gamerdad There is a grim sort of horror to be found in the depths of toxic relationships that is amplified the victimhood of the invisible trauma unwitnessed by friends and family, cutting a sometimes familiar path across ancient memories repressed by time and distance. Not everything, mind. Not even most of it, or even a lot of it, but enough that after four episodes I needed a break for some weeks to process and work up courage to cap off the series. Weird, huh? You don’t even think about these things for goddamn thirty years and then pop you’re all like well, now shut the front door.

gamerdad It took a couple short first seasons, but the writers have now managed to disentangle the two main characters from their pre-show romantic partners. The long distance engagement fell off a cliff at the end of season one, while Maggie’s dude was crushed by falling space trash at the conclusion of season two. I know the will they won’t they trope is pretty common these days, but I suppose it wasn’t anything new in the 90s either and the same writers likely had some plans about making the central couple struggle for a couple seasons (albeit short seasons) with their connection despite existing romances. I may have mentioned this in a previous post, but I don’t recall much of either these early seasons back from when I watched it if I ever did, nor did my early viewing ever have much respect for order or continuity through my re-runs on cable approach to 1990s television. That is to say, this binge through is all pretty new to me.

gamerdad As often happens when I game, I followed a rabbit hole of interest and was soon thereafter installing something new on one of my devices. I’ve played the first chapter of The Witcher twice before and both times I feel of my horse and went on with other adventures. I’m not sure this time will be any different. But just in case, here is a marker in time to note when such adventure begins anew.

gamerdad A cartoon television show based on a card game based on an internet comic named after a breakfast cereal. Mmm Oatmeal.

I was having some blood drawn the other day and the nurse with a needle plunged into my arm asked me about the cartoon on my shirt. The tee was a relic from when I ran the Beat the Blerch virtual half marathon back a decade ago. Try explaining The Oatmeal and his comic sensibilities in race form to a random human. Now I’m here trying to explain a tv show on netflix with the same premise.

I’ve been vying for the centre of the galaxy for a long time. I mean, for starters it’s just a big tease, isn’t it? The centre of the galaxy? It’s just calling out for you isn’t it?

And for seconds, it shows up as a perpetual navigation destination on the galaxy map, your waypoints always kinda nudging you closer and closer. Go towards the core!

Well. I reached it today. I didn’t even realize it was that close. It suddenly was just: there you go. Click to travel. And it turns out it’s kinda a disaster. My ship is crashed and I’m kinda stuck at the moment. I’m gonna need to play me some macguyver to get back to civilization, I think.

Screenshots capture some of the vibe, but I thought I would try posting some video as well.

gamerdad Onward. I seemed to get sucked into this game with some regularity, usually after an update or something inspires me to load it up again and push forward on my save. That’s not a bad thing. [read more...]

gamerdad Do you ever play a game so much that you start to feel like you need to switch up your style a little bit? I had that vibe this evening. With the latest Worlds update to NMS I was feeling a bit like I was missing out on that feeling of a BIG change because, frankly, I’ve done so much exploring and building and questing that it’s just more of the same but nicer, see? But how do you switch it up, you ask? Well, my approach was really stupidly simple. I’ve been playing in first person view for most of my play time. In fact, I started this current profile as a #vr playthrough and then just got over the hassle. I mean I still VR it, but there’s something chill about just picking up the controller and no-fussing it. So, yeah. I switched my view into the over-the-shoulder third person perspective, summoned the space station so I could change my appearance a little, and then wandered over to the roulette portal and transported myself blind to a rando planet. The result dropped me into a pretty nice, near-paradise world by sheer chance and there wasn’t a sole on it save for what seemed like an auto-generated empty base. So I flew around for a bit, built a new base there, and just—played. This little screencap series is all from that session.

gamerdad Another hundred or so klicks to the south east and another leg of the #flightsimulator adventure landed me at Hector? airport in Fargo. A sunny Saturday afternoon skooting across North Dakota was about as interesting as flying across Saskatchewan, save for a few extra lakes to look at. I’m really gonna need it find some cool scenery soon or this adventure is going to start to fly straight into dullsville international. My landing guidance did spice things up and gave me two terrible options for my approach, so I made my own and (as you can tell from the audio I recorded) it was a little rushed and a little rough, and it didn’t help that the joystick driver borked mid-flight so I was left flying by keyboard for part of the trip. Donk!

gamerdad We went to the theatre last night in an effort first and foremost to escape the heat into somewhere we could sit in there in an air conditioned building for two hours. I like #pixar films. I mean, a few weeks ago I was walking around Pixar Pier in Disneyland and high-fiving costumed characters, so there’s no sense in denying it, right? Those folks have clung onto the storytelling vibe that made them famous. I mean, people think it’s the computer animation aspect, but let me tell you—they are really a storytelling company with a unique animation approach: the CGI thing would have been a gimmick and it would have blipped by with less notice had a movie like Toy Story not actually been first and foremost a good story. Inside Out was a good story. As a parent, it was like, these are the feels. I went to the sequel thinking it was gonna show me the next set of feels, appropriately so because I’m now the father of a late-stage teenager and it’s all about the feels these days. So that was my bar. Me, a dad, sitting there next to my sixteen year old daughter, wondering was this story about girl bodychecking into puberty and the storytelling the swirled around that: was it handled with the care it needed? Did it feel the right vibes? And—yeah. It did. I think. It was a good story. Was I sad that the parent role was so realistically side-lined in this: minor spoiler, but the bulk of the movie takes place at a weekend hockey camp so all these things the kid is going through happen in the absence of her parents and it becomes this battle inside her own head between her classic kid-emotions and these new confusing and sometimes irrational teenager emotions who just kinda take over. And the parents—the character who I most personally related to—made a wink-wink sex joke to his wife as they sped off ditching the kid, and was then absent in the plot until the end credits. The growing up aspect didn’t quite hit me as hard because of this—and that’s fine, but it took me some time to roll that around in my brain. It is a kids movie for kids after all. My kid loved it.

gamerdad I hate that I get distracted by this notion of new content. I mean, we’re all seekers of exciting novelty, I get that. We have these games that make our #comfortplay list, the stuff where we zen out to not think about it and just sit there and grind through tasks or crafting or whatever. Minecraft did that for me for a while, and there is a totally different vibe playing through a story like in Final Fantasy and needing to pay attention to details and plot beats versus loading up an exploration sim and just drifting in the wind seeking out something interesting. I mean, ultimately that’s the curse of it tho, right? Newness temporarily negates the zen because the universe where the unexpected has become normalized suddenly is unexpected in a different way so the curiosity gets piqued and you can’t just sit there and waddle through it. So that’s what kinda bugs me, that I take that bait and since I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t do jump scare movies that translates right over to the kind of guy who wants to poke around the universe making sure there is nothing creeping in the dark corners as I’m putzing along building bases and refining ore and being zen. So I take the new-content bait and walk around with my metaphorical flashlight to see what they dropped out there in the darkness.

gamerdad Getting over the supposed subtlety of the latest update, I’m just revelling in the fact that it distracted me from my other adventures. While I should be down in our cool cool basement where my computer is flying a virtual plane across North Dakota, instead I find myself upstairs in my hot hot living room where the #ps5 lives so that I can add a couple more hours to my NMS playtime tally. Of course it never fails to awe me that I can spend a couple hours in this universe and discover this near limitless variety of colours and shapes and sights just by flying a spaceship from planet to planet. In fact, sometimes just waiting a few minutes for a storm to clear or for the time of day to shift, the whole feel of a place will change.