I started playing Warframe pretty recently. Well, sort of. I started playing Warframe past the introduction recently. I started playing it years and years ago, because one of my friends was really into the game, but I was getting into it as he was falling off it and I didn’t really have it in me to stay focused on the game by myself back then. I still don’t these days, but I’ve got a pair of friends (the same pair who got me into Palia and most other new games I’ve tried over the last year) who have been investing their time in the game recently and, since I’m more interested in doing fun stuff with my friends than the specifics of most games, I decided to launch myself back into it. Plus, this game gets around most of my aversion to guns in games since the enemies in this one are rarely human, melee attacks are my preferred mode of combat, and I can actually not use any guns at all if that’s what I want–for instance, I’m doing a Bow, Shuriken, Hammer thing right now and having a blast. I don’t really understand more than the very basics of whatever plotlines exist in the game since my friends have been powering me through the various advancement-critical missions so they can open up the world for me, reveal something they’ve been trying to keep a secret (which is working really well, aided in part by the fact that I genuinely don’t know enough to spot whatever stuff they might be trying to hide), and get me all of the cool abilities that usually take a long time to unlock. So I’m having fun but I’m also confused to the point of just sort of sliding through the missions without them leaving any kind of lasting impression on me.
Continue readingStory
Chained Echoes Is More Fun Than I’ve Had In Ages
Over the past week and a half, I’ve spent what limited evening video game time I’ve got playing Chained Echoes on my Switch. I only heard about the game because a podcaster I follow (Austin Walker of the wonderful Friends at the Table) tweeted about appearing on an episode of another podcast (specifically the Jan 16th, 2023 episode of Axe of the Blood God: An RPG Podcast). Since I’m really into RPGs and I trust Austin’s opinions on games, I decided to give it a listen. Wound up getting myself a new RPG to enjoy and a new podcast to check out at the same time. Unfortunately, for a while there, I was too stressed out to consider trying anything new, especially after the new thing I was most excited for wound up being incredibly underwhelming. Between that and just being generally busy, I didn’t start playing Chained Echoes until last week.
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.
Continue readingIntroduction To The Leeching Wastes
My reviewers and I need another week to get ready to start posting the rewritten serial story, so I’ve got something else for you today! The following is an introductory story I wrote for a small Dungeons and Dragons campaign I’m running for a few friends, based on a bunch of very different ideas I had. I was actually creating this world and campaign when I was writing my posts about creating interesting tabletop RPG worlds, so you can see how I put a lot of that stuff into practice. I told all of the players that their character was the “you” referenced and even though they all sat this watch together, their recollection of this experience was exactly as this short story is written. I won’t add too many disclaimers to the start of this since it’s just a fun “get a feel for the world” sort of thing, but I felt like some context would help. Now, without further ado, welcome to The Leeching Wastes!
Continue readingSpace Pictures and Tabletop Roleplaying Games
I love me some space clouds. Thanks to the advances of modern technology, a whole lot of science, and an even greater amount of international cooperation, we now have some pretty fucking cool pictures of space. I can only imagine that more and more pictures from NASA have come out since I wrote this and if I go online for anything over my vacation, it will have been to look at neat pictures of space clouds. I mean, just look at this thing! It’s so freaking fluffy! Which makes since, since it’s a loosely adhered cloud of space dust that is only visible because we’re so far away from it. Like the haze of humidity during a warm summer sunset, we can only perceive it because we’ve got light bouncing off every bit of it towards our eyes.
Continue reading/cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuters/CFX5ZZJ7ABIUVJ5A36QFQF5RF4.jpg){kind=link}
Some Site News: I’m Gonna Repost My Own Stuff!
I’ve been thinking about making some changes to what I post here. Since I tend to focus on other projects on the weekends, I frequently never get around to writing a Saturday post until I’m into the next week. It isn’t difficult to write an extra post one or two days a week, but I think I might go back through all stuff I’ve written in years past and share it here. Not just anything of course. I’m thinking of either reposting old poetry or doing a re-run of my Coldheart and Iron series. I haven’t really decided, but it’s more of a “which one will I do first?” than a “what should I do?” type question.
Continue readingUnderstanding Story Adaptation Between Mediums
I’ve always been interested in the way stories change as they are adapted from one form of media to another. For most of my life, the only examples I had were books to movies. I didn’t follow comics closely enough to really consider how comicbook characters were represented in superhero movies and TV shows, and I knew that most comicbooks had such varied, ever-renewed stories that adaptation was fairly open-ended. When the Lord of the Rings movies came out, I was given my first real chance to evaluate something I was familiar with as it moved from books to movies. I didn’t have the skills required to do it in a good, critical way when the first movie came out, but the movies remained a part of my life for long enough that I was still thinking about them and the books when I finally had the skills to do a thorough critical analysis.
Continue readingThe Pokémon Anime Is Not As Repetitive As I Thought
I read an article a while back about the way that shows are produced and written for a weekly release (the traditional method) and a full-season release (new to streaming platforms). The article didn’t make claims about quality or superiority, it just clarified why some seasons are longer than others, why some shows have more episodes, and how the pacing, plotting, and character development can change between the two forms. The crux of it was that, by being able to drop an entire season at once, a show wouldn’t need to remind its viewers of important information as frequently as a weekly show would. Because it was meant to be consumed quickly, it could skip over a lot of the “last time on” type information and the “I’m going to remind you of this thing we encountered five episodes ago because it’s actually been four months for us.” Stories take longer to tell if you have to tell them in pieces and can’t reference the old information, or you have to tell stories without as many elements that are reliant on past information. It’s not better or worse, just different.
Continue readingLove and War
Bennel slumped down at the table with a sigh of relief. As his pack clattered to the floor and his cloak settled down around his shoulders, he put his head down and heaved another sigh against the surface of the table.
Tem placed one of the drinks they carried in front of the young warrior priest and clapped him on the shoulder with their now empty hand. “Rest, young one. Rest, eat, and drink! You have earned a taste of life’s pleasures after a battle such as that.”
Bennel winced as Tem’s hand slapped against the still-healing hole in his shoulder. “Careful, you rock monster. Magic might patch up wounds quickly but they still take a long time to fully heal.”
Continue readingAll This To Say I Just Want To Talk About Stories
There is nothing I love more than talking about stories and storytelling with people. A mix of literary criticism, careful analysis, delighted comparison, and rampant speculation, nothing gets me as fired up, recharged, and happy as a long talk about beloved stories with someone who shares my enthusiasm. It is something that has been in short supply lately, given my isolation and what feels like the rising toxicity of the internet. Most of my friends who enjoy stories don’t really care for the level of analysis and discussion I would like, and the few places I have access to this online, there’s a degree of rabidity that makes me uncomfortable to engage with others past a surface level.
Continue reading