Day 1000 of Russia's invasion of Ukraine came and went last week. Courtesy of a favored saying of the age, "elections have consequences", our current President took a look at his scheduled replacement, and decided we need to push out as much materiel to Ukraine as we can, while we can, and has also relaxed the restrictions on using our weapons on Russian soil. Russia responded by updating their stated stance on using nukes to include countries that provide weapons to their opponents, and tried to back up their words by using a ballistic missile (of the sort that could carry nukes) on Ukraine... after letting us know first over the "let's not accidentally start World War III" hotline first. Putin's not happy, and that's fine by me, especially since he could just stop this whole mess any time he likes - well, maybe that's not an option for him domestically after all this time, but that falls squarely into Not My Problem territory.
Of course, the whole Israel-Hamas fight is still going on as well, and that's still a "pox on both houses" thing. Seemingly, the International Criminal Court agrees, since they've put out arrest warrants for the leaders of both sides. Netanyahu responded by calling it "anti-Semitic". No, this isn't an attack on the Jewish people at random or as a whole, just tagging the people leading both sides of a needlessly brutal conflict to maybe pay for their crimes someday. I know, consequences for your actions is such an outdated way of thinking, but I'm a little old-fashioned that way.
Speaking of consequences and the lack thereof, the lead-up to the transfer of the Presidency continues apace. The judge that convicted Trump on multiple state felony counts has apparently decided to lay low a bit, indefinitely postponing his sentencing - so Trump gets to decide how hard he wants to push his appeals process, but that's almost a given, since he really doesn't want to go down as America's first felon President. Meanwhile, Trump continues to announce the appointments he wants to make, and I can't decide how much of that is "these are people he knows and likes" and how much is just maximum trolling. At least we won't have the (credibly alleged) pedophile Matt Gaetz around as either the incoming Attorney General, nor as a U.S. Representative, after his multiple withdrawals. There's still plenty of unpleasant people maybe getting into positions of power, depending on how the Republican Senate handles things.
Locally, things remain reasonably sane for the time being... so long as you're not homeless, at least. On the plus side, the local/regional "homeless warehouse" got shut down. On the minus side, that shutdown occurred without much in the way of plans for handling the demand otherwise, from what I can glean. On the other hand, my local city council just modified and enhanced their "public camping" laws to both eliminate any need for camping equipment to be involved and make it a misdemeanor with potential jail-time attached. Gotta love that whole "go be homeless somewhere else" vibe... not. That, and I really don't like laws where application is left to the discretion of law enforcement on the scene, since you know anybody looking to apply this is going to make a value judgment on how "homeless" the target looks or was behaving previously.
So, to quote Cartman, screw you guys, I'm going home. After the disappointment of Starfield's DLC, nothing remotely recent was calling out to me, so I hopped back into Disgaea 2 PC for the first time in a while. Rather, I started from scratch, and I've made it further than I ever have to date. Sadly, Steam Deck's sleep mode isn't a panacea for the Item World length problem (I've had actual gameplay problems crop up using it), but setting aside a weekend afternoon I've found to be doable. Of course, that leaves a lot of time during the week for shorter fare, which I was filling with various smaller games from my Steam backlog.
Then Death Stranding got surprise-dropped on XBox, with a 50% sale to start knocking it down under $20, meeting my cheap-bastard requirements. I'd heard good things about the game over the years, so I gave it a go. It's definitely a novel game, both in the gameplay loop and the world building, and it's sufficiently occasionally weird to keep my attention. The "rebuilding America" theme is a little on-the-nose for current affairs, and it's mentally tricky dealing with them trying to map a much smaller gamespace onto the continental U.S. (likely not a big deal for developers/players in other countries that just don't grasp the scale of this country), but that's the extent of the "bad" that I can really dredge up for this game at the moment. Long story short, I've found it good for under-an-hour play sessions so far, and I'd recommend it for anybody to check out on XBox.
No comments:
Post a Comment