i started this up a month ago with the naive hope of blazing through it to be ready for avowed but i pretty quickly realized this wasn’t something i wanted to speed through. i told myself avowed will be there for me when i’m ready to play it, so i savored pillars of eternity 2 deadfire and goddamn dude. god damn dude. some good fucking food!!
i loved the first one so i had no doubt i’d be into the sequel, but i just didn’t expect it to hit so much harder for me. it’s so narratively dense and rich without feeling impenetrable. the variety on display in character depth is masterful, i truly felt bad swapping some of my favorites out for certain quests because i would MISS them. and the game’s overarching philosophical and religious themes around mortal self-determination and agency, the gods’ duty to mortals, and what faith means in the light of this all is just brilliant.
gonna start doing monthly recaps of my last.fm history as a fun way to catalog and expand upon listening habits and whatever whims i indulged.
random thoughts looking at the collage:
my friend bryn and i swap music because he’s a baby and i’m an old man, it’s a good learning experience. most recently he sent me tierra whack’s “whack world” and it’s really great. an experiment in building a 15-minute album out of 1-minute songs, she showcases a pretty broad range and skill in focusing on what can hook you in a short period. so many of them could easily be blown up into 3-minute songs if she wanted to. she also made an impressive 15-minute video for the album, that was actually how i experienced it the first time. highly recommend. faves: cable guy, hungry hippo, silly sam, fruit salad, pretty ugly
i didn’t listen to “GNX” much when it came out, but kendrick lamar’ssuperbowl half-time show lit that fire in me and it hit my rotation hard. dude’s on top of the world. faves: squabble up, luther, hey now, tv off, heart pt.6
i’ve got a post in my drafts to go a bit deeper on the pillows, but they’re an all-time favorite of mine and the news of them breaking up after 35 years had me down bad.
rosé’s debut album “rosie” is alright but the taylorswiftification of pop music is fuckin real. faves: toxic till the end, APT., dance all night
i love charli xcx but will forever believe “true romance” is her best album and forever be curious about what a future around that charli would’ve sounded like. faves: nuclear seasons, you (ha ha ha), what i like, black roses, you’re the one
a discord pal mentioned a short freeware game called hero core during a bigger conversation the server was having around combat design and i thought, what the hell, why not, it’s saturday, let’s download this bad boy and give it a go.
the dying light of the big app-based social internet is pushing a lot of people i know back to blogging. it’s something i used to do across a variety of platforms (livejournal, vox, myspace) before microblogging took over (facebook, twitter, tumblr, cohost) but always as part of some other network, never something i just did on my own platform.
giving this a shot not because i think i write particularly well, but because i’d like to get better at it and see if it’s a satisfying outlet for whatever junk comes to mind.
additionally, and maybe actually most importantly, i want a place that is truly mine. bluesky can be fun but it’s just twitter and that won’t change. my portfolio site is self-hosted, sure, but that’s hardly a creative space itself. this can actually be an outlet.
