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This weekend was very light on gaming for various reasons.  Saturday I scurried around in the morning and cleaned the house so that I could be done in time to hit an 11 am matinee of Detective Pikachu.  My wife was busy doing an AP Statistics review session they call “Super STATurday” where they prep them for the upcoming AP exam and then the students take a mock test.  Since my wife does not generally go in for the nonsense that I enjoy like Pokemon…  I figured it was easiest if I just went by myself.  First off…  Detective Pikachu is adorable and if you need something pure in your life you should totally go see it.  I am not exactly a diehard Pokemon fan but I have been around it enough to get a general feel for the movie doing an excellent job of representing the various critters.  Secondly… Ryan Reynolds was perfect in the role and make the entire film feel like a G rated Deadpool…  which admittedly Once Upon a Deadpool is my favorite version of Deadpool 2.

The other big takeaway I have from the movie is that Sonic the Hedgehog as a movie is going to do just fine in the box office regardless of how much us nerds are raging against it.  The representation of Sonic bothers me greatly, but I was in a theater crammed full of kids on Saturday and they cheered and laughed when that trailer came on.  We are not the target audience of that movie, and it instead is designed for the same demographic that all of those Spykids movies were.  As much as it pains me to say it…  our opinion of that Sonic doesn’t really matter if the kids are engaged.  I do however think Pokemon Detective Pikachu was a more faithful recreation of both the look and feel of the Pokemon setting with deep call backs to lots of other settings from the games.  I think it was also genius to be handing out packs of Pokemon cards to everyone that bought a ticket…  I saw lots of kids excited to be getting these.  I am pretty sure that Pikachu was in every pack, but I also pulled a Bulbasaur which is probably my favorite of the starters.

For this next bit I don’t have any photos taken of my device, but I picked up a new tablet and spent a good deal of the weekend messing with it.  I’ve had android tablets before and always the experience was less than ideal, at least compared to what I was used to with my old Ipad 2.  As much as I hate to admit it…  Apple makes damned good tablet devices and I have always wanted something akin to that on the correct marketplace.  After a good deal of sifting through product reviews I wound up going with the Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 and so far am exceptionally happy with it.  Ultimately my constraints were fairly simple…  I wanted to be able to run mobile games on it fluidly, I wanted to be able to read comics on it at a resolution friendly to my aging eyes, and I wanted some sort of a pen device so I could maybe start sketching on it.  After looking at a bunch of different options I landed on either the Tab S3 or S4 and wound up finding a decent deal on the S4.

Then for awhile I thought Amazon had lost my order, as it failed to show up during the original delivery estimate and shifted into “maybe your package will arrive someday” mode.  The original tracking code is seemingly permanently stuck on “label created” mode.  It did however arrive one day late and seemingly no worse for the wear, and I was able to spend most of the weekend getting things set up on it.  As such I have been spending a lot of time juggling between Marvel Unlimited and reading up on comics there and the handful of CBZs that I had laying around from various Humble Bundle deals.  With those I am using a piece of software called ComiCat that seems to do a good job of both showing an attractive news stand mode and letting me flip through the comics seamlessly.

So far the battery life is excellent as I have not charged it past the first day and used it pretty much every night to go through my dailies in both Dragalia Lost and Marvel Future Fight as well as spending a good deal of time reading comics.  At this point I think the battery is somewhere around 85% which fares significantly better than my phone which can be drained by Dragalia Lost in what feels like a few minutes.  It is light weight enough to be able to fairly comfortable hold one handed, though I am contemplating investing in a pop socket to make that process a little easier.  Side note… as I have said before I have really stupidly large hands so I am not entirely certain if the average human being could hold the tablet one handed, but it works for me.  I do however fear dropping this on my face considering I have done that with my phone…  given that mobile time is generally my getting ready for sleep activity.  All in all however… I am super happy with this tablet and it also cost considerably less than a modern Ipad so bonus points there.

I had one of those nights where I was bouncing around between games.  First off I spent some time working on RetroArch trying to get things configured as I wanted them.  I made some very minimal progress, but I do at least have MAME games launching from underneath it.  I still think I am going to have to go through the process of manually setting up playlists for the best possible experience.  In part why I like RetroArch/Libretro cores so much is the excellent controller support and the way whatever I happen to have plugged in seems to automagically work.  I also like the various shader effects which is another reason why the whole manual playlist idea is probably a good one.  From there I popped over into The Surge for a bit but ultimately bounced out of it pretty quickly.  I like the concept of this game…  but Dark Soulsian games so far really aren’t my jam.

When I ultimately settled in to a game for a bit I wound up playing some Sunless Skies.  Fallen London is probably one of my favorite game settings and for a long time I made a daily practice of logging in and playing through my adventures.  After the success of the web based game a couple of standalone titles have been released, Sunless Seas a game about travelling out into the black abyss of the Unterzee a subterranean ocean the size of Europe that surrounds the city.  Sunless Skies however is a direct sequel set ten years after the events of the first game in which you pilot a sky train of sorts around the region known has the High Wilderness way above the world of both Fallen London and Sunless Seas.  The truth is I have never made it terribly far in Sunless Seas…  or at least nowhere near far enough to know anything about the events that play out in that game, I just decided I would rather pilot a locomotive than a boat last night.

There is something deeply relaxing about puttering around and visiting the various islands and having locomotive battles.  The game more or less features a lot of the same elements in that you move around through the darkness looking for things to interact with.  When you do interact you have various quests to keep you engaged in the story line and various crew members to pick up and have dialog with.  I seem to always go down the path that involves being combat ready, but this game seems to favor the subtlety checks way more than was the case with the web based game.  It seems like every time I take down a marauder train…  boarding and looting it is a subtlety check which makes me want to start pushing that up a bit more than I have.

I guess it was the sort of game that my brain was needing last night, but it unfortunately did not lull me into a sense of peace as I spent most of the night tossing and turning and not quite getting restful sleep.  As a result this morning I am feeling groggy and assume I am going to have to push through with copious amounts of caffeine to make the day function.  I have a fairly packed day so here is hoping that I make it through unscathed.

First off let me start today’s post by saying how much I appreciate the outpouring of support that I have had over the last couple of days.  I’m sorry that I have not responded to each of you individually…  but I just haven’t been in a great place to be able to do that.  My focus was trying to get through the last couple of days which also had the added bonus of being super stressful on the work front as well.  Each time I saw a message come through it helped, and I wish I had been able to really be sociable and such.  I had mostly been staying off social media the last few days apart from making a few random comments here or there to take my mind off things.  What makes the whole experience weird is we have had a ferret playpen in our living room for at least the last ten years…  so now that we have cleaned everything and removed it…  there is a visible void that will take some getting used to.

To add to the pile of woes that are happening…  I spend a lot of time on the sofa with my laptop remoted in to the machine upstairs.  We were eating dinner and I had to get up to check on the printer upstairs that was reporting to be out of paper.  I had pre-emptively filled it and apparently did not get it jostled just right for the sensors to notice.  As soon as I had gotten settled in and was about to kick out the leg rest…  the handle that does this broke completely.  Now the handle itself had broken some time back as it was plastic and not exactly the best idea for a part that would get a lot of constant use with a certain amount of force applied to it.  This time the pulley or spring or whatever ties the mechanism to the armature under the chair came loose and now the remainder of the broken lever flops freely.  This is part of a sectional…  and the manufacturer apparently no longer carries the design anymore…  which lead me to research a replacement part.  Apparently these handles are pretty standard and I managed to track down what appears to be a replacement and a new cable to boot just in case that actually snapped as well.  So there is a project on the stack for the weekend.

As far as gaming goes…  I am still playing quite a bit of Marvel Future Fight via Memu Android Emulator each evening.  I largely just burn down the daily objectives similar to how I usually play Dragalia Lost.  I apparently did not notice this last night or this morning when I took the screenshot…  but I appear to have 3 heroes that I can unlock now because I had gathered enough biometrics while doing other things to get over the initial 10 threshold.  I’ve since swapped out Agent 13 to Luna Snow another one of the Netmarble created champions because the team bonus between her and Sharon Rogers is pretty nice.  More or less Sharon Rogers is the primary champion and Captain America and Luna Snow are just walking buffs.  At some point I want to spend some more time playing Iron Hammer which is an interesting Amalgam character of Ironman and Thor first seen in Infinity War #3.  Whatever the case playing a blend of Ironman and Thor is pretty sweet.

I am also still spending a lot of time playing Dragalia Lost because the Fire Emblem event is still going on, and should have the next story block released today.  Both the summon changes and this event went in at the same time…  and it definitely feels like I am getting to summon way more often and without the worry of getting shitty wyrmprints the whole experience feels better.  I am still getting a lot of crap summons, but have managed to gather up several really nice ones over the course of the event so far.  Marth is my jam and the character I play the most in Smash Bros…  so I was super happy to get it here as well.  It reminds me that I really should return to playing some of the Fire Emblem mobile game at some point.  It is still weird to me how much mobile gaming I am doing these days… but the whole playing from bed thing is a way bigger pull than it used to be.

As far as non-mobile gaming…  I played an awful lot of Lumines yesterday because zoning in on a puzzle game was an excellent way to forget about the world for awhile.  As a PSP owner I loved this game on that platform, and was super happy to see when it got remastered and re-released on the Nintendo Switch.  This is one of those games like Tetris that you can just blank out while playing and move into pure muscle memory territory, or at least that is generally how I play puzzle games.  The more I think about things the more I fuck them up… so if I can just reach a point where I am reacting automatically I am not psyching myself out.  The only real question is…  how do you pronounce this game?  I heard someone in a video the other day call it what sounded like “Lou Mines” whereas I have always called it “Lumin Es” sorta like Luminous chopped off with an Es at the end.  The fact that the game has always had a sort of shiny flair element above the I made me think this, but hell I could be wrong.  Lou Mines just does not sound right however.

Last night was a rough night, and one where we didn’t get an awful lot to sleep.  First off I am super thankful that we have an amazing vet that is open extremely late, and was wiling to stay there as long as it took us to finally reach the decision.  When you reach the point where you are capable of taking action…  there is still an awful lot of second guessing yourself but from the moment I got home there was not really a time when she was not regularly having seizures.  Before I left yesterday I had tried my best to stabilize her and she was resting relatively comfortably in one of her beds.  When I arrived at home that was very much not the case.

So this morning we are going to remember Shiloh in happier times, napping in her toy box or bouncing on the bed.  It is weird how we quickly reach a point where we think things have always been this way.  The photo above was taken in July of last year and she was still her happy and bouncy self, seemingly unaffected by the fetters of age.  So what seemed like something that had been going on for years was in truth a fairly rapid decline over the past year.  The nurse last night remarked that she was one of the oldest ferrets she had ever seen come in to the vet…  that also specializes in exotics.  So I guess we stole a lot of good years that we might not have gotten otherwise.

While Bella that we lost in 2017 was “my” baby…  I still very much loved Shiloh so this has been hard to go through.  The experience also seemingly traumatized the cats…  one of which only came out of hiding after we got back from the vet.  It isn’t really over yet however… because at some point I have to go pick her back up…  so that I can bury her beside her cage mate Bella.  I don’t have much of a post in me this morning but I wanted to at least give an update since so many people offered support yesterday.