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.

Sometimes I cope with daily stress by staring at hundreds of YouTube video clips of The Chase, stuffing food into my mouth, feeling smugly content that I can answer every question about American Football. Sometimes I cope with daily stress by making a thing. This is the latter. It was an idea that just popped into my head one day, fully formed. What if I export the isolated microphone track from one of my game videos, go through it and clip out any noteworthy words or phrases out of context, and set them to a beat?

It’s quite a thrill to find out some random word or phrase or sound you recorded months ago just happens to fit perfectly into a piece of music. Also, it’s a great distraction from the election, which is tomorrow. It feels like all of society here in the U.S. is on hold until we see how it turns out. So it’s a lot of waiting and hand-wringing for us here. Personally I’m tired of the speculating, and I’m ready to rip the band-aid off, to find out which version of Awful we actually end up with.

This is a post that I’ve meant to write, started to write, given up writing, re-started writing, given up again, and now re-started for the hundredth time over the course of the last three or four years. In the post-2020 election world, it seems like a good time to try again to publicly codify these things. (I’m reminded why I’ve never finished these posts before. The more I dig into my thought processes, the more I find a complicated and nearly-limitless set of rules.

While everyone else is playing Shadowlands for some reason, I just got a game called Pathologic 2. It’s been on my wish list for over a year and I just saw it was on sale for $20 last week. I first heard about this game when I saw a YouTuber mention it while playing Death Stranding. They suggested it was, like Death Stranding itself, one of those atypical experimental sorts of games that more people should play, so I put it on my wish list.

I mentioned before that I hadn’t run into any “difficulty walls” in Pathologic 2 yet. Well, now I have! In my first playthrough, I got about 12 hours into the game, which put me at the start of Day 4-the beginning of Act III, where the story really starts going pear-shaped-before I reached a dead-end, no-win scenario. My hunger level was so extreme and my health was so low that I simply couldn’t walk far enough from my last save point to find any more food, and I died over and over and over again.

Just a quick note for the archives, to report that I did finish Pathologic 2, by which I mean I reached the end credits. I wouldn’t say that I “won” or “beat” the game by any means, since everyone died, and I myself died about a million times by the time I got to the end. A YouTube commenter quite explicitly informed me that I was playing my first blind playthrough using trial and error with no foreknowledge or wiki guidance very wrong, perhaps because I simply lacked the brain capacity to understand the game.

I have rebuilt Endgame Viable as a static site, which means massive changes for me, the developer, and some changes for you, the reader. First, it probably looks completely different. Second, there are some things that you won’t be able to do on the new site, at least not initially: Search for posts. Update: The workaround is to type “your search term site:endgameviable.com” into Google. Comment on posts. For comments, I wired up a somewhat janky private Remark42 server.

Over the winter holidays, I got into an isometric Baldur’s Gate-style RPG kick and played several games in that genre. The first was Wasteland 2, a post-apocalyptic RPG in the style of the original Fallout 1 and 2.

I only bought one new game in 2020 so it will be very easy to pick my own personal Game of the Year for 2020. But I also talk about a few other noteworthy games I played during the year.

I tried out Pillars of Eternity next in The Great 2020 Holiday RPG Game Blitz, a game that I got for free on the Epic Game Store.

For completeness, I present this brainstorming session about merging two other kinds of content streams in with blog content, an unfinished draft from somewhere during a Lost Time Period of 2020.

Recently I started learning Go, Google’s internally-developed language. It’s also known as “Golang,” because it turns out that “Go” is a terrible search term.

Somehow March is almost upon us, and I still haven’t written about Tyranny, the other free game I got from the Epic Store oh so long ago now. It was the next in a burst of isometric CRPG games that I played around Christmas time, which started with Wasteland 2 and then Pillars of Eternity.

I’m pleased to announce that on March 1st, I started a new software engineering job, working generally in the field of “IT infrastructure lifecycle management.” This is a pretty big, life-changing sort of job for me.

I don’t get the Valheim craze and I wasn’t wowed by Outriders either. There, I said it.

This past week I found myself trying three free games I got from the Epic Game Store.

I got a two-month free trial of Stadia Pro and have been trying it out.

Video adventures uploaded in the last week or so.

At last, the Pillars of Eternity series comes to an end.

Before and after I started a new job in March, my gaming time and interest plummeted to nothing, so I commenced a period of short gaming sessions of mainly free games and demos which continues to this very day.

Some Twitter activity prompted me to think about how and why I follow some D&D shows.

And now we move into videos of games I’ve played during a Free Two-Month Stadia Pro Trial phase (which I got from someone at my new job). There are a whole lot of free games to click on and play with a Stadia subscription, but the down side is that 99% of them are games you’ve never heard of before.

Setting up Hugo, the static site generator, to build my blog with Microsoft Azure.

Finding a microphone that can also be used for content creation (aka. makin’ vidyas) in a noisy room is challenging.