I had such a good experience playing Ashen last night that I want to share. (I mentioned playing Ashen in my week notes.) It has an inventive multiplayer mechanic that pairs the player with another player at approximately the same place, if one is available. If one isn’t available, you get an NPC companion, who is often quite competent but sometimes prone to disappearing or falling off ledges.
Last night in a new area – a dark, winding, flooded canyon – I was matched with another player1. Even with fast travel, the game does such a good job with art and environments to create a sense of being somewhere new, dangerous, and far from home. My new companion appeared at just the right time, as I approached a small camp of several strong marauders by myself. Together we handily took them out, and then we carefully moved along gangways from platform to platform high over the water, fighting enemies and finding quest items and treasures nearly in unison. They went down once and I revived them; later they returned the aid when I was surprised and overwhelmed, appearing with a flurry of heavy blows to finish off the enemies swarming me.2
We progressed for a long time, maybe 30 minutes, silent companions leapfrogging from small patches of light and safety back into skirmishes. At a chokepoint in the route, far into the uphill journey, I was long out of health renewal items and getting nervous. We faced one final cluster of tough enemies and then pressed up a very long corridor, to emerge finally into bright daylight, in a brand new environment, in sight of a fast travel monument. We were safe! This was a really cool semi-social adventure that perfectly showed off the game’s theme of finding hope – and help – in a dark place.
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Real players are identifiable because their movements are a little more unpredictable. The loop often goes, “great, I have a partner, are they real or — oop, they just ran away, they’re real. ↩︎
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Each player only gets a single revival between rests at monuments, so this put us each in a vulnerable position going forward, ratcheting up the tension. ↩︎
- After a couple of long sessions on opening weekend and then one final run at the boss the following week, I made it through the new dungeon with some pals. Since then, the grind of an hour here and there has been a nice diversion. The episodic story progression is a little thin right now, but the gameplay loops feel pretty solid.
- I’m doing some real-work package development for the first time, building some tools to make it easier to jump-start Quarto notebooks and presentations. Having experimented with my own utility packages, I’m happy how much I could get done in just a couple of hours, thanks to {devtools} and {use this}.
- My Posit::conf talk from this year is online! I was lucky to be part of a session with some smart and thoughtful data folks, and I’m proud of contributing something I’m feel good about. You can find my talk in the full directory over at the Posit blog
- The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett
- Long Island Compromise, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
- Metaphor: reFantazio — I’ve never played a Persona/Persona-like, so this is a new experience for me. I’m enjoying the storytelling, combat and banger soundtrack!
- Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders — I had a great time with the downhill biker original, and this version of that game, but on skis, seems like a lot of fun. The demo is free on Steam and, so far, equally controller-breaking as the original.
- Ever go to the record store in search of a particular album, but they don’t have it so you come home with four different albums instead? No? Just me?
- The weight of org-mode kind of accreted around my cognitive carapace once again, and so I’ve been trying out Obsidian. I may write up a little more later; I’m finding it to feel modern in ways that I like, flexible and effective at organizing some notes and to-dos while staying under the radar of my “constantly tinker” impulse.
- RIP Ward Christiensen, one of the founders of the BBS.
- RIP to Omnivore, too? Disappointing to see a solid read-later product go the way of AI huckster-chasing.
Matt Dray has found that Shiny apps can run at itch.io! This is very cool. It would be really fun to have a kind of Shiny game jam.
Weeknotes, Nov 17, 2024
The start of rainy season is a perfect time to discover a leak, yes? Just checking. Deeper into autumn, now, I am also seeing just how many leaves our various trees hold; they hold a lot of leaves! There’s so much raking to do. It’s a brisk, windy and grey morning.
This week’s soup: Potato-forward, topped with roast chicken and chile crisp. Solid.
I didn’t capture a lot for notes, this week. I’m tired, working on focus and calm. I’m dismayed that a campaign run on meanness, anger and fear could win the way it did; I’m furious at the centrist reaction that this just shows how polarized we are as a nation. We’re not polarized when a candidate can demagogue against kids who need gender-affirming care; we’re broken.
gaming
I bounced off of Ashen a few years ago, but picked it up again this week when it re-appeared on Game Pass. I’m terrible at it, still, but am kind of grateful for its vibe of hopeful, slow progress. It’s a very good pastime to recline in a big chair with the Steam Deck.
work
I appreciate this post by Michael Lopp on using Monday to set the tone for the week. I’ve been practicing many of these and think his reminder to consider metrics is really useful. I’m not as good at this in particular – should spend some time on that one.
weekend
I’m hoping today to get out for a good walk and find some photos. We’ll see how that goes.
Tuesday’s sunset was lovely.
Weeknotes #/n
It’s been a few weeks since I posted one of these, and this certainly feels like a weird moment to try to pick up the habit, again. But while I sit with some truths perhaps it helps to mark a few other more quotidian things, from this week and the handful prior.
this month in Destiny?
R stuff
reading
other games
misc
That’s what I have for now. it’s a rainy Seattle weekend and it’s nice to be inside and cozy — but still looking forward to a good walk, later.
Thinking this week about how both compressed and expanded time feels. Compressed because how can another four years have passed and brought us here? And expanded because somehow memories have not kept up, like 2020 happened a long time ago.
Only four years ago, we were partway through what would be a full year of Trump’s horrific governance during the first year of COVID, a year that ended with his fostering of a deadly insurrection. That he could lie ceaselessly about that year and never be truly challenged on it; that the way the year felt, and what we experienced through it – adrift, abandoned, fearful and divided by his uncaring and mean government. That such a year is not, after all, seared into more peoples’ memories, is so baffling.
I don’t know how any opposition to an endless stream of lies and anger like that could win. It’s not simply that it wasn’t challenged; it’s that it wasn’t repeatedly, assertively dismissed as a vile set of lies by everyone who witnessed it. There was no truth too much for the voters who believed him. “They’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs” – this was treated for the next twelve weeks as representing a policy difference, not a gross and obvious disqualification. Not as representing a profound truth of the man.
In the final weeks his campaign doubled down on anti-trans hate-mongering, and I hoped this would mark a desperate turn. I’m dismayed that it did not. Somehow, the promise to punish marginalized people, the open endorsing and encouraging of bigotry, was more persuasive than the lived experience of just four years ago. That’s a truth of America that I have to sit with for a while.
