Well, I meant to spend a bunch of my free time last weekend getting through as much of Dragon Age: Origins as I could, since that is my book club assignment for the month of August (we’ve had to shuffle some things around a bit due to us both being busy). Instead of doing any amount of that, though, I wound up getting back into Palia again. Super heavily. Hours upon hours, most of which was spent blasting through quests, digging back into building and decorating my house, investigating all the fun new features that have been introduced since I last played in April, and spending some real-world money on the game so I could experience a little bit of video game-based gender euphoria (or at least as close as I can get to that, given to my general lack of feelings on the matter). It was a bit more than I probably should have spent, but I decided to just use my July video game budget and take the rest out of my “fun big purchase” account (which is slowly beginning to recover from buying my new gaming PC). Also, I played it for the first time on maximum settings and the game looks so much better when everything is dialed all the way up. It’s a really fun, gorgeous little game. Well, little for now. It has grown a lot in the year since I started playing and all signs point toward it continuing to grow. I’m not sure how fast that growth will happen given that my current sense of it is skewed by being away for four months, but it feels like it has been pretty fast.