Spoiler warning: the following post contains major plot spoilers for God of War: Ragnarok and Pokémon: Violet/Scarlet. They’re in the next paragraph and form the majority of it, and they don’t show up any less the further down you go. You cannot escape them unless you leave this post now and only return once you’ve had am opportunity to beat those games to your satisfaction. I don’t really go into specifics in terms of how things happen, but there are secrets and conclusions to things that get revealed, so maybe bail out before you read those if reading them will negatively impact your gaming experience. Since I’m out of other stuff to put here, to push the spoilers further down the page, I’ll let you go with a final admonition of “you’ve been warned” and hope that you are making good choices for yourself.
Continue readingTwo Week Skip
Well, I meant to do only one week of skipped chapters, but then life happened and now we’re at two weeks. I can’t promise it won’t go longer since the holidays are coming up and this period of the year is frequently tumultuous or at least emotionally complicated in a way that leaves me with little energy for anything other than surviving/resting between intense bouts of anxiety or coming up with ways for this time of year to suck less as a person without anyone to mark the holidays with in an immediate, nearby sense. Normally I’d just travel to where my friends are at, but that might be a bit more than I can muster this year on account of… well, everything. Still, I enjoy writing and will be choosing that over a lot of other options when I have the spirit within me to put forth effort, but I’m just saying now that maybe don’t expect consistent new Saturday chapters of Infrared Isolation until the new year is underway. Plus, there’s some major holidays that are Saturday Adjacent this year so maybe I’ll just take them off. Who knows. I’m clearly flying by the seat of my pants right now.
Thoughts on the Conclusion of Pokémon Violet
Spoiler Warning: This post discusses the main arc of the latest Pokémon games and while it doesn’t go into detail, I know that some people would prefer to avoid any kind of information at all. This spoiler warning is for those people. And it starts in the fourth paragraph below (this is paragraph zero).
Continue readingThe Latest Update to Splatoon 3 Looks Pretty Chill
A new season has begun in Splatoon 3. I haven’t been playing the game much lately, and the idea of new stages, game modes, and weaponry doesn’t really appeal to me in the “let’s try out some new cool stuff!” kind of way, but it might just get me back into the game anyway. After all, it’s always been fun when I haven’t been getting disconnected and put in time out as a result. The core gameplay loop is pretty fun and fairly low-stakes since the matches only last a few minutes, so the only thing that ever really gets on my nerves is the communication issues. Sure, there’s still some issues that the game’s creators need to address by improving communication overall, but my ISP also shares some of the blame at this point and there’s not much I can do about it unless I want to call so I can get sales pitches thrown at me for an hour while I get transferred between various departments multiple times before someone just as tired of the rigmarole as I am finally confirms that they don’t offer any service plans that include what I want. And I would rather do just about anything else with my time than that.
Continue readingThe One Thing I Can’t Escape in Pokémon Violet
I still have a few more plot events to run through in the latest Pokémon game, not to mention about one hundred to one hundred fifty Pokémon still to catch or trade for, but I’ve put a pretty serious dent in the game’s content, met most of the NPCs, finished my classes, and at least briefly visited every major area in the game. I’ve had some fun moments spotting Psyducks glitched into surfaces, finding Garchomps flying around in mountains, discovering that my shiny Psyduck really is visually glitched and I wasn’t just imagining it being weird-looking this entire time (it’s constantly under a “bright-light-making-colors-fade-a-bit” effect when it appears in the world), and getting revenge on the high-powered trainer I accidentally ran into in my first few hours of the game (a cabbie just outside the central hub city on the path to the Elite Four is stronger than most gym leaders). I’ve had a lot of fun exploring the world, searching for new Pokémon to catch, and discovering stuff some of my friends who already finished their Pokédexes never found. It’s been fun. Mostly.
Continue readingNew Games, New Gaming Group, and All Kinds of Fun.
I recently started a new Dungeons and Dragons campaign. We had our session 0 three weeks ago, session 1 a single week again, and unfortunately had to skip the session 2 we’d planned for just a couple days ago. This is my current Sunday group, which consists of three regular players, one occasional (perhaps only Honey Heist) player, and one enigma who may never show up or may begin attending regularly. Whatever their heart demands, I guess. Still, it’s a solid group of players and they all made really fun characters for our 2-4 session introductory D&D campaign. The idea is that we’ll do this short campaign as a way to do a bit of world development (I get to have their characters as NPCs once we’re done) and to get everyone a bit more comfortable with each other. After this is done, we’ll be moving on to testing out Blades in the Dark for a similar amount of time, and then move from there to other games (the specific order is TBD). Once we’ve given most of them a try, we’ll wrap back around and decide what we want to play longer-term.
Continue readingTrauma, Healing, And Family Therapy
Content Warning for discussions of trauma (non-specific), family therapy, and personal therapy.
Continue readingOne-Week Pause
I’m skipping another week of Infrared Isolation. I could have tried to get it finished in time for today, but with everything I’d got going on right now (more on that next week), I think it’s better to give myself less stress and take more time for things. So Chapter 12 will go up next week and, hopefully, there’ll be few interruptions over the rest of the month. Things have to calm down in my life eventually.
Spending My Time And Attention
As you might have guessed from the subject matter of my blog posts of late, I’ve been thinking a lot about social media and the role it plays in my life. Which is actually just a piece of what I’ve actually been thinking about recently. And by “recently” I mean “for most of my adult life but in a new sort of context.” I’ve been thinking a lot about my time, my attention, my effort, and how I spend all three of those things. The recent focus of this mental exercise was inspired by a thread I saw on Twitter a couple weeks ago (that I unfortunately can’t find again) that made some bold claims about the amount of money and energy spent on advertising to people against their consent. I mean, all you need to do is look at how many ad-blocker programs exist for web browsers and phones to see how much people want to avoid it, and so much money gets spent on not only bypassing those things, but filling as much of the world with advertisements as possible.
Continue readingGod of War: Ragnarok Is as Fun to Play as It Is to Read
I’ve gotten a bit further in God of War: Ragnarok. I’m still only about halfway through the game, I think, since I’ve been distracted by things like getting adequate sleep, other video games, and a new book release, but I’m enjoying myself. I’ve had a few issues in combat,specifically with the game responding sluggishly to my controller inputs, but I’m also hypersensitive to input lag thanks to my work as a software tester and my sort of high-precision style of gameplay. Other than that, and a couple weird moments where the camera got pushed somewhere useless when I dodge an attack near a wall, it’s been a fun, enjoyable experience. Even when I’ve been fighting some really angry ghosts who keep kicking my ass to the point where I’d just give up on the fight and start over if I got hit a single time before I got said angry ghost to half HP. All-in-all, the game remains just as fun as the first one and while I do miss some of the combat mechanics I used frequently in the prequel, there’s plenty of new and fun combat mechanics for me to use in this one.
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