In which I need to be clear

On April 13, 2022April 13, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, video gamesLeave a comment

Fuck, and I cannot express this any more sincerely, Cuphead.

I’m just kind of screwing around with my various video game systems while I’m waiting out the Elden Ring series, and after five years of sitting on the fence about it I finally downloaded Cuphead.

Two reasons for the delay: one, the game’s visual aesthetic borrows extensively from 1930’s era Fleischer cartoons, with all the racist history that that era and that style of animation brings with it. And if I’m being 100% honest I feel kind of dirty about it. I dropped $20 on the game; I may make an equal or larger charitable donation somewhere appropriate and see if that eases my conscience at all. (To be clear, I haven’t noted anything directly problematic with the game itself, and you should read the articles I linked to, both of which make a nicely nuanced case about the game, but … it’s squicky. That’s a scientific term.)

Also, not for nothin’, it’s hard as hell, and that’s coming from me, a certified Fromsoft Guy. Worse, it’s hard as hell with short chapters, so there’s tons of swearing and immediately jumping back in going on, all the while insisting that I’m going to quit after this fucking stage kills me one more time. I mean, you win a stage in like a minute and a half if you’re playing well, probably faster once I get better at it. But I’m not going to get better at it if I end up throwing the Series X out a window, now, am I?

(Subject for a later post: I hate the Xbox Series X’s UI, a whole fucking lot.)

I devoured John Scalzi’s new novel, The Kaiju Preservation Society, over the last couple of days, and it was exactly what I wanted from it. Kaiju might be the John Scalziest book that John Scalzi could possibly write, and given his description of how the book happened (he spent 2020 beating his head around a novel that was decidedly out of his comfort zone and ended up bailing on it, and then this novel jumped into his head more or less in its final form and he wrote it in barely two months) it’s not hard to see how it ended up that way. Now, I love Scalzi’s style– my writing at its very best approaches Scalzi’s command of his tone, and I think I’m flattering myself by saying that, to be clear, but this is someone I look up to– but it’s turned up to 12 here, to the point where he almost feels like he’s parodying himself a little bit. Like, not every single conversation needs to be quippy. Sometimes people can just talk. If you’re not already a fan this isn’t going to be the book that convinces you (I’ll hand you Redshirts for that) and if you’re a fan you’re going to enjoy it. The rest of y’all? Smart, sarcastic, accessible science fiction and giant monsters. The word Kaiju is right there in the title; you know what you’re going to get. Go grab it up.

So this is happening

On April 12, 2022April 12, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn Music2 Comments

My son, who clearly does not realize what he has gotten himself into, has to do a report on a Famous Person from Indiana, and has somehow chosen Axl Rose, born in Lafayette in 1962. The ensuing discussion among my wife and I about what GnR song is their most iconic led to my brother suggesting that I get an immediate divorce. While I suspect I’m probably not going that route– I would be homeless in a month without my wife– her opinions on GnR are Wrong. My son, at one point during the conversation, looked at us and, I swear to you, quietly mumbled “What have I started?” to himself.

The correct answer is Sweet Child O’ Mine, by the way.

I think what’s probably going to happen is I’m going to write a 75-page pamphlet on GnR and give it to him, and he can edit it down to three pages or a hundred words or whatever passes for hard work in fourth grade nowadays.

I don’t have to go in to work tomorrow, as I have a training thing in the morning, which means that I’ll actually have my afternoon to myself. I’m going to take the rest of the night off after I finish this brief post and curl up with a book; I started John Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society last night and it’s going to demand my full attention until I finish it, I think.

In which I am inconsistent

On April 11, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Do you know what I did when I got home from work today?

Well, okay, I ate a pile of Arby’s. But after that?

Yeah, I fired up fucking Elden Ring again. I only played for a few minutes, but there was this one minibus I hadn’t killed yet, and … well, I wanted to, so I did. I am currently trying to decide whether I want to go ahead and dive into New Game + or hold off in hopes of being properly leveled for the inevitable DLC, which hasn’t been announced and probably won’t be released for months yet. I think the answer is probably “dive into New Game+,” except for … everything I said yesterday, which is all still true even if I’m apparently too dumb to act like it.

Today went well, I suppose; there are 31 days of school left as of right now, and I’m being observed tomorrow. I should probably figure out what I’m having the kids actually do during said observed lesson. I’ve never actually done an observed lesson by the seat of my pants, though, and if there was ever a time to do that just for the hell of it, the last month of my boss’ time in the building is probably it. He’s not going to give me a bad observation. He’s just not. I know this, which allows me a certain amount of freedom. That, and the fact that even if he did give me a poor evaluation I don’t think it would actually matter to anyone.

(I’m not going to do that. I’ll come up with something. We’ll see what it is, though.)

Let’s see, anything else? I wrote a post about the Expanse series a month or so ago, and while looking for books to compare the Expanse to, I commented that I’d never read any of Iain M. Banks’ Culture books. That wasn’t 100% true, as it turns out; I have owned the first book, Consider Phlebas, for long enough that my single, aborted attempt to read it doesn’t show up on Goodreads anywhere. I decided to take another shot at it and finished it the other day. The good news: I can’t figure out why I put it down all those years ago; the bad news: that doesn’t mean I thought it was especially good. I’ve heard that Phlebas is among the weaker Culture novels if not the weakest, so I might go ahead and try the second book anyway. Anybody out there have any observations to make? If I didn’t like the first Culture book, should I continue on anyway?

A Genuinely Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: I finally beat ELDEN RING

On April 10, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, video games1 Comment

I finally– FINALLY— managed to put Elden Ring to bed just now, after a completely ridiculous 122 hours of gameplay over roughly a month and a half (the game came out on February 25) of my actual life. I’m not doing the math to figure out how many hours a day that represents; I can tell you I did actually take a couple of days off here and there, but not many.

Here’s the review: this is easily one of the best games I’ve ever played, and I’m probably never touching it again. Now, there are plenty of other games I’ve put more than 120 hours into– there are other Fromsoft games I’ve put more than 122 hours into (Sekiro and Dark Souls III, definitely, and while they aren’t Fromsoft, Nioh and Nioh 2 as well) but those have all been on multiple playthroughs. Even something like Skyrim, which is legendary for the amount of content it contains, wasn’t close to 122 hours on my first playthrough. 122 hours is twice the length of a really big game, and I am one hundred percent certain that there is a ton of stuff left to do in this game that I left on the table– even if it’s just as simple as the fact that I was playing a strength build and so I went basically the entire game without casting a spell. I’m sure I missed dungeons. I probably missed entire quest lines scattered here and there, and who knows what other little landmarks or interesting bits of content I just never noticed.

It’s difficult to explain to people who don’t play video games just how big this game is, and how– much as I predicted, about 90 hours ago– that kind of scope ends up actually being detrimental to the game. Because, okay, this was my first playthrough, and subsequent playthroughs won’t need to be nearly as long, because 1) I really won’t feel the need to do every single thing that I can possibly do on a second playthrough and 2) Since I know the general layout of the world and the basic path for exploration I won’t need to do as much fiddlefarting around as I did on the first playthrough, where there were big stretches where I didn’t really know what to do next so I just sort of wandered around until I stumbled over something. So I’m not in for another 120 hours, but even 50-60 for a second playthrough of something I’ve done before is just a big investment of time. That’s literally multiple days of playtime. Like, I loved it, it’s delicious, but if I eat any more I’m gonna throw up, and that’s not what I want.

I am uploading the final batch of episodes now; episodes 88 and 89 will go live today, so that’s 22 more episodes, meaning that the last episode will air on the 21st, since I don’t intend to bump up the release speed at all. I need to decide what I’m doing with the channel now; I’m closing in on a year that I’ve been doing this (I started in June of 2021) and I was really hoping that this series would goose my follower count a bit. I started the series with 116 followers on YouTube. I currently have, after 88 episodes of what at least to me seems like quality content about the hottest game on the market, have … 116 followers. I think a year of an hour of content every single day— I didn’t miss a single deadline once I started– is probably enough to determine whether I’m 1) going to blow up or 2) want to blow up on YouTube as a platform. I think the first answer is no; I had heard all kinds of stories about how follower counts pick up a lot once you get your 100th follower and your first video with 500 views; I’ve done both and they haven’t. The second … I’m tired, y’all. Video games and reading are my two big leisure activities and I effectively converted one of them into a job over the last year and I’m really not sure I want to keep doing it. I’m going to take those eleven days and play a game or two and not record at all, just to see if I feel differently about it, and we’ll see if I pick things back up in a couple of weeks (I could always just finish that year out and make it official) or if I decide to walk away from the channel for a while. I mean, I could always just record stuff when I want to, or cut down on the recorded episodes and do more livestreams or something. There are avenues in between “keep doing exactly what I’m doing” and “completely shut down.”

OK, God, that’s not funny

On April 9, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn video games2 Comments

I’m literally on the last boss in Elden Ring and my PS5 suddenly won’t send a signal to my TV.

BRB, Googling how to make a nuclear weapon.

Let’s see how long this lasts

On April 8, 2022April 9, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

I have deleted TikTok, Twitter and Tweetbot— yes, I had two different apps just for Twitter– from my phone. My plan is to leave them gone for a week; my hope is that I can make it through my coffee tomorrow morning. My phone rather helpfully asked me if I wanted to cancel my $5.99 yearly subscription to Tweetbot, which I actually declined; it re-ups next week, which kind of entertains me.

I’m trying to cut down on the amount of free-floating dread and hate I have in my life, you see. Twitter is a prime contributor to this, although TikTok definitely has its moments, and although I feel like both services are useful to me in certain ways– Twitter, in particular, is the source of most of my news nowadays– I just need a detox for a while. I need free-floating existential dread to have less of a death-grip on my brain and every time I open Twitter up I am reminded how fucking awful everything is.

Note that I’m not even going cold turkey on the service– I literally have it open on my second monitor as I’m typing this, the second monitor that I have on my desk more or less specifically for Twitter. I’m just keeping it off my phone, to cut down on those moments where I realize I’ve lost an hour to mindless scrolling. I mean, hell, I’ve stopped typing this post three or four times because something shiny scrolled by, so maybe I’ll ditch that too. But baby steps, right? Right.

nameless whining

On April 7, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, lifeLeave a comment

Made it through the job interview today without humiliating myself or collapsing into burnout, which I’m going to assume is a good thing. I did point out that I wasn’t a programmer and that didn’t instantly end the interview, so who knows, maybe this will work out. Last Friday I was thinking I could handle another year or two in teaching. Today, with nothing really happening in between that I could blame for changing my mind, I’m back in “I have to get the hell out of here” mode again. I think I’ve probably been spending too much time on Twitter; nothing is better at reminding me what a fucking awful place the world is than that app. And teaching absolutely requires optimism.

Meanwhile, I have an actual blister on the pad of my left thumb, right where I move the left thumbstick on my controller around, and despite the fact that I have literally been playing enough video games to give me a blister I still don’t think I’m especially close to finishing this fucking game. The fact that I’ve started referring to Elden Ring as “this fucking game” can probably give you some indication of where my patience level is with it right now, and I swear to God that if I don’t have this damn game put to bed by the time school starts back up again I’m just not going back to work. I haven’t heard anything back from my contractors about the door or the vanity, either, which means that I need to spend part of my Friday raising hell. I’m not looking forward to it.

Ugh. I feel like I spent this entire week in a shitty mood; I’m not sure if that bled out to everybody else or if I’m imagining it or what, but I’ve just been crabby all week. don’t feel like I’ve been relaxing, really– not that I know how– but I’ve been taking lots of unnecessary naps, which is weird.

I’ve blocked three people on Twitter while I’ve been typing this post. And I’m not even really paying attention to Twitter right now.

Blech.