It was important to me to try and get back into a rhythm of writing. Since my kids were born (Hello, I have twin four year olds, a boy and a girl, they're happy and healthy thank you), I've been pressed to find time for my own hobbies. Before the kids were born, it was hard to find time to take away from the act of playing games (enjoyable, rewarding) and put time into the act of writing about playing videogames (rigorous (even if it doesn't read like I put rigor into it!), unrewarding, especially when decoupled from the instant gratification of likes and retweets on a pithy joke tweet).
I was trying to do one blogpost a month without spending too much time writing about how I was trying to write one blogpost a month. It's hard! So out of some love for myself, I am going to ease up a little bit to technically achieve my goal even while I relax my standards.
Here's what I've been doing:
Vampire Survivors: This game continues to add new content, so I pick it up every few months to see the new sights. I'm impressed with how the latest additions are not merely thrown into the list of characters or items which can be collected, but are introduced through some weird one-off mechanics which are not otherwise seen in the game. After the unusual introduction, the items become more normal, except they require a higher level of time management to assemble the requirements for proper usage of the items in the strictly limited 30 minutes of arena time. While the early rounds of Vampire Survivor are about pure survival, asking if can you last the full 30 minutes, the end game asks you to optimize every second of those 30 minutes to reach every corner of the map with the appropriate pre-requisite weapons to evolve the most powerful items. It's all optional, there are no high scores, and no leaderboards. But the rewards feel powerful, and worth the effort.
Atlanta: I'm struggling with Season 2 of this show. Every episode exudes this sense of dread. The season begins with a quick evocation of "Robbing season", the idea the time of year when people must steal to survive is upon us. The show is gorgeous to look at, but some episodes are actually just pure horror episodes with an occasional comic remark?
Garbage Day: This newsletter is great, and subscribers get access to a discord where I have found new music, insulted cryptocurrency schemes, and learned more than I ever wanted to know about the Human Pet Guy.
Silos: I like backlogged.com for keeping track of games I want to play and posting reviews of games I have played. I dislike the concept of silos, especially the idea that backlogged.com might one day disappear. People don't follow me on backlogged but they follow me on twitter. I don't want to use twitter anymore, I want to use my blog. So I am exploring how to hook up the tools I want to use (my blog, backlogged) to the tools other people are using (twitter) and connecting them all together. So far I got a quick IFTT going to post to twitter when I make a new review on backlogged. It looks nice! (It will also post to twitter when I make this blogpost. I don't know if that will look nice yet!)
