It takes a lot to convince me to fork out for adding a streaming service to the roster nowadays, considering I long ago cut D+ and whatever they’re calling HBO’s service this week out of the budget. Especially when the service in question is tied to the “fruit logo” financial ecosystem.
But dagnabbit, I really love the Murderbot series of novels & novellas from Martha Wells. And everything I read & watched about the upcoming show convinced me to give it a try.
I’m keeping up with a handful of shows this season, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm ranging from “I can’t wait for the next episode” to “well, I might as well see how this reaches a conclusion.” With a month and some-odd left to go in most of these show’s runs, it’s time for some thoughts.
(Note that I’m leaving out the long-running, continuing Apothecary Diaries, which remains one of the finest shows of this decade and looks destined for all-time-classic status. We love Maomao in this household.)
I haven’t had enough to say about any specific thing to flesh out an entire post… though I suppose I could go back to my pre-Twitter use of this site to simply post very short status updates and minor thoughts… maybe. We’ll see. In the meantime, here are a few tidbits from my recent life:
Over on Tumblr, the “very functional webbed site” which is perpetually on the verge of falling completely apart, I don’t usually do more than reblog the occasional post, sometimes with a tag or so added, occasionally with actual commentary.
One of the tags I use a lot lately? “#fuck genAI”
I would trust these duckies over the product of any given genAI algorithm.
I recently added commentary to a post (one about the John Cena chatbot kerfuffle, if you’re curious) and thought, “You know what? I should store this on my own dingdanged website for posterity.” And so, somewhat reworked, here’s my official position on genAI garbage like ChatGPT and its ilk.
So there I was, feeling like I needed to play something different. I can only do so much Warframe space ninja action at a time before I need something slightly lower paced. I’m at a tedious and frustrating part of my solo Satisfactory game and don’t want to hit burnout while also running a weekly co-op session for some coworkers. What else is on offer? Is it time to go shopping?
I very nearly wound up buying Baldur’s Gate 3 but decided that “try a D&D game again” probably wouldn’t pan out any better than any of the previous few times, such as when I spent a few hours with Solasta. While researching BG3, however, I bumped into mention of something else: A Diablo type game (of which there are, admittedly, quite a few) that isn’t by Blizzard and isn’t a Path of Exile game and isn’t part of the now-cursed Torchlight franchise, nor is it spawned from or closely related to Titan Quest/Grim Dawn. (OK, yes, I’ve clearly tried a few of these over the years. There’s an itch which needs scratching.) After reading a couple of reviews, I decided to use the last of the “gift card” money in my Steam wallet to pick up…
Last Epoch.
That certainly is a distinctive type of game interface, isn’t it? I have loot drops filtered so the lowest-tiers of rarity appear just as bits of light without the name cards to reduce visual clutter.(more…)
