Endgame Viable

Is Lord of the Rings still Lord of the Rings even when it’s not Lord of the Rings? That is the question I set out to answer when looking at Lord of the Rings: War in the North, from 2011. Actually, it was just the next game on my Steam backlog list. I paid $5 for it in a Steam sale some time back, and yesterday I looked at it for the first time. (823 words.)

The Steam Backlog Bonanza Week One. Streams will be at roughly 4 PM EDT (GMT-4 I think) on my YouTube channel for about an hour and/or until I get bored. Currently I don’t enable chat so lurkers are extremely welcome. If you miss it, I believe the streams are available to watch if not immediately afterward then shortly after. I know… you can subscribe to my channel and find out! AND SMASH THAT BELL!!!! Hehe. (733 words.)

It doesn’t seem like a game from 2007 would be that “old,” but it sure is. I tried out a shooter called TimeShift from my Steam backlog. I bought it in 2016 for $1.80. Installing TimeShift was painless. In fact, since it’s so old, it took almost no time at all to install. The size of the game was measured in Megabytes-3000 of them, roughly. The mechanics of the game are pretty standard for a shooter: You point at things and shoot them, with various weapons, which generally fall into the standard categories: Pistol, Assault Rifle, Shotgun, and variations thereof. (660 words.)

I grouse about Elder Scrolls Online a lot, so I thought it would be fair to point out that I actually had an enjoyable play session yesterday for a couple of hours. My “main” from the game’s launch in 2014 is a Nord Templar who is now somewhere around level 48 I think. This is the character I keep trying to play, and keep running into frustrations because the game consistently refuses to let me play the way I want to play this character. I wanted to make this guy a heavy armor, two-handed grunt who smashes everything over the head with a huge heavy swing of the two-handed sword. That is apparently “wrong” for a Templar, and the game punishes me all the time for it. It’s very aggravating. I don’t play him very much anymore. (1240 words.)

Life Is Feudal, the MMO, as opposed to the other two games with the same name that are different, recently became free to download and play on Steam. This is a game I’ve wanted to check out almost since the day I heard about it, which seems like five or ten or a hundred years ago now. It’s been an Early Access game all this time (and still is), but it’s always been more than the amount I’m willing to pay for an Early Access game, which is $10. Finally they decided to do what is essentially a free trial. (774 words.)

Theoretically you can click the following link to download the latest version of an OPML file of Blaugustians: Blaugust 2019 OPML File I tend to model my software development life around the Perl mantra: “The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris.” Thus did I find myself hemming and hawing over the prospect of manually adding a whole bunch of blogs to my RSS feed reader for this Blaugust. (485 words.)

It’s raining this morning, which is always a bummer of a way to start the day. Even my dog and cat don’t want to do anything on rainy mornings. I thought I would mention something about games on this gaming blog for a change. I don’t know if I ever mentioned that I finished playing Bloodborne on the PS4. I’m uploading the video series now. (I did a much better job with thumbnails and metadata than I did with Sekiro.) I was pleased to find that my thumb performed much better than I anticipated by the end. I could maintain playing on a controller for an hour or so every day without any significant loss in hand functionality for the rest of my non-gaming activities throughout the day. (809 words.)

I’m trying a new RSS feed reader for this Blaugust. It’s a Windows-based reader called NewsFlow. The grid layout. I don't read posts like this but it was more colorful for the screenshot than just a list of text. It’s not that I particularly wanted to try a new reader, but InoReader, my web-based reader of choice, has implemented a limitation of 150 feeds in the free version. At the time they implemented the limitation, some time earlier this year, I had over 300 feeds in my list. I went through and cut the list down to under 150 after removing a bunch of feeds that haven’t updated in years or have vanished from the web entirely. (560 words.)

I forgot that I was trying to write something every day to get into shape for Blaugust. Writing calisthenics, if you will. (I just now learned that I have no idea how to spell the word “calisthenics.” My first attempt was “calusthetics.” It’s entirely possible I have never written that word in a document before in my lifetime.) Writing is a habit that needs to be exercised, by the way. You can’t just sit down and write out of the blue, just like you can’t just run a marathon out of the blue. Well, you *can* (and should-start writing, that is, not run a marathon) but those first words you write won’t be as good as the ones you write after writing every day for a while. It’s just how it is. It’s why *starting* to write is the most important part-and by far the hardest part-of writing. (1102 words.)

Today’s post is an experiment in a different writing position. Due to various aches and pains that I mentioned before, I’m constantly looking for new physical positions to write in. Here are the writing positions that I know cause pain over time: Sitting at desktop PC like I’ve done all my life “Standing desk” in front of living room television Sitting in living room chair with laptop in lap Sitting in living room chair with laptop on a mobile laptop stand shelf thingy Lying in bed with laptop on lap Lying in bed with laptop on a stand thingy I recently bought This time, I’m trying to sit in the living room chair, looking at the television, using a wireless keyboard in my lap that is attached to the media PC. This will keep my head in an elevated position, not hunched over, while keeping my arms relaxed at my sides for typing. (1506 words.)