Dealing with backlog: Horizon Zero Dawn

As usual I'm the last one to the party. When this game got released for PC back in 2020 I immediately bought it because I knew I wanted to play it, even though I knew the broad strokes of the story from having watched Toni play it. But it had a rough PC release so I waited before playing it and then other things got in the way.

Finally I decided it was time and it was an amazing ride!

As usual I wanted to do all the side content in a region before I moved on, but I soon realized that the Hunting Grounds were very difficult on a low level. So I left those and endeavoured to do them as the last thing in the game. I went on to do literally everything else. All the collectables, all the bandit camps, all the tallnecks and all the sidequests. Even all the weapon tutorials. 

The main story was just as amazing as I remembered, even more so now that I got all the details. 

I wish the game had had romance options and I wouldn't have had to kill Nil. I saw it coming. I just wish I didn't have to. I liked him. I also wished there had been more interactions with the Sun King and with Erend. And Petra was great. Just so many cool characters. 

The tallnecks were always an experience and I had a lot of fun climbing them. 

Interestingly the machines that scared me the most for the longest time were the bellowbacks. Not even fireclaws in the DLC were as scary. 

I left the DLC until after I had finished the main story of the base game. Frozen Wilds was really cool and Aratak is big brother material. Finding out some backgroun for Sylens was interesting too. He's a really interesting character, morally grey and incredibly shrewd. 

After I had 100%ed Frozen Wilds I went back to the base game and collected some last achievements and did all the hunting grounds and with that 100%ed the base game too. I wanted to try to collect all the datapoints I had missed, but some were in side rooms in main story locations that seemed to have become inaccessible once that story quest was completed. So I gave up that idea pretty soon. 

This game gave me a huge post-game hangover and even if I've started another game now I still think about HZD every day. I can't wait for Forbidden West to drop on PC!

Grey's Anatomy S19 and Station 19 S06

It's the end of an era for Grey's Anatomy with Ellen Pompeo leaving the show. How can we have Grey's without Grey? Turns out pretty well. They're doing a good job of establishing the new interns. I really enjoyed seeing the social commentary on the abortion issue in the US and with it a reintroduction of Addison Montgomery. 

I don't approve of the hint that Richard is going to fall off the wagon or whatever's going on with Teddy. Things were finally looking up for Teddy and Owen T_T Taryn and Levi are the best and I want everything good for them. Yasuda is probably my favourite new intern. Simone needs to learn to follow her heart. Lucas is a fuck-up, but an adorable fuck-up. 

All in all I really enjoyed this season and I'm excited for whatever comes next, with or without Meredith.

As for Station 19 we have Maya trying to be better and trying to fix her relationship with Carina, but not before getting seriously close to the edge. We have Jack trying to form a relationship with his biological family as well as trying to find his foster siblings. We have Travis running for mayor. The relationship between Sully and the Chief is reaching make or break. (I really just want Sully back with Andy, please). Theo is on a mission that becomes all-consuming to the point of destroying every single relationship he has. 

I don't like the new girl. And Dixon is reaching new heights on his assholery. 

That finale though O_O

Sweden Rock Festival 2023

SRF 2014.

SRF 2015. 

SRF 2016. 

SRF 2017. 

SRF 2018.

SRF 2019.

SRF 2022.

We've been home for two days now and reality is starting to settle back in. Although my voice is still gone. This year I shared the whole thing on Instagram as well so I recommend going there for pictures :)

On Tuesday last week we got in the car at 5am and after having picked up the last person of our roadtrip gang, we finally got on the road around 5:30am. Amazingly we didn't stop for bathroom breaks or snack breaks as many times as earlier years and we arrived at the camp ground just after 11:30am. Made incredibly good time on that journey! Got the tents up and for the rest of that day it was all party.

The next morning most of us crawled out of our tents around 8am and went to find breakfast, which turned into way more of a quest than any of us wanted first thing in the morning. The regular ready-to-go breakfast bags from earlier years were nowhere to be seen and so we begrudgingly half-assed our own. At least I got morning coffee. 

My first concert of this year was Soilwork. They were the band that got me into death metal as a teenager and I used to love them, but now I haven't really listened to them much in the last ten years or so. After this concert I'll definitely pick them up again! The entire front row became a mosh-pit during their concert. It was glorious!

Airbourne was playing around dinner time and so we decided to go in and half-watch them while eating. We then returned to the camp for a short while, until it was time to go back and see Def Leppard, Avatar and Mötley Crüe. Avatar easily wins best concert of the year for me ♥

The second day started out strong with Korpiklaani and then we returned to camp until evening when it was time for Kamelot. I don't really listen to Kamelot (I've heard like two songs), but I've liked what I heard so I decided to tag along to see them. It was a really cool show! After that concert we spent the rest of the day at the camp until it was time for Deep Purple and Europe. Neither of which I was super excited about, but they both seemed like bands I shoudl take the chance to see while I still can. Deep Purple was too psychedelic experimental instrumental solo jam session for me. After every song there was a solo jam session for each band member (probably to allow the singer to catch a break). But aside from that it struck all of us how damned polite and sweet they were. All of us were just standing there like awwwwwh. Europe, being Swedish, has a huge following and it was very clear whenever one of the mor well-known songs were played.

The third day is when my voice went to shit. This year the festival area was super dusty. I don't know what they did different earlier years, but it has never been this dusty. I saw several people walking around with scarves/bandanas/masks covering their mouths and noses, and for me that's a lesson learned for next year. More than one person in our camp got red and irritated eyes from all the dust. But anyway... I had only two concerts planned for Friday and they were in the evening so most of the day was spent partying in the camp. We then finished the day with Powerwolf (amazing as usual) and Iron Maiden. Iron Maiden mainly played lesser known songs for the first half-hour and with none of us being big fans, we decided to leave after that. Once we had returned to the camp and it had been maybe forty minutes since they started playing we heard Fear of the Dark. First well-known song of that gig. 

Last day, Saturday, and I could barely speak. We had only two concerts planned for Saturday as well, which was just as well because traditionally everybody is completely beat and ready to leave and still trying their hardest to keep the party and energy levels up. To mixed results. The first concert was early, Joddla med Siv, they're a Swedish folk rock band from Skåne and they have a MASSIVELY HUGE following in Skåne, which the organizors seem to have missed or underappreciated. They were on one of the smaller stages, when they could easily have filled the second to largest stage or maybe even the largest one. People crowded in front of the stage, spilling out through the entrances and exits on either side trying to squeeze in to see them. And they delivered. It was amazing! I've seen the number 35k people in the audience thrown around...

After Joddla was done we returned to camp and started to slowly pack our things together while continuing the party. Before going in to see Ghost as the final act of the festival we made sure all our things were gathered up and then we went back inside. Ghost was really great, but Avatar still wins best concert of the year. 

After the concert there was a small celebration of the ferstival's 30th anniversary with small clips from every festival playing on the big picture screens on the biggest stage and fireworks. We then went back to camp to grab our things and head for the car. We packed our stuff and ourselves in the car and after a clusterfuck traffic jam of everybody else having the same brilliant idea, we finally got out onto the road at 00:40am. Because it was so late we ended up taking several more stretch-your-legs breaks and we arrived home at around 8am on Sunday morning. We showered, unpacked, and then fell into bed until around 2pm.

It's now 1am on the Wednesday after and my voice is still terrible, but slowly getting better. 

Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities

This show is an anthology show like Love, Death and Robots or Black Mirror, but with horror stories. There are eight stories in this first batch, two of which are based on Lovecraft stories and in my opinion those two were the best ones. 

Lot 36 is a story about a xenophobic guy who works at a storage unit complex and specifically with clearing out storage units belonging to people who have died and haven't had their things claimed within an allotted time frame. He then sells any valuables on the side so he's basically a thief. He stumbles onto an old guy of Nazi origin who was deep inside the mythical Nazi mysticism, and things go sideways from there as the guy delves deeper than he should. It was a really slow story and the preposterous way it ended left a lot to be desired. Sebastian Roché was great in this.

Graveyard Rats is a story about a grave robber in post-WW1 20th century who is fighting his own war with the rats for the buried valuables. It was a fun story mostly, way too preposterous to be called anything even remotely scary. And it ended like a cautionary tale. 

The Autopsy was the first story that was really somewhat good. The erratic behavior of a mine worker causes something like a bomb to go off inside a mine and killing a bunch of people. A doctor is then called in to do the autopsy of the workers, and what he finds is really disturbing. The entire story is pretty disturbing, albeit somewhat predictable. 

The Outside is about a girl who's struggled her entire life with feeling ugly, unwanted and weird. She happens upon a lotion that's supposeed to fix everything. This story was really weird and really unsatisfying and not at all scary. Dan Stevens was great as the salesman though. 

Pickman's Model is the first Lovecraftian story and it's really right up my alley. It gives me the whole chilling, spine-tingling, not exactly scary but something is definitely wrong kind of feeling. It's Lovecraft's short story by the same name put to the screen, and it's amazing. Doesn't hurt that Ben Barnes is the protagonist either, and Crispin Glover was amazing as Pickman. 

Dreams in the Witch House is the second Lovecraftian story and while the writer has taken some artistic liberties it's really, really well made and turned into a classic haunted house story with some Lovecraftian themes and supernatural tendencies, and I'm all for it! Rupert Grint did a great job as the protagonist. 

The Viewing was something like a fever dream someone high on LSD might come up with. It was just very very weird and neither of us liked it. It's about a bunch of outstanding people being invited into the home of a rich elderly recluse. He shows off his collection, because as a rich man he likes collecting things. All the things. One thing he has collected is a meteor. Which turns out to be a space egg, which expectedly cracks open and all hell breaks loose. 

The Murmuring is a classic haunted house tale. But it focused more on the marital issues of the two people in the house than the ghosts or the house, and so this story that should've been exactly my thing turned into a slog. Andrew Lincoln is in this one and he does a very convincing job. 

The thing with anthologies is that it won't always be good, but it's always interesting and overall worth it. I hope there'll be a second volume.