August was a month. It was a hot month. Not as hot or as long as July, but still, nine days of 90+ degree temperatures is nothing to shake a burning stick at. But our region is not historically equipped for prolonged and multiple heat waves every year. Yes, Central California gets hot. Yes, Arizona is hot. Yes, the Great Salt Lake is on its way to generating toxic dust storms that people may just have to deal with for the rest of their lives if water usage continues to plod along with Human development. But hey, what's a few thousand on an A/C unit?
I think it was around the end of August when I realized to Conklederp that there was a surprising amount of streaming TV shows that cropped up that I would like to watch. From wanting to catch up with Season 4 of Stranger Things, to starting She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, to House of the Dragon not feeling as strong as I was lead to believe, to watching the first three episodes of Sandman while donating platelets two weekends ago, to Rings of Power starting yesterday (Thursday, September 21st) to which I will likely do a brief write up because how could I not, to Andor starting with three episodes on Wednesday, September 21st, to the second season of The Bad Batch debuting a week later on the 28th. There is a lot of streaming TV that I want to watch, that is admittedly hard to catch up on with only an hour or so after The Squire goes to bed and I am not either playing F.E.A.R., Dropsy, Layers of Fear VR, or finishing up my Atari series that will probably (counting backward) run about nine weeks, running from either October through November or November through the end of the year.
Not that I had initially thought that I would be planning out 18 articles, but try playing 51 games and writing just a little bit about each game and keeping that to two articles and you will see my conundrum. And this has actually been a lot of fun, do not get me wrong there, as I likely would not have played several of these games. But I get into a lot of this in the opening article, so I will leave that alone for now.
As of this writing, I am on the verge of finishing Final Fantasy X, but I am currently grinding AP. It started out as wanting to just raise some "levels" (in the way that you learn abilities in FFX) after dying in the final boss fight, and it has turned into a skinner box of serotonin by learning abilities on the sphere grid. And it does not help that moving from the airship to the midway savepoint (before you wander through the cyclopean city of Sin's bowels) that the only monster I choose to run away from is the Behemoth King, and can rack up 4-7 Sphere Grid points (or upwards of 13 with Tidus who has the Double AP sword equipped). I will cover this more in the Game EXP article, but I am not actively participating in the Animal Arena outside of the first group you catch in the Calm Lands, I have only played one Blitzball match, and I only know of the Cloudy Mirror from an article. So if you have played FFX, you will likely know what I am talking about and if not, then stay tuned for our article about it on Friday September 16th (calling it right now). That really has been most of my play time on the Switch. Just the grinding alone I have been doing, probably for the last six to eight hours.
I will likely be finishing the first of the games in the F.E.A.R. franchise soon and an article soon to follow. I could probably finish the rest of the game in an afternoon where The Squire takes a long-ass nap, but I often find myself ready to stop after about 30-45 minutes, which is about how long it takes me to finish each chapter. Not having ever played Counter-Strike, this might not be an appropriate comparison, but with F.E.A.R. I feel like I am playing in a Counter-Strike map with the occasional scare-chord and hallucination. I am sneaking around corners and shooting at human militaristic enemies with guns, which really just describes 87.6% of all first-person shooters. I am moderately curious to see how this ends, and so I soldier on. Soldier.
In Dropsy, I have talked about Dropsy, and the couple of times I have dropped back in, I have not accomplished anything worthwhile apart from revisiting the same areas of the map I have already been to. All 41 areas. I counted. It might be time to look up a walkthrough, or at least an item walkthrough to find out what I do with certain items which might lead me to figure out additional puzzles on my own.
Reading-wise, I finished Daughter of the Drow, which had some great passages of the Underdark from a human's perspective, then I started a collection of short stories about Drizzt, but stopped after only four stories when I realized that the remaining stories took place years after The Halfling's Gem, and the following two books (The Legacy, and Starless Night), so I put the rest of the book on hold. Then I started and finished Darkwalker on Moonshae, the first novel written in the Forgotten Realms back in 1987, then I started on the second Elminster book, Elminister in Myth Drannor, and am currently 44% of the way through. I also picked up three collections of She-Hulk comics through Amazon because they were offered "free" through their Prime Reading program and it is interesting to see where the concept of She-Hulk started back in 1980 and where she is going with the show. I do not know if there will be an article about it, but I will likely post about it on the Gram if I have not already by the time this article goes up.
Lastly, in the real world, Conklederp, The Squire, and I went to our local bouldering gym, which neither Conklederp nor I had been to since February 2020. Since spring 2021 we have been using the home climbing wall we built, but it was very nice to be back in a place that we used to frequent 2-3 times a week before the pandemic. Probably because of our home wall, I was able to do two V-3s, so I was not completely out of practice or out of shape. I am also down about 10 lbs from the last time I was at the gym due to various factors, probably not drinking as much beer as I did in the Before Times, and not going out for beer and chicken wings every Friday probably has a little to do with it. Maybe. But we did reactivate our memberships, so it looks like we'll likely be going back more frequently so we do not feel like we are wasting our money.
So that is me looking into September. There is probably more, but that is all I can think of to get to right now.
No comments:
Post a Comment