Microblogging Journal through 3/18/2024

Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Monday 03/11

• 23:09 # In Lords of the Fallen, Judge Cleric has been defeated on night two. I haven’t counted the number of attempts yet but it was five ~25-40 minute recording sessions. In the end it was super easy. Just had to be 100% perfect and maintain perfect focus and concentration for the entire first phase and then the entire second phase. What could be simpler. (Also upgrading my dual-wield weapons to +9 and equipping a poison weapon helped too.) Then another skybeam appeared in the distance so I guess there’s a bit more to go and another intense boss fight to look forward to. (Actually I didn’t hate this boss fight. It was way better than any of the ones in Lies of P.)

Tuesday 03/12

• 23:44 # Lightreaper down tonight, with the help of a bit of a bug that made him stop attacking me. Also the Iron Wanderer down, which was a steaming pile of garbage fight that made me extremely angry. Super laggy, no room to fight in, constantly stuck on the walls, view constantly blocked by massive fire effects in my face, crazy inexplicable hit boxes, excessive inescapable stunlock chains by the fire column attack. Needs another patch by the devs to make it, you know, not suck.

Wednesday 03/13

• 19:29 # That new Daggerheart thing keeps saying to “mark a hope” as if that’s a normal thing to say that anyone can understand. Kids today and their new-fangled hipster lingo. I keep thinking I’m supposed to draw on someone named Hope.

Thursday 03/14

• 20:02 # I just read about this thing called DC20. It seems inevitable that everyone and their cousin would try to market a new tabletop rpg rule system to replace D&D because it’s been going on since the 70s and that’s what always happens when one thing gets “too popular.” The problem is that there isn’t really that much wrong with D&D, except it’s owned by Wizards of the Coast. So everyone else has to be like “Get our new thing! It’s amazing! Well, honestly it’s the same, really, but you give your money to us instead of to WotC!” I guess there’s a certain percent of people who would find that a compelling sales pitch, but I can’t imagine it’s very high. Anyway DC20 didn’t bother putting a single page on their web site to describe it, and they want people to pay $10 for the PDF? I’m supposed to watch random YouTube influencers yelling sales pitches at me to learn a single thing about it?

• 20:05 # Btw when I say “there isn’t that much wrong with D&D,” that obviously excludes that thing where everyone yells “Guidance!” or “I give the help action!” before anyone does literally anything.

• 20:13 # I made the mistake of recording a couple of cat videos on my work iPhone, because I don’t remember why. I’ve been trying to figure out how to get those videos off of the iPhone, because corporate hq is sending me a hardware refresh and I’m going to have to send this one back. I’ve gotten the videos onto my work MacBook, but that doesn’t help very much because it’s a work MacBook and corporate IT tends to frown on letting people just copy files willy-nilly off of work MacBooks. I’ve managed to email the photos, but the videos are too big. It’s an ongoing drama of trying to rescue the cat videos.

Friday 03/15

• 20:24 # I had an idea that I might make a D&D character on dndbeyond but then I noticed that it would cost me about $4,023 just to be able to select an Artificer class so then I didn’t. I’ve had this thought before: D&D is golf for nerds. It’s typically only approachable to the upper class who can afford to buy thousands of dollars of extra gear.

• 20:30 # Speaking of ttrpgs, it’s a bit surprising to me that tabletop roleplaying systems are still sold like static books. It seems like it would be far better and more convenient for the players of the games to sell them as subscriptions to an interactive web site. (But not in a predatory way like dndbeyond, obviously.) Or even installable applications, through a storefront like Steam.

Sunday 03/17

• 21:51 # I’ve spent a majority of the weekend working on a weird project that I currently think is pretty cool and has definite promise but I’ll probably be extremely embarrassed about in a few days. I took the Phandelver and Below D&D adventure book and recorded two 2-hour sessions of playing D&D by myself. Lessons have been learned about the complex juggling act of having 50 books, multiple web sites, a laptop, a PC, dice, and about a million other things all happening at the same time.