It's been alright.

I took last week off; Thanksgiving and all that.  It was a good week for me!

Dumbchicky seems to actually be successfully (??) incubating some of the quail eggs, so they are progressing with their development; I'm getting ready to lockdown on them so that they can perhaps hatch (??).  We'll see what happens.

I hit lvl 130 in Median XL and now I've started to really see progress slow down; I'm not sure how much more it will take for me to try and tackle the next set of ubers/dungeons, but there was already a lvl 125 boss that I couldn't take out yet.  There's some set equipment that I've tried farming for that would be good for my neutraldin build but haven't managed to find yet, so that's an option.  Interestingly enough, there's actually a new patch coming out on Dec 10th...crazy.

I played through the finished chapter 2 of Deltarune.  This chapter offered another fantastical-type adventure with the same sort of intermingling of genuine character development and slappy humor that I've come to recognize from Toby Fox's work.  It seems like Deltarune is setting up for more questions, more exposition, more...stakes (?) when compared to Undertale.  The dual interplay between the worlds of the "Lightners" and "Darkners" I think facilitates deeper readings of the main characters, and they all feel more layered than they did in Undertale.  I'm not saying that the characters in Undertale were necessarily all one-note, but with Deltarune I feel like it's more obvious that they've got stuff hidden underneath their surface layer and that really makes you wonder exactly who these people are.  The game never spells any of this out for you either (yet), but there is enough there to make you wonder about it very strongly.

In the meantime, I took my break last week as an opportunity to play through a bunch more of The Last of Us 2, completing the majority of it and getting past a supposed "twist" that I heard at least one reviewer mentioning as turning their worldview upside-down.  Sigh.  As usual, I find myself not really agreeing with other people's opinions.  Like when I was watching Brave, the overarching direction and path of the plot was easy to predict early on, but all of the little destinations and detours along the way have proven to be worthwhile.  There's no one singular moment that stands out as jaw-dropping, but there are a multitude of smaller experiences contained within the narrative and environment of TLOU2 that I've really appreciated.

TLOU2 has actually done this really funny thing where every time I start coming down with a criticism of it, it remedies that criticism in the next chapter.  "It feels like they haven't really done anything new with the zombie encounters in this game", I told my friend, immediately before going into a new chapter where a new mechanic around the zombies was introduced.

The gameplay pacing of TLOU2 is entirely familiar (tense exploration, followed by stealth action encounters, culminating in an intense action scene, and then story beats and exposition), but that's because, well...it works.  The dialogue and character interactions, too, take the strengths of TLOU1 and carry it over.  The "Left Behind" expansion story was honestly probably the most memorable part of TLOU1 as a whole and I think they've really taken that experience and used it again here.

TLOU2 does a lot of work with contrasting and contextualizing things under different lights.  That sounds vague, but that's because that statement applies to a lot of different things in TLOU2.  There are extremely obvious ways in which this comes up, but also much more subtle ways as well, and I think it's those more subtle ways that I've really been appreciating as I go through the game.  It's something that would make the entire thing worth another playthrough, I'd imagine.  Unfortunately, this is also the sort of thing that I don't really see called out in reviews.  It's easy to talk about such-and-such plot twist or whatever, but I think it takes a more nuanced critique to call out attention to how color palettes are used, to how subtle parallels are drawn between similar scenes and characters.

At a certain point in TLOU2 I was wondering "what are they trying to say here?  What is the 'point' that they're trying to get across?"  And fortunately, it doesn't actually seem like there is one.  I say fortunate because if that was the case, then no matter what the "message" is, it would probably fall flat.  The best allegories, after all, are the ones that don't tell you what to do with your life.  They merely explore a situation, and make you think about it.  I feel like TLOU2 does this well; it makes you think about things, and it does so in a very fleshed-out way, more than just surface-level.

So far, at least.

"What would Sayuri do?"

It's a question that I find myself asking again, today.

And I realize, as I think about this question, that Sayuri has changed over the years.  She has grown up, somehow, even without me realizing it.  I think the Sayuri of yesteryear would simply not say anything, would simply be fulled along with the flow, with a quiet expression in her eyes.  But the Sayuri I know today believes in herself more than that.  She does what she believes in, wordlessly.  She is not cold as ice, not sharp like a dagger, but she can carry a silence that will undoubtedly make some uncomfortable.  It is not always a silence like that of her older sister...sometimes, it carries a warmth with it as well.

Sayuri is...careful.  I think part of the atmosphere of deliberate motion and action stems from contemplating everything before doing it.  But I think even when caught off guard by something, when put into a negative situation, she would do her best to remain composed.  To choose what is right and then follow through silently.

To be unapologetic, yet push forward with such minimal force that one need not turn around after making a mistake.  It feels almost paradoxical, but perhaps it is similar to taking a step without committing weight.

How does one push forward with so little force?  Perhaps--surely, this is something I used to know.  For now, it is something that I will meditate on.

Why do you always tell me "I should" instead of "I won't"?

--Someone who once believed in you

Let's see here...

I'm back from my trip (and tested negative, yey).  It was a good week, with several highlights here and there.  I spent some time worrying about what exactly I should be doing with myself, but that actually subsided fairly quickly as I settled into a sort of natural balance between doing a tiny bit of work, playing Median XL, and exploring the area and doing various things.  I got to have some nice food, including some shrimp/lobster/crab rolls, and also got to visit the aquarium, which was really nice.

I've progressed very far in Median XL with my Neutraldin build -- now level 125 and starting to try the uber dungeons/rifts that unlock at that level, which are proving to be difficult, haha.  It's been fun though, even though I worry about hitting a wall with the progression at some point.  Honestly, I expected that to have happened already, so I'm a bit surprised that this build has taken me so far.  I had still been waffling between some different builds -- unholy melee paladin seems to be regarded as one of the better ones -- but somehow ended up taking this one all the way so far, and at this point all my gear is specced for that build, so it would be sort of a commitment to try and respec (though I guess it's not out of the question).

I also tried to go reach out to my past.  It didn't work, but I think I learned a lot for myself regardless.

I seem to sort of be back on the train of rolling along with Rhythm Quest development, which feels nice...I feel like with all the breaks that I've taken and trips and everything I've been missing out on days where I just do a good amount of work on it, but today seems to have bucked that trend.

That's about it, I guess?  My latest soundtrack commission has been turning out well, and things in general are in a pretty good spot for me I think.  I've perhaps started to figure out some ways to put a more positive slant on things that maybe have previously struggled with.

I made it to the other side of the country!  Where I will be (temporarily) staying, just for a bit.  Hopefully the chickies at home don't get too stinky.

 

Impostor Factory and the Freebird Games series

I played through Impostor Factory, the third main game in the "To the Moon" series.  The Freebird Games works have a specific brand of intrigue and suspense woven into their stories that I think is really their strong suit.  Though I admit that after a while you start to get a bit accustomed to it and always start wondering how tragedy is going to strike whenever things are going too well.  I suppose that is just standard fare for stories at some point, though.

Impostor Factory itself was good, but how do I say this...it wasn't necessarily personally meaningful to me.  I think my favorite work in the series was "Finding Paradise" if only because it was the only work that I feel like had something to say to me beyond the story itself.  Perhaps this is merely because the themes explored in "To the Moon" and "Impostor Factory" were less resonant to me personally (perhaps, in a similar vein to watching Ratatouille and thinking "that's a cool story which I cannot really relate to"?)

I had a bunch of stuff typed out about To the Moon and Finding Paradise but I'm beginning to really doubt my own reflections of the works, so let's just leave it as a personal preference for now.

There's a world in which I take to replaying these games with an eye towards serious critique and analysis, but that probably isn't something I have the time for now, unfortunately.  However, I do think that the best way to get better at expressing opinions about and analyzing/critiquing works of art is to....practice...

Vacation

Or as much as you can go on vacation while self-employed, anyways.  It's been an interesting week so far and I guess a refreshing change of pace.  I've done various things here and there, nothing big though.  Just mostly taking it easy, as I should.  I've done a bit of walking around, a bit of work, a bit of just hanging out and playing, and today I went to the aquarium, which was really fun.  I even tried cooking shrimp etouffee for the first time, so there's that.

Median XL

Oh, and I've been playing Median XL a bunch, somewhat surprisingly.  There was definitely a sort of initial hump that I had to get past where I was sort of figuring everything out, but I've settled into things now.  Notably, I was speeding through the acts a little too fast and thus running into heavy exp penalties (d'oh).  I was trying to find references for the monster levels in Median XL by area so I could figure out which areas I should actually be in, until I realized that this is built into the new UI to begin with (it displays in the top right of the automap screen, if enabled).  Derp.

Anyways, I played around with a few different characters but decided to take my Neutral Paladin the distance for now -- this is a funny build that uses two buffs that shoot lightning at nearby enemies automatically, so you sort of just walk around as enemies get hurt and fall to the floor.  It's a little more complicated than that in actuality, of course, but that's still the core aspect of the build.  I seem to be doing pretty well, and am level 115, now firmly into the territory of starting to do some of the end-game quests and hidden dungeons and such.  It's been fun!

 

Pokemon Unite

Is taking a bit of a break this week, so I'll probably be back to it next week instead.