As a small festive gift for myself, I decided to purchase the expansion pass to my Nintendo Online subscription. I already had the only DLC in the pack for a game I own, thanks to my hefty playtime on Animal Crossing, but I was excited by the idea of playing a bunch of my favorite Nintendo 64 games without needing to do my usual amount of coaxing, constant saving, and sacrificing to the Nintengods required to use my old, dusty, beat-up N64. I haven’t looked at it the same since that time I was playing through Paper Mario, got all the way through a save-less dungeon and boss fight combo, and then had the game crash/N64 shut off AS I WAS OPENING THE SAVE SCREEN TO SELECT A FILE TO SAVE TO. Definitely not still mad about that one. The only classic the expansion pass is missing that I feel a hankering to replay is Donkey Kong 64 and I’m used to ignoring that one since my old copy of the game doesn’t seem to work very well.
Continue readingWildermyth Is Great In Single AND Multiplayer
I’ve been steadily working my way through Wildermyth during my vacation. I meant to play a bunch of other games during my winter vacation time, but I wound up getting sucked back into Wildermyth thanks to a combination of my Wednesday night gaming evening with a friend and watching the VODs of a collection of the Friends at the Table crew playing through one of the stories (something they started doing as one of the donation goals from their charity stream back in July). I don’t regret it, aside from how much I’ve wrecked my sleep schedule by “one more task before I stop for the night”-ing my way to four in the morning, because it’s a lot of fun to grind my way through mechanically and narratively. The battles are satisfying, the random events are interesting, and the storytelling is always fun to read through. It really is just a great game to sink my time into.
Continue readingThis Is My 900th Post
While I’d love to claim that this is a complete coincidence, I’ll admit that I did thumb the scales a teensy bit to line up the first post of 2023 with my 900th over all blog post. A teensy bit. My time off was legitimate and I definitely didn’t have anything ready for last Saturday as far as Infrared Isolation goes, but I did decide to still do a post on the 31st and not take an entire week off when I realized I wasn’t going to have Chapter 13 ready just so I could line this up. It was a small amount of effort and is, ultimately, a fairly small thing. I’ve been running this blog since 2017, after all, and while most of those years show huge periods of inactivity from me, 2018 and 2022 saw almost daily posts, and that’s most of 900 posts right there. The rest mostly come from posting in the last third of 2021 and the last two months of 2017, when I got on the daily blogging train for the fist time.
Continue readingSaturday Morning Musing
I don’t have an Infrared Isolation chapter ready for today (Holidays, y’all), so I figured we might as well return to an old classic instead of just putting up a short post about skipping a week. Plus, I felt the need to stretch, metaphorically speaking, after some rest, and figured this would be as good a way as any.
Continue readingHunkering Down For A Holiday Blizzard
There’s a storm coming. It probably won’t hit with the severity they’re predicting two days ahead of it’s arrival [it didn’t], but it’s probably still going to be freezing cold and awful for the whole thing [it was] even if it never quite reaches the monstrous blizzard severity they’re saying is possible. I mean, that’s the thing about living where I do. We tend to catch the edge of every storm that swings down from Canada toward the rest of the Midwest and upper East Coast, but we rarely get hit by the worst of it. As someone who grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, getting frequently struck by heavy storms and intense weather of all kinds, I kind of miss it. Sure, my perspective now would be very different, since I actually need to go places, do things, and ostensibly keep my home accessible to the world, but I wouldn’t mind a day or two of being snowed in just to enjoy the cozy feeling of not needing to be anywhere while the snow falls.
Continue readingThe Ground Itself Is My Favorite Worldbuilding Game
I’ve been playing Everest Pipkin’s The Ground Itself with one of my D&D groups lately, as we work on building out the world I created while writing about worldbuilding for Tabletop Roleplaying Games. It has been a lot of fun to create this location with my friends, all of us co-authoring the world’s elements as we build off each other’s ideas, take ideas in directions the others wouldn’t have considered, and generally have a more fun time than we expected we would. The open-ended prompts based on the deck, the somewhat chaotic nature of drawing things from a deck (our first time period burned through half the deck before we got to jump in time), and the always energizing exchange as we flowed between casual, light roleplaying in a handful of scenes to discussing what one of us meant when someone established symbotic relationships with plant creatures. All of this has been a delight to share with my friends as we work on fleshing out a world to experience with characters we already care so much about.
Continue readingHappy Holidays! Also, Links for Holiday Escapism!
Today is the day before Christmas, which is, I suppose, the winter holiday I’m observing this year. At least from a taking-time-off perspective. Personally, I celebrate Candlenights since it doesn’t have any emotional baggage like all the other holidays I’ve celebrated in the past, and the openly-embracing-the-made-up-ness of it appeals to me as someone attempting to create my own traditions. I’d probably celebrate any of the other winter holidays, but a lot of those are tied to specific traditions, religions, or religious traditions, and I’m not a part of any of those. I grew up catholic and white so my entire culture/heritage as far as the winter is concerned is Christmas (Jesus) and Christmas (Capitalism), neither of which appeal to me. All of which is to say there will be no post beyond this today and I’ll be taking three whole days off in the next week as I rest, prepare for the coming year, and probably try to figure out if I actually want to make Christmas cookies or if I just want to eat Christmas cookies that someone else made. My next post will be up on Thursday the 29th.
If you’re looking for an escape and aren’t familiar with my work, check out Infrared Isolation or any of my poetry for my more recent work. Otherwise I’ve got almost 900 posts of stuff on this ol’ blog for you. If you want some good, funny videos, I recommend Drawfee (This One is my favorite, but it’s a little PG-13+). If you want audio-only, I recommender either the Partizan or Sangfielle seasons of Friends at the Table (Sangfielle is horror-ish, but quick to start, while Partizan has a pre-season bit that is kinda important and also fun to listen to). If you want something to read, I suggest Vattu which should keep you plenty busy for a day or two.
If that’s not enough… well… I don’t know what to tell you. Friends at the Table and Drawfee should, in their entirety, take you about a year to get through unless you listen to an average of about 5 hours of audio programming per day like I do. In which case, combined, they’ll take you about a year. Regardless, I hope you get through your holidays and enjoy yourself at least a little bit.
Spending Christmas In Valheim
The time has come for my yearly return to Valheim. There’s a new major patch, I’ve got some amount of time off coming up that is pretty much unclaimed due to the world shutting down for a holiday I don’t celebrate, and I have a huge backlog of podcasts since I spent the last three or four months doing a re-listen of the entire Sci-Fi side of Friends At The Table in preparation for the upcoming new season. Now, all I need to do is figure out how to get my friend who hosts the world to leave his computer on so I can play while he’s busy with family. Then I’ll be set to build the new base we’ve been discussing and maybe go on a bunch of hunts to finally have enough feathers so I’m not constantly rationing all of my arrows. He’s the tank and I’m the DPS, so I have been running out super quickly now that we’re in areas that take some real work to deal with all kinds of more-mobile enemies (the plains are full of smaller enemies that really just love to change their movement direction the instant I loose my arrows).
Continue readingThe Best Game I’ve Played This Month is Lil Gator Game
Recently, I purchased and played through the entirety of a game in a single day. I stayed up very late to do it, but I managed to one hundred percent Lil Gator Game in an extended evening. I’ve been following the development of the game on Twitter for a while now, ever since I saw a retweet and was instantly charmed by the blocky but detailed aesthetics and the clear homage to The Legend of Zelda that the main gameplay revolves around. Over the months since then, I’ve watched as more and more detail has come out via small videos and trailers for Steam and then, on the 14th, I bought it immediately. While I’m normally leery of any kind of hype train, I can definitely say that this game delivered on every promise it made.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 19
Content Warning: mentions of depression, suicidal ideation related to OCD, death, grief, and loss.
Also, spoiler warning for The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask I guess?
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