Category: Linkage

  • 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.

  • 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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  • My Duck On Stuff: The Archive

    As I’m unlikely to ever treat the site as a working feature anymore, and given that it was a very silly name to begin with, I’ve imported the 98 posts’ worth of material from the My Duck On Stuff site over here for safe keeping. If you’re interested, check out the Ducks On Stuff category, to which I may add entries from time to time.

    That’s one domain fewer to renew every year, if nothing else.

  • 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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  • How I Spent My End-of-Summer Vacation

    I took a few days off. I didn’t have any particular reason nor much in the way of goals (though I had some of those, mostly unmet). My boss keeps reminding me that I use the least PTO of all employees so, here I am, having burned a few days’ worth.

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  • Kickstarter: For When Delayed Gratification Is Your Jam

    I suppose I should apologize to somebody for that post title, but it’s true in its own way, right? Right.

    A couple of years back I threw some money behind the idea of a self-produced, non-Netflix-y 13th season of Mystery Science Theater 3000. And it was good! Very, very good. Albeit not without the sort of technological growing pains one might expect from cobbling together a whole streaming environment out of available parts. (Not entirely unlike using special parts to make robot friends, after all.)

    But seriously. Several sets of hosts, some superb(ly bad) movies and top-notch riffing, exactly what one hopes for from another batch of newly-minted MST3K. I got what I paid for, no argument there.

    Oh, but I also had signed up at a level which suggested there’d be… physical goodies. At some point. Well… it took a couple of years but today’s that “at some point.” Behold:

    I never know what to do with stickers. It’s not like I have a car. Maybe I’ll look into some magnetic backing material and turn them into really big fridge magnets.

    Stickers! A t-shirt! A popcorn bucket! A guzzler of a drink cup! Posters! (Not pictured in an unrolled state; they didn’t want to stay unrolled without heavy weights for eight corners’ worth, oh also they’re huge. Just trust me that they’re really nifty.)

    It’s not like I signed up to back Season 13 specifically to have physical goodies shipped to my doorstep, but I’m sure not complaining. And I’ll definitely get some mileage out of that t-shirt if nothing else.

    Maybe I’ll pour some non-popcorn-y snacks into the bucket and curl up with “Beyond Atlantis” some evening soon…