Tag: video games

Well that was certainly a day

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching, video gamesLeave a comment

I’m not going to go into a lot of details, but one of our teachers was assaulted last night at a soccer game, and holy shit did that make for a busy day for Union Guy today. I spent all day Handling Business and then got home and sent approximately four thousand words worth of emails and now I am very much ready for a few days where I do not speak to anyone under 35 whose genetic material I was not personally responsible for.

(I get to pet giraffes on Sunday. It’s going to be a good weekend.)

The thing is, I haven’t had a bad day yet. That’s the truth. I’ve had some long ones, but we’ll hit a solid month of school next week and I haven’t written a single office referral that was actually for me. There was one issue that happened in the girls’ bathroom that I happened to be the staffer on hand for and I made it clear that I hadn’t witnessed it, and a handful of uniform violations that I don’t really give a shit about and nobody is going to pay attention to anyway. It’s September 9th and I’ve barely raised my voice. I don’t know what the hell is going on. It’s been so long since I enjoyed teaching that I don’t even trust the idea anymore.

Complete change of subject here: The current series on the channel is the supremely interesting Raji: An Ancient Epic, but that’s going to be ending on Saturday, and as of right now I’m not 100% sure what the next Let’s Play is going to be. I’m not convinced that there’s a lot of overlap between my YouTube people and my blog people, but I was considering lifting an idea from Penny Arcade and finding a super-cheap game that I didn’t know anything about every couple of weeks or so and playing it for half an hour just to see what I think of it. Some of them might turn into Let’s Plays sooner or later but the idea would be just to find something completely random and see if I could turn it into an entertaining video. If it blew up somehow I might let people suggest games. Does that sound interesting at all?

In which I am on druuuuuuuuugs

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I currently have prescriptions for two brain drugs. One, Effexor, is my daily anti-anxiety drug. I’m on 150 mg; I started at 75 and eventually decided that upping my dosage a bit was warranted. I used to have a secondary script for … shit I can never remember the name, but some secondary drug that I only took when I absolutely couldn’t get my brain to shut down, generally when I was trying to get to sleep. My new doctor didn’t love the secondary prescription because apparently long-term use of that type of drug can be Bad, and while I was only taking an occasional and small dose (12 pills would last me a couple of months, easy) I generally am not the type to continue taking medication that my doctor doesn’t recommend even if some other doctor did recommend it.

Anyway, long story short, she switched me to something else the last time I went in, and I gave up and went and took one when I found myself, at 1:00 in the morning, having to research larger outdoor pools on my phone because I needed to know right now how much they cost and what sizes they were available in. That was after ordering a new pillow on Amazon at midnight, apparently, which I didn’t even remember I’d done until seeing the email in the morning. But yeah: random panic about pool prices in the middle of the fucking night is very much a “take a brain pill” moment, so I did, and I think the next time I talk to her I’m going to suggest going back to the old stuff, because I have been a pile of sludge all day today. I took my son to camp at 12:30, came home intending to hop in the shower and get some stuff done, and instead I sat in a chair and stared for over an hour. I’m significantly more human now but the first six or seven hours of being technically awake were a mess today, and not in a good way. Like, I wasn’t high, I just … didn’t want to move. I managed to get to sleep, at least, so the pill did what it was supposed to, but as it stands this isn’t something I can take during the week, which cuts its usefulness to me by a pretty significant degree.

Meanwhile, Day 3 of live-streaming Stray happens in … oh, about half an hour, over at lutherplaysgames.com, so come hang out with us:

What day is it again?

On By Luther M. SilerIn video games3 Comments

This has been keeping me busy for the last couple of days:

I don’t know how familiar you are with Stray, but I’ve been jonesing to play it literally since the first moment I heard of it, before the PS5 even launched– it was originally talked about as, if not a launch title, something really close to it, and it just came out yesterday. I’ve got two livestreams up at the channel and I’m expecting a third Friday night; the game is short so I might finish it then or it might require one more (and then maybe another to try and snag the trophies) but I’ve been having an absolute blast with it. Even if you don’t normally follow my channel or video game YouTube in general, give this five minutes if you’re a cat person. It’s really cool.

A couple of reviews

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews, video gamesLeave a comment

Return of the Obra Dinn (PS4, played on PS5) was recommended to me on Twitter as a neat little mystery game that might be up my alley. I am fond of indie games that have unique looks to them, and I certainly haven’t played anything that looks like this in quite a while. For about the first half-hour or so, I hated it. The game is very obscure at first about exactly what is going on at any given moment and what you’re supposed to be doing, and the initial learning curve is steep. I beat it today after just over nine hours. The reason I didn’t post yesterday is because I sat down after dinner intending to just play a little bit and the next thing I knew it was 10:30 and my wife was asking me if I had any plans to come to bed.

The premise: It is 1807. You are … well, you’re an insurance agent, as ridiculous as that might sound, and the Obra Dinn, which had gone missing, has shown up at port in England, with all hands dead or missing. Your job is to find out what happened to them, using a weird little magic pocket watch to jump into specific moments in the past. There are 60 people to identify, between the crew and a small handful of passengers, and you must identify everyone on board and determine how they died. You have access, eventually, to all of the moments where anyone died, and you have to piece together clues using their jobs, ethnicities, associations on the ship, and dress to figure out who everyone is, and sometimes you need to trace someone back through moments of other people’s lives to figure out what happened to them.

It’s fucking fascinating. I’m going to play through it again to record a guide over the next few days. The game is four years old, so no one really needs a guide right now, there are plenty out there, but I’m going to enjoy explaining how clever I am.

Tom Sweterlitsch’s The Gone World was also a Twitter recommend, and I started reading it the same night I started playing Obra Dinn, and so the night before I was up too late playing a video game, I was up reading the first half of a book and didn’t get to bed properly until past midnight. This is the cover to my edition but the quotes are different; mine describes the book as a cross between True Crime and Inception, and that’s about as accurate a description for the book as I could possibly imagine. It starts off as a rather gruesome police procedural/murder mystery and then before you know it Sweterlitsch has worked in time travel and the literal end of the world and “thin places” between universes and holy shit it’s a mindfuck.

This book is currently on my shortlist for the best books of 2022; I’m not a hundred percent certain it’s going to stay there, as it’ll depend on how well the book sticks with me. The first 2/3 or so are amazing and, again, I was up too late reading and blew through half of it the first time I picked it up, but one of two things happens toward the end and I’m genuinely not sure which: either Sweterlitsch sort of loses control of his narrative a bit, which has gotten quite complicated by the end, or my tendency to not be the universe’s most careful reader got the better of me and hurt the rush to the end a little bit. Or, entirely possible, both happened, but one way or another the worst thing I can say about this book is that 2/3 of it is phenomenal and it doesn’t quite stick the ending, which I figure is still worth a recommendation.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing the last couple of days. I no longer celebrate the Fourth of July, so we haven’t done anything America-related today, although my birthday is tomorrow so we had my birthday dinner tonight. I am full of pork chops and mashed potatoes and sheet cake. ‘Twas a good day.

Some updates

On By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments

The YouTube channel is dead; long live the YouTube channel.

I’m not deleting it, mind you, but after a couple of weeks of not updating, initially caused by Covid and then a couple of very busy weeks at home, I find that I don’t miss having to spend an hour or more every single day playing video games in a room by myself where no one is allowed to talk to me and where any noise or, God forbid, a bathroom break meant that I was going to have to spend more time after the video was done editing it. I want to spend some time just playing games when I want to and not worrying about some sort of schedule.

I’m not abandoning the idea altogether, mind you, and in fact I still have a couple of games I want to record. But I can tell already that Horizon: Forbidden West is, of all the games I’ve done Let’s Plays on, the one least amenable to the format I’ve chosen, and I want to just play it without having to worry about breaking it up into digestible chunks. The channel wasn’t making me any money and I was probably years away from enough subs to be able to make any money off of it, so I’m going to shove it back into the realm of “hobby” and stop taking it nearly as seriously.

Today was the first day of summer vacation, and speaking as someone who Does Not Know How To Relax, I feel like I used it pretty well. The front lawn is mowed, some cleaning was accomplished, weeds have been whacked, and I delivered some things to Goodwill that have been sitting around the house for a while. We need to finish clearing out my father-in-law’s apartment before June 1, so I’ll likely be up there tomorrow for a while, and then … well, who knows after that.

Playing around with the 3D printer continues apace; I have made five useless objects, one of which broke while trying to remove it from the print bed and another of which broke because of what I’m pretty sure was a design flaw in the model and not actually either user error or the printer being weird. This little axolotl I printed is pretty cool, though, and right now I’ve got it working on what will be a fourteen-hour, high-detail print of a hook horror from Dungeons & Dragons. The boy has announced that he wants a 3d print of every final-evolution Pokémon from Generation 1. There are, apparently, 81 of them. No word on whether he plans to pay for the filament, and I have to admit I’m also wondering what keeping this little nozzle at 200 degrees Celsius and the bed at 90 degrees Celsius for hours at a time is going to do to my electric bill.

This one’s a big deal: I had an interview scheduled at another school Friday afternoon, and was setting one up at another school for next week, and then had a long talk with the remaining members of my team Friday morning about next year. It is rumored that we’ve finally got a principal (and, to be clear, we have a name, not just a “they have found a warm body” rumor) and it’s amazing just what a difference the simple rumor that they’d named someone actually made. At any rate, after that conversation, I went back to my classroom, looked around, reflected on the fact that I’d been up very late Thursday night thinking about this interview, and emailed both the principals involved and cancelled. I will, for better or for worse, be returning to my current job again this fall, and I have closed out all of my various job-seekery accounts again for the time being. I’m about to go into year 19 of teaching. There is, unfortunately, a strong likelihood that my school will be closing at either the end of this year or the end of next year, and there is also a rumor that the middle school math teacher at Hogwarts will be retiring at the end of this year. If that happens, I plan to do everything in my power to get that job. But that’s a year away, if in fact it actually happens, and you best believe I’ll be keeping a close eye on it. But for now? I’m coming back.

I expect to regret this decision by September. We’ll see.

In which I may have made a slight mistake

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

I still haven’t really decided if I’m going to return to an hour of new videos a day once the Elden Ring series ends tomorrow over on YouTube; you would think that my use of the word tomorrow in that sentence would imply some urgency, and you might also think that the existence of a Let’s Play thumbnail right there on the screen might imply that I had, in fact, already started another series! I have. Sorta. I’m two episodes in, and then I got distracted by Infernax, which is more fun than it has any right to be, only that game is only like six hours long and I’m already most of the way through it and I haven’t been recording any of my playthrough because I’m currently kind of tired of that. So I need to finish up this game before I pick up that game and I already don’t remember where the hell I was or what the hell I was doing and did you know that the way the Xbox handles family accounts is bullshit? Because it kind of is.

There will probably be a whole post on that, once I figure out how they think this bullshit works.

Oh, and also Cuphead, which I’ve settled into a nice little boss-a-day schedule on, although I think my video game skills are going to top out before the game does. I don’t remember the last time I played a game and thought “I can’t beat this,” but this might be the one.

This is all to say that I have been playing Infernax pretty much nonstop since dinnertime and I have to write an assignment for my shitheads students tomorrow (I used the phrase “rude-ass child” to refer to one of my kids today, and when she threatened to tell her mom I told her to go for it and that the conversation wasn’t going to go the way she thought, and I don’t feel the slightest bit of remorse over it) and I probably ought to do that at some point. Then again, I get to work 40 minutes early most days. That’s plenty of time, right?

… right?

Sure.

Just confirming

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

I still hate Cuphead, but I’m going to go play for another couple of hours to make sure.

In which I need to be clear

On 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.