As I’m typing this morning, the remnants of the eye of tropical storm Isaias, which I neither know how to spell nor say, is passing about a hundred miles to the east. Yesterday and last night in particular, it dumped a massive amount of rain on my house, and this morning I woke up early to the sound of some of that rain dripping inside my house. I live in a house built in the 1950s, so it’s old and quirky.

Yesterday’s Promptapalooza prompt kicked off with Everwake, who wrote: - Everwake Apologies for quoting so much, but it’s fantastic. Go read the post please. I added a second link to it so you don’t even have to scroll up to find it. I loved that opening paragraph so much because it perfectly encapsulates my own fears as I wait for the 28th, staring at this super secret writing prompt without the vaguest clue of what to say about it.

Technically I’m starting this post on the night of the 5th, while a thunderstorm passes overhead and rain pours down again. This time, there’s a lot of lightning as well, so I’ve turned off most everything in the house. I haven’t had a working uninterruptible power supply in quite some years, and the only drawback I’ve experienced is that I don’t like leaving my most expensive electrical equipment plugged in while lightning strikes within a few miles.

I’ve been having a lot of back pain over the last several days, so sitting down to write in the mornings, when I feel the most like writing blog posts, has been a massive chore. I’m trying to push through it to get this post done on Sunday so I don’t fall another day behind. I don’t think of myself as a chronic pain sufferer but over the last several years it’s becoming clear that my freedom of will is increasingly limited by the day-to-day status of my back, and I haven’t quite adjusted to it yet.

Yesterday’s Promptapalooza prompt started with Krikket, and exhorted: Tell us about your physical creative space, and how it influences your content creation. Except it wasn’t yesterday’s prompt, it was the day-before-yesterday’s prompt now, because I completely forgot to post this yesterday. My first reaction to this prompt was pretty similar to Krikket’s: “Oh God I don’t want any part of that.” I have major problems organizing my “physical space.” My creative (and living) space is almost entirely inside my head or on a screen of some kind.

Now there’s a title that’s sure to wreck some page layouts. Thanks to forgetting about blogging for a day, I’m a day behind now, so I’ll be combining two prompts into one post. This works out well, because I don’t want to respond to one of them anyway. The first prompt from two days ago started with SDWeasel over at Unidentified Signal Source: What is something you have lost along the way that you would love to have back?

Yesterday’s Promptapalooza topic du jour came from Just Geeking By, a blog that is new to me. Check it out. What are some of the things that get you excited in life? One exciting thing for me is discovering an interesting new make-believe world through the medium of games, movies, television, or books, which segues neatly into Remnant: From The Ashes, which is free on the Epic Store right now.

Well that was quick. I got to the first boss fight (Shroud) and I’m ready to uninstall the game forever now. I chose “Hard” difficulty because I’m a Souls veteran. The combat has been taxing at times, but after some adjustments in tactics, easily overcome. Up until this one boss fight, when it became ludicrously impossible. Shroud has a million hit points. Shroud teleports away after every attack. Shroud lives in an arena that is choked with obstacles preventing you from moving around freely.

I’m rendering some videos so I have a moment here. Soon after ragequitting Remnant: From The Ashes because of the Shroud boss, I went back and figured out how to defeat that bastard. My recipe for success was: Replace the medium/short-range coach gun I was given at the start with a long-range hunter’s rifle. Upgrade the hunter’s rifle to +2. Install the Hot Shot weapon mod in the hunter’s rifle, which does stacks of fire damage over time.

I got distracted with Remnant: From The Ashes, so here are the Promptapalooza prompts I missed: Tell us about a person/s or thing/s that has greatly influenced you. Most of the people on that list would be family or people I’ve known personally, but the first “famous” name that came to mind is Brian May, guitarist for Queen. I don’t play much like him, but his intellectual approach to musicianship has inspired me greatly.

I meant to post this two days ago four days ago but I kept putting it off because I hated what I wrote and kept thinking that maybe if I just add a little more it will magically fix itself. So here we are. Not magically fixed at all. Then I put it off again because I didn’t feel like finding a picture. The Promptapalooza prompt from what is now two days past was: Do you “finish” games/hobbies/projects and move on or do you come back to the same things again and again?

First, catching up on Promptapalooza prompts: Tell us about some of your hobbies outside of the realm of your specific niche. Ugh. I feel like all my hobbies have fallen by the wayside. But music, writing, stuff like that. Tell us about some of your favourite antagonists and explain why. Recently, Abby from The Last Of Us Part 2, though I would say it’s arguable whether she’s an antagonist or a protagonist.

It’s my Promptapalooza time! Yesterday, Sandrian at Aeternus Gaming talked about content creation. Today, let us consider this topic: What are you looking forward to the most over the course of the next year? Hoo boy. That’s a doozy. I’ve been dreading this day since I first saw this prompt. Before you run screaming away from what is about to happen, let me direct you to tomorrow’s Promptapalooza writing prompt, which according to my notes will be hosted by Kanter at MMO One Night a Week.

I thought about writing a little on New World and/or Crowfall but I’m having a lot of difficulty finding good things to say about those games and I don’t particularly want to ruin everyone’s hopes and dreams for the future of MMOs. So instead I’ll catch up on all the Promptapalooza prompts I missed. With the pandemic, we are going through an unprecedented time. In what ways has this shared global event impacted your content creation?

I’m not going to dwell on this very much, because everyone else seems to be enjoying it, but just for the record, I didn’t care for the New World beta very much. I was ready to give up on it after a half hour, but I recognize that MMOs tend to start slow. So I persevered for a little over two hours and by the end I felt it to be repetitive and unrewarding.

I’ve been mildly interested in setting up a system of gathering my tweets into digests and posting them on the blog periodically, maybe once a week. I just like the idea of keeping all of my writing in one convenient place, for myself if nothing else. It seems like something that should be very easy to do, but of course, it’s 2020, and all of the computing world has moved into walled garden silos where you’re forced to adopt somebody else’s stockholder-approved idea of an ideal workflow.

If you’re reading this blog post, you’re probably not the kind of person who is going to watch YouTube videos, but just in case, here is a minor programming note regarding the Endgame Viable cross media empire. Generally speaking, I only upload game videos to YouTube when all three of these conditions are met: When I’m finished playing the game (so nobody spoils anything in comments), when I at least liked the game enough to finish it, and when I think the game might be interesting to watch (meaning that my particular playthrough might be different from everyone else’s in some way-in the way I played the game, or my reactions to it).

So I’m playing an MMO again, kind of. I just happened to notice the other day that the base version of The Division 2 was on sale in the Ubisoft store for $10. Adding in a handful of “Uplay Points”-or whatever they’re called-that I’d gathered from years of playing Assassin’s Creed games, I knocked it down to $8. The Division 2 is my favorite of the “looter shooters” I’ve seen, mainly because the cover shooting mechanics looks and feels more natural than any of the others.

This has been a weird day since I woke up. First, I slept all the way through the night without any interruptions from my cat, dog, bladder, or back pain, which is quite rare these days. The encroaching darkness and change of the seasons is at peak strangeness right now where I live, so all day the lighting and temperature has felt off. Then Twitter apparently decided to screw me over for no apparent reason.

I started to write this post after seeing Roger’s post on the complications of ethical gaming, which followed Wolfy’s post on the same subject, although it turns out I don’t have anything to add to what they said. Just go read their posts and imagine me nodding along in agreement. It’s complicated, and it’s personal. But beyond simply agreeing with them, I suppose I felt compelled to continue with this post to acknowledge that yes, I know, I’ve played a lot of Ubisoft games this year, and I’ve enjoyed the heck out of them*, even while Ubisoft Corporate has been under fire for gross social and ethical malfeasance.

I would have sworn that I’d written a post about Horizon Zero Dawn at some point in the past two years, but apparently I haven’t. So here it is. In 2017, everyone lost their minds over Horizon Zero Dawn, a game which was a PS4 exclusive at the time. I thought it looked cool, but I couldn’t play it. In 2018, I bought a PS4 Pro on sale, and Horizon Zero Dawn was one of the exclusive titles that I intended to play on it (along with Bloodborne and a slew of Naughty Dog games).

This will probably be my only post on Genshin Impact, the hot new MMO everyone is talking about. It was kind of fun. But not because of the game. I derived the most enjoyment from making up my own dialog to go against the NPC dialog. Since, for some incomprehensible reason-I guess JRPG tradition-you have to press X after every NPC line, there is plenty of opportunity to inject yourself into every scene.

Ha! Here’s one more post about Genshin Impact. I copied the (100% unedited) transcript from my video down below. I had hoped I could do that in the last post, but it apparently takes a day for YouTube to think about the video and make the automatic transcript. The transcript also includes the NPC dialog, which is kind of a bummer. I still wish I had a tool that I could run my microphone track through to automatically create a transcript like this.

I tried out the Resident Evil 3 remake demo on the PS4 the other day. It looks nice, but the gameplay is brutal. It takes three headshots to kill a zombie, and about a dozen non-headshots if your aim is as bad as mine, so you run out of bullets in about 10 seconds flat, and then have to either run away or use the knife. The knife is not a very effective weapon.

People on Twitter seem to be freaking out about paying $20 for some new thing in Lord of the Rings Online. I am baffled. I don’t currently play LotRO, but I’ve always wanted to finish the Epic Story before they shut down the game. It’s just that it’s an Epic Chore to do so. But I’ve made peace with the fact that I’ll probably never finish the whole thing before the game ends.