What I Got Up To This Month (May '24)

May has come and gone and I'm still feeling alright about things. I feel decent about myself for the first time in a long time because I'm (slowly) working through some personal stuff. Life is pretty good.

Because it had a substantial update recently (and a lot of buzz thanks to the PS5 port), I've been playing Sea of Thieves again and that game's still a lot of fun. It's stressful and has the potential for some very bad player interactions (the thing that made me stop playing in the past was a series of homophobic teens harassing me off the game) but sailing around and being a pirate is something that no other game I've played really hits in the same way.

A new Assassin's Creed game set in Japan just got announced and that made me want to get caught up on this series since I do, mostly, continue to like what it's got going on. I started it years ago and my playthrough is now on its third system (PS4, then PC, and now PS5, all thanks to transfarring), but I've been playing a ton of Assassin's Creed Valhalla and I finally finished it.  I still think it's way too big and I'd prefer a return to the older style of AC games, but the writing in this is stronger than I remembered  and the stories, while long, have all been pretty good. I also think Eivor is a compelling protagonist.

Assassin's Creed Valhalla inspired me to read the copy of Beowulf I've had on my shelf, and I'm glad I finally got to it. Specifically, it was Maria Dahvana Headley's Beowulf: A New Translation which translates the Old English epic into modern parlance. That means there's slang, profanity, and a whole lot of people going "bro," bro. I don't know how it'll age but as an artifact of "today" it's an interesting experiment.

A new season of Doctor Who started and I have pretty mixed thoughts. The first two episodes, Space Babies and The Devil's Chord, were pretty, um, bad. There were things to like about them, sure, but I had a strong feeling this show was changing into something I wouldn't like. The next two episodes, though, Boom and 73 Yards, felt way more up my alley. The show is still taking a turn into the supernatural that I hope isn't permanent but we have RTD running Doctor Who again and the show is (sometimes) pretty darn good!

I finished playing Resident Evil 5 this month and it was great! I said as much in my post about it, but it's basically Resident Evil 4 with co-op. Because of that, the pacing is reliant on how well two people are able to get past certain challenges rather than something I can just brute force on my own, but it also means you get to share the joy of RE4 with another person and that was pretty cool. I also started Darkside Chronicles, though I have a ways to go with that before I finish it.