Finished Bloodborne, Resumed Demon’s Souls

It’s raining this morning, which is always a bummer of a way to start the day. Even my dog and cat don’t want to do anything on rainy mornings.

I thought I would mention something about games on this gaming blog for a change.

I don’t know if I ever mentioned that I finished playing Bloodborne on the PS4. I’m uploading the video series now. (I did a much better job with thumbnails and metadata than I did with Sekiro.) I was pleased to find that my thumb performed much better than I anticipated by the end. I could maintain playing on a controller for an hour or so every day without any significant loss in hand functionality for the rest of my non-gaming activities throughout the day.

After that, I wanted to take advantage of my thumb while I could so I dug out the PS3 again and, after the obligatory period of fiddling with the Razer Ripsaw and OBS until it would successfully record, continued Demon’s Souls from where I last left off in 2018. (Did I ever mention I started Demon’s Souls in 2018? Probably not. Oh, I did.) I played another ~15 hours on top of the 6 hours I had already put in. I ran into some hard bosses that were irritating me so I took a break from it. That was around the time that the Blaugust news hit so I started thinking about what I would do for that and got thoroughly sidetracked from games entirely.

I also play a little bit of Lords of the Fallen now and then. I’m trying to record a series for that game, too. It’s sort of a cut-rate Dark Souls. It’s universally panned as being awful, but I would describe it as “okay.” I already own it so it has the advantage of being free-for-me-to-play.

And that’s about it. The time that would otherwise go into gaming currently goes into one of these activities: Compressing and organizing video files to save space on my network drive, trying to figure out a plan to backup said video files when I inevitably run out of space no matter how hard I try, salvaging old music project files from 20-year-old backup files, coming up with a plan for Blaugust, writing blog posts like this one, uploading video files to YouTube, or tweaking streaming settings for Streamlabs.

I’m typing these words into EverNote on the iPad. I’m now remembering from last year’s NaNoWriMo how absolutely awful the EverNote app on the iPad is. EverNote is the only application I’m aware of that I can seamlessly move from PC to laptop to Chromebook to web to iPad to phone, and work on the same document everywhere. I mean that literally. I can get up from my PC and walk to my laptop and continue the same document, then leave the laptop and pick up my phone and continue the same document, then go to my iPad and continue the same document. It’s fantastic. Especially for me, now, when I have physical difficulties sitting in one place typing for too long. (I think Microsoft OneNote might be capable of that but I don’t think it’s as universally cross-platform, at least least time I checked.)

Unfortunately EverNote is also one of the worst-performing applications on all of those platforms. I don’t know how they can possibly have been around for so long and manage to fix so few bugs. I guess because they don’t have any competition. The iPad app in particular is painfully slow. Every time I press a key on the Apple wireless keyboard, there is a significant delay before it shows up in the document. It’s like every key press has to go out to their cloud servers and back, which is entirely possible since with every keystroke the “predictive text” at the bottom of the screen changes.

Well I strayed off-topic there. Mainly because I started talking about games but quickly ran out of things to say about games because I haven’t really played much of anything in the last week.

I think I’m in a period of down time to mentally prepare for the Blaugust Blitz Of Steam Backlog Bonanza. Or … something. I haven’t thought of a name for it yet. :) I made a few more adjustments to the game lineup, by the way. I moved some games I definitely didn’t want to play way down to the bottom of the list to make room for games I definitely did want to try. (I don’t know why I feel compelled to mention I’m not quite sticking to the random list order, as if there might be some kind of penalty.) Anyway I’m looking forward to seeing what happens with these games. I’m just in a holding pattern right now waiting for the start of Blaugust.