Baby quails, The Last of Us Part 2, Unholy Melee Paladin Respec, The Matrix: Reloaded

It's been ok....until this morning when I had interrupted sleep for the second night in a row.  The day didn't really go so well.

Let's start with the stuff that's more relevant to the people who are likely to be reading this.

So...dumbchicky has actually managed to hatch some baby quails, amazingly.  I found one dead baby chick (not sure what happened to it, maybe it got stuck, or trampled, or something), and one other egg that might be cracked (in a bad way), but other than that she has four healthy baby quail chicks scooting around and nestling under her belly now.  This was our experiment to see if we could break her out of her brooding by actually giving her some eggs to hatch, and lo and behold, despite her clumsiness she actually managed to do a good job.

Unfortunately since she has been in lockdown she has also been having really stinky poos in her bin since I'm not putting her outside to poo anymore.  I woke up at 5AM this morning because I smelled her poo from the other room ....  .... sigh.  I also didn't get very much done at all on Rhythm Quest done today, so I wasn't in the best mood.

Anyways, we will see what happens with these quails, I think my current plan is to keep them until they start causing any sort of problems, then......they will probably become dinner, lol.  So far they have been causing me a surprising amount of stress despite actually taking care of themselves fairly well.  But I guess that isn't totally surprising.

 

In other news, I finished up The Last of Us Part 2!  The game actually went on a bit further than I expected, but I think it was warranted in order to really reach the appropriate conclusion.

Overall I really appreciated this game, though I don't think it is one for the weak (as should be fairly obvious).  There are fairly gratuitous amounts of violence and gruesome acts depicted (as is probably pretty clear if you know of the game), but I think surprisingly I think a lot of this felt rather necessary in order to really reach the proper impact of the game.  That said, I have some counterpoints that I'd like to bring up about this.  First, while I think that the violence involved in the game's "main" plot scenes is feels justifiable to me, I found myself a bit off-put by the amped-up level of physical violence during gameplay compared to TLOU1, particularly in using melee weapons.  I think that there's a big part of TLOU2 (arguably all of it) that leans into the discomfort of violence, but I think that the melee combat felt a little over-the-top when compared to both stealth kills and weapon-shooting, and this was definitely amped up from TLOU1 from what I can remember.  There's a youtube video I remember watching where a reviewer/player was commenting on how they were excited about how many different "fatalities" were included in the game, when using different melee weapons in different situations.  Regardless of whether or not this person "missed the point", I just felt like this feature in particular was outside of my taste.

I also think that despite the multitudes of accessibility options present in TLOU2 (the navigation assistance/hint feature was a godsend, not to mention the motion sickness options without which I probably could not have finished the game in the first place), there's a distinct lack of options around trigger warnings and violence/gore settings.  I don't want to be too critical here as there is no real way to make this game work without a significant amount of violence and if you included "trigger warning for violence" it'd end up getting redundant.  As I mentioned before, TLOU2 has some very dark and gruesome moments, and I don't think those can really function any differently.  However this is honestly too much to stomach for a lot of people and I'm just wondering whether there could have been an option to simply cut to black during some of the more intense / triggering moments.  I understand this might seem a bit silly, "why not just close your own eyes" you might ask, but I really feel like this is a legitimate concern.

Despite all that, I think they really pulled it all off well in the end, and I really appreciated seeing what they had to show, even though it went into some very unpleasant territory.  TLOU2 does a very good job of pointing out parallels and putting you in similar yet different situations, or maybe similar situations with different contexts.  The story is told linearly for a majority of the game, but there are some important/major exceptions to that, and the game uses that to full effect in order to recontextualize actions and situations which you thought you might have understood at first.

I saw this mentioned in reviews, as well, and I think it's quite obvious how TLOU2 does this on a very surface level.  But I think what makes me appreciate TLOU2 is that it doesn't just stop at a surface level, it goes much deeper than that.  Subtle things such as seeing the same piece of artwork in two different settings (is it graffiti?  Or is it a holy symbol?) really gets your head going.  It's not just a one-and-done thing, TLOU2 is really thorough in how it explores this theme and I was really impressed by that.  TLOU2 makes you feel different ways in similar situations and when it does so, it doesn't feel like a slap in the face; it makes you ask yourself, "why?".

I enjoyed the gameplay as well, I think the additional tools and crafting options compared to TLOU1 really help to spice things up and make combat/stealth feel very fresh.  The downside of this is that the more new things that get added to your toolkit, the more overwhelming it is when you need to quickly do a gut instinct reaction.  In a brain-dead FPS game if an enemy sneaks up behind you, you do the same thing you always do -- wheel around and shoot it dead, using the same buttons you do for everything else.  Here, that isn't so simple, as you've got stun bombs, pistols (with detachable silencers), throwable bricks, crossbows, etc.  This works out great when you're hidden under cover carefully planning an angle of attack on how to assassinate three zombies without making any noise.  However when you run into an unexpected situation, there's this moment of "oh god, what do I press, what weapon do I even have out right now, argh" -- or at least, there was for me.  So I think that was a weak point of the combat design.  Granted, the goal of stealth combat is to =avoid= those sorts of situations in the first place, so perhaps it's not such a big deal, but I did want to note it as that was a moment when things felt a bit clumsy for me.

I could say more about the story and characters in detail but I've written enough and I don't want to do a deep analysis and this has all been spoiler-free anyways, so I'll just call it there.

In Median XL news, I finally took the plunge and respec'ed my Neutral paladin into an Unholy Melee Paladin, currently using the fire-based Blood Thorns skill -- though in hindsight I'm wondering whether I should have chosen to go with the cold-based Lemures skill.  I actually had the complete 4-piece  equipment set for this build, so that was a a pretty good start on things; then it was just a matter of figuring out all the mystic orbs, socketing, skill speccing, etc.  It took a lot of looking at different things (including the only forum guide written on the build, which is...unfortunately several versions out of date), and tweaking a bunch, but that happens to be something I quite enjoy in my RPGs, so I didn't mind a ton!

Funnily enough, I might not have actually went through with the respec, except I still have not been able to find the glove piece of the neutraldin set (despite trying a bunch).  I wonder if luck had been different, if I would have just stayed as a neutraldin?  Anyways, the new build unfortunately actually seems to have significantly less single-target damage (lemures might have been doing better on that.....).  On the plus side, I managed to clear an uber quest that I was really struggling on with the neutraldin build!  The new build also sustains much better, and I'm able to farm areas like teganze and fauztinville without having to resort to chugging potions or anything like that.  So in that sense I think it's been an improvement, which is great to see.  Unfortunately I'm still at a similar plateau of sorts and there aren't obvious ways to drastically improve my build without lucking into some nice sacred uniques or doing more min-maxing of charms and stuff.  But we'll see how it goes from here.  Patch 2.1.0 is dropping in 3 days, so I might just download that and see what that brings anyways, though I don't think there are a ton of changes to Paladins in particular.

I =did= keep a copy of my saves before respecs, so I could also try rolling back and going for a lemures build as well, if I end up hitting a brick wall.  We'll see.

Edit: Right, I guess I can also mention that we watched through The Matrix: Reloaded.  I've seen it before, but this was so long ago that there's no way that I could remember that much about it.  I was unsurprised by the fact that it was....a pretty poor movie.  However this time around it was so much more clear to me exactly why this is -- at least, to me.  It's not the convoluted plot, it's not the dialogue, it's not the needlessly excessive fight scenes, it's not the awkward let's-show-sex-as-if-we're-mature-now attitude, though all of those of course reflect poorly.  It's the fact that there's no stakes or meaning to any of it.  The fight scenes in the first film worked so well not just because they were cool but because they had meaning to them.  Neo fighting Morpheus has a clear undertone of Morpheus wanting to unlock Neo's potential, but at the same time showing him that he's still too weak in his current state.  Even when Neo and Trinity are just blazing guns like crazy to rescue Morpheus, the emotional message is in Neo's confidence -- he's proactive, working as part of the team.  It's notable how little of the fight/chase scenes in The Matrix: Reloaded have any dialogue involved, or at least any meaningful dialogue.

The same is true for all of the exposition and world-building.  In the first film, all of the exposition about Zion, the Nebuchadnezzar, The Matrix, and all of that works well because we're pulled in by the mystery and intrigue set up by the first chapters, by Neo (and ourselves) wanting to discover the truth after it being hinted at for so long.  In the second film, we get a whole bunch of shots that show the architecture and culture of Zion, but there's no reason to care about any of it.  Morpheus (tries to) give a really grand speech about how humanity will prevail, yadda yadda, but again, it falls flat because we weren't given any significance to it.  It almost feels like a Star Wars movie, but...not a very good one.

The ironic part is that the movie itself seems to repeatedly pose the question of "purpose" -- postulating that choices are predetermined, but the only important thing we can do is find out "why".  Unfortunately the film really fails to answer that question for itself.  Why did it matter?  Why did we bother watching this?

There is some actual potential in some of the ideas and plotlines presented in the story.  Neo's visions of Trinity's death are really important, as is the revelation that The One can't actually end the war or save humanity.  Morpheus has built his entire existence upon this belief, so having it torn down so unceremoniously is obviously a huge thing.  There's a story here somewhere about the weight of expectations, and about how even though Neo became The One, up until this point he was still just playing a part.  Who are we when we no longer have a path before us to follow?  Agent Smith becoming a virus -- the very thing he compared the human race to in the first film -- is also significant.  And no, "it gets covered in the third film" isn't a good excuse for any of this.