Archive: 2018

176 entries. 138,612 words.

January, 2018

• Games Played – Year End 2017. 2018-01-01 3:30 PM.
  • Progression Report
  
  What counts as astronomy in Divinity: Original Sin. First, statistics for December of 2017. I flip-flopped around a lot during the holiday time, as is pretty normal for me. A surprising addition to this list is EverQuest II, in which I had quite a bit of fun starting a new character, at least until I installed new Steam purchase Divinity: Original Sin, which captured a lot of my attention late in the month. (Said attention waned considerably after two very difficult boss fights in a row.) 518 words.
• On The Radar For 2018. 2018-01-03 3:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Pre-Release
  
  Here’s my annual summary of PC MMORPGs that are on my radar for the new year 2018. (Here is 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014). I am only considering “traditional” style MMORPGs in this list, not things like MOBAs or brawlers or Diablo-clones or whatever else people call MMOs these days. Actually, since I find out about these from MMO sites, and most MMO sites now cover things that aren’t traditional MMORPGs, some of these might in fact not be traditional MMORPGs. But I try to weed out things that are obviously not MMORPGs, like, say, Conan Exiles. 1,409 words.
• Top 10 Videos From 2017. 2018-01-05 3:30 PM.
  • Videos
  
  It’s time for more video rankings! I know blog readers hate videos, but this is the only place I can put this information for posterity. Major video releases from me in 2017 included: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (still unfinished) Mass Effect Andromeda Final Fantasy XIV - Stormblood, The Legend Returns Guild Wars 2 - Heart of Thorns, Path of Fire, Living World Seasons 2 and 3 Dark Souls III - The Ringed City DLC (still unfinished) Below are my top ten videos in 2017, according to YouTube running time. (This is as of December 27th, so technically it doesn’t count the last 4 days of the year.) 724 words.
• Single-Player Holidays. 2018-01-08 3:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • RPG
  
  The last thing I mentioned playing was Divinity: Original Sin. I sort of gave up on it. It’s a great game and all, but it’s just too exhausting. I went through two boss fights in a row (SparkMaster 5000 and Radagoth) and both times, luck was the determining factor for success. That’s just not fun. I don’t know how all the people who play tabletop games do it. :) 781 words.
• Free Book Weekend. 2018-01-12 3:30 PM.
  • Administration
  • Writing
  
  We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog post for a blatant, unabashed, self-promotional advertisement that has no purpose other than to shower me with cold, hard cash that I will not share with you.* I have had a book on Amazon called Lute of the Sparrow under my writing name Everett Renshaw for about seven years now. This weekend (starting January 13), I am making it available for free. Please go forth, download it, read it, and post a review. Preferably a good review. 124 words.
• ARK Revisited Two Years Later. 2018-01-15 3:30 PM.
  • Reviews
  • Survival
  
  There is a wide variety of interesting sky effects, too. I haven’t played ARK much since early 2016, so I decided to re-download it and give it another look. The game finally “launched” last year, after all. Presumably all of the problems I had with the game are now fixed. Well, not exactly. Although to be fair I really enjoyed it before, too. I just ran out of challenge. I got to a point where I could go to any biome and survive, and kill any dinosaur in my path, and that is pretty much “winning” the game. 1,026 words.
• Survey Revisions Continue. 2018-01-17 3:30 PM.
  • Editing
  • Process
  • everettrenshaw.com
  
  I promised myself I would try to write two writing posts a month. Technically this should be the second one, but it’s actually just the first one. Oh well. While I have not been extremely happy with my progress on editing “Survey,” my 2016 NaNoWriMo project, I have at least *made* progress on it. Last time I described how I was highlighting sections of text that needed attention, and I have more-or-less completed that. 697 words.
• YouTube – Death of a Hobby. 2018-01-17 3:35 PM.
  • Videos
  
  I never thought this would happen, but YouTube finally made changes that affect me. Previously, channels had to reach 10,000 total views to be eligible for the YouTube Partner Program (YPP). …starting today, new channels will need to have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time within the past 12 months to be eligible for ads. We will begin enforcing these new requirements for existing channels in YPP beginning February 20th, 2018. 562 words.
• Largely News-Free. 2018-01-18 2:51 PM.
  • Politics
  • swampip.com
  
  I’m still here but nothing much to say about current events. I’m just not interested right now. I don’t care a whit if the government shuts down or not. I don’t care a whit about the president saying curse words in private meetings. DACA and Dreamers are issues that I typically don’t think about and have little or no personal stake in. Watching the “hole versus house” followup war of narratives is more interesting to me: That is, the president’s team trying, successfully I might add, to shape the controversy as the “course language” he did or didn’t use and focusing on that, which completely derailed the more substantive policy discussion. The “why” he said it was completely lost amid the deluge of “what” he said, and that was a win for Team Trump. It’s yet another lesson in how easy it is to manipulate the mainstream media and drive the news cycle (see also: Trump wins election). 167 words.
• MMO News Roundup. 2018-01-19 3:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  I’m trying an experiment here: A list of MMO news that I found noteworthy during the week. I’m trying this slightly retro blogging format because, to be brutally honest, for most MMO topics, I have a lot of trouble summoning up more than a few sentences of commentary, which results in a glut of unfinished blog drafts and a paucity of published posts (ha!). The challenge here will be finding a picture to use. 799 words.
• Shutdown Optics Wars. 2018-01-21 2:34 PM.
  • Politics
  • swampip.com
  
  It occurred to me that this shutdown is the Republicans’ best and probably only strategy for winning elections in 2018. Prior to the shutdown, there were only two accomplishments Republicans could campaign on: Neil Gorsuch and passing the Tax Bill, neither of which are particularly great for capturing undecided voters, even if there wasn’t a truckload of negative baggage attached to each of them. Of course, they could also campaign on “Look how great Trump is!” Um. Yeah. Probably not a great strategy for most areas of the country. 323 words.
• Rift Prime – Too Late?. 2018-01-22 3:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  Looking longingly at the place where level 69 players-or patrons-can go. I suppose the announcement of RIFT Prime deserves its own blog post, rather than an offhand remark in a news summary. Like most of the other reactions I’ve read, I’m tentatively interested, but I’m certainly not jumping on the hype train yet. See, here’s the thing. I’m probably only going to subscribe to one game at a time. Historically the main reason is that there are precious few games out there worth subscribing to. But in more practical terms right now I have drastically reduced disposable income and it would be pretty reckless to throw money away on something that isn’t amazing. I’m no longer working at a job where an hour of cubicle work time offsets months of subscriptions on mediocre games I forget to even play. 845 words.
• MMO News Roundup 2. 2018-01-26 3:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  I found this Moonshade Highlands library in Rift for, I think, the very first time this week. Weirdly I got to it from Sanctum. I have no idea what it’s for, except to give me a little bit more experience as I level up. 636 words.
• The Authorities by Scott Meyers (Audiobook). 2018-01-26 9:58 PM.
  • Books
  • Reviews
  • everettrenshaw.com
  
  Published by Rocket Hat Industries. Read by Luke Daniels. Produced by … Scott Meyer? (Presumably the author paid Luke Daniels to make the audiobook.) Sinclair Rutherford is a young Seattle cop with a taste for the finer things. Doing menial tasks and getting hassled by superiors he doesn’t respect are definitely not “finer things.” Good police work and bad luck lead him to crack a case that changes quickly from a career-making break into a high-profile humiliation when footage of his pursuit of the suspect—wildly inappropriate murder weapon in hand—becomes an Internet sensation. 316 words.
• The Land: Founding by Aleron Kong (Audiobook). 2018-01-26 10:36 PM.
  • Books
  • Reviews
  • everettrenshaw.com
  
  The Land: Founding: A LitRPG Saga: Chaos Seeds, Book 1 by Aleron Kong Self-published. Read by Nick Podehl. Produced by Tamori Publications LLC. Tricked into a world of banished gods, demons, goblins, sprites and magic, Richter must learn to meet the perils of The Land and begin to forge his own kingdom. Actions have consequences across The Land, with powerful creatures and factions now hell-bent on Richter’s destruction. This is definitely a winner for the largest number of sub-titles within one title. I have no idea where I heard about this book or why I got it. 302 words.
• Pandemic: The Extinction Files by A. G. Riddle (Audiobook). 2018-01-26 11:08 PM.
  • Books
  • Reviews
  • everettrenshaw.com
  
  Pandemic: The Extinction Files, Book 1 by A. G. Riddle Published by Riddle, Inc. Read by Edoardo Ballerini. Produced by Audible Studios. In Africa, a mysterious outbreak spreads quickly. Teams from the CDC and WHO respond, but they soon learn that there is more to the epidemic than they believed. It may be the beginning of a global experiment-an event that will change the human race forever. Another one where I have no idea how or why this book got into my Audible library. I don’t know if it was recommended to me or if I just randomly clicked on something on the front page of the site to try to use up my Audible credits before I cancelled my subscription. Probably that latter one, because I had a lot to use up, and I try to vary my genres now and then. (I think this is a “thriller.”) 1,083 words.
• Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson (Audiobook). 2018-01-27 1:41 AM.
  • Books
  • Reviews
  • everettrenshaw.com
  
  Gardens of the Moon: The Malazan Book of the Fallen, Book 1 by Steven Erikson Published by Tor Books. Read by Ralph Lister. Produced by Brilliance Audio. The Malazan Empire simmers with discontent, bled dry by interminable warfare, bitter infighting and bloody confrontations with the formidable Anomander Rake and his Tiste Andii, ancient and implacable sorcerers. Even the imperial legions, long inured to the bloodshed, yearn for some respite. Yet Empress Laseen’s rule remains absolute, enforced by her dread Claw assassins. 461 words.
• The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (Audiobook). 2018-01-27 11:31 PM.
  • Books
  • Reviews
  • everettrenshaw.com
  
  The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu) Published by Tor Books. Read by Luke Daniels. Produced by Macmillon Audio. I got this a long time ago because it won the Hugo in 2015, but I only just got around to it in my January 2018 listening binge. Set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision. 492 words.
• FFXIV – 4.2 Rise of a New Sun Patch Notes. 2018-01-29 3:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  They aren’t too concerned about spoiling things from the previous patch, are they? Roughly 75% of the 4.2 patch doesn’t interest me, but there’s a few cool things in there. This cracked me up: You won’t be able to skip the cut scenes in Castrum Meridianum and the Praetorium anymore. If I were a new player, I’d be glad about that, because I’d hate to miss them (I honestly don’t remember if I watched them the first time or not, or if I ever have). I don’t understand why they didn’t do the same in other Main Scenario instances though. The social pressure to skip cut scenes in instances is immense (even if nobody asks you to), and to this day I can’t understand why they keep putting cut scenes, even very short ones, into group instances. 1,382 words.

February, 2018

• MMO News Reactions 3. 2018-02-02 3:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  Gloamwood. I played a new character through the first two zones in Rift to imagine what Rift Prime might be like. _A series of short reactions to the week’s MMORPG stories, otherwise known as “just about giving up on blogging” because I can’t be bothered to write long posts lately. 641 words.
• What’s With The Console Exclusives?. 2018-02-05 3:30 PM.
  • Discussion
  
  Last week we learned that Red Dead Redemption 2 will be delayed until October 26, 2018, and there is still no word on a PC version. (The first one was a console exclusive.) Red Dead Redemption 2 is Coming October 26th 2018: https://t.co/LLSkGYfJMP pic.twitter.com/fSu8k9qVZe — Rockstar Games (@RockstarGames) February 1, 2018 I personally don’t care that much about RDR2, having never played or even seen the first one. I was more interested in the ensuing Twitter thread I got involved in about PC versus console games. I felt like I came across as one of those “oh no PC games are dead!” people so I figured I should elaborate a bit more here. (It’s almost impossible to say anything substantive on Twitter without being misinterpreted.) 1,485 words.
• Games Played – January 2018. 2018-02-05 3:30 PM.
  • Progression Report
  
  A Bethesda-heavy month. Oblivion - 23 hours Fallout 4 - 20 hours Rift - 15 hours ShooterGame* … I mean ARK - 10 hours Morrowind - 10 hours Skyrim - 4 hours Dark Souls III - 3 hours Final Fantasy XIV - 2 hours ESO - 1 hour It might seem like an even distribution of games across the entire month, but it was more like a sequential progression of games starting with Morrowind, then Oblivion, then ARK, and then the month ended with Rift and finally Fallout 4 sunk its claws into me big time (again), quite unexpectedly. 137 words.
• MMO News Reactions 4. 2018-02-09 3:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  _A series of short reactions to the week’s MMORPG stories, otherwise known as “just about giving up on blogging” because I can’t be bothered to write long posts lately. _ Nexon laid off some people. I don’t think I play any Nexon games. Forbes interview on WoW Classic. I don’t think I mentioned this at the time, but while Blizzcon made it sound like WoW Classic was right around the corner, I secretly thought it sounded like they hadn’t even started on it yet. This confirms that it sounds like they haven’t even gotten out of the “memos around the office” phase of this project yet. How many years away will this thing be? Will Star Citizen be out before WoW Classic? 165 words.
• A Podcast Experiment. 2018-02-11 3:16 PM.
  • Administration
  • Media
  • Podcast
  
  I’m excited and terrified to announce that I’m launching an experimental podcast project tentatively called Main Quest and you-yes you-can listen to the first two episodes right here! Well, down below a bit, anyway. Have you ever been sitting at work, or driving your car, or waiting at the dentist, and thought, “I wish I could listen to the story from a game right now?” Well I have. A lot. So much so that I’ve recorded a lot of my own gameplay with OBS over the last two or three years, converted it to mp3s, and put them on my phone, just so I could listen to them at work. (I’ve never been able to play videos or watch Twitch at work.) 380 words.
• RIFT Leveling Anew. 2018-02-12 3:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Opinion
  
  With all the buzz about RIFT Prime, I wondered if I could recreate a nostalgic experience for free just by starting a new character on plain old RIFT Normal. I wanted to check two things: To see if experience points were withheld from free players at the beginning of the game just like at level 68, leading to hard road blocks that could only be made up by endless grinding or spending cash. Secondly, I wanted to speculate on what RIFT Prime might deliver to me that would be superior to what I was experiencing completely for free. 1,409 words.
• MMO News Reactions 5. 2018-02-16 3:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  A series of short reactions to the week’s MMORPG stories, otherwise known as “just about giving up on blogging” because I can’t be bothered to write long posts lately. Sorry about last week’s post. I was scrolling through Twitter last Friday and much to my own surprise I found that I’d posted something to my blog without even looking at it or setting a header image or anything. This time I will refrain from scheduling this to post right after creating the draft!_ 318 words.
• FFXIV – 4.2 Rise of a New Sun Completed (Spoilers). 2018-02-19 3:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  I put off FFXIV for a couple of weeks while I finished my Fallout 4 obsession, then I jumped in and completed the Main Scenario Quest for the 4.2 Patch. It took two whole days, maybe three total hours. I’m glad to have finished it. I had basically zero interest in playing it, to be honest, but I know from experience that no matter how much one doesn’t feel like playing the MSQ, it’s far better to stay up-to-date than to have to catch back up later. (Ask anyone who’s come back to FFXIV after any kind of absence, like, say, me. Go play the MSQ immediately!! Drop everything!! Do it now!! It’s the one inescapable dependency from which literally every other feature of the game inherits.) 627 words.
• That Ashes of Creation Live Stream. 2018-02-21 3:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  I’ve worked on this post for a very long time. I’ve added stuff. Then I’ve deleted stuff. Then I’ve added other stuff. Then I’ve deleted other stuff. I don’t even know what it reads like anymore. If this were a novel, it would certainly be abandoned. Bhagpuss asked me what I didn’t like about the Ashes of Creation video. I actually try not to be this negative anymore, because it doesn’t do anyone any good to complain about something that other people might like. And it’s not like anyone is consulting me on how to make games. But you asked! :) 2,523 words.
• Kitchen Sink Post #6. 2018-02-23 3:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  _I’m still tinkering with the formula for this weekly “bullet post” thing. Now I feel like I should include news items and any interesting progress I’ve made on games I’m playing. _ ESO… always seems better in screenshots. I started the week playing some FFXIV, trying to work on improving my gear with Rabanastre runs and Omega 4.0 runs. Then I started playing ESO, trying to find what it was that everyone keeps saying that they love about that game. I was determined to level my original launch Templar from 44 to 50, hoping that’s when everything would suddenly click again. I got to 47, but I remain baffled. I’m working on a post titled, “Why can’t I get back into ESO?” I hear what people say about how they think the questing is some of the best storytelling in MMORPGs, but I just stare blankly wondering if we are even talking about the same game or speaking the same language. 318 words.
• Why Is It So Hard to Get Back Into ESO?. 2018-02-26 3:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  Coldharbor, a painfully long slog through a very depressing blue landscape. If I had to guess which MMORPG was most popular right now based just on my Twitter feed (discounting WoW of course), I would guess that ESO is probably a strong contender. I used to love ESO. I played for about two months when it launched. I enjoyed it a lot. It was such a fresh take on the genre. It has fantastic graphics, sound, and music. It’s clearly a high quality game, well worth the purchase price. 1,160 words.

March, 2018

• MMO Roundup #7. 2018-03-02 3:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  Not only am I still trying to find a formula for this weekly bullet post, but I am also still trying to find the right formula for the post’s title. A hilariously anachronistic priest in a supposedly historical game. I have played nothing at all this week except Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and am now over 60 hours. I almost rage quit when I met the first boss and died a hundred times, but after I eventually beat him mostly through luck and potions, I realized it was actually really easy and there was no need to quit. :) 330 words.
• Games Played – February 2018. 2018-03-03 3:30 PM.
  • Progression Report
  
  I can’t say that February was the most productive month I’ve ever spent on this Earth. But I got a lot of material for a podcast, at least. (And YouTube videos, if I ever upload them.) Kingdom Come: Deliverance - 63 hours Fallout 4 - 60 hours Final Fantasy XIV - 39 hours Elder Scrolls Online - 17 hours If you were to put them in chronological order, it would be: Fallout 4, FFXIV and ESO, then Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I’m actually very surprised I played that much FFXIV and ESO. It didn’t feel like I played much. 98 words.
• Life is Strange. 2018-03-05 3:30 PM.
  • Single-Player
  • Steam
  
  Steam is having yet another one of those sales, and I saw that a lot of Square Enix games were available cheap. Life is Strange, for example, is available for $5. It’s one of those games that everyone says is fantastic. It also happens that the first episode is available for free, so I thought I’d try it out and see if I wanted to spend the $5 for the entire thing. 689 words.
• MMO Roundup #8. 2018-03-09 3:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  Now I’m trying to work out why WordPress keeps using old images when it posts these things to Twitter. I think it’s because I was using a “Clone Post” plugin to make these posts. So I’m making this one from scratch. Seeing as how there is a game-breaking bug that prevents me from continuing to play it, I’ve abandoned Kingdom Come: Deliverance until whichever decade Warhorse decides to release the 1.3 patch for the PC. 415 words.
• RIFT Prime – The First Week. 2018-03-12 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  2 plat 50 gold for that horse so you better believe it gets a screenshot! I mentioned briefly that I jumped into RIFT Prime, because of course I did. Everybody was talking about it, so as an MMORPG player, it is part of the rules that you have to join in on whatever the newest, shiniest thing is, especially if there is even the slimmest of possibilities that it might actually be fun. 3,391 words.
• Project: Gorgon Acquired. 2018-03-14 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  Project: Gorgon launched on Steam Early Access Tuesday at $40 with a 25% sale, bringing it down to $30 for the first week, which is precisely the price that I hoped it would be. Unlike all the other Early Access games that expect you to pay $30, I know exactly what I’m going to get with Project: Gorgon, and $30 seems like a decent price point to play around with it. 1,031 words.
• MMO Roundup #9. 2018-03-16 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  A weekly diary of MMO news and observations. The Bane Bard 330 outfit, mostly. The boots don’t match! It’s been a very unusual multi-game bonanza lately. Normally I stick with one game at a time, but I’ve been all over the place. This is not a good thing. It means that none of the games I’m currently playing are all that interesting to me, and I’m in that mood where I’m searching for The Next Big Thing. 681 words.
• A Very Morose Writing Update. 2018-03-19 2:14 PM.
  • Writing
  • Process
  • everettrenshaw.com
  
  # Monday, March 19, 2018 I promised myself that I would write about writing twice a month. The last writing post I published was January 17, over two months ago. Brace yourself for a shocking revelation. My writing is not going well. This could explain why I haven’t been rushing to tell you about it twice a month. I am writing this post in Visual Studio Code, because perhaps it will inspire me. I love VSCode. I am writing in Markdown format, and watching the little preview window on the right-hand side update as I type. It’s very satisfying. 1,277 words.
• EverQuest Coirnav Diary, Complete (Probably). 2018-03-19 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  I rolled a Human Druid on the new EverQuest Coirnav progression server Friday. Wilhelm (and many web pages) said I should roll a Necromancer if I wanted to solo, but then I read about Druids on Keen’s page and it sounded more interesting to me. I entered the game. I was first assaulted by that wonderful UI that’s clearly made for someone who has played EverQuest for nineteen years straight, and not someone who has, for all intents and purposes, never seen the game before. Much like my memory of the game from 1999, the UI covered about half of my view. 2,429 words.
• MMO Roundup #10. 2018-03-23 2:30 PM.
  • Administration
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  A weekly diary of MMO news and observations. Secret World Legends, the League of Monster Slayers tree house In my last roundup I said that Secret World Legends wasn’t The Next Big Thing. This week I made a new Templar Sword/Elementalist and now suddenly the game looks fresh and interesting and exciting again. It just goes to show how much a tiny change in play style can make a huge difference in one’s perception of a game. 306 words.
• Secret World Legends Revisited. 2018-03-26 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  It’s another week, so of course it’s time to abandon the last game and switch to another! This time we’ve landed on Secret World Legends in the Great MMORPG Weekly Roulette Wheel. (RIFT Prime and EverQuest were the previous winners.) Not many screenshot choices to pick from because SWL seems very selective about actually saving images to the hard drive. 642 words.
• Why Self-Publishing Might Be A Mistake. 2018-03-28 6:09 PM.
  • Writing
  • Process
  • everettrenshaw.com
  
  Recently I saw a tweet from someone contemplating self-publishing some of their writing. They didn’t sound confident about it. It prompted me to write this post. I’ve thought about this for years, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it was a mistake to self-publish Lute of the Sparrow on Amazon. It was an informative experience, true. But the only thing I really gained from it was the first-hand knowledge and experience of formatting a book for e-publishing. At the time I thought that would be worth something, but in retrospect, it’s not. The process has probably changed entirely since 2011 anyway. 1,515 words.
• MMO Roundup #11. 2018-03-30 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  _These post titles are killing me. I hate titles that don’t mean anything. I don’t know about anyone else, but I almost never click through to read an article if the title doesn’t interest me (my feed reader also shows the first sentence, so that is also a factor). I assume everyone else is the same. But here I am, doing the exact thing I hate. “Generic Post #11.” I might as well call it, “Don’t bother reading this one.” Not even mentioning the SEO implications of a worthless title. Not too many people are going to search for “Generic Post #11.” 508 words.
• Besieged by Kevin Hearne (Audiobook). 2018-03-30 5:32 PM.
  • Books
  • Reviews
  • everettrenshaw.com
  
  Published by Del Rey. Read by Luke Daniels. Produced by Random House Audio. The ancient gods are alive and well in the modern world in this hilarious, action-packed collection of original short stories featuring Atticus O’Sullivan, the handsome, tattooed, 2,000-year-old Irishman with extraordinary magic powers from Kevin Hearne’s New York Times best-selling Iron Druid Chronicles. Listen time: 8 hours, 46 minutes, between 1/26/2018 and sometime in February or March? I finished listening to this a while ago, but forgot to write about it. There isn’t much to say, really. It’s another book in the Iron Druid Chronicles, and if you liked any of the previous entries, you’ll like this one, too. 229 words.
• A Fox Passing Through. 2018-03-31 3:26 PM.
  • Blog
  • thomaskrehbiel.com
  
  Pictures of a fox in my back yard. 233 words.

April, 2018

• Games Played – March 2018. 2018-04-02 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Progression Report
  
  Secret World Legends, Sign of the Times March was an odd month, both in gaming and life. Even the weather was weird. March doesn’t usually feel like the dead of winter where I live. Secret World Legends - 57 hours RIFT Prime (and RIFT) - 48 hours* Kingdom Come: Deliverance - 38 hours Project: Gorgon - 11 hours** EverQuest - 8 hours Final Fantasy XIV - 3 hours Guild Wars 2 - 3 hours Black Desert Online - 2 hours Life is Strange - 2 hours * ManicTime seems to have difficulty distinguishing between RIFT and RIFT Prime, so I’m not entirely sure how much time was in RIFT and how much was in Prime. I don’t think I spent more than a few hours in RIFT Normal, though. 138 words.
• Weeklies – Haven Week. 2018-04-06 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  New title! “Weeklies?” Get it? Like Dailies, but Weeklies! I was actually planning to stop doing these but then Bhagpuss had to go and say that he enjoyed them. :) I’ve been very distracted this week by re-watching the complete Haven series, because @MissByx reminded me that I had not yet seen past season 4, so I started it again from the beginning. I could write volumes about this show but I will try to refrain. The show has almost no connection to the novella it’s based on (which was a noir crime drama, not supernatural in any way), but it captures the spirit of Stephen King’s other supernatural works very well. It is also a textbook example of how building likable, relatable, grounded characters is the most important thing in genre fiction (for me, at least). The style and tone of the show changes quite a lot over the course of its six-but-they-call-it-five seasons, but it still resonated very strongly with me all the way to the end. (The video game tie-in is this: The show’s lead Emily Rose also voiced Elena Fisher in the Uncharted games, and fellow Uncharted actors Nolan North and Claudia Black also appeared in Haven.) 470 words.
• Kingdom Come: Deliverance Completed. 2018-04-09 2:30 PM.
  • Reviews
  • RPG
  • Steam
  
  I’ve been holding off on writing about Kingdom Come: Deliverance until I was done, but finally, after 86.7 hours according to the save game file, and 108 hours according to ManicTime, between February 20 and this past weekend, April 8, I finished the game. An interior in Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Spectacular scenery and lighting is common. I say “finished,” but what I mean is that I reached the The End screen, the point at which the developers believe your characters’ story has ended. Like most “open world” games, there are still many more side quests I could do, and there are a lot of random encounters in the world, but I’m never interested in that stuff once I finish the main story. 2,436 words.
• Weeklies – SWL, Anti-PAX, Batteries. 2018-04-13 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  It’s been a slow week. City of the Sun God, near the Houy Sentinel. My primary game is still Secret World Legends though I didn’t play as much this week. Now that the Morninglight content is already out, I don’t feel any more pressure to “hurry up.” Also, Egypt is a bit dull, particularly the City of the Sun God, which is just a long series of tasks that don’t seem to have much story relevance. Other than the cut scenes, most of your minute-to-minute gameplay is mindlessly standing in front of monsters, pressing the left mouse button over and over again with little or no danger of dying. (Just like Kritika Online!) It’s a far cry from the Egypt of the old The Secret World, which was a constant (albeit annoying) struggle to survive. 790 words.
• FFXIV – End Of Life?. 2018-04-16 3:46 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  I haven’t logged into Final Fantasy XIV for a couple of months now. I hadn’t logged in for a couple of months before that, too. Most times I try to log in, I stare at the screen for a few minutes, then log out. What’s up with that? To be honest, I think I’ve reached the point I get to in every MMORPG’s lifetime when I’ve consumed all of the endgame content that I’m interested in. Previously, this has happened in RIFT and … well, that’s it, I think. I’ve left every other MMORPG from lack of interest rather than lack of content. 689 words.
• Weeklies – ESO, SWL. 2018-04-20 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  Yikes, April is almost over already. I finished Secret World Legends’ Red Sun, Black Sand and left Egypt behind. I’m taking a break for a while. This past weekend I decided to try to play through the Morrowind content in ESO. It took four tries, but I finally got past the first meeting with Vivec and into the rest of the story. (I had a hard time finding a character I wanted to play.) I knew reports had indicated it was short, but I was still a bit surprised to finish the entire Morrowind expansion story in 5 1/2 hours*. As per usual, I recorded everything and it will probably end up on my YouTube channel. I’m also working on a post about it. 302 words.
• GW2 – LW4, Ep 2, A Bug In The System (Spoilers). 2018-04-23 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  I finally finished Guild Wars 2’s Living World Season 4, Episode 2, “A Bug In The System” on Friday night. So here’s the quarterly post where I yell at Guild Wars 2 again for making me incredibly angry when I play it. This scenic overview looked better in the game than in this screenshot. It was the most disjointed episode I can remember, but I’ll concede it was probably because of the way I played it. The episode consists of five “chapters.” I played the first three chapters all in a row (because you have to, grumble, grumble) back in March. I started into the fourth “chapter,” the one where you have to wander all over the new Sandswept Isles map and destroy shield generators, but I stopped in frustrated disgust (because I really did not care for the maze-like, mob-packed map or the lack of clear directions about where to go) and left the game for a month. Then I went back into the game and finished the shield generator bit over several non-contiguous days last week, and played the final chapter on Friday night. 1,365 words.
• ESO – Morrowind Story (Spoilers). 2018-04-25 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  I finished up the Morrowind storyline in Elder Scrolls Online last week. I liked it. With the usual ESO caveats. Because even living gods who can levitate moonlets need someone to run errands now and then. I’m not entirely sure what to call Morrowind. Is it DLC? Is it an Expansion? It’s not big enough to deserve the title “Expansion” if that’s what they are calling it, but it’s also a distinctly different entity from the DLC that is normally in the Crown Store, because you had to buy it separately. Oh, here it is: They call them “Chapters.” 1,841 words.
• North and South Korea. 2018-04-27 11:15 AM.
  • Politics
  • swampip.com
  
  The huge news out of the Koreas this morning definitely deserves a mention for posterity: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/north-and-south-korea-agree-to-work-toward-common-goal-of-denuclearization/2018/04/27/7dcb03d6-4981-11e8-8082-105a446d19b8_story.html https://www.cnn.com/asia/live-news/north-korea-south-korea-summit-intl/index.html http://www.foxnews.com/world/2018/04/27/kim-jong-un-pens-message-peace-in-south-koreas-peace-house.html The first thing I thought was: Wow there is going to be a whole lot of cognitive dissonance happening on Twitter today, and a whole bunch of activists working overtime to spin this news for or against their favored elected officials. Even I am experiencing cognitive dissonance. There is no question this is a solid win for the Trump administration, and I have no idea how it could possibly have happened, given all the previous news. 94 words.
• Weeklies – Oligarchgate (The One About Daybreak). 2018-04-27 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  Not much gaming to report this week. I’m on a Secret World Legends break. I’ve mainly been dabbling in Elder Scrolls Online (trying to record the Orsinium storyline; much like with Morrowind, I messed up and have to restart it). Since @Sypster has been talking up Dungeons & Dragons Online for a while, I thought I would check it out again myself. I’ve played DDO before, and enjoyed it, but I haven’t had it installed in years (computer forensic evidence suggests since 2015). So I downloaded it and tried to login. It won’t let me play using the SSG account I use for LotRO. It tells me I need a subscription. It’s a free-to-play game. DDO isn’t listed on my SSG account and I can’t find any way to add it. I had to create a new SSG account to play DDO, which apparently is what they recommend now. That is dumb. My characters weren’t very high level and I can’t even remember what classes they were, but I didn’t think they deserved to be erased completely. Anyway I ended up playing for about 20 minutes and, while I remembered why I enjoyed it, there are plenty of other enjoyable games for me to play right now. 861 words.

May, 2018

• Monthly Recap – April 2018. 2018-05-02 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Podcast
  • Roundup
  • Videos
  
  _I’m altering the format for this post a bit. Previously I just recorded the games I’d been playing, for no discernible reason. Now I’m going to add in a bunch of cross-media promotion so people have an even bigger reason to skip it. _ My ESO Nightblade in Glenumbra - another example of how screenshots look awful during most games’ night cycle. 658 words.
• Week End – EQ Royale, New World. 2018-05-05 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  I’m moving this post to Saturday so I can mention stuff that happens on Friday, which previously fell through the cracks. (Of course nothing happened on Friday this week.) The MMO news and blogging world dries up completely on weekends so it’s a better time for recaps anyway. My Week It’s been a slow gaming week for me. I played a little bit of ESO, a little bit of DDO, and, for the first time, a little bit of a Steam sale game I bought in December 2015 called Ryse: Son of Rome. It’s a bombastic third-person action RPG that so far I would characterize as “okay.” 490 words.
• The First Time I Played Fortnite Battle Royale. 2018-05-07 2:30 PM.
  • MMO
  • Reviews
  
  Fortnite was in the news last week. The real news, that is, not just the MMO news. Both The New York Times and The Guardian mentioned it. But I’m not here to talk about those articles. They just reminded me of those heady days when I played Fortnite Battle Royale myself. Heady day, I mean. Because I only played for one day. One match, in fact, on that one day.* It didn’t click with me. 1,846 words.
• Fortnite, The Followup. 2018-05-09 2:30 PM.
  • MMO
  • Reviews
  
  After writing my last post on Fortnite, I played over a dozen more games and now I have a somewhat more nuanced opinion about it. To respond a little bit to Jeromai’s comment, I think I get it now. Kind of. At least I have some understanding of the appeal of the battle royale genre in general and Fortnite in particular. Two major things clicked into place, which I’ll detail below. Being a jaded old bitter gamer, though, I had to power through three to five “meh whatever” games before I started to feel any compulsion to play more. Being a plain old old gamer with no desire to spend 24/7 practicing, I’m also pretty sure I’ve already plateaued after less than a week, and now I have nowhere to go but into frustrated, “I’m just not good enough to play this” territory. 2,426 words.
• Hostages From North Korea Released. 2018-05-09 4:34 PM.
  • Politics
  • swampip.com
  
  Another post just to mark the event that three American hostages are being released from North Korea today: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/05/09/3-americans-detained-in-north-korea-in-good-health-and-on-their-way-back-to-us-trump-says.html https://abcnews.go.com/International/trump-americans-held-north-korea-back-us/story?id=54905339 I wondered a while back if these hostages had anything to do with North Korea’s sudden willingness to bargain. What has the U.S. given up to get these hostages back? Or did the U.S. deliver some kind of private ultimatum that forced North Korea to release the hostages and come to the table? Did the U.S. have anything at all to do with it? I don’t know, but I’ll be curious to find out the answers someday. 97 words.
• Week End – Conan Exiles, Wild West Online. 2018-05-12 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  My Week Last weekend I tried Fortnite Battle Royale for a second time and I haven’t played much else this week. It was a brand new gaming experience for me and that pretty much trumps everything else when I’m in the doldrums of “every game I own is boring” that dominates roughly 50% of any given year. And hey, it’s free! Admittedly, I had more fun spectating and making videos than I did actually playing the game. Also, I kind of stopped playing already, since, being an adult, I (and my sore finger joints) can’t commit to the mandatory 500 minimum hours of practice time required to keep up. And once the thrill of discovery is over, there is not much fun in playing battle royale without the mindset of playing to win. 997 words.
• Ryse: Son of Rome. 2018-05-14 2:30 PM.
  • Reviews
  • Single-Player
  
  You play Marius, a Roman soldier with a gruff Sean Bean-style accent. The main reason to play Ryse: Son of Rome is because you bought it for $7 in a Steam sale three years ago, and you’re bored of everything else and desperate for something-anything-new and interesting to play. (Without the bother and expense of spending $60+ on actual new games.) That being said, it’s actually not a bad game. 1,244 words.
• Eurovision 2018. 2018-05-14 7:32 PM.
  • Blog
  • thomaskrehbiel.com
  
  My thoughts after watching the Eurovision Song Contest for the first time. 1,851 words.
• FFXIV – Story’s End. 2018-05-16 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  My Final Fantasy XIV subscription runs out this weekend, and I’m not planning to renew it. (I said that last time, too, but this time I really mean it!) I want to clarify my last post a little bit. I said that I had “run out of endgame content,” but after thinking about it a while, that isn’t exactly what I meant to say. A more appropriate analogy would be that my FFXIV character feels like she’s nearing the end of her story. 685 words.
• Week End – Albion, Phoebes. 2018-05-19 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  A summary of news and observations from this past week. My Week The ring and middle fingers of my left hand have been sore so I’ve been trying to lay off of mouse-and-keyboard gaming for a bit. (It helps that none of my current games are speaking to me right now.) I installed Bioshock Remastered and have been casually playing through it again on Easy mode with a controller. I also played a bit of The Forest on a controller, which I discovered had finally launched for reals (it’s a great game, and still has one of my favorite building systems). 882 words.
• DDO Likes and Dislikes. 2018-05-21 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Reviews
  
  I played a few more hours of Dungeons and Dragons Online over the weekend, continuing to start over from scratch since I couldn’t get to my previous characters after the switchover to Standing Stone Game. It’s kind of a relaxing game for me right now because it requires no thought or effort. I just click, click, click and look at the pretty pictures on the screen as they go by. 764 words.
• The Tragic End Of A Bird Nest. 2018-05-22 5:06 PM.
  • Writing
  • everettrenshaw.com
  
  A couple of “flycatcher” birds returned this year to nest outside my back door. (I don’t know their exact species but I think they might be Eastern phoebes.) I watched in fascination as four little baby birds grew up in the nest this Spring. I took tons of pictures of them. I setup a streaming webcam so I could watch and listen to them from my computer room. (The parents would chirp and scold me if I stood at the door to watch.) I even figured out how to stream an image from my DLSR camera fitted with a telephoto lens. 1,639 words.
• Scourged by Kevin Hearne (2018, Audiobook). 2018-05-24 12:28 PM.
  • Books
  • Reviews
  • everettrenshaw.com
  
  Published by Del Rey. Read by Luke Daniels. Produced by Random House Audio. Unchained from fate, the Norse gods Loki and Hel are ready to unleash Ragnarok, a.k.a. the Apocalypse, upon the earth. They’ve made allies on the darker side of many pantheons, and there’s a globe-spanning battle brewing that ancient Druid Atticus O’Sullivan will be hard-pressed to survive, much less win. Listen time: About 9 hours, 5/22-23. (At 120% speed.) 599 words.
• The Bear and the Nightingale (2017, Sample) by Katherine Arden. 2018-05-25 4:06 PM.
  • Books
  • Reviews
  • everettrenshaw.com
  
  Published by Del Rey. A magical debut novel for listeners of Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, and Neil Gaiman’s myth-rich fantasies, The Bear and the Nightingale spins an irresistible spell as it announces the arrival of a singular talent with a gorgeous voice. I have this idea that I will try to read a sample of a Kindle book every day or at least a few times a week for a while. I don’t read enough, but I can’t really bring myself to buy Kindle books if I’m not sure that I’m going to like it and read the whole thing from start to finish. I feel pretty guilty if I buy a book but then don’t like the first chapter, and I feel pretty resentful when I try to read a whole book that I don’t like. So I’ll just take advantage of these free Kindle samples while they’re available. 566 words.
• GDPR Compliance Missive. 2018-05-25 4:33 PM.
  • Blog
  
  Today, May 25th (a Friday, amusingly enough for those of us who know that Friday is the worst day to deploy new things), is the day that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect for the European Union, so, since I have a web site on The Internet, and I know there are Europeans who occasionally visit this site, and supposedly I’m a professional in the information technology field, I wanted to write about it quickly. 1,697 words.
• Week End – Summerset, FFXIV 4.3. 2018-05-26 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  News and observations from the past week. Fort Frolic from BioShock Remastered. In The News Steam is (allegedly) cracking down on sexytime cartoon games. I say “allegedly” only because I personally couldn’t confirm any official communications from Valve, I only read the second-hand reports from potentially affected developers. This caused a bit of an uproar in the Twitterverse. My only two cents is that this is an example of one of the many universal truths in life: You can choose to make an artistic statement or you can choose to make money, but very rarely can you choose both. Especially when you hitch your business wagon to someone else’s selling platform, be it Steam, YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, Facebook, Patreon, network television, or any of a million other examples, you inevitably run into boundaries and limitations, and they can change on a whim. 584 words.
• What the Heck is Dauntless. 2018-05-29 4:42 PM.
  • MMO
  
  Over the Memorial Day weekend here in the U.S. everyone was talking about Dauntless, or more accurately, talking about the queues that made it impossible to play Dauntless. It made me wonder: What the heck is Dauntless? Well, it’s a co-op action RPG coming to PC in 2018. And I guess that’s all we need to know to create hordes of stampeding fans hyped with excitement about it. Or at least, that’s what their web site would lead us to believe, because the only other clue we get before the big red “Download Game” button is: “Battle ferocious Behemoths, craft powerful weapons, and forge your legend in the Shattered Isles.” 936 words.

June, 2018

• Week End – Fallout 76, Because SEO. 2018-06-02 2:55 PM.
  • MMO
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  A summary of news and observations from the week. I loaded Dauntless (and FRAPS) a second time just to take a screenshot for this post. In The News It’s been an incredibly bleak week for news, to my eye. Maybe everyone took the whole week off, because Monday was a holiday here in the US. 642 words.
• Monthly Recap – May 2018. 2018-06-04 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  The obligatory screenshot from the beginning of BioShock. Games Played It’s been a really slow month for gaming. BioShock Remastered, 13 hours. Haven’t quite reached the end yet as my attention got diverted elsewhere. Fortnite, 10 hours. I enjoyed it but it doesn’t suit my non-competitive lifestyle. Ryse: Son of Rome, 7 hours. Quick and satisfying. Dungeons and Dragons Online, 7 hours. Great for vegging out, but like most older games, terrible if you want to read any of the text on the screen. The Forest, 3 hours. A great, atmospheric, immersive forest environment exploration and survival game that deserves more time than I give it. Podcast RSS Feed 326 words.
• The Expanse Re-Watch – S1E01, Dulcinea. 2018-06-05 2:30 PM.
  • Television
  • everettrenshaw.com
  
  I started to write a blog post about The Expanse Season 3, Episode 7 (Delta-V). That episode seemed to be the beginning of a brand new story arc, perhaps the start of a new book in the source material. I didn’t particularly care for the episode, and I ended up ranting about all the things I didn’t like about The Expanse, especially in Season 3. I’m fully aware that others love this show and praise it endlessly, and most consider Season 3 to be the best one yet, while I’m over here struggling to find a single thing to hold onto and enjoy. I wondered what I was missing. Surely I must be missing something? 2,943 words.
• The Expanse Re-Watch – S1E02, The Big Empty. 2018-06-07 2:30 PM.
  • Television
  • everettrenshaw.com
  
  Join me as I re-watch The Expanse, Season 1, to try to find out where the show went wrong for me. Summary I’ve decided that I’m just going to quote Wikipedia’s brief episode summaries here, instead of spending all of my time writing my own summaries. The point of these posts is to explore what I think of the episodes, not retell the episodes. The Big Empty was written by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, and directed by Terry McDonough. I am noting the writers and directors, by the way, to see if I notice any patterns in which writers or directors create the episodes I like or dislike. 1,630 words.
• Week End – Steam Flood. 2018-06-09 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Steam
  
  News and observations from the past week. I keep thinking I should write real posts about stuff, but I’m having a hard time finding anything that interests me enough to write more than a few sentences. Dark Souls Remastered. It bugs me but also amuses me that the featured image I put in these posts doesn’t match the title. 660 words.
• E3 – Anthem, Sekiro, Cyberpunk 2077, Fallout 76. 2018-06-11 2:30 PM.
  • Musings
  
  Fine! I’ll write something about the E3s and whatnot. I’m not a big fan of these kinds of game conferences but I actually sat down and watched some showcases this weekend, because really, who among us can honestly say they’d pass up a chance to write snarky tweets and ruin people’s fun on the Internet. I missed most of the EA show on Friday. I started watching right before the Anthem gameplay footage, which was followed by approximately 20 continuous hours of FIFA gameplay. 895 words.
• E3 – Square Enix, Ubisoft, Sony. 2018-06-13 2:30 PM.
  • Consoles
  • Musings
  
  I watched the Square Enix showcase but it left little impression on me. Unlike seemingly everyone else, though, I liked that it was just a series of trailers and videos, and not one of those awkward live presentations in front of a confused audience. I just feel like in the year 2018, we should have evolved beyond the 90s-Steve Jobs-cult-of-personality-walking-around-on-stage phase of our lives. Although the guy from Bethesda talking about Fallout 76 actually was pretty entertaining. I’ll make one exception for him I guess, if I could remember his name. Everybody else sounded, though, like a corporate robot talking about PowerPoint slides, graphs, and charts, and sucked every bit of fun out of the games they were supposed to be excited about, because it’s so, so obvious that it’s just numbers on a spreadsheet to them. 1,499 words.
• Week End – Wall-to-Wall E3. 2018-06-16 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  In The News I have to retract last week’s applause for Valve’s Libertarian stance on content. I started to write a blog post about this, but Wilhelm said everything I was going to say. They completely and comically reversed their “no filters” stance and replaced it with “we’ll take down whatever we personally don’t like and call it trolling.” It’s the right move from a business and PR perspective, probably, but whatever respect I had for what I interpreted as a principled we-trust-the-customers-to-decide stand last week is now completely gone. I certainly never would have bought Active Shooter, but pulling that game while leaving thousands of other murder simulators on the store could not be any more arbitrary. 1,088 words.
• On Blogging More. 2018-06-18 2:30 PM.
  • Blog
  • Musings
  • Writing
  
  This is an amalgamation of an old draft from March 2017 that I never got around to publishing, probably because I never found a picture for it, and some new thoughts because the subject came up again this past week. My keyboard, stylistically distorted purely for artistic effect, not at all to mask the dust and dirt that showed up because of the side lighting angle. 2,366 words.
• Week End – WHO Pitch Forks. 2018-06-23 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  Weekly summary of news and observations. I should really copy and paste a standard template for this opening because I have to type it from memory every time and I think it subtly changes every week. In The News There’s been some hubbub about the World Health Organization’s gaming disorder classification. The WHO added “gaming disorder” to the “International Classification of Diseases,” and every gamer who has been on the defensive about that kind of thing since the 90s got out their pitch forks and torches. I personally think any gamer who is actually honest with themselves can probably remember a time when they made a choice to play a game instead of doing something more important instead, so denying that a “gaming disorder” could exist to the point that it impairs a person’s life seems silly to me. Of course someone could hurt their life by playing too many games. I think in this case it’s largely an argument over semantics. Addictive personalities and compulsive disorders are definitely a real thing, but whether you’re addicted to gaming or something else is probably irrelevant, so I imagine the objection here is singling out “gaming” as more of a trigger than anything else. 712 words.
• Controller Woes: Aging and D-Pads. 2018-06-25 2:30 PM.
  • Hardware
  • Musings
  
  I’ve been playing a lot of Dark Souls Remastered lately, which requires playing on a controller. Technically you can play the game with mouse-and-keyboard on PC (and it’s even easier in the Remastered edition) but the control scheme is completely alien to any other mouse-and-keyboard game, and it takes a lot of getting used to, and it’s just not worth the effort for one game. Even the controller scheme takes a fair amount practicing and learning, even if you’re used to using controller. 915 words.
• Virginia Primary Results. 2018-06-26 5:51 PM.
  • Politics
  • swampip.com
  
  Guys! It’s time to really put our money where our mouth is and get out there and really vote to let everyone know because 2018 is going to be such a huge change year and … And… Okay, you caught me, I completely forgot about the Virginia primaries. Today, I thought, Oh yeah! I should start looking into that because I saw a few people mention voting on Twitter. Well, it turns out the Virginia primaries were on June 12, precisely two weeks ago today. Suffice it to say, I’m not following daily news anymore, nationally or locally, I’m not paying any attention to whatever the daily outrage is, I’m not on Facebook very much, I’m in my own world doing my own thing and it’s very stress-free. 233 words.
• Dark Souls Remastered Edition. 2018-06-27 2:30 PM.
  • Reviews
  
  To the dismay of I’m sure most people on the Internet, I could write for days about how much Dark Souls pitches exactly into my wheelhouse as a game (mixed metaphor used intentionally because it’s funny), but I’ll try to keep this post focused on just what is different in the PC version of the Dark Souls Remastered edition. In short: There aren’t that many differences. But there are some. As a caveat, I haven’t completed the entire game just yet. But I’m pretty close. I have just three bosses remaining at the time of this writing: Kalameet, Manus, and Gwyn. I’ve spent over 50 hours in the game now and I feel like I have a pretty good handle on the changes. 1,368 words.
• Week End – Trion, GW2. 2018-06-30 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  Weekly news and observations. In The News In surprise news, Trion acquired Gazillion’s assets. It’s not all that surprising, actually. After their implosion, I would think Gazillion was selling everything at a deep discount, so why not pick up a whole library of a competitor’s source code? Trion also seems to be trying to turn themselves into something like SpatialOS, which, again, why not? It sounds like they’ll be renting out the technology they already use and maintain for their own games. The gaming industry is more about building game engines now than building games anyway. It’s turning into another record industry, where the artists (the game makers in this case) are the least important part. (Note: That might be a cynical viewpoint.) 672 words.

July, 2018

• Monthly Recap – June 2018. 2018-07-02 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Single-Player
  • Steam
  
  Games Played It’s true, I have a nearly limitless supply of images from Dark Souls to put into my posts. Dark Souls Remastered, 65 hours. It feels like I’ve played a lot more than this, actually. I now know this is beyond the limit of how much I can play a controller game in a month. (I remember once thinking that controller games were easier on my hands than WASD mouse-and-keyboard games, boy was *that* wrong.) The Walking Dead, Season Two, 9 hours. I finally played this Telltale game, some four years after buying it, and some five years after playing the first season, because I was looking for something to do this past weekend that didn’t require much hand activity. The Walking Dead, Season One (400 Days DLC), 2 hours. I realized I never got the 400 Days DLC for the first game so I played through that, too. I *should* have played it before Season Two, but of course I didn’t. Dark Souls III, 2 hours. I started trying to make a new character so I can finish my The Ringed City DLC playthrough, but I abandoned it to rest my hands. Fallout 1, 1 hour. Another game I tried to play because it required only mouse clicking and no WASD movement, but despite loving the game in 1997, it’s a bit of a snooze-fest in 2018. Guild Wars 2, 1 hour. I played the first part of the Living World Season 4, Episode 3, which was the entirety of my MMORPG gameplay for the entire month. I found yet another disadvantage of console gaming because I can’t track anything I play there. I just have to guesstimate that I played a few hours of Demon’s Souls on the PS3 this month, which I also abandoned to rest my hands. 331 words.
• GW2 – Not Forewarned Enough. 2018-07-04 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  After finishing the first part of Living World Season 4, Episode 3, Seized, last week I said that everything had already been said about GW2’s Living World and nothing had changed. I muttered under my breath a lot about that first part-both the story and gameplay-but to be far it was far better than the first part of LW4 Episode 1, which was the video game equivalent of riding in a hot car with a screaming toddler. 2,236 words.
• GW2 – Writers Fired. 2018-07-06 2:30 PM.
  • Musings
  
  Given recent unexpected events at ArenaNet, I feel pretty awful about my last post on GW2. I’ve expressed displeasure over ArenaNet’s handling of story and gameplay plenty of times here which is exactly the kind of thing that led to the firing of two ArenaNet writers. So I wanted to say a couple of things. Oddly contrite-looking Commander screenshot seems appropriate here. First of all, I absolutely respect any game writer or developer’s right to tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about, that I don’t understand the challenges associated with writing for a game, etc., etc. I don’t know what it’s like to write for a game, and I’m quite sure it’s entirely different from writing a book or writing a blog. I try to keep that kind of thing in mind when I’m commenting on games but sometimes I forget. 772 words.
• Week End – Defiance 2050 I guess?. 2018-07-07 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  In The News Of course the big controversy of the week was that whole thing with ArenaNet and the influencer and the two writers, which I won’t rehash here. I kind of wish I hadn’t said anything yesterday, because it was “too soon.” I only meant to say I felt kind of guilty about having just written a scathing post about the game. Maybe I’ll revisit it in a few weeks, because I do think there are a lot of different lessons to be learned from the entire catastrophe. 502 words.
• Blaugust Reborn Is Happening. 2018-07-10 2:30 PM.
  • Community
  
  Belghast is rebooting Blaugust, so head on over there for all the details (and here for more details). All the cool kids are doing it. I probably won’t be able to participate formally, but I’m sure I’ll post something during the month and I’ll cheer everyone on from the sidelines. This is a screenshot of a cryptic book from Secret World Legends, which is supposed to sort of vaguely remind one of the topic of blogging when one doesn’t have any better images around. 243 words.
• Demon’s Souls, Briefly. 2018-07-11 2:30 PM.
  • Reviews
  • Videos
  
  As I wait for my hands and fingers and thumbs to regenerate themselves, which is taking forever-frankly at this point I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever be able to play an action game with a controller ever again-I thought I would try to injure my hands more by typing up a bit about Demon’s Souls. If nothing else, The Nexus has a lot more artistic style than Firelink Shrine. 978 words.
• Week End – A Pretty Boring Week. 2018-07-14 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  News and observations from the week. In The News It’s been another dead week, as far as I can tell. One of these days I’d love to do a statistical analysis to see just what percentage of news articles are about games still in development. I bet it would approach 50%. Last weekend, Tennocon, the Warframe fan conference, happened. The biggest news I remember hearing was Warframe coming to the Switch. That wacky Switch thing seems just crazy enough to work. It’s slowly but steadily gaining momentum month after month. 334 words.
• BioShock Remastered. 2018-07-16 2:30 PM.
  • Single-Player
  
  Way back in May I was looking for an easy game to play*, and I found the Remastered editions of BioShock and BioShock 2 in my Steam library. They appeared there for free when those editions were released, because I owned the original games. My original plan was to play BioShock 2, because I have owned it since the Christmas sale of 2010 and have yet to play it, but I didn’t remember the original story very well so I started up the first game instead. 831 words.
• Week End – WoW 8.0. 2018-07-21 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  Weekly news and observations. In The News The biggest news this week is the World of Warcraft 8.0 pre-expansion patch dropping Tuesday. I don’t have a WoW subscription and have no plans to play this expansion (which doesn’t actually begin until next month), at least not right away. It’s tempting to jump in with all the excitement at launch time, but I haven’t played WoW since about two weeks after the last expansion, and I know I’ll only play this expansion for about two weeks before running into the “I’ve done all of this before” wall, so I’ll just save myself the $65 this time around. Not to mention I can’t play games right now anyway, see below. 455 words.
• WoW – Questioning My Belonging In MMORPGs. 2018-07-24 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  MMORPG players are abuzz about World of Warcraft’s next expansion, Battle for Azeroth, which begins next month. (There are too many posts to link here; throw a dart at the blogosphere and you’ll find a post on Battle for Azeroth preparations.) The last character I played in unsubscribed WoW: A level 3 Goblin, c. 2017 Nothing makes me puzzle over my association with the MMORPG genre more than a World of Warcraft expansion. Nothing makes me feel so out of place-so much like an outsider, like I don’t fit in with the MMORPG player crowd. 1,192 words.
• Week End – Thorny Battle. 2018-07-28 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  In The News Nobody is talking about anything except World of Warcraft’s “War of Thorns” event. It’s either the greatest thing ever, or the worst thing ever, or some variation in between, depending on where you look. However, some people are talking about the newest update to No Man’s Sky. I’ve been tempted to get this game forever, but I’m really hesitant to get a game so dependent on procedurally-generated worlds, even at a discounted Steam price of $30. I didn’t care for Trove’s procedurally-generated worlds too much. 259 words.
• Flipping The Tables For Blaugust. 2018-07-29 1:39 PM.
  • Blog
  • Writing
  
  I’ve belatedly decided to officially participate in the Blaugust extravaganza. I wasn’t going to because frankly I didn’t think I’d be able to write 31 posts in August. (I still don’t think I will.) But late this past week I stumbled upon some information that I completely missed the first time: You don’t actually have to write 31 posts to participate. I figure that even in my crippled state I should be able to manage five or ten posts. 272 words.
• Primary Care Doctors. 2018-07-30 12:42 PM.
  • Blog
  • Musings
  
  This afternoon I have an appointment with a new primary care doctor, one I’ve never seen before. I had no choice but to select a new one because I had to buy new insurance this year, and my old doctor wasn’t “in the network.” It took three months to get this appointment. I don’t like doctors even on a good day. Especially “primary care” doctors. As far as I can tell, the main goal of this type of doctor is to shove you out the office door as fast as possible with the most generic of healthcare solutions that they can think of: “Here, take this generic prescription and come back in a couple weeks if your problem’s not better.” That appears to be the main thing they teach you in primary care doctor school. 347 words.
• The Medical Report. 2018-07-31 3:11 PM.
  • Blog
  • Musings
  
  The very brief medical news is: Yesterday, the doctor was considerably more concerned about my high blood pressure than my hands. I’ll be starting on some new medication for it. I have a followup appointment Wednesday morning where bloodwork will be done and they will see if my pressure is still in what they casually referred to as the “stroke zone.” They did an EKG and I got the distinct impression that if the readings had gone poorly, I might very well have been strapped to a gurney and carted to a hospital right then. But apparently the result was acceptable. 367 words.

August, 2018

• Blaugust Introduction – Blaugust 1. 2018-08-01 7:22 PM.
  • Blog
  • Musings
  
  This is my back yard and the raucous neighbors who frequently visit. Today is the first day of Blaugust. I thought I would start by introducing myself, something I probably should have done a long time ago. Hi! I’m a middle-aged guy who lives alone in a somewhat rural-ish house with a dog and a cat. I’m “in my 40s,” though in truth I’m now a lot closer to 50 than I would care to admit. I was married for a time, but now I’m divorced. I don’t have any kids. I’m an INTP and/or an INFP depending on my mood when I take that test. 659 words.
• Gaming Goals Aren’t Fun For Me – Blaugust 2. 2018-08-02 2:59 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  I’ve noticed over the years that a lot of bloggers post their gaming goals at the start of every month. I’ve always found this both fascinating and puzzling. I myself can’t think of a time when I’ve ever made long-term planning goals for any games I’m playing. My goal-all the time, every month, every day, every time I log into any game-is to experience something fun or interesting or entertaining or challenging or surprising. 342 words.
• Blog Post Topic Ideas. 2018-08-02 7:00 PM.
  • Blog
  • Discussion
  
  I know bloggers are always in search of topics to write about, so I thought I would throw out some ideas here at the start of Blaugust. Then I noticed some others doing that. Then I noticed topic brainstorming is actually on the schedule for the first week. Reading comprehension, yay! Anyway a__lmost all of these are based on posts that are sitting in my Drafts folder unfinished right now. What do you use Twitter for? Is it a conversation platform? Is it a notification platform? Is it safe? How do you use retweets and favorites? 726 words.
• Monthly Recap – July 2018. 2018-08-03 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  If you’re just joining us, I use the free version of a program called ManicTime to track all the games I play every month. I’ve found it to be a lot more accurate than Steam, especially for the games that I don’t run through Steam. I’m not sure I can really explain why I track this information, though. I guess so I have a record of what I’m playing, in case I ever want to look back and see. 421 words.
• The Cataract Report – Blaugust 3. 2018-08-03 8:30 PM.
  • Blog
  • Musings
  
  Not from today, but from 2010, the last time I saw an eye doctor before 2018. This morning I finally saw the cataract specialist. It’s been about five months since the optometrist told me I had a cataract. It looks like I never wrote a full post about that. No Blaugust back then. :) The delay was mostly because of having to meet insurance requirements: To make a long story short, I have new insurance this year, and that insurance requires a referral from my primary care doctor, but I had to find a new primary care doctor because my old one was not in the new insurance network, all of which adds up to a lot of waiting for appointments. (There was also a little bit of me delaying making the appointments because I hate doing that.) 774 words.
• Those WoW Cinematics – Blaugust 4. 2018-08-04 2:16 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  From Legion, Helheim Normally each Saturday I post a summary of interesting gaming news and events from my week. But this week, I haven’t seen any gaming stories of interest, and I’ve already posted a number of things about myself for Blaugust. Instead, this morning I thought I would write about these wacky World of Warcraft cinematics all the kids are talking about. Specifically, Warbringer Jaina, Warbringer Sylvanas, and Old Soldier. 335 words.
• New Writing Process Didn’t Work – Blaugust 5. 2018-08-05 11:44 AM.
  • Blog
  • Musings
  • Writing
  
  This photo of boats is completely relevant to this post! I think I’ve collected enough observational data now to abandon my new writing process. At first it was new and invigorating, but after a week it’s kind of irritating and not any better or faster. For posterity, here’s what I did: I turned on the webcam and recorded myself talking for about 7 or 8 minutes. I played back the video with VLC and set the playback speed slightly slower, and transcribed what I said into a Scrivener document. Then I copied the transcription into another Scrivener document and edited it into a blog post. I read the final post out loud several times to complete the editing process. Then I copied it into WordPress, added a picture, and published it almost immediately. 507 words.
• I Wish EQ2 Would Explain More – Blaugust 6. 2018-08-06 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  EverQuest II would probably rank second on my list of MMORPGs that I wish was easier for me to get into and play more (below Lord of the Rings Online). But they sure don’t make much of effort to accommodate new or returning players. The longest I’ve ever played EverQuest II is leveling a Warden up into the 40s five years ago. Whenever I return to that character, it’s almost impossible to figure out how to play the game again, because EQ2 follows the “more-is-more” philosophy of giving out hotbar abilities every character level. If you don’t play regularly, it’s pretty hard to comprehend the sheer magnitude of hotbar skills given to you, when to use them, or whether to use them at all. 1,027 words.
• Back Yard Bird-Watching – Blaugust 7. 2018-08-07 11:22 PM.
  • Blog
  • Musings
  
  The classic and ubiquitous American Robin from many years ago at a different house. My dad was an avid backyard bird-watcher. He would setup bird feeders and watch all the wildlife that showed up through binoculars from the living room. In the early days of video cameras, this was back in the 80s, I remember he’d setup one of those monstrous suitcase-sized VHS camcorders on a tripod to record birds at the feeders. 690 words.
• The Hand Report – Blaugust 8. 2018-08-08 8:24 PM.
  • Blog
  • Musings
  
  This morning I went to another doctor’s appointment, the fourth one in the last nine days. This time I went to see a hand specialist, as I had been referred from my primary care doctor. I was amazed to be able to get an appointment to see him two days after calling. It’s interesting to see the kind of people you find in waiting rooms. Based on my meager experience the last couple of weeks, doctor’s offices seems to be the social hotspot for people over 60. Today an entourage of four older folks were in the waiting room to help one of their number with an appointment for an injured arm. I listened to them talk amongst themselves about how to fill out the medical history forms. “She has trouble with depression doesn’t she? She doesn’t want them to know about that though. How much does she weigh?” This and many other very private subjects were broadcast throughout the waiting room for anyone to hear. It was quite funny. Waiting rooms: Great places to hang out if you want to steal identities. 805 words.
• Nineties News Nostalgia on Netflix – Blaugust 9. 2018-08-09 7:48 PM.
  • Blog
  • Media
  • Musings
  
   I just finished watching the American Crime Story: The People Versus O.J. Simpson series on Netflix. It’s pretty good. I’m not sure it deserved to win any Emmys, but I enjoyed it anyway, especially the second half of the series. I didn’t remember a lot of the twists and turns. I didn’t see much of anything about the whole OJ Trial when it happened. I remember the basic framework of it: The Bronco, the trial, the gloves, the acquittal. Oops, spoiler alert! Anyway I didn’t pay any attention to the details at the time. For example, I never knew that OJ’s friend is the same Kardashian that spawned all the Kardashians we know and love today. 297 words.
• More Netflix Documentaries – Blaugust 10. 2018-08-10 6:13 PM.
  • Blog
  • Media
  
  You might have noticed I don’t post a lot about games here, and that’s mostly because I haven’t played much of anything in the last month. So the “here’s what I played last night” style of post is completely off the table for me so far in Blaugust. It makes it kind of hard to think of something to say. :) I could tell you what I watched last night, which was a Netflix documentary called Evil Genius: The True Story of America’s Most Diabolical Bank Heist. I had never heard of the so-called “pizza bomber” before, and the 4-part series fascinated me, in the same way that one is fascinated watching a train wreck. I don’t often watch documentaries about recent events (though I suppose one could argue that 2003 isn’t exactly “recent” anymore), and I was struck by how strange and unsettling it was to see a lot of HD footage. Documentary footage is supposed to be grainy restored film or old photographs moving around with Ken Burns’ panning and zooming effects. 550 words.
• My Oldest Computer Files – Blaugust 11. 2018-08-11 2:30 PM.
  • Blog
  • Musings
  
  My dog likes to be involved with everything. They say everything’s been written before and there’s nothing new to write on a gaming blog. Well, okay, I say that, because I’m lazy and not very motivated. I keep looking at all the mountains of writing prompts floating around Blaugust, including the ones I wrote, and thinking, “Meh, I’m just not interested in writing about that today.” 880 words.
• Diablo III for the First Time – Blaugust 12. 2018-08-12 4:44 PM.
  • Reviews
  • Single-Player
  
  The quest for non-WASD games to play using only the right hand on the mouse inevitably leads to either strategy games or isometric action RPGs. I’ve been through a number of strategy games already and I just can’t get into them right now. In the past, I’ve turned to Path of Exile in this kind of situation (because it’s free), but this time I decided to try out the trial version of Diablo III for the very first time. 847 words.
• Battle for Azeroth Impulse Buy – Blaugust 13. 2018-08-13 3:19 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  It was probably inevitable. I went ahead and pre-ordered the World of Warcraft expansion Battle for Azeroth one day early. There’s a couple of reasons I caved. First, I was thinking about buying a new game anyway. Even though I said I wasn’t going to buy Diablo III, I started contemplating it. I did in fact load up Path of Exile Sunday night and play a little bit of my old characters (level 13 is my highest level guy there), and it wasn’t as fun as I expected. PoE is a far better-looking game, but it also has more complex mechanics. It swung the pendulum a bit too far in the other direction. It’s actually hard to beat bosses. You have to watch your health bar and drink potions at the right time and dodge stuff and think about what you’re doing. :) 859 words.
• The Siege of Lordaeron – Blaugust 14. 2018-08-14 5:55 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  I re-activated my World of Warcraft subscription this morning and played the new expansion for about 45 minutes. Hardcore! I had some hope that I might avoid spamming posts about Battle for Azeroth, but what else is there to talk about? I also made an appointment to take my dog and cat to the vet next week. Not exactly riveting stuff. I’m going to refrain from mentioning any of the negative observations I made and just focus on the good things. We live in a time when even constructive criticism is interpreted as a personal affront to most fans. (It’s a bit like politics… you can either express hate for games, or express love for games, but anything in between is socially unacceptable now.) In reality it’s the same World of Warcraft with all of the same pros and cons as before, but I’ll just pretend I was starstruck the whole time. 770 words.
• 2.5 Hrs Into Battle for Azeroth – Blaugust 15. 2018-08-15 1:40 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  Finding spoiler-free screenshots typically results in rather bland imagery for blog posts. The second problem with writing post after post about Battle for Azeroth, besides boring everyone to death, is that nobody is going to read them. Everyone is avoiding spoilers, so nobody is going to click on a post about the expansion two days in. (I wouldn’t, and I’m generally not reading WoW posts right now.) 745 words.
• Finding Teldrassil – Blaugust 16. 2018-08-16 2:48 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  That’s not Teldrassil, that’s the new city in Kul Tiras, which I can confirm is, in fact, sprawling and confusing. I’m already tired of writing about Battle for Azeroth and I’ve played for less than 4 hours. It’s possible that you can infer something on how I feel about MMORPGs in general right now, but I’ll leave that to the reader’s imagination. 699 words.
• Realm Pop – Blaugust 17. 2018-08-17 12:04 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  Thanks to a post from Leo’s Life, I learned about a web site called Realm Pop. It’s a very simple site that charts demographics information about all of the World of Warcraft servers. I’ve always suspected that I played World of Warcraft on a fairly low population server (Undermine), but now I can finally see it in black-and-white: 232,356 players. And that is including the populations of its two “connected” realms, Anvilmar and Xavius. So it’s actually 232k people spread out over three different servers. 493 words.
• Developer Appreciation Overthinking – Blaugust 18. 2018-08-18 2:30 PM.
  • Blog
  • Musings
  
  The Blaugust theme of the week is Developer Appreciation, but I’ll be honest, I have no idea how to write on this topic. It’s one of those situations where I have to decide whether to write what I think everyone expects, or write what I actually think. I’m sure the intention here is to simply state, “I think games are great and I don’t think developers should get death threats on Twitter!” But that sounds a lot like “Sky Is Blue Week” or “Water Is Wet Week” to me. Of course I appreciate the developers of the games I play. I wouldn’t be buying or writing about their games if I didn’t! Of course I don’t think developers should be getting death threats, because I’m a normal human being who understands cause and effect, and the consequences of my actions. 830 words.
• Sunday Browns and Disenchanted Disappointment – Blaugust 19. 2018-08-19 3:36 PM.
  • Media
  • MMORPG
  
  Drustvar, the brown zone … for a few steps, until the lighting changes. Today is not just an “I can’t think of anything to write” day, it’s an “I actively don’t want to write because I hate the way I write” day. I was working on a post about comments last night but it’s not finished and I don’t want to post it until it is. 581 words.
• Drustvar Screenshots – Blaugust 20. 2018-08-20 6:07 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  Screenshots! Because it’s that kind of a day. A friendly, inviting architectural feature for the entrance to a building. Here we see the bow of a boat built in a house, and the incredibly rare Swift Stormsaber mount that I usually ride in WoW. 108 words.
• Drustvar Complete, Mastodon – Blaugust 21. 2018-08-21 1:24 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  So we meet again, blank page. Stop yelling at me, now-a-total-of-150-draft-posts-I-can’t-use, you know what you did. Ever wonder why I embed the image in the post and also set it as the "featured image" in WordPress, so it shows up twice on the web site? For the RSS feed. I design my posts almost exclusively for RSS feed readers. 627 words.
• That Amazon New World Preview – Blaugust 22. 2018-08-22 12:41 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  From the [new New World game site][1]. Cool for a game, but loads of historicity to pick apart there. :) We got our first “hands on” look at Amazon’s New World from Tech Advisor UK, and it doesn’t look pretty. (I mean, it looks pretty, sure, but I am referring to the gameplay.) 680 words.
• News: Ashes, Torchlight, Twitch – Blaugust 23. 2018-08-23 2:09 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Videos
  
  There were a few big news items in the gaming world that I failed to mention, largely because they didn’t mean that much to me, but if I smash them all together perhaps I can make a post out of them. From the Ashes of Creation press kit. Ashes of Creation and My.com The first is Ashes of Creation’s publishing deal with My.com. My understanding is this is a European deal so theoretically it doesn’t affect me anyway. 652 words.
• Where Exactly Is This Battle? – Blaugust 24. 2018-08-24 6:26 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  Stormsong Valley This is going to get me into trouble, but I’m already bored with Battle for Azeroth. I didn’t even play yesterday. It’s basically a continuation of Legion, and … well, I already played Legion. The story that got me interested in the first place is nowhere to be seen. There is no “battle for Azeroth” taking place in the Battle for Azeroth expansion, as far as I can tell, at least through level 115. I knew this was going to happen, and I fell for the hype anyway. 657 words.
• Stormsong Valley and On Accident – Blaugust 25. 2018-08-25 1:45 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Writing
  
  Moonshade Highlands, I mean, Stormsong Valley The Azshara short was the weakest of the three Warbringer videos, as self-contained short films go. (Sylvanas being the strongest.) My reaction before watching it: Who is Azshara? And after watching it: Who is Azshara? As far as I could tell, it had no connection with the game of World of Warcraft that I’ve been playing the past week. 494 words.
• A Logical Dead End – Blaugust 26. 2018-08-26 3:19 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  Island Expedition tutorial I just went ahead and cancelled my World of Warcraft subscription today. It was largely a formality. I can’t imagine a world (of Warcraft! Har!) where this expansion would have been so great that I’d have played for more than a month. Incidentally, no other MMO makes it so easy to cancel its subscription, I’ve noticed. You just click the “Cancel” link and that’s it. No questions, no guilt trips, no nothing. 834 words.
• Side Quests and Spigots – Blaugust 27. 2018-08-27 1:51 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  Isn’t anyone going to clean up this beach? Really bad for tourism. My Blaugust posts have definitely turned into a diary. Not normally what I like to write, but the posts must be posted. I’ve abandoned the concept of playing World of Warcraft by giving the game my full attention. I played for two more hours yesterday while watching Hulu, clicking through the quest text without reading it, blindly killing mobs and collecting drops until the objectives were done. 813 words.
• Cyberpunk 2077 Gameplay Reaction – Blaugust 28. 2018-08-28 3:30 PM.
  • Pre-Release
  • Single-Player
  
  Screenshot from the Cyberpunk 2077 web site. Well at least it’s not a post about Battle for Azeroth. But it is another post where I say what I really think instead of what people want to hear, so I’ll probably get in trouble. Like Roger, and late-breaking addition Scopique, I took a look at GameSpot’s Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay demo. My reaction was a bit less enthusiastic. (Those two links are the only other two reactions I’ve seen to the video, by the way. I did not even to read any YouTube comments.) Up until now I’ve been pretty dispassionate about the game, largely ignoring it. I typically don’t start thinking about whether to buy a game or not until launch day or beyond. 976 words.
• Hard Drive Shopping – Blaugust 29. 2018-08-29 2:00 PM.
  • Hardware
  • Musings
  
  Casualties of War aka. Information Technology. This SSD and external USB drive both died last year, both less than two years old. I mentioned my main 2 TB D: drive conked out yesterday morning for mysterious reasons. It’s working again now, but I’m eyeing it suspiciously, because I’ve noticed some odd behavior in my applications and rebooted a couple of times yesterday to straighten it out. I’m not sure it was hard drive related but it could have been. I successfully copied all of my “documents” (which includes documents, music, pictures, and videos) to a safe place, so I won’t lose anything important if the drive dies completely. 1,093 words.
• Battle for Azeroth 119 Update – Blaugust 30. 2018-08-30 1:45 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  This will be my last “spontaneous” Blaugust post this year. I started tomorrow’s “performance review” post a week ago, and then there will be my “what I played this month” post after that, which I started yesterday. I started today’s post … well, today. So since it’s my last one, I better make it good! Um. Okay. Here we go. Any second now, something interesting will come to me. 1,008 words.
• Blaugust Performance Self-Review – Blaugust 31. 2018-08-31 2:00 PM.
  • Blog
  • Musings
  • Writing
  
  Back in July I filled a directory with 70 photographs for potential use in Blaugust posts. Last chance to use them! This is Chingoteague. I’m not sure if this is sunrise or sunset but let’s just say it’s sunset to fit the theme of the post. 2,723 words.

September, 2018

• Games Played – August 2018. 2018-09-01 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Progression Report
  
  The first story thing WoW gave me to do upon reaching level 120 was to go to this Zandalar desert to assassinate some Horde NPCs. I completely forgot to say this in my huge missive yesterday: Blaugust seemed like a great success, congratulations to everyone who participated! Huge thanks to Belghast and all the mentors for pulling all of that together. To all the new bloggers, great job! It doesn’t matter if you posted every day or not. If you keep going, that’s fantastic, but if you need to take a break, that’s fine too. Every blogger has a different pace that their comfortable with. There’s no wrong way to do it. 387 words.
• WoW – Finding Jaina’s Trail Again. 2018-09-03 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  I mentioned that I was close to giving up on World of Warcraft’s Battle for Azeroth expansion, because the game seemed to have given up on telling me Jaina’s story. Well I finally picked up her story again. It turns out that you have to complete all three Kul Tiras zone story chapters (half of which don’t seem to have anything to do with anything) before a new quest unlocks which begins the followup to Jaina’s cut scenes from the very beginning of the expansion. 601 words.
• Week End – Carbine, CCP, Daybreak, Witcher. 2018-09-08 2:30 PM.
  • Blog
  
  I started to write three or four blog posts this week, didn’t finish them, and didn’t want to post them. Instead I decided to cram all of them together into one summary post for the week. This allows me to post, but without the bother of crafting long essays that have beginnings, middles, or ends, when everything I want to say can be summed up in a paragraph. No wonder listcicles are so popular! I rather like the process of keeping a draft open throughout the week and just throwing sentences into it now and again as they occur to me. 1,275 words.
• New Lord of the Rings MMO. 2018-09-10 2:00 PM.
  • MMO
  • MMORPG
  • Pre-Release
  
  A random Lord of the Rings Online screenshot Even packed full of news as it was, I still neglected to mention in my Saturday post that Athlon is planning to make a new Lord of the Rings Prequel MMO. That is the extent of what we know so far. We can speculate that it will probably be released on console and PC, that it will probably be free-to-play, and that it will probably not even remotely resemble the kind of traditional MMORPG that we actually want to play. My own personal prediction based on context is that it’s going to be a cookie-cutter shovelware game designed to grab as much money from players as quickly as possible, somewhere in the vein of a game like Black Gold Online, my go-to example of such. 275 words.
• Resuming Dark Souls In The Worst Place. 2018-09-12 2:00 PM.
  • RPG
  • Single-Player
  
  My thumb is finally well enough that I can use a game controller again. This is both good news and bad news. The good news is that I can resume Dark Souls Remastered and finish my casual nostalgia tour, my (latest) video series Magnum Opus. The bad news is that I’m in a terrible place to resume the game. The last time I played Dark Souls Remastered before significant pain in my fingers and thumbs impacted my performance was June 23rd, when I spent all day working on Artorias (technically it only took 1 hour and 35 minutes, but it was spread out all day). He was the last boss I could defeat. 500 words.
• The Witcher’s (Hard) Easy Difficulty. 2018-09-13 2:30 PM.
  • RPG
  • Single-Player
  
  Before getting back to Dark Souls, of course I have to finish The Witcher, which I started after I got bored with Battle for Azeroth. I’ve never finished it before. I think I’ve always crashed out of it somewhere in Chapter II. Probably because of all the tedious running back and forth in the Temple District. The first Witcher game gets a lot of flak for its odd combat system (and rightly so), but I’ve never been bothered by it. It’s weird, but it’s not difficult to comprehend how it works. You point at an enemy and press the left mouse button. What could be simpler? It’s just that you have to press the button at the right time, or else the game yells at you and your guy just stands there. The temptation is strong to simply spam the left button like you would every other game, but you have to wait until the cursor turns yellow before you can click to get those chain attacks. 1,044 words.
• The Outsider by Stephen King (2018). 2018-09-16 3:00 PM.
  • Reviews
  • Audiobooks
  
  I wish I could remember enough to write a summary. 290 words.
• Cataract Surgery Day. 2018-09-18 1:00 PM.
  • Blog
  
  This is probably the last chance I’ll have to write anything before I get a cataract removed from my right eye. I’ll have scheduled this post to publish Tuesday morning, theoretically about the time of the surgery. I say “theoretically” because there are a lot of moving parts that have to come together and I feel like there’s at least a 50% chance I’ll arrive at the appointment and they’ll tell me, “Sorry we can’t proceed because some random thing wasn’t done right. And of course we’ll have to charge you for wasting our time. Have a nice day!” There were a lot of logistical things to coordinate (getting a “permission slip” from my regular doctor, getting eye drops from the pharmacy, etc.). I _think_everything is in place as I write this (Monday), but who knows? I’m very good at imagining all the things that could go wrong. 593 words.
• Cataract Removed. 2018-09-19 12:08 AM.
  • Blog
  
  Just a very brief post to say the cataract surgery went well, and the procedure did in fact take about 10 minutes. I felt nothing, saw nothing, heard almost nothing except some classic rock tunes on a radio somewhere. Most of the time was spent signing consent forms, waiting for dilation drops to take effect (they dosed me three different times with dilation drops which lasted all day), and putting an IV in my arm for a sedative. I don’t think I ever lost consciousness, however my memory of the actual procedure is a bit hazy and I was a bit wobbly for a little while. If the procedure hadn’t been explained to me beforehand, I would have had no idea what they did. I can’t logically explain it but I couldn’t see or feel a thing except some colors and shapes in my vision for a few minutes. I never even saw the doctor who did the procedure. I can only presume they put something over my eye(s) to limit my vision, but I have no memory of that. Anyway then they wheeled me out, put a clear plastic shield over the eye, unhooked everything, and I was outta there. I go back tomorrow morning for them to check everything, and that’s it. 214 words.
• Day Two Without Cataract. 2018-09-19 9:13 PM.
  • Blog
  
  Day two of life after cataract surgery was perfectly fine. I went to my followup appointment this morning, where the doctor barely even looked at me before letting me go again. They apparently don’t worry too much about people my age recovering from cataract surgery. But in any case the technician checked my eyeball pressure and I could read the eye chart at I think it was 20/30 through the bionic lens already. 299 words.
• Day Three. 2018-09-20 10:25 PM.
  • Blog
  
  The eye continues to improve. Computer screen text is getting clearer, and sunlight doesn’t hurt as much. The “new” eye wears out quickly though in front of the computer. It starts to twitch, as one’s eyes do after reading a long time. (At least my eyes do.) It just starts happening within about five minutes. So I’m staying away from the computer except for short periods. Earlier in the year, I found that with the cataract, dark themes (white-on-black text) were easier to read, but since the surgery I’ve found the exact opposite. 181 words.
• Day Four. 2018-09-21 11:05 PM.
  • Blog
  
  Okay I’m getting pretty impatient now. I want to be fully recovered right now please. The new eye is better after another day, but still a bit blurry and hard to focus on a computer monitor for any amount of time, especially text. It gets better every day, but it’s still a chore. I can see the television from a chair halfway across the room fine, though, so I’ve been watching (and re-watching, in fact) The Americans, and I started playing a little bit of The Last Of Us (Remastered) on the PS4. 185 words.
• Telltale and Last Of Us. 2018-09-22 9:30 PM.
  • Consoles
  • RPG
  • Single-Player
  
  So I guess I’ll write something about games this time. The eye continues to improve, and focusing on nearby things gets a little bit better each day. (Writing this post has been the easiest so far.) There’s still a slight bit of soreness there which crops up in unexpected ways. Sometimes it hurts when I yawn or squeeze my eye shut, and sometimes it feels like there’s something like a hair stuck in the eye. Usually some Tylenol fixes it. But it doesn’t interfere with my activity at all. Today I mowed and drove to the grocery store and back (I was cleared for driving the next day, actually). 642 words.
• Comfy Questions and Answers, Part 1. 2018-09-27 2:00 PM.
  • Blog
  
  Nothing new to report about the eye, except the new normal seems more normal every day. I stopped using the antibiotic eye drops as instructed, and now only use the prednisone (steroid) eye drops 4 times a day for another week. (Those drops drive me crazy because I swear they have chalk in them, as if they simply crushed up some pills and mixed it with water.) I don’t see much of anything interesting happening in gaming. I feel really bad for news sites right now. There’s maybe 1 or 2 actual news stories a week, usually about games that aren’t even out yet, but they have to keep making up stuff that sounds like important news twenty times a day. 1,192 words.
• Comfy Questions and Answers, Part 2. 2018-09-28 11:18 PM.
  • Blog
  
  This is a photo I took in the New York Cloisters museum some years back. Seemed appropriate for the Jesus talk down below. Had a rough night last night with back pain. One of those situations where there’s no way to stand, sit, or lie down that feels better. It’s a lot better today but I’ve also been working harder to keep myself still. Yesterday I tried to ignore it. Big mistake. Frustrating as it might be, there’s always less overall down time when you stop and rest rather than try to keep pushing through the pain or sickness. There’s your dose of adult wisdom for the day. 820 words.
• Comfy Questions and Answers, Part 3. 2018-09-30 7:25 PM.
  • Blog
  
  In the interests of brevity and not boring everyone to death, I’ll edit the rest of these down to a few sentences. 12. “What is your family ancestry?” My family came from a group of Anabaptists who originated in Switzerland, moved to what is now Ukraine, and emigrated to Kansas en masse around 1874. 13. “What scares you?” A whole lot of things, mostly personal. 14. “What are you most grateful for?” Life, consciousness, self-awareness. 576 words.

October, 2018

• Games Played – September 2018. 2018-10-01 2:30 PM.
  • Consoles
  • Progression Report
  • Roundup
  • RPG
  
  Even with a week and a half of down time from cataract surgery, I still managed to play a few games this past month. The Witcher (Enhanced Edition), 39 hours. This is what I spent most of my gaming time doing after World of Warcraft and before surgery, and a little bit afterward to finish up the story. This is the first time I’ve finished the whole game. It got kind of weird at the end. Dragon Age: Inquisition, 5 hours. I restarted this a number of times with different classes, trying to find something to play after WoW. But it didn’t stick (again). World of Warcraft, 5 hours. The last bit before I lost interest. I don’t think I logged in for the last week of my subscription time. See you in two years for the next expansion, WoW! One problem with console gaming is that I don’t know where to find statistical data showing how much I played on the PS4. But I would guess I played 6 or 7 hours of The Last of Us (Remastered) this month. 296 words.
• Fallout 4 Podcast Completed. 2018-10-02 2:30 PM.
  • Podcast
  • Single-Player
  
  I uploaded the last episode of my Fallout 4 podcast yesterday. It took me a while to get the concluding episode out due to injuring my hand and cataract surgery and, frankly, a bit of malaise, but it’s finally done. Here is the series page, though it displays the episodes in reverse order. It’s a serial podcast, so it’s better if you start at the first one. In all there are 21 episodes for a total of about 5 hours of listening. As a body of work, I’m quite proud of it. It’s a great story (well, mostly), but it’s also the most complicated piece of audio engineering I’ve completed in quite some time. I wrote a number of scripts and figured out a lot of FFMPEG command-line options to streamline the processing of each episode. 244 words.
• Battle for Azeroth Conclusions. 2018-10-03 4:06 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  My World of Warcraft subscription ended weeks ago, and the last time I actually played was September 3rd, a month ago. I meant to go back and complete the Siege of Boralus but I got too involved playing The Witcher again. I rescued Jaina though, so that was a good-enough ending for me. I figured I should finally post what I thought of the expansion. I get the impression there’s a lot of people complaining about Battle for Azeroth. I don’t see that myself. I only see the people saying, “Gosh there’s a lot of people angry about this expansion.” I don’t know where people are looking to see all these angry people, or why people are even looking there. I’ve only seen people reporting what I consider to be legitimate criticisms in a fairly respectful way. 938 words.
• GW2 – A Star To Guide Us. 2018-10-06 9:50 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  I saw that Sypster posted about returning to Guild Wars 2, so in the absence of anything else to write about, I’ll relay my own experience with that very subject. Back in July, I went ahead and uninstalled Guild Wars 2. Partly because I’d grown to strongly dislike the gameplay (as opposed to the nominal experience of mildly disliking it), and partly because I didn’t think much of ArenaNet anymore. (And still don’t.) 787 words.
• Bless Online Launching For Reals. 2018-10-10 2:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  I stumbled upon a headline from Blaugust alumni MMOist about Bless Online launching for reals on October 23. I’ve alternated between interest and disinterest on this title since at least 2017, but I knew I wasn’t going to spend a cent on it until I could play it first. (Especially after Bhagpuss’s first impressions, parts one and two, made it sound like as uninspired a game as it could possibly be made to sound.) Luckily for me it looks like the game will launch as free-to-play. 666 words.
• Snap Judgment – MapleStory 2. 2018-10-11 1:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  But I have to admit there is something deeply funny about questing in a business suit. MapleStory 2 is one of those MMOs that I never would have looked at twice, except that there’s nothing else to look at right now. See previous post lamenting the pitiable dearth of MMORPGs. The last Nexon game I played was Riders of Icarus, which I did not think much of. I even downloaded and tried it again yesterday, and I still didn’t like it. It sounds like a cool idea to have a game built around collecting mounts and such, but none of that seems to exist at the beginning of the game, which is a huge disappointment. The UI and all the “advertisements” plastered all over the screen are very off-putting as well. 588 words.
• Not Dead Yet – The Inactivity Report. 2018-10-18 3:36 PM.
  • Consoles
  • Musings
  
  Horizon Zero Dawn, the only thing I’ve played in the last week. I was trying yet again to think of something interesting to write, when I saw Roger talking about Blaugust this morning, which led me to Gevlon talking about Blaugust, where I found out that I’m no longer an active blogger. I mean, sure, I haven’t posted in a week, whereas I normally try to post something once or twice a week. But man, talk about a tough room. 1,201 words.
• Winter Arrived Today. 2018-10-22 1:51 PM.
  • Writing
  • NaNoWriMo
  • everettrenshaw.com
  
  I woke this morning to an almost literally freezing cold house, which means that we can no longer pretend that the cold months of the year won’t happen. By “we” I mean “me,” because there are some people who actually like the transition from summer to fall. I personally spend most days between November and March in three or four layers of clothes, moving slowly, barely staving off uncontrollable shivering fits, unable to concentrate, hiding in the darkness that consumes most of each day. 582 words.
• The Last Of Us, YouTube, and a Ripsaw. 2018-10-22 9:44 PM.
  • Consoles
  • Single-Player
  • Videos
  
  I just realized this image is pretty similar to the Horizon Zero Dawn image in my last post. I mentioned that I had abandoned The Last Of Us and gotten into Horizon Zero Dawn, so of course, right after that, I abandoned Horizon Zero Dawn and got back into The Last Of Us. 1,577 words.
• Trion Sold To Who Now?. 2018-10-23 1:10 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  Trion Worlds was just acquired by a company called Gambino. No wait, it’s Gamigo. I don’t have much to say about this except I’ve never heard of Gamigo before. I’m hardly an expert in the global operations of every company in the gaming industry, but it does seem a little bit strange that the name Gamigo has never crossed my MMO radar in the last twenty years. They seem to be based in Germany, so maybe it’s not that surprising. The first impressions I’m hearing from people on social media are not particularly good. 668 words.
• Snap Judgment – Bless Online. 2018-10-26 3:29 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Reviews
  
  Bless Online launched on Steam for free the other day to exactly zero fanfare, as far as I can tell. Certainly nobody mentioned it on Twitter or in the blogosphere. I had to use my feed reader’s search feature to find the announcement on MassivelyOP. I’m a big fan of free trials when it comes to MMORPGs, and very rarely have I ever spent money on one without trying it out in some way first. (Not counting the old days when you had no choice. Let’s say I haven’t played without a trial since 2006.) So now that it would cost me nothing but time, I finally downloaded Bless Online, installed it, and gave it a shot. 1,025 words.
• Video Game Museums. 2018-10-29 8:55 PM.
  • Musings
  
  The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, photo by Brandt Luke Zorn. I saw a tweet the other day that made me raise an eyebrow: Hey Twitter fans: please go track down people who could legally get us Star Wars Galaxy's server code, and City of Heroes server code. If they agree to hand over the server code, we can bring those games back online legally. 688 words.

November, 2018

• NaNoWriMo 2018 Vlog Experiment. 2018-11-03 12:37 AM.
  • NaNoWriMo
  • everettrenshaw.com
  
  I’m trying an experiment this year for NaNoWriMo. Instead of writing blog posts about my progress, I’m recording “vlogs” about it. I created a YouTube channel where you can watch me ramble about my NaNoWriMo journey this year. My goal is to record a short video every day talking about my progress, the challenges I run into, how I deal with them, etc. Things that I think might be educational or inspiring or helpful or just funny to other writers. A lot about “the writing process” and how I’m feeling about the project as I go along. Thrills, chills, spills. Stuff that I would normally write about, but I’m just going to talk about them instead. I would rather reserve my writing energy for the NaNoWriMo draft as much as possible. 302 words.
• NaNoWriMo 2018, Day 3 Vlog. 2018-11-04 12:36 PM.
  • NaNoWriMo
  • Vlog
  • everettrenshaw.com
  
  Kind of a long one. A better day. Hilarious text-to-speech on the iPad, switching scenes, what I like about my writing so far, blanks between writing sessions, thinking about getting Scrivener for iOS, starting fresh every day, finally getting into the world of the story, bringing complex modern sociopolitical themes into the backdrop of the sword-and-sorcery city setting. 58 words.
• NaNoWriMo 2018, Day 4 Vlog. 2018-11-05 1:45 PM.
  • Writing
  • everettrenshaw.com
  
  Considerably more talking than writing on day 4. Morning update: Irish accents, daylight savings, second Mythica movie, nervous about iOS Scrivener, feeling mute when I’m not able to type on a keyboard, struggling to differentiate character voices in dialog. Evening update: the story so far, NaNoWriMo community and me. 49 words.
• Games Played – October 2018. 2018-11-05 3:00 PM.
  • Consoles
  • MMORPG
  
  Very old GW2 shot from my media library because my back hurts too much to sit at my PC to find a new one, and this post has been sitting here for a week waiting to post and I’m tired of waiting. 304 words.
• Midterm Elections 2018. 2018-11-07 3:33 PM.
  • Politics
  • swampip.com
  
  A fun topic for everyone! Election results: Democrats take the House, Republicans gained significant ground in the Senate. So everyone is claiming victory this morning. No matter what your views are, you can find something in the election to celebrate, something to mock, and something to worry to about. To me, this reaffirms how divided the country is, and that there’s no sign it’s going to get better anytime soon. 2020 is likely to be a blood bath. 1,272 words.
• Mandatory BlizzCon Post. 2018-11-08 2:43 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Musings
  
  Random WoW image from the media library because I can’t be bothered to find one that makes sense for this post. This will be what I hope is a quick blog post about BlizzCon, largely inspired by peer pressure more than any real interest. In fact, the main reason this post didn’t get deleted was I needed a vehicle to say that I’m trying to reserve most of my writing energy this month for NaNoWriMo. I’m still having back trouble so typing at keyboards for long periods of time is challenging. You can safely skip the rest of this post because I won’t be saying anything about BlizzCon that you haven’t already read a thousand times before. 563 words.
• NaNoWriMo 2018, Day 7 Vlog. 2018-11-08 3:06 PM.
  • NaNoWriMo
  • everettrenshaw.com
  
  It’s interesting to watch view statistics when you upload a series of videos to YouTube. You might think, as I do, that if you say, “I’m going to upload a series of videos to YouTube, one every day, and here’s the first one,” that people would know and understand how to find and watch the complete series if they’re interested, and you’ll get similar view statistics on each video. But you’d be wrong. The first video will get some views, if you have any followers at all, and then the remainder of the videos will get zero views because everyone will wander away and forget about you amid the rest of their busy daily lives. So from time to time you have to keep reminding people, on social media, or in blog posts like this one. :) 194 words.
• LotRO Legendary Server Malaise. 2018-11-10 3:00 PM.
  • MMORPG
  
  Lord of the Rings Online opened their Legendary Server the other day. It’s another of what has become known in the industry as a “progression” server, although I feel like they’re stretching that definition in this case. (Then again, nobody has ever defined what a “progression” server is, except Daybreak. Or maybe it started with SOE, I don’t remember.) In this case “progression” seems to mean a new server with a level cap of 50 and nothing else, which to me is the bare minimum of effort. 1,099 words.
• My Grandfather on Armistice Day, 100 Years Ago. 2018-11-11 4:00 PM.
  • Musings
  
  Exactly one hundred years ago today, World War I ended with the signing of the Armistice. I’m posting this at 11:00 my time, though of course the actual Armistice was signed in France, so I’m probably four or five hours late. My grandfather was a part of the American Expeditionary Force along with a million others, went through basic training, shipped over to France, and arrived just in time for the last offensive in the war, the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, which began on September 26, 1918. He was 23 at the time. 1,013 words.
• November in Review. 2018-11-28 3:24 PM.
  • MMO
  • Musings
  
  I don’t normally do month-in-review posts, but since I was largely absent this month, I figured I should do one for a change. I’ve spent most of November trying to recover from back pain. The first day of the month it got really bad, then it got better, then it got really bad again, and now it’s getting better again. I’ve been taking a muscle relaxant called baclofen every day this month, and last week I started going to physical therapy to try to loosen things up. X-rays have shown it’s entirely a muscle problem in my upper back, neck, and shoulders, most likely caused by years of slightly incorrect sitting posture (my own theory, since I have no other ideas-assuming it’s not some as-yet-undiscovered medical issue). Technically I have a slight curve in my spine between my shoulder blades but they tell me it’s not unusual and not the root cause here. 765 words.

December, 2018

• Games Played – November 2018. 2018-12-01 2:30 PM.
  • MMORPG
  • Roundup
  
  This should be a hoot. Because I didn’t play any games in November. As I mentioned last time, I spent November recovering from back pain and avoided the PC computer chair like the plague while I worked on rebuilding my upper back muscles with torturous stretches and exercises. Lord of the Rings Online, 1 hour. I played my level 62 hobbit Hunter in Mines of Moria for an hour. I did not advance any levels in the allegedly super fast leveling curve that everyone says LotRO has. This little bit of gaming probably contributed to a very painful relapse of back pain in the middle of the month. And that was it, folks. In fact ManicTime tells me I only used the PC in November for a total of 5 hours. 249 words.
• NaNoWriMo 2018, Day 30 Vlog. 2018-12-01 2:37 PM.
  • Writing
  • NaNoWriMo
  • everettrenshaw.com
  
  Last vlog for NaNoWriMo 2018, unless I record one more epilogue a bit later to show how I reorganized my Scrivener project. Validating 50,247 words. Lack of editing. Thoughts on what to do next. Reflecting on the month. There are in fact 31 vlog videos, which you can find in this NaNoWriMo 2018 Playlist on YouTube. All the ups and downs of writing for 30 days. 66 words.
• RimWorld First Impressions. 2018-12-10 7:47 PM.
  • Reviews
  • Single-Player
  • Steam
  
  The rest of the world has already played and finished with RimWorld, which I think has been in Early Access for quite some time, but I just started playing it. I happened to see Sean Sands from Gamers With Jobs playing it on their YouTube channel and thought it looked amazing, so I picked it up. I didn’t even wait for a sale, because I wanted to jump into it while I was interested. I have a habit of losing interest in things within days or weeks. 354 words.
• Another Year Over. 2018-12-20 2:00 PM.
  • Music
  • Musings
  • Videos
  
  I’m playing RimWorld in pretty much every spare moment of every day right now. This game is just amazing. If MMORPGs had even a tenth of this much interesting gameplay elements, maybe they wouldn’t be dying out. :) Note: I don’t really think MMORPGs are dying out. They’re just evolving into the game equivalent of Marvel summer blockbusters: Designed by focus groups to appeal to the broadest possible audience, which often doesn’t include MMORPG players of the 90s, who are clearly in the minority of gamer audiences these days. 1,279 words.
• Fighting Early Access Disasters. 2018-12-24 2:29 PM.
  • Musings
  • Responses
  
  Live shot of players navigating the gaming industry in 2018. Bhagpuss has a post referencing, among other things, the deplorable state of Early Access game releases right now, seen in such recent launch disasters as Fallout 76 (not technically early access but, seriously, it was) and Atlas (which as I write this hasn’t been out more than a day and has already been review-bombed to death on Steam). 610 words.