I don’t remember if I’ve written about this before, so here’s a quick backstory: The lease expires for the house I’m renting at the end of August, so I bought a new house. The closing for the new house was in June, which was about two months earlier than I planned for, so I’m currently living in a stressful chaotic limbo between two houses. I had planned to put off moving until closer to the end of my lease expiration, but when quite a few consecutive days of 95+ degree heat rolled through my un-air-conditioned rental house, complete with 219% humidity that felt like wearing clothes made out of a boiling wet sponge, my dog and I bailed out early and moved to the new place for good on Monday. (763 words.)

Welcome to another installment of Snap Judgment, where I fully evaluate every nuance of a game after playing it for less than an hour. I downloaded and installed the latest malware … I mean, Asian import MMORPG … Riders of Icarus. I kid, I kid. But it asked me to reboot to finish the installation, which makes me wonder just what kind of rootkit it put on my system. Not to mention the extremely suspicious Nexon anti-cheat monitoring software that runs in the background. But I guess that’s the standard for Asian games now, because ArcheAge had one, and I think Blade and Soul, and maybe some others I can’t remember. I assume they’re all capturing my passwords and sending them to China, and not doing anything to prevent cheating. (254 words.)

Turbine is refocusing on free-to-play mobile games?? For the last couple of months I’ve been trying to force myself (unsuccessfully) to play LotRO with the sole intention of leveling my 51 Hobbit Hunter (my only character over level 20-something) through Mines of Moria and the rest of the story content I keep hearing so much about. I’ve been trying to do this because I-like I’m sure a lot of other LotRO players-worry that Turbine isn’t going to renew their Tolkien license in 2017 and the game is going to shutter. I didn’t think that was likely to happen, but it was a possibility. (250 words.)

Today I am trying to enable posting by email on my blog again. (13 words.)

The topic of animated GIFs came up in the NBI Discord this morning so I thought I’d write a little bit about it. I hate animated GIFs. That is all. No, really, I hate them. I lived through the 1990s World Wide Web, so I have vivid memories of the days when every advertiser put obnoxious blinking animated GIFs in every web ad, making every web page into some crazy dystopian night-time Las Vegas scene with blinking neon signs in every direction. (There was an early Futurama episode that captured this very well-I think it was A Bycyclops Built For Two.) It was horrible. It was so bad it birthed the entire ad-blocker industry. (514 words.)

The first rule of blogging is not to blog about blogging. However, June is the Newbie Blogger Initiative here in the game blogging community, so this is the month where we throw out all the rules, talk about the craft of blogging, and try to recruit and encourage new bloggers. I technically started blogging in 1998, when I put some random notes up on my first ever web site, unless you count some Quake match updates I posted on the clan’s page in 1997. I didn’t really start blogging with any regularity though until about 2002 or 2003. The point is that I’ve been at this hobby for a while now, so I have at least a little sense of the landscape. (1099 words.)

I finally have a chance to talk a bit about Overwatch, which I played for roughly an hour or two during the open beta. My first impression was horrible, because I played it on a Sunday night, which is usually my least favorite time of the week, considering that it’s the time when I’m forced to face the reality of going back to work the next day. Last week was a particularly onerous week because it was my last one on the dying project, so I was anticipating a horrendous week of panic and anxiety from me and everyone else who would be left behind after I’m gone. (1207 words.)

I am writing this post on my phone while I sit in my new cubicle at my new job, which is not so much new as it is different, in that I have only moved about 15 yards away from my old cubicle which I left Friday. I moved from an old and dying project where I constantly had to deal with the world collapsing around me to an equally old but at least stable, funded project where I will only be responsible for a straightforward set of requirements. (584 words.)

I finished my first playthrough of Dark Souls III Sunday morning. I think it took around 84 hours and 87 levels, using a Knight build based mainly around strength and vitality. All bosses defeated solo, although I almost cracked and summoned help on the Twin Princes. (After the rather dismal experience I had with the Dancer of Boreal Valley, and when it looked like I might be heading in the same direction with the Twin Princes, I did summon help twice, but both times I died very quickly, which I took as a sign that I should stick with my original plan to get all the bosses solo on the first playthrough.) (496 words.)

Fantastic game and a worthy sequel. Nothing new or radically different, mind you (except a mana bar), just more of the same, excellent quality gameplay in different yet somehow familiar settings. Visually it resembles the first game more than the second one, in my opinion, but at the same time it’s got its own bleached-film style. My only complaints so far are that I seem to get stuck on terrain a lot and sometimes the camera is more wonky than I’d like. The new FireLink Shrine. (257 words.)