So on the 17th of July I became 12 years sober, this is also the 2 year anniversary Metal Monday, wild! I am in awe of everyone in my life today.

I am grateful for everyone who reads, thank you!

YouTube Obsession

I am a registered Warhammer 40k fan but I’m mainly a slut for the lore, books and video games.

Poorhammer Podcast talks about every aspect of 40k gaming but mostly focuses on the table-top side of the hobby. Though I have zero plans to play the game I do love when knowledgeable people talk about their interests entertainingly.

The show also is worth watching on YouTube because they a really well edited with relevant visuals.

Watching

We live in a universe where everything is made by Ryan Murphy. And if you watch the first and second season of his American Crime series you can understand why. The People vs O.J. Simpson is a masterful piece of American lore-making. Adapting Jeffery Toobin’s The Run of His Life, the show mixes conjecture, fact and myth into a near-camp exploration of celebrity, race and the American Justice System. Absolutely perfect television.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace is a queer history the American delusion. The camp is skyrocketed in the 4th dimension just by casting Penelope Cruz as Donatella Versace.

I watched the 3rd season in 2021 Impeachment as it was coming out and I enjoyed it I guess, just didn’t hit the same highs as the previous season.

Because I recently read A Vast Conspiracy the Jeffery Toobin book the season is based on, I re-watched with my partner who had not seen it before. I was merely a tween when the scandal was happening (My partner was even younger) so there was a lot I could not understand at the time but I remember it being incredibly confusing. It turns out, that’s exactly how it was. The series suffers because there is some much and it went on for so long, compiling the interesting parts for the show muddled the context. The weakest of the 3 seasons but that’s a high bar.

Of course the show has incredible acting and is worth watching just to see the performances. Particularly I love Mira Sorvino as Marcia Lewis, she has an element of chaos to her that is palpable.

Reading

As mentioned above, I love reading Warhammer 40k books and lore. It’s fun. As far as novels go however I’ve only read about the Imperium of Man. I’m a human, I can relate with humans, even if they are bio engineered Space Marines. I’ve never read any books that explore the other factions.

But, as I wasting time in a Barns and Noble before a movie I went to check out the sci-fi section. Sometimes you can find Warhammer books that are hard to find 2nd hand but have somehow lingered, tucked away on some random bookstore shelf. This time I didn’t find anything rare but I did find a copy of The Infinite and the Divine by Robert Rath. The book is always out at the library and the audiobook is like $36¹ so seeing on the shelf for $10, I figured why not.

The book explores the Necron faction, an ancient race of reanimated space skeletons. The main hook for me is that they are so old that even the oldest races in the 40k universe have no memory of them until they suddenly start to show up again.

So far the main character Trazyn is on his billion-year mission to catalog the galaxy, to make a complete compendium of it’s contents. This leads to Faustian deals to acquire said knowledge and I love a doomed character trying to outsmart or outrun their situation.

Fast and fun light reading I’m sure I’ll finish it fairly quickly.

Playing

So I recently got back into playing Cyberpunk 2077. I played the game of PS4, it was a tragedy.

I eventually played the game on PS5 and enjoyed my time with it. Then almost immediately after I finished my first play through CD Projekt RED released the biggest overhaul patch the game has had since release. Along side this patch was the Phantom Liberty DLC² .

The DLC went on sale last week so I’ve been jumping in and really enjoying the updates to the progression system and the game running smoother overall. It still helps to shutdown the game after playing for extended periods. This technique helped with The Witcher 3 when I would experience laggy gameplay or glitches in that game as well.

I’ve mentioned many times before that if a game offers a way to stealth missions I will always choose stealth. Having already played the stealth style I’m going against my nature with a full-on unga-bunga melee character this time. I’m really enjoying it and it helps that game feels faster when I’m not stopping to crouch-walk every five feet.

But wow, they really tried with this game. It’s far from perfect but they put a lot in this game I’m surprised it works at all. It continues to have a weird relationship with sex in the world; It’s everywhere and celebrated but also used as a signifier for rampant hedonism and evil characters. It’s a huge game with a lot of issues. Breaking news I know.

I’ve heard the DLC is good and will report back when I get to it in 100 hours.

Other Notables

** Buffoonery this complete would be funny if it weren’t so disgusting.

** Sometimes we all need a light listicle.

** Cringeworthy comedy(?) from early Tom Green but an interesting artifact of the era nonetheless.

1  And Black Library does not give libraries access to their audiobooks. BOO!

2  I cannot, for the life of me, ever remember the name of the DLC, I always call it Liberty City or Liberty Valance