Everything Is Fine

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  • Gambling is fine

    In the year 2026, everything is gambling now. I don’t just mean how there are more casinos everywhere (although there are) or how sports betting has pervaded everything (although it has), but now we have prop bets, “prediction markets” (that are basically just sports betting, but also about other things), online gambling that lets you access things like blackjack and poker on your phone, online gambling that lets you play things like high stakes plinko or bet on how high a number goes before it crashes.

    And then there’s cryptocurrency, which is less a currency and more just a way to speculate on other people being hopefully dumber and/or greedier than you. Especially when you move away from Bitcoin (which is basically an asset now – still not really a currency because it’s not useful, but no worse an “investment” than incredibly volatile stock) and into the world of “memecoins” where the idea is basically to mint, hype your trash token to a bunch of rubes, and then liquidate and pocket all the money. (Or in other words, bet some money, and then watch the line go up and sell before it crashes, just like that game at the end of the last paragraph.)

    It’s not just that these things exist (which is mildly problematic on its own), but they’ve become even more accessible than ever. You used to have to go to a casino or sportsbook (or a guy at the bar or whatever) but now you just install an app or go to a website, type in your credit card info (or buy some “sweepstakes coins” – more on that later), and you’re ready to start betting. On sports, it’s just an endless scroll of games and buttons to tap to immediately place a bet. Click “See More” or whatever it is in your app of choice and suddenly instead of just picking winners, you’re picking who’s going to score, what the first play is going to be, or longer-term bets like which teams are going to win the championship. I even like sports betting and have had some minor success at it, but the day it launched in my home state, I remember thinking both “Sweet, gonna do this all the time now” but also “Uh, maybe this is a little too easy.”

    But if you want to bet on things like elections (or be even more of a ghoul and bet on things like wars and assassinations) there’s “prediction markets” like Kalshi and Polymarket. The CEO of Kalshi says his goal is to financialize every difference in opinion, and that’s basically what these “markets” do. (I don’t see any markets specifically open about murders; maybe they don’t allow that, but there are some on Polymarket now about if/when the US will launch a strike on Iran or Russia capturing particular Ukrainian cities.) If you think something will happen, you can find that market and buy the “shares” in the outcome. The price of a share is based on the calculated odds (every “winning” share pays out $1, and you can find shares for sale from anywhere from $0.003 up to $0.998 depending on the market), but then you can also sell that share to some other sucker along the way. It’s like betting on your bets! (Or like options trading for people who are even less informed about how trading works!)

    How is this legal? For sports betting, it’s legal because sports. (Even before sports betting was allowed to be legalized nationwide, there was a special exception for horse racing – gambling has always been ok when it supports a particular industry.) For “prediction markets” it’s legal because you’re buying tradable contracts, which is totally not betting. For sites like Stake, you buy fake money in bundles (and they inflate the fake money, so for like $50, you get 500,000 Gold Coins (that have no cash value and aren’t redeemable in any way) but then you also get a FREE BONUS of 50 sweepstakes coins (or whatever any given site calls them) that you can also play with, and those sweepstakes coins are redeemable for cash and prizes! You’re not gambling with money, you’re buying tokens and then you can win more tokens and trade your tokens for money! (Yes, that’s how it works in a casino, but generally, casino games online are not legal, barring a few jurisdictions where they are, like Pennsylvania, where I have managed to lose tens of dollars like a quarter at a time playing blackjack on my phone. Even I’m not immune to this nonsense.)

    Look, I like to gamble. I think it’s fun. I bet on sports; I go to casinos; I play the lottery; I play poker. Do I sometimes win? Yes. Do I usually lose? At some of those, yes. (I think I’m profitable over my lifetime at poker and sports betting; I have definitely never won the lottery.) Would it be better for my finances if I just never did any of it? Obviously. I would also have more money if I never bought board games or went on vacation or ate at restaurants, and I’m never going to stop doing those things, either.

    Is it destructive? Not for me personally(other than having lost money), but in general, probably. States with legalized sports gambling have overall lower credit scores, more bankruptcies, and more debts in collections. And that’s just the regulated sportsbooks that are licensed by gaming commissions and required to provide things like self-limiting, self-exclusion, and information to assist with gambling addictions. Kalshi at least has a disclaimer at the bottom of the page that trading incurs risk (although no links or phone numbers for addiction) and Polymarket not only doesn’t have anything like that at the bottom of the page, but it doesn’t even have a bottom of the page! If you keep holding Page Down or spinning your scroll wheel, you just keep getting more markets forever! (Okay, one, it’s probably not “forever” but I’m not gonna find the bottom and two, there is page footer with links, but those also don’t provide any help getting your out of your downward spiral of betting on the over/under on the number of views on the next Mr. Beast video or whether there will be a Magnitude 10 earthquake this year.) Despite being sketchy as hell, Stake does have a big section of their website about responsible gaming, so that’s cool. (They also have leaderboards where you can rank up by betting more, so that’s not great.)

    It’s obnoxious. It used to be that gambling was weird and sketchy, but now ESPN not only talks about the lines in the pregame coverage, but also now runs their own sportsbook. And everything is sponsored by sportsbooks now. Your game gets interrupted constantly by reminders that you could be betting right now! You can bet mid-game! How are your bets doing?! You know that parody from Family Guy where the “subliminal message” about smoking was just a guy yelling “SMOKE”? It’s basically that. (Oh god, can you imagine the advertising for weed if that gets fully legalized?)

    So yeah, it’s a way to squeeze more money out of people who don’t have any. It’s addictive, and it’s everywhere. It’s kinda fun. It’s probably fine. Probably. Not the downfall of society at all.

  • “Artificial Intelligence” is fine

    Hey, look! The first post of 2026, and it almost got posted within the first week. That’s a good start! I’ve been thinking about some of the talking points I wanted to put in here for a while now, and while I haven’t really “drafted” anything yet, I wanted to get it out here, so here’s what I’ve got.

    First, we all know that “AI” as it’s being marketed excruciatingly and shoved into everything is a big pile of shit. Most “AI” integrations aren’t anything more than chatbots or algorithms or what would have been basic automations a few years ago, but now we call it “AI” so venture capitalists will throw all their money at it. The “AI” built into Microsoft Word is just the spelling checker turned up to 1000% such that, instead of just realizing you’ve typed something that isn’t a word, it sees that you’ve typed a word and starts suggesting what words normally come after that. Hell, that’s what Clippit (the actual name of the paperclip) was doing back in Office 97. (“It looks like you’re writing a letter!”) It’s not “new,” and it’s not “intelligent,” and honestly, it’s not even all that helpful.

    Next, we have what people are actually doing with these things. We have people “writing music” and filling Spotify and YouTube with it, and people “making art” that’s terrible, with people with the wrong number of fingers and legs that bend the wrong way, and people “writing” text that doesn’t make any sense and isn’t coherent at all. It’s all trash, where people with no desire to “make something” but the desire to “have made something” can babble out some prompts and copy/paste output into the platform of their choice and say they did it. They don’t get any of the satisfaction of creation, but that’s not what they wanted, anyway. When someone wants to make art, they can just do it. Maybe it’ll be bad (and it always is your first time, because creation is a skill that takes practice and training) but that’s ok, because it’s still yours. Hell, I think you would get more satisfaction commissioning someone to make art for you than you would just getting a bot to do it, because then at least you can think “they made this for me.”

    And then we have the heinous shit people are doing, most recently getting Grok to make CSAM and post it on Twitter. Like, just literally being like “hey chatbot, take this picture of a child and make them nude” and the bot’s all “here you go!” As if the internet wasn’t enough of a pedo hellscape (that exact phrase being used in a report about Roblox) but now one of the largest social media platforms owned by the richest person in the world is helping!

    But ok, my gimmick here is that everything is “fine.” That everything that’s critically acclaimed actually is just whatever, and everything that sucks also has something wonderful and worthwhile. So what’s the positive to all of this garbage?

    Honestly, at the moment, not much. I mean, there’s the abstract positive that a lot of really stupid people with way too much money are spending all that money on nothing and we all continue to not like it and not buy it. That’s at least worth some entertainment value.

    There’s also that some of this nonsense is actually almost useful. Right now, all the air in the room is taken up by LLMs, basically prediction engines that can look at a “token” (basically, a snippet of text, or a piece of an image, or something) and have some knowledge of what tokens are usually found around it and reproduce something that sounds like natural language, or looks like a picture, or whatever. That’s where we get all this “AI” slop filling everything, but for things where reproducing what came before is all you need, like writing simple code (or interpreting existing code), it can help people to make those little tools we wish we had, so we can get back to the stuff that’s actually productive.

    Nobody really talks about machine learning or neural networks anymore (because being able to deepfake your dead grandma is apparently more marketable) but things like speech recognition and handwriting recognition (that were impossibly futuristic at one point, then cutting edge, and now for the most part they just kinda work) are based on that stuff. (My understanding is that generally, these are just algorithms, and not really “AI,” but those algorithms are trained using a lot of the same types of systems that train ChatGPT and other LLMs.

    And then there’s using the same sort of training on things like financial data, that could potentially change the way things like forensic accounting or actuarial work is done. (Of course, they could lead to things like the model that ended up being trained to “spot cancer” based on images of moles and “learned” that moles with rulers in the picture were cancerous, so the principle of “garbage in, garbage out” still applies.)

    Basically, there are a lot of solutions out there just looking for problems. (And right now, companies like OpenAI are betting trillions of dollars that the problem you have is that you really want a chatbot to tell you to kill yourself or post crap to social media to be read by other chatbots so that even more chatbots can post comments about Obama.)

    It could go the way of cryptocurrency, where a lot of money and time will be spent telling us it’s “the future” when ultimately it goes nowhere except for a small community of diehards and a very large network of grifters. (Really, “blockchain” in terms of the technical aspects of a trustless public ledger is a neat concept. There still isn’t a use for it that wouldn’t be better of to just use a database, but it’s still a neat concept.)

    Or it could go the way of something like digital cameras, where some people play around with it but people who really care don’t use it, until suddenly it just sort of becomes the way it’s done. (“AI generation” will hopefully never become the “way it’s done” but there must be some middle ground between “I made this by hand” and “a chatbot made this for me.”)

    So yeah, “Artificial Intelligence” is stupid. If someone wants you to use it, they’re probably also stupid. If you’re thinking “I don’t know; I think there might be something to this…” you might not be completely stupid. Basically, if you don’t buy it, and don’t use it to replace actual human thought or creativity, then it’s fine.

    Naturally, no content on this site is generated by any sort of AI. You can tell, because it’s stupid, but in a sincere and human way!

  • 2026 is going to be fine

    Just as it was “important” to put out some words about the year that’s ending, it’s equally important to then provide some additional words about the year to come.

    Is 2026 going to be “better” than 2025? Well, I certainly hope so, but also, that’s sort of the point of New Year’s, right? The changing of the calendar lets us set new baselines for ourselves. All the things we know we should have been doing for a long time get a little bit easier to do at the beginning of the year. Sure, that’s because of “New Year’s Resolutions” but there’s something else that always feels hopeful about a new year. I’m going to lose weight (even if I don’t put effort into it); I’m going to meet someone (even if I don’t go looking); I’m going to post more on that website I set up last year (No, really, I’m going to do that. Probably.).

    Given that, it’s easy to think 2026 is looking up. I mean, all the terrible garbage from 2025 is still going to be there, but also, all the good people out here helping deal with them are, too, and those people should have even more resolve, considering they got us this far.

    As for me, I’m still going to play games. I’m still going to play poker (including, probably, right on January 1st). I’m going to keep going to concerts, and I’m going to keep on curling (far less than I used to, but still roughly once a week and maybe a weekend or two away). I expect that wrestling will keep being good (and hopefully will come back to the DC metro area – specifically that AEW will come back to the DC area – WWE just did for John Cena’s retirement).

    At some point, we (probably) get GTA 6. We’re all waiting for that, right? And some movies? (I honestly don’t follow movies anymore; I’m sure there are some people are waiting for. Dune 3?)

    So keep your head up – a new year means new opportunities for self-improvement, or just to do those things you’ve been putting off, like getting back to the doctor, or calling your old friend. Or if you’re already perfect, then you can just keep doing that.

    So yeah… what am I doing in 2026? I guess what I did in 2025. If your 2025 was good, then I hope your 2026 is the same. If your 2025 was crap, then I hope your 2026 is better. Looking forward from here, I can only assume it’ll be fine.

    And, you know, maybe IT will happen. That would be interesting, wouldn’t it? Maybe thinking about that will get you through the year.

  • 2025 was fine

    Like all good (and most mediocre to bad) content creators, it’s time for a year-end wrap up.

    In 2025, we saw the beginning of what has been described as the “American century of humiliation.” First of all, that captures the vibe pretty well. I remember in the early 2000s when people would say they were embarrassed to be American (and the group that would become known as The Chicks basically got cancelled for saying they were embarrassed to be from the same state as the President), but I really do feel like we’re at a point where, if you aren’t American, and you meet someone who is, your first reaction would be “That’s rough, buddy” or maybe just “Oof”. (Yeah, everyone in this interaction communicates primarily in memes. What of it?)

    So yeah, we had tariffs, then we didn’t, then we did, but nobody knew how much, and then we had roving kidnapping squads around the country and people who don’t believe in medicine in charge of funding medicine… the United States is no longer “a shining city on a hill” but instead a glowing dumpster fire in a dark alley.

    And elsewhere in the world, we have wars, multiple countries undertaking what could be called genocides, climate change, more billionaires doing even less for anyone else… things aren’t great.

    But you know what, people are still fighting. People are marching about those genocides, some places are doing at least something to try to alleviate (or live with) climate change, and the courts are frequently putting the big wet dipshit president in his place. (I know back at the beginning I said I wasn’t going to do political posts, and I think I’ll still stick to that, but come on, there was really one big thing sort of hovering over us all this year.)

    And we’re all getting through it. If you’re reading this, you’re still here. Your friends are here, and you’re helping each other get through it. You might be thinking “actually, I’m not really helping” but you probably are. If you hang out with your friends and talk about things that aren’t the overall collapse of our society, then you’re helping to cope with it. If you’re still finding joy out there, then you’re helping others to do that, too.

    For me, I decided to start going to concerts in 2025, and went to… [checks calendar] six? I think that’s right. And I went to Gen Con! And curling in Canada! I got my friends to start watching wrestling with me, and I played in an actual RPG campaign. I made the largest cash I’ve ever had so far in a poker tournament. More recently, my sister got engaged, and asked me to walk her down the aisle at her wedding, so that’s cool.

    So there you have it – there was a lot of garbage in 2025, but there was good stuff, too. My 2025 was fine. I hope yours was fine, too.

    EDIT: Looking back at my social media, I forgot there was an Anglican schism! That reminds me of all the tangential history we got to see. A new Pope. (From America!) A woman Archbishop of Canterbury (that a bunch of churches don’t recognize). A lot of trivia books are going to have a lot of notes about 2025!

  • The holidays are fine; I’m fine.

    Just banging out a “quick” post to provide some updates to the <checks analytics> zero people who visit the site. Cool cool cool. Anyway, I set this up as, I guess, a sort of New Year’s Resolution last year to “make something”. I don’t (at least yet) aspire to be any sort of “content creator” so I’m not getting in to streaming (although I’ve done it) or making YouTube videos (although I’ve done it and will likely do it again when the “my friends will probably want to watch this” feeling strikes me again) or even writing longform essays (although that’s closer, I’m not about to start a newsletter or anything). However, I do still have all these dumb ideas floating inside my dumb head, and I’m still going to vomit them onto this site, and hopefully even more frequently! (Stay tuned for that!)

    Anyway, things are fine. Thanksgiving was fun; I went back “home” and saw family (including the small portion of my family inurned in the National Cemetery of the Alleghenies, which is beautiful) and ate and had a nice weekend. And then immediately after Thanksgiving is over (or really, even before it’s over), “Christmas” starts, and that comes with its own big pile of stressors.

    For me, it’s not a big deal – the stressors aren’t things like “oh my god I’m so lonely and I can’t handle it” – I get why some people experience that, and if that’s you, I’m sorry. Especially in this day and age, not only are there people out there with nobody close to them, but there are possibly even more people who do have people, but for whatever reason can’t turn to those people. (Parents who have fallen down conspiracy rabbit holes, communities who have decided you’re no longer acceptable company, or friends who, maybe just through the ceaseless march of time, have drifted away and started entirely separate lives.) It can be overwhelming to be surrounded by a world that keeps hammering you with “it’s a time for celebration, and togetherness, and magic” while also providing you with nothing to celebrate, nobody to be with, and nothing at all magical.

    If that’s you; I don’t know what to tell you, other than… I get it, I think. I can’t say that I’m really “celebrating” anything right now, and the family I’m visiting this week for Christmas are mostly working all week, so I’ll still be mostly occupying an empty house, just someone else’s house (which might be worse?). I could never understand the magnitude of what you’re feeling, but I think I can at least comprehend why you’re feeling it, and I hope you make it through the season. If it’s because you’re lonely, try to find the other lonely people and help each other hold it together. If it’s because you’re just “over it” – that’s ok. You have no real obligations other than the ones you place on yourself. (You might think other people are placing them on you, but you can tell them to shove it. Hell, maybe you’ve already done that, which might have been what led to the loneliness. If that’s the case, then you still probably did the right thing for yourself because boundaries are important.)

    My holiday stressors are much more mundane – as soon as Thanksgiving is over, the “Christmas to-do list” starts. I have to buy all the gifts. I have to buy, write, and mail the cards. (I didn’t do that this year.) I have to get stuff for the work holiday party. I have to get stuff for my friends’ party. I have to have the money to do all of these things. I have to have the time to do all of these things, while still otherwise maintaining a day-to-day life. (As an aside, I feel like everyone else “does” more stuff than I do, but they also still have more free time, too? I don’t know how that works, and it’s probably just either my perception or they’re spending more time and effort on looking like they have it together…)

    But the gifts are purchased, and the work party has happened, and the friends’ party is in a couple of hours, and I have just one more work day (at least before Christmas; I don’t take off the week between Christmas and New Year’s), and so the stressful part of the holiday is in the past. On Thursday, the gifts will be exchanged, and then the “oh, I guess that’s it, then” feelings will hit, and then it’s right back to… whatever it is. Back to jobs we don’t like that don’t pay enough. Back to a world that gives you something to be outraged about every single day, but doesn’t give you any time to really feel that outrage, both because of the aforementioned job(s) and because the next day brings something new.

    It does feel like this year is possibly the least “Christmassy” it’s felt in a long time. I don’t know if it’s the political atmosphere (which blows) or the economy (which certainly makes spending a bunch of money on other people feel less good than it usually does), or just getting older (and everyone in my family getting older) making us all just want to spend less time on this stuff. Another theory I have is that, with “Christmas season” expanding more and more into the rest of the year, all the cheer and whatnot kind of gets diluted and there isn’t any left when the actual holiday rolls around.

    But with all that said… it’s fine? There’s still something “nice” about the holidays, sort of capping off the year and letting us all reflect and reset and prepare for another one. I’ll make another post soon sort of “wrapping up” 2025 and then another laying out 2026. (Spoiler alert: just as setting up this page was a sort of “resolution” for 2025, I’ll have another for 2026 to actually use it more. Maybe as frequently as weekly? Weekly is tough, because I don’t know that I really have that much to talk about. We’ll see.)

  • A Handful of New Shooter Games are Fine

    After finishing Expedition 33, I started Cyberpunk 2077 (because it’s in the Game Catalog on PlayStation Plus) and it seems fine. I’ll get back to it eventually because cyberpunk (with a small c) is cool and this particular instance has some fun vibes. However, this post is about a bunch of games I was looking forward to all coming out around the same time. One of them, I purchased and am playing. The others, I played demos or betas and might purchase, depending on… I don’t know.

    First, the one I actually bought and am playing is Borderlands 4. I’m maybe like a third of the way through it so far, and… [drum roll]
    … it’s fine. So far, I would put it as better than 3 (most people seem to not have liked 3 all that much, but I enjoyed it), but not as good as 2. Some parts of it are incredibly annoying (like the various “carry quests” that require toting around an item that uses a hand, so you can’t aim down sights or grapple or various other movements you’re very used to, or, to me, things like waves of enemies spawning in pretty much every time you go anywhere, but I’m aware it’s a shooter game with weird guns so enemies popping up everywhere to kill with your weird guns is kind of the point) but most of it ranges from “kind of entertaining” to “pretty fun.”

    The story is kind of dumb, but it’s Borderlands, and “kind of dumb” is basically what the franchise is all about. Because it’s doing the “open world” thing, the enemies and missions scale to your level, so you don’t really get to experience the “look how powerful you are now” bit because the enemies constantly get a little tankier or hit harder, which definitely takes away a lot of the allure, but also helps keep the random waves of fodder that pop up everywhere from being boring. It does keep them from being ignorable, too, though, which is a pain when you’re actually trying to go somewhere.

    It’s enjoyable enough. I’ll finish it in time.

    The next one to talk about is Battlefield 6. I have not purchased this one, but I did play an open beta, and I had a pretty good time. I’m part of an online community that used to play (among other things) a lot of Battlefield 4, and this pretty quickly brought back a lot of those vibes. I also have some “real-life friends” (wow, that’s weird to type) who play and they’re trying to get me into it, and… maybe. The game does have a single-player campaign, but I’m not terribly interested in it, and while the multiplayer isn’t bad and doesn’t really require any sort of grinding, I also don’t really see myself playing it all that much, and so I’m not sure that I want to spend 70 dollars on it. Maybe if it goes on sale or someone gives me a gift card or something. (Or my next trip to a casino is a win, but not a big enough win to do something like buy a new coat or furniture. Like maybe winning a hundred bucks on slots or something?)

    And the third one is sort of a sleeper hit to me, and that it’s a game that I’m not “supposed to” like, but I played the most recent tech demo and had a pretty good time. That game is Arc Raiders – an “extraction shooter” (in quotes because there are gaming bloggers and vloggers commenting that it’s not really an extraction shooter) which is a… genre? game mode? style? whatever… that I don’t really like. Or at least, I don’t like the idea of. I’ve never played Tarkov (god it looks so sweaty and toxic) but I was kind of looking forward to Marathon before the whole art fiasco and Riloe on YouTube has me intrigued about the game Beautiful Light (which doesn’t release for another year), so I’m not entirely against the idea of a “get in, get thing, and get out” game.

    Arc Raiders is very stylish. The sound and environments are very nice, and while it has the “stakes” of an extraction shooter (if you get killed, you lose whatever you were carrying), you can get a free loadout to jump in whenever, and unless you’re really going hard, most of the “loot” you get is gonna be junk like batteries and other scrap. Your best gear is going to be stuff you assemble in your base, and if you lose it, you’ll probably be able to build more. From what I’ve seen so far, the community is pretty chill, too, and yelling “hey, friendly!” on proximity chat seems to mostly get people to chill. The enemies (the PvE enemies, that is, not the other players) are really neat, too. They’re mostly things like aerial drones with realistic physics and stuff so you can send them careening off or crashing by disabling one rotor on a quadcopter. I’m thinking I’m going to buy this one, but mainly because it’s only $40, and I think I can get at least that much entertainment out of it.

    And that’s just shooter games. Europa Universalis V just released, and I kind of want to play that a bunch, too. I like(d) Stellaris and Victoria 3 is/was pretty interesting, too. I might just be getting hooked by YouTubers who are able to be entertaining while playing it.

    And that’s not even including the huge games that I’m not interested in, like Silksong, or… I don’t know, whatever else people are playing right now. (I was going to say Call of Duty, but I checked and the newest one isn’t out yet.)

    So yeah, find your self a game or two. It’ll be fine.

  • Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is fine

    Ok, here’s the post about E33. I finished (at least, the story and rolled credits) this last weekend, so here’s the deal.

    First of all, if I had to sum it up in one word, that word would probably be “beautiful.” The environments are varied and gorgeous, the characters are wonderfully depicted, and the music is absolutely perfect. (Although I’m told that if you know French, the soundtrack spoils the rest of the game while you play it. I can’t confirm that, because I don’t know French.)

    The story is wonderfully told (although I won’t spoil any of it here, because you either won’t get it, are still planning to play the game and don’t want to know yet, or already know) and every beat perfectly pulls you along to the next segment. I had been mildly spoiled on parts of it, but they still hit because of the way certain segments are delivered.

    HOWEVER

    As your characters level up, they gain stats, but the vast majority of their stats come from their equipped “Pictos”, various trinkets you find that boost one or two stats and give the character an extra ability to go with it. Then, after having a Picto equipped for four battles, you earn the “Lumina” that lets you have the ability even without the Picto equipped. You pay for “Lumina” with “Colors of Lumina” (actually, you pay with “Lumina Points” that you earn by spending Colors of Lumina, but I’m condensing somewhat) and each character gets their own pool of Lumina.

    You also find new weapons for your characters, and you find higher level weapons as you go, but you can also use “Chroma Catalysts” to increase the levels of weapons. The higher you’re trying to make the level, the more catalysts you need, and above certain level cutoffs, you need not just more, but an entirely different kind. (There are Chroma Catalysts (that only work up to level 3), then Polished Chroma Catalysts (that work up to level 9), Resplendent Chroma Catalysts (that work up to level 19), and Grandiose Chroma Catalysts (that work up to level 32). There are also Perfect Chroma Catalysts that you use specifically to go from 32 to 33, but you (I guess) only encounter those in the like post-post-game (or maybe in New Game+), since I got my weapons up to like level 23 (which is separate from the character levels which were just under 70) and that was plenty.)

    Then there are skill points! To be fair, any game with any sort of character progression has skill points and skill trees, so that’s whatever, but it’s not just like you spend your points and then you have skills. I mean, you can and do, but then you can only have 6 skills equipped, so you end up switching skills around as you unlock more, and then switching Pictos around because each character can only equip 3 at a time, all trying to make sure to synergize your weapon with your skills and Pictos and the enemies’ weaknesses… sometimes, it’s a bit much.

    And the combat is turn-based. That’s not really a knock against it, because JRPGs have turn-based combat and everyone loves those. (I mean, I don’t, but maybe I do? I really liked Super Mario RPG, but I never played any Final Fantasy games or Chrono Trigger.) I do know one person that doesn’t want to play E33 because of turn-based combat. I think that person should just get over it, but I get it. There’s only so much time to play games, so you gotta stick to the ones you think are fun.

    And this one was fun. It was gorgeous and transcendently scored. You really do feel powerful as you progress, and I legitimately felt emotions during some of the cutscenes. Trying to decide how to spec your characters is a bit of a chore, but eventually, it just becomes a big pile of options you don’t want/need and then a handful that speak to you. It’s kind of a pain, but it also means you can play however you want. There’s an incredibly high difficulty ceiling, but everything on the main path is pretty manageable.

    It’s beautiful, enthralling, emotional, tedious, aggravating, challenging, fun… It’s fine…

    …and it’s probably game of the year.

  • Doing Stuff By Yourself is Fine

    First of all, I’m actually almost done with Expedition 33 (or at least “almost done” in that I’m up to the “final” dungeon). My post about how that game is fine will be coming… I don’t know… I’ll just say “soon-ish.”

    Anyway, this post was going to be about how Live Music is Fine (because just before and after Gen Con, I went to various shows) but then I decided to make it slightly more personal and slightly more general and just make it about going and doing things you want to do, regardless of whether or not your friends want to go with you.

    Don’t get me wrong, going to movies, concerts, sporting events, casinos, or whatever it is you like to do with other people that like to do them is great. Sometimes, though, you end up being the only one in a particular group that’s into a particular thing. (Weirdly, I’m basically the only person in my group of board gamers that also plays Magic: the Gathering. There’s one guy who also plays on Arena, but there’s nobody who’d be up for going to a prerelease or doing a cube draft or whatever.)

    When that happens, just go. You wanna do something special for yourself (for your birthday, or because you have the day off of work, or just because you’ve always wanted to), go do it. Don’t wait for other people to be available (because they never will) or drag someone along that isn’t interested. (That being said, if they’re kind of interested, absolutely try to cajole them into it. I’ve gotten a few friends to watch wrestling pay-per-views with me the past couple of months by just bringing it up all the time.)

    None of your friends like the band in town, but you’re a big fan? Fuckin’ rock out by yourself! Chat with the people in line next to you, or in the seats next to you (or in the pit next to you if that’s your thing). You’ll meet great people and you’ll still have a good time.

    Maybe it’s being 40, or maybe it’s that I have money to blow (occasionally) now, but all of those “oh man, I would go to that, except…” events just don’t have anything stopping me anymore. Maybe it’s the post-COVID environment. (Weirdly, I didn’t go to concerts pre-COVID, so I didn’t really miss them not happening.) For me, it’s mostly concerts (lately, at least), but you could also include things like going to AEW events or that trip to Connecticut I did last fall, where I did some sightseeing and went to Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods. (I had been wanting to visit Foxwoods since I was a younger, more avid poker player… it’s gone downhill since then.)

    So yeah, it’s not that I’m “checking things off the bucket list” yet. I don’t think buying a ticket to see Chevelle is quite to that point. But don’t be ashamed to like what you like. It’s fine.

    And Ghost was fine, Summer of Loud was fine, Volbeat and Halestorm were fine, and Chevelle was fine. I’m glad I went to all of them.

  • Gen Con 2025 was Fine

    Wow – It’s been a while since I posted anything here. I’m also working on the actually controversial take of “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is Fine” but I want to finish the game before I write it. Spoiler alert: it’s fine.

    Anyway, Gen Con! The largest gaming convention in North America was like two weeks ago, and I’m just now sitting down to post my stupid opinions about it. Here’s a brief rundown of the weekend…

    Travel

    About an hour into the (9-10 hour) trip, the transmission blew up in my friend’s car. UItimately, we rented a car and got moving again, but it cost us a few hours. Thankfully, the rest of the way was uneventful.

    Board Games

    Naturally, I played board games. Some new ones I played are:

    • Vantage: Really enjoyable sort of “choose your own adventure” game where you explore a planet and then stuff happens to you. Played it once during the convention, liked it enough to buy it, and then played it with friends at home and they liked it too. Yay! I don’t want to give too many details away, but if you like games like Tales of the Arabian Nights, you’ll probably also really like this. And there’s SO MUCH CONTENT – 802 different locations and like 900 different items, creatures, and whatnot you can end up encountering.
    • Grendel: The Game of Crime and Mayhem: Okay, Baader-Meinhof effect – I saw this game in the Gen Con event catalog and thought it sounded neat, so I got a ticket. Then, the game went up on Kickstarter and I discovered it’s based on an old comic book that I had never heard of. Then, during an RPG session later, the GM’s laptop wallpaper was of the comic. Grendel is having a moment, apparently.
      • To actually talk about the game for a moment, it’s a four player, maneuvering dudes and tokens around a map sort of game with player asymmetry. I found it easier to pick up than Root, which is probably the closest comparison. However, it has two main gimmicks (or if you find calling them “gimmicks” derogatory, then “things that set it apart”).
        • First, each player uses an entirely different set of mechanics to choose their actions on a turn. Grendel draws chits out of a bag, and plays them onto tracks on their player board, getting bonuses for matching colors; Argent plays a deckbuilder, flipping cards until they either choose to stop (and then do all the actions they revealed) or reveals 4 skulls on cards (losing their turn); the police move little police cars around a rondel on their player board; and the mob rolls dice and allocates them to action spaces.
        • The other gimmick is that, throughout the game, players earn “aggression” tokens that they use by dropping into little towers that sit in each of the map’s zones. Tokens have values from 1-3, and notably, are sized inversely to their values. That matters because each tower has a counterweight in it, and when enough weight is in there, the tokens spill back out, and then a “Mayhem phase” takes place, which is mainly where scoring happens.
      • I thought it was fine; I’d play it again, but the session had two major drawbacks (neither of which was really an issue with the game):
        • First, they only allocated an hour to learn and play the game. It’s not a super long game, but you probably want at least two hours.
        • Second, the person demoing it had only just received the copy and didn’t really know the rules all that well. They knew enough to teach the game mechanics, but not really to answer any complicated questions.
    • Primacy: Another moving dudes around on a map game, but this one had (initially) symmetric action selection, and different spaces on the board contribute different resources toward scoring. I’d say the closest analog to this one that I’ve played before would by Scythe. (It felt much lighter and more accessible than Scythe, though.) It was fun to play, the person running the demo was the designer, and they were able to coach us through playing the entire game. (Or maybe like 90% of the game. We went into final scoring technically before we were supposed to due to time, but we were close to finishing anyway.) This one is a future Kickstarter that I’ll be watching for, but I’m not sure if I’ll go for it. Probably depends on price or what all is included.
    • Enthrone: A two player… not hidden movement, because all the movement is public, but hidden… identity? game. There are 8 pawns on the board, starting on the outside and moving toward the center. You get three cards (out of eight, one for each pawn), and choose one to play with; on it is a particular pawn. You win if you a) get your pawn to the center of the board, b) remove your opponent’s pawn from the board, or c) remove three other pawns from the board that your card identifies. Really nice components, and a really interesting set of mechanics around how to move pieces and when to try to conceal your intentions. Greatly enjoyed playing it, but probably wouldn’t buy it because two player games are in a weird spot – I can’t play them by myself, but at a gaming meetup or something, you really want something that plays about four.
    • Sidereal Confluence: Really old trading game – not gonna give it a review, it’s from like 2017, but I’ve had it for a while and never got it to the table, but at Gen Con, you can find a big bunch of people to play your weird game that plays up to nine players. (We only had 6, but still…)

    RPGs

    • Call of Cthulhu: I always try to get in one session at the con, and if possible, run by You Too Can Cthulhu. This one had the hook that all the player characters were pro wrestlers, so I was in. However, that really was just the hook, and had very little to do with what was really going on. It was still a pretty fun time, though.
    • Mork Borg (or maybe it was CY Borg? It was in space.): Just hanging out with friends and screwing around. Someone had a really creative scenario they put together with some weird-ass characters, so I jumped in while they were playing. Didn’t personally get to do much, but that didn’t bother me.

    CCGs

    • Magic! I played one game of commander with an online friend and one of their friends. It was fun. Didn’t do any drafts or anything. Magic was all over in the stadium, so it was hard to just go jam an event in between other things, and also there wasn’t really anything “can’t-miss”. I’ve done the Unknown event at a Magic Con and a Gen Con now, and they’re usually more trouble than they’re worth. (Also pretty expensive.)
    • Riftbound: It’s the new one from Riot Games based on League of Legends. I dunno; I guess it’s ok. The trial decks are neat (although all the cards are watermarked SAMPLE and are (hopefully) not printed on the actual cardstock the trading cards use) and it’s got some interesting mechanics. I’ll see if a scene for it pops up around me.
    • I also saw people playing the Gundam TCG and the Godzilla TCG. I’m not interested in either, but people seemed to be having a good time.

    Miscellaneous Other Things

    • Glitter Guild Burlesque Show: Saw this for the first time last year and went back for more. A good mix of sexy and weird. Every convention can be improved with titties. (Although the seating arrangement this time made it rather difficult to see said titties. Still a good time, though.)
    • Stage Combat Class: Took a stage knife fighting class last year and went back for a different one. This was advertised as a “mass battle” but only 5 people attended, so we instead did a small little melee around a table. Very fun. Would recommend checking out Counterfeit Combat if they do a session at an event you’re at. Will check out their offerings at future Gen Cons.
    • The Exhibit Hall! To some, the main attraction. To others, the smelly pit full of jerks that’s in the way between you and new board games. I was able to get to all the booths I had on my list, although some were incredibly cramped, or were swamped with people buying some hit release that I couldn’t see anything else. No wagons/strollers/carts was a nice change, though. There was just some sort of… funk? Calling it a “miasma” would be overstating it harshly, but moving from either the corridors or the gaming hall into the exhibit hall did feel like there was a sudden atmospheric change, like it was hotter and stuffier. There’s enough other stuff to do that you could potentially skip it entirely, but I couldn’t let myself not look at anything in there.
    • The Block Party: In terms of arrangement, it was pretty nice. A lot of space to move around, and an ok selection of stuff. Lots of long lines (72,000 attendees will do that), but if I wanted something, it was attainable. Didn’t get a lot here, though. A very mediocre burger one day, and a pretty darn good one the next day. Ate most other food at the other bars/restaurants around the convention center.
    • Pinball Alley: Surprisingly accessible, but like $2 per play. (Granted, pinball at most arcade bars or whatever is usually at least a dollar, but still.) They had some nice machines and I had a little fun. It was fine.
    • NOBODY WANTED TO PLAY BLOOD ON THE CLOCKTOWER but it’s fine. I have my local group I play with like once a month, and if I really wanted, I could have jumped into games with randos in the hallway, but… ugh.
    • I didn’t get COVID like last year!

    Summary

    I don’t know; some years, I leave the con feeling really hype, like I had a blast and can’t wait for the next one. Nothing went particularly wrong this year (save the thing in the “Travel” section), and all the games I played were pretty fun. I met my friends (and some new ones) and hung out, played, caught up. It was a good time.

    Except it wasn’t? Like, on at least one occasion while walking somewhere, I distinctly had a thought like “this is miserable” and it wasn’t at all (maybe the walk was, or my bag was heavy or something).

    Except it was – I did everything I set out to do and all of those things met or exceeded my expectations.

    So I guess… the vibes were off? Weirdly, several other people had similar thoughts – that they had fun, but also were unhappy, or… something? Interestingly, most of the people saying that were people who had been many times before. First timers seemed to genuinely be ecstatic and were already talking about next year. Maybe some of us are just over it.

    It’s enough to make me say “maybe I’ll skip next year”, but I’ll still enter the VIG lottery in the fall, and I’ll still probably grab a badge in January “just in case” so I can get a housing time. Then I’ll book a hotel room if I have a good time “just in case”. Then I’ll have event tickets, and probably help GM something, and then I’ll get all amped up again. (Maybe I just expect too much?)

    It’s fine.

  • Magic: the Gathering – Final Fantasy is Fine

    Two weeks ago (three if you count the prerelease, which I guess you might as well), Wizards of the Coast released the latest Magic: the Gathering expansion set: Final Fantasy. These cards feature famous characters, places, and events from the history of the video game series (Or at least, I think so; I’ve never played any of them. Maybe there are games that aren’t represented.) and due to that, demand is through the roof. This is bigger than a few years ago with the Lord of the Rings set, which itself was way bigger than the crossovers with Warhammer, Doctor Who, Fallout, and whatever other ones have been done lately.

    In a lot of ways, it’s good. People who have never played Magic are being drawn to the game, which is usually great. (Not every person getting into the game is great, but in general, more Magic players is better, in my opinion.)

    And what is the Final Fantasy series? It’s a bunch of epic stories, featuring culturally iconic characters drawn beautifully that’s been around since 1987. It’s made for a trading card game. (Yes, there actually was a Final Fantasy trading card game. Wait, is a trading card game. It’s still around, and just had its own expansion release in March.)

    Anyway, as far as Magic settings go, it’s a good one. I like it a lot more than Aetherdrift (“Your favorite Magic characters driving cars”) and Outlaws at Thunder Junction (“Your favorite Magic characters wearing cowboy hats”). Having 16 mainline games to pick and choose from means only the most important stuff gets in. I played one prerelease and a few drafts on Arena, and I like the cards. The set is fun to play, which I guess would be the main objective of producing it.

    (Here’s me playing one of those drafts lately.)

    However, there’s more going on here than just a Magic expansion that has Cloud and Sephiroth in it. Magic also has years of characters, stories, and art. Right now, the most popular format that people play is Commander, which allows you to use (for the most part) any card from Magic’s history, and now, alongside all of that history of characters like Jace Beleren, Ajani Goldmane, Liliana Vess, and Chandra Nalaar (not to mention characters that haven’t been the face of the game, like Jaya Ballard, the Phyrexian praetors, and the leaders of the Ravnican Guilds), we’ve also got various Doctors Who, Gandalf, Aerith, and coming soon, Spider-Man and Avatar Aang.

    Basically, sitting at a table of Magic players is like watching a game of Fortnite. Oh shit, is that Doctor Octopus?! Attacking Gimli?! Wielding Excalibur?! (Yeah, there was an Assassins Creed set, too.)

    I mean, it’s still Magic. You tap lands to cast spells, and attack your opponent with creatures and try to reduce their life total to 0. These “Universes Beyond” sets as Wizards calls them, in that sense, aren’t that different from any other, especially if, like me, you play each set in a self-contained way in sealed or draft events. Mechanically, it doesn’t matter if the card has Spider-Man on it since the rules text and the character are independent of each other.

    Fun side note there – that’s actually a snag Wizards has with the upcoming Spider-Man set. They got the license from Marvel to print characters on trading cards, but they did not get the license from Marvel to put the characters in a digital card game, so the Spider-Man cards will not be “printed” into Magic Arena or Magic: the Gathering Online. Instead, a different set where all the cards are mechanically identical but “in universe” for Magic will be there.

    So then why aren’t they just doing that for every set? (Not “having different characters on the cards between paper and digital,” that’s stupid as hell. I mean just having Magic characters and setting on all the cards.) Why pay Square, Marvel, Games Workshop, or whoever owns the IP for Doctor Who (the BBC?) for licensing when Wizards could (and in at least one case, still has to) just use their own IP on the cards. (And they could even cross over with their own IP, like they did with Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate, or with Hasbro’s other properties like they did with Transformers.)

    And it’s not even just Magic being “Fortnite-ified”. Beavis and Butthead are being added to Call of Duty. Freddy and Jason were in Mortal Kombat. The Ninja Turtles were added to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Everything crosses over with everything. Hell, not only is every game like Fortnite by just jamming every celebrity or IP into it they can find, Magic specifically printed cards with Fortnite elements on them. (They were reprints reskinned as Fortnite stuff, so “Smuggler’s Copter” became “Battle Bus”; “Wrath of God” became “Shrinking Storm”; etc.)

    And that’s what’s wrong with M:tG FF – it’s an effort to sell Magic cards to people who wouldn’t want them. It’s an effort to sell Magic cards to people who likely won’t ever play Magic again six weeks from now when the next expansion comes out. It’s an effort to keep selling us IPs we’ve already seen and experienced instead of coming up new ones. And it’s only going to keep happening more.

    But man, the cards are fun. I’m gonna play some more.

    It’s fine.