Endgame Viable

For the record, I’ve finished Living World Season 3 and started into Path of Fire. As of Monday morning, I’ve just gotten to the second map, Desert Highlands. It’s a far better expansion than Heart of Thorns already, although I just ran into a story gate that isn’t obvious how to open. Now back to the past… Living World Season 3, Episode 5, Flashpoint, starts off with a trip to Taimi’s lab, where we find Kasmeer chastising us for not inviting her to join Dragon’s Watch yet. As usual with Asura, there is a slight diversion as we fight back the experiments (hasn’t anyone learned yet to keep Asura far, far away from technical gadgets?). (1038 words.)

Episode 4 is entitled The Head of the Snake, and by the end, I was hoping someone would cut off my head to put me out of my misery. It began innocently enough, with a party at Divinity’s Reach with Queen Jennah. It reminded me of another story instance I vaguely remember from the distant past, perhaps in another Living Story, where you had to walk around talking to party guests. This time, White Mantle forces crashed the party by attacking Divinity’s Reach, which miraculously created a new map right next to the city where we’ve never seen one before. (Or was that little space there the whole time? If so, did they plan to put a map there all along?) (1226 words.)

Episode 3 of the Living World Season 3 takes us to Bitterfrost Frontier, another new map north of Frostgorge Sound. The episode begins with some “challenges” in Tarir to train baby dragon Aurene how to be a good dragon. I cringed at first but it turned out the challenges were fairly benign, if somewhat tedious. It seemed like filler material to extend the length of the content, to be honest. (311 words.)

Bhagpuss recommended that I skip the Living World Season 3* and go right into Path of Fire, which by all accounts is far superior, but I’m stubbornly persisting in my efforts to complete the whole season first. Partly it’s because I’ve been recording this adventure, so I’ll have videos of it all. And partly it’s because I want to experience it “as it was intended.” I see a lot of people using their new mounts to get to places which seems like cheating. :) (544 words.)

September was a fairly low-energy, chaotic gaming month. I tried a lot of different games but nothing really clicked. Most of my time in GW2 was spent on either Living Story Season 3 or mindlessly working on map completion while watching television. Guild Wars 2 - 25 hours Elite: Dangerous - 11 hours Final Fantasy XIV - 5 hours 7 Days To Die - 3 hours Lord of the Rings Online - 3 hours Rift - 2 hours Assassin’s Creed 3 - 1 hour Stellaris - 1 hour (88 words.)

I bought the Path of Fire expansion on Friday morning, about four hours before launch time. Not that it matters, but I hope that my purchase was late enough that it doesn’t “count” in the video game industry’s pre-order shenanigans. It was early enough that I got the bonuses, though. (Not that I’ll ever use them.) When I logged in around 11:30, I realized that I had not yet started the Living Story Season 3, and I remembered that I had planned to finish that before going into Path of Fire. (I actually meant to finish it before buying Path of Fire, but I forgot about that part.) (691 words.)

I’m currently uninterested in any game on my hard drive, but I had a sudden flash of inspiration and re-downloaded Elite: Dangerous. I impulsively paid 20 pounds for the Horizons expansion, which sounded cheap until it turned out to be 27 dollars in real money charged to my credit card. After a somewhat lengthy downloading and installation process I was back in the game that I last played for about a month after it’s initial launch at the end of 2014. (847 words.)

I bought a new electric guitar amp! Finally. I haven’t had one since around 2001. It arrived from Amazon yesterday. I settled on the Line 6 Spider V 30 for $200. It’s a little 30 watt practice amp. I wanted something I could simply turn on and go, as opposed to something like RockSmith on Steam which takes about an hour to load and has that dreaded input delay. I was undecided between the Spider and a Fender Champion 40 for the longest time. Historically I’ve stuck with “traditional” brands for musical equipment, but I went out on a limb and got the high-tech newcomer. (To me, brands that entered the music scene after the 90s are still “new.”) My main deciding factor was that the knobs looked cooler. :) Also, the Line 6 has a USB output so you can record direct from it, which will come in very handy for me. (603 words.)

I've been in a very passive media consumption mood for the last week, so I've spent most of my free time watching movies instead of playing games. Here's what I've watched in the past week or so: Amazon Prime Oasis. Pilot for a stylish science fiction series. A priest is requested at a struggling offworld human colony. I always find it interesting when people of faith are portrayed as something other than stereotypical villains, especially in science fiction. This priest is a little too far on the stereotypical "cool guy therapist" anti-trope side, though, but hey, it's a step in the right direction. Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation. Popcorn flick. It was okay. Good stunts, as usual. Terminator: Genisys. Popcorn flick. It was terrible. #NotMyTerminator 13 Hours. Story of the Benghazi attack. I expected this would be a typical Michael Bay seizure-inducing flick, but it was remarkably reserved. I question the details of the film, but overall it "sort of" matched what I had read of the incident and was better than I expected. The entire film I was distracted by the fact that John Krazinski looked exactly like Zachary Levi from Chuck. The Battle of Chosin. Documentary on a disastrous Korean War battle that I had previously not known about, and the entry of China into that war. I watched it because I wanted to know more about how we got to where we are today with North Korea, and the roots of that are very much in the Korean War. It was a good documentary, but a terrible event. Hornet's Nest. Documentary following two embedded reporters during the Afghanistan War and an intense battle with the Taliban. Initially I watched this to understand more about the conditions of fighting in Afghanistan, but as it went on I felt it was more important simply to bear witness to what those guys went through. (Incidentally, Sand Castle is another good movie about the Afghanistan War-it's a drama but it presented the political situation pretty well.) Apocalypse Now. I'd never seen it before, and it's been on my "I should watch that someday" list for ever. It was okay. Some parts were good, other parts seemed to be drowning in pretentious cinema or like you had to be high to enjoy it. Not surprisingly, young Martin Sheen looked exactly like Emilio Estavez from Young Guns. Netflix Jaws. Never seen before. It was pretty good. Better than I expected a movie from the 1970s to be. The Siege of Jadotville. Dramatization of a Cold War incident that I'd never heard of before, about Irish soldiers trying to defend a town in the Congo during the 1960s. Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama Bin Laden. A dramatic recreation in the form of a documentary. It was okay. Tropic Thunder. Parody of Vietnam War movies by Ben Stiller. It was funny, but it was the kind of humor that you're ashamed to be laughing at and would probably not admit to anyone that you thought it was funny. :) Generally I prefer my humor to be a little more subtle, and this movie kind of hit you over the head with it. Still, it was better than I expected it to be. (538 words.)

I’ve had a Yo-kai Watch in my inventory for a while, but I never knew what it was for or where I got it. I remember finding it in my inventory, and I kept looking at it, thinking, “What the heck is this thing for?” Well it turns out that I must have accidentally done the Yo-kai Event quest in 2016. I have no memory of that, but when I went to find the Yo-kai quest-giver in Ul’dah the other day, he/she/it was nowhere to be found. I went to the Gold Saucer, followed the crowd of people, and found the Yo-kai vendor, which I must have already talked to in 2016 too. I even had the Yo-kai Medallium book, and one Yo-kai Medal on one of my Retainers. (403 words.)