In a recent work “hangout” chat, I mentioned in passing that some day I’d like to get out to the Oregon Coast again. As someone who neither owns or operates a motor vehicle I’m reliant upon tourism services, twice-daily bus service, or the kindness of friends to see the ocean so it doesn’t happen very often. One of my coworkers noted in the chat that, in fact, they had an Astoria trip planned for late July and would I be interested in a lift to & from?
Sure I would!
Thus preparations began and so, yesterday, I went on a little tourism adventure.
This model, available for viewing at the Heritage Museum in Astoria, Oregon, depicts a mockup of a dog-powered wheel used to churn butter. No, I am not making this up.
Commence a lot of walking punctuated by museum visits and stone benches.
When I moved into my new bedroom in the rental house last year I saw that the room came with a neat knickknack shelf right over where the bed goes. How delightful! So I put some things on it.
Please pay no attention to how incredibly dusty that mini Mini has become over the past year.
Then, one night last week, my brain decided it would be fun to ponder what would happen if… oh, let’s say, there was an earthquake. Would I want a solid chunk of LEGO to land on me from that height? What about the gooseneck reading lamp with the metal base? Or the Zentraedi Officer’s Pod?
Why did it take this long to even ponder the question? Because I’m not always terribly bright, that’s why. But once the realization occurred to me at all, I couldn’t let go of it. So I had a rethink. Now the lamp is gone (I rarely used it anyway), the heavy plastic items are in the glass display case (remember that?), and the overhead shelf is populated by much, much softer objects.
The lizard doggo, the Ruan Mei “creations,” and the quaggan should be much, much less likely to do physical damage to me if they fall off the shelf for some reason.
And so I sleep just that little bit easier at night now.
I haven’t been playing Warframe all that heavily lately, mostly just doing Nightwave dailies to progress that reward track and leveling up weapons for mastery. Along the way I’ve slowly accumulated items called “Riven Slivers” which can be turned in to receive something called a “Riven Mod.” That’s basically a mystery mod (item which enhances a warframe, weapon, or other piece of equipment) with randomized stats (usually a mix of some positive and one very negative) that is locked to a given named weapon (any variant thereof).
Earlier this month I got a Riven Mod, and once I revealed its assigned weapon, I was kind of annoyed: It’s for the Sobek, the “normal” version of which is a kind of middling shotgun. I already have a stack of shotguns in my arsenal, do I need another? Probably not, I decided.
Then I noticed this was my 2nd Sobek Riven Mod. Huh. (Mind you, one cannot equip more than one Riven Mod on a weapon. So having two is just pointless… maybe. Kind of. Put a pin in that.)
Immediately afterward during my next mission in the Saturn system, a Kuva Larvling showed up (as they do) and the weapon it offered me if I chose to make that Larvling into a full Lich was…
… yeah, the Kuva Sobek. I guess the game absolutely wanted me to add a Sobek to my inventory. So I went ahead and kicked off the Lich hunting process, more out of a fit of pique than anything else, if I’m honest. But hey, mastery progress is mastery progress, a weapon’s a weapon. It’s all good, baby!
For some reason, when I got to the point of wanting to replace some of my early power plants (coal, maybe some regular-fuel) with nuclear power, I decided to build the biggest plant I’ve ever made in the game, solo or multiplayer. This is my “1.0” save, started when the game officially left Early Access last autumn.
I ran the numbers and decided that 4 uranium fuel rods per minute feeding 20 power generators was exactly the right number to aim for.
What the hell was I thinking?
Please allow me to offer some advice if you want to follow in my virtual footsteps. I made some mistakes; perhaps my hubris will be partly absolved if I can help others avoid them.
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.
The title? Makes me wonder if someone in the band has been reading Japanese light novels lately, going by sheer length alone. The music? Very, very solid, the product of a band doing what they want to be doing in this moment to the best of their ability.
I bounced off of most of the previous full Garbage album, No Gods No Masters, so I went into Let All That We Imagine Be The Light with considerable trepidation. Not many of my most recent new music purchases have panned out terribly well. (Note the lack of reviews here since, oh, 2023…) For instance: The less said about Apocalyptica’s recent attempt to return to the well bearing the sign “Metallica songs to cover,” the better.
If you’ve ever liked a Garbage album then I have an easy time recommending this one to you. It’s ten songs of varying but mostly average length with dense, almost crunchy at times, production values and Shirley Manson in what could best be described as “having run out of fucks to give but not to say” mode.
Seriously, if f-bombs are going to bother you, this may not be the best music purchase option.
Every song on here is at least good, and a few are marvelous. The high point for me is “Radical,” which also happens to serve as the title track (after a fashion). I considered it just-okay on first listen, bumped it up to pretty-good a couple of listens later, and at this point (a week after initial purchase) I’ve locked in a 5-star rating and I don’t see that going anywhere any time soon, given that parts of it have been in the earworm rotation of my psyche for days now.
With that said… not that I know anything about what satisfies pop sensibilities nowadays but I don’t see anything on the album becoming wildly popular outside of the band’s existing fanbase. There are no “club hits” hiding in the track list, there are no barn-burners or simple anthems for folks to nod & sing along with. This is meaty & meaningful stuff that you’ve kinda gotta be in the mood for going in.
Still, it’s a pretty damned good record overall, and I’m glad to have it in the library.
