pshaw_raven | Entries tagged with bird vs backlog

Here's some recent Disney photos, including starting line pics and some crowd scenes Fox was able to get. Gideon's Bakehouse, some of the Fab 50 statues, food (obvs), and one very random Skyliner pic. I deeply dislike the Skyliner, but we're forced into using it to get certain places. During one of it's numerous stops and stalls, Fox was able to zoom in and get a picture of this safety placard showing how to clip on to the pylon for maintenance work. I may add more race photos in later, but so far I only see one where I don't look like Jeffery Dahmer. Fox says my facial expressions are "determined" rather than the way I describe them, which is "derpy, but also murderous."

Last night I accidentally finished Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. I say "accidentally" because I was not expecting to beat the final boss on the first try. But I did go in with the best armor in the game, a seriously overpowered great sword, and a ton of healing items. I'm also at 99.90% map completion so that's going to bother me. I started a new game and briefly played Zangetsu, who has a pretty good move set, but it looks like he doesn't pick up items? I know he wouldn't collect shards, but I'm hoping for some different story and dialogue from him.

Once I get that map at 100% I plan to move on to finishing Bendy (stuck on the level four boss ATM) and I'd like to start Axiom Verge, which I just picked up on sale.

On the printed side of the world, I have just started on the Battle of Borodino in War & Peace. How many different ways is Tolstoy going to describe Bonaparte as "fat?" Because he is pretty relentless in his descriptions and it's hilarious. His passages talking about Napoleon's military "genius" are also dripping with sarcasm. I would expect no less from a Russian author, though. I am probably about five hundred pages from the end now, and I feel like I can reasonably expect to finish by the end of the year. So far it's been a very worthwhile journey.

Today's plans include more laundry, finding the instruction booklet for my meditation clock, and getting back into the swing of drawing every day. I needed to reset the meditation timer and found that I don't remember how to do it, and the company doesn't seem to provide PDFs of the instructions. So it's either trial and error, or hunt down the little booklet, which I'm 95% certain I didn't throw away. No running today, but this weekend gets me back into training with an eight-week ramp up to running Dopey in January. It's going to be tough but I'm sure I can manage it. I have a six miler tomorrow, followed by a 90-minute run Sunday. Then the long runs start increasing by two miles each week until you hit twenty, which is usually enough training distance to get you through a marathon. And all the training load gives me a terrific excuse to bake more.

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Tycho - Cloud Generator

Just last month, Death's Door released and I picked it up in pre-order. This is one I think you'd call a metroidvania - you can revisit previous map areas as you gain new abilities and there are new bits you can access. I've enjoyed this one a lot, and not simply because I get to play as a cute little Crow with a bigass sword. The pacing is good, there's enough stuff scattered around that backtracking isn't so much of a grind, and the soundtrack is terrific. I should have got that when it was on sale.

The only two major points of frustration were a seriously hard platforming challenge late-game to get to a Vitality Shrine. This wasn't helped by my brain deciding it was going to confuse "roll" with "fire" so I'd go to fire my hook across a canyon and instead, roll off the cliff. I'm not a particularly good gamer, as you might imagine. Otherwise that one might have been a lot less annoying, though it does still rely on speed and timing to get through. The other was an early game mini boss, I guess it's called a Black Knight, but a lot of people on Reddit have started referring to it as "thicc knight" due to the way it looks. I think it's supposed to be some sort of clockwork, but I honestly don't know. It's incredibly hard to defeat early on when you have few upgrades and one melee weapon, but eventually it just clicked and I got it. I'm at probably the end of the game now, so I need to decide if I want to go back for collectibles, or do that on a new save file. There's an achievement for completing the game using on the discarded umbrella as your melee weapon, and I'm going to try it. It'll make some of the fights drag out, but once you learn the patterns it's just a matter of not getting hit, and not confusing roll with fire. I love this one, it was absolutely worth getting and worth playing.

Last night I finished The Messenger. I try to play games as blind as I can. So in this case, I had no idea how long this one actually was, and kept getting frustrated when new stuff would come up. Surely THIS has to be the last area. Nope. I think dying a lot is supposed to be a part of it, because I did die an awful lot, even for me. I think I got through some areas just with lucky button mashing. I have no desire to go back for collectibles, since after the game's midpoint, some areas become a whole lot more difficult and it doesn't feel worth the rage to do it. I've unlocked NG+ but have not started a new game yet, nor have I started the "Picnic Panic" DLC. Honestly, I've never been so relieved to roll credits on a game. I was damn tired of this thing, and completely fed up before I even got to the last area. Again, I did go in blind, so I didn't know what to expect, and I think a second playthrough might go better now that I do know.

Honestly, it was a lot of fun, and the art is spectacular, but for low-skill gamers, some of the sections are nightmares. Most of it is the fun sort of difficult, where you're motivated to keep trying and happy when you do succeed. Towards the end, it seems as if there are screens that are difficult simply to be difficult. They're not fun or motivating, and when I'd get across some section I'd been stuck on and die before making it to the next checkpoint, I'd have to just shut the game down for a while because I was so pissed off at it, and at myself. I'd give it four stars out of five - I think the main problems I have with it are "end user" problems and not as much the game itself.

A rather quieter game experience is Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa) which seems to be a much shorter one set in the far north and based on a traditional story from the Inupiaq. The control feels a bit soft, but it's not bothersome to me. In fact, if you start struggling with a section, the game guides you through it, showing you where to go and stand at each point - which came in handy early on, with a balance puzzle that was driving me nuts because I wasn't quite grasping the physics of it. Anyway, you also get to play as an Acrtic Fox and it makes adorable fox noises.

I'm at about halfway through this one, and will go back to it this evening. Along the way you collect "cultural insights," which are short documentary clips about the Inupiaq, and are scattered along the route as owls. So I get to collect owls with my fox. (insert happy bird noises) I'm saving those up to watch at the end. So far Id' highly recommend it for a shorter, somewhat easier game with good art and a very engaging story. And honestly, I play these games for the stories.

Current Mood: awake

It's once again been an interesting couple of days. I think this the right timeline, let's see.

Saturday we had some pretty severe storms come through. Fox and I have started using a site called Windy.com that primarily shows wind speed & direction along with lightning strikes, in almost real time. It was designed primarily for people in aviation but obviously weather nerds like it, too. There was a LOT of lightning with this system, to the point that we unplugged and utilized the physical disconnect that removes the radio tower from the house system. Basically the last two catastrophic lightning strikes we took hit the tower, then came into the house and fried our shit that way. We didn't suffer any problems, but a tower at Cherokee Hill did.

Since lightning does whatever it wants, it hit something near the tower, traveled through the earth, then went UP the grounding pins and blew the utility box that way. Because why not. So they got that back online Sunday. Around that time I lost my cell connection to Sprint. Normally when the wifi and internet are out I can still get online with my phone using my data plan, but nope. Not sure what was going on there, but it didn't come back until late yesterday.

Then Sunday and Monday afternoon, the power went out. No clue as to why, though it looked from the outage map that a transfer station down in Florahome was the problem. But one day the lights flickered and went out for about 90 minutes. Yesterday the flickering and surges went on for almost three minutes - as you might imagine that's not good for computers and such. It FINALLY went out and stayed off for again, about 90 minutes. I'm planning my day today around losing power again by three, but we'll see what happens.

So the last few days have been full of WTF-ery.

I did manage to get online long enough to hit the Steam sale and picked up "In Between" and "The Messenger." I need a break from Blasphemous - I'm at the end of my last penance and I'm for some reason stuck on Escribar. I don't remember him being this difficult to beat before. After getting through this, though, I have one more achievement in the game - the three hour speedrun, which I feel reasonable confident about. I also want to finish up Demetrios, which I might do tomorrow evening.

My tendons and calf muscle have felt well enough to get out and run, so I try to get up early and get out before it's too miserable outside. If I'm up at 5:30 that's plenty of time for a cup of coffee, "dropping weight" *ahem*, and getting outside while the sun is just starting to rise. Today I did speed intervals - 6 half-milers at my desired race pace, with short jogs and walks in between to bring my heart rate back down. I was able to sustain race pace, but I noticed a few times I started pushing hard and going well above that speed, and I felt it. I sometimes have trouble moderating my pace, so interval work is something I try to schedule once a week. I need to keep reminding myself that while having a little time cushion is good, I don't have to bust a lung. Moderate your pace, give yourself a little extra time for walk breaks if you need them, and don't get so hung up on a PR that you hurt yourself.

Current Mood: discombobulated
Current Music: Bon Iver - Holocene

I try not to get involved with too many games at once, since that can get overwhelming for me. But I usually have three or four I'm playing at any given point as I work my way through my Steam library.

Last night I finished a playthrough of Hollow Knight - finally! I fully intend to start a new game, but it was immensely satisfying to get to the end. And I'll go ahead and admit I'm an achievement hound and a completionist, so obviously there's plenty more to do there.

I'm also currently playing a point-and-click, Demetrios: The BIG Cynical Adventure! which promises "eight to twelve hours of fun!" It's from a French developer and so far it's just hilariously wrong. Plenty of gross humor, and the puzzles and such are challenging but not overly so. I have not gotten so stuck on anything that I needed a walkthrough guide. The game also has a built in hint system, so that's helpful. I'm enjoying collecting "game overs," where if you see an opportunity to do something stupid and kill yourself or go to jail, you get a game over screen. But then you can just continue where you left off. Usually the game over screen says something snarky about what an idiot you are.

I started playing Bendy and The Ink Machine, which ... holy shit. That game went from 0 to 100 real fast. I kind of wanted to save this one for when Hollow Knight was done, both games being pretty immersive and engaging. I want to give each more of my attention, rather than pondering strategies for one while playing the other. I forget which chapter I'm on here, but I know my next objective was "Save Boris," so I guess I gotta go save Boris. Actually I was kind of getting to like Boris, he seems nice, unlike every other bloodthirsty psycho cartoon I've met. I also picked up an achievement for squeaking an absurd number of Bendy dolls, which was absurdly fun to do.

And I want to finish up The Talos Principle, which I started playing in 2016 and dropped for some reason. For a couple of years there I was just not doing much gaming. Anyway, I know I'm fairly close to the end of this one, and given the huge gap, I think it would be worth my while to just finish up and start a new game to play through without a five year hiatus. I started again and remembered what I liked about it so I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes. But I also really hate those floating attack orbs - WTF. I'm trying to get through a maze right now where you basically have to try to outrun the stupid things and needless to say, I keep dying.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Steely Dan - Do It Again

It wasn't quite as cold this morning but I had the worst time getting a fire going. It simply would not catch, and I even found some slivers of fatwood, tore pages out of the phone book, and doused the logs in lamp oil trying to get this thing burning. Fox finally got it to an acceptable level of burniness, after I spent probably 90 minutes nursing the sullen little thing.

We actually are going to wind up with plenty of lighter pine. There are some sick and damaged trees back in the thicker forest, one even has this huge knot of hardened resin around the trunk about twelve feet up where something damaged it.

With my rebuilt computer, I did something I've wanted to do for a while now and reset the graphics in The Talos Principle. Back in 2016 or so I managed to give myself a serious case of motion sickness with the game, so we started tweaking the graphics settings to try to make it less vomit-inducing. Unfortunately we also lowered the quality and it just looked ... bad. The movement wasn't fluid anymore and the backgrounds lost their detail. I reset it and played a bit, and I think now with my "eyes" behind and a little above my robot self I won't get motion sickness, and all the engaging visual detail is back. It will take a while to get back in the groove of playing but it'll be worth it. I was enjoying the game and was pretty far along, too.

I'm probably going to purchase a World Anvil account soon and start posting data for Muna. When I do I'll link to it. But at this point the world-building has gotten so big and detailed that I'm having trouble keeping track of everything.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Dire Straits - I Want My MTV