Striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind

Lockdown is starting to ease now, though I can’t see there’ll be too many changes on the personal front for a while; it’s not like I’m desperate to rush out shopping or anything, though I guess a haircut wouldn’t go amiss once barbers can open again. I can see homeworking continuing for the foreseeable future, the technology is holding up surprisingly well, and when I’ve got a clear task to focus on I think I’m rather more productive at home. The difficulty is when things are more of a slog – trying to co-ordinate with other systems or people – when suddenly the myriad distracting possibilities become all the more tempting. Hopefully things will be a bit flexible in the future allowing for one or two days at home alongside office work.

Game-wise, not much to report. Borderlands 3 ticks along; the writing doesn’t seem quite as sharp as for previous games, the series was always a close-run thing between funny and grating, and this one errs towards the latter a bit more often. Still, plenty of silly guns and explode-y type fun to be had. War Thunder thunders along; I generally stick to Second World War era prop aircraft in there, but with a bunch of Cold War jet additions I’ve started to poke more of a nose into jet gameplay. There’s a new season of Destiny 2 bearing a striking similarity to previous seasons of Destiny 2, but it’s a comforting formula of nudging up gear levels, and I still come back to its gunplay over pretty much anything else. On the Oculus Quest it’s Beat Sabre all the way, I should probably have a look at some of the other music/rhythm games on it, and with the good weather maybe get out in the garden for a bit of Superhot VR with less danger to the furniture (counterbalanced by more danger of alarming the neighbours with peculiar flailing).

Away from games there’s been a bit more time for other media. I haven’t been reading much fiction, even less fantasy fiction recently; Joe Abercrombie has the first of new trilogy out, but I’m waiting for all three before diving in and bingeing (my poor ageing brain has trouble picking things up a year apart) so instead I picked up Ed McDonald’s Raven’s Mark trilogy and enjoyed them a lot. Televisually the third series of Westworld was disappointing, it felt like they threw too much in and it failed to gel. I finally got around to Altered Carbon and felt that did a pretty good job, the second season took a while to get going but overall a nice adaptation of the books. There’s been something of an explosion of lockdown-produced media; on the BBC Charlie Brooker’s Antiviral Wipe and Staged with David Tennant and Michael Sheen were both excellent, on YouTube Alex Horne’s Home Tasking and John Finnemore’s Cabin Fever have been a lot of fun. I’m sure there must be more, but nothing else immediately springs to mind.

Stay safe out there!