PixlBit

Look, it's a corgi pup! Lead my procession, young pup!

I'm a generous ruler, it's only been two weeks since the last update and you're getting another hot pup. You may receive yet another during the month of June since it's a pretty busy time with things to discuss, like E3 for instance. I usually like to stay off the grid for longer than this, and therefore be in higher demand, but desperate times call for hot pups. Don't bother thinking about that, it makes sense. A monarch knows.

Now that all of the ceremonial pup-&-circumstance is finished, it's time to begin the statecraft. That's your favorite part, right? Well, it's not my favorite part. We all know the pups are the only good part of this. I have half a mind to shorten all of you by a head, but the pups soothe my soul enough to prevent me from embracing tyranny. I'm glad nobody can hear me whisper, otherwise this might be a scandal.

A book I bought

The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman - I bought it because the story revolves around a couple who run a lighthouse. I love lighthouses so that's all I needed. Also, it's suppose to be depressing, evocative, and make me cry. The majority of the books I've been reading the past couple years have been similar, I probably like this kind of stimuli.

Games I've finished

Quantum Conundrum - Disappointing ending, but really fun puzzles and a cool little game for anybody like me who loved Portal and wanted to see what Kim Swift did after she left Valve. It's basically Portal again, and it's pretty good. It feels built to engage people who have played Portal and were fairly sharp at it, but the feeling of Quantum Conundrum is faster and perhaps more difficult.

You have to learn how to use springboards to shoot boxes and pieces of furniture around the level, and then learn to ride on top of them in order to get yourself across as well. It's fun and satisfying but if you've played a bunch of Portal you'll immediately feel how QC is more of a "fly by the seat of your pants" type of feeling, as opposed to the more slow and smooth solutions in a Portal game. If you're like me you'll experiment a bit and eventually reach the end of an area in a furious sequence of events that leave you saying, "What did I just do? Did they want me to do that? Oh well, I'm at the end of the level so something must have gone right!" The rules are consistent and the physics-manipulation mechanics are easy to understand, and the logic in the solutions are simple, but the solutions require the player to be fast and loose within that simplicity.

In a way they're the kind of puzzles that probably would have been playtested and then removed from a big budget Portal game, which isn't a knock on them or an endorsement of them, just a feeling. If you'd like a more frisky Portal game Quantum Conundrum has your back, it's pretty good like that.

Games I'm playing right now

Ultimate DOOM - I'm playing this on Xbox 360... via the backwards compatibility and emulation of the original collector's edition copy of DOOM 3 for the original Xbox ...which contains console ports of Ultimate DOOM and DOOM 2. There's so many ports of DOOM that rabbit holes like this are hardly even the weirdest way to play it.

This port has all 4 episodes of DOOM and right now I'm in the middle of The Shores of Hell. It's super good. All this week I've been coming home from school to play it, and I like to put on headphones and listen to Death while I do. It's been a pretty metal week as a result.

Fallout New Vegas - I'm playing this for the first time finally. I grabbed the Ultimate edition for 360 with all the DLC and I'm 40 hours in so far. I'm obsessed with Fallout 3, and I think New Vegas might just be better in almost every way so far. Overall there's a lot of small tweaks that make it more satisfying on all fronts both mechanically and systemically. I also love the setting more because it's basically taking a lot of things I loved about Red Dead Redemption and mashing it together with Fallout 3. Fallout games are really good, like super good, and New Vegas is no exception. Great subject matter, music, artwork, systems, and role-playing. Really weird, dark, funny, gross, sexy, and scary. It's Fallout.

School and soup

I'm taking an intermediate algebra class right now during the summer term so I can refresh my basic skills before I do the standard college algebra in the fall. It feels good to be back in school again and working towards a thing. I planned on only taking a small break from school to rethink what I wanted to pursue, but that ended up turning into a 3 year hiatus away from college. It was the worst and I ended up working myself into an awful rut and hated every beautiful day. Now I can turn the page on that and start getting learned again. I was always happiest when I was in school, and that spark shot right back into me on the first day of class. On the first day I could hardly get myself to bed and ended up only grabbing 3 hours of rest before I needed to get ready for school.

Summer term is accelerated so we do twice the work, but it's been going fine so far and I still have an "A". The class is nice. Our instructor was an Army vet of 20 years doing over the horizon radar. I sit next to a nice guy named Tim. I've managed not to make any Home Improvement jokes so far. Today we did a quick refresher on how to divide a polynomial by a monomial, or something like that. I tend to know what to do with algebra when I see it, but I've always had a hard time remembering the vocabulary.

I signed up for a few classes in the fall, all of which I'm really excited for. Intro to Programming, College Algebra, and Astronomy. I really wanted to fit Archery into the schedule but the instructor isn't doing that one in the fall. I think I might be able to do it in the spring, next year.

I've been making a lot of vegetable soups lately and trying to learn my way around fresh produce. Some of the potions have been really great and others have been pretty bad. I ruined one of them by overcooking lentils and split green peas, so the whole soup ended up real mushy. I'm going to isolate the part where things went awry, the lentils and peas, and learn to cook those on their own properly now instead of just winging it and tossing them in. I made a soup yesterday with vegetable stock, kale, red chard, red cabbage, leeks, a head of broccoli, some celery, lemon slices, and a zucchini. It turned out pretty nice but the lemon is a little strong so that probably wasn't a great idea.

What to look forward to in my next update

More pups. Duh!