gamerdad The fifth book in the Bobiverse series showed up in my audiobook library the other day and I quickly moved it to the top of my reading/listening queue.

I’m still not sure if this series counts as humour science fiction or speculative fan service, but i’ve enjoyed every title in it, whatever it is. In only a couple chapters into book 5 tho, so more thoughts on the book and the whole series as I keep reading. Um, listening.

gamerdad I’ve continued to dive into this Australian campaign for another couple hour-long play sessions and have come to the ultimate conclusion that as much as I like this game I’m probably playing it far less strategically than the designers intended.

It’s not that I’m not strategic, but I’ve come to notice that my play style is way more casual than details-oriented. The game famously floods you with dozens of narrative threads all meant as tweaks and dials and knobs and gears to micromanage the course of a civilization thru history. That’s the appeal. That’s the game. And I’m sitting here thinking about how difficult it is to keep all those metaphorical plates spinning as I play. I’m clicking from turn to turn and building all the little pieces to grow my team wondering how some people keep track of it all. But I started to then think about how much I tend to rush it all. Click. Next. Click click. Next.

Then the obvious dawned on me: there’s no rush. I could spend hours on each turn if I wanted. I could read every option. Look at all the data before each play, each spend, each build. I could, but I usually don’t. I just click, click and click some more. Strategy never happens at pace, it is methodical and slow, and I just play “wrong” when I play casually.

I mean, I’m not sure if that changes anything at all whatsoever, but it’s interesting to notice and think about.

gamerdad No thanks to Youtube I found myself watching the latest in depth video about the next version of Civilization, the seventh instalment due early next year in February. Of course, my next best option to playing a game that won’t come out for six months is to dig back into some #ps5 Civilization 6.

Anyway. The last few times I’ve played I’ve been mucking around with the custom game settings. Call me a casual gamer, but sometimes I just like to play in a more creative way, so toning down the difficulty and the aggression of the ai is about the only way to turn this into a builder type game versus the all out campaign of military and religious warfare. Sometimes I just like to build big cities and explore, y’know?

Tonight I was randomly assigned to be the great ancient civilization of Australia, which disappointingly had nothing to do with the mighty aboriginal cultures but instead just the regular modern crocodile dundee aussies. I may need to find the mute button to keep up this save file tho—there’s only so many times I can listen to Waltzing Matilda playing in the background, ugh.

gamerdad Back when I was working full time I powered thru so many audiobooks that it word make your head spin. It probably accounts for why my library is in the 500s and’s I’ll never write or post about even a solid fraction of them. Since I’ve been downtown again a few days this week I’ve been back into the audiobooks again and that means I’ve picked back up on this Lord of the Rings history once more. With only a couple hours left I may even finish it off soon, though it seems appropriate with orchestra starting up again shortly that I rejoined my listen right about where they are talking about the music score from the film—a definite masterpiece to compare to, and be a huge part of, the film itself.

gamerdad Along with some user manuals (which are still weeks away from release as I write this) I’ve been inventorying my supplies for a basic D&D campaign. Dice. Map tools. A big kitchen table to play at. And apparently, tho maybe I’m jumping the gun here, coins are useful. And sure, I could be boring and just but a set, but I do have a #3Dprinter just sitting there in my basement calling out for reason and purpose. I downloaded a set of community-designed coins as a start and I figure I’ll just start printing and creating a collection of some kind. I don’t have any silver or grey filament tho, so I’ll see how they look in a couple hours and maybe lean into some painting to lock in the final look.

I started back at the beginning this week. We binge watched season four over three short days (there were only six episodes in this last round) and in a bout of “we should have rewatched season three to re-catch-up confusion, I got to thinking that I really didn’t understand it and it might be that I need to revisit the whole series again, in order, to get a better sense of the whole.

That said, I did pull out the graphic novels and flip through them too in an attempt to see if there were any hints, but it turns out that season four was seemingly invented whole cloth for the Netflix show and not adapted from the page like the first three seasons, so the slight change in vibe and tone I was sensing might not have been completely off.

The Kid had already dug into the reviews before we capped off the series (even though she did politely wait for me to watch the actual show) and the reviews of season four were right in line with what we sensed: a bit of meh, a bit of wtf, a bit of oh. The show was always weird, but sometimes nostalgia kicks in and the magic we glommed onto during those magical first episodes doesn’t float fully across the entire series even if the quality and story parallels. We can inflate stuff in our brains and make it out to be better than it was. But benefit of the doubt, I’m re-watching the whole damn thing now.

gamerdad It would seem that I made it thru the first chapter, and not without some considerable effort. I did some more reading and my impressions and impressiveness with the climbing mechanics were on track as this game seems to be 98%all about that exact thing. But as a puzzle game those climbing challenges are getting increasingly more complex as I progress—obviously, huh? Where Of left off last time turned out to be right at the start of one of those impressively challenging climbing puzzles so a couple days after playing the tutorial I had to give my memory a plunge into the depths of medium term storage to recall all the tricky bits and beat the stage. Somehow I managed, but not without some tired fingers from manipulating the climb controls. I can only imagine how tired the little dude clinging to the wall must feel—and if he could talk, how frustrated with my skills.

gamerdad I haven’t been buying many games but in celebration of some anticipated new income in the coming weeks I spent my first hour’s pay on a title that had been tucked away on my wishlist for a while. I don’t remember where I heard about this, maybe from a podcast? but it looked intriguing enough as a chill out zen game to have on the #steamdeck for bursts of quiet time play.

I didn’t quite make it through the opening act, but I think I’ve got the vibe. It’s like 95% exploration and climbing so far, and before you think it’s just pressing the arrows and moving around on a wall, think again. It’s strategic, and you need to be increasingly more thoughtful about placing ropes and leaping and resting and then of course the multi-button climbing controls where each hand is controlled by a different button. It’s deliciously complex. I think I like it.

gamerdad An odd chain of events led me to playing #flightsimulator on my #steamdeck this morning. Ultimately it kinda started with a power failure that borked an update on the deck and forced me after about four hours of effort to bite the bullet and reimage my device. It was one of those sacrifices that led me to have basically a fresh install and lots of room to install games—particularly when I’d been struggling with the motivation for a digital purge. When I first got the deck, FS2020 wouldn’t even install on it, only stream, and the lag was unbearable. But for some reason it gave me the option and since I had the room I, again, bit the bullet and endured a three hour 129GB download over wifi to get the game on there. Of course I had to crank down all the graphics settings to “medium” at best, and in many cases just off (I mean, you can’t tell on a small screen anyways) and I actually got some respectable performance out of the thing, even flying over a small city like my hometown. Now I just need to tweak the control scheme and maybe I can actually play on this thing, huh?

gamerdad Back at home after our mini vacation we kicked off a second campaign of this little tile game so we could both preserve the campaign we started with our friends and also kick off a new run with just us two now that we got our heads wrapped around the rules a bit better. There had initially been a bit of confusion around the scoring of tasks, particularly around the ability to build compounding tasks that multiplied or efforts per tile played while not breaking the resource count. See, the point of the game is to string together specific landscape resources to chain points.

Our initial read of the rules was quick (because we just wanted to play and we were sitting in a hotel lobby) but on a more thorough comb over the scoring we got our heads around some of the deeper strategy which is simple enough to learn but still has some depth and randomness baked in. Or new campaign got a couple game sessions checked off on the campaign sheet and we made a lot more progress now that we’ve figured it all out.

gamerdad We picked up a copy of this new game at a board game store in Calgary while killing time before a backcountry hiking trip, and our first couple rounds were sat in the lobby of our staging hotel.

As a #cooperativegame board game it was as much a social evening sorting thru the rules and chatting thru strategy as it was a focused games round.

We had a few curious gazes as other guests made their way past over the hour and a half but no one looked too far askew at what four middle aged hosers were doing playing a weird game at a random hotel in Calgary on a Wednesday evening.

gamerdad I watched this back in January and reviewed it here but the post was lost in the great hack of ‘24. So…

I could strive to tell you something smart about a twenty-year old superhero movie other than that it intersected through my life in a string of coincidences over the last month so much so that I opted to open up my Disney account and watch it again all these years later. I could strive to have some kind of intellectual commentary this movie, or ask if it has stood up to the test of time or has competed in a film landscape of a million other more modern takes on the superhero genre. I could even strive to say something about the quality of Pixar animation, especially considering that not three months ago I was standing at the gate of their main campus in Emeryville, California snapping pictures through the fence and longing to be on the other side. I could, but rather I’ll just say that there is always going to be something timeless about a parenting story, a story about a dad in a mid-life crisis, or a story that lurks on the fringes of social commentary about the role of exceptionalism versus inclusivity. I was more drawn into this movie than I thought I would have been, again, even twenty years later (having seen it in the theatre on the big screen nearly two decades ago now.) It’s not perfect, and Moore’s Watchmen comic will always have tackled this plot in a more nuanced, adult way, but for a movie which is now known as much for the rollercoaster themed after it as for the story, it's not a bad rewatch.