Drives are done! Thursday was all wins, Friday was mostly wins, Saturday was mostly losses and me being 20 away from the threshold and several games on thinking I would be five under, but no, I threaded the needle perfectly. I did a couple extra to fill out the standard 100 comp points bar as I was 11/15, but seeing as I turn off the signatures in client I have no need for the last tier, and it's not a permanent cosmetic anyways, so save your sanity and all that...

I'll be getting Ashe's crimson weapon and also Vendetta's gold, I think... I really do enjoy the sword spinning. I've been trying her a bit in normal gameplay and she is so desperately dependant on her perks to be playable, she has no self sustain or invulnerability frames, and no holding up your sword to block damage doesn't really count. Stadium fixes a lot of these problems and more, but even there it takes you myriad rounds to build her, she's one of the slowest.

( Shion first impressions, and Reign of Talon thoughts so far )

4th June is Nendoroid FUNS - the last included Final Fantasy and the Sakura announcements, and one for Persona 5 - and 6th June is Good Smile Fest, which we know for sure will include one Sakura scale alongside Keroberos. And whilst the concept fortunately didn't sell it to me and I'm not a fan of Sakura's outfit, full size Kero has next to no figures at all, so I'm excited to see him at least.

This post is however about nendoroids specifically. I could make it much, much longer, but whittled it down to those I feel have a decent chance based on character popularity for what would sell, precedent (if they've released nendos in the series already), and outside factors that may tip the balance in that series' favour.

( Read more... )

Yesterday I defrosted my freezer, which I learned a few times of doing this ago that the fastest way to do this is hot water in various bowls; it still took about five hours and then it let it go cold again for another two before putting my food back in. All the additional bending and leg movement meant I woke up today with my thighs hurting like hell, which boded extremely ill. After grocery in bed rest I could barely stand, I tried heat pads and ice packs and neither of them made a difference, so we'll see if I'm able to get up tomorrow...

I also dyed my hair over the weekend. Hurray for itchiness reprieve. My upstairs neighbours' making the walls growl/groan got so bad I wrote them a letter essentially asking what it might be and that it's been so disruptive to me I can't sleep more than a few hours if they're at home. After weeks of this I'm anticipating the noise happening, which has led to me not really getting over PEM again and I haven't been able to write for over a month at this point or engage with anything new or even something repeated such as Khlip's Endwalker replay and it's making me a bit loopy. I don't know if they got the letter or no, but they weren't there last night and not tonight either, so big rest, hopefully 😭 the outside road problem noise has basically stopped entirely. No more click clack other than extremely faint and I'm specifically listening out for it, so I can cancel the council lady coming to visit. It turns out waiting 20 months will make a problem go away as routine maintenance will mean a manhole cover is opened and tightened properly this time. Who knew.

Let's see. I made two more alts. The timing of me having crashed out due to more released content I can't do (XI alliance raid 3, so no raids of any kind for DT) is laughable. But I made Prih's shard on the fourth, a xaela who may lean more magic (I haven't decided yet - for Prih, she's not particularly magically inclined and neither is Khlip, and the reasoning I've given for this is that other shards get an over abundance of magic of perhaps two or more people. This was the case for Neineith, who caused a calamity due to it) and also another Overwatch alt as I had the strongest desire to see Freja go to Evercold because it just seems like her wheelhouse?? I want to put her there?? And one of the Neo Fantasian hairs is so close to being her hair in actuality I could not pass this up??

I've gone through 80% of ARR in perhaps four days, combination poor sleep waking up after a few hours killing time before groceries and brain empty PEM post groceries. She somehow keeps organically stumbling into or spawning S ranks, which seems fitting...

Comp point grind continues. Tank has stalled a bit since Junker Queen was nerfed and though I do like Ram builds conceptually I am not a great Ram. DPS I've mainly been playing Mei, she has 2-3 situational builds and I am finally proficient in all of them. Support, they supposedly did a Juno rework and one power I really like but her healing is still lacklustre and spotty and her ult charge is so slow, and they nerfed my Brigitte build so p much everything I like to play has been hit at this point, I expect Mei to get the same next season 💀 i'm at 10k for the competitive year already and was aiming for 30k or so again for the things I want/remaining golds, so we keep at it... I'm really hoping the cat being added in mid season doesn't fuck me up too badly.

I wanted to make something aesthetically pleasing with my Overwatch gold weapons for the skins I'm presently wearing, which led to me painstakingly cropping each weapon out by hand to incorporate onto pastel backgrounds. I did this in one sitting last weekend when I couldn't sleep, and I'm posting them after my body woke me up after one hour of sleep to inform me it was nauseous (I've been in bed for 9 hours and only slept 1, help).

These are the order I acquired them in, and there's 25 total (plus 6 galactic repeats not seen here), or, half the roster. I did not succeed at golds for all women at the end of the competitive year because they went and added four more women right off the bat and Mizuki became the third male character to win me over LMAO. Golds for women will happen, eventually; I'm holding points right now for crimson wolf weapons.

( Read more... )

Bullet points today, I should have been asleep hours ago but then started building a movie theatre in The Sims whilst listening to the storm rattle my windows.

• completed all the DLC Tomb score and time attack trophies for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, respectively. I ended up doing the one that I hated last and just followed a visual guide for every step of it 🥹 do I try Deadly Obsession. We just don't know.

• mogtomes have been very slow, as the schedule was changed to have more Air Force... and whilst I don't dislike Air Force per say, there is only so much Air Force you can do in a game not designed for first person play. Or when the new one moves significantly faster and gives you motion sickness - it would not be Dawntrail content without something upsetting my brain. I find Leaps relaxing (it's the repetition, it's like running old platforming levels that take a few minutes tops) and Cliffhangers are ez, and I used Air Force previously to pad, and now I am constantly clock watching as it's more important than ever to be in the Saucer on the hour, which is just stressful to me. I feel very behind! I've had to not work on those that can do weeklies at all for the extra hours I've had to put in for Cliffhangers. Once I get the alts that can't do anything else but Saucer closer to completion I'll feel better about it, but, oof. If they keep extra Air Force next time I'll have to reevaluate priorities, unfortunately next time will probably include Dawntrail post-MSQ content...

• posted fic. Silent reception at first but had a few nice comments which helps. Went back to undercoverfic today and the uncertainty just ballooned, bleh. I think writing something very Amélie focused helped with the chapter I left off with, it's given me a few things to add in I hadn't considered/wasn't able to figure out at the time. After that it's more Cole and Ashe stuff, which I'm anxious about... it's a story I want to tell and do better justice to than Blizzard ever will, they have a way with uh, writing opposite sex relationships (don't get me started on some of the weird Emfrej shit, and I like Emfrej), and I just. I love Ashe so much I want her to get closure so she can look at this dumb stupid man she cared about and get to say to his face hey I don't need you anymore!! But you better show up to my wedding or both me and my wife will hunt you for sport! That's what I want.

• since yearly lore cycle was announced, we have had... precisely zero lore. Well. We had the five week lore event which was just hero release lore bites we usually get, one week at a time. Anran's had OW leave their HQ after the Talon attack... not much more than that. Now we're getting a webtoon but it's only about the OW aligned heroes and what they're doing now, but only some of the episodes are public, the rest are paid, it's still just slice of life working in OW. Next week we get the next hero trailer/her lore, and she's involved at Grand Mesa, which is where Ashe's upcoming heist is. I'm so fucking scaredTM.

• Drives next week. I'm so fucking scaredTM. I am Pro/All Star border in Stadium but had the most horrendous loss streak and realised I wasn't really having fun in the mode at all (the women have been nerfed, because it's not fair if they have powerful dot's and bullshit abilities, whilst the men have been reworked and buffed, because it's totally fine if they do) so decided to leave it until Drives. I did do my comp placements in support just in case... which it wholeheartedly told me I was predicted Plat 5, kept putting me in Plat lobbies, I won 80% of my games, and then went oh yeah my bad I forgot you should be Diamond 3. Yeah, how is this fair for anybody (it's not).

• will old bp rewards return for tenth anniversary or will I be disappointed on every single front. Find out next time

• irl wise I slipped against the edge of the bath on Tuesday and managed to cut my wrist (blood) and have a palm sized bruise on my left leg. My body's totally proportionate response to losing this tiny amount of blood was to vasovagal syncope aura at me, to which I had to find a way to speedrun getting conditioner out of my hair in about thirty seconds so I could somehow safely get out of the bath and wall slide my way to my bed and lay down breath in nose out through mouth. Not very pleasant when it chooses to do this in showers. 🫠🫠

• the road damage noise I've been experiencing for the last eighteen months, the one that has forced me to have a fan on when I'm sleeping and still routinely makes it difficult to go back to sleep if I get woken up/disturbed by anything because of the intrusive CLICK CLACK making it impossible to relax as I jolt awake... stopped. Last Thursday. So about ten days. Haven't heard it once. I very much doubt this was the council or the transport company but perhaps an unexpected third thing when there was some other highway maintenance related to manhole covers, as the person I was in contact with at the council said that was all she heard, to which I was like, why did you not tell me this fourteen months ago you know I can't go outside and am not able to identify the source myself. We were in the process of listening device - once again council lady has disappeared into the ether and become uncontactable - so if we hit three weeks and no noise it probably won't be necessary anymore. Which is good because it was going to cause me a lot of problems doing the recordings with it. Anyway, my sleep has been better this week by virtue of.. being able to go back to sleep quickly instead of having to wait hours to do so. And not having to tolerate noise has given me so many extra spoons. But we'll see how long it lasts.

100% completion! I have scoured the map for collectibles and had a lovely week inside of ruins and have been jumpscared a few times (but not too badly) and got frustrated during combat sequences a few times (if they discover a body the npc's AI just fucking BEELINES for you even if you're hidden) and had a fair few ???? moments during climbing exploration because it wasn't immediately obvious... sometimes jumps do not look jumpable at first glance, the grappling mechanic fails for no discernible reason except Lara is angled oddly, or she won't navigate complex terrain all that well...

The DLC unfortunately returns to the format that I remember Rise using for its tombs, in that they're all designed around timed puzzles so you can run them quickly to get a higher score and then trophies. I sincerely do not care for timed puzzles that require me to double back half a dozen times because I missed activating something by a fraction of a second. I want to explore it's about the aesthetic and vibes. I want to take my time solving a puzzle myself, but not in a repetitive way. I was perhaps two thirds of the way through the first DLC tomb and so frustrated and having so little fun that I had reached the point of "I don't care I just want it to be over" and used a walkthrough to get out. I am hesitant to do any more of them frankly, but trophies.

I was thinking about maybe doing a Deadly Obsession run in NG+, which is the hardest difficulty of the game with no checkpoints and reduced campfires, which can be done reasonably quickly in NG+ if you get all the gear you need and max out your resources before you start the file. The final boss arena changed my mind on this entirely because I can foresee losing hours of my life to running this sequence.

( why I will not be doing that )

Uhhh what else. I liked Lara's feral moment: good is not soft. She has a terrible day after Square dutifully kills their one other female character that fights, and your doe eyed protagonist should have moments of striking fear into those who have chosen to test her. I liked the ending: Lara got to see her parents one last time, I liked the Crimson Fire twist, there was some really good music playing during the tomb at the Mission of San Juan, I got to explore a Spanish galleon, temples galore. I liked an npc commenting on the thrill of discovery he could hear in Lara's voice, of seeing things unseen for thousands of years, and hoping she'd never lose that wonder. I did not like Lara's death cutscenes, which I never ever have, but if you're fast enough you can checkpoint reload before you have to see it and spare yourself watching spike impalement. Honestly the most heinous of these was during an escape sequence in Paititi, if the guard catches you they joyously hack you to pieces in the street whilst Lara screams, and that is way, way too 2013 Tomb Raider for me, which is why I never played it. It's just torture porn. It bothers me that there are cutscenes people had to make for every single location which is just Lara screaming and dying in brutal ways, it's not necessary. Men of the genre don't have this happen to them, your defining woman does not need it either. It also bumps the rating: there's a lot of stabbing going on in the closing hours but you don't see any of it on screen and there's no blood either?? The most gruesome thing was in the opening couple hours with a recently mauled, blood soaked half body asset being thrown at you from a jaguar's maw but most of the time unless it's Lara out of combat deaths, nothing.

Anyway, I give it a solid "it was fine", music was consistently great, it looked beautiful, narrative was not ground breaking but it wasn't a bad story to tell by any stretch. Once I decide what to do re: DLC tombs, it's probably time for Endwalker, where I'll be wishing for Mayan and Incan ruins, and what Dawntrail could have been...

Just finished 5.5 MSQ on Khlip. I was going to give Endwalker a chance but. No. No I hate it here actually.

( things that don't land for me )

Anyway my mood has been better (thank goodness for that), I'm hoping to get most of it not all of my edits done for my wip before groceries on Tuesday. I am trying like the eighth type of lightbulb before having to bite the bullet and spend like £50 instead of £10 to see if something almost alike to what I previously had but not quite will work instead. 🥲 but I could also end up returning all those... eyes pls. We'll see how I feel about Endwalker after I play something else as planned.