T w e n t y S i d e d
I’m sorry I missed last week. Genuinely. Toward the end of the week before last, I got what I thought at the time was a sinus infection. Last weekend I was utterly miserable and in constant pain. Normally the common sinus meds or even pain relievers don’t work on my sinuses, or not well anyway. But; I did finally take some ibuprofen. It surprisingly (only in my case) helped, and the situation has slowly improved since. I’m still trying to manage pain, and while there is possibly an infection going on, I never developed any *other* symptoms of an infection. There is clearly some kind of inflammation and/or blockage and on-line searches point at sinusitis. Which I already suspected was a problem. I would really like to do outpatient surgery to clear out my sinuses.
I was ready to talk about the “Thorn” arc in the last two Halloween movies. I really wasn’t sure it would support much thought, but it did eventually occur to me that the Thorn movies reflect Friday the 13th V and VI in some elements. VI essentially overwrites V. Halloween doesn’t do that *yet*, but they do adopt the retconned plot point of introducing a young, new antagonist then taking it back in the next movie; eventually getting rid of her entirely at the beginning of Halloween VI. Kind of weird how these two franchises ran a similar main plot point over parts IV, V, and VI of both series. Especially since the Friday the 13th movies were ALL produced and released before Halloween IV was written. Now, to be honest, I have no doubt the creators of Halloween IV cribbed notes from Friday the 13th, but part V does go in a different direction, and then of course VI then introduces the Thorn story and retroactively inserts it into the previous movies. (Yes, technically the man in black is in the released version of Halloween V, but it really does seem like they didn’t know *why* yet. It was just a possible thread. Could have gone several ways.)
Yes, that is way too many spoilers for something not published yet. But beyond the sickness I’ve been working on Christmas plans for the immediate family and my parents. I’m almost done with gift shopping; I just have a few more to arrange. I haven’t even started Steam in three or four weeks, so I’m just now updating it. There are several full game downloads to do…I know for example the latest update to Star Wars: The Old Republic came out and I haven’t even installed it let alone tried anything. I kept putting off the RAM upgrade for my laptop and now RAM is so expensive I can’t do anything about it anyway. The last time I checked getting two new 16GB modules for this computer it was around $150 shipped, I think. May have been a bit less. Now it’s almost $300. The good news is a recent Manjaro update seems to have significantly boosted my performance. I haven’t looked into WHY, honestly. I know something that helped manage my memory is switching to Vivaldi as my main web browser. That and using the YouTube “app” instead of a browser window. I know it’s just a streamlined Chromium-based web page, but it does actually reduce the RAM footprint. I have yet to experience the playlist management slowdown since switching. Sure, I have to click almost every video multiple times to get it to start without an ad, but I can tolerate that.
We finally got my dad’s surgery scheduled. He has all the pre-surgery stuff coming up in early January, then the surgery itself takes place in mid-January. The best case scenario is that he will be able to walk a bit better thanks to a significant decrease in dizziness. There may be some improvements to cognition as well. He is looking at the surgery as a cure-all, which probably isn’t realistic but is understandable. I would probably hope for unrealistically-good outcomes as well. Family and doctors telling him it is unlikely to help his muscle control and certainly can’t recover anything that may have been damaged by the fluid pressure in his brain. However, his overall capability has been better the past week, after several weeks of discomfort and fatigue. I still drove him around for Christmas shopping.
It’s Life Day time again in Star Wars: The Old Republic. The decorations still don’t seem to be up, but the events have started. I have only collected a few gifts and done one round of “Hug A Wookiee,” so I can’t really show you what the rewards are this year. Nor is there anything to really show off. I hope the developer isn’t so far off their game from losing voice talent for so long the events are all we get. I’ll see how this week goes, and hopefully I can be back with you all soon! Happy Life Day!
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My condolences on the price hike. TLDR is thet the AI bubble and Crucial leaving the consumer market are to blame.
With TOR my focus has always been on finishing all the class stories, and pretty much only on that given my limited playing time, but with the Trooper finishing off my TOR Diary run on the blog I’m pondering what to do next. I keep musing about getting into things like these Life Day things and the new events they run, but I hesitate because I remember doing one on Hoth solo and doing all right until I hit the final huge mech and couldn’t beat it until someone else showed up to help, and even the ones that are something like “gather up all the kittens” make me wonder if it will be the same sort of thing. But I could also go back to Dark Age of Camelot, as I played most of the way through the solo content with a Paladin and then started a Thane in the “Lady Thor” model but stopped playing it.
I rarely, but DO, run into the problem you’re describing in the ongoing planetary events. That is, at least with my Legendary characters, I can mostly solo anything (I should note that several of my most-used characters do have full or nearly-full sets of 340 armor) but sometimes run into something that knocks me out. I’m certainly not going to pretend to be an amazing player, but I have no problem labeling myself as thoroughly average. I’m going to do better than a lot of players…but in any encounter someone is gonna run up and one-hit a boss that normally takes me a minute to defeat.
I suspect that sometimes the random wipes are bugged, but considering how much level/difficulty balancing the game incorporates; sometimes maybe an encounter keys to a large group or a very capable player and then I come along before the difficulty resets. Of course, there are still a few bosses in the game that have one particular skill that can make them almost impossible to kill. It’s blockable, but if you miss it twice in a row, many players will be out-of-luck. There’s one on the Dread Masters’ planet, IIRC.
But generally, I find the Christmas event, anyway, dead easy. At least to the extent I’ve explored it. I only do the “hug a wookie” and snowball throws for “snow covered packages,” the event currency. That, of course, you can then spend on the year’s limited items. I also, as I’ve mentioned before, do the Galactic Seasons events (two per year); but NOT EVERYTHING in them. The daily/weekly conquest challenges are simple. And it’s easy to find or generate enough things to do (as I’ve documented) to get all 100 levels of rewards. But these also usually have some kind of narrative or plotline, although it was VERY thin during the VA strike. Three seasons back, and in previous seasons, you actually had a story you worked through to achieve the plotline-based rewards. The last two seasons have just had you do operations and flashpoints, which I skipped. I can solo story-mode flashpoints, and even a couple of non-story-mode ones. I’ve done master mode on a couple, but haven’t engaged in content that I felt made it worth it. Operations…honestly I’ve *almost* beaten a couple solo. I’ve heard of people that can beat a few solo, and of course you have a handful of players that say “it’s easy.” I can’t do it yet. Maybe I never will.