Endgame Viable

Fine! I’ll write something about the E3s and whatnot. I’m not a big fan of these kinds of game conferences but I actually sat down and watched some showcases this weekend, because really, who among us can honestly say they’d pass up a chance to write snarky tweets and ruin people’s fun on the Internet. I missed most of the EA show on Friday. I started watching right before the Anthem gameplay footage, which was followed by approximately 20 continuous hours of FIFA gameplay. (895 words.)

News and observations from the past week. I keep thinking I should write real posts about stuff, but I’m having a hard time finding anything that interests me enough to write more than a few sentences. Dark Souls Remastered. It bugs me but also amuses me that the featured image I put in these posts doesn’t match the title. (660 words.)

Join me as I re-watch The Expanse, Season 1, to try to find out where the show went wrong for me. Summary I’ve decided that I’m just going to quote Wikipedia’s brief episode summaries here, instead of spending all of my time writing my own summaries. The point of these posts is to explore what I think of the episodes, not retell the episodes. The Big Empty was written by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, and directed by Terry McDonough. I am noting the writers and directors, by the way, to see if I notice any patterns in which writers or directors create the episodes I like or dislike. (1630 words.)

I started to write a blog post about The Expanse Season 3, Episode 7 (Delta-V). That episode seemed to be the beginning of a brand new story arc, perhaps the start of a new book in the source material. I didn’t particularly care for the episode, and I ended up ranting about all the things I didn’t like about The Expanse, especially in Season 3. I’m fully aware that others love this show and praise it endlessly, and most consider Season 3 to be the best one yet, while I’m over here struggling to find a single thing to hold onto and enjoy. I wondered what I was missing. Surely I must be missing something? (2943 words.)

The obligatory screenshot from the beginning of BioShock. Games Played It’s been a really slow month for gaming. BioShock Remastered, 13 hours. Haven’t quite reached the end yet as my attention got diverted elsewhere. Fortnite, 10 hours. I enjoyed it but it doesn’t suit my non-competitive lifestyle. Ryse: Son of Rome, 7 hours. Quick and satisfying. Dungeons and Dragons Online, 7 hours. Great for vegging out, but like most older games, terrible if you want to read any of the text on the screen. The Forest, 3 hours. A great, atmospheric, immersive forest environment exploration and survival game that deserves more time than I give it. Podcast RSS Feed (326 words.)

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.)