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.
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.
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!
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.
I had a good time this weekend coming up with a new way to visualize armor stat distribution in my Destiny 2 profiler tool. 🎮
🎮 Now that I’ve finished Citizen Sleeper, maybe I’ll head back to my long-time Destiny hobby, but maybe … Elden Ring!
I spent a good chunk of my Sunday playing the brilliant Citizen Sleeper. It has this amazing balance of insightful and moving writing, tense mechanics, and gradually revealed countdowns to critical gameplay events. It’s really great!
I’ve had a nice afternoon working on my hobby R/Shiny project, a loadout finder for the game Destiny 2. These improvements make it a lot more flexible and informative: It can now optionally include armor that would otherwise be filtered out of configurations by the minimum stat threshold, and it will show current mods used in displayed loadouts.