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…)
I’ve been taking a bit of a break from my solo Satisfactory save, mainly because dealing with the logistics of nuclear power is a major headache when you have to build every last concrete foundation, conveyor belt, and hunk of machinery involved all by yourself.
Luckily, several of my coworkers agreed to join me on a new multiplayer save.
I didn’t even know there was a “huge helmet” option. It’s properly ridiculous, and I mean that in the best way.
Unlike with the two-year-long multiplayer save with the kids, I’m not trying to impose any sort of restrictions on how these guys build out their projects. Huge concrete slabs hanging in the air? Fine, cool, as long as we’re getting results. And with four sets of hands (minus one of our players in the most recent session) it’s amazing how much progress you can make. We’ve gone from “nothing” to “coal power and steel production” in about six in-game hours. Never mind the mountain of research we’ve already unlocked.
I’m having a blast, playing with people who are coming at the game from very different perspectives. We have one guy who’s roughly at my level of time spent really digging into the game, one who’s kind of a blueprint-based speed runner (I’m not judging here, I could honestly be better about using blueprints), and one who had barely touched the game at all before we started this run.
What will we achieve? Fun, if nothing else, I hope.
