-9. Father was an abusive alcoholic monster who ruined friendships and activities like baseball by fighting with parents early on in life. My mother was/is a workaholic with a tendency to be neglectful of emotions as I got older. I was often left alone to care for my younger brothers. Brothers who left to their own devices became little monsters themselves by falling into drugs and alcohol both before 14.

My childhood ended at 14. I’m 33 now at probably the lowest point of my life. Because, except for my Dad, we still live together. All those years in between 14 and now I learned to cope by reducing myself to nothing. Be quiet. Don’t move. Stay in my room. Don’t be a burden. Unfortunately I’m at two extremes where I feel safest in that reduced state but everything in me wants to leave. Even if it means living in the streets. That’s my trap. That’s how my childhood has me by the throat even now.

SimCity 4 and Factorio.

I absolutely detest the practice of saying the “the proper nouns of the world,” i.e the Tom Brady’s of the world. Or the Empire State buildings of the world. First off, it’s a proper noun. The implication of a proper noun is there is only one specific instance. Second, that’s diminishing to the proper noun used by lowering that status to the mean. Last, it’s usually used in a sports context to unnecessarily group up a bunch of players even though we already know the context of why they’re being grouped up for comparison. It’s just fucking dumb. It really grinds my gears.

This explanation helps a lot. I was watching Maxamillion_Dood play online and it seemed like every other track they selected was random. And when it wasn’t he clearly didn’t know what lap they started on. Like the race would be over the first time they crossed the finish line. Everytime that happened Max was confused. Even to me as a viewer that seemed weird. I couldn’t tell what was going on either. First time I ever watched a Mario Kart game and had a hard time telling what was going on.

I was on broadcast crews for sports events. I started out doing camera then worked my way up to graphics. As cool and fun as that job was there’s major caveats to it. You need multiple jobs in this field to make any money. You can’t just coast at one place and expect to make bank. You have to hustle back and forth between gig after gig. This was just for college. Pros are even worse. I knew people getting gigs with my favorite pro teams and they’d say stuff like " we only got 2 dates this month" and that’s with avails given upto 6 months in advance. I was told for one arena that the group there is very clicky and the only way to get into it is to wait for someone to die. I know guys who would spend a weekend in Philly just to book it up to New York for a few days then fly down to Florida for the next weekend. It’s a real hustle, with potentially no down time, and crap pay. It’s an amazing gig of you’re fresh out of college and have the energy for it. Unfortunately life put a couple road blocks in my way and I had to give it up for my own sanity.

I agree that it still needs a cooking, but what’s there is already so good. Salmon is great raw or cooked.

For video games, Ostranauts. It’s the perfect space survival sim IMO. You wake up on an industrial salvage station and get a ship. Then you fly to derelict ships and scrap them for money and parts. Build up your own ship and travel farther and farther out. It’s jank as fuck to learn but once you get it down it’s the type of game where you put on music then just go for hours and hours. It’s early access and a lot is changing but the core gameplay loop is so addicting already.

For tabletop games, Infinity. It’s the best miniatures skirmish game I’ve ever played. The rules are deep but tight. The number of minis you put on the table is just right to me. List building is the best of any game I ever played. The rules are free. The app is free. The miniatures are the best out of any wargame I’ve ever played. It’s just a shame that people are so locked into Games Workshop that they don’t see other games as an option. Like I had a couple friends get hardcore into it but never more than that. And at the height of it’s popularity at our store we had one of the best players on the East coast play in a tournament. That was a sight to behold. Like I’m not a tourney player at all for any game. Watching the number 1 east coast player do his thing was the most inspired I ever was to become a tournament player.

Try it. It’s a fantastic game. I think the newest version that came out on Steam is the way to go but a lot of people still recommend the PSP Version if you wanna emulate it. Or you can go all the way back to the SNES version. I don’t think there’s a bad version of the game but there are definitely better versions of the game.

Tactics Ogre. I see people drop Final Fantasy Tactics as the greatest tactics game of all time. Then you always see Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, and Disgaea after. People sleep on Tactics Ogre. It’s a mechanically superior game to all of the mentioned. It’s story is equally as good as FFT. I think the graphics are better. It’s a challenging game from the start. FFT was created with the Tactics Ogre director and lead artist to be a more accessible version of TO. People see 90s golden era Final Fantasy and automatically put FFT on a pedestal. TO is like Undertaker stalking AJ Styles ready to obliterate whatever is in its way.

Working my way through act 2 of Baldur’s Gate 3. I feel like I’ve done just about everything in the Temple of Shar except the ::: spoiler spoiler fight against Balthazar. :::I tried it a couple times but got whooped a little too easily. Shadowheart is a beast though. She’s usually the last one alive when I try it. She can take out all the mobs by herself. It’s gonna take the whole squad to win the fight. I need to get my party up a level or two. Me being a defenseless bard is pretty tough. In all my attempts I’ve been sniped turn one with little recourse to get revived.

Then on top of that I’ve put time in AI Wars 2 and fighting games. AI Wars 2 is so cool. Complete information overload and a wonky UI but it’s got the addicting qualities I like in video games.

Tekken has been calling me as like a stress reliever. Then the Marvel announcement yesterday made me fire up Strive and SF6. I might put real effort into Strive this time. I’ve always wanted to but it’s never quite clicked like SF, and Tekken. And yes I installed DBFZ out of sheer joy yesterday. That rollback better be good.

My brother got Loser down one of his sideburns. Everybody uses it against him every once in a while.

The new Deafheaven album is amazing.

Snooze - I Know How You Will Die - Out of left field discovery. They have a really diverse sound scape. It’s mostly metal but does a good job of not following a set genre of metal.

BCNR - Forever Howlong - is a grower, not a shower. At first I didn’t really like Tyler’s songs because she left absolutely no room for anything to breath. But I’ve done a 180 on them as I find her voice so soothing.

I can pop my right peck on command. I can pop my left peck only if I concentrate as hard as possible.

This and the level of free speech that came with it is really needed right now. I don’t mean free speech in a go tell someone you disagree with to fuck their aunt type of way. I mean having real deep hard conversations about organizing and enabling movements. It feels like the Internet is scared of that because of monetization and content policies that have chopped the balls off of any form of organization or resistance. Like there’s so much shit I wish I could say but some mod policy kills it with a pinned post at the top of the comment section before I can even begin typing out my thoughts.

Yeah, I put many hours into it. It’s a blast.

Because Cities Skylines 2 is such a letdown I’ve been trying Timberborn and wanna start Songs of Syx. City builders are my staple but it’s been years since I’ve caught the same high as when I played Sim City 4. CS1 was great but SC4 is still the best city builder game ever made IMO.

Tekken 8. I love fighting games too. Street Fighter 6 is great but I fell off that game hard. Capcom is way to slow to do anything with the game. It’s really easy to get bored with it.

After that I really wanna go back and finish BG3. I spent a lot of time in act 1 and barely touched it after that. I don’t know why I dropped it. I was having a blast. I guess that’s ADHD or something.

Be careful with Subnautica. I lost 75 hours of my life in the blink of an eye to that game. It’s easily one of the best survival horror adventure games ever made.

Terraria is also up there. Once you play it you never really need to try another side scrolling 2D Minecraft like game again.

I was able to pick up Street Fighter and Baldur’s Gate before I left my job. They’be been holding me for months now. Two of the best games to come out this year are real life savers when I’m stressed the fuck out.

I’m on a Ryzen 7700x with 32gb or ram and a rx5700xt GPU. I average about 25fps on low to medium settings at 1440p. It’s not the best, but it’s playable.

Performance issues aside, it’s a much better city management game than CS1. The progression system is fantastic. There’s a lot to learn when growing your city. The wonderful part is you can really go at your own pace. I got a 15k pop city and barely touched some of the mid game tech yet. It’s not forcing me to upgrade like my city will come to a halt. It really is the best combination of management and city building we’ve had since SimCity4.

That being said there are some sore spots. Maps with bumpy terrain are a pain in the ass. It feels like I’ve done more terraforming in 10 hours of CS2 than 500 I clocked in CS1. That’s how ridiculous the terrain system can be. I have no clue what they were thinking making the terrain so janky in this game. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not game breaking. It’s more of an inconvenience. Like I have to spend meaningful time terraforming large chunks of the map to get good land. Even after that it still comes out janky. To my understanding it’s all about the map. Like maps added later in development were flatter and I picked one of the rough early maps. It’s still a jank system.The way buildings lay on terrain abd morphs the land is bad and needs to be looked at.

As good as the road tools are, they’re finicky. It’s probably because I don’t have the muscle memory for it yet, but I spend a lot of time micro moving roads into place to get the right connection. The node based system is great, but takes some getting used to.

Balance seems off to me. My industry demand is always on max. I’ll build out an area and it goes away just to pop right back to max once the new buildings are running. Then I look at the numbers and they don’t make sense. 10 workers for a factory is way to little. I end up having whole neighborhoods of nothing but factories. It’s annoying. When in reality there might be a few factories here and there, they each employ thousands of people and take up little space. Where as this game has you building full factory cities because each building employs no more than 20 people. It’s another thing that needs to be adjusted imo.

Those are the only things I have to complain about the game so far. During my first extended playthrough I thought it really felt like SimCity4. I was blasting the SC4 soundtrack when playing it, but the progression system felt familiar. It adds so much to the game. It gives you a sense of accomplishment when you see your work means something. And there’s a lot of levels a city can reach. There’s always gonna be something to work towards. Performance wise, it could be better. Hopefully it gets sorted out in the coming months.

City builders have always been the type of games where once you get sick of the soundtrack, you put on your own music. I’ve barely listened to the CS2 tracks because I’ve been blasting Simcity 3K, 4 and metal the whole time.