Screenshots! Because it’s that kind of a day.

So we meet again, blank page. Stop yelling at me, now-a-total-of-150-draft-posts-I-can’t-use, you know what you did. World of Warcraft In Battle for Azeroth yesterday, I got to the end of the Drustvar zone, which actually isn’t the end because there are still some side quests and missing pieces for the zone completion achievement, but it’s the end of the main story for the zone, and of course I excitedly ran after the NPCs to go into the final dramatic confrontation to complete it … until I saw I was running into a Dungeon Portal.

We got our first “hands on” look at Amazon’s New World from Tech Advisor UK, and it doesn’t look pretty. (I mean, it looks pretty, sure, but I am referring to the gameplay.) Here’s what I’ve previously written about New World: Amazon’s New World Reveal Hopes and Predictions for New World Amazon’s New World, Part Two Week End - EQ Royale, New World I’ve had a rather cynical take, to put it mildly.

There were a few big news items in the gaming world that I failed to mention, largely because they didn’t mean that much to me, but if I smash them all together perhaps I can make a post out of them. Ashes of Creation and My.com The first is Ashes of Creation’s publishing deal with My.com. My understanding is this is a European deal so theoretically it doesn’t affect me anyway.

This is going to get me into trouble, but I’m already bored with Battle for Azeroth. I didn’t even play yesterday. It’s basically a continuation of Legion, and … well, I already played Legion. The story that got me interested in the first place is nowhere to be seen. There is no “battle for Azeroth” taking place in the Battle for Azeroth expansion, as far as I can tell, at least through level 115.

The Azshara short was the weakest of the three Warbringer videos, as self-contained short films go. (Sylvanas being the strongest.) My reaction before watching it: Who is Azshara? And after watching it: Who is Azshara? As far as I could tell, it had no connection with the game of World of Warcraft that I’ve been playing the past week. As I’m going through Stormsong Valley, I can understand why people rush to endgame in WoW.

I just went ahead and cancelled my World of Warcraft subscription today. It was largely a formality. I can’t imagine a world (of Warcraft! Har!) where this expansion would have been so great that I’d have played for more than a month. Incidentally, no other MMO makes it so easy to cancel its subscription, I’ve noticed. You just click the “Cancel” link and that’s it. No questions, no guilt trips, no nothing.

My Blaugust posts have definitely turned into a diary. Not normally what I like to write, but the posts must be posted. I’ve abandoned the concept of playing World of Warcraft by giving the game my full attention. I played for two more hours yesterday while watching Hulu, clicking through the quest text without reading it, blindly killing mobs and collecting drops until the objectives were done. In this way I’m plowing through the remainder of the side quests in Tiragarde Sound that I skipped over the first time through.

Well at least it’s not a post about Battle for Azeroth. But it is another post where I say what I really think instead of what people want to hear, so I’ll probably get in trouble. Like Roger, and late-breaking addition Scopique, I took a look at GameSpot’s Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay demo. My reaction was a bit less enthusiastic. (Those two links are the only other two reactions I’ve seen to the video, by the way.

I mentioned my main 2 TB D: drive conked out yesterday morning for mysterious reasons. It’s working again now, but I’m eyeing it suspiciously, because I’ve noticed some odd behavior in my applications and rebooted a couple of times yesterday to straighten it out. I’m not sure it was hard drive related but it could have been. I successfully copied all of my “documents” (which includes documents, music, pictures, and videos) to a safe place, so I won’t lose anything important if the drive dies completely.

This will be my last “spontaneous” Blaugust post this year. I started tomorrow’s “performance review” post a week ago, and then there will be my “what I played this month” post after that, which I started yesterday. I started today’s post … well, today. So since it’s my last one, I better make it good! Um. Okay. Here we go. Any second now, something interesting will come to me.

It’s time to review my performance in Blaugust! Setting goals is only half the battle in self-improvement. The other half is evaluating your performance to see what worked, what didn’t work, and how you can improve for next time. I planned to do this after Blaugust, but then I thought, hey, this could be a Blaugust post, too! It’s sort of like having the last day off. Non-Repeating History Blaugust 2015 left a bitter taste in my mouth, because I remember it as a frustrating time with my job exploding in fifty thousand different directions at once, leaving no interest and zero energy for writing blog posts at the same time, so I gave up in the middle.

I completely forgot to say this in my huge missive yesterday: Blaugust seemed like a great success, congratulations to everyone who participated! Huge thanks to Belghast and all the mentors for pulling all of that together. To all the new bloggers, great job! It doesn’t matter if you posted every day or not. If you keep going, that’s fantastic, but if you need to take a break, that’s fine too.

I mentioned that I was close to giving up on World of Warcraft’s Battle for Azeroth expansion, because the game seemed to have given up on telling me Jaina’s story. Well I finally picked up her story again. It turns out that you have to complete all three Kul Tiras zone story chapters (half of which don’t seem to have anything to do with anything) before a new quest unlocks which begins the followup to Jaina’s cut scenes from the very beginning of the expansion.

I started to write three or four blog posts this week, didn’t finish them, and didn’t want to post them. Instead I decided to cram all of them together into one summary post for the week. This allows me to post, but without the bother of crafting long essays that have beginnings, middles, or ends, when everything I want to say can be summed up in a paragraph. No wonder listcicles are so popular!

Even packed full of news as it was, I still neglected to mention in my Saturday post that Athlon is planning to make a new Lord of the Rings Prequel MMO. That is the extent of what we know so far. We can speculate that it will probably be released on console and PC, that it will probably be free-to-play, and that it will probably not even remotely resemble the kind of traditional MMORPG that we actually want to play.

My thumb is finally well enough that I can use a game controller again. This is both good news and bad news. The good news is that I can resume Dark Souls Remastered and finish my casual nostalgia tour, my (latest) video series Magnum Opus. The bad news is that I’m in a terrible place to resume the game. The last time I played Dark Souls Remastered before significant pain in my fingers and thumbs impacted my performance was June 23rd, when I spent all day working on Artorias (technically it only took 1 hour and 35 minutes, but it was spread out all day).

Before getting back to Dark Souls, of course I have to finish The Witcher, which I started after I got bored with Battle for Azeroth. I’ve never finished it before. I think I’ve always crashed out of it somewhere in Chapter II. Probably because of all the tedious running back and forth in the Temple District. The first Witcher game gets a lot of flak for its odd combat system (and rightly so), but I’ve never been bothered by it.

This is probably the last chance I’ll have to write anything before I get a cataract removed from my right eye. I’ll have scheduled this post to publish Tuesday morning, theoretically about the time of the surgery. I say “theoretically” because there are a lot of moving parts that have to come together and I feel like there’s at least a 50% chance I’ll arrive at the appointment and they’ll tell me, “Sorry we can’t proceed because some random thing wasn’t done right.

Just a very brief post to say the cataract surgery went well, and the procedure did in fact take about 10 minutes. I felt nothing, saw nothing, heard almost nothing except some classic rock tunes on a radio somewhere. Most of the time was spent signing consent forms, waiting for dilation drops to take effect (they dosed me three different times with dilation drops which lasted all day), and putting an IV in my arm for a sedative.

Day two of life after cataract surgery was perfectly fine. I went to my followup appointment this morning, where the doctor barely even looked at me before letting me go again. They apparently don’t worry too much about people my age recovering from cataract surgery. But in any case the technician checked my eyeball pressure and I could read the eye chart at I think it was 20/30 through the bionic lens already.

The eye continues to improve. Computer screen text is getting clearer, and sunlight doesn’t hurt as much. The “new” eye wears out quickly though in front of the computer. It starts to twitch, as one’s eyes do after reading a long time. (At least my eyes do.) It just starts happening within about five minutes. So I’m staying away from the computer except for short periods. Earlier in the year, I found that with the cataract, dark themes (white-on-black text) were easier to read, but since the surgery I’ve found the exact opposite.

Okay I’m getting pretty impatient now. I want to be fully recovered right now please. The new eye is better after another day, but still a bit blurry and hard to focus on a computer monitor for any amount of time, especially text. It gets better every day, but it’s still a chore. I can see the television from a chair halfway across the room fine, though, so I’ve been watching (and re-watching, in fact) The Americans, and I started playing a little bit of The Last Of Us (Remastered) on the PS4.

So I guess I’ll write something about games this time. The eye continues to improve, and focusing on nearby things gets a little bit better each day. (Writing this post has been the easiest so far.) There’s still a slight bit of soreness there which crops up in unexpected ways. Sometimes it hurts when I yawn or squeeze my eye shut, and sometimes it feels like there’s something like a hair stuck in the eye.

Nothing new to report about the eye, except the new normal seems more normal every day. I stopped using the antibiotic eye drops as instructed, and now only use the prednisone (steroid) eye drops 4 times a day for another week. (Those drops drive me crazy because I swear they have chalk in them, as if they simply crushed up some pills and mixed it with water.) I don’t see much of anything interesting happening in gaming.