T w e n t y S i d e d

Sable has been on my Steam Wishlist for quite a while. Long enough that I had actually *removed* it for several months to a year, because it was never on sale for enough of a discount to make it a “must get” option. Well, this weekend I was notified that Sable was 65% off, which put it under $10. I figured that was worth it. Sable is arguably my favorite type of game: platforming/exploration/puzzle-solving with minimum (or no) combat. There are games that include combat that I still really enjoy, like Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy and the first remake of Prince of Persia. Or the first and second generation of Tomb Raider games. Likewise, the exploration component can be more expansive or even effectively non-existent. In Prince of Persia and Tomb Raider for example, the exploration content extended to places you could go to that you didn’t actually have to explore and “secret” items. This feature is occasionally called “open-world,” although this is a nebulous concept that only really works with a proper level of interaction, and depending on the primary gameplay. In Sable, for instance; exploration and secret-finding seems to be the entirety of the open world. I’ve read there are several optional side-quests, but in the introduction/tutorial the gameplay was *mostly* linear. Today I’ll go through that first area.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “New Game: Sable”

Paige Francis He/him

I spent a lot of time last summer talking about how everything was breaking. The last few days I’ve spent on car repairs. Nothing serious, but time consuming. In fact the days I set aside to plan and write this particular post have been spent on blow-outs and blinkers. I’m about to go get one more thing working and then take a shower and maybe even go to bed after. I don’t normally drink what are most-commonly-known as soft drinks or carbonated beverages, but it was hot enough today to take a Coke Zero break, and then have another later.

So, my apologies for not having anything substantive ready for this week. The ease with which I replaced the Manjaro installation on my desktop with Mint has me itching to try other distributions again, using what I know now. I was planning on trying a Bazzite install (without the nVidia drivers) until the child that is running Bazzite mentioned that since an update early this week Bazzite started asking them to log in to the wifi network every now and then. They aren’t *disconnected* from the network…everything is still working. The system has just started asking them to log in again. They finally clicked on the prompt and it opened a webpage having to do with Fedora. But we have no idea what is prompting this behavior. It did NOT start out doing this; it happened as part of an update.

Troubling.

Anyway, that’s it for now; see you next week!

Paige Francis He/him

We had our first verifiable over-100 degree (F) day this week. The house we live in had a new A/C compressor and blower installed around 2010, so the part-owners we share ownership with still think of it as “new.” The system it replaced was installed when the house was first put up back in the mid-to-late 1970’s, so since that A/C lasted 30 years the one that’s 15-years-old is, obviously; new. Here’s the trick: when the “new” A/C was installed the empty-nester family didn’t use half of the house regularly. So they got a SMALLER compressor. It’s rated for just about 1/2 the square footage of our house. As a result we have installed supplementary window units in 2 bedrooms. It would be in all 3 bedrooms, but the window was removed in the third bedroom around 2010 as well when the bathroom next to two of the bedrooms was remodeled to have a giant bathtub. The owners then installed too-small of a water heater to fill the tub, so it never got used. That’s the bathroom that I recently renovated, by the way. I talked about it last summer. Keeping two bedrooms closed off from the central A/C system helps the small A/C compressor, but it is showing its age and honestly we need a third window-unit or mini-split for the living room. Every modern window unit we’ve installed has resulted in a DECREASED electric bill as we cut down on the demands on the central A/C. Kind of shows how far technology has come in the last few decades.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “I HATE the Summer”

Paige Francis He/him