Just a note that I’m going to be pretty quiet this week, if I post here at all; the wife is going to be out of town, and so I’m going to be at home, working on music and hanging out with my kid and, yeah, probably just finishing up the various odds and ends in The Division. If I post at all, it’s going to be elsewhere.*
Regarding The Division: last week I wrote that I was struggling to stay motivated, and also that I will eventually need this game to end. I kept assigning various goalposts to reach, just to give myself something to look forward to, and I’ve pretty much ticked off all the items on the to-do list: I’ve seen where my office is supposed to be (as I expected, it bears absolutely no resemblance to the real thing); I hit level 30; I’m almost done with all the main story missions (I wiped out on the final boss in the final mission a few too many times last night, and it got too frustrating and the hour grew late, and so I turned it off). All I plan to do now is to get all the wings in my main base up to 100%, which most likely means I just have to finish all the side missions and encounters (since I finished all of the main missions, save that last one). I might screw around in the Dark Zone, too, but I don’t particularly care for PvP, which is not news to anyone.
I’m about halfway through Matt Ruff’s “Lovecraft Country“. It’s got an interesting structure; it’s less of a novel and more of a connected set of short stories that are arranged in chronological order and contain the same characters, though each story is from a different POV. With a title like Lovecraft Country, you’d expect there to be a fair amount of dreadful, otherworldly weirdness – and there certainly is, though it pales in comparison to the real, true horror that is American Racism. I get far more terrified by that stuff than I do the occult business, and I suppose that’s because (a) the racism stuff is true, and feels very real, and as such (b) it works much better than the Lovecraftian stuff that exists within it. Again – I’m only halfway through, and so I’m still not quite sure where it’s going. But I’m enjoying it quite a bit.
Finally: even though we bought the BluRay, we couldn’t help ourselves; and so, because our families were in town this weekend for our son’s 3rd birthday party, we watched the digital download version of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and GODDAMN I will never get tired of that movie. I don’t care that it’s basically A New Hope retold, because it’s done so goddamned well. (And if you haven’t already seen this shot-for-shot comparison of Eps 4 and 7, well, you should fix that.)
EDIT: I knew I was forgetting something: I played that Final Fantasy XV demo this weekend, and… was it supposed to be totally underwhelming and janky and kinda shitty? Because it was totally underwhelming and super-janky and definitely kinda shitty.
Also downloaded the Doom beta, and attempted to get into a match (which took about 10 minutes just to find a lobby), but then I remembered I don’t give a shit about multiplayer, and so I deleted it, and that’s that.
* I started a new, personal, private blog last week. I’m not going out of my way to publicize it, though I suppose even mentioning it here is doing the exact opposite of not publicizing it, but, I mean, look: blogging is weird. If you want to read it, contact me privately and I’ll email you an invitation; no hard feelings if you’re not interested, though.
Shouts From The Couch 