videogames – Page 6 – Philoquialisms

Weekly status update [0025/????]

A pleasantly quiet week, punctuated with some quiet pleasantness.

As mentioned in my rant earlier this week, I finished up Final Fantasy XIII after years of having it hang over my head. I then immediately started playing it again from the start. I’ll probably write a “Here’s a Thing” about it soonish, but: it’s a lot better than people think. Except for the trophies. Damn the trophies.
We had the first extended game night in ages at Fercott Fermentables on Tuesday. We played Power Grid at Jase’s request; despite him having never played the game, he won on the first tiebreaker, with Chad in second. Power Grid is a stone cold classic board game, and I enjoy it every time I play, although in this particular game I knew I was going to lose and lose badly about halfway through. Good times, though, with great company and a good atmosphere.
I have a big stack of books from the library but haven’t made a huge dent in them yet due to playing too many video games instead. I did finally read/look at/gape at Banksy’s Wall and Piece, which Chad kindly loaned me. It’s a gorgeous piece of art full of gorgeous (and sad, and clever, and all other sorts of things) pieces of art. One of my favorite touches: a lot of the pieces have either how long it took to paint them–sometimes crazy short amounts of time–or how long they lasted before getting painted over or removed.
The diet continues to go well, inasmuch as I’m pretty sure I’m still losing weight and I’m definitely still managing keto. I intentionally didn’t weigh myself when I started and still haven’t, due to my tendency to obsess over slight variations in the short-term numbers when long-term trends are the important part, but the key “clothes fit better” index is going strong.
Speaking of personal health, neither my back nor my wrists have been acting up recently, which is a very pleasant state of affairs. I suspect the former is at least partly due to the continued weight loss; not sure about the wrists, but I’m not gonna knock it either.

All in all, a pleasant week, with the sadly-too-rare pleasure of an excellent board game evening in the middle. I… should really try and do something to make those happen more often, but I’m not sure what. Now, though, it’s time to get back to reading on this quiet Saturday, which is actually a whole lot like what I would have been doing on most Saturdays before retirement anyhow. Funny how that works.

The devil in the dull

After seven years of it hanging over my head, I just “platted” Final Fantasy XIII for the PS3, and I’m here to tell you: trophies (or achievements, or whatever your favorite system calls them) are the absolute worst.

For those of you who might be unfamiliar with the idea, a brief explanation. Achievements (or trophies; I will use the terms interchangeably from here on out) are a way of tracking and rewarding a player’s actions in the vast majority of modern games. It all started with the Xbox 360; the PlayStation 3 followed suit a couple of years late, and both Sony and Microsoft’s modern systems continue the trend. Steam, the juggernaut of gaming on modern PCs, also tracks achievements, and people have even reverse-engineered them into games of yore. They act as a “scoring system” for all of their platforms; for example, as of this moment I’m Level 20 on my PlayStation Network account, with 32 platinum trophies–essentially but not precisely “games I got every achievement in”–and another 3300 or so other trophies of less valuable metals indicating progress in hundreds of games.

There are fundamentally three types of achievements:

Some you get for passing certain points in the game; these tend to be unmissable, assuming you play through the whole thing.
Others you get for doing certain challenge-y things within a given game, such as beating it on a particular difficulty level or using a weak weapon, or simply pulling off something clever or challenging that isn’t required to beat the game itself.
Lastly are achievements that pretend to be the second kind, above, but are secretly actually “play the game until you hate it with every fiber of your being because this stupid achievement is making you do something tedious and awful.”

Now, perhaps you can put your sleuthing hat on and figure out which of the above I abhor. (I’m actually not a big fan of the first type of achievement, either; they feel like participation stickers. But at least they tend to be inoffensive.) Sometimes the second type can even shade into the third, if the challenging thing you’re asking a player to do ends up being too challenging; game designers tend to be a little too close to their games, and often don’t realize that what is easy for them and their testers can be downright devilish for players out in the real world.

The problem is that almost every game with achievements has at least one of that last type, even games I’ve otherwise really enjoyed. For example, Axiom Verge–one of my favorite games of all time–has an achievement that requires you to “glitch” at least one of every enemy in the game. This is quite tedious and frustrating, as some enemies only show up in one or two rooms in the game, and missing one means scouring the map for That One Thing You Didn’t Do. Now, I happen to have collected all of the achievements in Axiom Verge on three different occasions (two different PSN accounts, plus on Steam), but I still hate that particular achievement with a passion.

I recently “platted” (short for “platinummed”, a delightful verbing of the act of getting the last trophy/achievement on a PlayStation game, which nets you a special platinum trophy on top of the copper, silver, or gold one that whatever the actual thing you did provides) Diablo III. That game also had a couple of awful trophies; one required you to essentially beat the game with six different characters, which is a lot of one game for most people, but that wasn’t the big offender. No. The awful one was the “complete 500 bounties” trophy.

Bounties in Diablo III are semi-random tasks the game assigns you, five at a time. The thing is: after you’ve done twenty bounties or so, you’ve basically seen everything that the bounty system can offer. And yet you have to grind out another 480 of them. 480! Even a fast bounty takes a couple of minutes to complete. It took me hours of completing bounties while doing other things (mostly watching Twitch) to complete that trophy, none of it fun.

So, back to Final Fantasy XIII. It, too, has a couple of awful achievements, but one of them takes the grand prize in the Garbage Design Sweepstakes. You have to “hold” (i.e. have in your inventory) every single weapon and accessory in the game. Many of these you can’t actually find in the game; instead, you have to upgrade other, weaker items into the missing ones. The details of the system aren’t important. What’s important is that getting this one trophy easily adds another ten or so hours onto the game, minimum… all of which consists of repetitive tasks where you kill enemies over and over and over and over and over to get items to sell (or use) to feed the upgrade engine. It is awful, unfun, and you are basically forced into using a guide off the Internet to make sure you don’t miss any of the upgrade paths.

So: I beat the game back in 2011, looked at what I had to do for the last trophies–there are some other really stupid ones in the game that I won’t get into–and went “nope.” But it’s been nagging me in the back of my head ever since then. I platted both of FFXIII‘s sequels, and FFXV as well (for those of you wondering “why not FFXIV?”: it’s an massively multiplayer online game, and I’m not allowed to play those for a whole bunch of reasons having to do with my well-being), and still FFXIII sat there, trophy list 60% complete, mocking me.

And so this past week I decided I’d finish it off. And finish it I did. A tiny bit of that was fun; a couple of the bits in the game that I hadn’t done were interesting and challengin. But mostly it was miserable and boring and tedious.

But. By merely existing, achievements are a gamification of the act of playing games. And a lot of people–myself included–are easily susceptible to that sort of thing. I look at a game where I have 70% of the trophies and go: I should get the rest. Then I have a shiny platinum! Then people will know I beat the game. And so I found myself listening to The Dollop for two hours tonight while tediously playing the same battle over and over and over to get enough in-game money to just be done with this. This is not good game design. It’s captive, sure, but it’s unhealthy. And I don’t like it at all. But I can’t help myself, either.

At least I can blame Bill Gates.

Weekly status update [0024/????]

Hey, look, I’m actually writing this on Friday for a change!

I finally, finally finished up Diablo III‘s Platinum trophy on my PS4. I promptly uninstalled the game afterwards. I need to write a post at some point about how unhealthy “trophy culture” is, particularly because just about every game has one or two absolutely idiotic trophies that make what is otherwise a delightful experience miserable. For Diablo III, that was the “do 500 bounties” trophy: it was a tremendous amount of boring busywork. Fortunately…
…I did many of said bounties while watching Twitch. I still watch Landail on the regs, and I’ve also started watching quite a bit of Sinatar, who mostly plays old PC RPGs, for much the same reason: a chill pace and a sense of actual community in chat.
With Diablo III done, I picked Shining in the Darkness back up again with some more seriousness. I’ve made quite a bit more progress in the game, and am still very much enjoying the act of mapping the game on actual graphing paper. There’s something deeply satisfying about looking at the stack of maps I’ve drawn that staring at a map on GameFAQs just doesn’t match.
I’ve been reading a lot too. In fact, the only thing I picked up on Prime Day was a shiny new Kindle Paperwhite. I’m not a huge fan of it being touch-only, but I can’t deny that it is a lot easier to read thanks to the LCD backlighting. Getting all of my books onto it was a hassle, since they’re spread across my Amazon account and my computer (yes, before you tech people ask, I use Calibre), but I got everything back up and running the way I like it. That said, my current efforts are geared towards a fat stack of books I checked out from the library, including a whole lot of Christopher Moore that I missed out on in the last fifteen years or so.
I went to a dinner thing Thursday night. The company was good and I got to play board games for the first time in something like a month, which was a pleasure, even if they were all very casual games. The Mind continues to be fascinating, and I got to play CrossTalk for the first time, which plays a lot like the old TV show Password, with the key twist being that the other team guesses when your team captain gives clues. This makes the game a fascinating game of chicken on the part of the captains. It was a lot of fun and way more interesting than even I had suspected it would be, and that was without the advanced “gamers’ rules”.
The dentist was was fine. Expensive, but fine.

It was a pretty good week, on the balance; I cleared a couple of irritating things off of my plate and got to play board games with people, so, y’know: pretty peak retirement living.

Weekly status update [0023/????]

I almost completely missed that yesterday was Friday the 13th. Thanks, Reddit!

Finished reading The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. Like many Stephenson novels, it picks up a lot in the rear half, and I went from struggling to read more than twenty or so pages of it at a time to tearing through the last couple of hundred pages in a day. It’s Stephenson Ending Ratio is only about a 0.3 or so as well, which is a pleasant surprise; it’s still too abrupt, but it actually answered most of my questions. I suspect Nicole Gailland (the co-author) had something to do with that.
I also finally finished Minitel: Welcome to the Internet, which was a fascinating look into a bit of technology I knew nothing about. The idea that France was effectively connected to its own private Internet in the mid-’80s is kind of amazing. It was a very slow read due to the huge numbers of footnotes–I have to read them immediately, and flipping back and forth in the book is so slow–but Minitel was one of the better Platform Studies books. Next up is the one on the Super Nintendo. I expect to be at least mildly disappointed, as I am Error (the one for the NES) is maybe my favorite volume of the series, so I’m going in with too-high expectations. Further news as events warrant.
Played way, way too much Diablo III. I have all but one trophy for it now on the PS4, and that trophy requires a lot of boring grinding. I’ve been doing said grinding while watching people on Twitch, so it’s not all a waste of my time, but it’s moments like this that I regret ever hunting down trophies and achievements.
Actually did some puzzles again for the first time in ages. It was mostly multi-sudoku, but I also did two Trigons. Fair warning: even “easy” Trigons are hard, and the really hard ones are damn-near impossible. It’s not uncommon for single puzzles to take me upwards of two hours of continuous solving. Said solution is all the sweeter for the result, though.
Went through another fairly lengthy fast (no zero-calorie days, thank goodness). I think it helped with once again recalibrating my satiety. I will say that the rotisserie chicken I had from Walmart today for breakfast-and-lunch was one of the tastiest things I’ve had… but I know it’s because as of this morning just about anything was going to be delicious.
Not a whole lot of social interaction outside of Twitch, unfortunately. My semi-regular online gaming partner has been busy with other things, we haven’t had a board game night in ages… I should probably figure out something I can do to see actual humans on a semi-regular basis. Probably.

I’m going to the dentist on Monday, which is the first big medical-y expense I’ll have had since I retired. I didn’t keep my dental insurance, so I’m… apprehensive about how expensive it’ll be. Guess we’ll find out! Other than that, though, I feel like things are going well overall. It’s as unexciting as always, but I’m still not bored, and won’t be for the foreseeable future. 23 weeks in: so far, so good.

Weekly status update [0022/????]

Just gonna jump right in.

My love affair with Planetside 2 is already over. Turned out that I was really good at gunning and really bad at the actual first-person shoot-people-with-guns bits… and while the former is useful some of the time, the latter is useful pretty much all of the time. After a bad night I realized that I just didn’t have it in me to “git gud” at the pew pews. It’s a shame, too, because I had finally convinced some friends to play with me… just in time to stop playing. Ah, well.
On the other hand, Dead Cells is really good, and actually runs fine on my ancient Linux desktop. If you like Souls-style combat, platformers, and roguelikes, check it out. It’s coming to consoles in a few months if you’d rather not futz with Steam.
I’m still slowly working my way through The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. It’s a bit of a slow read, like most Stephenson, although the story is captivating enough. It just sometimes requires more energy than I have available to put into the book. (It’s no Baroque Cycle, though; I remember being proud when I made it through more than 10 pages of those books in a single night. So dense. So dense.)
I haven’t had to use my wrist braces in a couple of weeks, which has been very nice. They’re still sitting next to my chair just in case.
I hadn’t tested my typing speed in ages, and I noticed that my mistake rate had dropped pretty significantly (of course, right now, I’m making tons of them… stupid observational effect), so I took another set of typing speed tests. I nailed 80wpm on this not-so-great Chromebook keyboard I’m typing on right now and 81wpm on my fancy mechanical keyboard, so I think it’s safe to say that I’m around that now with Colemak. That’s a ~10wpm difference from the last time I seriously tested myself, and it’s pretty much all down to error rate. It feels good to be back in the top 10% or so of typists with a whole new method, not gonna lie.
Saw two back-to-back laser light shows last night (Friday) with friends, one for Rush’s 2112 and one that had a bunch of random famous Led Zeppelin songs. The 2112 show was better, with tighter synchronization and (in my opinion) better music, but the Zep show was definitely more of a crowd-pleaser. I had never been to a laser light show before; it was quite a treat. Chad and I immediately started musing on what modern albums we would like to see given the laser treatment. We both landed on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy as a really strong candidate… as long as you cut out Kanye breathing into a mic for six minutes at the end of “Runaway.”
Keto still going strong; I haven’t had a single cheat day yet, which might be a record. The losses are a little harder to see at the moment, but I can feel it in my shirts and see it on my face when I look in the mirror, and I have a good five more months before my first obligatory cheat period (going home for the holidays), so there’s plenty of time for more improvement.
I just watched it this morning, but Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette on Netflix is… amazing and powerful and tough. Strong recommendation. It’s basically the only TV I’ve watched in the last couple of weeks.

Whew. That sure looks like a lot, given how little it actually feels like happened this week. That’s… good, I suppose?

Anyhow, just in case you were wondering or worried: still not bored!

Weekly status update [0021/????]

It was a relatively uneventful week, other than a pair of delicious meals that effectively bookended the working chunk. I was confused enough on Monday to think it was Saturday, though, so it goes to show you that days of the week start becoming a bit nebulous once they don’t actually affect your life very much. Or I’m just very forgetful.

Or both. Why not both?

The first meal, on Tuesday, was a going-away dinner for one of my old coworkers. I was pleasantly surprised to be invited, and had a good time chatting with all of my old teammates. The steak wasn’t bad either. (It was delicious.)
The second meal, on Friday, was at the local Tex Mex place I frequent. I got a platter full of meat with caramelized onions, avocado, and all the taste. It was also delicious.
In the middle, along with last weekend? So much Planetside 2. So much. According to this page, I started playing this past Sunday or Monday (the graph is a bit unclear) and have already put 61 hours into the game. That’s… a lot of game. It also doesn’t count the several hours I’ve spent on alternate characters. I wrote about it here. Yesterday I could feel the game starting to get a bit stale… but then I convinced one of my old coworkers to play Friday evening, and we both had a great time together, and that renewed my excitement. We’ll see how long it lasts.
Alongside the videogames (well, mostly the one), I finished reading John Kessel’s The Moon and the Other. I should write a “Here’s a Book Thing” about it, and I may, so I’ll just say that I enjoyed it quite a bit. What on the surface looks in some ways like a reaction to The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t, really. Also, those two books one after the other was a bit of a weird coincidence, given their exploration of gender roles… but I picked up the Kessel almost entirely based on the cover.
I suspect my back is just going to hurt me a bit every morning from here on out, but at least it’s not the acute pain I was experiencing the last few weeks any more. Small blessings and all that.

Lastly, this is not really something specific that happened, but: every time I left the house, I realized how little I leave the house now. I am definitely not an errand-a-day sort of guy; if anything, I bundle them up and do them all at once, then stay home for two or three days before venturing out again. This was helped by the fact that I didn’t get a rotisserie chicken from Walmart even once this week, which usually puts me on the road for a couple of minutes every morning. It seems a little strange, as someone who spent at least some time in the car every weekday since I was sixteen or so. It’s a small but significant change to the rhythm of my life.

Here’s a videogame thing: Planetside 2

I’ve had more “oh, damn, it’s 6am and I haven’t gone to bed yet” nights in the last week than I’ve had in total since I retired, and it’s all because of Planetside 2.

For those of you unfamiliar with the game, Planetside 2 is a massively multiplayer online first-person strategic shooter. That’s a whole lot of adjectives; put simply, you run around going “pew pew” with laser guns, there’s a lot of people playing at the same time, and there are goals and objectives beyond “pew pew a bunch of them before you get pew pewed back.”

In many ways, the game is a more complicated version of a game mode I was obsessed with many years ago, Unreal Tournament 2004‘s Onslaught mode. At the depths of my addiction to that particular mode, I would come home from working at LSU at 1700 or so and not stop until 0200 or 0300, night after night, for weeks on end. I stopped because it was utterly wrecking my wrists; as a keyboard-and-mouse game, I was doing a lot of repetitive strain on my right wrist in particular as I played.

Planetside 2 is basically Onslaught scaled up 64x or so. There are three teams/factions; the goal is to be the team with the most territory. You can’t just drop deep into your opponent’s land and capture there, because the only vulnerable territory is that connected to your own by the “Lattice,” which is generally (but not always) the stuff that’s right next to it on the map. What this means in practice is that the “front” of the fight is constantly shifting but almost never crazily distant, as your faction either successfully claims a bit of territory and pushes further in, or loses territory and is pushed back.

Now, I’m playing on the PS4, which makes it a bit of a double whammy of a mess: I’m already not exactly good at first-person shooters, having lost my high level of coordination as I’ve gotten older, and using a controller rather than keyboard and mouse just makes it worse. But that’s actually mostly okay, because the game has a bunch of “support” work that you can do. I spend most of my time as an engineer, repairing vehicles and other things around the bases, and the game rewards me for doing so.

That said, the game has some major issues. It’s free-to-play, and while its monetization strategy is only mostly scummy, the real problem is that it’s a free-to-play game… on a console… in the dead of summer… where you shoot people. If you don’t already know what that means, let me tell you: it is absolutely overrun with twelve year old boys who think cursing is the Coolest Thing Ever and constantly kill their own teammates because it’s funny. There are moments of utter brilliance, when you get in with an organized group and manage to fend off a nasty assault or execute one of your own… and there are moments of utter frustration when the person whose vehicle you were keeping alive turns the turret and shoots you for no good reason.

And while the monetization is only mostly scummy, it is scummy. The rate at which you get experience (“certifications”) in the game is low, so it strongly encourages you to drop real money on the game to unlock stuff.

But there are some clever things too. For one, most of the weapons are “sidegrades;” better at some things but worse at others. You actually really don’t ever need to buy a new weapon for most of the classes, and if you do it can come much later. That’s surprisingly respectful for a F2P game, where often the person with the most money gets super-awesome ultra better versions of the standard weapons.

Now, I know that I’m not supposed to play massively multiplayer online games, because I know what a time-sink they can be. But I suspect that I’m going to run Planetside 2 dry in a week or two; it’s fun, but ultimately pretty same-y, and unless I can convince some friends to play with me–it’d sure be nice to team up with actual adults rather than prepubescents–it’s going to end up too lonely to sustain. But for the time being I’m having fun, and given that I haven’t paid a penny for the game (and don’t plan to), why not?

(If you’re interested in teaming up, drop me a note. I know no one will, but I feel like I’ve gotta try.)

In conclusion: Planetside 2 is pretty neat. It’s given me sleepless nights. Would play again.

Weekly status update [0020/????]

It’s kind of amazing to me that I’m 20 weeks, 140 days, into retirement. It both doesn’t feel that long at all–I can still remember driving into work and hunting for a parking spot, sometimes the most challenging thing I did all day–and impressively far in the past. That second part excites me; I was a little worried that the days would quickly start disappearing into a blur of nothingness, but instead I feel like I actually get quite a bit out of most of my waking hours. Sure, it’s reading, or playing games, but those are both things that I wanted to do more of in the past and didn’t have the time for. Now that I do, it’s nice. Really nice.

I’ve officially given up on the whole USPS situation. Dealing with their international handling department is a special kind of hell. I got replacements for all of the items, so I don’t really care that much now; I’m mostly just angry I wasted time contacting them in the first place. More fool me for trying to do the right thing.
I fasted most of this week, and I think that was successful in recalibrating my hunger levels… but then I went and ate way too much today in a sort of rebound effect. Sigh. I still stuck with the keto side of things, so I’m not worried about that, but we’ll have to see in the days ahead if I screwed it up.
Still haven’t done much in the way of puzzles. The dot-by-dot book I got in my last order from Japan is actually really disappointing; it has a bunch of cheater art in the background of most of the puzzles, so you almost always know what the picture is going to be before you start. Boo.
Played a whole lot of videogames this week. I finished Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction after putting it aside a couple of months ago, and tore through Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty in a single sitting the next day (it’s short, though). I still haven’t made much more progress in Shining in the Darkness, though; I’m not sure why. I was enjoying it when I was playing it. Instead I picked up the original PlayStation version of Final Fantasy Tactics digitally and started playing it on my PS3… but I think I’m gonna force myself to set that aside and get back to the Shining series.
I’m a good chunk of the way into The Moon and the Other, which is an interesting sf novel by John Kessel. In some ways its setting is an inversion of The Handmaid’s Tale, which makes for really interesting compare-and-contrast reading. I didn’t do that intentionally… but it’s a neat result.
Watched a whole lot of Landail on Twitch, as he was playing a game I particularly like (Tactics Ogre) most of the week. Actively spent less time in some of the other online communities I’m a part of due to frustration with some of them.
My back’s not in great shape again yet, but it’s better every day, I feel, and I’m taking an ibuprofen every morning to help reduce the inflammation.
On the other hand, I haven’t needed my wrist braces for days, which is very nice.

All in all, despite the frustrations I had earlier in the week, I feel pretty good about how it ended. Even the tiniest dent in my gaming backlog’s a good thing, and I’ve really been enjoying my recent reading level. Hopefully next week will continue the up and to the right trend.

Tiny bits, late June edition

My lower back’s been killing me since last Thursday, and I exacerbated it by sitting in front of my computer for several hours last night playing through most of the original Creeper World again. I woke up this morning with a realization that I had better move very, very carefully today, or I will be laid up for days.

I’ve been on hold with the USPS for an hour now. They destroyed a package sent from Germany and are supposedly sending me paperwork to file a claim for insurance… but it’s been two weeks and they haven’t yet. Their website is horribly broken, too. Putting in my claim number causes it to have a server error. Confidence level of me actually getting my insurance claim: near zero.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a great book, but I can only read it a chapter or so at a time. What was meant to read as a dark parable at the time of publication comes off much more dire in today’s political clime. I haven’t even touched the second season of the show on Hulu, partly because I want it to finish airing, partly because I’m not sure I can handle it right now.

I’m on my second day of a fast. I had two Atkins shakes this morning (along with a multivitamin and an Advil), and I don’t plan on having calories again until Thursday. I’m not happy with how much my appetite has grown over the last couple of months, and fasting is the best way I know to reset that… but while it’s happening I find myself occasionally thinking longingly of the taste of paper towels.

Reading back over this, it sure seems like a big bucket of negativity, but that’s just a consequence of the moment. A positive: I placed another order for Japanese puzzle books yesterday, and it’s coming in tomorrow, because Japan has their stuff seriously together when it comes to international shipping. I even got a dot-to-dot magazine, because apparently those are okay for adults to do now, and I’ve always secretly loved them. My lines aren’t very straight, but there’s something deeply satisfying about connecting things in numerical order. A tiny ordering of the universe, a pushing back of entropy. And you get a pretty picture as a side bonus.

Weekly status update [0018/????]

Oh, hey, I’m actually writing this on Friday for a bit of a change.

I’ve moved on from reading Stephen King’s crime trilogy to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. I’m about halfway through. It’s excellent and dark as hell.
I actually beat Phantasy Star this weekend. The game got very repetitive near the end, with mostly the same enemies in the last four or five dungeons. I stopped mapping the game myself and switched to using online maps in my frustration, tearing through the endgame as quickly as possible. The mid-game was a solid RPG, and the game was technically amazing; it honestly looked better than many SNES RPGs. But was it fun all the way through? Definitely not.
I’m now playing Shining in the Darkness. It’s another “map it out on a piece of graph paper” game, but I’m enjoying it quite a bit more, at least for the time being. The levels are huge, 30×30 each; fortunately the graph paper I bought has a smaller-scale grid on the back of each sheet, so it’s not a problem to map.
I finished the PS4 remaster of Assassin’s Creed II and started both AC: Brotherhood and Horizon: Zero Dawn. They’re good games both, if a little too similar to each other. I should pick just one to stick with for the moment.
While I was dealing with Linux being idiotic yesterday, I was also having to fight with the USPS. They destroyed a package of board games from amazon.de, and apparently I’m going to have to fill out a bunch of forms to claim the insurance on the package, never mind the fact that they have a case file with a bunch of evidence that it is, indeed, destroyed. Sigh.
Not a lot of TV. I watch an episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine every couple of days, but that’s it. Same with puzzles; I don’t think I’ve solved a single one in the last week. I have been continuing my watching of Landail play games on Twitch, although at the moment it’s mostly hate-watching due to the game he’s playing.
Keto continues apace.

It’s been something of an exhausting week, mainly due to the stress of dealing with USPS and my computer. I’m actually glad that it’s the weekend now, which is honestly a bit of a strange thing to say nowadays, but there you have it.