Good Morning Friends! I am slowly trying to get back into the swing of things. My last day of work for the year was 12/17 and as a result I am good and toast when it comes to actually getting up at normal times. Normal for me being 5:30 in the morning, but I am struggling forward regardless and trying to make a blog post happen. Apologies for the extremely sporadic nature of my posts over the last few weeks but I was very much “in vacation mode”. The truth is you didn’t miss an awful lot and I have fallen back into a single player gaming binge. For the last few weeks I have been getting up around 8 am when the synergy of my bladder and the cats wanting food coalesced into forcing me out of the bed. Now we are returning to being governed by an alarm and so far… the progress is mixed.
Thanks to watching my way through the second season of Witcher over the break, I have found myself returning to playing Witcher 3. This will be my second full play through of the game and it is just as good as I remember it being. There is something about the end of one year and the beginning of a new one… that seemingly drives me to wanting to play a big meaty open world single player adventure. The weirdest part about this most recent turtle is that it isn’t really due to me being stressed and needing a break from humanity. If anything I have the latent desire to be around other people, but my brain just wants to be playing these sort of games instead of diving back into the Endwalker alt leveling and gear grinding process.
It started initially as a good intentioned “lets have a break to let other people play this extremely congested game”, and has more or less turned into an obsession with completing all of the things in Velen and Novigrad. I love this world and setting and I love being my kind-hearted version of Geralt. Someone really in need and shouldn’t be spending coin in my services? Well if given the chance I will take the “you keep the coin” option. I will say that the game actively fights against you trying to turn Geralt into a questing knight however, because often times things don’t go down as you might hope. I’ve found a number of quests this time around that I somehow missed last time and me trying my best to save the say… has not necessarily been good enough. Then there are the comedy relief quests like the Trolls… and I love Witcher Trolls. It was also only on this playing… that I finally grasped what “Chorfun” meant.
The thing that I have been struggling with is that initially I had decided to give Yennifer a try this time around. However… I just can’t do it. Triss is just better in every possible way and I kinda hate that Yennifer is so hardly pushed as the “lore correct” answer. Yen is just not a good match for my kinder gentler soft-hearted version of Geralt. Yen makes sense if you are leaning into the whole “two hopelessly fucked up people who deserve each other” aspect of The Witcher universe, but just feels wrong to me personally. That said if you are a Yen stan I won’t get in your way… but I have a feeling I am going to keep choosing Miss Merigold over and over each time I play through.
All of this said… I have picked back up the novels and started up again where I left off with Blood of Elves. This time last year I read through the first two books… which are largely a collection of short stories. By the time I got to Blood of the Elves, it was just dense enough to make me bounce after reading the two much more casual reads in a row. For the last several nights I have been reading for about an hour on my phone and while I read terribly slowly… especially when my wife keeps trying to talk to me while reading… however I am about halfway through at this point. My wife and I have completely different “going to sleep routines”. For her it is like she needs to get all of her talking out of her system before she can sleep… but for me I need silence to wind down and the more she talks… the more I wake back up. Generally speaking through reading something is one of the better ways for me to drift off to slumber and reading the book on my phone gives me these perfectly bite sized chunks of the book formatted to fit the small screen.
Well this is a blog post down… and I am still awake so here is hoping I can get back into the swing of actually waking up on time and knocking out a post each morning. I had a great break and I hope you all did as well.