Not the most interesting of months – my journal notes are mostly about errands, life-admin, and feeling a bit under the weather.
Fun
Games
For a couple of days I fell down a rabbit hole with Stonks-9800, and had much better luck than in the demo. My character is currently making ¥1 billion per month just on the dividends from their own company, plus hundreds of millions from rental income. So I’m throwing hundreds of millions at risky investments just because of their potential for 1000% returns, in a way that I feel morally weird about even though I’m entirely aware its fictional.
I started Borderlands 4 both in solo and co-op. For my co-op run with Danny, I’ve chosen Vex the Siren, mostly for her pet tiger. To explore solo, I’ve chosen Harlowe. I’m not expecting to finish my solo run, as I usually have a lot of trouble navigating around the maps in Borderlands. However, I have found the starting area of Kairos much easier to travel around than the starting areas of other games in the series, partly thanks to the green and sunny biome and partly thanks to being able to call up a glowing trail that points towards your pinned objective.
Destiny 2′s Ash and Iron update was … disappointing. The new activity, Reclaim, defaults to being a solo activity when launched directly from the quest, which is the worst way to play the activity. When me, Si, and Josh tried 4 of the “new” missions added into the default mission playlist, the “Portal”, only one of them worked well; the other missions had missing collectibles or time-limits that were impossibly short. The activities aren’t even new – they’re a mixture of recycled past missions and carved-out elements of old dungeons – so how can they come back broken?
Finally, I remembered that Splitgate had gone offline, so I launched it to check if anything was still left. Splitgate is less dead than most games that have their servers shut down, as the developers worked on ensuring create peer-to-peer matchmaking could run. (The article here about the server shutdown explicitly mentions the Stop Killing Games movement, which is cool). The core of the game is still there, stripped of the store, achievements, and any unlock criteria for items, and will be playable for as long as there are people who want to play.
Other
I’ve moved this site away from WordPress.com and onto BlueHost’s WordPress hosting. Eventually I’d like to have my own site in a more independent form, but I don’t know enough yet about how to do that, so my intention is to use WordPress-on-BlueHost as a transitional step.
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