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Today marks the first day back from a bit of a vacation.  As a result I must apologize for failing completely to write anything Friday.  I had every intent of making it an upside down day where I blog in the evening, however after getting home Friday night that just sort of evaporated.  I am leading the post off with a Mass Effect Andromeda screenshot, but I admit this is a little bit of bait and switch given that I am probably not going to be writing about that game at all until tomorrow morning.  Instead this morning I am going to talk about my adventures.  For the wife it has been spring break, and generally speaking we attempt to do something during that time.  When we traveled through Dallas on the way home from Pax South in January, we realized it had been a significant amount of time since we just went to the Metro for the sake of going there.  Another thing you need to know about us, is that we are die hard Half Priced Books fans… and for those not indoctrinated into that chain of book stores please click through this link and join the cult.  To call it a used book store is a bit of a disservice to just how many cool things they tend to have and how many genres they cross.  The only problem is there are none in the Tulsa metro area, however we regularly make a trip down the turnpike to Oklahoma City and hit the three that are located there.  Additionally any time we travel we see if there are any in the nearby area that we can either hit on the way there or on the way home.  As a result we have explored many in the Kansas City, St Louis, Austin, San Antonio, Dallas/Fort Worth, and Madison areas, and a few singlets we have found along the way.

Similarly I also love Micro Center and Fry’s Electronics… but we have neither of those chains.  I make an attempt to hit them any time I am in the vicinity, so combing those two goals we had this idea of trying to hit as many stores as we could.  What we did not figure in is just how damned big the Metro is, and how much time we would lose simply in travelling.  Additionally we threw in a trip to IKEA which is always a must, and Container Store…  as well as a slew of Target and Walmart stores to hunt for interesting clearance.  The end result is that over the course of what was functionally a day and a half in the Metro we hit I believe 10 Half Priced Book Stores, 2 Fry’s, the single solitary Micro center, IKEA and one of the several Container Stores.  The last we largely manages to catch because there happened to be one across the street from the In and Out burger we stopped at for lunch on Friday.  As far as eating establishments, we managed to hit Fuzzy’s Tacos for lunch on Thursday and an apparent local chain called Snuffers for dinner that night as well as the previously mentioned In and Out.  As far as wandering… my wife and I are extremely “drift compatible” when it comes to exploring new areas.  The only problem is… we did not even touch the Forth Worth area stores because we did not always take the most optimum routes.  That is one thing I really want… the ability to throw a bunch of points on a map and have google plot the most optimal course to hit all of them.  We also did not exactly stay in the most optimal location either… with me picking a random hotel in Richardson with quite possibly the most uncomfortable beds I have ever slept in.  All in all however it was fun trip, and as is always the case I took some photos of things that I found interesting…  which is more than likely going to be the bulk of the rest of this post.

At one of the HPB stores, I found a copy of Magic the Gathering Arena… which in itself was not that big of a deal.  However what was interesting is that in the back of the book nobody had detached and sent in the coupon for the free card.  I’ve mangled a triptych of images here so you can see the book cover, the coupon as well as the card that you would have gotten had you turned in it.  I believe I have this card laying around somewhere, because while the book was pretty crummy…  at the time I was absolutely after any card I could get my hands on.

Another interesting find is some Blizzard Noobz figures circa Blizzcon 2009.  They had the Murloc, Undead, and Ragnaros but sadly had none of the Jim Raynor which is probably the coolest of the set.  I ended up picking up the Ragnaros because I always liked that one as well.  I was just sort of shocked to see them still in the wild… and even more so that they had been marked down to $5.

In the straight up odd department, at IKEA I found this interesting “hanging dryer” as the sign said.  Some googling tells me that this is extremely popular with the “cloth diaper” community.  Whatever the case… it is an adorable octopoid hanger and was worth taking a photo of.

Finally in the just straight up weird category… one of the various stores I hit had a Daryl Dixon Funko Pop… that was literally the size of someones head.  I was trying to figure out what I could hold up for scale… and wound up using my hand but that may or may not be useful given that my hands are also huge.  You can however see a normal pop box on the shelf below for a potentially better reference.

In the realm of “Bel has lost his damned mind” another happening over the extended four day weekend… is that I decided to shave back down to a mustache/goatee combo.  I just felt like I needed a change for awhile after doing a perfect impression of Hagrid for the better part of the last few years.   This photo was snapped while recording AggroChat because my co-hosts could not believe that I actually did it, so that is why you get garbage lighting conditions and a microphone in my face.

Finally we wrapped the weekend with officially opening our back yard for the spring.  This means that my wife and I spent most of Saturday afternoon collecting leaves, spraying for weeds…  and applying a copious amount of fungicide to our very tree-like red tipped photinias.  The best part of this is of course that our patio just off the bedroom is now open for business, and my wife spent most of Sunday out there grading in the shade of our balcony.  Tonight I need to drag all ten bags of assorted yard debris around to the curb so that the trash service can pick them up on Tuesday.  The way our town works, is that we have to use these rather expensive bags that have the city name printed all over them, which in turn get filtered off into a green waste system.  The alternative was to buy a second trash bin, but that also limits you to only having a fixed amount each week.  This way we can clean the yard whenever we get the desire to do so and simply pay for bags.  Whatever the case the yard is open once more… and I’ve already gotten several birds coming to check out the feeder.  Yesterday we had a couple of gorgeous cardinals and a pair of blue jays, and it seems like the nesting pairs of turtles doves are back as well.  Now I just need to find me a switch so I can hang out on the back patio and play in style.

This morning I am using a screenshot completely unrelated to anything that I am going to talk about just because I thought it looked cool.  Last night was that night we dread all year long…  the night we attempt to deal with Taxes.  Tax Season is sort of the boogie man for adults, with the IRS being the grim harbingers of our impending doom.  The truth is we have never really run into major issues with Taxes, and in spite of this…  I still get almost physically ill when I think about dealing with them.  We have our taxes done, because there is something about having the piece of mind that someone is obligated by contract to come defend you if you ever get audited…  and at least somewhat financially responsible if something bad comes up.  I realize in the internet age I should be able to deal with my own taxes rather easily… but it is just more comforting to hurl a stack of papers at someone else… flail my arms and expect them to make it all make sense.  Over the years we have gotten mildly better at getting our shit together, and have started a system that involves cramming everything that looks even vaguely tax related into a manila envelope.  For the most part this year… we were able to pull things together easy enough with only minimal last minute scramble to try and sort out the last few documents that we were missing.  The truth…  the fact that we did this pulling together act on a day other than the day we had our tax appointment… is a huge positive for us.  Traditionally right up until the very moment we are supposed to go we are flying through the house rooting through piles of paperwork looking for a golden ticket…  or in our case that receipt from some charitable giving.

The thing that always screws us over in the end, is the fact that we functionally have to pay taxes in two different states.  During the summer my wife works as an AP test grader…  which always occurs in another state and counts as income for said state.  So that means in the next few weeks we are going to have to do the whole money order/certified check thing… and get the stupid slip of paper mailed off to this other state and hope beyond hope that it gets there.  We are fine in the long run, having to pay both states as is usually the case and getting back some from federal so it works out in the end.  But I cannot explain how fundamental and deep to my very core this sense of panic is that I feel when we start discussing taxes.  I am wondering if this is just a me thing, or if literally everyone goes through this yearly hell.  Its like so rarely do you really actually have to confront a cold force that can literally ruin you… in quite the same fashion as the IRS could.  All of it seems to be buried in arcane formula, and calculations that only software actually understands… that feels like it could very well add up and say that you owe everything you have.  There are certain aspects of life that make complete and total sense to me… but the Tax code will never be one of them.  So instead we live in this state of augmented anxiety until finally we gather the courage…  or it gets late enough that we absolutely have to deal with them.

Then when they are over… there is this crashing wave of euphoria.  Like we just survived the fight of our lives and came out with most of our limbs intact.  So instead of heading home we went out to eat, to celebrate our victory.  Its like going home didn’t make sense after the epic battle we just survived.  So instead we went to one of our regular rotation of Mexican restaurants where I had a glorious feast of chicken, cheese and chorizo.  I am supremely disappointed in whoever coded the spell checker built into Windows because I am seeing a red squiggly line over chorizo… the most glorious of meats.  After dinner we wound up needing to make a quick trip to Walmart…  which for us is a once in a month occurrence because our local store is completely crazy.  After wandering around and looking for what we actually came for, we exited thirty to forty minutes later.  So by the time I fed the animals and changed into my comfy flannel pants…  I wound up getting home about an hour late for the Final Fantasy XIV raid night.  I had talked during the day about wanting to make an attempt on Diadem and they did in fact seem to be able to pull together the people for that.  Some folks even got some of the tasty 265 gear…. but not for the classes they were actually playing.  Final Fantasy XIV really needs to give us the ability to trade gear among a fixed party.  I wound up tagging in after Diadem for Thordan Extreme, of which we sort of figured out at least the first few phases of that dance.  It is going to be one of those fights where we simply have to memorize the pattern and make sure everyone makes it through each phase shift alive.  More than anything though… I am happy to have slain the tax beast at least for this one season.

Last night was a bit of an odd one, in that I did not get out of work until after 6 pm and did not get home until almost 7 pm.  The series of meetings that I have been thrust into on Wednesday nights has been a thing, and there seems to be no end to them in the near future.  By the time I finally got home I was feeling fairly lousy, and after fixing dinner for wife and I didn’t really feel like doing much.  I sort of melted into the couch and attempted to do a little gaming on the laptop, but before I realized it I was falling asleep.  My wife seemed to be going through the same thing and by the time I headed to bed around 8 pm she was completely dead to the world on the couch and unwakeable without going through an excessive amount of effort.  So I left her sleeping there and crashed…  only to wake up just shy of 1 am due to the cats getting into a bit of a tussle.  I stumbled into the kitchen to take some meds because I was still feeling generally lousy, and around that point in my sleepy fumbling I dropped a pill blister on the floor that miraculously roused sleeping beauty.  So we attempted to head to bed while not waking up enough to make falling right back to sleep a chore.  Thankfully after about thirty minutes of “adjusting” I got right back to sleep and was not woken again until my watch “pre-alarm” started going off.  Generally speaking my smart watch makes me up by buzzing taps about a minute ahead of our insanely annoying alarm on the other side of the room…  giving me a bit of a gentle rousing before the crash of reality hits with the elder machination.

The challenge I am struggling with right now is there are just too damned many games I want to play.  For starters thanks to a whole slew of reasons I have yet to be Final Fantasy XV.  As I said the other day I am between two decisions on this game… do I force myself to push ahead and play the game in a manner that I do not feel enjoyable, or do I keep piddling away at it in my own manner and make the most of it?  So far I am leaning towards option two, and I am still very much enjoying this game.  Were this my ONLY game I probably would be considerably further in it, because in every manner it feels like a single player MMO to me, and I am sort of piddling around in it like I do an MMO.

Then there is of course Horizon Zero Dawn, the new hotness that I want to spend all my time playing.  I wrote at length about my feelings regarding this game and it bummed me out that I didn’t feel okay with hanging out upstairs and playing it last night.  I felt largely out of sorts and the game does in fact require a modicum of coordination to land shots in the appropriate sweet spots.  As a result I opted against playing, but I still have a super strong drive to do so… and am hoping I will be feeling generally grand this evening and can return to exploring the much more opened world.

Then there is of course Zelda Breath of the Wild which should be arriving for my Wii U next Tuesday.  I am not really sure why the delay but in truth I am a bit thankful for it.  I’ve opted against getting a Switch on launch day, because really there is just this one title that I would want to play on it.  In theory I will be happy enough playing it on the Wii U because all I really want to do is explore the world and get my Zelda on once again.  That said the major problem is… it is once again another big game stacked on top of a pile of already big games.

Another big game that is now sitting in my Steam Library waiting to be installed is Torment Tides of Numenera.  The funny thing about Kickstarter games is that when they finally release… they sort of sneak up on you.  I just looked it up in gmail, and my original backing of this game was on March 6th of 2013, and almost four years later it finally shows up.  The problem with Torment however is that it is also waiting in line behind another similar title… Tyranny which I also have yet to finish.  Spoiler alert, Tyranny will be the March AggroChat game club title, so one way or another I will be finishing that one off in the coming weeks.  However I really only want to have one classic PC RPG sitting waiting in the wings at a time, so for the moment Torment will sit there waiting.

Then there is of course the next Mass Effect game which releases somewhere towards the end of March.  I am hoping and praying that this will not be another Dragon Age Inquisition, where it is a Bioware experience that I just could not get into for whatever reason.  Generally speaking I like the Mass Effect series way better than I do Dragon Age, because overall the games have been a much more even handed experience for me.  My favorite in the series is Mass Effect 2, but I still find it super easy to get enjoyment out of both the original and the third installment.  I’ve played through the entire sequence several times as well, and they still have lots of great replayability for me personally.  I am hoping that Andromeda just adds to that experience, but once again it is a HUGE game… landing at almost exactly the same time as everything else.

Then in the summer we have Elder Scrolls Online Morrowind… which lands June 6th and looks awesome.  The only problem there however is that I know the experience is going to get overshadowed by the launch of another MMO expansion.  However this post is more a placeholder saying that I would absolutely LOVE to wrap up the other content, or at least make a dent in it before Morrowind officially lands.

Finally we have Stormblood… the Final Fantasy XIV expansion that is certain to overshadow literally anything else that is going on at that time.  It launches June 20th and is going to ultimately spawn a feeding frenzy of leveling through both the new story and content and beginning all of the things that come with a proper expansion.  Essentially this is also a line in the sand…  that I basically need to have completed any of the games that I mentioned above before we reach this point in the year or I am simply not going to get around to it for several months.  I am certain that I have left some things off of the list, but it seems like there are just an awful lot of big gaming experiences landing next to each other that I really want to play.  What I mean by “big gaming” is that each of these is a massive game featuring more gameplay that a person could reasonably sit through in a day or two.  With a shooter for example, you have a linear story arc that follows a sequence of levels until you finally reach the crescendo in the final boss fight. Each of the games on my list however is an RPG with meandering and character progression… all of which for me at least can take hundreds of hours of gameplay rather than tens of hours.  For the moment however… I am going to keep juggling FFXV and Horizon and see where I can make it progress wise.  However I still feel like I am drowning in too many good games to play at once and the fear of missing out…  is tangible.