Gormongous

Not terribly much, the general fucked-ness of the world aside! I got furloughed for the first year of the pandemic, more or less, then got rehired, but I'm getting bored at a job that's getting busier without getting more interesting, so that may change someday soon. I also caught Covid despite a booster right before visiting home for Christmas, so that sucked, but otherwise things have been good. My relationship with my current girlfriend is stronger than ever, my podcast is still alive somehow, and Elden Ring has managed to get me back into games.

I can say, at least, that I really appreciate Mackenzie Davis after her performance in Station Eleven and it's making me wonder if I should pick Halt & Catch Fire up again for a rewatch with my girlfriend...

Hey Zeus! Glad to know that you've been doing well after what sounds like an incredibly rough patch. I'm embarrassed to be checking in... uh, two months late? But yeah, I stop by sometimes.

The "inbred" trait is pretty harsh, but there are perks in the legacy trees quite early on to minimize the harms of inbreeding, so... yes and no?

It's very clear that Troy is on a heavily modified version of Rome 2's engine and the best innovations post-Rome 2 have been backported in with mixed success. Certainly, the political and diplomatic systems can't remotely match Three Kingdoms for their lack of extraneous clicks and other bullshit. I'm playing the Furious Wilds DLC for the latter right now and it's incredible, after a win as Hector in Troy, how much I keep expecting agent spam, hiking across the map to deal with a sudden declaration of war, and tedious sieges when Three Kingdoms largely dispensed with that (and hopefully someone's taking notes there).

I think that Adaptation is the main counterpoint to that observation, because Donald is so kind and patient and forgiving... but, of course, he's playing the foil to the anxious and caustic Charlie, so...

I only wish I had the time to register an account on a random forum in order to clutch my pearls dramatically about how underpaid nurses are and how it's the fault of the jocks who bullied me in high school. Why is anyone mad about professional athletes and other entertainers being, on the far end of the bell curve, mildly overpaid? The most cursory Google search reveals that it'd be much more logical and effective to blame health system and health plan CEOs for giving themselves multi-million dollar bonuses when it comes to nurses being underpaid, but I guess that that would require a critique of our society and not just blaming overpaid athletes as individual signs of our decadence. Also, how about this: professional athletes absolutely destroy their bodies (and, in some cases, their brains) over what is usually a decade-long career and they deserve whatever money people are willing to give them without being made into a bogeyman for the vast societal inequalities that have allowed billionaires to add $262 billion to their already ineffable fortunes during a once-in-a-century pandemic? Like, yeah, some people are overpaid for the labor they do, but your first target is professional athletes, whose work you can see manifest on their very bodies? Really?

I've definitely noticed that trend in Japanese media, too. I wonder if it's the cultural baggage of novels (and fiction in general) being a women-dominated endeavor in Japan throughout the pre-modern period. Men wrote poems and nonfiction, women wrote "silly stories," and that's how The Tale of Genji came to be considered as perhaps the world's first novel.

To be fair, I just haven't seen Frozen 2. I liked the first one well enough, but even those who loved it seemed to be mixed about the followup. Jenny Nicholson got a good video out of it, at least:

Yeah, I enjoyed much of the DLC for Crusader Kings 2, but I find it incredibly telling that they twice announced that they were done making DLC for the game... only to renege on that statement. I'm not nearly naive enough to think that they got sudden ideas for another two years' worth of DLC twice, and design choices driven by financial necessity always make me leery but especially when it comes to video games.

It's what I expected when Valve acquired the studio, but this is definitely a case where I'd rather have been wrong than right.

I saw The Beach Bum, Harmony Korine's latest film, and it was... fine? Despite Korine's stated motive of making a movie about a lucky dude living a happy and blessed life, it's really not too different from his previous works that figure near-sociopathic burnouts leaving destruction in their wake. Want to see Matthew McConaughey as a stoned pervert without two brain cells to rub together, but seen every other movie where he plays that role? I mean, sure, maybe try out The Beach Bum, although I personally got more out of a couple of the cameos myself (Martin Lawrence and Zac Efron, especially).

Nah, I played the crap out of X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter and it was especially good about differentiating light and heavy craft. X-Wing Alliance was the inflection point.

My issue with the director's cut is largely that the addition of scenes on LV-426 before the outbreak ruin the dramatic tension of the first act, but the rest of the changes are golden, I agree.

I successfully defended my dissertation yesterday. It's (almost) the end of a grueling three-month process where I was promised another year's extension on the program deadline, denied that extension by the university administration, and then given the chance to defend an abridged version of my dissertation, after much bargaining and pleading with my department. I have a lot of feelings: pride that I was able to write almost 25,000 words in the space of a month while also working full time in order to finish a draft for submission, disappointment that my dissertation couldn't be the full work that I'd envisioned, relief that I got it all done anyway, humiliation that I was forced to spend weeks begging for professors and bureaucrats to suspend arbitrary and often informal rules that they'd always tell me they didn't personally agree with, and anxiety that... well, that feels a lot like low-grade PTSD, like I'm on the plane home but I'll always be ass-deep in that jungle muck. I've been incredibly lucky to have a lot of friends, not a few of them from this community, who've supported me in this decade-long process, and I owe each and every one of them my thanks. Whether or not I use my doctorate to teach, as I had planned, I'm incredibly happy to have achieved a lifelong goal of mine, against such odds.

Yeah, that's a big issue for me, too. At the peak of the site's output, two thirds of the "articles" were either podcasts or those discussion prompts that they've thankfully gotten rid of now. I don't know why they hired some of the best writers in games journalism in order to put them in front of a microphone and have them churn out half-baked gut takes on stuff. Lately it's been really frustrating that their Neon Genesis Evangelion (re)watch has been almost entirely "I like this" "I don't like that" with Austin doing some history lessons in between.

Also, I was such a big fan of the first couple seasons of Letterkenny and I was hoping that the fifth-season premiere was a sign of better things to come, after the slump of the third and fourth seasons, but instead it was bad and the sixth season is even worse. Jared Keeso has clearly chewed through all his material about small-town life in rural Canada and, accordingly, has fallen back on the last resorts of every long-running comedy: flanderization and in-jokes. The show's tight dialogue, a cocktail of obscure slang run through a byzantine syntax, has devolved into repetitive patter that fills up way too much time. Sometimes a joke going on for too long can be funny (and it was, in earlier seasons), but it's basically Letterkenny's only class of joke at this point. For example, their gag about "To be fair" is four seasons old now and the humor is entirely that they haven't forgotten said gag. I wish they would. I wish I could. The fifth and sixth seasons are also odd because they feature cartoonish portrayals of Quebecois, Mennonites, and... gay men? I guess the show used up all its earnestness looking at farmers, druggies, and the natives on the neighboring reservation. I can tell that the writing of recent seasons wants to push this show to a fantastical place where everything can be exaggerated and outrageous (a place where there's more and easier material, presumably) but I just miss episodes like "A Fuss in the Back Bush" or "The Native Flu." Oh well!

Saw Bad Times at the El Royale half a year late. Generally speaking, I like Drew Goddard, but this movie needed someone else on the script or a different person directing, because it was full of bright ideas (including one tremendous scene involving an a cappella rendition of "You Can't Hurry Love") but struggled to integrate them into its flashback-heavy chronology without gutting the pacing. By the time that a surprisingly miscast Chris Hemsworth showed up, I'd mostly broken up with the film, but I imagine it'll be one of those experiences where I remember only the high points a couple years from now, like its motifs of people pushed to the fringes and the need for absolution, and not that it overstayed its welcome by a good half an hour.

I bought Star Traders: Frontiers last year on the dual recommendations of Rock Paper Shotgun and Tom Chick. It is everything that they say it is: a breathtakingly vast space sim where you can do well as an illegal or legal trader, a mercenary, a diplomatic courier, a pirate, a spy, or any mix of those roles. It's got as many interlocking systems as a Paradox game and it truly does its best to let you engage with or automate them, whatever your taste is. And yet I've played over twenty hours without really clicking with it. It seems at once too deep (the reputation and character RPG systems, especially) and too shallow (you make money to make more money to make even more money). I recognize it as an objectively good game, and I keep wanting to come back to it, but I just can't connect. Have my tastes changed? Is it the presentation, which is admittedly anemic? I don't know. Do you have any games that you should like and that you keep trying to like, but just... don't?

If it makes you feel better, Martin's said that the endgame that he gave to Benioff and Weiss was just one possible outcome, so any resemblance to the books that'll hopefully come out someday will probably be only passing.

Weirdly, I didn't have that reaction to Deus Ex: Human Revolution, but I did to Mankind Divided. I'm not sure what the difference was: the formula getting tired with another thirty- or forty-hour game, the layout change from corridor missions linking small open-world areas to a more holistically open-world design, the incredibly dumb and obvious "ripped-from-the-headlines" themes of Mankind Divided... Whatever it was, I played through Human Revolution twice but gave up ten hours into Mankind Divided.

I also bounced off of Stardew Valley, despite the farming life appealing a lot for me, but it was because I couldn't handle the combination of (perceived) time pressure and missable unlocks. I know that it's supposed to be the kind of game where you say to yourself, "Aww, I didn't manage to plant the strawberry bushes early enough! Oh well, next year," but I'm just not set up like that. Also, I found myself getting kind of annoyed that you could give a nice gift to someone and they'd feel indifferent or even negative towards you, because of a secret list of likes and dislikes for every character. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm built for more of a management sim-style farming game, but I liked the surface vibe of Stardew so much...

I'll drink long and deep to that!

I feel you on Dead Cells. I can appreciate the intricacy and the skill of it all, but beating a boss or getting a cool new blueprint just leaves me feeling exhausted and frustrated, not exhilarated like in Dark Souls.