YouTube Obsession
CairnBuilder has some of the best thumbnails on Youtube:
I’m not sure how favorable they are to the almighty algo but I enjoy them. His videos range from genre and trope breakdowns (He has an upcoming video on “Mom games”) to streams of mechanics intensive strategy games like Conquest of Elysium and Dominions.
Anyway, he just did a really great look at the first Geneforge game. A game I have been wanting to play for a long time.
I’m going to describe his humor as “Soft Edgelord” which strikes a perfect balance for me.
Reading
The joys of have undiagnosed ADHD is that tend to go down some holes whenever I hear a term that fascinates me. Most recently, the phrase “Sympathetic powder” came on my radar and I just had to know everything about it and it lead me to this article on JSTOR.
Basically, alchemists believed that hurting people hurt people so much that they would treat a sword for for injuries it had caused. So, if a knife cut your hand open, some doctors rub Sympathetic Powder on the knife to treat your wounds. WILD.
This article lead me to Friedrich Helvetius and his account of turning lead into gold using a shard of a true philosopher stone. The story has a pretty sick title: The Golden Calf, Which the World Adores, and Desires.
The story, as ol Friedrich tells it, is that a strange man came to his workshop claiming to have a shard of THE philosopher stone. In a very John Smith of the Mormons kinda way, Friedrich has tons of reasons why this guy was not seen by anyone else and he no longer has access to the shard. It’s most likely bullshit but it’s also a fun story and some consider it the earliest depiction of the Men in Black.
ANYWAY, I was only able to find a copy of the The Golden Calf on Project Gutenburg. A site that I love, its the only way I have read any public domain authors, like Balzac and Victor Hugo. However, I have a hard time with the layout of its books in a web browser. It hurts my eyes after awhile so I went to freemediaheckyeah to find an alternative.
Enter Yomu, a simple, free, DRM free eReader for phones and tablets. My favorite feature of the this reader is that you can opt to scroll the text rather than flip pages. For some reason, my brain believes that scrolling to read on a phone is better than swiping pages.
So the lesson here is to follow the rabbit holes, use free software to consume free media and when someone says they can turn lead into gold (metaphorically or literally) they are probably selling bullshit.
Playing
Over the past few weeks over at my twitch channel I have been playing steam demos until I get tired of them or they destroy my computer…
Before Drop Command wiped out my computer I was really enjoying my time with it. So what made it so good? The game appears to running a simplified game of BattleTech: Campaign Operations allowing the player to run their own mech company: Taking contracts, building mechs, hiring new pilots and searching star systems for jobs across a huge galaxy. There’s also a lot of player customization which I find essential for games like this.
Then there’s the graphics, the whole aesthetic, really playing off the low poly games of the mid 90s. It looks like the original Star Fox. I was hoping that this lower graphical fidelity would ease the load on my computer but it appears even this is too much.
Easily my favorite games of the demos I’ve played and I believe I’ve only scratched the surface of all mechanics that will be available at 1.0.
Other Notables
**
