Redwolf's Journal (continued)

 Been a while, but it seems less "necessary" to put thoughts here in general. Still, I have a few I want to collect today on recent movie watching... Cloud Atlas I caught Cloud Atlas on Netflix, knowing it was a big release at the time. Having seen it... well... it hit me about as I would have expected, I think. I see a certain artistry in it. I appreciate many elements of the movie and performances. At the same time, though, it strikes me as pretentious. It's long, but could have delivered the same point about interconnectivity of people even if it dropped a couple of the story arcs. It doesn't feel like there is a lot of payoff for the build up in most cases. Overall, it's something I'm kind of glad to have seen, but have no intention to spent time rewatching at any point. Spider-Man: No Way Home Relatively spoiler free remarks: I enjoyed it. The movie has several things going against it in my book: Heavy reliance/use of previous story elements Inclusion of ...

Whether money or the love of, I've had various thoughts bouncing around for a while... - Some have come up pretty recently. At work, a few of us have been scrambling for the last handful of months trying to set up a new advertising/accounting system. We are supposed to go fully live with it this coming week and the sales team is only just getting into it because... well, "we don't have time" translates to me as closer to "we have no initiative." I can't be too critical. I don't realistically expect people to sink their own time after hours into such things, but I still feel frustrated when others have to be pulled kicking and screaming into something I've already been pushed into. What this really means, though, is this last week we've found a lot of problems we didn't foresee when it was just a few people with admin rights working in the system. A lot of the new stuff amounts to procedures that need to change, but one thing that's co...

 As we near what was supposed to be the go-live date for a major system change (but won't be due to issues), work continues to consume most of my brainpower as it has for the last few months. Ugh. Still want a vacation, but it doesn't seem practical in the foreseeable future. I have managed to consume entertainment in off-hours, though. I got caught up with watching Loki (though still haven't gone back to watch Falcon/Soldier). I liked it quite a lot. There were some moments that made me laugh aloud, there's some serious drama, and it feels Loki himself actually goes through some personal change. Admittedly, it's hard to tell for sure with him. I totally respect the ending for not being a throw-down with a cosmic villain preventing a hole in the sky. My only real gripe is that events of the series seem positioned to be a linchpin for the next wave of movies. I don't really like that, but that's sort of the burden of a "cinematic universe" and Marv...

  Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries is... a Mechwarrior game, and I hadn't played one of those in a long time. It gets most things right, but it doesn't strike me as highly revolutionary or a great improvement over older entries to the series beyond natural graphic updates. The strategic layer covers handling of finances for a mercenary lance - pay and salvage versus repair, travel, salaries, and upgrades. Travel time is, I guess, "realistic" within the setting, though I find it a bit disturbing to watch months roll by for a major refit or travel more than a couple systems away on the map. And my quest for revenge (the main story) took something like twenty years. Mech modification and design is restricted by the newer (in relative terms) hard point limits beyond just tonnage and space, which can make acquiring certain variants of mech models important. The tactical play of the missions is fairly routine, though gets mixed up enough that I didn't really feel bored by it...

I started off the day busting my ass working on things that came up yesterday during a training session in our new system as incomplete or needing adjustment. I made pretty good time with it through the morning, really, and I'm proud of it. Then, while walking at lunch, I observed an odd feeling of somehow being on the verge of something. It was like some epiphany was just beyond reach, waiting to be grabbed. I was reminded of a period of my life when I was not so jaded and actually so in love that everything felt more vivid and alive. This wasn't that, but it was still unusual, remarkable, and positive. This afternoon, our CFO is filling me in on some personnel changes. This mostly revolved around people who are leaving, but one is coming in soon. She then offers the good news that I'm getting a raise as of next week. 15% doesn't radically change life, but it's not trivial either and when any raise at all has been virtually mythological in the company the last seve...

 Maaaan, I kinda hate politics, even at small levels. Yesterday was our yearly HOA meeting and a new couple that has just recently bought and moved in has changed the dynamics of things with some definite butting of heads. A few years ago one family sort of de facto "took over" the board by virtue of being motivated. In general, I don't disagree with them, so I'm not saying that's a bad thing. The complex is definitely in better shape in many ways than it has been and our finances are not constantly scraping the bottom of the barrel as they were for a decade after I moved in. So this is good. The down side I see is the president of the last few years can be a little... authoritarian. As I agree with her decisions most of the time, that isn't really a problem, but I do genuinely wish she had a lighter touch. The new couple moved in and immediately made a request to fence/cage off their back patio area for benefit of a cat they didn't want wandering potentia...

Thanks to deep discounts for a few days and a lack of other entertainments on my plate, I picked up Endless Legend a couple weeks back. It's a reasonably-solid fantasy 4X strategy game. It definitely manages the (cliche, but true) one-more-turn feel to things. On the up side, I like the variety of races. Some of them feel pretty standard, but some really shake up fundamental gameplay elements like eschewing the food resource for buying population and unit healing or only being able to settle one city or "infesting" locations beyond normal borders. I also like the quest system. Most of the actual quests boil down to completing a certain research or going to a location with a specific unit(s) in your army, but they help add some flavor and each race has a different (if slightly in some cases) quest chain that eventually leads to a possible victory condition. On the down side, the quests sometimes seem prone to breakage. I think I messed one up by killing a roaming army on ...