After completing four Mass Effect games in a row, I fell into a rather large gaming slump in May. Many, many days had no gaming whatsoever. DiRT Rally - 13 hours Dark Souls III (The Ringed City DLC) - 7 hours Mass Effect Andromeda - 2 hours Quake Champions - 1 hour ESO - 1 hour (56 words.)

Hey look, I downloaded the fan kit with ready-made images for blog posts! There wasn’t much happening Friday the 26th except some kind of Far Cry 5 reveal, so I’ll see if I can summon up some words about it. From what I can tell, Far Cry 5 is going to be essentially the same gameplay as Far Cry 2, 3, 4, and Primal, except it will be set in America with a Christian cult as the bad guys, and of course, that’s where the controversy begins. (799 words.)

I’m back with another book report. This time it’s SEVENEVES by Neal Stephenson (I have to look up the proper spelling of his name every single time), which I read sometime last year. (Hey, at least I’m writing this post this year!) In my Cryptonomicon review, I said Neal Stephenson is hit-or-miss with me, but this time he delivered a solid hit. I loved this book. It’s about the moon breaking up and destroying the world, and the steps taken to save the human race. (730 words.)

I apologize, but at some point in the last couple of weeks, WordPress decided that I needed to approve every single comment regardless of who it came from, so you may see some delays with comments showing up. I have no idea why it’s doing this. I can only assume some random thing changed with WordPress or Akismet or Jetpack recently. I’ve fiddled with some settings again tonight to see if it helps. (73 words.)

Another one rescued from my Drafts folder, from February 2016… I’m in the camp of people who primarily play MMORPGs solo, so I guess I can speak a little on this topic. I wouldn’t say that I “demand” solo content from MMORPGs, though.* And it’s not that I’m against group content. I just prefer games where I can log in and do interesting things without having to form or join a group all the time. (925 words.)

The other night I discovered that Amazon Prime has a long list of original shows just like Netflix. I don’t know how this escaped my attention. Actually I do know: I usually find something to watch on Netflix before I click the Amazon button on my Vizio remote. Anyway, scrolling through the Amazon Originals list I spotted The Man In The High Castle, which is a show I’ve heard about often but never realized it was an Amazon show. (726 words.)

Today’s writing topic is: Chris Cornell, who sadly committed suicide. I might be a smidge older than some of the other folks reminiscing on Twitter about Soundgarden and Chris Cornell in the wake of his recent death. My memory of Soundgarden is limited to exactly two songs from 90s radio: Black Hole Sun and Spoonman. I liked both songs, possibly even loved Spoonman. I remember vividly where I was the first time I heard it, actually. (674 words.)

I wrote this pseudo-review sometime in 2016. I finally got around to reading Cryptonomicon by Neil Stephenson, which had been sitting in my Kindle library for years. I knew basically nothing about the book, except that it was one of those books that comes up a lot in geek circles, so I felt like I was obligated to read it. Neil Stephenson is a hit-or-miss kind of author for me. Snow Crash is the only other book of his I’ve read. (485 words.)

The other day saw one of the biggest MMORPG* events on the Internet that I can recall in recent memory: Bungie’s Destiny 2 Gameplay Reveal Event. Since some of us have to work, I didn’t actually see it, but almost everyone in my timeline was watching it and commenting on it. It had the feel of an Apple event. I never played Destiny, since I don’t have any of the new generation of consoles. (331 words.)

Last weekend I rented The Accountant on Verizon VOD. It was decent, but not quite good. I felt a pretty strong connection to Ben Afleck’s character because I can identify with many of the symptoms he reeled off about “high functioning autism.” I’ve never been diagnosed but I’ve always assumed I’m on the Asperger’s spectrum somewhere, enough to be recognizable, but not enough to be debilitating. The plot that went on around him, though, wasn’t all that interesting to me (corporate accounting woohoo). (310 words.)

I complain a lot about a lack of gaming news (to myself, at least) but I completely overlooked the recent announcement of a new MMORPG called Wild West Online (WWO) from new studio 612 Games. It will be set in … wait for it … the Wild West. Taking a cue from Wilhelm here and screen-capturing their web site. :) Initially I understood it would be a PvP game. But before you groan and click away, there seems to have been some miscommunication and MassivelyOP’s interview indicates PvE players will get their own play area as well. (358 words.)

Grimdark TMNT from [1d4chan][1]. Artist unknown. A tweet caught my attention Friday and I thought about responding, but it was a topic that would fill a lot more than a couple tweets and I was looking for something to write about anyway. i'm never going to understand why people keep writing grimdark shit all the time. the world is miserable enough as it is. don't add to it. — Runesael, Archfey of Humbug (@Runesael) May 12, 2017 The gist: Why do people keep making that icky grimdark stuff? (994 words.)

I needed to use up some Audible credits, so I picked up an audiobook called Off To Be The Wizard by Scott Meyer. I found it by looking up the works performed by Luke Daniels, one of my favorite audiobook readers, ever since I discovered him from listening to the Iron Druid Chronicles by Kevin Hearne. (If you like the Harry Dresden books, you might also like IDC. It’s the same sort of thing, but with an Irish wolfhound. (819 words.)

I don’t know how many people know this, but I used to play a lot of Quake CTF with Crayola Clan in the 1990s. Back then, “eSports” were community-run tournaments with no stakes and no prizes and barely any organization. We played mostly NetQuake, QuakeWorld, and Quake 2. We played a little bit of Quake 3 Arena but I personally never liked it and by then gaming started to get commercial with sponsors and cash prizes and it was more work than fun and it was all too stressful to deal with. (707 words.)

Continuing my pseudo-regular new series on television shows and movies I’ve watched recently, because … well, it’s something to write about. These are not “reviews” per se, but merely thoughts and observations. You can assume, though, that if I’m writing a post about a thing, it’s notable to me in some way, either especially good, or especially bad, or otherwise relevant somehow. Today I’d like to talk about a little show called The Shannara Chronicles. (1277 words.)