It has been roughly a week, a little longer, since my last post.

Let's talk.

What Have I Been Up To

Since the last blog post, I've had a surprising amount of free time. I have also felt quite lazy, perhaps owing to the fact that this free time was preceded by business. All in all, this combination led me to doing absolutely nothing of productive value. This doesn't bother me, however. Productivity should be a means to an end, not by itself the goal. Thus, I've spent the last week purely by entertaining myself.

Entertainment for me meant the following this past week or so; I've played and finished three different games, I've finished reading a book that I've been at for some time, I've re-watched a movie that I love, and I've submitted a poem to a zine. I might share the poem here at some point in the future, I just have to decide where, and would like to wait until I get a response from the zine first. And frankly, I don't think I have much to say about Fellowship of the Ring that hasn't been said elsewhere so I won't be talking about that one much either. So let's talk about the other stuff.

The Games I've Played

Last week, I played Superliminal, Cryptmaster and Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun - Words of Vengeance (henceforth Words of Vengeance). Although these games won't get individual Game Session entries on the blog, I still want to give each a mini-review of sorts here. No longer than a paragraph.

Let's start with Superliminal, the first game I've played last week. I love Portal, and I love The Stanley Parable, so a game that feels like a marriage between the two sounded like an amazing idea. And I was correct to think so, because this game is a wonderful time. The way it plays with space and perspective was quite fresh, and the game's story about being stuck in a dream which degrades the deeper you go was well executed. The presentation is top-notch. The mechanics weren't as confusing and disorienting as they first seemed to be, as the game does a very good job of on-boarding the player. However, I feel like the developers held back from harder puzzles, and relied more on obscurity rather than complexity for difficulty. Another criticism is that while visual gags and environmental humor landed really well with me, I cannot say the same about the verbal jokes themselves, though they were never to a point of irritation. All in all, Superliminal is a great game that I would recommend to anyone who enjoys games like Portal, The Stanley Parable and The Looker.

The second game I played was Cryptmaster, and I really enjoyed it as well. It was not the first dungeon crawler of Wizardry lineage I've played, but the first one I've bothered to finish. It was also the first typing game I've played. I don't think there's anything in this game I haven't enjoyed, I loved the dark and brooding themes and atmosphere contrasted with silly but not cringe-y (at least for me) humor. The puzzles and riddles, while I've read that for native speakers of English, they might have been too commo, for me were things I've mostly never heard of before and challenging. The only problem I've had in retrospect was level-ups for player characters being quite slow due to how the system works. This led to me settling on a combat strategy quite early on which I've followed until the last boss, since I've unlocked less than half of each character's move set. This wasn't a huge concern, however, since combat is not that prevalent and can be skipped for the majority of the game. I would recommend Cryptmaster to anyone who likes dungeon crawlers, and would be willing to try something more outlandish in the genre.

Wanting more after my first tango with typing games, I played Words of Vengeance. A short spin-off of Boltgun, made for promoting the second entry in the now-series. It's a quite short game, I've completed it in half an hour, and it's free. I cannot say anything along the lines of "it does what you expect of the genre" due to my unfamiliarity with the said genre, but it feels like that's what I would say if I was familiar with it. It was quite fun, especially for what's basically an advertisement, and due to it being free I don't see a reason why I wouldn't recommend it. Unless of course, you don't like WH40K and the humor which may be present in the setting, which this game contains quite a lot of.

That's it for video games, I was able to complete three due to the short completion times of each. That means three off of my backlog, so I'm happy with that. Let's move onto the book I've read.

Master and Margarita

When I first met my partner, we did the common courting ritual of recommending each other things to read and watch, as one does. I quite frankly don't even remember what I recommended to her at this point, but one of her recommendations was the book Master and Margarita by Mihail Bulgakov, one of her favorites she said. I did start to read it then, but I have just finished it. While I won't be giving a precise time frame, know for reference that we have been living together for a while! In my defense, it has been a busy time like I've oh-so-often mentioned herein the blog, so I think that I may be excused.

In any case, I will be publishing a Book Club entry for it quite soon, maybe even today or tomorrow. So we can move onto the last part of this already-too-long post.

Site Update

Finally, keen eyed readers might've noticed a new icon to the top right of every blog post, and the blog directory itself. That's right, RSS is here! Well, I call it RSS but in reality it's an atom feed. Now, if you ask me the difference between the two formats I couldn't really tell you much. All I know is that atom is a newer format, and it's well supported. It's good enough for me, and the purposes of this blog, so we're going ahead with that.

As with everything else on this website, the feed is also generated with a custom system. This comes with caveats, such as some feed readers not being able to load images even though CORS headers are set, and to my knowledge, the format specifications are followed. But it works near perfect with the readers I personally use (Feeder on Android, and Akregator on desktop), and it passes validators, so I'm leaning that the problem is rather on those readers' end rather than my feed.

Currently, there's only one feed for the blog. Although I thought about making separate feeds for different sections of the website, the post amount and frequency there doesn't really justify it, so I've decided that if there's anything big I share elsewhere, I'll just make sure I also announce it here on the blog.

This comes with some neat updates for the web view as well, there are now publish and last edit dates available for each post! And while posts don't have categories yet, that's another thing I'm thinking about adding in the future, the only thing holding me back for now is a good UI design to filter posts by category in web view, and the decision to split the feed into different categories or not.

That's all for this week, let's talk again later.