Grimdark TMNT from [1d4chan][1]. Artist unknown. A tweet caught my attention Friday and I thought about responding, but it was a topic that would fill a lot more than a couple tweets and I was looking for something to write about anyway. i'm never going to understand why people keep writing grimdark shit all the time. the world is miserable enough as it is. don't add to it. (995 words.)

I needed to use up some Audible credits, so I picked up an audiobook called Off To Be The Wizard by Scott Meyer. I found it by looking up the works performed by Luke Daniels, one of my favorite audiobook readers, ever since I discovered him from listening to the Iron Druid Chronicles by Kevin Hearne. (If you like the Harry Dresden books, you might also like IDC. It’s the same sort of thing, but with an Irish wolfhound.) (819 words.)

I don’t know how many people know this, but I used to play a lot of Quake CTF with Crayola Clan in the 1990s. Back then, “eSports” were community-run tournaments with no stakes and no prizes and barely any organization. We played mostly NetQuake, QuakeWorld, and Quake 2. We played a little bit of Quake 3 Arena but I personally never liked it and by then gaming started to get commercial with sponsors and cash prizes and it was more work than fun and it was all too stressful to deal with. (707 words.)

Continuing my pseudo-regular new series on television shows and movies I’ve watched recently, because … well, it’s something to write about. These are not “reviews” per se, but merely thoughts and observations. You can assume, though, that if I’m writing a post about a thing, it’s notable to me in some way, either especially good, or especially bad, or otherwise relevant somehow. Today I’d like to talk about a little show called The Shannara Chronicles. (1277 words.)

Here’s an oldie from Drafts… and I didn’t even have to find pictures for it! Here are some screen shots that didn’t fit anywhere else. I quested for quite a while in Hellswamp without being accosted by anyone. Reds and greens wandered around doing their own thing for hours even while the zone was in conflict. Me and the puppy questing out in Hellswamp, not getting ganked. (390 words.)

This is another in my recent series of posts that I’m calling, “What in God’s name can I possibly find to schedule for publishing today.” I saw some folks on Twitter talking about the Farseer books by Robin Hobb, and since I’ve been looking for new stuff to consume, I bought the first book on Kindle, Assassin’s Apprentice. I almost used an Audible credit on it, but I have some complex rules about whether to get books in text format or audiobook format, and this one came up as text format. Besides, it was only $1.99. (836 words.)

Here’s a timely post written about six months ago, which sat in my Drafts folder lacking not only a picture, but also some links. I started playing the Battlefield 1 single-player campaign on a Friday evening, and finished it the next day, on Saturday night. There were six missions. I recorded 12 videos, averaging about 35 minutes each, for a grand total of about 7 hours of gameplay. Let’s be extremely generous and say I cut out an hour of video, so let’s round it up to 8 hours. (2016 words.)

This post sat in my Drafts folder for nearly two months waiting for me to add that picture… I’m hearing reports (from my super secret source known as “the Internet”) of a game called Rend revealed at PAX East 2017. Rend is a self-described “hybrid survival game” from FrostKeep Studios, a studio I’ve never heard of, but which supposedly has a good pedigree. It’s largely being reported as a “survival sandbox” game like ARK or Conan Exiles, but MassivelyOP also compared it to Crowfall and Camelot Unchained. I submit that a better name for this kind of game would be something like “tribal warfare simulator” or “multiplayer online persistent team PvP” (MOPTP pronounced, obviously, “moptop”). (332 words.)

This one should be pretty simple. Mass Effect Andromeda - 97 hours … and that’s literally it. (17 words.)

After Two Episodes I have seen a number of people on Twitter talking positively about the new Netflix show 13 Reasons Why, so I watched the first two episodes last night. I expected it to be a touching drama about a teen suicide, but it appears to be more of a tense psychological thriller, somewhat in the vein of I Know What You Did Last Summer (except that we, the audience, don’t know). (2963 words.)