I’ve had a rather nice week last week, not that much happening really, but I was in a good mood, and things have been going pretty well. I had to get some new shoes on Friday as my old ones were getting holes that were too big to ignore in them. My new pair is not really agreeing well with my feet still, so it’s not the most comfortable, but I hope that will get better with time, usually they just need some more time to get walked in.

Books

I fininshed off reading Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, and it was a good book, mostly enjoyed it, I didn’t get as annoyed with the landscape description as most people seem to be annoyed by, it was more the fact that we followed the worst characters that I really didn’t like, and the good ones didn’t get that much time. It really sped up around the last 100 pages though, and there was some fun stuff happening that I really enjoyed. All in all a pretty good book, and I think it probably works well for what it seems to be intended to do, make communism more palatable to americans. But I didn’t really need that. Hopefully with that ground work laid we will get to enjoy the next book with less annoying american white men who will save the world, or at least think they are trying.

As my next one I need at least a book break before I start on the next mars book I found that I have Provenence by Ann Leckie, I can’t even remember having gotten it, and had little clue about what it is or anything, and I think I will try to read as little as possible about it before reading it, so I dived in, and I’m kind of intrigued, it’s a side book to her other Imperial Radch books, it will be fun to see it more from a bit of a different perspective. So far from the 30 or so pages that I read yesterday it seems pretty good.

Games

I started A Solitaire Mystery last week, and I finished it as well, it’s a fun little solitaire game with a goofy spy story, and it’s fun for the amount of the story it takes, I had a good time with this one.

I played a bit of Grapple Dog Which is a really fun kind of throwback platformer, and I’m enjoying myself a lot swinging around on the levels, I beat the second boss this week, and it was quite a fun one, still not focusing too much on collectibles, there seem to be quite a lot of fun stuff to do once it’s finished as well, with time attack courses and so on, there is a lot in this game, and a lot more than I expected from the first glance, pretty solid.

It was the release of the early access of Slay the Spire II this week, so I started to play some Slay the Spire again, I’m still as bad at it as I used to be, but it’s fun to tinker with and I really like the “work with what you got” mentality of it. I don’t quite know why, but the art is less off putting to me this time than the last time I played it, the second one is beautiful, maybe that was something that made me appreciate it more, I think I will still at least play a couple of runs and see, maybe I’ll be able to be less then absolutely atrocious at the game, and being able to enjoy myself a bit more.

I finished The Room which I got for really cheap on my phone earlier this year, and it’s a bit meh, I liked some of the puzzles, when you got to puzzle around with them, but the whole hiding things around on the box where you just have to tap around until something reacts is not really fun for me, so a lot of the time it’s just looking at the hint to see what they did to hide something away this time rather than having fun working on puzzles.

And at last I did start Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons Another try to actually enjoy a Zelda game, I don’t really have too much fun with the 3D ones, at least the ones I’ve tried, and starting with a gameboy colour one seemed like a good idea to me, and I’ve been having fun with it for an hour or so at least, it’s pretty impressive what they have managed to get out of the hardware, and I’m enjoying it for now at least, let’s see if I get a bit farther here than what I have come before.

Media

There has been a bit of slay the spire II stuff at the end of the week, and it’s good since I feel like I’m not really that invested in mewgenics stuff anymore, since it’s a genre that doesn’t really interest me much. I also started to watch a series about Paradise Killer that has been quite delightful, it really seems like a weird game with heart, and is more or less a prequel to Promise Mascot Agency which I played last year and really had a great time with. It feels like paradise killer is a game which is really more fun to play coach coop, or having someone to bounce off of, I really like the styling and over the top-ness of it though, it’s great.

I’ve been having a lot of podcasts bunching up, so I did a bit of triage on saturday, and listened to quite a lot of them, getting my queue from 50 at the start down to 30 now, which feels more managable, lots of good stuff, so I deleted out stuff that I wasn’t really that interested in, which I might take up again later in case there is a lull again, I’m just happy that there is a lot of fun stuff to listen to again, after it was a bit meager a couple of weeks there.