Disclaimer: I’m not in the mood to write a post but I just want to keep a list of what is going on so…

April is already over. The oppressive heat of May-September is right around the corner. Here on the Internet folks (well, some folks) are quite concerned over Elon Musk buying Twitter. I have thoughts on that I keep meaning to write down but never do. I’m hedging my bets. No plans to leave twitter but it did spur me to check out the “Fediverse” which I’m finding to be an amusing experience so far. The Mastadon instance I’m on (https://mstdn.social) feels a little like Twitter in the old days (not that it is a new instance..it just has an influx of new people) where FollowFriday is still a thing and I’m finding lots of science and tech folks to follow and learn from. Have to say though, my favorite account is from someone in northern England who is a stonemason and who posts pics from their job sites. I have nothing but respect and envy for people who build things with their hands.

Games

This will be quick. I started the month still playing Guild Wars 2, then munged up my shoulder so using a keyboard was really painful. That led to me subscribing to Final Fantasy XIV and starting a new character (playing on the PS5 via controller). Both the good and the bad part of paying a sub (for me) is that it means I feel obliged to play that game pretty exclusively. Which is mostly what I’ve been playing this month, though just the other night I started a character in Godfall, which I found was pretty fun. So maybe more of that in the days to come.

Bloodborn, Code Vein, Horizon Zero Dawn & LOTRO have all fallen by the wayside.

Books

I finished the 2nd Expanse Novel, Caliban’s War. I’m still not sure who Caliban is. I enjoyed it, but with the same caveat as book 1: the TV show is such an authentic recreation of the books that this all feels really familiar given it hasn’t been very long since I watched the show. Characters look different in the books, and yeah there’s a lot of details that are different, but the big picture feels very familiar. This didn’t prevent me from rolling right into book 3, Abaddon’s Gate, though. [To put Caliban’s War in context for TV show viewers, this is the book where Avasarala, Bobbie and Prax are introduced…hopefully that’s not much of a spoiler.]

TV

I dunno. Nothing that feels exciting to write about. As a family we’re keeping up with Moon Knight, Picard and Halo, as well as rewatching Upload (which I find both hilarious and depressing…the latter because it all seems so plausible). Oh and trying to get through season 2 of Raised by Wolves, a show we watch mostly to see how much more weird it can get. I’m not sure either of us really cares about the story or the characters any more. Oh and we’re still wading through Star Trek: Deep Space 9 at lunch.

For my solo viewing, I bit off another chunk of The Sopranos. I’m not sure why I am forcing myself to plow through it. Everyone made such a fuss about it back in the day that I keep thinking “It has to get really great!” but I think I’m in season 4 and it is still mostly just “OK.” When I burned out on The Sopranos I bounced around a bit before landing on All Creatures Great & Small which I’m finding very soothing. It’s a PBS Masterpiece show. Also been watching random documentary-ish shows from The Smithsonian Channel and PBS.

And that’s April. We’re 2/3rds of the way to the summer equinox. We’re halfway to Halloween! One third of the way to Christmas. I’m bracing myself for the long, hot, humid, miserable summer weather and am already looking forward to when it gets cool in November.

Another month ends and we say goodbye to what is laughingly referred to as winter here in North Carolina. I spotted an 80F day in the 10-day forecast. (Of course it’ll probably snow that day…in my next life I’m going to be a weatherperson so I can be wrong most of the time and get away with it.)

Games

The big take-away this month is an old lesson re-learned. Don’t pre-order games. I pre-ordered three this month and the results were not good:

Horizon Forbidden West — Nothing at all wrong with this game but starting to play it just made me want to go back and re-play Horizon Zero Dawn, which is what I’ve been doing lately. I probably could’ve just done that and picked up HFW later. Still it’s such a great series I don’t have any regrets about this pre-order.

Elden Ring — I pre-ordered the Xbox version of this and it flat-out did not work. There was some glitch in the update progress where I (and many others) had a version installed that would not connect to the networks, and there was no way to ‘force’ a refresh. On top of this, there are many reports about poor performance. The good news here is that Microsoft gave me a refund with no fuss at all. I’ll come back to this at some point in future when the kinks are worked out.

Dying Light 2 — This one I pre-ordered on the PS5 and it was so janky that I set it aside. No refund available. This was just money poured down the drain, though I’m sure eventually it’ll get patched and I’ll give it another go.

Those were the three games I had INTENDED to be playing.

What I actually wound up playing is, as mentioned, Horizon Zero Dawn. I have the Platinum trophy for this, earned 5 years ago, and re-playing it without hunting for trophies has been incredibly fun and relaxing. I am in no rush to finish, but I’m glad Forbidden West is waiting in the wings.

Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Hold was a Playstation+ freebie and I wanted to check it out to see if I’d be interested in Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, which I believe is out in March. I really did enjoy my time with this one and intend to go back to finish it at some point.

Dying Light 2 was not ready for prime time, though when it worked well it was pretty fun. Looking forward to playing this one when it is done. Still salty about paying $60 to beta test it, though.

Scarlet Nexus was a bounce-off. I really expected to like this game but ultimately I just never got in the groove, and the story wasn’t interesting enough to hold me in that world when I wasn’t enjoying the minute-to-minute gameplay. Don’t expect I’ll ever finish this.

Bloodborne is back in rotation now that Elden Ring is out. I haven’t been playing it much, just trying to keep the muscle memory alive until such time as I’m ready to dive back in ‘for real’.

Babylon’s Fall is coming soon and there was a demo available on the Playstation. I tried it and found it quite lacking. This is a game I might try when it’s in the “Games under $15” section of the store.

Lost Ark is a PC game that a lot of my friends are excited about. I tried it, uninstalled it, read more hype from friends, re-installed it, and I guess technically I’m playing it. I poke at it while I have my morning coffee on weekends. It seems… fine. I really don’t understand the excitement over it, but it’s free-to-play so maybe I’ll keep poking it.

Books

Well book, singular, actually. I finished Bernard Cornwell’s War Lord, the last book in his Saxon Stories series. At least the last so far, but Uhtred is so old in it that I’m not sure how Cornwell could squeeze in any more unless he goes back and fleshes out some periods earlier in our hero’s life. I have to say, it’s been a while since I read something this long (there are 13 novels in the series) without getting tired of it.

Having finished that, though, I’ve kind of taken my foot off the gas as far as reading goes. Gotta get back to it!

TV

So much TV!

With The Expanse finished airing, we went back and re-watched Season 5 & watched Season 6. I’m now ready for someone to pick up the rights and keep making this show. I was honestly not as enthusiastic about Season 5 as I was about Seasons 1-4 just because the gang was no longer together, but season 6 pulled me back in.

We’ve also started a re-watch of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine though honestly we’ve both been a little lukewarm about it so far. We’ll see if it gets better after season 1. I remember not being a huge fan back when it aired but I was hoping that a re-watch would change my opinion.

Currently we’re rewatching Season 1 of Raising Dion before watching the new second season. This is the story of a single mom raising a son who has super-powers, which sounds like the setup for a comedy but it isn’t: it’s a drama (tho of course some funny things happen now and then).

My late-night, “watch the stuff @partpurple doesn’t want to watch” selection this month has been The Sopranos; my first viewing. I just started season three, if memory serves. So far it’s been OK but I’m not sure why folks made such a fuss about it back in the day.

Ascendance of a Book Worm is an anime about a young woman who dies and is resurrected in the body of a small girl in a fantasy world. She quickly learns to her horror that there are almost no books in this world so she sets out to ‘invent’ paper making and printing. It was a pretty sweet story; I hope there are more seasons coming.

Wrap Up and plans for March

So that was February. In terms of gaming I don’t have much planned for March. Keep playing Horizon until it isn’t fun and then…who knows?

In books I’ve started a re-read of Leviathan Wakes, which is the first Expanse novel.

And I have 4(?) more seasons of The Sopranos to get through, which will probably take all month. I’m not sure where @partpurple and I will go after Raising Dion. We still need to get back to Star Trek Discovery so we’ll probably do that. I dunno, can’t make plans without consulting with her.

Hope everyone had a nice February and here’s to March going out like a lamb. Preferably not a 90F lamb!

I’ve noticed a lot of bloggers do some kind of “end of the month recap/plans for next month” posts. They seem like a good idea, if for no other reason than to remind ourselves “What was I doing last year at this time?”

So I’ve decided to jump on the bandwagon, but I didn’t take any notes along the way and I have the memory of a dust bunny so to some extent I’m winging it this month. But let’s see what we can see.

Games

I spent the first two thirds of the month just kind of flailing around. Part of this was my new resolution to try not to hyper-focus on any one game since that was kind of getting in the way of having fun. Part of it was that nothing was latching on to me.

Then I caught the Bloodborne bug and I’ve been playing that obsessively for the past ten days or so. At this point in my current playthrough I believe I’ve beaten 8 bosses, about half of which were optional. At least 6, and maybe 7, were first time kills for me. Next up is Rom the Vacuous Spider, for those of you who are Bloodborne savvy.

I’m not sure I’m going to tackle Rom as I may have hit my saturation point for Bloodborne finally. We’ll see.

Other games I dabbled in this month: Elder Scrolls Online, Death Stranding, Nobody Saves The World, Kingdom of Amalur: Re-Reckoning, and Persona 5. I made SOME progress in Death Stranding and Amalur but played the rest very lightly indeed.

TV

Earlier in the month I was on a Western kick. I re-watched all of Yellowstone and dove into the 1883 spin-off, though when it skipped a few weeks I drifted away. I was also watching old Westerns from the 50s, 60s & 70s.

Then I jumped over to HBO for Mare of Easttown and now I’m working through The Sopranos, which I’ve somehow never seen. Still in Season 1 of that.

Family viewing has been Lost in Space (the reboot) and now we’re re-watching Season 5 of The Expanse before we roll into Season 6 (with The Expanse we’ve always waited for a full season to be available so we can binge, and we always rewatch at least the previous season to refresh our memories). We also finished our re-watch of all seasons of Star Trek The Next Generation.

Books

Another month of Uhtred. In January I finished War of the Wolf and Sword of Kings, books 11 & 12 of Bernard Cornwell’s The Saxon Stories series. If you’re unfamiliar with these books, the TV series The Last Kingdom is based on it. The TV series only covers the first few books.

At this point. Uhtred is an old man who is dealing with the grandchildren of the people who were giving him a hard time when he was young. While the books do tend to get somewhat repetitive I’ve enjoyed just watching people enter and exit his life. Some random kid he rescues in one book might be one of his most trustworthy companions 5 or 6 books later.

On to the FUTURE!

February 2022

Games

February is going to be packed. On the 1st, Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep: A Wonderlands One-shot Adventure hits Playstation Plus so I’m going to check that out in order to measure my interest in the full-length game coming later in the spring.

On Friday, February 4th, Dying Light 2 launches. I have it pre-ordered and will be playing on the Playstation

Two weeks later, on the 18th, Horizon Forbidden West launches. That will probably be a “drop everything and pay attention to me” titles, as Horizon Forbidden Dawn is in my top-3 all time favorite games. (Along with the first Red Dead Redemption and…I dunno what #3 would be, maybe HZD is in my top-2 favorite games.). Obviously I’ll be playing this on Playstation since it is an exclusive.

Then just a week later, Elden Ring comes out. I wasn’t very interested in this until I had my Bloodborne revelation. Then I got so excited I pre-ordered it, though I probably won’t be playing at launch because of Forbidden West. Though you never know, do you? Elden Ring I will be playing on Xbox.

TV

The Sopranos will probably get me through the month for my ‘me time’ viewing.

Family viewing, after The Expanse we’ll probably go back and finish up some left over stuff, like Book of Boba Fett, Star Trek Discovery and who knows what else.

Oh! One new thing we want to watch is Kristen Bell in The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window which is a mystery-parody. We’ll watch anything the Bell is in, having been big fans all the way back to Veronica Mars.

I haven’t seen much buzz around this one, so here’s a trailer:

Books

I’m going to finish up book 13 of The Saxon Stories then…I’m not sure. I’ve been reading these books for over a year now. Having to make a decision on what to read next just feels very foreign. Maybe I’ll finally read the books that The Expanse is based on. I think I’ve only read the first one… Leviathan Wakes.

So that’s that. Recap of January, some loose plans for February. Maybe in February I’ll start remembering to take screenshots so I don’t have to keep re-using the same couple at the top of my posts.