Monthly Update: October 2021

 

I just realized that it was October 1st on Friday while standing in my office looking at a calendar of October.  Also that I should have had a Monthly Update article ready for Friday, October 1st, but here we are on Monday, October 4th, but sometimes that is just the way things fall these days.

Because we still have the biohazard symbol in our logo (the real-life biohazard, not the video game series Biohazard / Resident Evil), we are still somewhere in the lifespan of this pandemic.  Yes, in the United States infections (seven day average of 116,090 new infections every day) are on their way down, as well as hospitalizations (seven day average of 74,760 patients admitted to the hospital and of those 21,219 in the ICU) after a steady rise for the last two months.  Back in July, I believe it was on an episode of The Daily or on NPR (I apologize for not being able to cite my sources on this one) they were anticipating an increase in infections/hospitalizations/deaths for about two months and then a drop off after that, which is what had been seen in China, India, and Israel.  With some luck, this downward trend will continue, but as we head into Thanksgiving in just about two months, followed by Christmas a month after that, then New Year a week after that, I would not be surprised by another increase in all of the areas mentioned above from about December through March.  I am not an infectious disease analyst by any means, so you don't have to take my word for it.  Oh, and as of last Friday (October 1st, the US passed 700,000 COVID-19 related deaths.  And everyone at Fox News can go to Hell.  Again.  Some more.  Whatever.

I feel like the highlight of the last month was playing Tux and Fanny, a game I received a review code for back in the middle of September.  If you haven't read our article yet, the game is a point-and-click adventure game that incorporates numerous other genres of video games as well as different narrative devices to tell the story of how Tux and Fanny were able to get their soccer ball inflated so that they could enjoy the afternoon together.  The game is currently available on the Nintendo Switch and on itch.io.  Again, I highly recommend the game and that is not the freeness of the review code talking and I"m hoping to hear Dr. Potts' thoughts on the game soon.  I also finished EqqO, which I started a while back and had been playing on-and-off.

I also started Blair Witch on the Nintendo Switch which I purchased a while back and started after Conklederp and I finished the video game escape room, Curious Cases.  I hope to have an article up about that game in the coming weeks, but that will probably be up after I finish my article for Call of Cthulhu.  And then Metroid Dread releases on Friday (8th) so I may either start playing that immediately, or I will put it on the back burner in the hopes that I will be able to find a way to play Metroid Fusion (being part four in the now five part mainline Metroid series).  In the 3DS-verse, I started and finished Spirit Camera: The Lost Memoir closer to the beginning of September and then started Professor Layton and the Unwound Future, which I am working my way through here and there when I find the time and maybe it is me, but only about a third of the way through and I feel like a couple of the riddle answers have been more subjective that would have sat well with Obi-Wan (ie: "from a certain point of view").

Speaking of time, I have again found myself in the realm of the employed for which I am eternally thankful, for the most part; meaning the noon-working life was spending a small portion of my day looking for work and the majority of it with my family.  And with this 9-5pm job again comes the time management conundrum.  I do have some time at work to play the 3DS on my breaks, but in recent weeks, I have also found that I can use my breaks to email myself articles that I have been working on, which frees up my time a little after getting home from work; which is why last Wednesday's MIDI Week Single looked the way it did.  Then I have some time in the evenings to do some writing, or more likely, do some reading.  I have mentioned (before and here again) that I have been reading the new canon Star Wars novels and while for the most part, I have been enjoying them, I have hit a wall rather hard.  Heir to the Jedi by Kevin Hearne I have not been vibing with as much as most of the other stories.  I do not know if it is because it is a Luke Skywalker story if it is a story written in first person past tense, that I find the writing to not be as good or as entertaining as I wanted it to be, or any combination thereof.  What I have told Conklederp is that if I read it with whiny Luke as a 19-year-old, it is a lot more palatable.  I have also been rereading The Lord of the Rings to Conklederp as we drift off to sleep and even now, feelings about how I wish Peter Jackson et al. had handled the Black Riders is again coming back; in that, I wish they were more terrifying, or terrifying at all in the movies.  Anyway, love the books, which is why I'm rereading them again.

Last week, Conklederp and I watched the first episode of American Horror Stories, the new series from the American Horror Story creators but this time it is a series of stand-alone short stories that last only an episode or two.  We did not make it past the first episode, not because it was too scary, but because we felt kind of odd watching a show that was actively fetishizing a 16-year-old girl who specifically said in the episode that she hadn't come out to her classmates in high school because she didn't want them fetishizing her sexuality.  So instead we started Midnight Mass on Netflix, from the creators of The House on Haunted Hill and The Haunting of Bly Manor.  We are four episodes in (as of this writing, but we will likely be done by the time this article goes up on Monday as there are only seven episodes).  And I have been hearing a lot of good things about Squid Game over the last week so maybe we'll jump in on that bandwagon.  And then there is Star Wars: Visions which I was initially not interested in until I saw a couple of screenshots and hopefully we will start in on that soon.

Lastly, I am again participating in Inktober, but again, only doing it in a non-serious manner.  Last year I stopped before the end due to some at-home issues we were having with our cat Joey Mjolnir Explosion and I just lost the chutzpuh.  This year I am picking it back up again and have decided that I am going to relegate my drawings to post-it notes while at work; and it's okay that I'm using post-it notes because I was the one who bought them and brought them into work so I am not wasting company office supplies.  I will only be posting those pictures over on our Instagram page if you are at all interested. 

Let us leave it there for now.  I have a number of articles that I will try to have written this month in between actually playing games, attempting drawings, actually working, and my post-work home life (which is pretty damn awesome).  We'll see you during the month.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
So They Took from the Moment