Category: Geekery

  • A Steam-y 2023

    End-of-year retrospectives are as common this time of year as wadded up balls of wrapping paper thrown aside in frustration while trying to wrap presents. I’ll be putting together my thoughts on some of the music released during this calendar year later on, but I was reminded this afternoon that Steam’s fancy “year in review” results are now available, so let’s take a look-see.

    Sadly, most of those 4 new games didn’t connect with me very well. Better luck next year, game studios! My attention is valuable, after all!

    Checking out the full document may be entertaining for you, but if you’d rather just get the high points in summary: I played a lot of Satisfactory, I spent a couple months getting back into Skyrim pretty heavily, and I used my PC to play Gems of War & Ascension a few times (usually I play those on the tablet).

    The amount of Satisfactory I played will come as no surprise to regular followers of this site. (Hello to both of you!)

    No kidding?

    Over 170 sessions, nearly 70% of my entire time spent out of all games from my Steam library. Yeah, that tracks.

    But that’s not the whole story, is it? I play games which aren’t on Steam, after all. Like Honkai Star Rail (my main mobile game), Fire Emblem: Three Houses (several years on and I’m finally winding down on that one), Fire Emblem Engage (for a few months there, anyway), the beta for Palia (the 3D Stardew we keep hoping starts to gel), the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV (just getting back into that very very recently), and a few other odds & ends besides.

    That seems like a lot of games, but again, remember that Satisfactory (and HSR) are getting the bulk of my attention… as do books, TV shows, music, and so on. I’m a “gamer” but only in the mildest, most casual sense of the term.

    And that’s fine!

    I hope you’ve all had fun this year, and I hope you have increasing amounts and quality of fun in the year ahead.

  • Hummingbirds On Video

    Over the course of this year we noticed that some of Vyx’s potted flowers on the deck were attracting hummingbirds. I hadn’t even considered that any of those lived around here, but sure enough, they became our most frequent guests. When the flowering plants ran their course going into autumn, we replaced them with a flat hummingbird feeder and waited to see if they’d appreciate our offering.

    It took them a week or so to realize what was up, but once they did, hoo boy! I’d start hearing their clicks and clacks and seeing them darting between the rails to sneak a sip or two all through the day. After a while they got to the point of just hanging out for up to half a minute, chilling out and sipping that tasty, tasty sugar-water.

    This weekend I realized, oh hey, I have a GoPro HERO9 Black. And it can record 240 frames per second in high definition. A project was born!

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  • Satisfactory: Final Destination Tour Video

    Since the inception of the Final Destination site project in my current solo Satisfactory game, I knew I was going to make “content” out of it. (Sorry, Patrick Willems.) There was always going to be a tour, it was just a question of what format the tour would take. I went back and forth on whether to make it a long post with lots of pictures or just record a tour video and put text bits in it. Both options have merits and downsides, and the internal debate allowed me to put off doing anything for several weeks even after (more-or-less) completing the build.

    Yesterday I woke up and decided, it’s time to record a video. Thus, the following:

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  • Satisfactory: I Lumen-ate

    On Tuesday, the 14th of November, 2023 the 8th major update to Satisfactory arrived in Early Access, after spending months in the Experimental branch to shake out the worst of the bugs… most of them, anyway. We have a few things to talk about with “U8” but today we’re going to focus primarily on the new engine’s support for something called “Lumen” and how that makes an already-pretty game even prettier.

    I took this screenshot within the first two minutes of enabling Lumen while at the Final Destination site. Just a purely random view and it shows off the new lighting so well! Dang this game’s pretty.
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  • The State Of Games – Late Oct 2023

    I’m passing a lot of my time playing games lately, a mix of new and really-very-old. Let’s run down the list a bit, shall we?

    Not visible in this screenshot: All the stuff I crammed into too tiny of a space. Out of sight, out of mind!
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  • Kafka Says Boom

    I needed to get OBS Studio and Davinci Resolve installed on the new computer anyway, and what better way to incentivize myself than the wild hair of an idea which led to…

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