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Pretty Good Hat

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I played the demo of Lamplighters League yesterday. It’s a fun mix of real-time stealth and turn-based tactics that looks like a great adventure in the full game. The demo is available for another couple of days, so consider checking it out, gamers!

I chanced across this old post about how my kid played Breath of the Wild, recently. Well, they’re keeping up that style: they started playing Elden Ring last week, and beat the game today. One week! I’m months into that game and nowhere near finishing it. All this, after starting Tears of the Kingdom weeks after I did, totally bogarting my Switch and beating the game after profoundly breaking all its mechanics to their will.

I’m so deeply disheartened at Vice’s shutting down of Waypoint. It has been such a source of insight and joy. If its strong patron-supported model of critique and community can’t survive – and let’s be clear, it’s not that it didn’t make money; it didn’t make enough money for some small group of assholes to care enough to keep it on the books – then… well, fuck capitalism, go home.

The next few weeks of podcasts are going to sad bangers.

Screenshot of a pixel-style game showing a party of player characters on the right side and a giant floating monster with rays of light emanating from it, on the left.

I’m really having a good time with Chained Echoes. This was the first pretty hard boss and I had to think about how to handle it, revising my tactics and leveling up my party a bit more before I successfully finished it off. This is a great Steam Deck game for kicking back on the sofa.

An animated gif showing a set of growing bars measuring Destiny 2 weapon usage

I’ve had a really nice hobby R coding weekend, learning to use {gganimate} to make plots like this. I’ve been re-tooling all my old piles of fish scripts that I’ve used to gather my Destiny data from the game’s API. Now I have a useful pair of quarto notebooks that retrieve data using parallel processing and produce this kind of output. I’m super enthused by what I’ve learned!

Screenshot of a web application showing two items selected from a form field. They are circled in bright purple marker with an arrow pointing to them to draw the eye.

I finished a big update to Armorer this week, to enable inclusion of subclass fragments in stat calculations. I learned a ton with this release and laid good groundwork for additional mod management. I’m pretty pleased!

Somewhere in south-central Utah, listening to this episode of Waypoint Radio, my wife said, “Hmm, Motorsport Manager sounds pretty neat.” She, who rarely plays video games at all, turns out to be an absolute star at it. (No surprise, of course; she is an extraordinary manager of many things.) We had a great time learning and playing it yesterday. What will happen to our ex-driver turned manager, Han Portlandia, and her scrappy young team? We’ll find out more today!

🎮 I got to spend a few hours this weekend laying siege to the new dungeon that was released in Destiny 2 on Friday. Today, my team and I finished it! It’s the first time I’ve been able to play new, hard content at release and without any prior knowledge of it – and to actually complete it! I’m really happy that I got to do it, and I really enjoyed the time with my team to figure it all out together and successfully make our way through it.