well enough to keep going, but it’s not like I can’t wait to get my work done so I can get back to reading. I’m just still curious about how he’s going to tie all of this into the Shannara series, because we’re still solidly in modern America urban-fantasy land. A Knight of the Word took place in Seattle at Halloween and Angel Fire East has us back in the main character’s mid-west small town around Christmas. Nest, the main character, is now 29 and spends a LOT of time putting on cold winter clothes and making cookies and hot chocolate for house guests, which isn’t really what I’m tuned in for. In all three of these books (book 1 was Running With the Demon) Brooks spends a little too much time showing off how well he knows these areas, constantly describing the buildings and roads our characters travel on even though they’re all pretty mundane. But again, I keep reading so there must be something here!

And that’s January in the bag. I don’t really do goals but I REALLY hope to be done with Horizon Forbidden West by the end of next month, and I’m looking forward to more Eternal Strands. Stay warm, everyone!

December 2024

Since it’s the last recap of the year, I guess we need to look back on the highlights of my year in blogging:
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OK now that that’s done, we can go on with the regular recap. I really had no highlights to speak of and I am once again asking myself why I even bother with this blog given how infrequently I post to it. I keep promising myself I’ll write more but time these days feels so precious and I never have enough to do all the things I want to do. Since blogging doesn’t frequently make it to the top of the list I guess I need to accept that it isn’t that important to me. But, y’know, inertia. I’ve been writing it for over 20 years.

Bah, that’s not a very upbeat way to start the final recap of 2024! I’m also stalling because I took no notes this month and can’t really remember what I played. [dramatic pause while I try to remember] OK I think I got it, let’s go!

Playing

At the end of last month I’d finished playing My Time At Portia and I almost immediately rolled into My Time At Sandrock but didn’t stick with it very long, just because I was dealing with a bit of “My Time at…” fatigue. I definitely plan to go back to it at some point after giving the series a bit of a rest. My immediate thoughts were along the same lines of everything I’ve read about Sandrock: it is like Portia, only better.

December was also the month I got back into MMOs, plural. Talk about not having enough time, right? I finally got into World of Warcraft‘s “The War Within” just about the time my sub ran out. I thought about resubscribing but when I compared the $15/month cost to the 4 or 5 hours/month I was playing, it just seemed silly. I’d just left the Isle of Dorn, which I very much enjoyed. Maybe at some point I’ll re-sub and just play through the story content. My general issue with MMOs is they never end so I can never ‘finish’ them and move on to one of the hundreds of single player games I really want to play.

I also got back into The Elder Scrolls Online, not that I remember exactly how that happened at this point. I think it was a super sale on the last expansion and all the expansions before it. I brought my Playstation account up to date then got sucked into the Golden Pursuits event they were running. When I got the free mount (pictured at the top of this post) it made me wonder why I’d bothered. That thing is hideous!!! But the event did push me out of my comfort zone. I did a PUG dungeon and 5 rounds of PvP Battlegrounds, just to advance the Golden Pursuits. Both were the type of content I generally avoid like the plague but in the end, they both went well. The Dungeon was even, dare I say it? Fun! Anyway I’m still playing ESO, casually. I paid for a month of ESO+ but don’t expect to continue that; ESO is a game you can play without the subscription if you just want to dabble. [Technically you never have to pay but when I’m playing seriously I find I really miss the ESO+ perks.]

And Warframe, which I actually wrote a post about. I’m still having a lot of fun there. There are so many types of content hidden away (hidden to those looking at the game from the outside, I mean) in this game. The other day I was running hoverboard races and pulling off tricks and stuff. Who knew?

Aloy stands in front of 2 giant vanquished machines
I realize this doesn’t look like much, but here Aloy is standing in front of 2 machines she had to defeat at the same time: a thunderjaw and a tremortusk. It was quite an intense fight!

Aside from MMOs I’ve been bouncing around various single player games, trying to finish something, somewhere, and completely failing. I REALLY want to finally finish Horizon Forbidden West and Death Stranding. I started Like a Dragon: Ishin and was having a great time but just drifted away. Oh and after watching the Borderlands movie I found myself back to playing Borderlands (the OG Borderlands). At least I finally tore myself free of being a slave to Fallout 76‘s Season Pass which kind of led to me finally stop playing.

I am noticing a bad pattern with me and Season Passes where I start to obsess over them which quickly leads to me playing a game not for fun but to try to advance the season pass. Doesn’t take long for that behavior to turn the game into just another daily chore to get through. This in turn leads to developing negative associations with a game that I initially was enjoying. Anyway I need to work on that aspect of my gaming personality. I don’t think ‘swearing off’ Season Passes completely is the answer; I need to find some kind of middle ground.

A screenshot from Borderlands, looking through the scope of a rifle at charging enemies
Back to making slow but steady progress in Borderlands 1

Watching

Again, didn’t take notes so…

Star Trek: The Lower Decks (Paramount+) final season was wonderful. I’m really going to miss this show but I expect I will re-watch it often over the coming years, as I do most Trek shows.

Silo (Apple TV+): We’re in the midst of Season 2 and man waiting a week for each new episode is killing me! We love this show! We went back and re-watched Season 1 which felt worth doing, just as a refresher and because we picked up some foreshadowing we missed the first time through. I’ve never read the books but Part Purple has, and we both enjoy it so make of that what you will.

Man on the Inside (Netflix): Ted Danson plays an elderly engineering professor who goes undercover in a retirement community even though he knows nothing about being a detective. I would like to say hilarity ensues, but it’s more like amusing warm feelings ensue. And some melancholy. It was a wonderful show, though also a bit frightening if you’re someone of my age!

Nobody Wants This (Netflix): Once we were done with Man on the Inside we headed over to another The Good Place alum, Kristen Bell and her new(ish) sitcom. We’re enjoying this one too but be warned it’s a bit on the raunchy side, but it has its share of romance too. We’re still in the middle of it but since it’s a sitcom I don’t anticipate any big wrenches being thrown into the works. Good fun so far.

Yellowstone (Peacock): I’m finally watching the 5th season of Yellowstone, mostly so I can cancel Peacock. I had Peacock for Premiere League Football but I rarely watch any more and I’m trying to cut some streaming costs here and there. If you haven’t seen Yellowstone somehow, the best way I can think to describe it is The Sopranos in Montana, only with more lawyers. I find it compelling even though almost every character is pretty awful.

Dr Stone (Crunchyroll): This has been my anime of choice this month. I liken this one to a survivalbox game in anime form. Something turned all humans to stone for 3700 years until one science geek ‘wakes up’ and figures out how to wake up others, while at the same time he tries to jumpstart technology using all his knowledge. It’s pretty fun so far (I’m still in Season 1).

Reading

A Christmas Carol gets read every year, and this year was no different.

Also finished Running With The Demon by Terry Brooks and rolled right into the sequel, A Knight of the Word. These are his “pre-Shannara” books and are basically urban fantasy. UF is not generally one of my favorite genres but this time out it is working for me.

And that’s about it for December. Next thing I’m looking forward to is Wuthering Waves coming to Playstation on Jan 2nd. I’ve heard so much good about this game that I’m really looking forward to playing!

November 2024

November is gone already!? I have to say having US Thanksgiving fall so late in the month has really thrown me off. For the past couple of years we’ve had nearly a week between Thanksgiving and the end of the month, but that won’t happen again for a while. Anyway point is the end of the month caught me completely unprepared, AND I haven’t been taking any notes to speak of. Good thing I don’t have much to report.

Playing

My Time At Portia — I mentioned last month that I had started playing this on PS5 and this month I really leaned into it. Last time I checked I had 120 hours played on PS5. Just this weekend I got the Trophy for finishing the “main story” but the game just keeps rolling on with more story-quests. That said, I think I may be done for a few reasons. First is that this game is terribly optimized for console. On Playstation (and from what I’ve read, on Xbox) it’s just terribly laggy, particularly in combat. I mean the frame rate drops into probably single digits when you start fighting in a dungeon. For most of the game fighting is pretty limited so it wasn’t a big deal, but now there is some dungeon I’m supposed to work through which is all combat and that’s not something I’m looking forward to. Second is that My Time At Sandrock exists and everyone says it’s a better game so I just feel like if I want more “My Time At..” action I should move on to that.

Also I’m sort of out of new things. My workshop (that’s it at the top of the post) has fully upgraded buildings, a factory, a farm with automated irrigation and it’s been a long while since I got new plans to build. So now it all kind of feels repetitive. I could buy more land and there are still house upgrades I could get, but the house decorating is pretty bad. (For instance you can place a table but you can’t put anything on the table.) I never got into the romance aspects because ‘dates’ are not much fun and involve a lot of running around. Plus I had stuff to build!

And y’know, I have SO many other games waiting in the wings, including a replay of Dragon Age Inquisition I was toying with, before jumping into Veilguard. But that’s another 100 hour game so not sure I’m up for it.

Also it’s delightfully ironic that I bought a PS5 Pro and then spent the month playing a low-poly, poorly optimized PS4 game on it!

But really Portia is the only thing I spent much time on. I logged into World of Warcraft a few times then my sub ran out and it seemed silly to renew it given how rarely I play right now. I may circle back at some time. I never even got to The War Within after buying it!

Watching

Interview With The Vampire (Netflix) — We watched the movie, then the series. The movie was kind of bad in my opinion, but the series was actually pretty good. I’ve never read the books so can’t compare them but it all just felt darker to me.

Silo (Apple+) — With the new season here we decided to go back and re-watch S1 before jumping into the new stuff and I’m glad we did. There was a lot of texture to the show I’d kind of forgotten, plus it somewhat rewards a 2nd viewing because you catch foreshadowing details once you know where the story is going.

Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai (Crunchyroll) — Weird title, but a rather sweet anime. There is something called “Puberty Syndrome” impacting students where they feel so unseen that they start to vanish, among other strange things. The title comes from an early scene when protagonist Sakuta, the titular Rascal, notices an attractive young woman in a bunny suit cavorting around in a library. This is Mai, the other main character, and she is trying to get a reaction out of anyone. Turns out no one can see her other than Sakuta. Thus a friendship is born. From there the story goes all over the place as Sakuta and Mai become a couple and try to help out others with Puberty Syndrome.

Reading

Kahayatle by Elle Casey — This was in our Kindle library; I guess PartPurple bought it at some point. It’s kind of “Lord of the Flies” on a grand scale. A plague has killed off all the young children and adults, leaving the world nothing but teenagers, and you can imagine how well that goes. For reasons never made clear a bunch of them decide to become cannibals rather than scavenging for food or hunting animals. The protagonist is a young woman who solves all her problems by beating the shit out of people, after which they become her friends for some reason. I started reading this before Halloween and thought it was poorly written but it suited the season. That said it has over 4 stars at Goodreads so maybe I’m just a grump.

Warpaint by Elle Casey — The next book in the same series as Kayayatle. Now the protagonist is living in the Everglades with some Native American kids, bludgeoning her way to leadership. When I realized there were 4 books in this series and it just felt like the same thing happening over and over, I bailed on it. Maybe I’ll come back to it next year in Spooky Season but for now, this is a Did Not Finish title.

Running With The Demon by Terry Brooks — I learned recently that Brooks has written something like 30 books in the Shannara series; I had no idea. Then I saw that this was the first one chronologically and it is urban fantasy that takes place in our world. I was fascinated by that. I assume, but do not know for sure (don’t spoil me!) that the world of Shannara is actually some far future earth. Or maybe there’s a portal or some kind of inter-dimensional thing going on? Who knows? But I mean to find out!

So far this is about a small town in the midwest where a demon, in the guise of a human, is sowing discontent while a young girl who can see magical creatures, both good and evil, tries to stop him. I don’t want to go too far into it because I don’t want to spoil things too much, but there’ve been some fun twists and turns and the writing is generally pretty good. I’m enjoying this one so far but 30 books is a daunting task to read. I can’t imagine having written that many. The first Shannara book was published in 1977 so I guess it HAS taken him almost 50 years. Terry Brooks is 80 now but apparently still writing!

And that’s November, such that it was. Overall it was a mixed month. Early on we were still dealing with COVID fatigue and work was an absolute horror show. But there was feasting the Thanksgiving, the weather finally turned cool and dry, I got a new console and I did a LOT of gaming, even if it was mostly just one game. And I’m starting December with a week off, so that’s nice! Maybe I’ll manage to write a blog post or two this month, you never know!

October 2024

The end of this month has really snuck up on me; it’s been a weird one. October 2024 was the month that COVID finally caught up to me and it really threw things into disarray. Ironically, I’m about 90% certain that I caught it by going to a local drugstore for a vaccine. I’m basically a recluse and it is rare that I go into a building with other people, and in this case there was a clearly sick 20-something young woman sharing the waiting nook and and ‘get the shot’ room with me. She was wheezing and sneezing and clearly ill. Stupid me hadn’t thought to bring a mask and she wasn’t wearing one, of course. A few days later the symptoms started showing. A few days after that, @partpurple started showing symptoms

Anyway the good news is I didn’t wind up in the hospital or anything, but it really disrupted my gaming for the month. I had been doing a lot of PC gaming but COVID sent me retreating to the couch and the consoles. I mostly worked and slept for a good two weeks but in the short times I was awake and free I worked my way through the Diablo IV expansion, and then I was looking for something cozy to play. I tried a number of games but knew what I really wanted and that was My Time at Portia, a game I’d played in the past but had never finished. I owned it on PC but not on console.

That prompted me to finally get my Steam Deck working again. It had been busted since last winter. I finally hooked it up to an external monitor and it was sitting at some kind of boot menu. I got past that and everything started working EXCEPT the screen. As long as it was hooked to an external monitor it worked great, but that kind of misses the point.

They say that one of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome, but that is what I did, looking up various combos of button presses to cause the Steam Deck to reset itself or something. And eventually it worked but there’s no way I could ever repeat the steps because I just lost track of how many times I held 2 or 3 buttons for 10 or 15 or 30 seconds, but suddenly the screen lit up and things have been fine since.

I started playing My Time At Portia on the Steam Deck but soon realized my COVID-tearing eyes weren’t up to the task. Then I tried using Steam Link to play on the TV and that worked, sort of. I think my issue is that my PC has a 1440P ultra widescreen monitor and the TV is a 4K. I didn’t spend a lot of time on it but the result was the game showed up on the TV with letterboxing bars all around. It worked but didn’t look great. Finally I broke down and just bought My Time At Portia on the PS5 and started enjoying that.

Then work blew up and the last two weeks has seen plenty of 12 (or more) hours days, just putting the final touches on an overall pretty crappy month. Also it is Halloween and 80F so.. man, October has sucked!

Playing

The only game I spent any significant amount of time with was :

The Plucky Squire — I mentioned this one last month, but I finished it early this month (before COVID). I really enjoyed it until the very end. For most of the time I spent playing it was this charming and chill experience. Exploring, puzzle solving and some mini-games that weren’t that hard. But then at the very end of the game the mini-games all returned in a much harder variation. One in particular, a rhythm game (which I suck at) really frustrated me. I got through it all and enjoyed the ending credits but it really dampened any enthusiasm to replay it or trophy hunt. In the end it took me 18 hours to get through, of which like 17 were just amazingly fun and charming, and then an hour of frustration at the very end!

Watching

We’ve been watching a bunch of supernatural stuff that originated on AMC but are now on Netflix. We finished A Discovery of Witches, which was fine. Then The Mayfair Witches which was a little more creepy/spooky and I liked that one better. Now we’re onto Interview with the Vampire which so far I’m liking more than the old Brad Pitt/Tom Cruise movie, which @partpurple insisted I watch before we started the series.

I also finished Station Eleven which I’d started last month, and which I enjoyed. It felt like a different kind of post apocalypse story, I guess.

And that’s pretty much all I remember. I watched a LOT of YouTube and specifically Critical Role sessions because they are so long. I tended to just sleep/doze through them. For real I was sleeping like 20 hours a day on weekends when I could get away with it, and I’m STILL sleeping a lot more than 2 weeks since I first showed symptoms.

Reading

I finally finished The Tower of Swallows, one of the Witcher novels. There are two more in the series that have been translated. Not sure if there are more or if the author is still writing them. But I finally accepted the fact that I just don’t enjoy them very much. Love the games, loved the Netflix show, but the books just don’t hit right with me. There’s a TON of world building but the actual plot moves so very slowly that I just kind of lose track of it.

Now I’m reading Kahayatle by Elle Casey. I found it in our Kindle library and imagine @partpurple bought it at some point. It is terrible. The writer isn’t very good; I think she self-published these. The premise is some disease killed off all the adults and young children so we now have a world-wide Lord of the Flies situation and for some reason most of the population seems to have turned into cannibals, or “Canners” as they call them for some weird reason. I keep telling myself I have to stop reading it because it is written so badly, but at the same time it is so ‘lite’ that the pages fly by. I think it is part of a trilogy and I assume we own all the books so we’ll see how long it takes me to give up on them.

I’m not a writer so I don’t feel qualified to critique Elle Casey but there is just a vibe I get from new writers where they haven’t learned the art of ‘sketching’ with words, so they tend to over explain small details, almost like they’re writing a movie script or something. So every time a character sticks their tongue out or makes a ‘raspberry’ at another character… I know the author is trying to convey that here is a kind of light-hearted moment in the midst of all this awful, but it just feels over-written and over-detailed and comes off feeling fake. I’m not good at describing this feeling because, again, not a writer, but I can sure feel it when I’m reading and it snaps me out of the world.

Melville was able to write super detailed accounts of how things work in the middle of his novels, but in my experience he’s about the only author I know who has mastered this. So when your characters decide to remove a flag from a bicycle, you can just say they removed the flag. You don’t have to show us how they went to find a wrench and how the nut was a little rusted but with some elbow grease it finally came free and it got unscrewed and the flag was removed. We don’t need all those details; our imaginations can fill in all of that.

On the other hand when a character is pinned under a bigger adversary so that one of her arms is trapped under her body, and she gets free by biting her adversary in the crotch, that makes me stop and puzzle out what their position was and how that worked. Like I dunno, you have to pick your details battles, I guess?

Anyway she wrote a bunch of novels and I didn’t so I should just shut up. But I can’t really recommend Kahayatle even though I’m still reading it. 🙂

And that’s October, the month of COVID & couches and too much work and not much else. Here’s to a better November!

 

September 2024

Wow, I’m not really sure how to approach the recap this month. I’ve played a little bit of a lot of games; far too many to list them all here without being even more boring than usual. I seem to be following some kind of a zig-zag pattern where I’m either 100% focused on a game or two, or I’m just dipping my toe in everywhere and not making any progress anywhere. I’ve come to be more comfortable with the latter now that most of the stuff I play is either already in my backlog or is arriving via Game Pass or something. In ye olden times too often I’d spend $50 on a game and play it for 2 hours before drifting away, and that was not (fiscally) cool.

Anyway let’s dive in. Gonna break things up by platform this month.

Playing

Playstation

The Plucky Squire — Ideally you stop reading now and just go play this because I wish I’d known nothing about it going in. I’ll tell you that it is colorful and charming and mixes a bunch of game styles in a storybook & toy-filled world. You’ll do top-down (old school) Zelda style fighting, platforming, puzzle-solving and assorted mini-games. Haven’t finished it yet (I’m in Chapter 7 of 10 chapters) but it’s been really good so far. It IS pretty short though; HowLongToBeat says its about 10 hours long.

Screenshot from The Plucky Squire show the character in the surface of some kind of cannister
At one point in our journey there’s a Defender clone mini-game that takes part on the surface of this cannister, and it’s a damned fine Defender clone, too!

Xbox & Xbox Games on PC

Fallout 76 — Having finished up the last Season at level 200 or so, I stepped back for a while and gave Fallout 76 a bit of a rest, but towards the end of the month I started engaging again. Specifically when the new Caravan system dropped. A lot of weapons have been somewhat nerfed which has upset the community but honestly I’m finding I’m enjoying myself more now that things aren’t all dying from a single shot.

Red Dead Redemption 2 — My Xbox was running low on storage space so I sorted games by size and RDR2 was the biggest at 123 GB. I fired it up and found my last save was from 2019 (!) so I, of course, decided to start fresh. It’s kind of amazing how well this game holds up. It’s an Xbox One game but it really looks as good as most “new gen” games. That all said, I haven’t gotten very far and the game is so old and so popular that I don’t have much to say about it other than that I’m having fun.

Borderlands Game of the Year Edition — After bouncing off the PC version, I started playing on the Xbox where the experience is much better!

PC

Throne & Liberty — This is the new F2P MMO that launches on October 1st. I’m embarrassed to admit I bought early access “accidentally.” I’d played the beta earlier this summer and was thrilled by how pretty the game looked (I was pretty newly returned to PC gaming at the time) and “pre-ordered” the game in a fit of enthusiasm. At the time I didn’t even notice the game was going to be F2P and I was just buying an early access package! Once I realized my mistake I SHOULD have canceled but didn’t because… I dunno why honestly.

I have buyer’s remorse. The game really is pretty but it is also really intended for hardcore group/guild play, so I don’t expect I’ll play it for long; waiting for the normal launch and pumping 10 or 15 hours for free would have been the right move. Ah well, live and maybe learn. But I’m more interested in returning to New World when the Avernum re-launch (?) happens. But yeah, Throne & Liberty is VERY pretty and…um… is an MMO. I don’t really have much more to say about it!

Borderlands Game of the Year Edition — A game I booted up on a whim wound up ‘sticking’ for the first time. It took some fiddling to get it to run OK. It never really ran well, and I don’t think that had to do with the power of my machine or anything. I’m no game developer but I wonder if the engine just wasn’t build to handle the horsepower of today’s CPUs and GPUs. No matter what setting I tweaked, turning always felt a little rough even though the actual frame rate would hold steady; eventually it got to be too much so I dropped it. (But see above in the Xbox section.)

World of Warcraft — I made slow but steady progress for most of the month, but just this past weekend I finished the Dragonflight main campaign which unlocked a lot of new systems and made everything much more enjoyable for me. My new character is at level 55 now; 15 more levels until I can jump over to The War Within and that shouldn’t really take too long to achieve. Feeling much better about WoW since finishing that DF campaign.

World of Warcraft cut scene screenshot showing dragons opening a portal

Guild Wars 2 — Having trouble here. I’m still in Living World Season 1. My character is at max level so going through Living World isn’t really progressing me much so I’m just playing for the story. I should just move on but I’m stubborn.

Watching

Terminator Zero (Netflix) — This is an anime set in the Terminator universe that we all (OK maybe not ALL) know and love. I’d heard good things about it but the first couple of episodes were a bit of a disappointment as they felt so similar to the first couple of movies. Terminator is sent back to stop someone in the past. Resistant member is sent back to stop the Terminator. The only significant difference was that this one was set in Japan. But I stuck with it and starting about the 3rd episode it became its own thing and got really good. It has terminator fighting action, questions about time travel and paradoxes and such, and even examines how different people react to robots, with some more than willing to anthropomorphize them and others seeing them as just things. It’s short, like every other new show on streaming services, and has an actual conclusion while leaving plenty of threads to follow for a second season, which I hope we get. Recommended, but do be prepared to give it 3 or 4 episodes to start to gel.

A Discovery of Witches (Netflix) — I think I mentioned this one last month, but we finished it up (there are 3 seasons) and it came to a pretty good conclusion. This is still not really my wheelhouse but urban fantasy fan @partpurple liked it a lot. One of the odd things is that there are 3 “Creature” species in the show: vampires, witches and demons. But we NEVER find out what makes a demon a demon. We never see any of them do anything supernatural-ish. I’m sure the books do a better job and I’m kind of trying to get PartPurple to read them so she can fill me in. Also if there is a downside to being a vampire in this world, they never showed it. LOL but here I am complaining after saying we watched it all and it was OK. But it was OK!

Rings of Power (Amazon) — We went back and re-watched Season 1 before moving on to Season 2. I actually liked Season 1 quite a bit more in a second viewing but we’ve JUST started Season 2 so don’t have much to say about it yet.

Station Eleven (Max) — This is a post-apocalypse show that posits a plague with a 99% fatality rate and what happens in the aftermath. I’d never heard of it and it maybe hit a little too close to home when it came out in 2021! So far it’s been really good though. There is (again, so far) nothing fantastical happening here. No zombies or anything. Just the collapse of civilization with a heavy “theater kids” angle. Yes, it’s a little weird. But good so far (I’m about half-way through.)

Reading

Still plodding through The Tower of Swallows, which is I think the 4th Witcher book? This is going to be the end for me though; as much as I love The Witcher games and The Witcher Netflix shows, the books are just not grabbing me. Y’know what they feel like? Imagine The Lord of the Rings if all the appendix info was in the body of the books. There’s just so much world-building going on, but not much plot. I can see why CD Projekt Red picked the world to set a game in as there is a TON of lore but it’s all shared in giant lumps of text while our characters sit around a fire toasting marshmallows for chapters at a time. I’m going to finish this one and there is I believe one more in the series but I don’t think I can take another novel full of fictional history.

So that’s September. Plan for October is New World Avernum, more World of Warcraft and… who knows what else? I’ll probably continue to flit about and not make much progress anywhere. But as long as I’m having fun, right? Hope you all have a great month!