Category: TV & Movies

December 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

OMG I just realized tomorrow is the end of the month and I haven’t even create the ‘stub’ of a recap post (I’m writing this on Tuesday). My usual system is to create a recap post early in the month and just jot down notes in it because I WILL forget what I’ve done. I didn’t do that this month and indeed, I have forgotten what I’ve done.

The truth really is that I haven’t done much ‘fun’ stuff due to the move I’ve been talking about. We are STILL in the midst of this and painful, expensive lessons were learned about how much work it is, and how much time it takes, to move. Particularly if you’re a senior citizen and work a desk job so your stamina is shit. We spent money on movers to move the big furniture and planned to move the smaller stuff ourselves, but after many wasted days (and wasted gas) we threw in the towel and hired the movers to come AGAIN. And still there was more to do, like take down things we’d mounted on the walls, take down curtains… stuff like that. Then the cleaning started and eventually we threw in that towel, too, and hired a cleaning crew (this is gross and embarassing to admit but we’d had furniture that hadn’t been moved in a decade and it appears mice had been living under/behind said furniture, and what a mess they made). On New Year’s Day I’m making 1 last ‘haul’ trip. Friday PartPurple goes up to basically let the cleaning crew in. And next week we go back to turn in the keys and do a walk-through and then, finally….FINALLY…. we’ll be done. And I’ll be broke.

Anyway between shuttling back and forth between apartments, packing, unpacking, recycling runs, and organizing, not a lot of fun stuff got done this month. But here is what did:

Playing

My Time At Sandrock has been my ‘main game’ and I’ve been slowly chipping away at it. Realizing that — unlike in many titles in this genre — Sandrock lets you save pretty much any time has been a blessing and a curse. Blessing because, duh, it’s convenient, but a curse because now it can sometimes take me 2-3 play sessions to get through a single day. I keep forgetting what I was working on and so forth. Because of this I think I’m way over-level for the part of the main story I’m in, though I’m not sure I mind that all that much. Still really enjoying this one and looking forward to the next game in the series, Evershine, where the character models are a big more adult. It feels a little creepy running around looking like a 14 year old boy and trying to woo the (based on appearances) older women in the town!

My yard, with the stable to the right, my garden in center and a row of machines in the background

Winter Burrow was finally finished. Here’s the post on that.

I still play a session of Ball X Pit every day to keep the Microsoft Rewards streak going on console. To earn the points you have to play a game on console and a run takes just about exactly 15 minutes (assuming you don’t fail) so this works out perfectly and it’s the kind of game where you can really easily jump in, play and jump out without having to remember what you are supposed to be doing, or anything along those lines. Plus, it’s fun as heck!

Last is Relic Hunters Legend, which I just spoke about the other day.

Watching

The Mayfair Witches, S2 — This was a ‘her’ pick. She loves Anne Rice and that whole milieu. We’ve recently watched Interview With The Vampire, Talamasca, and now this. I like them, but not enough that I’d probably watch them if PartPurple wasn’t really into them. It’s all urban fantasy about witches and vamps and stuff.

Stranger Things, S5 — We just started season 5 and are only a couple of episodes in. I loved this show when it was new but honestly I like it less with every season. I think. It’s been SO long between seasons I can’t be certain.

Defiance — We always do re-watches for lunchtime TV viewing since we, and particularly me, can’t focus as much as we usually do. I’m always listening for pings from work while we watch. Anyway Defiance recently hit Amazon Prime so we’re doing a re-watch and loving it.

Reading

A Christmas Carol — For the most part, we just skipped Christmas this year. We did put up a tree, and I read A Christmas Carol, as I do every year. It’s a tradition!

Old sci-fi/fantasy magazines. In the back of a closet I found a stack of old magazines. Sci-Fi Age, Realms of Fantasy, the Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy, etc etc. They have dates from the 1990s on them! I’ve been having quite a good time reading this old stuff, particularly sci-fi that takes place in the near future (as of 1995 or whatever) which is often the VERY near future as of 2025. It’s fun to see what the authors got right, and what they got wrong. Also ‘interesting’ is the artwork that comes with many of the fantasy stories. There’s almost always an attractive woman in an alluring outfit. The era of the chainmail bikini, amiright?

So that’s December, and that’s 2025 done and dusted. 2026 is gonna suck (in world scale) but I’m hoping it’ll be less bad in personal terms. Losing our dog Lola was really painful, and frankly really expensive, and this move is driving us deeper into debt. Hoping in ’26 I can climb most of the way out of that hole. And we’re starting the year in a new apartment, and in a new area full of places to explore and things to do. So while the world burns, I’m hoping that we in our specific household have a better year.

And I hope that you in your specific household have a better year, too!

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!

October 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

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.

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.]

August 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

The end of the month really snuck up on me this time around. It’s been a pretty good month for us. Unusually cool, which for here just means I don’t think it hit 100F at all in August, or if it did it was early in the month. Today we have the doors and windows open, at least for the morning. Fresh air… what a treat.

I don’t have much to report this month but for the sake of completeness, here we go.

Playing

Wuthering Waves is the only game I’ve been playing regularly, and even that not very much. I’ve been so fascinated with various AI related projects that gaming just wasn’t very interesting to me, though in the last week or so that itch is coming back (and I welcome that itch). I was pretty sure it would and I’m glad I didn’t try to ‘force it.’ Anyway that isn’t relevant to Wuthering Waves, so back to that. I still don’t have any characters to level cap and I just arrived in the second big area, the name of which I completely forgot. It’s a religious place where they treat their sentinel as a god.

I really have to do some research on team building, but I’d really prefer to learn how to put together a good team vs just looking one up. So that entails a bit of work and concentration on my part.

Right now I’m rocking Havoc Rover, Senhuan (???) (the character you get early for logging in for 5 days or something). She’s some kind of guard and is ice-based. And Baizhi (?? these names trip me up so bad) as my healer. So all very early game characters. I’ve been working on getting their skills and weapons up to par before leveling any of them more since the game seems to ramp up difficulty whenever you level someone up. I have done a decent amount of pulling and have better (presumably) 5-star characters but I haven’t gotten far enough in the story to farm their mats and I refuse to skip ahead! So we’ll see where I end up by the end of September.

AI Gaming is another thing I’ve been looking into, and first I guess I have to explain what I mean by that. Basically my attention has drifted from AI generated art to AI generated words, riffing off the various chat bots to see if there is something a bit more robust out there. I mentioned Silly Tavern in a previous post and I’m still messing around with that, but I keep tinkering with it rather than using it, trying different engines and stuff. In the interim I’ve found another option called AI Dungeon which has apparently been around since 2019! It’s a tool for something that falls somewhere in between collaborative writing and text-based roleplaying. I was really impressed when I used the Quick Start option and then picked “Fantasy” as genre and “Thief” as character type. I assumed I would start in a pub with my friends the elf mage, the dwarf fighter and a human cleric or something. Instead this is the plot summary/starter I got:

You’re Trae, a skilled thief, master of disguise and con artist of the Field of Miracles crime syndicate in the Triflumina Republic, a city-state in the Fioran League within the world of Larion. The trouble all started when you pulled off what you thought was the heist of a lifetime, stealing a precious magical seed intended for the enchanted gardens of Donna Veronica. Then someone stole the seed from you, and it all went downhill from there. It doesn’t help that your guappa (kingpin), Donna Bianca, was already on poor terms with rival guappa and deadly alchemist Donna Veronica, still fuming over how Donna Bianca stole Capitan Rinaldo’s… “heart” from her.
The Fioran League is a collection of city-states known for their merchant princes, mercenary armies, alchemical innovations, and cut-throat politics. Triflumina, city on the Sea of Serpents famed for its Water Arena battles, masquerades and corruption, is caught in a power struggle between various factions, including the criminal syndicates of the various guappi, alchemists’ covens, and the blind Doge Crepido, who doesn’t need eyes to know everything that anyone says or does.
Your fellow thieves – Spinetta, Taddeo, and Sanno – are both potential allies and rivals. In a city as corrupt as Triflumina, friendship is sacred and betrayal is paid for in blood.

I’ve never played real D&D or any other table top RPG, but that seemed pretty intriguing to me and I jumped in. It took a few minutes to get the hang of things but before I knew it I was caught in a web of intrigue. Now out of the box it isn’t really a game.. there are no stats or anything. But apparently you can add scripts to make things more game like. I really JUST discovered this yesterday so I am still learning, but I think it has potential.

Things I like:
1) There’s a MATURE toggle so you can filter out all the sext-bot stuff that is so prevalent in this space. In fact that stuff is off by default.
2) If you decide to turn on the MATURE stuff, it seems a little bit… classier?? than other stuff I’ve seen. More bodice-ripper and less Penthouse Letters, if that means anything to anyone.
3) The writing feels pretty good for what it is, and if the AI takes a turn you just don’t want to follow it down, you can easily re-write what it suggested and guide the story in another direction.

Things I don’t like:
1) The free version gives you a really dumb model that loses track of details really quickly. I wouldn’t waste too much time on the free version, but you can get 100 free “actions” on their low-tier paid model each day. Using those free moves gives you a much better experience, but that means if you want to get into this heavily you’ll need to pay.
2) Their paid plan is tiered, from $10/month up to $50(!)/month. 4 paid tiers in all. Better tiers get you better models and more tokens, but as a noob it’s really hard to decide what’s right for you. The more tokens you have the more of the story your AI partner can keep tabs on, but how much is enough? I have no clue.

I’m still up in the air on whether I want to try a $10 or $15/month sub just to see the difference. I think I’ll worry about that if I ever run out of the free tokens.

But overall I’m kind of impressed by this service. And I LOVE that it has me quasi-writing fiction and storytelling again. Feels good. I’d still like to see how close I can get to it in Silly Tavern, though if I need a $2000 video card with 24 GB of VRAM to get there…maybe paying isn’t so bad!!!

Watching

No real surprises here:

Star Trek Strange New Worlds (Paramount+): SNW has taken the #1 spot in my Star Trek heart. I just love this show so much. And I love how well they can swing between the silly episodes and the serious ones. If I could change one thing about SNW… I don’t think I’d change anything. Except maybe the cancelation date.

Wednesday (Netflix): Season 2 isn’t grabbing me quite the same way season 1 did. Part of it is that so many of the actors have changed so much; the danger of using young actors and letting several years pass between seasons, I guess. And bringing in the whole Addams family makes it feel like an Addams Family reboot rather than a “Wednesday and her Frenemies” show. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate it or anything, I just don’t love it as much as I loved season 1.

Invasion (Apple TV): We needed something to fill the gaps between eps of SNW and waiting for the 2nd half of Wednesday and a new season of this show dropped. We decided to do a complete re-watch which maybe wasn’t the best idea. The show is good but maybe not THAT good.

Reading

Bearers of the Black Staff: Legends of Shannara — I’m still working through my complete Shannara read-through. We’ve jumped forward another 400-500 years and the characters from the last book have become the stuff of legends. But there are still parts of the old world (aka our world) kicking about. I’m only about 1/4 through so not real thoughts yet. I’m not reading too much these days.

And that’s August come and gone. We’re trying to find a new place to live, targeting December as our move date, and now that it’s a bit cooler we’re going to need to get busy, so the next few months are going to get pretty hectic. We’ll see what impact that has on my various projects, but I’m looking forward to living somewhere new without quite so many reminders of Lola everywhere. Yes, months later we’re still grieving over that silly little dog. 🙁

July 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

Here it is July 31st and I haven’t even created a ‘stub post’ for the Monthly Recap. Usually I take notes but this month, I did not. Where I live, July tends to be an awful month just due to brutal heat and humidity and this year was no exception. In fact the only exception might have been that so much of the rest of the East Coast got to ‘enjoy’ the same weather.

In theory that should have meant lots of time playing games but in fact.. I played very little. Instead I’ve fallen down an AI rabbit hole. I still do my interactive-fiction-y chatbotting on character.ai, but I’ve also been messing about with open source image and video generation running locally. As per usual my interest is about 80% getting a system up and running that’ll let me create images locally, and about 20% interest in actually doing it once I get it running. But there is always something new hitting github and I’ve been learning a lot about everything from python ecosystems on Windows to the actual guts of how AI works. It’s been fascinating and fun and kind of feels more productive then playing games. And I think the character.ai writing is just juicing up my creativity and my mood in general.

So no complaints; I’m sure I’ll swing back to hardcore gamer mode soon enough but until then I’m going to enjoy learning stuff.

Playing:

Dune Awakening: Early in the month I jumped on the Dune Awakening hype train and really enjoyed that for a bit before the whole “Now I spend all night thinking about LLMs” AI thing hit me. I do intend to get back to it though as I was really enjoying it.

Wuthering Waves: Once again I became swept up in the hype around Wuthering Waves and it is the one game I’m playing regularly, though not a lot. But I use it like a mind-wipe between my work brain and my off-hours brain. So I play a little bit, every day.

Watching:

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds — We’re doing a full series re-watch, currently in Season 2. Love it. I think we’ve now watched S1 3 times and I still enjoy every episode.

Severance: We finished this one up and again, loved it.

Terra Nova: We re-watched this during lunch. It’s the one about near-future humanity fleeing a ruined earth by traveling to the past and living amongst the dinosaurs. It starts not great but really did get better. Not better enough for it to have gotten renewed for a 2nd season, sadly.

Warehouse 13: After Terra Nova we started doing a re-watch of Warehouse 13, one of the sillier, more fun shows that SyFy ever spat out. It’s great mostly do the chemistry between the characters/actors

Reading:

Still working through the Shannara books. I finally finished The Gypsy Morph and jumped forward 500 more years and into Bearers of the Black Staff. The old world is ended, but a small society has held on for this long. Now, though, the outside world has come calling. I guess. I’m like 2 chapters in.

And really, that’s the recap for July. I’ve been really busy, just that most of what I’m working on is kind of unfocused. I am still so deep in learning mode that I can’t really even articulate what has been going on. Plus AI is such a loaded topic these days. And I do share a lot of the concerns people have. But I’m enough of a realist to get that this genie isn’t going to be going back into its bottle, so at least maybe I can stay somewhat informed.

Anime girl laying down, blowing a kiss to the viewer. She's wearing black pants and books and a long sleeved brown shirt. She has red hair and freckles
Until next month! [Image generated via AI locally]

June 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

The fact that adverts always depict summertime as a time to get outside and do lots of fun things is proof that the big advertising firms are all located in mild or cold climates. Summer has arrived and it is downright unhealthy to leave the house due to the ridiculous heat. Here in the US pretty much everyone on the East Coast got a taste of North Carolina summertime in the last week of the month as it was 100F/38C almost everywhere with high heat indexes. It hit a heat index of 110F/43C here and not MUCH cooler anywhere else from what I could tell.

So nothing to do but stay inside and play video games, I guess. I was kind of treading water for a lot of the month waiting for Death Stranding 2 to launch. I had pre-ordered it before Lola got sick and we became buried under vet bills, and Sony is awful about refunds so I just rode with it. Might be my last new game for quite a while until I get those bills paid off. Only 35 payments to go! Of course I’d pay 3 times that if we could get our little puppy-daughter back. Missing her as much now as ever. It has to get easier eventually. right?

Enough of the depressing stuff, let’s talk video games.

Playing

Planet of Lana [Xbox Game Pass] got finished. I’d written about it a while ago and most of what I wrote stands. Towards the end some of the puzzles got a little bit more finicky in terms of reaction times and so forth, but nothing too bad. It was a great little game. Kind of sweet, kind of scary, all environmental story-telling. Highly recommended. Took me 5.5 hours to play through. I could do a replay to chase Achievements and what not, and I don’t rule out that possibility at some point in the future.

Screenshot from Planet of Lana showing Lana squatting down to give Mui a pat
Lana giving Mui pets for a job well done.

Alan Wake Remastered: This is one of those well-loved (by the general gaming community) games that I’ve always meant to play but have never gotten around to. The Remastered version was on PS+ Extra and was short enough I figured I could finish it before my sub ran out, and sure enough I did. Took me 20 hours in total and… I honestly didn’t like it much. The story was fantastic and if they ever make a movie version (I keep hearing chatter about them doing that) I would be down to watch it, 100%. But the actual gameplay hasn’t aged very well. I found it vacillated between frustrating (clunky, slow controls) and tedious (the battles all feel kind of the same). I’m still glad I played it for the, I dunno, historical perspective, and now if Alan Wake 2 is ever on a deep discount somewhere I will probably pick it up, because the IDEA was fun, just the excecution wasn’t. It was probably fine back when it launched but, y’know, our expectations of how games should play change over time.

Ratchet & Clank (2015 version): I was just going through games that had been installed on the Playstation since forever and here this one was. I decided to play it a bit before uninstalling and ended up finishing it. It isn’t super long (12 hours for me) and the first 3/4 or so aren’t particularly tough. When I did finally start to feel a bit frustrated I just set the difficulty down to Easy and that made things REALLY easy but I was about ready for it to be over anyway. Overall it holds up really well for a 10 year old game, and the mechanic of everything busting into a ton of nuts and bolts that then get hovered up into Ratchet’s satchel is oddly satisfying. Kind of like hoovering up the bricks ins a Lego game. Overall, it was a good time!

A shot from near the end of Ratchet and Clank looking down into a giant machine

Wuthering Waves is back in rotation after I heard yet again about how great the story is. Of course I couldn’t remember how to play, and you can’t start fresh, so I created ANOTHER account to start clean. That’s account #4 so far! I have made it further than I ever have and who knows? Maybe I’ll stick with it to get to some of the good story stuff this time.

Tales of Arise is another re-visit. I got it way back at launch but got distracted. Once again I started fresh. I am really struggling with the combat. I just don’t vibe with it. It’s an action-RPG system but it does not reward button mashing and I, I have to admit, am a natural button masher. I’ve gone so far as to watch long YouTube videos about the combat system. Worse comes to worse I’ll put it down to Easy or Story Mode or something because I really enjoy the look and feel of the game, the world seems fun to explore, the characters’ constantly bickering leads me to believe a romance is budding, and I’d really like to experience all that eventually. We’ll see.

Death Stranding 2 is the game I’ve been waiting for and so far it has not disappointed. It is similar enough to the original that it felt really comfortable jumping in, but there’s new stuff too. I haven’t gotten very far as it just came out; but I expect it’ll be my “main game” for quite some time. I’m in no rush to get through it and immediately got caught up in placing structures to help other players out and becoming friends with all the folks in shelters in the first area. The story will be there when I’m ready for it, right?! Loved the first game and so far I’m loving the second as well!

A wide shot of desert scrub. Sam's trike is parked next to a generator. It is night and the generator casts a circle of light
It gets noticeably dark now, Generators have lights on them that you can see from some distance off. I don’t remember that being the case in the 1st game but maybe I’ve forgotten. That’s Sam’s trike parked next to it.

Watching

Shadow & Bone (Netflix) — We’d watched Season 1 of this a few years back I guess, but at some point they released a 2nd season and then canceled the show. Which is a shame because it was awfully good. Honestly we thought S1 was OK the first time we watched but for some reason felt it was way better on the re-watch. It’s a complex world and maybe it took a 2nd viewing to grok it all. Basically we have a world where some folks can wield magic of various sorts. In our world terms I would put it somewhere around 1880-1900 maybe? Technology is advancing to where magic isn’t quite the weapon it once was, we non-magic users fighting with swords and bolt action rifles. There are gatling guns but still at the hand-cranked level of tech.

Anyway this country is divided by “The Fold” which was created by the Black Heretic hundreds of years ago. This is a giant black cloud filled with monsters that divides the country in two, and passage through it is quite perilous. Into this mix comes a couple, life-long friends and both orphans. He is a tracker in the army, she is a cartographer, and the two of them get caught up in some world-changing events. There are other pockets of characters too, including a gang of n’er-do-wells always looking for a new job to pull off. It’s a great show we personal stories, geo-political issues, magic, war, forbidden love, monsters… I’m really sad that it was canceled, but it is based on a series (?) of books that I’m going to make a point to read.

Severance (Apple TV+) — I’d heard good things about this but it took us a long time to get around to trying it and… it is in fact really good. The premise is that these people work for some big tech firm on some super secret project. In order to do so they become “severed” so that when they are at work they can’t remember their outside life, and vice versa. The result is that the at-work entities know of nothing other than the office they work in. These “innies” as they call themselves, are the main focus of the show. The work they do is also very mysterious — it almost looks like they’re playing some kind of game. The company they work for is more or less a cult, just adding to the oddness of it all. It’s pretty creepy, sometimes darkly funny, and generally a good mystery. We haven’t finished the 2nd season yet but we’ve been really enjoying it.

Reading

Another month has come and gone and I’ve done very little reading, aside from constantly reading the news and feeling depressed about that. I need to figure out how to work reading back into my schedule!

And that’s that for June 2025. Aside from the continuing sadness/depression over the loss of Lola it has overall been a decent month, I guess. I am now officially a senior citizen, having turned 65. In the US that means signing up for Medicare which was oddly stressful because you get swarmed with junk mail and offers from companies that want to be your Medicare Supplemental provider. But as I still work full time and get insurance via the job I just did the minimum “Plan A” signup for now, which once I figured out that was what I had to do, was pretty easy. But yeah, I am now a literal [Medicare] card carrying “senior.” Ugh.

May 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

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

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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

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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.