I played a few more hours of Dungeons and Dragons Online over the weekend, continuing to start over from scratch since I couldn’t get to my previous characters after the switchover to Standing Stone Game. It’s kind of a relaxing game for me right now because it requires no thought or effort. I just click, click, click and look at the pretty pictures on the screen as they go by.

A couple of “flycatcher” birds returned this year to nest outside my back door. (I don’t know their exact species but I think they might be Eastern phoebes.) I watched in fascination as four little baby birds grew up in the nest this Spring. I took tons of pictures of them. I setup a streaming webcam so I could watch and listen to them from my computer room. (The parents would chirp and scold me if I stood at the door to watch.

Published by Del Rey. Read by Luke Daniels. Produced by Random House Audio. Unchained from fate, the Norse gods Loki and Hel are ready to unleash Ragnarok, a.k.a. the Apocalypse, upon the earth. They’ve made allies on the darker side of many pantheons, and there’s a globe-spanning battle brewing that ancient Druid Atticus O’Sullivan will be hard-pressed to survive, much less win. Listen time: About 9 hours, 5/22-23. (At 120% speed.

Published by Del Rey. A magical debut novel for listeners of Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, and Neil Gaiman’s myth-rich fantasies, The Bear and the Nightingale spins an irresistible spell as it announces the arrival of a singular talent with a gorgeous voice. I have this idea that I will try to read a sample of a Kindle book every day or at least a few times a week for a while.

Today, May 25th (a Friday, amusingly enough for those of us who know that Friday is the worst day to deploy new things), is the day that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect for the European Union, so, since I have a web site on The Internet, and I know there are Europeans who occasionally visit this site, and supposedly I’m a professional in the information technology field, I wanted to write about it quickly.

News and observations from the past week. In The News Steam is (allegedly) cracking down on sexytime cartoon games. I say “allegedly” only because I personally couldn’t confirm any official communications from Valve, I only read the second-hand reports from potentially affected developers. This caused a bit of an uproar in the Twitterverse. My only two cents is that this is an example of one of the many universal truths in life: You can choose to make an artistic statement or you can choose to make money, but very rarely can you choose both.

Over the Memorial Day weekend here in the U.S. everyone was talking about Dauntless, or more accurately, talking about the queues that made it impossible to play Dauntless. It made me wonder: What the heck is Dauntless? Well, it’s a co-op action RPG coming to PC in 2018. And I guess that’s all we need to know to create hordes of stampeding fans hyped with excitement about it. Or at least, that’s what their web site would lead us to believe, because the only other clue we get before the big red “Download Game” button is: “Battle ferocious Behemoths, craft powerful weapons, and forge your legend in the Shattered Isles.

A summary of news and observations from the week. In The News It’s been an incredibly bleak week for news, to my eye. Maybe everyone took the whole week off, because Monday was a holiday here in the US. Bethesda teased us with an announcement of a new game called Fallout 76. It’s debatable whether this deserves to be mentioned on an MMO-themed blog, but see above about bleak news. Bethesda themselves told us basically nothing about this game, but news sources are alive with speculation that instead of a single-player RPG like Fallout 3 or 4, it’s going to be an “online survival” game in the style of … well … I don’t know, exactly, because the phrase “online survival game” does not conjure up any games in my mind.

Games Played It’s been a really slow month for gaming. BioShock Remastered, 13 hours. Haven’t quite reached the end yet as my attention got diverted elsewhere. Fortnite, 10 hours. I enjoyed it but it doesn’t suit my non-competitive lifestyle. Ryse: Son of Rome, 7 hours. Quick and satisfying. Dungeons and Dragons Online, 7 hours. Great for vegging out, but like most older games, terrible if you want to read any of the text on the screen.

I started to write a blog post about The Expanse Season 3, Episode 7 (Delta-V). That episode seemed to be the beginning of a brand new story arc, perhaps the start of a new book in the source material. I didn’t particularly care for the episode, and I ended up ranting about all the things I didn’t like about The Expanse, especially in Season 3. I’m fully aware that others love this show and praise it endlessly, and most consider Season 3 to be the best one yet, while I’m over here struggling to find a single thing to hold onto and enjoy.

Join me as I re-watch The Expanse, Season 1, to try to find out where the show went wrong for me. Summary I’ve decided that I’m just going to quote Wikipedia’s brief episode summaries here, instead of spending all of my time writing my own summaries. The point of these posts is to explore what I think of the episodes, not retell the episodes. The Big Empty was written by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, and directed by Terry McDonough.

News and observations from the past week. I keep thinking I should write real posts about stuff, but I’m having a hard time finding anything that interests me enough to write more than a few sentences. In The News Star Wars Galaxies creator Raph Koster to release postmortem book on MMORPGs. This sounds very interesting, although I doubt it will go into the level of detail that I’d want. I want to see the actual source code, not stories about meetings or whatever.

Fine! I’ll write something about the E3s and whatnot. I’m not a big fan of these kinds of game conferences but I actually sat down and watched some showcases this weekend, because really, who among us can honestly say they’d pass up a chance to write snarky tweets and ruin people’s fun on the Internet. I missed most of the EA show on Friday. I started watching right before the Anthem gameplay footage, which was followed by approximately 20 continuous hours of FIFA gameplay.

I watched the Square Enix showcase but it left little impression on me. Unlike seemingly everyone else, though, I liked that it was just a series of trailers and videos, and not one of those awkward live presentations in front of a confused audience. I just feel like in the year 2018, we should have evolved beyond the 90s-Steve Jobs-cult-of-personality-walking-around-on-stage phase of our lives. Although the guy from Bethesda talking about Fallout 76 actually was pretty entertaining.

In The News I have to retract last week’s applause for Valve’s Libertarian stance on content. I started to write a blog post about this, but Wilhelm said everything I was going to say. They completely and comically reversed their “no filters” stance and replaced it with “we’ll take down whatever we personally don’t like and call it trolling.” It’s the right move from a business and PR perspective, probably, but whatever respect I had for what I interpreted as a principled we-trust-the-customers-to-decide stand last week is now completely gone.

This is an amalgamation of an old draft from March 2017 that I never got around to publishing, probably because I never found a picture for it, and some new thoughts because the subject came up again this past week. Roger wrote a post called Where Have all the Bloggers Gone? I believe the gist of it is that he’d like more bloggers to write more blog posts so he will have more to read with his morning coffee.

Weekly summary of news and observations. I should really copy and paste a standard template for this opening because I have to type it from memory every time and I think it subtly changes every week. In The News There’s been some hubbub about the World Health Organization’s gaming disorder classification. The WHO added “gaming disorder” to the “International Classification of Diseases,” and every gamer who has been on the defensive about that kind of thing since the 90s got out their pitch forks and torches.

I’ve been playing a lot of Dark Souls Remastered lately, which requires playing on a controller. Technically you can play the game with mouse-and-keyboard on PC (and it’s even easier in the Remastered edition) but the control scheme is completely alien to any other mouse-and-keyboard game, and it takes a lot of getting used to, and it’s just not worth the effort for one game. Even the controller scheme takes a fair amount practicing and learning, even if you’re used to using controller.

To the dismay of I’m sure most people on the Internet, I could write for days about how much Dark Souls pitches exactly into my wheelhouse as a game (mixed metaphor used intentionally because it’s funny), but I’ll try to keep this post focused on just what is different in the PC version of the Dark Souls Remastered edition. In short: There aren’t that many differences. But there are some.

Weekly news and observations. In The News In surprise news, Trion acquired Gazillion’s assets. It’s not all that surprising, actually. After their implosion, I would think Gazillion was selling everything at a deep discount, so why not pick up a whole library of a competitor’s source code? Trion also seems to be trying to turn themselves into something like SpatialOS, which, again, why not? It sounds like they’ll be renting out the technology they already use and maintain for their own games.

Games Played Dark Souls Remastered, 65 hours. It feels like I’ve played a lot more than this, actually. I now know this is beyond the limit of how much I can play a controller game in a month. (I remember once thinking that controller games were easier on my hands than WASD mouse-and-keyboard games, boy was *that* wrong.) The Walking Dead, Season Two, 9 hours. I finally played this Telltale game, some four years after buying it, and some five years after playing the first season, because I was looking for something to do this past weekend that didn’t require much hand activity.

After finishing the first part of Living World Season 4, Episode 3, Seized, last week I said that everything had already been said about GW2’s Living World and nothing had changed. I muttered under my breath a lot about that first part-both the story and gameplay-but to be far it was far better than the first part of LW4 Episode 1, which was the video game equivalent of riding in a hot car with a screaming toddler.

Given recent unexpected events at ArenaNet, I feel pretty awful about my last post on GW2. I’ve expressed displeasure over ArenaNet’s handling of story and gameplay plenty of times here which is exactly the kind of thing that led to the firing of two ArenaNet writers. So I wanted to say a couple of things. First of all, I absolutely respect any game writer or developer’s right to tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about, that I don’t understand the challenges associated with writing for a game, etc.

In The News Of course the big controversy of the week was that whole thing with ArenaNet and the influencer and the two writers, which I won’t rehash here. I kind of wish I hadn’t said anything yesterday, because it was “too soon.” I only meant to say I felt kind of guilty about having just written a scathing post about the game. Maybe I’ll revisit it in a few weeks, because I do think there are a lot of different lessons to be learned from the entire catastrophe.

Belghast is rebooting Blaugust, so head on over there for all the details (and here for more details). All the cool kids are doing it. I probably won’t be able to participate formally, but I’m sure I’ll post something during the month and I’ll cheer everyone on from the sidelines. I’m hoping* to get cataract surgery sometime in August, which I’m just going to go out on a limb and guess will probably impact my ability to write for some indeterminate time period.