The Holidays and Doings

I've, thankfully, had a good amount of entertainment to delve into of late.

I've been playing Bloodborne for a while. I have not yet finished it, though I doubt my opinion will change me. Like the Souls games, it has a familiar feel of polish and neat environments with foggy lore and story.
These games are generally great with their level design. From the gothic look of the places to the way they curl around on themselves, opening shortcuts back, the levels are one of the high points of the games. There's a real feel of exploration in pushing into a new area and a feeling of accomplishment opening a new path. Bloodborne perhaps loses a point because there are several areas accessible by losing to enemies and getting taken away, but it's still pretty great.
The other big point I have to call out is the combat. I'm not sure any other series of feels so tightly tuned that a little player experience and a point or two of character advancement can make an encounter go from overwhelming to routine and easy. Some of the boss fights are brutally unforgiving, but even those are generally doable and rewarding when you do succeed. Bloodborne urges aggression by removing shield use as a viable strategy, but it's still a well-crafted and balanced system.
I find myself simultaneously intrigued and dismayed by the story/lore presentation in the series. Every inch of the world feels steeped in history. Every item description or spoken character line hints at a greater story. That's great and draws me in. That's also about where it ends. For all I love about the games' lore, I want more meat and explanation. I want to feel more of a connection than just being some random person thrown into a situation as a hunter (or undead, etc.) to defeat legendary opponents and maybe shake up the status quo at the end, but that's really all the depth there is to the experience.
These are good games, overall, and I look forward to finishing Bloodborne (when I can finally beat Lady Maria!).

While visiting for Christmas, I watched Love Actually. I probably filed that away as "chick flick" and never considered it. I'm not sure I would change that opinion now, but I'll add that I think it's a pretty good movie. It manages to take a look at a lot of different relationships, both good and ill. It does so in a generally sweet way and it juggles a lot of characters surprisingly well. It's a bizarre thing to compare to, but after recently thinking X-Men: Apocalypse might have been so bad largely due to trying to work with so many different characters, this movie is proof that aspect, at least, can be done well.

We also watched Scrooge. I don't know that I have much to say about it as the story's pretty much a cultural touchstone at this point.

And somehow we watched the first couple episodes of the old Battlestar Galactica series. Heh. That was an interesting experience. I'm actually kind of surprised at how well some of the effects hold up - not all, but some. It was a good reminder of how much things were changed for the remake. The old Cylons weren't any fancy rogue creations of humans that now sometimes look human, but rather just a pretty one-note force of bad guys out to destroy humans. Yeah, it was certainly more simple, but they dive right into the scarcity of resources and wealthy hoarders of such pretty darn early. It was even observed that some of that seemed particularly timely even today.

I also have an Arduino kit to break out and start tinkering with. I want to learn about wiring/programming LEDs and such for possible costume applications. There's also Red Dead Redemption 2 and Horizon Zero Dawn to work through at some point.