pyromagnestir

Games I have played:

• Super Mario 3D World
• Super Mario Maker
• Tokyo Mirage Sessions
• Pushmo World
• Splatoon
• Captain Toad Treasure Tracker (if you can rent this one or buy it for 20 bucks or something, it's good and charming and there's a lot of craftsmanship packed into this game but for the amount of play time it offers it's just not a great value proposition at more than 20 bucks)
• Nintendo Land (I've had fun playing this with my nephew and niece, I wouldn't recommend it solely for single player though it does have a couple games that are alright in that regard, so if it's a pack in you could mess around with it for a bit)
• Earthbound (I have wanted to play this game for years, and was grateful to be able to do so on the Wii U virtual console in a way that is, shall we say, officially sanctioned, turns out the game's really cool)

Games I have yet to play, but intend to:

• Bayonetta 2
• Severed (don't know much about this one but it sounds intriguing and is only otherwise available on platforms I don't have or wouldn't prefer over the Wii U, so figured I would give it a mention here)
• Mario Kart 8
• and Zelda BotW of course

I've played other games, and will continue to play other games that are available on Wii U, but they're things like Steamworld Dig and Shovel Knight, which are also available on other platforms.

I'll add that right now I'm in the middle of a month of gamefly, as I took advantage of a half off a month type offer and decided to rent a bunch of Wii U games that have been on my to do list for a while. So I would say if you really want to save yourself some money that's probably a decent option, as you could easily pick 2 or 3 or maybe even 4 of the shorter games or ones you aren't sure about but want to try out and play them in a month.

I made it through Captain Toad, and now I have Splatoon with Mario Kart on the way. I might try to squeeze in Shovel Knight if I can. Then I'll dive into Zelda at some point.

So I finished 14 a couple weeks back, it ended up getting much creepier in the second half and also mixing in some stuff that had me saying to myself "oh it's going to do that is it? Interesting!" It was very good and I recommend it.

Then on Friday I finished a book called Ha'Penny, the second book in an alternate history trilogy where the idea is the U.S. didn't get involved in WWII, Hitler and the British fought to a standstill and made a treaty, the nazis control the continent, and Britain starts to emulate some of the nazi prejudices and slides slowly into fascism as well.
The plots of the books are actually more along the lines of crime mysteries, the first book, Farthing, which I read last summer, is about a murder in the home of prominent members of the British government who negotiated the peace with the nazis, it switches back and forth between the detective investigating the crime and a daughter of the family who is a suspect in the crime. The second book takes place right after the first, and switches back and forth the same detective, now looking into a plot to kill some prominent members of the British government along with Hitler himself, and a young actress who ends up caught up in the plot.
Both were quite good. Though perhaps now is not the best time for me to be reading about this sort of concept. I more than once found myself laughing sarcastically as I said "well I'm glad this sort of thing could really never happen in real life!" and then getting rather upset. But still, I'll pick up the final book in the series soon and probably finish it sometime this year.

Next up for fiction I'm gonna start Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, I know next to nothing about it except that it takes place in a post apocalyptic world and focuses on a group of people who travel around the great lakes region putting on plays or something? That description made me curious enough to check it out. I'll start it some time today.

As for non fiction, I continue to make progress in Che Guevara A Revolutionary Life. Now I'm up to the start of the Cuban missile crisis. The book is very interesting. I should finish it before the month is up.

I want to keep this thread going, so I'll write an update.

I finished Black Hawk Down, everything I said about that book in a previous post still stands. Real good book.

I also finished The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, don't have much to say about it other than that book was pleasant.

Also finished Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It has nothing to do with that mind trippy ballet movie, it's a non fiction book about statistics and probability and predictive models and economics and stuff, it's kinda hard for me to pin down but the main theme is most predictive models are garbage because they don't or can't account for hugely impactful but very unlikely events, which the author dubs black swans. The ideas it presents are interesting, though I kinda wish it had gotten into them on a more technical level, as most of the book is explaining the ideas on a general level or the author going on strange tangents (although if it had I probably wouldn't have been able to follow them sooooo...).

But the tone of the book is a bit off putting. At points the author comes off as stuck up, at other times petty. Some parts of the book are autobiographical, and other parts of the book are about straight up fictional characters who are presented as being real and doing things that never happened. So like I said it goes off on a few tangents. It's weird. That, more than any of the actual math or ideas presented, made it hard for me to get through, as evidenced by the fact that I actually started this book back in mid November but didn't finish it till February.

I have since learned that some of the horrible people in the Trump administration are big on some of Taleb's ideas. Not sure how I feel about that. I can appreciate the ideas. But those people are still horrible. If some people who weren't horrible used his ideas I'd certainly feel okay with that.

And now I'm in the middle of 14 by Peter Clines, it is a story about a guy who moves into a new apartment building that has a lot of odd quirks to it so he and his fellow tenants start to look into them and uncover more weird things and a deeper mystery. It's been really fun so far. My only problem is I went in thinking it was gonna be more creepy, but it's really just been about solving a mystery, not even remotely scary. But it's got me hooked so I'm tearing through it a lot faster than I planned.

And also in the middle of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson. I've been trying to look more at the how people see the world from various perspectives and he sounded like an interesting fella and certainly that has been the case thus far, as he's someone who passed medical school but went on to become a ruthless communist revolutionary guerrilla soldier.

Right now I'm at the part where he's a fighter in Fidel Castro's Cuban Revolution and the events that happened make it seem almost like a farce. If you wanted to make a dark comedy about a bunch of young adult men wanting to play war and running around in the mountains trying to start a revolution you could use this as direct inspiration. I almost can't understand how it switches from this to Fidel winning and being in power. But I suppose I shall learn how that happened soon enough.

Shameful note, when I was a kid I personally found World of Illusion starring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck to be very unsettling.

It's shameful because by the time it seems to have come out, December 1992, I was old enough that I probably shouldn't have been quite so unsettled by it, especially since there wasn't anything really all that unsettling about it, not sure what it was that bothered me. And hell I woulda seen quite a few rated R movies that are most definitely not for kids at that point and had no issues with them, and liked reading goosebumps which also came out around that time, but for whatever reason that game made me quite uncomfortable.

I made a point of beating the game when I found my old genesis and bought some new cables to hook it up a few years back.

being alive

Oh right, Destiny of the Republic. Yep that's it.

@cerberus3dog: I loved Death of the Republic about President James Garfield. Not sure it qualifies as a complete biography but it certainly is worth checking out, it kinda briskly moves through his life up to being elected and then settles down to detail his brief time as president, most of which was spent in bed after an assassination attempt while doctors try to treat him.

After reading that book I think he's now my favorite person ever elected president. Unfortunately he didn't get to do much actual presidenting.

So far this month I have finished:

Fall of Kings, the final book in David Gemmell's retelling of the Trojan war. The whole series was something I've been meaning to read for quite a while and I finally got around to it late last year.
It's a sorta realistic take on the old mythical story of the Trojan war, though not a completely grounded one as there are still a number of fantastical touches (particularly a whole lot of highly accurate prophecies), but it feels plausible enough outside of that. I quite like the series's versions of Odysseus, Priam, Andromache, Achilles, and other already well known figures from mythology.
The series was very good as a whole, and the final book was damn good.

Barrayar, from Lois McMaster Bujold's sci fi Vorkosigan series. It's a direct sequel to another book in the series, Shards of Honor, which I finished a couple years back.
I liked both. In Shards of Honor two characters from opposing sides of a war find themselves stranded together and forced to team up to survive, they fall in love, and shit gets complicated.
In Barrayar, they are married and living on dude's home planet when the dude is appointed regent for his new child emperor, so of course again shit gets quite complicated. I enjoyed it more than Shards. I felt the story of Barrayar just had more punch to it. And as a result I probably won't wait another couple years to pick up anther book in the series.

And I am near the end of:

Black Hawk Down, by Mark Bowden: A non fiction detailed journalistic breakdown of the events of the Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia, which kinda happened when, on a raid to pick up a couple targets, a couple helicopters were shot down and turned what was supposed to have been a simple hour long mission into an overnight all out battle where a bit over a hundred American soldiers were trying to hold out against what seemed like an entire city.
Many parts of it have made me legitimately uncomfortable (such as the part where the medic is desperately trying to treat a soldier who is bleeding to death from a gunshot and they can't extract him to base/hospital because of how rough the combat they are stuck in is) and this book has made me realize I could never have been a soldier. Not that I ever really wanted to be a soldier, but as someone who has never had much idea of what the hell I'm doing with my life the option of enlisting has been something I've considered once or twice. After reading this I don't know how anyone could want to be a soldier. I feel like this book should be required reading for anyone thinking about enlisting. If it terrifies them so much they change their mind, that's fine. And if it doesn't terrify them at all they shouldn't be allowed to enlist, because if you aren't even a little bit disturbed by some of this stuff that's just not healthy.

Some racing game for the NES. It was a top down perspective of the whole track and the cars looked like formula one type cars if I recall correctly. Don't know what it was called.

Aside from video gaming, plus board gaming and a particular interest poker, which all fall under gaming I suppose, and the usual movies, music, tv and books that most everyone enjoys to some degree, I've gotten into rock climbing. I suck at it but it's rather fun, and happens to be one form of exercise that I actually enjoy which is a bonus. Mostly I've stuck to the indoor gym since outdoor climbing is much harder and as I said I am not very good. Also I only have one friend who I go with and he seems to get hurt not infrequently, partly because he's much better and thus trying much harder things which put a lot of strain on a human body, a lot so that means there are long stretches where I just won't go.

Once I tried rock climbing it certainly made notice much more how in lots of video games, like Uncharted or Last Guardian to name a couple that I've played this past year, characters spend large periods of time jumping/dangling/clambering up and on cliffs, ledges, or whatnot and even often doing that stuff with just one hand! To which I say "fuck you game that shit's impossible so stop rubbing it in my face!"

The friend I climb with is actually a freak of nature who could do lots of that stuff. His arm was hurt a couple months ago and while he was recovering he was "taking it easy" by climbing stuff with one arm that I can't climb with two.