Friday, July 1, 2022

Monthly Update: July, 2022



Well, who would have thought that we would be here?  

I do not even know where to start with the spate of rulings and overturned rulings from the Supreme Court.  I brought up SCOTUS' overturning of Roe vs. Wade and was told that I didn't know what I was talking about despite having read the ruling and concurring opinions and quoting the text of the ruling in my post.  And maybe their entire goal was to have me question my own judgment and understanding of US law and how lawyers and judges write their legal opinions to not necessarily be easy reading.  I get that because they need to cover so many bases in their decisions that the wording can come across as convoluted or confusing.  I guess the one Business of Law class I took at a community college did not really do anything for me.  I will close this part down by saying that I do not understand the originalist point of view when it comes to the Constitution, that it can only be interpreted as it was written 234 years ago when slavery was legal and women were also considered property incapable of voting.  Because the Constitution does not specifically say "abortion" then it is not a right that The Founding Fathers thought that women should have.  But god forbid that you take an originalist take on the right to bear arms means that you cannot have an unmodified rifle that fires up to 45 rounds per minute when the guns available at the time could fire three to four musket balls per minute.

I am going to stop there, because I am neither a lawyer, a Constitutional lawyer, or someone with anything even close to a law degree, so anything I say or an opinion I have is going to be shat upon by someone who already has an opposing view, so let me talk about something that I do know about and will not cause anyone to feel the need to call me out for talking out of my ass.

On my laptop, I am continuing to play Borderlands 2 and am nearing the end of the main storyline after just over 72 hours.  I have been doing as many of the sidequests as possible because I like the abilities and skills that Maya the Siren learns and like the previous Borderlands (and MMOs in general it feels like), you earn a lot more experience points by completing quests than by killing enemies.  So when you have 250,000 exp needed to level up, earning 1-5 XP for killing a single level 25 psycho bandit is not going to cut it.  I had previously considered forking over $14ish a week or two ago as all of the DLC was on sale through Steam (whereas individually they would all cost upwards of $90+), but at this point, I am feeling like I will be over the game, not that it has not been fun, but I think I would like to move on to something else already in my 300+ Steam/GOG/Epic/Uplay/Origins PC games queue.

I did finish the first Diablo, for the first time ever though.  I have started the game multiple times over the last 20 years, but never reached the final level before; usually related to upgrading my computer and losing the iso file, or getting that Christmas Present Syndrome and moving on to something a little newer and forgetting to get back to Tristram 1.0.  I will have an article up on Monday, not so much a review as a long-winded description of playing the game, finding glitches, not completing things, and everyone's all-important Diablo question: what gear did I have when I beat the game?

I think I am still playing Diablo Immortal too. However, over the last week I have found that I am playing less of the story and just doing the Elder Rift, collecting all associated daily log-in and kill rewards, then selling/breaking down all unnecessary gear that does not have the pretty green arrow, then logging off.  Not that the game is not fun, but I like it for being able to pop in, do the dungeon in fewer than 10 minutes and then call it good; all usually during one of my 10-minute breaks throughout the day.  Kind of the same way I play Fire Emblem Heroes.

And speaking of Fire Emblem, I am still technically playing the Fire Emblem port of Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade on the Wii U, but I am going into the last battle of Chapter II and the anxiety of knowing that it is going to be a long end-of-chapter battle has me procrastinating about starting it.  I felt the same way going into the final chapter battle with Lyn et al, and really any of the final battles in any tactics games.  It just feels like this is the battle when the game throws nearly everything at you and knowing that I will likely have characters that can cross over into the next chapter if they survive makes me worried about characters possibly dying.  Yeah, I could spam save-states because you can do that with Virtual Console games, but it is something I do not want to do;  I mean, I did accidentally let Raven die towards the beginning/middle of Chapter II because that was a long battle that I did not want to restart and his death seemed to fit within the story that was playing out around me.

On the 3DS, I am still playing Dragon Quest IX (yes, which is a DS game), but I put that on hold around the beginning of June to start a project where I played through and reviewed all 51 games in the DS game Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1 that I think Dr. Potts got me nigh on a decade ago.  I have played several of the games on that cartridge in the arcade, on an Atari 2600, and in this collection on the DS, but staring down 51 games that you can play in less time than it takes me to write this paragraph can feel a little intimidating, especially where to start.  So I decided to go through each game with a set time limit.  All of this will be covered either towards the end of this month or in August after I have played through and written up everything because I know that having two finished articles out per week, not including the MIDI Week Single can be a little daunting.

Speaking of MIDI Week Singles, like any person in my position, I do have a spreadsheet with songs I would like to use for upcoming MWS articles, but that list grows by the week.  Out of over 26,000 games across 22 systems, I have 256 marked games with at least one song earmarked that I think might make good articles.  While trying to get away from reusing the same games and composers over and over (don't get me wrong though, I love Nobuo Uematsu, Koji Kondo, and David Wise), I decided to pull up music from games ranging from the Intellivision all the way to the Wii (not including the NES because I already did that in another spreadsheet and was the inspiration for this massive multi-sheet spreadsheet), but even looking over that spreadsheet feels overwhelming.  So to help me out, I have decided to run an RNG at least once a month to pull a song from the list of songs that I have not included.  I think this will also help me out when I feel like I am in a rut and let us be honest, ruts are a very real thing and I am not afraid to admit that I feel like they are scattered around, everywhere.  It is also what I did this last Wednesday which is how we ended up with a song from Garfield and His Nine Lives.

So that is where we find ourselves this month.  Still furious over rollbacks in women's healthcare access across the country, although the state I live in is maintaining its pro-choice policies, and apparently everyone else wants to merge with Idaho and is intrigued to see what if anything happens with The January 6th Committee's hearings going into July.  Yeah, I just cannot seem to get away from talking about everything under the sun that is not just video games.


~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Fuck God's Plan This Is Our Plan

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