Action Movies
This so far has been one of the stranger breaks from work I have experienced. Yesterday I was a complete waste of space in all possible versions of that term. I think I was just overly drained from the weekend and spent most of the day starting things but not quite getting into them. I played some Rift, patched up Final Fantasy XIV but never actually logged in, played an awful lot of Diablo 3 in very short spurts and occasionally connected to Destiny over remote play to attempt to get exotics from the Ultra Knight on the Dreadnought. For much of the day though I aimlessly drifted along with whatever happened to be on television. Namely for whatever reason yesterday was apparently classic action movie day or something, because I caught all of Die Hard and Rambo: First Blood Part II, as well as bits and pieces of others. The funny thing about action movies is with time they usually seem worse than you remember them… this was absolutely the case with Rambo. There were so many things in that movie that just seemed silly, from the fact that the helicopter he was piloting at one point seemed to have an endless supply of rockets, to the fact that he fired a ton of bullets and never seemed to stop and change the magazine… nor did it actually seem to have any place in his outfit to store extra magazines.
Diehard on the other hand, for the most part holds up just as well as I remember it. In fact in many ways, I appreciate the movie more these days. The only part I ever really had trouble reconciling was how he ended up without shoes. I mean I get the point… he was taking the advice to de-stress, but before I went off to be a hero I would have put my shoes on rapidly. Also the concept of undressing in a strange bathroom is not really something I would ever be comfortable with. However once the movie starts proper that movie makes a strange amount of sense. It comes off as more a heist film than a traditional action movie, and we are getting to watch both the heist and the guerrilla resistance to it. The movie has so many tropes that play out to make it work… from the cokehead hotshot, to the incompetent police chief… to the equally incompetent federal agents. I am sorry but Bruce Willis is still a bad ass even when I see him in a modern movie, but he seems to have lost a lot of his early “moonlighting” charm that gets displayed in the original Die Hard. Sure he makes snarky comments, but I feel like Die Hard really was more a reprisal of the Addison character in a different setting. The other big takeaway from watching both movies back to back is just how many visuals have been stolen from these films.
Crusaders are Slow
Last night was also a mixed bag in that we had been warned for the last several days that a major weather event was coming. Most certainly it was because it absolutely wreaked havoc on Wynnewood area, but for the most part in the Tulsa area we got nothing but spotty rain. That did not stop us however from going into storm mode where we both hung out downstairs watching the constant scroll of weather reports and storm chasers across our screen. As a result I didn’t do the normal Destiny thing because it didn’t really feel safe to be upstairs and oblivious to what was happening. Instead I played quite a bit more Diablo 3, and eventually took to helping my friend Thalen level. Later we were joined by Grace and the pace of leveling increased greatly. As my crusader I can take a lot of damage, but I just dish it out ever so slowly. The unfortunately part about my seasonal journey is that I am now to the point where I need to do some sort of a conquest to move on to the next step, and none of them look really doable for a crusader. I mean the “easiest” and most grindy one is to level three gems to 65, and at this point I am working on that every so slowly. I have all three of my normal gems to over 45 and am ever so slowly working my way to 65.
However to get that bank tab I am going to need another conquest somewhere. We made a quick attempt at the kill 350 in a cursed chest and came up very short with our group getting 292 which normally would feel awesome… but still very short of the goal. I have a couple of friends playing Demon Hunters and in theory they can solo it, so I might pester them for assistance. The chest in question that supposedly is the easiest to do is one that spawns in the Paths of the Drowned in Act V, and spawns a ton of bogglings. The problem being for me to kill things as a crusader I need to get them super close to me… and trying to wrangle all of the mobs is the big challenge. I really either need an disintegration wizard or a rapid fire demon hunter that can wreck things as fast as they spawn to get through it. The only problem here is that I am definitely behind the curve when it comes to this season and both demon hunters already have their extra bank tab and are now playing significantly less. My fear is that this is going to be the equivalent of the Black Spindle in Destiny… aka that thing I try a bunch of times but can never seem to do. As far as today goes… I am not sure what is on the radar. I know I need to adult like mad, and do the laundry. I am also hoping to sneak off to go see Civil War, largely because I know some of my co-workers will be wanting to talk about it upon my return. As far as gaming goes, that is entirely up in the air and more than likely I will just end up playing a lot more Diablo 3.