Monthly Update: March, 2024

 

God damn.  I don't know where to start.  I'm upset about Nex Benedict being murdered.  I'm flabbergasted about Alabama's ruling on extrauterine children regarding IVF procedures.  I'm horrified by the innocent people who have been kidnapped and those killed in retaliation.  And here too.  Pretty much everywhere.  And then more idiots who are still yelling about fabricated anythings just because their fabricated cultural policies don't seem to be favored by the majority of the US.

This has been my venting space, where some of the shit that just sits and boils, then gets edited down into bite-sized chunks because I can't do this all day and I'm sitting here comfortably in an office looking out a crows in a tree and a small coffee shack-on-wheels where people are buying $4 cold brews; that's actually not a bad price for a large 16 oz cold brew.  I'm in a literal seat of luxury, although our previous HR guy had tried to get me to replace my chair for upwards of two years.

[Insert Meaningful Transition Here]

You may've noticed that over the past couple of weeks, we've been posting exclusively Demo Time articles on Mondays and Fridays.  That was all in thanks to Steam's Next Fest (Is it Next Fest or NextFest?) that happened last month from the 5th through the 12th where publishers/developers would share demos for their upcoming games.  During a previous Next Fest in October, there were a couple of games I played and had planned on writing about, but at the end of the week, the pictures I had taken while playing on the Steam Deck were no longer accessible because the demos had been delisted.  This time I played more than one demo a night for the duration of Next Fest, which resulted in 17 games, and one No Man's Sky, which released a demo to coincide with their Omega expansion/DLC/Update.  Since I was playing everything on the Steam Deck and most of these were games that were officially untested, several games didn't work that I have piled into a compilation article rather than giving an entire article to "Yup, the exact same thing that happened here is what happened with REDACTED.  Nothing more to add."  I had thought about posting them more frequently, but then I found that I was still putting in a fair amount of time even though some demos only lasted me 10 minutes.  All of that is to say that it's likely that a lot, if not most of March will be filled with the remainder of the Demo Time articles that I didn't get to last month.  

And speaking of demos, kind of, we have an announcement to make:

[It's actually coming March 11th]

The impetus behind this A24-level trailer for written articles was brought about because of Keymailer, a third-party company that connects content creators (primarily YouTube and Twitch streamers) to game publishers to have their games advertised by giving out game codes in exchange for playing their games.  Yes, it's kind of like selling myself to play games, but I'm okay with that.  The problem though is that a lot of companies won't just give out codes to random schmoes, but only to "accredited" people which means having a certain number of Twitch subscribers, YouTube subscribers/views, etc, or your own website and not one powered by Blogspot, WordPress, or likely Tumblr.  So while I do have a Twitch account and have had a couple of streams there (three in the last 5+ years), I do have an active YouTube channel, but our primary focus is here, with occasionally decently written words strung together in a semi-cohesive and understandable manner.

But what if we had videos for our articles?  I'm not talking about video essays because no one here has the time or financial resources to start up that nonsense; and I also perform horribly on camera.  I'm talking about the occasional (as in whenever we receive review codes for games that actually interest us and see ¶5 Sentence 1) video with royalty-free music (see ¶5 Sentence 1) that uses screenshots (until I figure out this whole video capture from a Steam Deck business) I take during regular play.  The video editing software I'm using also doesn't have a save function unless I pay for the Premium edition (see ¶5 Sentence 1) so don't expect Oppenheimer any time ever.

So that's what we've been up to and what we're going to be up to for the next 30 days.

Don't forget to share, subscribe, and smash that LIKE button.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

You Are Here To Devour