ELSEWHERE

just a couple of guys being pals

also it's my Monday equivalent and I do not want to be a grown-up

Uhhhhhhhhh??????????????

Anyways, in unrelated and happier news, I am enjoying my Steam Deck a lot!!

(I don't think I mentioned it here but I did buy an OLED Steam Deck a few weeks ago, thanks to @mek for advising me on it before I made the purchase)

I've finally been able to dig into a bunch of games I've wanted to play, but haven't because they aren't ported to Xbox/won't be ported anytime soon/probably won't be ported ever because that is an entire process. I spend a lot of my workweek sitting at a desk, so even though my home computer situation is pretty comfortable it's not my preferred gaming setup and I'd much rather be on the couch. Plus it's portable enough that I can, to be frank, take it to work with me and play a bit in-between calls if we're slow. I caught up on my antiquity scrying in ESO that way and have been poking at some fun cozy games like Traveler's Rest and the cute frog game I forget how to spell!

This is extra fortuitous because tbh my desktop Steam has been fussy lately:

I absolutely despise troubleshooting computer issues so I've just been having to restart it a lot

so tl;dr life big and scary and bad, Steam Deck good

this DOES mean that Steam sales will finally be a siren song to me, I've always been immune in the past because I only played a few smattering of games on PC but now it's on and my wishlist already has like five or six games in it, up from zero a few weeks ago

re: Steam Deck I have tried a lot of great games (Luna's Fishing Garden, Traveler's Rest, aforementioned cute frog game I forget how to spell) and today I installed V Rising to try!

It's, okay, I guess, so far,,,,

I was immediately disappointed in the character creator, which has only two body types and they are Dorito-shaped Muscle Man and Pixar Mom:

and don't get me wrong like half my OCs are Dorito-shaped Muscle Men but if you're not gonna give me more options to toggle or sliders then at least have like ... a large femme, a small masc, or some kind of androgynous model to even it out a little bit??? I realize I'm nitpicking but making a blorbo is half the fun for me in games like this. I definitely don't expect a Bethesda style character creator (I had no issues with Valheim's character creator and it's just a few pixelated options, same w/ Stardew Valley although that one's a lot of pixelated options), but I do get frustrated when modern games kind of aggressively give you "there are two genders, big and small" as your options.

I'm a sucker for survival crafting games and, frankly, edgelord vampire shit, so I'll definitely keep playing, but a little ehhhhh to start and then the gameplay itself was giving me mobile game vibes??? I can't really explain it because it's definitely way better designed than that, but there was something about the progression screens and the way you farm resources that made it feel that way. I dunno!! I'll probably rotate it to the backburner and keep going on other games for now, mostly I wanted to complain about the character creator because what is this, World of WarCraft

After some further gameplay I am enjoying V Rising but my original complaints still stand

TGIF we are crawling to the weekend for sure, I am exhausted and sweaty and I did go get groceries so Tomorrow Erika doesn't have to but I wasn't even a little brave about it

I have had to mute terms related to that show The Boys, I am too fucking fragile to see most clips or content from it