Page 8 – Burning the midnight oil at noon

Minneapolis 2023 – Food Journal

A few weekends ago, my family and I went down to Minneapolis, Minnesota for a little bit of a get-away. There was actually a very specific reason why we went there, but I’ll get more into that in a later blog post (I indend to publish several relating to this trip!). What I want to talk about today is the depths of gluttony that I (re)discovered during this journey.

I often joke about how poor my diet is, and I like to think that my exaggeration is usually fairly obvious. That said, I knew that this trip would be one long junk-food-fest and did my best to eat little and well for the few days leading up to it. My family, though I love them dearly, are absolutely enablers when it comes to eating terribly, and I am a boy of very little willpower. Let the record state that I have no-one but myself to blame!

So, yeah, I don’t own a scale, but I could tell by the way that my shirts didn’t fit quite right when I got home, that I definitely over-indulged during my trip. Here’s the summary of all the terrible meal choices I made!

I Bought Brownies from Little Caesar’s

If this was a YouTube video, that title would include a “so you don’t have to” at the end. But this isn’t a YouTube video, because I’m old and I prefer to do my reviews the old way: with letters. Thank goodness I’m not really old and I’m not trying to do anything in print.

While I do tend to order food more often than I should, I can gladly say that I almost never order pizza any more. No, I make my own pizzas these days! Which is a very overdue blog post all its own. However! Having been sick with the ‘Rona for nearly two weeks, I have been lacking the energy to do a lot of regular things. Number one on the chopping block: preparing meals. So one day I ordered a pizza from Little Caesar’s.

The Little C will never be my first choice for pizza, but sometimes it’s just the right combination of cheap and crappy and it hits the spot like nothing else can. And sometimes they have cookie dough brownies with mini M&Ms baked in. That’s entirely why I got the pizza. I just wanted the brownies.

Mighty = Fallen

I’ve never had any delusion that I’m special. In fact, considering that there are roughly eight billion of us humans, I’m of the mind that nobody is special.

But I did hope, for a wonderful, fleeting moment, that perhaps there was something special about me. Specifically, after three and a half years of COVID-19 being a thing, and having been in close proximity to infected folks on a number of occasions but still never contracting it myself, I hoped that I might have a natural immunity to the virus.

And then last week I caught it.

Thankfully, I didn’t end up in an iron lung or anything. It’s actually been fairly bearable -not nearly as dire as it was made out to be in those early days (which could be because I’m a generally healthy person, and/or caught a weaker variant). That’s not to say it’s been fun! No, sir! For a week now, I’ve been almost completely without energy, essentially glued to the couch and wishing that I could sleep for more than two hours at a time. Add to that a cocktail of cold and flu symptoms that seem to come and go as they please, and you’ve got a recipe for a pretty miserable Ryan.

Well, I mean, my physical self has been miserable. I like to think that I’ve been in reasonably good spirits, considering all the horrible things happening inside my body. It also probably doesn’t help that I haven’t been sick at all since before the whole pandemic thing started, so I likely perceived it as being worse than it actually was. Also also, you know that stereotype of how men aren’t very good at handling being sick? Yeah, I embody that trope. Hell, I probably caused it.

Which is all to say: I’m good. I got knocked down for a while but I feel like I’ll be back to 100% before too long. There’s honestly not much else I feel like I need to write about the experience; it was basically a kaiju-scaled cold that hung around longer than usual. I just wanted to make sure that I recorded that it happened. I need to write about something, after all.

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: July 2023

~ Game Over ~

Akane the Kunoichi (PC) – I remember playing the demo of this waaaaay back on Xbox 360. It’s a very 2011 indie platformer. Which is to say that it’s very simplistic in both visuals and gameplay. Not bad, but nothing special.

Peglin (PC) – Peglin a while, Peglin forever!!

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Switch) – What an incredible ride. In my opinion, there’s absolutely no competition for Game of the Year 2023.

The Dogsman

I wrote about some things that I like about Final Fantasy XVI a few days ago. Here’s another thing:

While travelling around Valisthea, Clive will have a number of party members cycle in and out as the story dictates. For just about the entire duration of the game, though, Clive is joined by his loyal companion and fine hound, Torgal.

As a dog, Torgal doesn’t contribute a whole lot to the story, but he’s a big help in combat and Clive will even talk to him when no human party members are around. No matter what Clive says or asks, Torgal’s response is simply:

*bark*

I don’t know why I enjoy this so much, but I do.

The Huntsman

I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XVI a lot lately. I haven’t been completely absorbed in it like I was that other big fantasy game from a few months ago, but I’ve been putting aside roughly an hour a day to plug away at it. It’s a very good game! The combat is pretty fun, the story is wild, and the soundtrack is incredible. It is also shockingly linear, which I understand is a divisive trait, but I’ve been fairly happy with FFXVI keeping me (mostly) focused on the task at hand. Remember, Final Fantasy XIII is my second-favourite in the series, so linear isn’t a problem for me.

However! Clive’s adventure isn’t so set on rails that you’re only ever barreling toward the next objective. There are side quests to distract you! And, yeah, of course there are. Can you imagine the uproar from the internet nerds if an RPG was made in the modern day and did not include side quests? “Refunded!” I can hear them chanting. Side quests are great and all, but what really got me going was when the hunt board was introduced… I don’t know, a third of the way through the game? And yes, I know that hunts are effectively just side quests without the NPC chatter. But they’re more fun! And rewarding!

The Menu – Someone else’s movie review

One of my most anticipated movies of 2022 was The Menu. Now, that’s not saying much, because to be honest I don’t follow movies anymore and at this very moment I cannot name a single other movie that released last year. Based on that, you could probably even say that The Menu was my most anticipated movie of 2022.

So, I didn’t actually watch it until a couple months ago. And I’m not writing about it until a couple months after watching it. You would probably think that I didn’t like it all that much. Untrue! In fact, I thought that it was excellent! I just haven’t been a very good blogger in 2023.

I don’t know if the marketing for The Menu was bad, or purposely misleading, or I was just taking the wrong things from it, but the movie was not at all what I expected from commercials. In fact, one of the things that I liked most about it is that it actually kept me in suspense the entire time. Like, sure, it telegraphs some things, but for the most part I was very unsure of where it was going, and many of my preconceptions of how scenes would play out ended up being wrong.

That said, I’m actually going to continue being a poor blogger and not finish reviewing The Menu. No, rather I’m just going to embed an existing review by someone else. Because it’s right on point, and me trying to write my own review would quite likely amount to little more than me subconsciously regurgitating this one. Poorly. And that’s just as good as plagiarism.

I See You – A Movie Review?

Yesterday evening -or at least, at some point prior to this post going live- I watched a movie called I See You.

This was largely spurred on by the fact that I’ve spent too many nights watching let’s plays of horror games on YouTube over the last six years, and as such I’ve been completely desensitized to them. I decided that to slake my thirst for terror, I’d need to turn to professionally produced content, and so Netflix. I clicked on the first movie that seemed even vaguely interesting, and so I See You.

A 95-ish-minute-long film released in 2019, I See You is not a movie that I had so much as heard the title of previous to the evening in question. But, it was described as a dramatic film wherein a detective is investigating murders and spooky things begin happening, so I was like, yeah, okay, I can dig on this. Little did I know!

As I sit here typing, and pondering what I am about to type, my mind is weirdly overcome by the thought of how my ex-wife’s eyes would have lit up at that plot summary.

I am a sad fellow. But pay that no heed. This is a movie review!

I See You follows the story of a small, dysfunctional suburban family. The husband, a cop on the trail of a child abductor. The wife, a therapist (I think?) who has recently cheated on her spouse. The son, trying to cope with the breakdown of his parents’ marriage. We learn these details pretty much right out of the gate, and that’s basically all that that they are for the entire duration of the film.

I may have made a poor selection.

Nine Years at Freddy’s

The original Five Nights at Freddy’s video game was released in August of 2014. I don’t remember when it was first announced that a movie adaptation was in the works, but let’s say it wasn’t long after. So roughly nine long years later, it’s finally going to happen. Finally.

The jury’s obviously still out on whether it’s going to be good or not, but you know, it sure seems like it’s going to make me happy. We’ve got security cameras, we’ve got a sneaky li’l Balloon Boy drawing, we’ve got murdered children (presumably) stuffed into animatronic suits, we’ve got a big ol’ menacing Springtrap. What else could you even ask for?

Oh, a coherent plot? Relatable characters? Yeah, I guess those are things that FNAF hasn’t really had (albeit usually on purpose) in the video games space. But the novel trilogy, while not really to my taste, did have those things, so I’m not terribly worried on that front. Plus, like I said up above, this thing has been cooking for nine-ish years. It had better at least be decent with the amount of time and money that have been invested into it!

If absolutely nothing else, I’ll finally get to see a real, physical Freddy Fazbear animatronic running amok for a while. And that’s all I’ve ever really wanted.

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: June 2023

~ Game Over ~

Peglin (PC) – Well, it’s a roguelike. And therefore highly replayable. Especially since it’s got a mode that adds a new handicap every time you beat it.

Inhabit (Switch) – A cute puzzle game about taking care of yourself. It took less than two hours to beat, so it was really just a li’l appetizer of a game, but it was fun. Also, I recorded my playthrough for YouTube.

Gargoyle’s Quest (GB) – An action-RPG spin-off of the Ghosts ‘n Goblins series, and much more enjoyable in my opinion. While it’s got blind jumps and cheap deaths for sure, I did have fun revisiting this one for the first time in well over a decade.