Terry Poulin

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope

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When encountering it on Xbox, I found the first entry in The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan a superb adventure game. Enough so that after finishing it: I pre-ordered the second entry on the spot. I can understand why they targeted Halloween weekend as the launch for The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope. The game has a rather gruesome opening prologue before meeting up with the survivors of the bus wreck. It’s content is kind of ideal for Halloween, and I’ve been looking forward to it all month.

My Halloween plans pretty much were eat cake, and play Xbox. ‘Cuz even I need a day off once in a while, lol.

Early on Little Hope feels like things are a bit less heavy on the Quick Time Events (QTEs), given the shift from holy crap, pirates! Over to demons that go bump in the night as the main threat to your lives. Didn’t expect the twist at the end to make such crystal sense of everything that happened, but it was well executed. Whether intentional, or just my own attitude, it made the feeling of having had enough of the demons confronting the characters, and opting for more a aggressive approach: seem rather appropriate to the story. How it impacts the significance of characters surviving, well, made me feel a little less bad about missing a QTE and losing one on the way to the house. Some aspects of the gameplay may take advantages of people who paid attention in Man of Medan, or just be ready to oopsie you the same way over; it’s hard to tell.
Sounds like there are plans for a third game in The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes. I’ll probably be nabbing that when it comes out. Definitely a very fun game series.
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 Pretty sure that Willow’s reaction here is “Did someone say food?”

The week in pictures

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 Aside from the general busy level and workalcoholism, I think this largely sums things up.

Test of new socks: AWESOME. I’ve put off buying new socks for so long that it feels like clouds instead of boots. Also willow doesn’t understand why she doesn’t get a post-walk treat before I take my boots off, and after.

Pretty sure she demands pretzel sticks.

Misty wanting attention.

Willow wondering why Misty gets the crane service and the chair.

Sometimes: I am a dog chair.

Willow reminding me that her pretzel stick bribes are required for midnight snackage.

The kind of looks I get when getting dressed for work.

It’s amazing Willow didn’t dive on the plate faster than I could take the picture, lol.

Wasn’t sure if leftover brussels sprouts and alfredo sauce was a great idea. Combined with meatballs, it certainly is!

Willow wishes a poor meatball would roll off the table, on the floor, or just straight into her mouth.

Yes, Willow, I know you wants treats.

Sometimes you’ve just gotta splurge 🙂

Pretty sure the dogs are smarter than I am when it comes to how to spend an afternoon.

Best part of chili mac is definitely eating chili mac.

Comfort level: over 9000!

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Baldur’s Gate 3 devs built a testing AI. Then, they tried to defeat it.

That is kind of neat, and likely worth the effort as it grows more capabilities for abusing the game.

Television, novels, and comics tell us one day the super cool A.I. will be super smart, and may or may not try to kill us all. Personally, I think the future looks more like a series of special purpose constructs aimed to help us with specific tasks. That’s the super-cool A.I. I’m looking forward to, because I’m probably going to be dead decades or centuries before we see anything like Cortana or Jarvis, lol.

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“Willow, do you really need a pretzel that badly?”

Picture of the dogs looking at me like I’ve got cucumbers coming out of my ears, omitted to protect the guilty

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 Fuck it, I’m having a cookie; the current o’clock after a long tiring day.

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 When the weather reports shifted towards flash flood and river flood warnings, I was rather less concerned. Since the local terrain can handle quite a bit of water, and I’m not that close to the river.

Water simply collects by the fence, whether it runs off down the road or much more typically from our gutters down a slight slope towards the fence.

When it started to sound like someone up ended a lake, and dumped it overhead: I figured the slope out towards the fence would be pretty flooded this morning.

Willow was rather less enthused by this, as her favorite walking spot only has a couple meters of dry space between here and the fence.

Needless to say she took a shorter walk this morning than normal, lol.

This stands in stark contrast to plenty of places I’ve seen in Georgia where the angles of drainage feel more inverted. So I’ve long been happy that overflow collects down there instead offs my doorstep, lol