I ride around on a giant stone serpent I have named Tiny Snek now. I have played approximately five hundred hours of Pokemon Let’s Go: Pikachu since yesterday’s post, which does not count the twelve thousand hours my son has put into the game, and as of this exact moment I have not yet Caught Them All. I have Caught perhaps A Third Of Them, and I think perhaps I have played just a little too much Pokémon this weekend. I mean, my eyes are bleeding. That’s not normal, right? I don’t remember what my life was like before we bought this game but I don’t think eye-bleeding was ever really a prominent part of it.
This game has dick jokes in it, by the way. They are at least moderately subtle most of the time, but Jesus Christ the Boulder gym, the first one? Everything in there was a horrifying sex joke that my seven-year-old, currently perched on the arm of the recliner I’m writing this in and reading over my shoulder, did not understand. Also, all of the human character models, even the male ones, have at least a-cup breasts, which I’m really confused about. About half the time I can’t tell if I’m supposed to be talking to a male or female character until they give me a name. These are not things I was expecting to be thinking about while playing this.
Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day, so the boy and I have the day off and my wife has to go to work. I may have to accidentally break the TV at seven in the morning to save my sanity. Pray for me.
I’ve said this before, on more than one occasion: forget about what year you were born; the clearest delineating line between those of us commonly assigned Generation X and the Millennials is the answer to the question Did Pokémon play any role in your childhood? If no: Gen X. If yes: Millennial. Now, that falls apart when talking to people younger than the Millennials, but it’s a pretty damn good rule of thumb for the “currently middle-aged or approaching same” generations.
If you are seven, Pokémon has a good chance of being your life, especially if you are a seven-year-old boy. Which my son is. He has hundreds of Pokémon cards (he has never actually played the game, at least not correctly) a wide variety of Pokémon-themed clothing, Pokémon stuffed animals, Pokémon pajamas, books, you name it.
I don’t know shit about this stuff. I am 42. I think in a lot of ways I have more in common with Millennials than my own generation (I have never really identified with Gen X; if pushed, I’ll claim the Star Wars or Oregon Trail generations) but I am totally in the cold on this Pokémon thing. I think it started hitting when I was in high school, too old to notice it, but I’m not really sure. My younger brother was never into it either so I missed it by a good several years.
Point is, we bought Pokémon Let’s Go: Pikachu for the Switch yesterday and the whole goddamn family has been playing the game all day today. It was my idea; I am bound and determined to understand something about this weird-ass bullshit and if a roleplaying game can’t pull me into Pokémon on at least a superficial level then nothing can. I gotta say, other than the standard garbage control scheme that comes with every single Switch game (motion controls can die in a fire; I don’t ever want them again in anything I play, ever again) it’s actually a pretty good time; the boy was ecstatic about it, and the Switch has owned the TV all day. Under ordinary circumstances I might look askance upon the idea of literally spending the entire day playing video games; it’s snowy as hell outside and a three-day weekend and right now Daddy don’t care. I’m gonna find out what the fuck a Machamp is this weekend if it kills me, and I swear to God I just looked over and told him to go find some “ground types” to fight in a “gym” so he can earn a “badge.” I think I might have even used the terms correctly.
So, yeah. Weather outside is frightful and all that. What are y’all doing?
I’ve mentioned I’m playing through Dark Souls 3 again. This was my third playthrough. The first one, I hit a wall and had to stop playing because I couldn’t come even close to beating any of the game that was left. The second was as a strength-focused build and, while I beat the game, there was still one boss I couldn’t come close to killing no matter how hard I tried. He was optional, though, so I could just skip fighting him and still beat the game.
I was playing as a sorcerer for this run, for the first time. Playing as a sorcerer in Dark Souls 3 is kinda strange. You’re frankly just not that tough for most of the game until all the sudden at the very end you turn into a monster. My wife went to bed early last night, and I’d gotten to the point where I had three bosses left to beat the game– Lorian & Lothric, who I’d beaten once with the strength build, the final boss (ditto) and the fucking bullshit-ass Nameless King up there and his bullshit-ass dragon that he rides in on that you have to kill first. I had never beaten the Nameless King. Never even really come close. I told my wife I was gonna take a couple of stabs at the last couple of bosses and then come to bed, hoping that I’d get through one of them in half an hour or so and then make a sensible decision.
I beat Lorian & Lothric on my second try, and frankly I only lost to them the first time because I got overconfident and sloppy, and Dark Souls is a series where the most basic enemy in the game will demolish you if you stop paying attention for a minute. It took over an hour of trying on my last build to get through them and I still felt like I’d gotten kinda lucky at the end there.
“Screw it,” I thought, “I’ve been playing for less than ten minutes and I’m still not ready for bed.” (In my defense, it was barely nine– I wasn’t kidding when I said Bek had gone to bed early.) “I’m gonna give the King a try.” Now, this was dangerous– I know what I’m like, and it was entirely possible that I was sentencing myself to a night where I was still up at Goddamned midnight frustrated and tired and still losing to this annoying-ass boss and his annoying-ass dragon over and over again. Because, again, I’ve never beaten this bastard.
And then I demolished his ass– over half my health reserves left– on the first try. And everyone else in the house was in bed, so the proper response to an achievement of this magnitude– tearing my pants off and running around the house yelling swear words while waving said pants over my head– seemed inappropriate. So I just sat there in mild disbelief for a moment, thought “Ah, fuck it,” and went and beat the game. Which also took two tries, but mostly because the last boss does something halfway through the fight that I’d forgotten about and I got way too close and he wasted me.
So, yeah. If you’re a Dark Souls fan? Try a sorcerer build. It won’t come together for a while, but when it finally does? Holy shit.
…because God forbid I do anything especially useful with my last day of winter break, right? So I started another DSIII playthrough last night. I’m playing through as a sorcerer this time. I think I need to just play through the Dark Souls/Bloodborne/Nioh games in a cycle forever and stop spending money on these things. That’s five games; it’s enough, right?
While I’m talking vidya gaemz (and I hope you weren’t hoping for a long post on, again, the last night of break) several random thoughts:
The boy got Smash Bros Ultimate and Mario Kart 8 for Christmas. We’re playing a fair amount of both but MK8 is getting a lot more play. It’s frankly a lot easier for everyone and makes more sense in general. I’ve finally lost the feeling that Smash is nothing but bright colors in random places but it’s still not nearly as much fun as I feel like it’s supposed to be.
A pleasant surprise: Hollow Knight, which I got for like $11 on sale. It’s a Metroidvania, and a good one. If the word Metroidvania means anything to you at all and you haven’t played this, you should check it out.
I finally lost interest in Red Dead Redemption 2. It’s an amazing achievement on a lot of levels, but just isn’t as much fun or as absorbing as the first game was, and that’s sort of the most important level for it to succeed on, isn’t it? I was never even close to as tied up in this game as I was RDR1. I can go back and finish it whenever I want, but … well, I just started another Dark Souls 3 playthrough. So you can probably guess how long that will take to get done.
I’m crossing my fingers for a simple, easy first day back tomorrow. I will probably not get it. But we can always hope.
I’m trying to 100% Spider-Man PS4, which has mostly meant letting the boy take over every now and again so he can go catch criminals;
I’m losing steam on Red Dead Redemption 2, which is suffering from a not-moving-fast-enough main story and way too much to do in the rest of the game, leading to option paralysis;
I’m rereading the Broken Earth books by N.K. Jemisin, which continue to be awesome, and are in fact better now that I’m rereading/binging them;
I have heard that we get both a Captain Marvel and an Avengers 4 trailer this week, which … well, prepare for enthusiasm on my part about that;
I had a dream last night about The Goddamn Skylights Sequel, where someone else wrote it for me and published it and it was OK for me to take all the credit;
I am starting to think about the annual 10 Best New(*) Books I Read This Year post, and kind of wish I had thought to do a 10 Best New(*) Books I Read From 2013-2018 post last year, when it would have been a nice even five years. Maybe I’ll do that this year for the past six.
I need about 5000 pageviews in December to have had more blog traffic than last year. That ought to be a very achievable number the way things have been going lately so long as traffic doesn’t crater too hard around Christmas.
Work is fine, but I have way too many meetings coming in the next couple of weeks and I’m not remotely prepared for the one I have tomorrow. Hopefully there’s going to be a way to compress the schedule for the pre-meeting training (yeah, that’s a thing) that I looked at once and abandoned once I realized how many 20-minute videos they wanted me to watch.
The fastest way to get me to abandon doing anything is to expect me to watch videos of any length at all, by the way, and I can’t believe people don’t realize that. I can’t speed up a video and I don’t have 17 uninterruptible minutes right now, so you go to hell and I’m not gonna watch any of it.
I’m working on doubling my Twitter following. 20K or bust!
I discovered today, in the process of reading about and laughing at Tumblr’s decision to set itself on fire on the 17th, that I still have a Tumblr. So I fiddled around on Tumblr for a while. I still don’t know what the hell Tumblr is.
None of that was worth a post on its own, but hopefully all together there was something interesting in there. What’s going on in your end of the world?
If we were having coffee, you’d either be in my house or witness to just about the first time I’ve left my house since getting home from my dentist appointment on Wednesday. This, if you’re me, constitutes a certain type of pure bliss, and it has been a lovely, wonderful long weekend, one where I have mostly not been wearing pants and yesterday I did not bother to shower until just before bed.
Let’s talk geek shit, then, because at the moment it’s what I’ve got. Again, I haven’t left the house in a few days.
ITEM THE FIRST! I abandoned a book this morning, R.E. Stearns’ Barbary Station, when it became clear that despite starting off with an absolutely scandalous amount of potential the writing was never going to click for me. This book is about a duo of lesbian engineers who steal a colony ship and present it to a gang of space pirates, hoping that the gift will get them into the gang, because the galactic economy has gone to shit and “find a job with a pirate crew” is, under the circumstances, a sound plan. They then discover that the pirates living on the station are sort of trapped there, because the AI running the place has gone rogue and has decided Kill All Humans is the right way to deal with things.
I mean, come on. I can’t resist a single thing about that premise. This was bought the second I knew it existed.
One of them is a hacker, and hacking is presented as this drug-induced, hallucinatory metaphor-space, and the idea is fascinating. In fact, damn near all of the ideas in the book are fascinating. Everything about it is fascinating. What it isn’t is good, unfortunately. The writing is clumsy at best and the book is at least one solid editing pass and a new draft away from being a good read. I don’t normally like to slag on books I didn’t like here, especially if they didn’t piss me off in an entertaining way, but part of me kind of hopes that someone will read the premise and decide I suck at deciding if things are good and buy the book anyway. I need R. E. Stearns to sit down with a really good editor for her next book, and then to reissue this one. Major disappointment.
(I’m not alone in this assessment. The book currently has the worst overall star average of the nearly 600 books I’ve reviewed on Goodreads– only 3.19/5. It’s tied with a Chuck Wendig book that was the victim of a prolonged and stupid review bombing. That’s bad.)
Also, the font the book is written in is borderline unreadable. I thought I’d get used to it but it was still pushing me out of getting lost in the book before I bailed. With a better-written story, it might not have mattered, but with a poorly-written one, it was just One More Thing.
That was unpleasant, so let’s talk about ITEM THE SECOND! which is Red Dead Redemption 2. I actually took that picture by pointing my camera at my TV, because I got to the top of that mountain and looked off over the edge and thought Jesus, when I started playing video games, I was playing Asteroids, and now this. Because you can go anywhere you can see in that picture.
I will have a lot more to say about this game later, believe me, but for right now I just want to bask in how outstandingly beautiful the game is, and how it got me to spend a couple of hours this afternoon not bothering to advance the story at all but just exploring and hunting, which is kind of a ridiculous way to spend your Sunday before going back to work. There are things I don’t like– the control scheme it starts you with is terrible, and once you fix the terrible control scheme you’re still left with something that will lead to you occasionally firing a gun in a crowded tavern by accident or punching your horse. Both of those activities are kinda frowned upon.
I’ve done more geekery this weekend, but the one other thing I wanna talk about is going to get its own post, I think. So … wanna go hunt moose with me? Because I kinda want to bag a moose today.
INFINITEFREETIME NO LONGER. This blog is now called InfinitecomplaintsaboutAmazon.
Nah, not really. But in the midst of all this nonsense about the goddamn books we ordered some boots and shoes for the boy, because apparently November is just too ridiculously late to do something crazy like walk into a store and buy boots.
(I feel less sorry for brick and mortar retail every time some shit like this happens. It’s November. We haven’t had real snow yet. Leave some fucking boots on the shelves, you jackasses.)
Right, I forgot to complain about Amazon. So, we couldn’t find boots at the shoe store nearest to our house, or the Target nearest to that shoe store, so we ordered him a pair of boots and a pair of new shoes, because why not do both at the same time and OH HEY you missed out on that sale too. The boots got here the other day; all good.
The shoes got here today. Now, this was one of those “fulfilled by Amazon” things, so Amazon isn’t directly responsible for this, but I opened the box and there was still a fucking ink tag on one of the shoes.
Come the fuck on, guys. I have a dentist appointment tomorrow, and my appointment is near an actual Dick’s, so I’m gonna just swing by there with all my receipts and everything and see if they will remove the tag for me. Alternately, we’ll just cut the fucking laces off and buy new ones. I don’t have the damn energy to deal with a return right now.
(Wonders how effectively the internet can help with removing the tag.)
Anyway. The image up there isn’t there for any reason other than that I’m listening to Shimmy Shimmy Ya right now. I am officially on Thanksgiving vacation, meaning that I don’t even have to think about any children other than the one that lives in my house for the next several days. Virtual hunting is about to get way more important to my lifestyle than it used to be. It turns out we’re not leaving town like we thought we were, so we’re hosting Thanksgiving, but we’re gonna keep shit simple. The other four days of the weekend? Relaxation, motherfuckers.
The Amazon books showed up today, finally, and while I didn’t do page-throughs on them, at least the covers look okay. A little more orange than I’d like, but I can live with it.
Been playing Red Dead Redemption 2 all night while my wife does a puzzle and my kid plays with slime. So it’s been a quiet evening. I can live with that, especially when the alternative is blinding rage.
INFINITEFREETIME NO LONGER. This blog is now called InfinitecomplaintsaboutAmazon.
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