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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Media

This is a container category for media reviews and related drivel.

  • Fire Emblem Somewhat Engaged

    After Heroes and Three Houses and Three Hopes, now we’ve landed on Engage, the latest Fire Emblem title. Depending on which long-time fan of the series you want to believe, this either is or isn’t a welcome return to the classic play style and structure of yore.

    This’ll take some unpacking. Buckle up.

    Zen, my player avatar, about to do absolutely zero damage whatsoever to this bundle of cash on the hoof.
    (more…)

  • Quick End-Of-Month Check-In

    Let’s see… here are a few things I don’t yet have time + energy to flesh out, though some will get further attention at some point:

    • The GameBall trackball is holding up pretty well so far. At least, it hasn’t infuriated me and does its job reliably. So far. The third in the ongoing “in search of” post series will bubble up here probably in early February.
    • There’s a new Mono Inc record out, I have it, I’ve heard it. I need to sit with it and give it another solid listen-through before I feel like I’ll be ready to give it a proper review. It’s coming, though.
    • Fire Emblem Engage has taken over a lot of my free time, and that’s a good thing. If you have any interest in the game series at all and have read some reviews and seen first-impressions videos, my opinion probably won’t surprise you by diverging from a lot of those… but I want to get a bit further into the main storyline before putting my own complete thoughts in order here. I’ll absolutely be ranting and raving about it before much longer, don’t you worry.
    • I don’t think I’m writing an entire post about how angry I am about the state of housing. Nobody needs to read that, and I don’t need to be writing it. Suffice to say that I feel intensely frustrated by the fact that at almost exactly the time that I paid off the big big loan and started stashing money away for a potential move, the costs of everything jumped skyward and now I just… can’t. I’ve nearly been priced out of existing.
    • Another brief grumble unworthy of an entire post? The folks who make the good version of my primary diabetes-treatment medicine could resolve their supply-chain issues any day now, please and thank you. Taking the other folks’ version is a fuss and a bother and I hate it. (A pill-crusher is involved. Feh.)
    • And to end on a positive note, I need to write up my experiences with trains in Satisfactory now that they’ve been the central concept of my latest solo savegame and an integral part of the co-op game I’m playing with the kids. It’s been fun! But… there are definitely drawbacks to going All Trains All The Time. I’ll get into that at some point in the next few weeks.

    That’s all for now, folks. I hope you’re staying healthy and safe.

  • Fire Emblem Transitions

    In the beginning, there was Fire Emblem: Three Houses and it was good.

    Well, wait. That’s not entirely accurate. Let’s try this again.

    (more…)

  • Satisfactory: 2022 Co-op Year End Tour Video

    The video I mentioned in the previous post? Here it is:

    Arrak-ish. Dune… desert biome. Look, I’m bad at naming things sometimes, okay?

    I hope that we all get to have more fun, less stress, more health, less catastrophe, more prosperity, less misery in the year to come.

  • Silly Things To Do With Video Editing

    I’m working on a tour video for our three-person co-op Satisfactory game. I recorded the footage Tuesday night. (We took the week off for various reasons, so I used that time to let the Space Elevator shipment production accumulate a bit.) For lack of anything better to do and not wanting to actually Do Game Stuff without the others, I started a video project.

    Last night I completed the editing-down. Tonight I started the text overlay process, and decided I’d take this chance to learn something new (to me) in DaVinci Resolve: How to pin text to an object on the screen. Tracking, in other words.

    It’s a learning process, but for the sake of this one joke I feel like it was worth it:

    Yes, I used that garish color combination on purpose. I mean, why not?

    Mind you, I could have used a fancier method and achieved smoother, better-looking results. But for a quick throw-away joke? It’s fine.

    Hopefully I’ll have the full tour video up by the weekend.

  • 2022 Album Wrap-up

    It’s that time of year when, on social media, you start seeing some folks’ “Spotify Wrapped” posts along with various websites’ “best of” listicles and such-like. Well, this wasn’t a huge year for new music for me and since I had a computer rebuild partway through the year, my “most played” data in MusicBee is… stunted.

    But that’s not going to stop me from talking about the albums (and one “EP” big enough to qualify) I bought this year.

    (I’m leaving singles and one particular compilation/soundtrack record out for various reasons. If someone’s really curious I can loop back around to them in another post.)

    (more…)

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