- First things first – the holidays are here, so everybody remember to breathe and unclench your butts. I don’t exactly know why we do this to ourselves as a society, but it’s the holidays, and therefore each and every single one of us has something to be stressed out about. Maybe it’s whether or not the shopping will get done, or the cooking and baking will get done, or the mental wind up of knowing you’re going to have to spend a few days with people you don’t like very much, or some combination of these things. It’ll be OK. Take a deep breath, sit for a second, and don’t worry about it too much. You’ll get the stuff done, and your people will understand if you fall short of the goals you set for yourself. If they don’t, fuck ’em.
-
More thoughts on Baldur’s Gate 2. My love-hate relationship with Baldur’s Gate 2 has been well documented in this space, and it’s starting to look like I’m just not going to even finish the main game, which is a mild tragedy because I’m extremely close to the end. There’s an initial fight with the main villain (I have it on good authority from multiple sources that this is not the final boss fight) that I’m stuck on, and I’m starting to think I simply have no desire to close the game out. See, the main villain is a high-level wizard, and by this point in the game, one has already fought gobs and gobs of high-level wizards and liches, and all these fights are the same. They put up high level protections spells, so your mages must cast a series of debuff spells to eliminate those protections. It can feel like kind of a treadmill. For this last fight, absolutely none of the usual stuff is working, and neither is the unusual stuff, either. Instead of compelling me to respond to the challenge, this has left me tired of the game and its bullshit. I’ve fought enough fucking wizards already. I’ve fought enough of everything, really. The first fight with a Beholder was cool, but the next 20-30 or so were subject to diminishing returns. The whole game is like that. I first got to this fight almost two weeks ago, and I still don’t want to fire the game up even a tiny bit. Perhaps at some point I’ll turn the difficulty down and finish things out, but for the moment I’m done.
-
Regarding Wrestling. Long time readers have probably noticed that the amount of pro wrestling coverage here is down about 400%. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, I canceled my WWE subscription back in September or so. I mostly used it for watching NXT every week, and with NXT’s move to USA it threw the calculus of my subscription into direct question. I’ve stopped even giving a tenth of a shit about the main roster (realizing that I didn’t even sort of care about SummerSlam brought me to this conclusion), and while the massive archives are fantastic, I wasn’t using them much in practice. I would only be maintaining the subscription for TakeOvers. $10 a month isn’t so bad for something you use every week, but $120 a year for something you’re only going to use five times in that year is much dicier. So I was already thinking about ditching the subscription when they fucked up my billing information, making the decision much easier. Second, while I’ve been watching Dynamite when I am able, I’m not in a position to write about it as a matter of routine. I’m not always around on Wednesdays, and when I am I prefer to watch the show for pleasure, without the intrusion of furious note-taking.
Quick Grab Bag: 12/17/19
Rob Writes About Whatever 