I sort of lost interest in Rift when I got to level 68. Xarth Mire is not very pleasant to run around in, what with the lack of safe roads, the rather high mob density, and the frog tongues that constantly pull you to them no matter how much you want to run away from them. But mainly I drifted away from Rift because I started playing Fallout: New Vegas. I played it for about 8 hours last year, then put it away when Fallout 4 came out. Recently I installed New Vegas again and my old saved games magically appeared, so I was able to pick it up right where I left off. It’s quite good. I dare say it’s as good or better than Fallout 4, at least in terms of story. (300 words.)

Last night I welcomed on old friend back into my life: The post-NaNoWriMo blues. I’ve written about this before. Here’s me from December 2011: “The act of creation is so thrilling and stimulating and awesome that when it’s over, there’s nothing left inside but a black empty void of nothingness. For me, it generally manifests as a fervent desire to stare at the walls and feel useless all day.” I remember writing much more colorful language about it, though. Ah, here it is, from 2012: (511 words.)

I like to write up a post-mortem about my writing projects after I’m done with them, so here are my thoughts on my NaNoWriMo 2016 draft. For reference, it’s an untitled historical fiction set in Belgium at the beginning of World War I. It’s about, you know, people, who like, do stuff. The hook might still need some work. I validated my (exactly, as it turned out) 50,000 words about 8 PM on November 30th. (1571 words.)

I broke down and bought 15 days of Patron status in Rift. The amount of extra XP gain is very large and noticeable and I would say almost mandatory, at least if you want to keep your sanity while leveling. Before continuing with my Mage, in a fit of rage over being so under-powered in the new zones, I got out my Primalist and started leveling him. I made a Primalist back when they first came out but only got to level 9. This time, I discovered the Hammerknell Instant Adventures, which I’d never done before. (919 words.)

I saw Devil Daggers on Steam when it first came out and thought, “What an odd-sounding game.” I saw the “Too long, didn’t play” guy on Gamers With Jobs call it “punishingly hard,” and use it as the benchmark for measuring hard games ever since. I put it on my wish list. I laugh at hard games! Ha! Recently it went on sale and I bought it for $2.99, along with some other stuff I might play some day (including another one of the Batman games-I have them all now but haven’t played any of them yet). (417 words.)

I grudgingly embarked into Rift’s Starfall Prophecy over the weekend. I wasn’t excited about it, but I needed an excuse to postpone writing for NaNoWriMo. I’m trying to catch up from a huge deficit, so it’s important to put things off as long as possible. Anyway I pre-ordered Starfall Prophecy, so I figured I might as well play it. The dreaded Tuathe’de, who don’t ever turn around I was very thankful to see that you still get tokens for logging in. I would have been about five short of buying the squirrel mount if they’d stopped that upon launch. So yay! I bought the squirrel mount. It’s silly and I will never use it. I took a screenshot, though. (1605 words.)

I should be really excited to play Rift: Starfall Prophecy but to be honest I couldn’t care less about any MMORPG right now. I’m just in one of those moods. Instead I installed one of the many games on my Steam list that I’ve never tried so that I could bring you another (cue huge reverb and echo) … Snap Judgment! .. judgment .. ment .. nt. Novus Inceptio is yet another Early Access survival sandbox game. You gather materials and craft things and explore. Currently it appears to only have a single-player mode, but multi-player is supposed to be coming. (249 words.)

This is a long tale of my voting experience this morning. I tried to keep it entirely non-partisan and focus on what I saw, heard, and felt, but if you don’t want to risk it, feel free to skip. (But in return, you have to read every other one of my posts for the rest of time! Just kidding.) I wrote this fairly quickly by my standards, and normally I would spend about four years editing something this long, but I wanted to post it before the results started coming in. (5364 words.)

I thought I would try IntPiPoMo this year, because NaNoWriMo didn’t seem like enough to do in November! Since I’m currently playing Dark Souls 3’s Ashes of Ariandel, most of the screenshots for now are probably going to be from there. That is Friede on the right. She seems nice, right? It’s just a room with blood and corpses and giant flying insects. (63 words.)

Over the weekend I tapered off of Civ 6 to push through to the end of my umpteenth Dark Souls 3 playthrough so I would finally have a character ready for the Ashes of Ariandel DLC. It took a total of about 18 hours to go through all the bosses and all the areas (over the course of a couple weeks, not two days :). I had to make a new character because, if you didn’t know, you can’t transfer DS2 or DS3 characters from one PC to another. That’s really annoying, From Software. All those high-level characters I have on my old PC are now worthless unless I want to play the DLC on that old PC, which I don’t, because old PC is old. The aptly-named Snowfield (368 words.)