It’s been another way too warm week, so sweat is running all the time, at least the weekend was at least half way decent, got some cool wind at least if nothing else, but still not great when it comes to weather. Also finally got my vacation signed off at work, and next week I’m heading up towards my family, and visiting home again for the first time in a long while, so that’s hopefully going to be nice. I think it will be, but I don’t really have any feeling of it before right before, I have my tickets, and vacation papers, so everything is there, still it doesn’t feel like it’s happening, at least not yet. I will probably be writing next week, and then have a week off writing, or writing very late in that week I will be back towards the end of that one. Let’s see.

Books

I finished off Dissidence by Ken MacLeod, the first book of the Corporation Wars series, and I really enjoyed the book. The characters were really good and I think that’s what did it for me. They were fun to be around, and the philosophical musings were great as well. From what I heard of the author I had been expecting the books to be more explicitly political. But to me they don’t feel that much like that at all, so it was a way less heavy read than what I expected. Lot’s of fun though, and looking forward to continue on with the series. I still kind of want to read something more explicitly revolutionary which might come in Fall Revolution, at least from the name, which I also have, but there will be a while until I get that far in my reading.

The next one that I’m almost finished with now with only 30 pages or so left is You Robot by J.S. Morin, number 12 in the series. I do enjoy it still, it’s a fun series, but I kind of see how it’s starting to run a bit dry now, I enjoy the books and the characters still, but something kind of feels like it’s moving towards an end we’ll just see if it ends with a bang, or fizzles out. I’m pretty sure I’ll get through it today, and then it’s on to the next Nicola Claire book, and I’m really looking foreward to that, as the last one in the series felt like it was kind of a return back to form.

Games

Over the week I’ve mostly been playing Siralim the spread-sheet creature collector, it’s just a really comfortable grind, and it’s a series of games that just leans in to my peculiar kind of being, it’s just fun for me, a nice place where you spend some time grinding, seeing how your team performs, then some time managing back at base where you see what you can tweak to make the team a bit better, and then it’s back out again. It’s grindy, it’s kind of basic looking, but it’s just a lot of fun I find.

I’ve also been plugging away with Hexceed Which is basically no guess minesweeper with hexagons, and some extra kinds of hints some places. It’s a nice not so mind braking kind of puzzle, and it’s on my switch which is nice, I like doing sudoku variants, but it’s a bit annoying to have to be on my phone, the whole touch interface thing just isn’t that great. This is a fun light puzzle that I can do also when my mind feels a bit fried on the evening, which is nice.

I also had another go at starting In Other Waters which is a wonderful little game, it’s basically an interface game, where you’re the AI in a space suit, and you help the human that is with you exploring a new planet, and slowly categorising the flora and fauna and stuff around you. It’s a really wonderful game that is fun to play, my only problem with it is that it kinds of needs the sound as well, which means that it’s not a game I can play while doing something else, if I tried I think that I would miss so much as a lot of it happens in small text boxes around the screen, it’s a really great example of how real life graphics are not needed at all to create an engrossing world.

And at last I also did play some Fields of Mistria, which is a lot of fun, it’s basically another version of star dew valley, or at least so far it’s been, the characters are different, and I would say that the character writing it was puts this one apart from SDW quite a bit, they feel a bit more lifelike and reactive than in that game. There are also a couple of things that it seems to have been taking from Animal Crossing, and there are some systems that I haven’t found yet. There is also this really nice feeling of rebuilding and helping people that I enjoy a lot. This is a really fun game, and one that just makes me feel good.

Misc

I’ve also been reading a bit more up on things lately, some political theory, and some stuff about being on the autism spectrum, that really has been resonating with me quite a lot. Which has been good, it’s nice getting some names for things that I have felt for a while, and in some ways getting my views reinforced. I don’t really think it’s a bubble thing, as the world around us is the way it is, I get more than enough of the other sides of both these 2 things with having to deal with normal people.

The weather was nice enough that it didn’t kill me going on a bit of a longer walk this saturday, so at least the weekend felt like a weekend again, the only problem is that the sweat and stuff led to me managing to get some chafing wounds that are annoying, just have to wait until they heal for really doing that much of strenous moving around I guess.

This week I will also start preparing getting some more podcast backlog onto my phone, so that I have something to listen to for my travels, I’m quite sure I will have net when I’m back home at my parent’s, but it’s still nice to be prepared. And best of all it does seem like the weather is cooler back home, so that I don’t have to struggle with the heat, at least for a bit over a week.