Another week is through, another one where they were promising rain, and not much was coming, at least the temperatures are a bit better this week than they have been. I’ve kind of had the feeling that I haven’t done much, both through the week and on the weekend, but I think it has been more that I did a lot at work, and my mind was just rather tired over the day, it also has been a week where I’ve been working until 18, so the evenings in general are rather short when I go to sleep at midnight, but it is how it is, and let’s see, maybe this week will be better.

Books

I finished Newton’s Wake by Ken MacLeod, and I had a lot of fun with this book, it was really an interesting book to read, and it had those quite epic story feel that I get from Peter F Hamilton books, just a bit less wordy, and with a bit clearer politic stance. There are also space communists. From what I’ve seen this one is one of his less political books, so I’m looking foreward to starting a series that goes a bit deeper later. The ending was a bit confusing at first until I really thought it through. Fun characters, and a pretty epic story, it was a great ride.

And then I started Collusion Course by J.S. Morin, another one in the series, and it’s feeling more like just a long contiued story for each book that goes along. It’s still fun, and there are some quite interesting character progression. Other than that I don’t really have much to say about this one yet, other than it’s starting to bind together some strings from the other books.

I had a bit of a hang over after the MacLeod book, and it has been a bit harder to get going again, but I hope that now that the routine of a week is starting again it will get a bit easier to continue on reading.

Games

I’ve still been having a lot of fun with Dragon Quest 4: Chapters of the Chosen it’s a really fun story still, and it’s a nice simple loop of grinding, and exploring that just feels good. I’ve now gotten pretty deep into chapter 5, having beaten a demon that took over one of the castles that we got to know in the first story. And I’ve explored most of the map, now I’m trying to gather togeher pieces of a mythic armor to get to meet a dragon lord on a floating island. Pretty epic stuff, but what carries it still is the cozy feel, and the really lovingly done pixel art, the vibes are just great. My emulation device has been kind of acting up some times about the nds though, which has been annoying, I think it has something about charging or weird saving of save states, some times it just doesn’t want to restart from a saved spot and hangs, so I have to restart the whole device a couple of times, and then get a lucky timing in on managing to get into the menu where I can reset the nds emulator. For now I have been trying changing to another game before putting the device to sleep, to see if that helps the issue.

I’ve been tinkering with some of the older Dragon Quest Monsters games, on the gbc, and that led me back into the Siralim games, I have 3 and ultimate, and it feels like one of them will be one that I am in the mood for now on my switch, they are just really nice comfort games to me that feels great to just have that slow loop of tinkering and grinding, it just really works for me, there are quite a bit of systems, and it never forces you into really hard focus on a boss or something, so I can just having fun playing where it feels good, and still make progress, at least now it feels like it will be what I’m focusing on there, while DQ4 Probably will still be the focus.

I also played through Spaceplan on Android, it’s a really fun short incremental game, it’s really nice in that you can finish it in 3-4 days with occasional visits, rather than the normal phone fare of having an endless game that keeps begging you to check in and pay for extra stuff. It being a paid for app that just is there really helps in that regard. It’s a fun little story that doesn’t outlive it’s welcome.

On the 3DS I’ve also played a bit of Shin Megami Tensei 4 not that much, but a bit at least, now slowly on my way to Ikebukuro, it’s still a quite fun game, I just haven’t really been in the mood for the vibe that it has, I’ll probably be back, because it’s really quite a fun game, but just not the vibe for now.

Misc

Slowly I’m getting my podcast queue back in line, so that I’m just one week behind instead of 2, I’m still wanting to get down to under 20 in the queue before I’m adding some backlog episodes, but it’s kind of nice being a bit closer to the current time line, and not lag as much behind.

I spent a bit more time after work this week walking around a bit before going back home, which was pretty nice, some more time to decompress in between really doesn’t hurt, I will probably do that this week as well, depending on how I’m feeling.