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This game is beautiful. I could leave the review at that and it would almost be enough - the star player is the environment (of course, as you barely see another human for the duration of the game) with its crisp colours, sunset-illuminated vistas, and its unforgiving paths. That said, there’s beauty in the script too, with an introduction that crushes your feelings to a pulp before you do anything but click a few times and a constant warm dialogue between the protaganist and the co-worker in the neighbouring tower. ...

After two weeks in the fermenter, it was time to bottle the Irish Red Ale. My checklist is below. Bottling Workflow Wash the following with standard detergent: Bottling bucket Siphon tube Filling tube Bottlecaps Spigot Paddle Thermometer 500ml bottles (31) Wash the following using VWP: Filling tube Siphon tube Bottlecaps Spigot Paddle Trial jar (tall pint glass in this case) Hydrometer Thermometer Bottling bucket 500ml bottles (31) Assemble bottling bucket Attach tubing to fermenter spigot ...

The ingredients from my ingredient shopping arrived really quickly - I placed the order on Thursday at 17:30 and they arrived on Saturday. Impressive work from The Homebrew Company! I put together the workflow below and printed it out so I’d have something to follow along with on brew day. It really helped pinpoint things to focus on and times when I’d be able to prepare the next step while waiting for target temperatures. ...

Brewing beer is a hobby of mine. I haven’t done very many beers so far, but I find it very satisfying and rewarding. I’ve done a few kit brews with dry malt extract and one extract brew so far. I haven’t had any input into the ingredients I brew with before now - time for a change! I picked a recipe from Brewing Classic Styles, by Jamil Zainasheff & John J. Palmer, for an Irish Red Ale (It’s called Ruabeoir in their book, which smacks of putting “red beer” into Google Translate, but I digress…). ...

Since the last entry on the backlog, I’ve sunk a few more hours into Sheltered. It grew on me after a while, with the slog of getting resources being quite gripping. I accidentally overcrowded my shelter and killed half the posse through suffocation though - didn’t realise the oxygen filtration system wouldn’t keep up! An enjoyable game, but think I’ve had my fill of it. Onto the next game… Deponia Doomsday ...

Niamh and I had a boardgame night with six people as a sort of housewarming! With six players we were limited in what games we could play, so we played two games suited for the big group. In the recent Reddit Gifts Boardgames Exchange, I received a game called Codenames. It’s a team-based game, so I’ve had to wait until we had a reasonably large group to break it out. Each team has a “Spymaster” who gives one word clues so that their team picks the correct cards on the table. The trick to the game is linking multiple cards with a single clue, which I had great satisfaction doing - e.g. my team’s cards were “Telescope”, “Airplane”, and “Parachute”, so I gave the clue “Sky 3”. It was very good fun and very funny to see the wrong trains of thought that people went on for clues that seemed foolproof! Very fast turnaround for each round too - there were six of us, so we did three rounds, taking turns to be the spymaster and that took us around an hour in total. ...

I settled in for a wet Friday evening at home alone and cleared a few games from the list…with mixed results. Some miscellaneous items were on the list that I had actually played, but missed with my initial categorisation - an easy few points gained! Action Henk This was surprisingly fun. I honestly thought it would be awful, going by first impressions from the store page. It’s a pleasantly challenging racing game involving a corpulent action figure who can slide on his bum. You see what I mean about the first impressions now, I hope. The online multiplayer didn’t work so well - I think it has a limited player base - but the single player mode was engaging enough that my 67 minutes in game went by without me noticing it. I didn’t finish the single-player mode, but enjoyed what I played of it. ...

I have quite a large [[Steam]] game collection. 231 games. A ludicrous amount of games. As well as the games I’ve anticipated and obsessed over, I have random one-offs that were on sale, games that were included in various bundles, and freebies. Some of the ones I got on sale have been played less than the ones I got for free. I’d go so far as to say that most of the games in my Steam library are unplayed (I then went and checked - not the majority, but a pretty hefty sum: 92 out of 231). This really only hit home recently, as I decided to reorganise the categories in the game library and found myself completely at a loss about certain games. ...

I recently upgraded my computer build, replacing the graphics card, CPU, CPU cooler, RAM, and motherboard (rig details at the bottom of the post). The goal is to be able to hit some high graphics settings in AAA games going forward. So far, it’s working very well, though I haven’t stretched it yet really. I’ve played Arkham Knight without any performance issues, but nothing more current. I’m looking into overclocking, since it’s apparently very feasible with this system. The Asus motherboard has a built-in utility for overclocking, but I’m scared of taking the plunge - I’ll do some more reading before risking exploding my shiny new computer parts. ...

First blog post! Thanks for joining me on a journey into a random grab-bag of my thoughts. I intend mostly to use this site as a catch-all commonplace book for whatever I’m currently obsessed with. Enjoy the ride.