The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope

When encountering it on Xbox, I found the first entry in The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan a superb adventure game. Enough so that after finishing it: I pre-ordered the second entry on the spot. I can understand why they targeted Halloween weekend as the launch for The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope. The game has a rather gruesome opening prologue before meeting up with the survivors of the bus wreck. It's content is kind of ideal for Halloween, and I've been looking forward to it all month.

My Halloween plans pretty much were eat cake, and play Xbox. 'Cuz even I need a day off once in a while, lol.

Early on Little Hope feels like things are a bit less heavy on the Quick Time Events (QTEs), given the shift from holy crap, pirates! Over to demons that go bump in the night as the main threat to your lives. Didn't expect the twist at the end to make such crystal sense of everything that happened, but it was well executed. Whether intentional, or just my own attitude, it made the feeling of having had enough of the demons confronting the characters, and opting for more a aggressive approach: seem rather appropriate to the story. How it impacts the significance of characters surviving, well, made me feel a little less bad about missing a QTE and losing one on the way to the house. Some aspects of the gameplay may take advantages of people who paid attention in Man of Medan, or just be ready to oopsie you the same way over; it's hard to tell.

Sounds like there are plans for a third game in The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes. I'll probably be nabbing that when it comes out. Definitely a very fun game series.

 Pretty sure that Willow’s reaction here is “Did someone say food?”

The 1985 movie Clue only has one real, viable ending — and it isn’t the ‘good’ one

While I think that’s a pretty clever concept for a fourth ending, I think I rather like the traditional third ending. Both because it amuses me greatly, and because it makes the most sense of a farcical situation.

The week in pictures

 Aside from the general busy level and workalcoholism, I think this largely sums things up.

Test of new socks: AWESOME. I've put off buying new socks for so long that it feels like clouds instead of boots. Also willow doesn't understand why she doesn't get a post-walk treat before I take my boots off, and after.

Pretty sure she demands pretzel sticks.

Misty wanting attention.

Willow wondering why Misty gets the crane service and the chair.

Sometimes: I am a dog chair.

Willow reminding me that her pretzel stick bribes are required for midnight snackage.

The kind of looks I get when getting dressed for work.

It's amazing Willow didn't dive on the plate faster than I could take the picture, lol.

Wasn't sure if leftover brussels sprouts and alfredo sauce was a great idea. Combined with meatballs, it certainly is!

Willow wishes a poor meatball would roll off the table, on the floor, or just straight into her mouth.

Yes, Willow, I know you wants treats.

Sometimes you've just gotta splurge :)

Pretty sure the dogs are smarter than I am when it comes to how to spend an afternoon.

Best part of chili mac is definitely eating chili mac.

Comfort level: over 9000!

Baldur’s Gate 3 devs built a testing AI. Then, they tried to defeat it.

That is kind of neat, and likely worth the effort as it grows more capabilities for abusing the game.

Television, novels, and comics tell us one day the super cool A.I. will be super smart, and may or may not try to kill us all. Personally, I think the future looks more like a series of special purpose constructs aimed to help us with specific tasks. That’s the super-cool A.I. I’m looking forward to, because I’m probably going to be dead decades or centuries before we see anything like Cortana or Jarvis, lol.

“Willow, do you really need a pretzel that badly?”

Picture of the dogs looking at me like I’ve got cucumbers coming out of my ears, omitted to protect the guilty

 Next-gen games on Xbox Series X look fine but feel amazing

This kind of summarizes why I don't really care about playing games in 4k, but am very interested in the Series X

 Fuck it, I’m having a cookie; the current o’clock after a long tiring day.

 A comfortable doggo.

 When the weather reports shifted towards flash flood and river flood warnings, I was rather less concerned. Since the local terrain can handle quite a bit of water, and I’m not that close to the river.

Water simply collects by the fence, whether it runs off down the road or much more typically from our gutters down a slight slope towards the fence.

When it started to sound like someone up ended a lake, and dumped it overhead: I figured the slope out towards the fence would be pretty flooded this morning.

Willow was rather less enthused by this, as her favorite walking spot only has a couple meters of dry space between here and the fence.

Needless to say she took a shorter walk this morning than normal, lol.

This stands in stark contrast to plenty of places I’ve seen in Georgia where the angles of drainage feel more inverted. So I’ve long been happy that overflow collects down there instead offs my doorstep, lol

Not sure that my emergency action plan has changed much since I was a child, aside from the rise of LED bulbs and that my phone can speak an emergency alert for tornadoes. But I'd like to think warning times have improved over the last couple decades.

Officially hunkered down. All the things near shelter point. Etc. But based on the radar and the weather, I'm thinking if I was going to die by tornado tonight I'd already by dead. Just the same, I'd rather it be a shorter trip if I find myself grabbing dogs and taking cover.

And then there's the part I find more mixed.

Decided while I was at it: fresh underwear. Not unusual as part of my getting ready for bed. But not a horrible precaution for tornadoes either.

But then I pictured hanging from a tree branch by the elastic, narrowly saved from being gone with the wind. Because my sense of humour is rather twisted and easily amused. For some reason: this made my mind flash to a scene in the old visual novel: Family Project. Soon after the middle aged woman,  Masumi is introduced into the story: she tries to commit suicide by leaping off the nearest bridge. The main character ends up saving her by her panties, and putting the elastic to the ultimate test, in what's a spectacularly hilarious scene (if terribly embarrassing for the character). Personally, if I was in that predicament, I'd be keeping that pair for good luck, lol.

My mother would sometimes make dishes similar to this, based on what she considered “Italian peasant food”. As for me, I found most of them highly delicious. Often good ways to use up small bits of sauce or oil, and make something filling out of it.

Such meals also taught me good ways to combine inexpensive foods with leftovers, and how to turn it into a delivery vehicle for cheese. Hehe.

Willow of course wishes she could make off with a plateful, lol

 Willow is usually comfortable in the afternoons, and the lead instigator of treats when she’s awake.

And then sometimes she’s just surprised by delicious mysteries, lol

 “You were so comfy I had to come bug you isn’t a valid excuse, human, but the head pats are welcome.”

 So of the various ways that Windows NT pisses me off, one is networking.

Years of roaming between my home and work networks never made my Debian partition miss a beat. But with the Windows partition, it often decides to give me the finger.

Home/DHCP and Work/Static shouldn't be an issue, but however I've managed to achieve the state (more than once) it decides that Work/DNS servers should be used in place of Home/DHCP lease. Which of course means pain in my arse.

The various methods of stabbing NT's network stack with a spork through netsh and ipconfig didn't help me, or I've never learned more useful pressure points. Regardless the applied settings don't match what I've tried to configure on the connection nor the adapter through both the modern and old interface.

What finally works is this: https://superuser.com/a/1464468/295120

Hunted down the entry that corresponds to my pain woe and purged the value of ProfileNameServer for both tcpip and tcpip6. Vola the mother fucker switches back to the DNS in my DHCP lease.

Sigh.

 On the way home I had a scathingly brilliant idea. Combine the leftover noodles from last night’s garlic/olive oil/cheese plan with spinach and beans.

Willow and company were just sad that they didn’t get any of the chicken. Although they were happy for the beef / gravy chaser I set out for them, lol.

 Gamer Installs Crysis 3 On GeForce RTX 3090's VRAM - And It Runs

Not sure if I’m more impressed that someone actually tried this, or that we live in a world where you can get a graphics card with more memory than most people’s PCs.

Relative intelligence: they are full of treats and napping; I haven't even had lunch yet.