This has been another week where quite a lot happened at work, I at least managed to squeeze in some nice relaxation in the evenings, with some longer walks home, and reading quite a lot, all in all a decent week, not great, but not horrible either. The weather is still too Hot though.

Books

I finished off Collusion Course by J.S. Morin at the beginning of the week, it was pretty fun all in all, felt more like a transitional book more than anything, with some characters leaving the group that had become rather large. Will be interesting to see how it is going along with the next ones, decent book, it was fun, I don’t really have much interesting to say about these as I go, I do enjoy them a lot, and it’s silly fun, but most of them are more of the same with some new situation that the characters are dropped into. It’s still very enjoyable though, so I’m pretty sure I will go on through the series.

After that I’m on to the next sub-series of the Sector universe, with Alpha Process by Nicola Claire, and I enjoyed this one a lot, it seems to be going more back to the formula of the first ones in the series, where we follow the more romance book formula of alternating chapters between the two main people (they probably will become a couple, but didn’t get that far in this book). I enjoyed the writing a lot, and it went very quickly for me to read, just really fun, and we’re quite a few years in the future now, and basically being archeologists finding things from the other series, which is really quite fun, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens as this series goes on.

I wanted something a bit more heavy in between the lighter books, and after having really enjoyed Newton’s Wake by Ken MacLeod I started on his Corporation Wars series, so the book that I’m currently reading is Dissidence by Ken MacLeod. I’m a bit less than a third through it so far, and it’s a lot of fun setup, being the first in a triology that is expected, I really enjoy the world and the characters though, and if it continues on as strong as it has started this will be really great. There is a bit of political discussion and philosophy in this one that is quite interesting to read, looking foreward to going on with this one.

Games

It’s been more of an all over the place game week again this week, which I don’t quite understand, but the waves of my mood when it comes to games is how it is, Dragon Quest 4 got to that late mid-game where everything opened up, and like always I kind of lost interest in it, I enjoy the more linear parts of the stories a lot more, I want to come back to it and continue on, I just am getting a bit tired of bumbling around not quite understanding the hints that the people are giving me about where to go next.

I did play quite a bit of Siralim again this week, and it feels really fun to play with, it’s such a fun tinker-box of a game, there is just an endless amount of levers to pull, and see how they affect things. It’s probably something about it that really fits my slightly divergent brain. Most of the battles are quite easy to understand and go through, and you slowly open new possibilites, there are monsters to breed, there are an endless amount of levels that are procedurally generated, it’s probably a very niche type thing, but every time I sit down with these I just have a lot of fun with them. So if you have a slightly autistic kind of brain I think this is one that will fit well to you as well, it’s probably the most spreadsheet like monster-collection game out there, and I love it for it.

I’ve been doing quite a lot of sudoku on my phone again this week as well, mostly playing Logic wiz: Sudoku Variants and I’m still loving it, these puzzles are really well done, and playing at the hard level they are just interesting enough to get through in 10-20 min, and they are not getting too frustrating with too obscure things. It’s just really enjoyable for me, and probably will do some more again this week, seems like I’m into the logic deduction wave of games again.

For the first time in a while I did shop a bit, I got the first year pack of DLC for Hexceed which is basically a deduction, minesweeper like, which is very derivative of hexcells, but available on the switch. It’s just fun to do a couple of puzzles, and they are fun not that hard puzzles. The pack is basically 1000 extra puzzles, and a couple of new mechanics, so I’m sure I will have quite a long time of fun with them. So far I’m about 300 puzzles in of the 1500 ish that I have available to me now, and really enjoying it.

In addition to that I got the two Alwa games which are lightly metroidvania-ish platformers, I started with Alwa’s Legacy which is a fun retro type light metroidvania, and it’s fun, the jumps feel kind of sluggish and slow, kind of like a steerable version of the jumps from the first Castlevania games. There are some light puzzles, and some difficult-ish platforming so far, and I already have racked up close to 50 deaths in the couple of hours that I played the game, but it’s enjoyable. This is one that I have basically for when I just want a bit of action gaming again.

I did also play a bit of Return of the Obra Dinn and it’s a really amazing looking game, with some really fun story telling, and detective work. I really enjoyed it, just struggling a bit with finding all of the corpses, so that I feel I have enough stuff to get the real detective work starting, it’s a fun game, but one I think I will only be able to play over longer sessions, and mostly on weekends, since it’s just so much thought work going into how to get along.

Misc

I’ve been thinking and researching a bit more about things around me being on the spectrum this week, also a bit about maybe starting meditating again, this time with a main focus on tactics to figure out how to not keep on extending my sits until they get so long that they eat up too much time, and makes themselves work against the purpose by being another stressor. Probably just setting an upper limit on 15 minutes for at least a couple of months, so that I don’t get into the excuse of doing longer and longer ones.

I’ve been looking up some grounding excercises and some ways of maybe dealing better with some of the anxious times that I do have, when my mind goes into loops, and funnily enough in many cases it seems to be things that are similar to meditation, like breathing excercises the 3-2-1 way of noting 3 things you can see, touching 2 things that are here and noting one thing you can hear. It seems to work pretty well for me at least for now, and I will keep on exploring it a bit more in my life, as usual, once I get used to something and have done it a couple of times it tends to go into a pattern where I do them automatically.

Had some real fun time listening to podcasts this week as well, great episodes of both Into the Aether and Videogame Podtimism this week, which was really nice. I still want to get back into listening to the ITA backlog that I still have, but still being a bit too drowned in new episodes to get to it, and it’s a bit up and down with how I am enjoying the older ones. I will look into my queue again, and see if they all spark joy, but I think they do. So will have to see if I want to cut anything or not, I’m still on train to being only a week behind now which is nice.

Listening to Skeptics with a K this week (or basically last week’s episode) another reason why I enjoy them is that they seems to be less vary of showing their leftie tendencies than what others are, and it just feels nice, they do feel more authentic than most other skeptic stuff I do listen to, and it makes me like them even more, this is one that is consistantly growing on me. Really enjoyable for almost a year now.