Autumn Approaches - September 2023

I can’t believe it’s been half a month already. I must hastily finish this barely-even-started draft and think of a title. A major problem with writing a “newsletter” is that it’s impossible to think of a title that encompasses a potpourri of writing topics.

Autumn is quickly approaching, and I’m starting to see a lot of leaves falling in the last couple of weeks, and it’s noticably darker in the evenings. Which is unsettling, because I still think summer just started.

Gaming

I still haven’t played anything but Baldur’s Gate 3*, every weeknight, and every weekend, since August 3rd.

As of this posting, I’ve just officially entered Act 3. In my playthrough, I spend roughly 95% of my time fighting encounters, and maybe 5% of my time on story. It’s likely that I’m going to have to do more playthroughs on Explorer difficulty just to get a concise telling of all the companion stories. For some reason, in my playthrough, Shadowheart gets the lion’s share of companion story attention. (Two of the companions are actually dead and gone in my playthrough.)

My progress page is over 20,000 words now.

Otherwise, there’s some kerfuffle about Unity changing its pricing in 2024, and the usual trend-setters (i.e. everyone with an SEO-affected Internet property) siezed on the opportunity to turn it into some villainous moustache-twirling greedy capitalist overreach, just like every other time something happens with Unity or literally any other corporation employing more than 5 people. I didn’t dig too far into the story, because it’s almost impossible to find pragmatic discussion of the change now that it’s been buried so far underneath the outrage.

Video Production

Not much to talk about. I’ve officially recorded too many Baldur’s Gate 3 videos for it to feel advisable to upload them all. Almost 150 now. But I have to upload them to backup the files, if nothing else. I’ll have to set the scheduler to run the upload script two or three times a day.

The Pathfinder: Kingmaker series will stop, unfinished, because I’ve reached the point in the series where Baldur’s Gate 3 came out and I dropped Pathfinder like a hot potato. Hopefully I’ll return to it someday. I hate uploading incomplete video series, but as I’ve previously mentioned, after I lost my NAS I want to upload everything just for another backup of the files. I lost a bunch of videos from 2021 because I didn’t upload unfinished series. Hellpoint, for instance.

I got a new keyboard for my gaming PC. It’s a Cherry Stream keyboard, which is a low-profile, almost-chicklet-style keyboard, to replace my Cherry mechanical monstrosity. I’m rather fond of Apple-style keyboards (except I hate Apple keyboard layouts), so I wanted something that requires almost no finger strength to operate, because I don’t move my fingers much when I type. But the main reason I got rid of the mechanical keyboard is that the spacebar is so frickin’ loud that it sounds like gunfire on any video where I have to use my backup microphone, which is a Blue Snowball next to the monitor.

Day Job

Word came down recently of a “pivot,” which threw a wrench in the plans for the current project the team is working on. Leadership wants us to prioritize something else, but went out of their way to emphasize that we haven’t, in fact, wasted the last six months of our lives on throw-away work.

(Even if it was thrown away, it wouldn’t bother me that much, because what I got from the last six months was the knowledge I’ve gained over that time on Java Spring and Kubernetes and so forth, which I get to keep regardless of what happens to the project.)

Health and Wellness

Had some dentist appointments for “deep cleanings.” Of all the dental procedures I’ve had in my life–and I’ve had quite a lot of them–cleanings are my least favorite. I’ll take a root canal any day of the week over a cleaning, especially the “deep cleanings.” Yuck. Feels like you’re getting waterboarded with all the water spraying everywhere from that cleaning gizmo.

Media Consumption

Finished with American Dad, then saw that Archer was on Hulu, too. There’ve been a lot of seasons of Archer since the last time I watched it.

Then I saw there’s a new season of Futurama on Hulu. Obviously I’m going to watch a new season of Futurama, regardless of whether it’s good or bad. Spoiler alert: It’s bad, much like the Comedy Central reboot. Whoever’s writing this new season doesn’t remember what subversive humor and satire used to mean. Now it’s whatever you call the kind of humor that hits you over the head with a massive hammer of obvious jokes that everyone’s already heard a thousand times before. But, you know, it’s Futurama, so I’ll watch it anyway.

And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I liked the new D&D movie Honor Among Thieves. I desperated wanted to hate it, but I didn’t. It reminded me of an old 80s sword-and-sorcery movie. It was like watching Conan the Destroyer again, except with a bit of a Mel Brooks satire comedy vibe. Just an unassuming, old-fashioned fun adventure movie that wasn’t drowning in distractingly dumb-looking video game CGI. A simple, traditional story and likable ensemble characters goes a long way toward making a good movie.

While I was on Prime Video, I noticed a new season of Wheel of Time, which I haven’t watched yet. I was surprised it wasn’t affected by the strikes, but I imagine they wrapped up filming before May.

World Context

I haven’t been on Twitter since whatever day it was that they made Tweetdeck unusable, so my ability to keep up with the news has been severely compromised.

• An earthquake in Morroco killed thousands.
• Floods from a Medditeranean storm killed over ten thousand after dams burst in Syria.
• There’s yet another government shutdown crisis, because of course there is, because nobody in government knows how to govern.
• Republican speaker McCarthy began a formal investigation into impeaching Biden, because the opposition party pretty much always tries to impeach the sitting president now, making impeachment kind of a joke in modern politics.
• Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: 2024 Presidential Election, War in Ukraine, Hollywood Strikes, Nigerian Coup, Sudanese Civil War.
• Celebrity Deaths: Jimmy Buffet (musician).

Bye!