Good Morning Friends! I hope you had a most excellent weekend. For those of us in the US, it was Mother’s Day and I hope that went off swimmingly for everyone. Me… well we spent some time on the side of a very busy turnpike because we had a spectacular flat. For anyone who might not be used to this feature of my blog, Mixtape Mondays are where I create a number of mixtapes and share them with you. As a kid, I was a prolific maker of mixtapes and loved the structure of lining up songs in a specific order to convey a feeling. The original series ran for 20 episodes before I ran out of creative juice, and now we are on week three of this revival. Who knows how long I will keep it going this time, but I still have a bit more ammunition ready to go.
Contextual Rickroll
The internet has a proud tradition of bait and switch tactics, and one of the proudest of these traditions is hyping something up and then linking the Never Gonna Give You Up video by Rick Astley. I am not sure why this one artifact of a bygone age came to represent the epitome of cringe, but it did. However too often it seems like folks view this one video as some sort of isolated incident or an odd happening that makes no sense. However friends… I am here to tell you that the theme song of the Rickroll, was absolutely an element of the times in which the song was created. I’ve kicked around the notion of creating a playlist for a while that places the song in its proper conditions. When I was in seventh grade I had fairly major sinus surgery and spent quite a bit of time laying in the hospital. Given that I grew up with cable… and as a result without MTV… I consumed as much as I could possibly watch. Never Gonna Give You Up was a new song at this time, and I present to you the auditory landscape of this era.
That friend brings to close the third Mixtape Monday in this new series. I can’t say that I am going to be listening to this one a ton, but it served a very specific purpose. Think of this as an auditory time capsule to place the Rickroll in its original context. For those who might be finding this as your first Mixtape Mondays post, I keep an archive of all of the mixtapes I have created shown below. I hope you all have a most excellent week, and I hope I manage to finish up a few more mixes before next Monday.
Good Morning Friends! I’ve not really been feeling myself this week. It might be the constant rain or the impending stress of a holiday weekend and juggling visits to three houses. Whatever the case I have felt like going into turtle mode where I pull my head up into my shell. As such most of my gaming of late has been running around on my little Engineer in Guild Wars 2 and working on zone completion for leveling purposes. As of last night, she is 36 and I have at least one trait line fully trained to give me access to all sorts of goodies with my turrets. Engineer is a weird class, and honestly, I think it would be significantly better if the turrets were on shorter cooldowns. Essentially it feels like I can take on anything in the world… if I have my full retinue of mechanical friends, and the rest of the time I feel like a harsh glance could kill me.
The only World Boss that I have been doing on the regular is Tequatl, and of late I have been doing that on my Ranger. I am not sure why the sudden switch in allegiance, but doing Tequatl on a Longbow Ranger is pretty painless and I am mostly just running it for the chance at easy ascended gear. There are a few other bosses that would be probably beneficial to loop in, but it seems like I operate in one of two modes. Either I ride the World Boss train and spend all evening hitting everything, or I do Tequatl at reset and call it good for the rest of the evening. Once I settle into leveling an alt for the night, it is hard to poke my head back out and pay attention to other boss spawns from that point forward even though I get notifications. If I felt better this week I would probably be pushing the main story forward, but a fugue state of leveling my Engineer seems to be what my mind needs right now.
Moon Knight wrapped up and I am extremely happy with the conclusion of the series and where it places the character going forward for season two. The highlight of the series however is Taweret, because those ear wiggles are so damned great. I love the character of Layla and I have all sorts of theories as to how things are going to progress from here. However, I am seeing a lot of people who either were disappointed in the series or considered it generally meh. I’ve been talking to Thalen about this and I think it might be based on how bought into the character of Moon Knight you were going into the show. I was a Marvel kid and as such had encountered Moon Knight countless times… which gave me a firm understanding of which alters we might be seeing during the course of the show. The conclusion really is how I expected things to go down, or more so how it HAD to go down to progress.
Another interesting thing that I am watching now as it releases on YouTube is Mystery Incorporated, a version of Scooby Doo that appears to have taken notes from the modern Archie/Riverdale CW Series. So far it is interesting and very much NOT the slapstick romp that the cartoon is. Right now the only piece that exists is the pilot but it was interesting enough to subscribe to the channel and see where this goes. I’m not likely to get much gaming or media time this weekend, but at some point, there is a whole slew of other things that I want to catch up on. I purposefully waited until the entire Picard series had finished season 2 before checking that out, and then there is Strange New Worlds. I also need to actually sit down and watch my way through Discovery as well. Star Trek is definitely something that I have neglected over the years because while it was something I enjoyed… it was never the cultural touchstone for me that Star Was was.
There we have it… a blog post created. I sorta had to force my way through this one because I was not even sure what I wanted to talk about this morning. However, I did not want to go two days in a row without a post because it felt like I would be sliding down a potentially slippery slope back into going months between writing. Sometimes you just sorta have to brute force your way through it for a bit to keep the words flowing.
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Good Morning Friends. I had a bit of a rough night and even a bit of rough sleep. After the workday, I just felt drained and had made plans to hang with a friend that I ultimately backed out of. Instead, I wound up crashing on the sofa with my laptop piddling around on my tiny Sylvari Engineer. There is something deeply relaxing about just chilling out and working on map completion and subsequently leveling as a result. There is something about allowing yourself to go with the flow of events and knocking out renown hearts. It is moments like this that make me realize that I changed as a gamer more than the game itself changed. There is a time when this would not have been nearly as compelling as I found it last night, where it would have felt pointless. However, that pointlessness is in part what my brain has latched onto, or more the wide variety of things that I can do… but feel zero pressure to actually do.
This is going to be a bit of an odd post jumping around between topics. I am extremely ready for the finale of Moon Knight, which I realize at the time of writing this… already exists and I could watch it, but obviously have not had a chance to. I have greatly enjoyed this show, and I am wondering if it is because I was already deeply familiar with the character beforehand. I had a conversation the other day with my recently retired former boss, and he is not getting it at all. He said he is holding on to hope that everything will make sense in the end because he is ultimately committed to marvel franchises. However, from the first moments of the show, I am been hooked, in part I guess because I understand that character of Moon Knight is ultimately someone who is deeply fragmented and such an unreliable narrator. I am very interested to see where this character goes and how it interacts with the larger universe.
Another thing that I am really looking forward to is Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. What has been lacking with Marvel since Endgame is a broader sense of direction. What made the first sequence of movies work is that it felt like we were building towards something and that there was a larger conflict at play that ultimately came to a head in the Infinity War. We’ve lacked that sense of purpose and forward momentum, and I am feeling like Multiverse of Madness is going to give us that. This is going to be the match that lights the fuse on the next conflict, and I had a conversation with Thalen yesterday and almost agree with him. His current theory is that this is all leading to Secret Wars 2015, or at least a version of that story played out with Kang instead of the Beyonder. I could absolutely see this happening and whatever the case the end results are going to see the version of X-Men from the Animated series merged into the MCU.
Lastly, yesterday was the reveal of the oft-discussed “Warcraft Mobile Game”, and I have to say I am a little disappointed. I think the problem is that for me when someone says “Warcraft” I think “World of” not “Orcs & Humans”. Sure I played the original dos game, was really big into Warcraft II and making “PUDs”… and significantly LAN battles, but that is effectively ancient history at this point and no longer seems relevant. “Warcraft” has meant an MMORPG for the last eighteen years and my brain went to maybe them creating some new mobile MMORPG that took the best bits of WoW and translated them to a new phone experience. That is not what we got, and instead, it looks mostly like a Clash of Clans like game experience focused on the slapstick side of the Warcraft setting similar to Hearthstone.
That is “fine” and I am sure there is an audience for it. It is decidedly not really a game for me, however. I don’t have a lot of nostalgia for the RTS genre, and for me, it sort of felt like an interim format that was ultimately replaced by other sorts of real-time interaction like ARPGs. However there are a lot of people who seem to like Clash of Clans and the other derivatives that have been released over the years, so I fully expect that this is going to follow that format mixed in with a “gacha” system for pulling new heroes to lead your army. I am certain it will make Blizzard money and there are whales out there that will love “pulling” for this game. Mobile games always feel like the free sample that you get at a warehouse store… with the eventual premium price tag being way more than I want to spend on that enjoyment.
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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I managed to get my Warrior all the way trained in the Bladesworn Elite specialization and I have to say… I am really enjoying it. I grabbed a build from Snowcrows that I am using currently, with the minor substitution of using Marauder for survival rather than Berzerker gear. I think what I like the most is the gunblade that you end up wielding along with the spec, and how it feels very much like a greatsword without being a greatsword. Right now in the spec, it is running Axe/Pistol and then, of course, the Gun Katana shown above that just comes as part of running the build. I’ve been branching out a bit lately from the Necromancer, and I think likely I have just improved at predicting damage because other classes no longer feel as “squishy” as they once did.
I’ve also spent quite a bit of time playing the Ranger of late and recently went on a pilgrimage to get a Jacaranda as my pet. For those who have not experienced the Path of Fire content, these are angry floating balls of dirt and roots… with an inexplicable mouth full of teeth. They stand back and nuke the shit out of you with lightning and are apparently one of the better all-purpose pets in the game. They have pretty high DPS but also remain pretty damned tanky, and as such, I have shifted to using it all the time. I named mine Twigbert because it seemed fitting. At a minimum, I am running Tequatl every night as the Ranger. As far as weapons go I am mostly using a Longbow, and occasionally swapping to Greatsword for up close and personal damage.
I’ve also been spending a fair amount of time in WvW on the Ranger and I have to say it might be my favorite option for that game mode. Basically, I like being up on the ramparts and raining down arrows on the enemy team. This mission originally started as a way to boost my Warrior to be able to train Bladesworn a bit faster, since you can pretty reasonably get hero points as a byproduct of playing WvW. In truth, I have been doing this however as a way of working on getting some more Mystic Clovers, given that there are a few tracks that are extremely lucrative in this department. The sad truth that I have learned however is that the heroic scrolls are “bind on character”, which I learned too late… but you can still farm the currency to buy them and then just swap to the character that needs the points to purchase them. It wasn’t a complete loss because I do want to learn the Soulbeast elite specialization on Ranger.
As far as the story goes… I have stalled out a bit in New Kaineng City. This zone is beautiful… but also exceptionally dense and hard to navigate. As a result, I end up getting horribly distracted anytime I attempt to do anything. I’ve not had the mental fortitude to push through and as a result, I am floundering a bit and playing alts. I’ve never really loved the concept of a big sprawling urban area that is also a combat zone. I’ve seen several games do this over the years, but they always feel cumbersome and New Kaineng is no different. I mean that is not to say that I do not dig the look of the zone, and it really is an accomplishment in world-building, but it also feels like I have stepped into a different game than the one I have been playing for the last multiple hundred hours. I am looking forward to getting on the other side and pushing through into another “countryside” zone.
That is it, folks. Still very engaged with Guild Wars 2 and starting to branch out more into other characters. It is probably a good thing since I have a stack of 80s that get very little to no play. Currently, I have Necromancer, Warrior, Revenant, Guardian, Mesmer, and Ranger all sitting at level 80. My most recent leveling project has been the baby engineer, which is already around 30ish. At some point I should probably partake in some alt parking and at least rack in daily treasure chests.
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