The Office

I've been considering watching this show for years. But a lot of comedy is cringe to me so I just never really found the incentive to, until Toni decided to sit me down and watch it with him a while back. 

And yes, almost every single episode had me hiding behind my hands saying "Oh no, Michael, no please, no Michael, no, stop, Michael".

That said, once Michael was gone from the show I was just sad after every episode and I'd just end up saying "I miss Michael" after every episode without him. Annoying bastard grew on me xD

The very last season dropped the ball a bit, but everything up until then was golden. Now I don't only recognize, but also know the origin behind every meme :3

And it's really cute watching a show that takes place in 2005 and seeing all the budding tech. Youtube launches as brand new. Everybody's got a flip phone... It's so cute.

My last 5 books: Vampires and fangirls

1. Guilty Pleasures, by Laurell K. Hamilton. Interestingly I found out about this book series from a Buzzfeed list over the best literary vampires. It's the first book in the Anita Blake series and she feels sort of like a female Harry Dresden, but with less magic and more guns and not as much brains. I like it. Not sure I really like the mind control thing the vampires can do, but I really like Jean-Claude so far. As for the investigative element there really wasn't much going for Anita, she went down all the wrong avenues and only discovered who the killer was by having him literally reveal himself to her when he tried to kill her. So just dumb luck (or dumb bad luck?) Anita complains a lot, is scared a lot and just goes 'fuck it all' a lot. The best characters in this story were Phillip and Jean-Claude, and they're mostly absent. The reading is fun and fast-paced, but comes off as very shallow and without much substance. It's sexy and bloody, but also an action movie in book format. Did I have fun reading this? Yes. Will the story or characters stay with me? Probably not.

2. The Vampire Diaries: The Awakening & The Struggle, by L.J. Smith. I love the TV show and wanted to read the books after the show finished. It took me a while to get into it, mainly because Elena is extremely unlikeable for the first half of the first book. She only wants Stefan because he's the only boy at the high school who doesn't fall over himself to be with her. Like come on. There are some glaring differences between the books and the show. Aunt Jenna is called Judith and she has a fiancé named Robert who doesn't exist in the show. Jeremy doesn't exist in the books, instead Elena has a baby sister of four years old called Margaret. Caroline is a bitch throughout the books and Elena's main antagonist, instead of one of the girl trio as she is in the show. Instead there's a fourth girl called Meredith who's friends with Elena and Bonnie. Bonnie is still a witch and the most innocent and childlike of the bunch and she's infatuated with both Alaric and Damon. Katherine is stone-cold dead in the books and doesn't show up as an antagonist. The whole doppelganger thing isn't in the books. Stefan and Damon are five hundred years old and from Renaissance era Italy and not from Civil War era US. The books take place in the 90s and Elena fussing for a call from Stefan means she has to stay put at home where there's a phone. Stefan doesn't live at the ancestral home of the Salvatores (they are not a founding family), instead he lives at a boarding house. As for the events in the story they play out pretty much the same as in the show. Elena's parents are dead. Stefan shows up hoping to find a place among the humans of a small town. Damon follows him and weird things start to happen in the town. Stefan gets blamed. Everybody is enamoured with Damon because he compels everybody he meets. Teacher gets killed, Alaric shows up. Everything comes to a point at the Founder's Day celebration. Stefan and Elena both seem to think that Damon is behind everything weird that's been going on, but with the way the book ended dare I say... there's an Original lurking? Also the town is called Fell's Church and not Mystic Falls. I'm actually excited to read the continuation. 

3. The Ouroboros Cycle Book 1: A Monster's Coming of Age Story, by G.D. Falksen. This book starts out intriguing but then falls into sort of a lull until Babette meets Iosef, which is about halfway. The prologue, while being intriguing, has almost no bearing on the story until the very end. The story starts when Babette is sixteen and she is about to be introduced into the Society of high-socety 19th century France. She hates it and would rather read than dance. She meets Korbinian, a German officer of noble blood, and they quickly fall in love and although they have to jump through some hoops to be together their path seems plainly laid out before them. That doesn't go according to plan. Fast-forward a few years and Babette ends up having to flee from France. Her friend Iosef Shashavani agrees to help her under the pretense that they are to be married and he takes her to Georgia. This is when the interesting things start to happen and the book comes into its own as a vampire story. As the first part of a quintology this book leaves a lot of questions unanswered, but I really like many of the characters. Babette is badass. Iosef is dreamy. Korbinian is so sweet, and the hidden world which is only partially glimpsed in this book promises to be very interesting, so I'm excited to keep reading this series. 

4. Ship It, by Britta Lundin. I went into this book not sure if I'd like it. I was expecting it to be too much. Too girly. Too stupid and simpy and mushy. But instead I found something super relatable. Claire is me at sixteen. The fangirl experience of reading and writing fics and just gushing all over the internet for your OTPs and the fandom and the content and the actors and just having so many feels for things that aren't technically real. I fell in love with the book at the description of Claire at the first convention panel: "There's a girl in the front row who is all-out bawling, and I know how she feels. Emotions are, like, leaking out of my pores. Crying actually seems like a pretty minor reaction. All things considered, I might literally explode. 'Local girl explodes at Boise Comics Convention. Doctors mystified, but witnesses suspect she had too many feels. Details at eleven.'" And that's just page 64. Everything in this book is relatable. Trying to explain fandom to people outside of it. Trying to explain slash or ships or OTPs... It's such a struggle and I've been there. I'm there, still. How the book attempts to explore sexuality and sexual awakenings as well as just the feeling of belonging you get when you're in a place like a convention where everybody there just gets you because they're there for the same reason... It made my heart swell because I feel it. I'm one of you. And I never had the online presence Claire does because I never dared publish my fics. But oh, I feel it. The end had me straight up crying. Feels. 

5. Fangirl, by Rainbow Rowell. When I started this book I really wasn't sure if this would be a book I would end up finishing. But I endeavoured to give it 100 pages like I usually do. I didn't even notice the 100 page mark. At that point I was so pulled into the story that I had trouble putting the book down. I deeply relate to Cath and this is her coming of age story, her growing up experience, and she does some serious growing in the course of the novel. She's shy and quiet and anti-social and insecure in the beginning, but she ends up more outgoing towards the end. She's still shy and insecure, but less withdrawn about it and she dares to lean on others and learns to trust the people around her. Link is wonderful. Reagan is just what Cath needs to push her out of her shell. And throughout it all there's Cath's fangirling experience with Simon Snow which just resonates with me. The scene where they go to the midnight release of the last book had me drowning in memories of my own. The only fourth wall break in this book that probably should've been edited out is when Link mentions Harry Potter once, when the entire book is about Cath fangirling over Simon Snow, which is set up as a substitute for Harry Potter. Why even mention Potter at all?!?!? My favourite quote, because it explains why I love the Internet, is: "There are other people on the Internet. It's awesome. You get all the benefits of 'other people' without the body odour and the eye contact." This book is relatable to the extreme.

Dealing with backlog: Lovecraftian themed games, part 1

So I noticed that I had a whole bunch of Lovecraftian themed games in my Steam library and decided to go through them all. These are all games I've bought over the years but never played because other games held my attention more. 

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. This is an old Bethesda game from 2006 and I probably got this game two PCs ago and it has since just sat in my library. All the negative reviews on Steam talked about this game not working unless you fiddled with ini files and downloaded mods and patches to make it work on modern systems. To nobody's surprise it didn't work. And I couldn't be bothered to do all the fiddling and trouble-shooting.

Conarium. This is a puzzle adventure game of the walking sim variety. It isn't exactly scary but it keeps an unsettling vibe throughout, which I really enjoy. There's a lot of things they've drawn from the Cthulhu Mythos and storywise this seems to be a fanfiction sequel to At the Mountains of Madness which has to be one of my favourite Lovecraft stories overall (tekeli-li?). I played through the whole thing in one sitting and the only annoying segment was the part where I was being chased by mummies. Both endings were really cool. 

Dagon: by H.P. Lovecraft. This is a visual novel audiobook of Lovecraft's short story Dagon, which was the first story in the Cthulhu Mythos. This whole game is a deep-dive into Lovecraft's life and career, with tidbits of information around the author himself and his Cthulhu Mythos in-between story segments. Dagon is a very good introduction to the Mythos and a really chilling short story overall. Having it read out loud as an audiobook with visual elements to help only made it so much better.

Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder. This is a point-and-click adventure puzzle game from 2007 and I half expected it wouldn't work, but it worked surprisingly well. With only the small caveat that I had to play it in a window instead of fullscreen because the text became too pixalated to read in fullscreen. The game is about a man slowly descending into madness after glimpsing the beyond, in true Lovecraft fashion, and I had a really good time with it. 

Darkness Within 2: The Dark Lineage. The continuation of the previous game, with the same protag. Same thing with having to play in windowed mode or everything would be too pixelated to read. This game had a lot more clear and obvious Lovecraftian references, rather than the "inspired by" that the previous game was. This sequel had more infuriating puzzles though and sometimes Howard refused to go through a door or open a cabinet because he couldn't see it (but I could) until he turned on the flashlight. Tiny annoyances that made the experience a bit lesser than the previous game. Still had a good time with it!

Forgive Me Father. This is an arena shooter with a Lovecraftian spin. I'm not very good at these types of game because they're so fast-paced and I can't aim quick enough. That said my first session lasted two hours and I managed to beat the first boss. There is a story element of course, but I'm generally too busy being stressed about the pace to pay attention. But while I did have some fun with the fast-paced gameplay, in the end I felt no incentive to come back to it. Ultimately not my kind of game, despite the Lovecraftian theme.

I technically have a bunch more Lovecraftian themed game in my library, but after months of only playing small games (either action or adventure puzzle) I really felt the need to deep dive into a huge expansive open world RPG again. So this will be part 1.

Dealing with backlog: We Were Here series

After A Way Out we decided to check out this series of games that we've talked about trying.

We Were Here was a lot of fun. Originally we wanted to use the in-game voice mechanic, but we soon switched over to Discord again. It was just a lot more convenient. We had a lot of fun explaining things to each other and figuring out what to do and where to go. The only hurdle was the chess puzzle because Toni doesn't know chess at all. So I ended up filming it on my phone from his screen so I could mimic the movements on my own screen :P Our only complaint about this game was that it was too short. 

We Were Here Too started out fun. But at the end of the second room there is a cube puzzle. A timed cube puzzle. I was in the room with the spiral staircase and Toni had to figure out which cube corresponded with the cross on my wall (a.k.a the flattened out cube). We both became increasingly frustrated as we kept failing and failing and failing. And then we decided to end it there and try again some other time when we were less annoyed and frustrated. But when we came back to it two weeks later we discovered that we couldn't start from where we had left off. We looked it up and found out that the savepoint system within the game was broken and you basically had to complete the game in one sitting. There was a thread on Steam where it had been reported in like 2019 and the devs had responded to it in 2022... We decided to fuck this game.

We Were Here Together was fun throughout. We struggled a little bit with the puzzle for filling the barrels with differently-coloured liquids, but once we figured it out (with the help of a guide) the rest of it went pretty smoothly. Except for the puzzle where we were in separate but similar rooms and we had to line things up to match, because half the things were either missing or uninteractable. Looked it up and discovered that it was a known bug. Restarted the game and suddenly everything was working as intended. If it hadn't we probably wouldn't have finished this one either. But this game was a mostly smooth experience with a fun little story. 

We Were Here Forever was easily the best game in the franchise so far. None of the puzzles were too frustrating, the game was really pretty at times, and this is where it became obvious that all the games were connected story-wise. Anything that's timed are bound to annoy us because none of us manage the time constraint well. In this game it was the underwater puzzle, but we figured it out without too much hassle. One of the last puzzles with the recipe and the creation of an astrolabe was also timed, but I had quite a bit of fun with that one. 

This series was quite a bit of fun, but my brain got tired xD