Friday, November 10, 2017

Project 15: 12 Books in 21 Weeks

Provenance doesn't stand up to Ancillary Justice, but it is still a very fun space opera through an interesting universe.

Thursday, November 09, 2017

Blog: Video Games of October


I was pretty unsettled in October and jumped between games a bunch. I don't love the feeling of not having something serious to play, but for now I'm focused elsewhere and I'm pretty happy just to get a chance to play when I get a chance.

My top five games (by play time) for October were:
  1. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - One beautiful thing about Breath of the Wild is just how much there is to do. It makes it simple each time I turn it on to wander off into Hyrule and find something new and fun and engaging.

    Quite the outcome of a side trip.

  2. Pikmin 3 - I love this game. I could play it forever. There's just so much brightness and charm. The game play presents a lovely challenge of first finding a solution and then optimizing that solution. Every Nintendo Direct, I'm always hoping to see more Pikmin 3.

    Work to do, work to do.

  3. Kingdoms and Castles - I haven't bought too much in the way of new games lately, but listening to 3 Moves Ahead discuss Kingdoms and Castles it seems like enough fun for $10 to make it worth while. I've enjoyed it so far, although it doesn't have a huge range of things to do. There's something nice about building a simple city and using it to kill dragons.

    A dragon in the rain.

  4. FTL: Faster than Light - I suck at FTL. I've been bad at FTL since it came out. Then I watched Eurogamer play it and thanks to Jonneh, I suddenly understood a lot about how *not* to suck at FTL. Either way, even if you're bad it's still a good time.

    Finally.

  5. Pokémon Go - Daily bonuses keep me going, other than that I haven't played too much.

    This ... was a bad idea.

Here's my total play time chart for October:


And here's a chart of how much I've played over the month:



Wednesday, November 01, 2017

Project 17: #NafYoFuthMo

It's November, so the Social Internet has turned to its habit of either doing or whining about #NaNoWriMo, in which people write a novel in a month. I don't have time to write a novel in a month and I do have a thesis to finish (related points).


Therefore, I am going to do #NafYoFuthMo, National Finish Your F*ing Thesis Month. I'm not going to be able to finish everything this month, but I have enough stuff that I could do right now that it's a good time to give myself a big push and get closer to the line.

I have 3 big chapters I can finish, I'll consider it a win if I can have significant progress on each of the three. In the smaller scale I'm going to shoot for a new word target of 750 average each day.

I'll update on twitter regularly and occasionally here.

Project 15: 12 Books in 21 Weeks: Update 12

The second volume of Mouse Guard was as good as the first, and possibly even better. I don't read a lot of comics, so while I feel like the pace of the story is a little slow, that might just be par for the course. The art is absolutely phenomenal.

Giant Bugs and Staying on Top of Things

Into the Breach, Subset Games, 2018   This is a mix of obvious video game tactics and their obvious implications for getting things done. I&...