i’ve made a dumb website for my custom domain. hooray.
i registered the domain for e-mail but it might as well have a site on it too. i thought it would be cute to curate a list of video games i’d like to play, which will mostly be strategy and board games that are too cumbersome and will never happen.
i’ll probably maybe blog about the games i’m playing sometimes? or other things? unlikely.
anyway i also want to test a video embed so i have a silly dragon clip for you
edit: i later decided that embedding full size youtube videos wasn’t pretentious enough so now i’m trying fancy links that open them in a special lightbox
I don’t know. What do I have to write about? Do I have an interesting opinion about anything? Would my anxiety even permit me to post an interesting opinion online if I did?
This website is my mid-life crisis. I’ve spent nearly my whole existence being passionate – pretty much strictly about games. It just seems like I should probably do something besides only playing them. Plus that whole human desire to leave something behind after I go – thing, and I’m not buying my name on an Ohio State University building at this rate.
Avowed was very OK. OK? Listen. I’m not one of the great minds of our time. When I finish a book I don’t find that all the knowledge and morals have slipped to the tip of my tongue. I enjoyed the book or I didn’t. I may or may not be able to conjure two other works to call it a ‘cross between.’
I have thoughts, but I’ll not be organizing them into a viral youtube video essay any time soon. They’re just in there doing their thing. Wispy spirits gliding around my subconscious; Convincing me to stop and pet the dog; Guiding my hand to help a stranger in need; Whispering that the murderous fire paladin lady must die.
That one was a game reference in case you didn’t play it. Anyway, I think the most telling data from my time with Avowed goes as such:
Basically the more I played the more I just wanted to get it over with. Now I’m not immediately suggesting that this is a fault of the game itself. There are a few factors at play here.
I am, at the time of this writing, 39 years old, and I generally don’t have the same patience for a game as I did as a child. Japanese RPGs are pretty much off the table at this point, though I did manage to complete Persona 3 a couple years ago, a feat which to me is doubly impressive considering my usual sensitivities towards aging graphics. To be fair though – I can still farm and gather with the best of them if I’m gripped by a particularly satisfying MMO, especially if PVP is involved. I’d like to expand upon my ridiculous requirements to being interested in a game eventually.
Shifting this more towards the positive, I quite liked the story, and my desire to reach the finale definitely influenced my behavior. It turns out that ignoring side-quests is safer and easier than skipping pages in a book.
I will refrain from discussing much of the game systems considering my blatant disregard of them. I liked the style of combat at first, remarking it as Skyrim the Arcade Game, but eventually grew tired of it, noting how unnatural the enemy melee attacks felt, zipping them long distances around the battlefield with each swing.
In the end, I have no regrets playing the game nor with utilizing it’s difficulty slider. Especially considering it only set me back 12 dollars for a month of PC Game Pass. In fact despite the matte review, I would play through it again, for example, to refresh my knowledge of the series for a new installment. The various crucial story decisions the game affords makes for a more personal experience than watching a collection of cutscenes like I might be tempted to do with a more linear game. I really might play it again on the highest difficulty just for that dumb achievement. It's not a bad game! I just didn’t end up with a lot of great things to say about it, and maybe that’s a me problem.
heroes of the storm is? was? my favorite and most-played competitive game for sure. it’s just something special. this shot was from when something happened with a ranked season reset and it put me down in silver when i had been in high diamond and i had to crawl back up. this ended up being extremely challenging as i consider myself a player that was very good at filling in strategies and contributing to teamwork, making a team more than the sum of it’s parts, but without the raw skill or leadership to carry a team in the lower leagues.
i love strategy games, especially multiplayer board/card games, and root is a really good one. i was pretty excited to win my first online multiplayer match. every turn-based game should have async play btw.
this was the 2019 cod: modern warfare i think? they added the ground war mode which was 32v32 which is my jam. i generally don’t like small team games with the toxicity and pressure that comes with them, so games like battlefield and planetside are my favorites, as well as halo big team battles and the goats like tribes 2.
this was just beating up ai opponents in stellaris nexus, now called just nexus 5x i think. as per usual it’s a very good strategic and social digital board game that won’t be popular and will make me sad
the vanilla launch of alterac valley will probably remain my favorite pvp experience, this dumb screenshot was from some recent retail expansion match and lasted 23 minutes, probably longer than average these days
i want to post and store random pictures and screenshots somewhere without any hassle and for free because i’m ridiculous, but that pretty much just means social media and then you have to choose one and choosing a social media provider feels like you’re making some sort of lasting political decision with far-reaching i m p l i c a t i o n s.
i looked at tumblr for the first time some how and thought it might actually be the best social media platform in 2024 but i made this site to be a blog so having a separate blog just for pictures feels silly.
i’ve known for a while that i should just do an s3 bucket but i’m a noob at this stuff and i have this fear that some hackerman is going to randomly target me and make a bunch of malicious image requests or something and run up a huge bill?
anyway i found out cloudflare has this r2 storage which is basically s3 and this site is already hosted for free on cloudflare pages so i went with them. i’m a cloudflare stan. with traffic like mine it’ll be free as long as the hackermen don’t come for me.
edit: i replaced the screenshot and wow .webp files are magic, they compress further and look way better than optimized jpegs or pngs. apparently i should look into jpeg xl as well
edit2: well that was fun. anyway i think i’ve decided that images and video embeds look dumb on this site that i’ve styled to be low-key and icon heavy. i’m working to make targeted little sections and individual words be fun and just blasting screenshots takes away from my silly little art project. i think i’m just going to have fancy text links that will bring up a lightbox of whatever i’m trying to talk about
