Endgame Viable

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.)

Fridays are the worst days of the week for me, in terms of being bored. Usually half of the workforce is gone on Fridays, so it’s abnormally quiet and I have to spend eight solid hours trying to entertain myself in library-like silence. Using only my phone, mind you, because god forbid we have access to anything “fun” or “entertaining” on our work computers. The most interesting thing I can manage on my work computer is reading Wikipedia articles. My personal favorite is the On This Day page. (506 words.)

This is one of those rambling posts about everything and nothing, because I don’t have much to say. Just writing for the sake of writing because I was bored at work. I’ve been listening to audiobooks again, trying to use up my credits. I recently finished Stephen King’s 11.22.63, which was beautifully read by Craig Wasson. He’s the actor who played the lead in that weird 80s movie Body Double. Now I’m listening to Stephen King’s End of Watch, which is beautifully read by Will Patton. Later I might listen to Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep, the beauty of which I know nothing. [Editor’s note: I spent a lot of time wording and re-wording that last sentence, and I still don’t think it’s right.] (800 words.)

Based on the video, this poor fellow is apparently the only person working on New World artwork. :) Since Amazon was kind enough to tell us they were working on an MMORPG without telling us anything about it, I thought it might be fun to throw out a wish list for it, and also try to predict what they’ll actually do.* Check back in two or three or four years to see how well I did! (Actually it probably won’t take that long to find out I’m completely wrong.) (1906 words.)

I haven’t played very much lately. Over the last few weeks I’ve been putting time into reading up on World War I (research for what I hope will be a historical fiction story for NaNoWriMo), reading Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, listening to Stephen King’s 11.22.63 audiobook, and even playing with composing some music in Renoise. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say the frenzy over the 2016 election has turned into a really entertaining Jerry Springer episode. A carefully un-cropped screenshot of a video player. (438 words.)

Most of my gaming over the weekend was preempted by other media consumption. First it was Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, which I could not put down between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon, until I reached the third part of the book and had to have a break. (It’s a convenient stopping point, the reasons for which should be fairly obvious upon reading the table of contents.) And then Sunday night I noticed that Deadpool was on HBO prior to Westworld, which I hadn’t yet seen. It wasn’t that funny, since surprise is essential for comedy and most of the gags were predictable, but I thought the serious parts were pretty good. (I have zero knowledge of the comic book on which it’s based.) I found it somewhat amusing to see Collosus in the movie, which was a character I played a bit in Marvel Heros, seemingly a million years ago. (577 words.)

The following is a very cycnical screed about Amazon’s New World, fueled mostly by yet another rainy day and the constant barrage of Internet commenters acting shallow and uneducated about the election. And I have a headache. Please look away if you’re excited about this game. I am reacting only to the one paragraph of information shown in MOP’s reveal article, which is the same information shown on the Amazon page. (482 words.)

I saw Liore’s post on #3AlbumsThatChangedMyLife, and I started to think back on my own impressionable youth and the albums that affected me. I was raised in a somewhat musical family, but I didn’t become “interested” in music until let’s say my mid-to-late teenage years. Prior to that most pop songs went in one ear and out the other and I never owned any albums. (Okay I did buy a single of M-M-M-My Sharona, a song that was entirely inappropriate for my then-age.) In high school I started to learn to play guitar (again) and really started to buy, collect, and “study” music. Since then I’ve dabbled in writing songs and home recording and all manner of audio things, which now manifests as an occasional YouTube upload. But I think my musical senses really peaked in my late teens and twenties, which is reflected in this list. (1227 words.)