got_quiet

I guess it's December. It feels like the second half of this year blew by, just month after month of nothing going on. Outside of the OWL season I was just barely existing outside of work, which has picked up now that everyone has kind of decided that COVID is over, so I'm going on business trips again. I'm also catching colds again so that's unpleasant. There's still some masking around but sometimes I'm the only one doing it. Oh well I guess.

Looking back on the stuff goals I set for myself this year I don't think I got close to any of them! I am still working on the VN stuff and that's pretty much the only thing I got progress on. That is, playing the VNs, the planning for one got halted when a massive work deadline showed up and then it was followed by another work deadline... and I basically remained kinda drained for the rest of the year. It feels like it's been a long time since I've managed to gather anything resembling creativity for a while, which sucks, but that can always change I guess.

Because I've been traveling a lot for work again I've had a little bit of time to watch movies on planes or listen to podcasts on cross country trips.

I ended up watching Everything Everywhere All at Once on a plane ride and enjoyed it a lot. It was a heartfelt story with a lot of good humor, and I'm a complete sucker for stories that center around the relationship of mother and daughter. I'm also an easy crier so I did a whole bunch of that at the end.

On the flight back some of the last games of the Overwatch League were playing live, so I actually ended up spending money on wifi on the plane so I could watch the games. I felt like a bit of a high roller doing it because I almost never spend money on stuff like that, but I didn't want to miss it. It's actually crazy how you can just get streaming level bandwidth on a moving plane now.

The grand finals this year was good for the first time in franchise history, and it was good to see Fuel win it all. I felt bad for Shanghai though. They were dominant for almost two years, but those two years where during the pandemic, so they never really got to enjoy success in front of a crowd of fans. They went out early in this tournament and it's a shame because that's it for the roster. Void is retiring, Fleta may be too, it's just never going to happen for them (even though they are grand champions). Outside of the fact that this was a good match, the best part of the league is watching the teams burst out of their chairs screaming in celebration when they clutch an important match. I've missed that a lot over the past two years.

Now that there are big questions about Chinese licensing and half the League looks afraid to commit to a roster, we may finally be seeing the end of OWL. If it does die it will have lasted two years longer than I thought it would when it was starting up, so still a good run.

I haven't been reading much at all. I've been working through a book Bloodied Pages. It's a crime mystery book where a guy convinces his friend to go and steal a set of Curtis' North American Indian. It's sort of interesting and well researched as far as rare books go, but also silly in how the characters behave and how the prose is constructed. Everyone gets introduced by way of a nightmare and the conceit gets worn into the ground after the fifth character or so. And the motive is that the thief wants to steal and destroy a Curtis set because his dad used to beat him up, and his dad beat him up because /his/ dad sucked, and /his/ dad sucked because Curtis stole his photos. This doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever and I feel like the book is sort of suggesting that this is a reasonable thing to do.

I watched one episode of 1899 and it was fine. My roommates were watching and convinced me to try because they said that the Japanese ladies in the preview were actually Cantonese trying to fake it, which piqued my interest, but the watched 5 episodes without me and I don't care enough to catch up. I might watch a little more if I have nothing else to do, but honestly, I have a lot to do.

I was sick recently so was desperate for something I could just lie and stare at, and ended up rewatching Blood of Zeus. I think a lot of people don't like that show, but I actually enjoy it a lot. I like the Greek myth setting, and the way it's approached, where the gods are all messy as all fuck. I basically root for Hera and Seraphim the whole way through. Get fucked, Zeus. Is the voice acting and direction a little mediocre? Yes. Is the animation a little cheap, yes. Do I enjoy it when Hera makes Seraphim kneel? Yes. Is Hermes hot? Yes.

Saw the Glass Onion and The Last of Sheila too. Saw those with the roommates and we all enjoyed them both. I think Knives Out was the better of the two Rian Johnson movies, but The Glass Onion was still fun, and there were still a lot of little moments where foreshadowing paid off. The Last of Sheila is an old ass movie that Johnson cited as inspiration for his mysteries, so we watched that on Netflix after. It was also very good, and I think better with the twists and turns than The Glass Onion was, but it has a classic homophobic trope that I won't spoil but made things hilarious in a sad way. There's also a point where one of the characters is revealed to be a child molester, and the whole movie kind of shrugs it off. Which was also hilarious in a sad way. We were cracking jokes about how it was real hard for everyone to admit to being a shoplifter or a child molester, they just couldn't decide which was worse. It's definitely a show of it's time, but if you like old mysteries it was fun despite that.

A couple days ago Valheim got a major patch so all my friends are jumping back in. I'm joining them, but I don't really have much time to dedicate to chopping down trees. I feel guilty talking about media I spent time consuming over the past few months when I also am like "ahhh I have so much stupid adult stuff to do" but it is what is. Most of the time when I am doing something leisurely it's because I'm actively ignoring the serious deadline I have looming, and I've got about 4 of them right now, so that's been a bit rough of my nerves. I'm afraid to look at the beginning of the year posts cause they're all going to be about shit I wanted to a achieve but didn't. Oh well.