The new normal

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a post all about COVID. At least, not directly. Over the past few months, the company I work for has bled off no fewer than seven employees. We aren’t large, so this has really hurt. And because there’s a labor shortage in the US right now (the exact reasons why are a subject for another time), every place is hiring. That means we’ve had a ridiculously hard time getting people to apply–and if they do apply, most of them only stick around for a month or so before leaving to look for something less stressful. “Normal” this year has become an endless cycle of working extra hours because we’re so short-staffed, leading to a more stressful environment among those of us who have stuck around, and the new employees we do get pick up on that, and don’t want to stay, leading to more long hours, and more stress, and…

I miss the old normal. Which brings us to today’s word.

mundane, adj. – normal, ordinary, commonplace

Learned from: The Immortal (Apple IIGS, Amiga, Atari ST, Genesis, NES, PC, Nintendo Switch)

Developed by Will Harvey

Published by Electronic Arts (1990)

The Immortal was an odd, but memorable game. Part-adventure game, part-light RPG, it put you in the shoes of a rather old wizard, trying to find his mentor somewhere in a sprawling labyrinth. It sounds pretty straightforward (aside from the protagonist older than 30–how often do you see something like that, these days?), but the game was anything but. Your adventure was chock-full of clever puzzles to solve (or bash your head against), traps to avoid (or blunder into), monsters to fight (or sneak by, or even befriend), and spells to cast–even spells as “mundane” as fireballs, according to the manual.

The world usually felt threatening, sometimes alien (the will-o’-the-wisps stand out in my memory), and always lived-in. Even despite the clunky controls, and some would say unfair difficulty (how was I supposed to know that chest was full of spiders, ahead of time?!), I still have very fond recollections of my time with The Immortal. Despite the bland initial setup, the game is anything but mundane.

Believe it or not, EA publishing good, inventive games also used to be normal.

How fitting.

I was working on making dinner today, when an onion I was slicing up slid under my hand, and I ended up doing the knife-equivalent of whacking my thumb with a hammer. For such a relatively small wound, it bled a surprising amount. Which brings us to today’s word.

imbrued, verb – past tense of imbrue, to stain, particularly with blood

Learned from: Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (Playstation 4, PC, Switch, XBox One, mobile)

Developed by ArtPlay, Wayforward

Published by 505 Games (2019)

When I found my first Imbrued Skull, I thought it was a typo of “imbued.” But the rest of the translation had been pretty solid, and nothing in the item’s description suggested it was imbued with anything (except perhaps blood). So, on a whim I looked it up, and yeah, it’s just a very tongue-in-cheek play on words, considering the game it’s from.

I actually kind of respect that, because while <i>Bloodstained</i> is <i>Castlevania</i> in everything but name, it’s got enough self-awareness to give it a slightly playful identity all its own. Sure, there’s themes of human experimentation, and demonology, and all that, but you’ve also got a bumbling villager who keeps getting lost, despite all your efforts to help him get home, an old lady who just wants to eat all her favorite foods one last time before she dies, and the occasional fourth wall-breaking joke. And somehow, it all works.

What a terrible night to have a bloody hand injury…

Back from the dead

A lot has happened since my last post–most of it work-related. We’ve had a couple people leave, others have been out sick, so I’ve been picking up extra shifts and training in new hires as a result. It’s not over yet, but things have slowed down for the moment–enough that I was able to get my first round of the Moderna vaccine today. Which brings us to today’s word.

ampoule, noun – a small, hermetically sealed glass or plastic vessel used to store solutions for hypodermic injection

Learned from: Silent Hill 2 (Playstation 2, PC, XBox, Playstation 3, XBox 360)

Developed by Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo

Published by Konami (2001)

Silent Hill‘s equivalent of the first aid spray from Resident Evil, ampoules would bring you back to pretty much full health, no matter how close to death you were. Though, I really don’t know how any of the protagonists actually got the stuff inside into their systems, since you never pick up any syringes. Maybe they just drink it? Seems about as sanitary as anything else in Silent Hill: the town where you can get eye tetanus just by reading the street signs.

On the subject of the COVID vaccine though, it was painless. I got it about an hour and a half ago, and the worst side-effect I have so far is a tiny bit of an ache in my arm. So far, it’s not even as rough as the flu vaccine, which is great. Though, seeing just how many people showed up to get their doses this morning made me almost pine for the deserted streets of Silent Hill. A year of isolation hasn’t exactly helped my social anxiety.

Still, it feels good to be back posting here, so it won’t be long until the next one. Cheers, and sign up to get the vaccine if you haven’t already–it really isn’t bad at all.

Back to normal?

Well, two days ago marked the official start of a new era in United States politics. That sounds a bit melodramatic, but the past four years have felt much, much longer. And I know the problems inherent in, and responsible for those four years won’t just go away overnight, but we can hope they were ultimately an aberration. Which brings us to today’s word.

ergodic, adj. – the tendency for a system to even out to a baseline value over time

Learned from: Oxenfree (Playstation 4, Mac, Mobile, PC, Nintendo Switch, XBox One)

Developed by Night School Studio

Published by Night School Studio (2016)

Disclaimer: The definition above is significantly simplified. The exact meaning is rather technical, and seems to vary slightly depending on which dictionary I use to look it up. This is perhaps fitting, considering the term in the game applied to a theory of thermodynamics.

Oxenfree is an interesting horror-themed adventure game. Sort of a sci-fi, coming of age, ghost story…kind of. You play (mostly) as Alex, a girl who gets invited to a party on an abandoned island one summer. Once you’re there, you and your friends accidentally make contact with…something through your portable radio, and end up in a struggle for your lives against the entities on the island. Much like today’s word, this synopsis is over-simplified, but I don’t want to give spoilers, because the narrative really is good, with dialogue choices that seem to matter, and some really neat twists.

Anyway, at one point, you discover the notes of someone who was researching the entities, and it’s in this person’s study that you find, among other things, books on ergodic thermodynamics. You know, just a bit of light reading while your friends are getting possessed, and reality itself is warping around you.

Damn teenagers, always on their radios, opening rifts in space-time…

It’s enough to drive a man to drink.

To say that it’s a stressful time in my country is a criminal understatement. In under two days, we’re going to be ushering in a new president, and while that’s been little more than a formality every other time it’s happened, so long as I’ve been alive, this year is…different. There have already been acts of violence in the past few weeks, and I’m worried something worse is going to happen on inauguration day. On a more personal level, I’m not even going to be home to see it, if something does happen–my job is opening its doors to the public again, starting tomorrow, in a decision that was made rather suddenly. Beyond the anxiety over being stuck at work and potentially missing historic news as it unfolds, I really wish they’d waited until my coworkers and I had gotten the vaccine. All of this brings us to today’s word.

potation, noun – a dring; particularly: an alcoholic drink

Learned from: Utawarerumono: Mask of Deception (Playstation 4, Playstation 3, Playstation Vita, PC)

Developed by Aquaplus

Published by Atlus USA (2017)

I’m generally not big on visual novels. If they offer you choices in dialog or action that affect the story, that helps a bit. If they offer puzzles or combat, that helps more. The Utawarerumono games do offer Fire Emblem style battles, but they’re few and far between, and the narrative portions that make up the bulk of the game are often tedious and hard to suffer through. There’s always a good story there, but it’s always buried under fanservice, mixed attempts at humor, and side events that often contribute nothing to the plot.

Really, the only reason I’ve played two of these games so far, is because the next Dokapon game is a cross-over with this series (for some reason), and I wanted to be familiar with the characters.

One of these characters is Maroro, a court magician with a very…over the top personality. He’s dressed in garish robes and face paint, his mannerisms are downright foppish, and his speech is positively purple. He’s also kind of a sad sack, who always gets taken advantage of by people around him. Following one of these incidents, Maroro ends up at a bar, drowning his worries in potations he probably can’t afford, and pouring his heart out to you in a litany of flowery prose.

Maroro’s kind of insufferable, but it’s hard not to feel a little bad for him.

2020 in a word

I think we can all agree, this has been a terrible year. Does anyone even remember that things started off with a huge chunk of Australia being on fire? Or that the rain forests of Brazil followed suit? When practically half the planet is engulfed in flames, and it somehow faded from the public consciousness, you know it’s been an utterly abysmal year. Which brings us to today’s word.

septage, noun – sewage, human waste, especially: the contents of a septic tank

Learned from: Remnant: From the Ashes (Playstation 4, PC, XBox One)

Developed by Gunfire Games

Published by Perfect World Entertainment (2019)

I recently decided to pick this game back up, after close to a year. Back then, I’d been trying to talk some friends into picking it up to play through the campaign together, but they were too focused on Destiny 2, and later The Division 2, to have time for another game. At the time, I was kind of frustrated by this, so I set the game aside, until this past month, when I decided to just try to soldier through it on my own.

This was a mistake.

Remnant is a perfectly fine game, if a bit light on setup/story. The procedurally-generated levels randomize more than just the maps, but also quests, and even bosses…and this is where things fell apart for me. I was playing a long-range character, and the first boss I came to relentlessly charged in, giving me no room to breathe or set things up. Worse, he periodically spawned other enemies that charged in at me…and these guys explode when they get close. It was a nightmare…for one person. And I realized, Remnant is really designed for multiplayer, but the friends I have who are into these sorts of games probably wouldn’t be satisfied with the loot system (enemies don’t drop anything but money and ammo, meaning you’ll never randomly get a better weapon unless you find one on the map…and items don’t reset once you’ve picked something up), or the slow burn it takes to get any cool gear. Faster-paced games have spoiled them.

But, who cares, right? Where’s the word? Well, the loading screens (which I saw a lot of, from dying so much) cycle through item descriptions, mostly for things I never found, because I didn’t get far enough. One of them was some sort of “calling bell,” the description of which described an alien race whose young were incubated in “holy septage” or something like that. I have no idea what these creatures are, or what story significance this has, but it sounds interesting as heck…so I’m a little sad that (at a respectable difficulty setting at least), I’ll probably never experience more of this world. Maybe one of these days I’ll swallow my pride and try again at “normal” or even “easy” difficulty, but that feels wrong, somehow. Right now though, it’s all too frustrating.

Much like this year, and the way my country has handled the pandemic. May 2021 be less shitty.

This is Gorefist, who kept wiping the floor with me. The fact that he sounds like a rejected Rob Liefeld character may be the crappiest thing of all….

Have a very scary solstice

December is chock-full of holidays, and regardless of their individual religious connections, there’s a very good reason for that: the winter solstice. During the darkest time of the year, when the days–let alone the nights–are freezing, and light seems to be fading from the world, people needed an excuse to be happy. Even before 2020. Today’s word isn’t the happiest, but it does fit, thematically.

fuliginous, adj. – sooty, smoky, dirty

Learned from: Darkest Dungeon (PC, Mac, mobile, Playstation 4, Playstation Vita, Switch, XBox One)

Developed by Red Hook Studios

Published by Red Hook Studios (2016)

I have a certain fondness for games that are punishingly difficult: Dark Souls and its ilk, the Shin Megami Tensei series, etc. Darkest Dungeon is no exception. Your characters are as likely to go insane from the stress of exploring your family’s estate, as they are to die of actual physical damage. Pathological fears, obsessive compulsions, and strange fixations can cripple them more than any injury or disease. And sometimes when one of them succumbs to this stress, they have some colorful, almost H.P. Lovecraft-level purple prose to accompany it–such as the occultist who cried out about the pull of the “fuliginous abyss” calling to him, or something like that, before he lunged for the clearly evil altar in the middle of the room.

So yeah, your characters will occasionally do things that are outside your control, and those things can sometimes lead to the death of your entire party, like when they activate a ritual to open a rift in time and space, and some tentacled horror picks them apart, one by one. As long as you don’t mind setbacks like that, it’s an incredible game.

Pay to win

A friend of mine recently talked me into trying out Crusader Kings III, since it was on sale on Steam. And while I’m still just getting started, I’ve already learned quite a lot from this game, like dukes wielded more power and governed more land than counts (who were on the same level as earls), and that all of them outranked barons. And that’s just something I picked up from the tutorial section, along with today’s word.

scutage, noun – a tax imposed by a Medieval lord, in place of military service

Learned from: Crusader Kings III (PC, Mac)

Developed by Paradox Development Studio

Published by Paradox Interactive (2020)

I never knew just buying your way out of fighting was an option, until I played Crusader Kings III. I’d always just assumed that if your king went to war, and raised the call to arms, that was that (short of some Game of Thrones-style political scheming and treason). But it seems in some situations, if a baron, or count, or whatever thought that some of their able-bodied men would be put to better use tilling the fields or something, they could try to arrange payment of scutage in lieu of providing troops.

This is interesting, because the idea of rich people simply buying their way out of their obligations and responsibilities is most assuredly an outdated relic of the past, along with witch burnings, and treating all diseases with leeches. Right?

“While I like taking over new lands, I do also like people giving me money….”

Levity, by way of lexical ambiguity

Apologies again for the long break; politics, and skyrocketing COVID numbers (which, insanely, is also somehow political in my country) have made it hard to focus on projects like this. I’d been trying to distract myself, but it took months to even get a one-shot session of a tabletop RPG off the ground. That finally happened, though, and I’d forgotten how much I liked running games for friends–even over Discord, with all its technical glitches. In a roundabout way, this brings us to today’s word, because of joking around with friends, and also the game’s title.

jerkin, noun – a long, close-fitting jacket, usually without sleeves

Learned from: Dungeon Master (Apple IIGS, Amiga, Atari ST, PC, SNES, Turbografx-CD, Sharp X68000, PC-9801, FM Towns)

Developed by FTL Games

Published by FTL Games (1987)

Dungeon Master was a great first-person dungeon crawler (or DRPG, as the genre is sometimes called today). The puzzles actually made you think, the magic system was very interesting in how spells were put together, and it was pretty damn challenging. It was also rather obtuse at times, particularly when it came to equipment.

Weapons came with different types of attacks (slash, hack, bash, etc.), and you could see via experimentation, which ones packed more oomph. But armor? There was no “defense” rating, or anything like that; all you had to go on was the picture, and the item’s weight. So, while you could infer that a breastplate would protect a character more than a silk shirt, was a tunic better or worse than a jerkin? Impossible to say. So, you just had to kind of guess your way through outfitting your characters, which made staying a live more difficult than it needed to be. Then again, it’s not like real-life gear tends to have numerical ratings for anything but temperature ranges for winter coats.

And now for the lexical ambiguity joke:

Enjoy this stock image, because googling “dungeon master jerkin” brings up some very…different results.

Something we all need right now

Well, it’s been awhile, hasn’t it? My apologies. The world has just gotten…well, to be a lot to bear, lately. I’d get home from work each day, look at social media, and just…not have the energy to want to do much of anything. The closer we get to the presidential election, the more heated and worrisome things have been getting. And oddly, it took the situation getting even worse for me to feel like getting back to this. Long story short, my workplace might’ve just gotten exposed to COVID today, and I need to do something positive to feel better. Which brings us to today’s word.

catharsis, noun – a therapeutic and/or cleansing release of emotions, often through art

Learned from: Katharsis (PC)

Developed by Metropolis

Published by Metropolis (1997)

Katharsis was a fairly unremarkable game, when you get down to it: a horizontal-scrolling shoot-’em-up, that was distributed via shareware, if memory serves. Its graphics were okay for a DOS game, with 3D backgrounds, and some decent particle effects, but the only thing that really sticks out in my memory is the name, misspelled and edgy though it is. I don’t even think I ever bought the full game–just played however many levels were included in the demo a few times, and then probably went back to Half-Life or something.

But it goes to show that even something small and unremarkable can have an impact on your life to some extent. And while it does feel good, getting back to updating this blog, I think I’m going to go find something more visceral to keep the catharsis going. See you again soon.