I only managed three posts in August. Whoops.

Let’s catch up a bit.

Gaming

With the kids and I reaching a kind of plateau state in Warframe, Spud offered a suggestion for what to do next: Guild Wars 2. Remember that game? The MMO that Kyla and I started playing in the aftermath of the City of Heroes shutdown? (Admittedly, we wandered through Rift and the late, great Wildstar as well.) I still have a plush “Quaggan” based on one of the NPC races from that game!

So I dusted off my account, opened up several dozen “birthday gift” bundles (7 each across nearly a dozen characters), tried to re-familiarize myself with the gameplay, and discovered… yeah, it’s still a pretty decent MMO. We’ve done a few group sessions, including three “official” Tuesday night streamed outings. This time we’re not trying to document every bit of gameplay progress, because we’d be at that for a decade trying. Instead it’s more of a loose, “Here’s what our heroes are doing this week!” thing, and that’s working for us.

What’s more, we’re leaving ourselves open to run Warframe or even possibly start a new Satisfactory save later, thus letting us select whichever of the games we feel like playing on any given Tuesday night. Having options to choose from might be a lifesaver, instead of feeling locked into whatever the “official” game we’re working on might be at the time. We’ll see!

Otherwise I’m down to just a couple of mobile games, primarily Honkai Star Rail.

Music

August 15th was quite a day for music releases. I picked up three albums (in digital form): Mono Inc’s Darkness (highlights include “In My Darkness” and “Unter Deiner Haut”), JER’s Death of the Heart (highlights include “The Way You Tune It Out” and “I’M STILL BOTHERED”) and Alison Goldfrapp’s Flux (let’s go with “Find Xanadu”). The first two have some great tunes and I can easily recommend a full album purchase. The latter is… fine? It’s mostly okay background music but very few songs actually stand out and demand my direct attention. I feel like it’s a not-for-me situation, and I’m just never going to “get” Goldfrapp.

Still, two out of three ain’t bad. And I have an upcoming Assemblage 23 album to look forward to, never mind the occasional urge to listen to one or another of the bops from the K-Pop Demon Hunters soundtrack. (K-pop will never be “my thing” but I respect the work this movie put into selling it.)

Anime

Right now I’m only following the 2nd season of My Dress-Up Darling, which is maintaining its course of being utterly adorable and heartwarming, and the household watch-together show is Secrets of the Silent Witch, a “magical academy” setup that on the face of it feels like so many throw-away shows you’ve (possibly) seen before but this one’s got some extra charm in it, and some deft writing & characterization.

I had to drop Ruri Rocks, between the just-this-side-of-skeevy depictions of the girls and the fact that the show almost manages to make geology kind of dull… which is weird because its whole point was to get folks into the subject. Whoops. (Some additional blame probably belongs with the titular character being the most annoying and childish lead I’ve seen in ages.)

And technically I’m watching Bad Girl on HIDIVE, mostly in order to justify the continued subscription cost, but that’s not to say I’m recommending anyone else do so. It’s a very silly, nearly mindless bit of comedy fluff.

Life and Work

Work’s been a bit chaotic, so it’s a good thing life outside of that has been mostly (knock wood) quiet. My most recent bloodwork came back showing no worsening of my blood sugar or other metrics, and tomorrow I have an eye appointment to find out whether my vision’s getting worse or not. (I mean, I’m getting old. Of course it is.)

We’ve got a year and some-odd of time in this house and we’re still absolutely glad to be here. There was a neighbor with two big woof-y dogs that he left outside most hours of the day (and night), but he was only here for a few months. We don’t know if he got the boot or what, but at least we’re not awakened at all hours by dog barks. Now we just need that extremely loud Honda “ricer” to go away…

Central air is great but comes with a weird side-effect in summer: Either it’s too warm in my office (which faces the afternoon/evening sun) or it’s too cold because the AC has kicked in and I’ve got air blowing right on me. This has sapped my energy on most of the (too many) really hot days this year.

Though, oddly enough, what with the stretches of temperatures in the 70s… this has been the mildest summer in the last decade, near as I can tell. It would still have been a ridiculously, news-worthy level of hot overall at the turn of the millennium. Now, though? Well, that climate just keeps on changin’, don’t it?

And that’s most of the news that fits, or at least that I can recall. Now to see if I can remember to post more often, again. Let’s find out.