Game of E-Thrones 3: The Painting of Coming in Winter

I have no idea what all of that means as a single title.  And just a forewarning, today's post is going to ramble quite a bit.

E3 starts tomorrow (June 16, 2015), which means if you add all the numbers together you get 3 (6+1+6+2+0+1+5=21=2+1=3), which is the number of topics that I will be rambling about today.  So E3.  Going into E3 week this year, all I knew ahead of time was the handful of announcements from Bethesda: Doom, Fallout 4 and Nintendo: Nintendo World Championship 2015.  That's all I knew about before I woke up this morning and since the waking, I read more Bethesda announcements which include an online TCG from Bethesda called The Elder Scrolls: Legends, which people are saying is akin to Blizzard's Hearthstone, of which I know the name and basic mechanic (there are cards used for fighting) and that's about it.

As for other games, there's a gigantic list here that I will be sorting through as the week goes on.

Hopefully there's some word on last years announced Steamboy, but as their site hasn't been updated since last year, I fear that this project may have fallen through; but I can still have hope.

Lastly, I wanted to talk a little bit about Game of Thrones season 5, part in the season finale that aired last night (6/14/15) and part on the whole season.  First off, I am very happy with how the season finale went as far as story, or as some people have commented, the lack of story and/or character arcs.  Yes, I agree that some characters (Sansa) didn't appear to have done much this season aside from going from one not great situation to an exceedingly worse off situation, but I have learned from this show (as well as other long running shows such as LOST and X-Files that character arcs may last multiple seasons and GoT is a fairly massive show with a massive number of characters and giving important and memorable arcs for even half of the characters every season, I feel would not leave time for the other half to have any on screen time.  Sure this would be great and for the show to follow the books more closely, but people age [especially the youngin's (Bran, Arya, Sansa, Rickon, Tommen, Myrcella)] so obviously things have to be cut out, reduced and characters should be doing things more interesting than their respective characters in the books.

That paragraph/semi-rant boils down to, I will reserve judgement on characters, their motivations, their arcs until the end of the show.  Now that I think about it, I'm sure someone has charted how much time has elapsed during each individual season and the amount of time passed between seasons.  I might just go and look that up.  

And again, I was happy with season 5 as a whole and I look forward to nine months from now when I can binge watch the season all over again, then again with all of the commentaries, because that's the way I like my cake.

Additionally, fan theories (regarding both the books and the TV show) about characters and how people think they should be connected make me almost irrationally irritated.  I always bring it back to fan theories/demand about Will Turner's father in Pirates of the Caribbean. I could lead myself into a long rant that won't get me anywhere except just more worked up and annoyed, so I will stop myself here.

And since we agreed on three topics earlier today, with any luck, I'm going to start painting some Reaper Bones this week for our D&D group.  It's been almost 4 years since I've pointed a paintbrush at some minis, but it's time I got back into the habit.  And with eight minis to paint (and then some), I think I'll have full for the remainder of the week.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Et ca me fait quelque chose.

Monthly Update: October 2013

Does anyone else question this?  This is the third month that we've done a regular "Monthly Update" with the current month in the title, although most of what I've said in these articles has to do with the previous month.  And I have now just answered my own question.  What I've just said would most likely then be titled "Month in Review."  That is now out of the way.

So during the month of September, I really got into Dead Island.  After playing L4D2 quite a bit, I remembered that I had purchased Dead Island in one of the Humble Bundles and wanted to play something else with zombies.  At first I wasn't sure about the game, which needed some tweaking in the keyboard input department, but after that first questionable hour, I've managed to put in 21 hours and I only recently started Act II (~33% complete).  You can expect a First Impressions article to pop up within the next week.  I've put some time in on Torchlight II and Symphony, which will also get their own First Impressions, hopefully soon.

I also just entered the world of smartphones which I last talked about.  I also picked up the Humble Android Bundle 2, because now I have another outlet for my gaming needs/desires.  As I may've stated in my previous article, I don't see the new phone becoming my go-to for portable gaming, that will continue to be my 3DS.  But, that doesn't mean I won't use if for such purposes.

For those of you interested in miniatures, Reaper is doing a second Kickstarter to promote their Bones line of miniatures.  I got in on their first Kickstarter and came away with well over a hundred high quality plastic-ish minis.  This time around, instead of having multiple tiers, there's the "Thanks $1" tier and then a $100 tier and the earlier you support, the earlier you will get your shipment of (currently) 140 miniatures of varying sizes.  With only a week in, they are already over $1,000,000.  If I didn't already have a backlog of minis that I needed to paint then I would definitely get in on this Kickstarter again.  I just don't know if I would be able to swing it this time around.  With hope, there will always be Bones III next year.

Lastly, Conklederp got me Antichamber because she's awesome/amazing and because we've been together now for over half a decade.  I played the game for about half-an-hour before accidentally deleting my saved progress as I didn't initially know how to exit out of the game.  I know now.  I'll delving in that strange world again soon, probably with Conklederp watching or watching her play.

And I need to get back to playing Papo y Yo and Penumbra: Requiem, although those games are pretty similar in their execution of puzzle-platformers, so I may have to put one on the back burner (speaking of which, I need to go drink some coffee) until one is finished so I don't make myself completely puzzled out. 

So that's where I am, here at the beginning of October 2013.  Nothing too new or out of the ordinary, just plodding along when I'm not at work.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Instrumental