You may've noticed that we hadn't posted much apart from MIDI Week Singles the last couple of weeks and I just wanted to quickly jump in to give a little bit more of a post-explanation to accompany what I said during the Monthly Update.
So during the first three weeks of July, I spent with my Dad's side of the family on a trip to celebrate my Grandma's 95th birthday in a way that Conklederp and I could normally not afford. So we flew out and spent three days in Oslo, Norway, followed by a 10-day cruise that was supposed to start by taking us to Skagen, Denmark, but the Skagerrak was too choppy the morning we were supposed to make port and the captain made the decision an hour before and decided to head back to Norway for our second port. Then we proceeded as planned, stopping in various ports along the southern Norwegian coast until our last stop in Måløy, Norway, after which we arrived in Kirkwall in the Orkney Islands. Then we spent our second (originally planned only) day at sea and landed in Southampton on the 16th. We then spent time in London until we flew out of Heathrow (I can't comment on the baggage retrieval system, but kudos to Central Security who recovered my phone and promptly called Conklederp's phone after locking it from my laptop upon discovering that it wasn't in my pocket) on the 20th and back in Portland that same evening. We had some delays due to the Crowdstrike Windows Update Outage, but nothing compared to what my parents and The Kid had to deal with; everyone is back home and safe, so no worries on that front.
During the trip, we did have decent WiFi in our hotels in Oslo and London, with piss-poor WiFi on the boat because we didn't opt to pay the $99 for higher speed access, but I was able to post a few MIDI Week Single articles that I already had queued up. On our second day in Oslo, I discovered that my mouse had died so I was relegated to using the touchpad on my laptop, which isn't great, but it got me by with at least being able to write articles here and there, but I couldn't play anything. I also lost motivation to write articles since I knew that trying to create our S+ tier quality banners would have been an absolute pain with just the touchpad. But that was why I brought the Switch. And a handful of physical cartridges because the Tears of the Kingdom OLED Switch I primarily play is not the Switch that my primary account is on, although Conklederp also brought hers so I was able to start, but not finish, Layers of Fear 2.
I had been wanting to play Layers of Fear 2 since it was announced back in 2019 before we went on that cruise (for my Grandma's 90th birthday), but it hadn't been ported to the Switch yet and I couldn't've run it on my laptop then or now. I also finished The Outer Worlds, sinking about 95 hours into that game and I'll try to have an article up for that sometime next month. The rest of the time I played Kingdoms of Amalur since it's an easy game to put on and lose a handful of hours while relaxing in your concierge stateroom.
I didn't do as much reading as I thought I might, but I did blaze through Shadow and Bone on the flight home. While donating platelets, I watched the first two or three episodes of the Netflix series (of the same name) some months back and really enjoyed what I saw. And now having read the first book, I'm intrigued to find out about the B-story involving Kaz, Inej, and Jesper, whom I assume are in another book altogether.
So now that I'm back, we'll return to a more regular posting schedule.
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