I guess I'm just gonna do little reviews of all the videogames I play. At least if I have more than a thought or two.
Miles Morales is basically stand-alone DLC for the 2018 Sony Spider-Man game. And that game's great, so I'm not complaining.
I'm not really a reader of superhero comics, but I have always liked Miles, the Ultimate Spider-Man, as a character. After Peter Parker gets super-old and married and angsty, Miles shows up as an actual teenager and does teenager things. Spider-Man is meant to be a teenager, really.
I feel like the Spiderverse movie (I haven't seen the second one, so I can't generalize) does a decent job of introducing Miles to the masses. (I also love Spider-Gwen, and that movie is beautiful. I should probably watch the sequel). This game, tho, does a better job of making Miles the focus. Spiderverse just has too much going on.
I've got some quibbles about the game. It really hurries you along the story missions, expecting you to ignore the constant monologuing or phonecalls about how you really ought to be going on to the next urgent thing and go around doing the side missions to level up and get power ups. It doesn't hurt you to not have those to finish the story, but I feel it would've been more fun to have the power-ups in the actual story missions rather than in the post-game.
It's also kind of short. Basically DLC. But you don't have to buy the original Spider-Man, which I suppose is a plus.
Spider-Man 2 is reportedly kind of meh. Not bad, just not as good. I'll probably pick it up in a Steam sale.
What's particularly disappointing is Sony's decision to stop bringing their single-player games to PC. Mind you, they've been pretty spotty on supporting Steamdeck (Horizon Forbidden West, for example, is unsupported). But I do enjoy their stuff. And I'm not about to buy a PS5.
Eurovision was last weekend and I still have some thoughts.
More accurately, I started writing this a month ago but still felt compelled to finish the thought.
I didn't actually watch the Portugal national final, but when the winner was announced, I went and watched their performance.
And I... wasn't impressed. Sure, it's pretty, but kinda boring, you know?
I think it was ESC Gabe who pointed out in his livestream that these guys are singing Cante Alentejano, one of two Portuguese music forms that are recognized as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO. (God bless you, UNESCO). (The other one is Fado, which has been at Eurovision a few times). This is the first time Cante Alentejano has been at Eurovision.
As I mentioned briefly in the New Year bullet post, I've been messing with Home Assistant a bit at the new house. I'm trying very hard not to fall down a rabbit hole of just continuously buying crap.
I do like the idea of lights on timers. And, rather than some noisy timer switch or something, I can run a whole Home Assistant server and have it do the timers!
But honestly, Home Assistant is up there as one of the best open source projects in the world. There so much it can do, you find yourself making big, insane plans for what it could do. And then you gotta wonder is whether this grand plan you have is actually going to improve anything in your life or is it going to be a frustrating, fragile headache that you constantly need to fiddle with.
What's worse is the hardware side is an absolute mess of competing and compromised standards from companies whose primary goal is to get you to fully buy into their ecosystem, collect as much data as they could hypothetically monetize and top it off with a monthly subscription fee.
We managed to clear out the remaining stock of Leviton Zigbee switches for most of the smart switches in the house. Leviton has mostly moved over to connecting to their own centralized service with Wi-Fi. Terrible. Matter is the new emerging standard, but "standard" is a bit of an overstatement. Support is spotty and a significant fraction of devices require Wi-Fi. I bought the ZBT-2 Zigbee and Thread (which is the non-Wi-Fi Matter mesh radio protocol) hub, not realizing that it only supports one protocol at a time. And since we've got Zigbee switches in the wall, it's a Zigbee hub. If I want to do Matter, I'll need another Thread hub. Annoying. My bad, but still annoying.
The whole home automation thing is full of gotchas, and I think my plan is to take things slow, take on a small project here and there and avoid the temptation to just go on AliExpress or Amazon and buy a tonne of gadgets that probably aren't going to work.
