Month: September 2023

Flash Fiction Rerun: The Power of Plastic

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Jordan swiped their card and stared at the terminal until they remembered swiping didn’t work anymore. “Sorry.”

“I forget all the time.” The teller shrugged. “Just tap it on the screen.”

Jordan did and the payment terminal beeped, finally taking their payment.

As their receipt printed, Jordan jerked their head toward the rest of the store. “Amazing this place still runs.”

“Sure.” The teller shrugged again. “Stock’s different, but we still sell stuff. Helps people focus, you know?”

Jordan nodded, taking their receipt.

“Still.” The teller sighed, staring at the doors out of the store, “beats slaving away out there.”

“Yeah.”

“You good with all that?”

“I think so.”

“I could call someone…”

“No, I’ve got it.” Jordan gave a half-hearted smile, shifted their bags around, and started walking toward the exit. “Have a nice day.”

“You too.”

Jordan slowed, carefully peering out the door. The blasted ruins of cars, melted asphalt, and red haze in the air were still present. Nothing moved but plants swaying in the breeze.

Confident they were safe, Jordan hitched their mask over their face and exited the airlock. They glanced around as they walked, watching for danger and a ride away from the burned-out husk of the city. When they spotted a buggy pulled by a balding donkey, they waved it down. The elderly driver stowed Jordan’s bags and patiently waited while they fumbled with the payment terminal.

As the machine beeped to denote a payment received, the old driver chuckled. “I always figured capitalism would fail when civilization did. Thought we’d be bartering by now.”

Jordan chuckled as they climbed into their seat, brushing their iron grey hair away from their mask. “Guess it just goes to show. Peace, health, and safety are things money can’t buy. For the everything left, there’s MasterCard.”

Trying To Break Free From Identity Defined In Opposition To The World I Live In

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While I was mulling over my identity and coming to reflect on the decision I’d made years ago (largely out of self-defense, given how absolutely locked-in I was to my parents’ vision of who they wanted me to be), I was listening to a lot of Friends at the Table. A lot of stuff they said there informed the way I think about my place in contemporary society and the way my identity fits into the world I inhabt. Not because I was entirely unfamiliar with those ideas, but because the thinking they explored as a part of their science-fiction themed seasons (especially Twilight Mirage, their fourth season) helped build on what I’d learned in some of the classes I took in college, in the research I’d done on my own, and the helpful things I’d coincidentally read along the way. One the things that stuck with me the most was the GM, Austin Walker, talking about how he wanted to push the boundaries with their fourth season. I don’t remember the exact quote, but he said something along the lines of “we need to imagine the most radical thing we can and then take it one step further.” The idea being, he explained, that all of us are limited by the world we live in, by the society we’re used to, and that a civilization that had progressed to the very edges of what we could conceptualize would be able to imagine modes of being/ways of life/etc that we couldn’t even conceive of because we are so anchored by the world we know, and that the society he wanted the group to attempt to represent in this season should have progressed beyond even that.

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The End Of A Game Is An Opportunity To Start A New One

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After multiple months, my saga with the unfortunate sunday gaming group has come to an end. My time with the people who were part of my introduction to Pathfinder 2nd Edition has concluded. Despite my plans to give the group six full sessions to see if we could salvage the group, we only ever played five. Which probably sounds funny because I started talking about this group back in June, but we only got two more sessions in July and then one in late August due to scheduling issues, the GM catching Covid, and my grandmother’s passing. We skipped a lot of weeks, as it turns out, and apparently I wasn’t the only one who was on the verge of withdrawing for a while since I found out today, two days after I withdrew, that the whole campaign was shuttered (which saves my friend the trouble of figuring out how to gently break it to the group that they also weren’t interested in continuing to play). The GM has had some on-going health issues (which contributed to us skipping sessions) and one of the other players apparently also has some scheduling conflicts, so the GM sent my friend a message that he was shutting the whole thing down. I wish the group had been able to continue (since I know how much it sucks to lose a game because a group falls apart), but I got the strong sense that only a couple of the players were really enjoying themselves and since I’m pretty sure the GM is struggling with Long Covid, I really don’t think things could have ended any other way.

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Sea Of Stars Was A Great Game With A Poor Ending

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A quick disclaimer that, since I wrote about all but the very last bits of Sea of Stars already, this post is going to be rife with spoilers in probably every paragraph below this one (and especially rife in the paragraph immediately below this one)! It is impossible to discuss the things I want to without wading deeply into the various themes, plot beats, and even the final resolution of the game, so check out my first review if you just want to know whether or not you should play the game and then read this review if you don’t care about spoilers and want to know what I think about the game now that I’ve finished it. I will say that, regardless of what you might read below (and to give a pre-spoiler final conclusion on the game), I think you should play it. I had a blast and while I have a lot of thoughts about the story’s wrap up, it is still a point in the game’s favor that they put so much in the game that I have a burning desire to talk about it, even if I might not be as happy with the wrap-up as I would like to be. I put about thirty hours into the game and it was absolutely worth my money and that much of my time. I have no regrets about spending my time on it and I’ll probably even replay it eventually, using the New Game + mode to get the final achievements so I can rest easy knowing I did everything there was to do in the game. Now, with that said, on to my final and full review of the game!

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I’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 22

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It has been almost three months since I wrote the last entry in this series. I thought I’d probably hold off on more entries in this series until I’d spent more time in Tears of the Kingdom, but I’ve yet to have a reason to return to that entry in the franchise. All of my video game time has been spent on new games (or at least new to me, since Ni No Kuni is absolutely NOT a new game), so I haven’t felt much call to return to any old games, other than the sort of on-going repitition of playing Baldur’s Gate 3 (though I’d argue that doing alternate storylines isn’t exactly the same thing) and a desire to do a New Game + of Chained Echoes because I still don’t have anyone to talk to about that game. There isn’t as much beckoning replayability in Tears of the Kingdom as there was in Breath of the Wild. BotW had DLC already planned for it, that you could pre-purchase the day the game came out, after all. It has now been four months since TotK came out and there’s no word on DLC other than Nintendo’s usual “we have no plans at this time” statement. Which, you know, feels like it is misleading a lot of the time, but I’ll admit that this feeling might be a bit misdirected because Nintendo probably doesn’t get asked about unannounced DLC for small games that are unlikely to have it. They probably only get questioned on big games that don’t have DLC already announced, which feels like an incredibly skewed data pool to be used as the basis for drawing any kind of conclusions. So who knows what there will be, if anything, for TotK in the future, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

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My Exhaustion And Depression Teamed Up On Me

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Between therapy, not sleeping well last night (I was actually in bed on time for once, I just couldn’t fall asleep and then I kept waking up throughout the night), and the general events of the last two weeks, I just do not have the energy for much today. I finished Sea of Stars and want to write about it, but the thought of even starting on that post (by copying over the relevant bits of a discussion I had with someone about the game) have me feeling so exhausted that I’d rather lay down on the dirty floor of my office and not move for a week than try to parse through all the pieces of that largely one-sided discussion (my mistake for engaging with someone without checking if they were up for in-depth critical analysis). I mean, hell, I can’t decide what I’m doing to do for dinner and tonight’s grocery night, which means I could guiltlessly cop out by ordering Chinese food from the local place since I’ll be getting home late. Nothing like buying a bunch of food and then not eating any of it. Sure, it’s because I’m exhausted from a long day of work and then going grocery shopping afterwards, but it still feels weird to do. Plus, as much as I enjoy getting takeout from the local Chinese restaurant, I tend not sleep as well after eating it. Seems like eating something else might be the better choice in order to address my exhaustion, but that will take a degree of effort that picking up my dinner would not.

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Flash Fiction Rerun: The Sword And The Alchemist

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Tej slipped silently through square, disappearing into moonshadows as she neared the park. Even the guards at the entrance didn’t see her, despite their torches.

Once inside, she moved swiftly, heading for the column of moonlight over the plinth. As she neared, she saw the familiar glow of the blade magnifying all the light that struck it.

She took a moment to observe the churned mud surrounding the plinth. So many tried to free the sword and earn the Xendran crown. Who wouldn’t be tempted by that much power?

Certain she was alone, Tej slipped into the moonlight and laid a hand on the pommel. The blade began to brighten and she leapt away. “Shit.”

Tej threw her cloak over the blade, leaving the hilt uncovered. After a deep breath, she pulled it free and set it on the ground. She could see the blue and gold glow pressing against her cloak, so she worked quickly. It had taken weeks to convince people it had been struck by divine lightning after the first time.

She poured both her flasks into the plinth and stirred the liquid with a stick until it began to stiffen. Careful not to toss aside the stick, she grabbed the sword from the ground and plunged it back into the plinth. The light beneath sputtered and disappeared as she tore free her cloak’s hem to wipe the adhesive from the plinth and wrap up the stick.

As she snuck away, she checked the sky. By the time the sun rose, the sword would be sealed in the stone again. This recipe should buy her enough time to finish negotiating with the Aluskan Empire. Better to sell the crown and disappear with the money than be assassinated like the last four fools to pull the sword free.

Infrared Isolation: Hiatus

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I genuinely do not have it in me to do the work this project requires right now. I barely have it in me to keep regularly blog posts up and those actually get views. I’m sorry if this is the sole reason you’re here, but I need to stop trying to work on this project for a bit so I can focus on resting and recovering. I’ll, of course, keep trying to work on it in the meantime, but not having self-assigned deadlines that fly past will lessen the mental load of this process. Once I’ve gotten a few chapters done and no longer feel quite as emotionally exhausted and just ABSOLTELY knackered all the time, I’ll go back to posting them. I’ll even let you know ahead of time, so you can set your alarms.

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Even A Fun Nintendo Direct Couldn’t Break Through My Exhaustion This Week

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We had another Nintendo Direct recently. I was hoping for news about any potential Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom DLC, but I wasn’t expecting any. The current official word on that front is that Nintendo has no plans to release any DLC and while we’ve been misled in the past (and I hope we’re being misled now), I wouldn’t be surprised if there was no DLC coming. After all, the entirety of Tears of the Kingdom was founded as a bunch of ideas for DLCs for Breath of the Wild, so it would be a bit recursive to start getting DLC for what was simply too big, complex, and complete to be a mere DLC add-on to another game. Plus, the DLC was basically announced from the get-go for BotW and there was nothing at all announced for TotK, so some reservation seemed wise (I’d be happy if we only got a Master Mode, so even my hopes for any DLC are pretty tame). Other than that unlikely reveal or the eventual announcement of the next entry in the Legend of Zelda franchise (which I’d be surprised to see so soon after TotK’s release), I wasn’t really expecting there’d be much for me. All the things I’ve been anticipating either had release dates from previous announcements, had come out already, or where just for different platforms, so I kept my expectations low in defense against the likelihood that there’d be anything of particular interest for me.

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The Risky Nature of Digital Ownership

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Last night, after I finished the book I was reading (Mélusine, by Katherina Addison, the first in a series I’ll be writing about once I’ve finished them all), I went to open the next one in my NOOK app on my tablet and discovered the entire thing was blank. It said there were a bunch of pages in the book, but no matter how many times I swiped forward, I could never make it to page 2 or get any kind of anything to appear on the page. It was frustrating since it wasn’t time to get ready for bed yet but it was too late to really start anything new. Plus, you know, I’d bought an ebook that had turned out to be entirely useless to me. Nothing I did could fix the file (or the file of the 4th book in the series, which was bugged in the same way), so I found the support line, spent forty slow minutes trying to troubleshoot the problem with someone on their online helpdesk (which, to give this person their due, was available at eleven at night, central time, and seemed to be fairly competent at their job) only to eventually be given a refund since nothing they did seemed to resolve the problem for me. It was annoying and, sure, I got my money back, but I didn’t want money. I wanted to read the book!

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