Endgame Viable

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.)

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.)

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.)

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. (1697 words.)

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.)

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.)

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. (1639 words.)

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.)

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.)

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.)