Random Updates

My costuming has stalled out after I sewed a bunch of velcro to the vest, took a look in the mirror, and decided everything needed move up about an inch. So I really need to remove and re-sew all that velcro. Or just start on another vest entirely. Neither enthuses me.

I've played a good bit of The Long Dark story mode over the weekend. It's not without its faults, but it does add some direction to the directionless sandbox version of the game it's been up until recently. I like it. It's not overly complex. The graphics are somewhat simplistic in style, but manage to be beautiful sometimes. I like hunting for resources, and exploring new areas, and judging how far to go and how much to try to accomplish away from shelter, and I like struggling to recover after overextending. In the story mode, so far at least, I haven't been mauled by three wolves in a row and killed. The bear hunt, however, may be a bit overly difficult in my opinion. I think I'm nearing the end of chapter 2, what's been released so far out of the 7 planned.

I've also been playing Fate/Grand Order some on my phone. The Fate series is interesting, and I've considered a full post rambling on that, though haven't gotten to it. Mages summon magical heroes who are based on legends (but may deviate from them or exist in multiple states) to fight a battle over a "Holy Grail" that will grant the victors a wish. That's the basic concept. Some of the series/games explore different aspects of it with different incarnations of the heroic Servants and breaking of the "rules" in various ways. Having watched Fate/Stay Night and Fate/Zero as well as a few parts of Apocrypha, I feel like the series are at their best with flashy fight scenes and quieter interplay between Servant and Master. If you start to look too deeply into the mythos, though, it's a frickin' mess. Grand Order is reasonably entertaining, thus far, though not revolutionary by any means with gacha mechanics to collect Servants, grinding missions to level them, and such.

As much as I dislike focusing on politics, recent discussion of a "merit-based" immigration system has me thoughtful. In sort of vague principle, I don't really like such a change to the immigration system. On the other hand, I think there are changes that are necessary. And I consider when I looked at Canada's system - which assigns points based on things like linguistics skill, education, and rarity of job skills. Basically, it's a merit-based system right there. I've not done any big comparison between systems (or even dug into the US immigration requirements deeply), but... hmm...


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