Post a Comment On: Digitally Staving Off Boredom

Though I had planned to play a bit of Witcher 3 in-between my own little development endeavors, it seems my procrastinatory hormones are kicking in or something, because last week went to anime, and this week went to reading Let's Play walkthroughs of Ultimas IV, V, VI, the Martian Dreams spinoff, VII, and VII Part 2 as performed by "Nakar."

Nakar was a proud SomethingAwful goon back then, a title given to the forum participants.  SomethingAwful is one of a few places on the Internet that form a popularity singularity via a perpetual orgy of postmodern absurdism.  That's something I am apprehensive about.  One the things I've learned in life is, even in places where the point is to have a good time, popularity corrupts, and what do corrupt absurdists do?
[Image] Warren Spector warning us from 1990, albeit feeling taxes were the problem. Nevertheless, I am glad Nakar made the time to craft these Let's Play logs.  For many reasons:
I was able to indulge in rank nostalgia, having played pretty near all of the Ultima series, right up until EA ran it into the ground.   From a game development standpoint, the flaws that went into the cheats Nakar inflicted and imbalances Nakar encountered were a good case study. Most importantly, Nakar's utter subversion of The Avatar's values (including constant abuse of fan favorite Iolo) was funny.   Albeit, it was funny mostly in that horrendously sarcastic manner common around that time, to which society currently seems to be rubberbanding so hard that forced authenticity is drowning out all reason in popular media these days.
[Image] It was posted on SomethingAwful, so the answer is no. I should probably be regretting wasting my time more than I did.  However, "Nakar's Ultima" is a funny enough read to be well worthy of its own entry on the appropriate TV Tropes page, and a fine gaming history lesson besides.

Other matters of wasted time.

That bit of procrastination aside, you know another good thing I could be watching on Crunchyroll?  Mob Psycho 100, which is basically a clear evolution of One Punch Man where someone said, "Make the comically overpowered hero a teenager because that way the shonen will identify with him more and, if you like psychic characters so much, why don't you just make the hero one?" and the creator said, "Okay."  And it worked, because it's actually more popular and higher reviewed than the original. 

Unfortunately, Mob Psycho 100 seems to become more and more a fighting series as it goes on, and that's sort of a shame because a large part of the appeal of One Punch Man is that it points out just how tired that genre has become.  If it continues to play it straight through the end of the first season, I am probably done with it.

I also caved in to my impulse to subscribe to the XBox GamePass for Windows 10 because, if I can't focus enough to play the games I own, I might as well just have a generic subscription to a bunch of good ones.  I have sampled just the tip of the iceberg of the interesting games that are on this pass, and frankly there's more gameplay here than I can possibly make time for... perhaps I should simply get all my games this way.

Of course, I splurged on the pass mostly because The Outer Worlds is out on it next week, and a $10/mo subscription is whole lot cheaper than shelling out $60 to try it.  If it doesn't need major patching on release, I will be surprised, as that is sort of Obsidian Entertainment's hallmark. 

Development / Geldon's Boring Real Life.

One of the interesting points made in Steven Pressfields' books on artistic resistance is that it will be at the strongest, and pulls directly opposite, when you are closest to making actual progress on what you know you need to do.

Boy am I, it's utterly kicking my ass up one side and down the other right now.

That's unfortunate, as this utter shutdown of attaining self-validation by pursuing gains in an identified major life purpose is having the detrimental affect of pushing me further into an existential crisis.

But oh my, look at the time!  My bizarro weekend is over.  Well, fiddledeedee!