I missed out on writing this last week since I was on vacation in Praha, it was nice, but quite stressfull as I wanted to see as many things as possible over the 3-ish days that I had. 120 000 steps in 4 days was tiring though, so I was happy that I had some days afterwards to recover before I was going to work again. Some of the updates probably will be rather large as I still did manage to do some things as well.

Books

I finished off Ancillary Mercy and I really enjoyed the ending of the book, it was kind of a very open ending which was nice, not one of the ones where every single little thread was tied up and then a bow at the end, but it was a really quite enjoyable end to the series all in all.

I also read Exit Strategy, the 4th Murderbot book, and it was very similar to the other ones in the series, it was a fun read, but as normal kind of too short to really feel satisfying.

In Prague I bought A Memory Called Empire which I really enjoyed, reading most of it on the train ride back from Praha, this one felt kind of like a mix between the Meg Pechenick books that I read last year, and Cherryh’s Foreigner series, it was a really enjoyable read, and a nice way to use 9 hours on the train.

And the last one for this section I started reading the next book in what I think is the duology that the last book started A Desolution Called Peace (Wow I kind of feel that’s a very pretentious name, but what goes) And it’s one that is a bit more work to get into than the first one for some reason, but I think this one will be a fun one as well.

Games

I’ve been playing quite a bit of Dead Cells through these weeks, so much so that I’m starting to take some breaks playing some other stuff in between, so that I don’t burn out on a really fun game. I think I have gotten most of the movement upgrades now, so the game is quite a lot more open now than it was, and there really is a lot of stuff in this game, well, I do have all of the four DLCs also so it should have been quite obvious, but I think I have a lot of more hours of fun in this one in between.

I only brought my miyoo mini on my trip, since the switch is a bit too large to bring along, so I started out playing some Super Metroid and got pretty far, it’s fun, and it’s quite impressive how much they got right in that one, it’s just a really well done game.

As I got more tired in my train ride, since I got up at 03:40 in the morning at the end of my trip I was playing mostly some Game and Watch Collection 4 for the GBA, which is just a very nice game to play when my brain is feeling burnt out, I think my favourite of the Game and Watch games is fire, it’s just a really fun one.

I got home from my trip, and I kind of felt in the mood for some creature collector play, so I started a new save in Cassette Beasts which I quite enjoyed, but it felt a bit slow and not really quite for my mood this time, so I didn’t play that long, but I know it’s a really fun game, so I think I will get back to it again, but for now it was just a little bit.

I also played another session of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night and my previous thoughts on this one still mostly stands, it’s still not well optimised for the switch, the movement feels kind of slow and ratchety, the movement is stiff, and quite a few of the areas and enemies feels kind of out of place with the last one, some of the bosses are really fun though and fancy, some times it feels like the switch really is dying trying to render things, and the textures goes down to early youtube resolution.

So I didn’t really end up playing that much of the last one, and figured I’d combine the two, and I started a new save on Monster Sanctuary which I have played a bit of before, but didn’t really get that far in, I really enjoyed starting out with it this time, and I think this will be the one that I will play for a while, and put in some runs of dead cells now and again. It’s a fun mix of metroidvania and creature collector, and while the switch over when you meet an enemy feels a bit abrupt, it’s been quite fun starting out with it again.

Media

I’ve been through a ton of podcasts in my half delirium of wanting to see as much of Prague as possible, the four hour Into the Aether episode about Yakuza 0 was a highlight, I also got through 15 or so episodes from my backlog of Videogame Podtimism and quite a bit of other stuff, some of it feels like it kind of went just through my head as background noise though, in the confusion of being a completely unknown place to me with a different language, and different money, but it was nice to have something that I knew and grounded myself with.

As preparation for my trip to prague I did watch quite a bit of Honest guides to prague on youtube, and I’m happy that I did, it helped me enjoy the trip a lot more, recommending some places to eat, and helped really get me out of the really touristy areas and into the city itself. I ended up walking through many of the wards in the city rather than just the central Prague 1, and it was nice getting out of the way of the tourist machine and see how real people live. The food was also way cheaper there. I ended up using so little money that I had to buy some new shoes to use it all up, which was nice too since I really needed a new pair, the old ones were so used up that I was almost through the soles, and they had holes.