gamerdad You can thank Stranger Things, that iconic Netflix show of a couple years back that sparked a resurgence in 80s horror, and I jumped on that bandwagon fully intending to read one of the spiritual influences of that retro show, IT by Stephen King. [read more...]

gamerdad If I asked an AI to write a paranormal thriller wrapped around a religious allegory and puffed up with so much flowery language that a poet would hold their hands up for a reprieve, there is a good chance the AI would spit out something very close to this book. [read more...]

gamerdad It had been a long time since I read 1Q84. And strictly speaking, I never actually read it. I listened to it as a very excellent audiobook shortly after it came out fifteen years ago.

I was a different person then, half my adulthood and forever ago.

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gamerdad I could easily overwhelm myself here by just writing too much and then not reading enough.

It is the first dayof 2025 as I write this and I have set myself the bold goal of reading more. Scratch that. I have set myself the goal of finishing more books.

As it stands I have a lot of novels and non-fiction tomes with bookmarks protruding from them just sitting around. So, I am going to use this site to inventory the act of finishing as many of those as I can and then eventually starting some more.

Here’s the game plan: A post when I start (or jump back into) a book. A post when I finish a book. Simple. [read more...]

gamerdad The addictively vital nature of this silly game means that I spend almost as much time enthusiastically explaining to fellow gamers why they need to buy this game and play it. Like last night at my NYE party when may have finally I convinced Mr BR to fall off his wallet and get a copy.

Of course I celebrated by spending my first few walking hours of NYD-proper winning a round and unlocking a new deck. Kudos to me, huh?

I find that I lean pretty heavily into to the planet cards. I may need to try a different tactic to progress further as i’m finding this approach pretty single strategy and honestly reaching a bit of a plateau.

gamerdad This game spanned a pair of years. We paused mid way thru to ring in 2025.

Four of us sat down at an hour to midnight to puzzle through the jungle. Two of us had played before, but there were two newbies at the table so the set up and explaining took a little longer.

Not a bad way to start a new year, mind, especially since I played a great hand and handily won the round.

gamerdad As we dawdle into the final days of 2024 I have vowed as a kind of New Year’s resolution to read more books. That might not mean starting more books, mind, as much as finishing more books that I have already started. Either way, I started this one a couple weeks back and have been reading all about how a 1980s philosopher tries to explain modern computing architecture as he build up to what I presume is a thesis in the nature of the conscious mind and of by way how that relates to artificial intelligence and quantum mechanics.

Reading complex explanations of maths and algorithms and Turing Machines right before bed is a real challenge tho, I gotta say.

The nature of the conscious mind has been of particular interest to me because there is a narrative thread in my novel that ties directly back to this concept. In the story (spoiler alert) a forest is subject to alien mutation influences and begins to experience a kind of accelerated transmission of signals in its roots leading to a kind of primitive consciousness that communicates and interacts with the human characters. All that means is that I have been thinking a lot about what consciousness is, how to simplify it for a story, and what it says about the universe in which as i’m writing said story.

All of this is pretty heavy for bedtime.

gamerdad We are mid-holidays as I write this and I have been trying to avoid spending the entire winter break sitting on the couch virtual farming.

That said, between the cold and my health I have logged enough hours in my faux farm to approach the loop of one full year in game. My BIL who also plays this silly game asked me about game bugs the other day, and specifically that he had heard that there was just so many damn bugs in this game. I had told him I’d encountered virtually none.

Oops. Rookie mistake.

Everyone knows that you don’t jinx yourself like that.

As it turns out the harvest season finally rolled around and everyone’s spinach crop was coming in, and a few contracts popped into my contract list. I can harvest spinach, I thought to myself.

I took one spinach contract, got it started, and then went back for a second.

The contracts were for two different fields, but oddly they both loaned me the exact same equipment setup and both had the exact same delivery location. Harvest spinach, load it in a truck, and drive it to location X.

The first contract was naturally the first to have a full load ready to go, so I filled my truck and merrily drove off to the mill.

I found the unload spot, hit the button to tip the truck, and away went the spinach from contract number one.

Contract number two is 23% delivered the message told me.

Um. Hold up.

That was spinach from contract number one.

I turned off the autosaves and tried ending the contract early to reset things, but that only resulted in a huge bill for all the spinach I apparently stole. So revert that.

Aaaaaand sleep on it… my next play session is going to be trying to see what happens when both crops are fully delivered, if either pay out, or if I’m going to be on the hook for a bunch of pilfered spinach.

I guess I have found a bug, after all. Jinx.

gamerdad With my changing free time, I reinstalled Death Stranding earlier this weekend (after offloading it about a year ago because of shifting interests in other games) with the intention of playing something besides a perpetual game of Farming Simulator.

Of course when you don’t play a game for a year and your last save point was mid-mission there is the problem of jumping back into things and hoping for the best, but expecting the worst.

I survived.

But just barely.

Tho to be fair I’m still very early in the game and the difficulty is still pretty low as the narrative continues to just barely unravel.

I’m not a huge fan of the story. I mean in these wacky times, rah rah save america—as a Canadian—is like, um, ok. Sure, but jingo-bingo-bam. Who cares?!

The mechanics on the other hand are right up my alley, and the idea of building a persistent techno-ecosystem in the process of playing seems unique and curious enough to call me back to this back catalogue game. At least for a while…

gamerdad In my little farming universe it is mid-April, and having survived my first winter by doing soil cultivation contracts, chopping down trees, and speeding up time to 5x in the settings, summer is approaching quickly and with it new cycle of harvesting.

I am sure there is some play logic about it, but I do find it a bit interesting now that I am about sixty five hours (yeah really) into this first save that the game plops you down near the end of the year and just as you get into a groove for that first month or two of in-game time, whamo, you are dawdling through winter looking for ways to make money. I mean, for my own part I have been playing the game in just 2x speed with months set to two days—call it my 2x2 settings—so one day in game can take literally six to eight hours of real time to play through. Others definitely speed this along.

But, I mean, it’s a simulator and sometimes I will just sit here playing wondering what the point of the game is. Like, am I aiming for better equipment so that I can earn money faster to buy better equipment until I own everything and everyone in this small town—or am I just chilling out on a small farm?

Part of me kinda thinks that it might the latter.

That said, real time and no rush and just building what I can as the cash flow allows seems like the whole point. And I’m kinda ok with that too.

gamerdad I think I’m nearing level 30 on this playthru and the frequency with which challenging beast fight encounters has happened recently makes me think that either I’ve hit some critical waypoint in the game or just that I’m traveling further afield lately. I want to think that the game is throwing punches note that I’m ready, but also it just seems that wandering the distant corners of the wilderness is simply more dangerous than poking around the starter dungeons.

gamerdad There is a frustration I have with RPG games that comes in the form of the difficulty curve. Oh, sure. You may be one of those people who likes tough games, but here in my late-40s I’ve realized that I play games for the zen story and flow vibe and not the epic monumental challenge.

That said, I still enjoy games like Fallout and Skyrim for their vast worlds and complex mechanics.

So, back to that frustration. The frustration is the early game when your weakaf character is constantly getting his backside handed to him and I, as the gamer, needs to revisit dungeons or fights or quests that I’ve already attempted six times but have failed because I don’t have a strong enough bit of gear or high enough stats to deal with some random boss at the end of an hour of effort working through a challenge. I call this the early game reluctance of replaying a game: knowing I’m gonna need to grind through both the tutorial stages and the weakling phase until I get to the fun beefed up phase where I can just push through and only suffer character death occasionally. It usually lasts about ten to fifteen hours in these games, a time through which I punch with impatient grind trying to up my stats in any way possible (without amping up the difficulty too much) so that the balance is better for all that zen vibe flow yadda-yadda.

I’ve been replaying Skyrim for what seems like, I wanna say, the sixth or seventh time and last night it finally started to feel like I was creeping out of the early game phase. Better loot. More manageable fights. Fewer surprise death scenes. Scumming my way past this is never my proudest of achievements, but I’m just too old to want to trigger crunch an enemy to the redline of mutual death. I just want to sit on the couch and listen to a podcast while I effortlessly thump a few baddies. Is that too much to ask?