Post: Zen & Grind
Thursday the 7th of November, 2024, posted before bed.

I keep logging in because I keep seeing news and posts about new content, but when it settles I ultimately just end up spending an hour grinding resources and exploring.

The value of a relaxing game like No Man’s Sky is that after a long day of work or writing it is awfully nice to just run around and not worry about anything but just dabbling and dawdling through a procedurally generated planet never previously seen by human eyes.

It’s been a crazy week at home, at work, and around the world. I needed some chill time so between tending my virtual farm in Farming Simulator and collecting ferrite and salvaged data in the infinite multiverse of No Man’s Sky I’ve needed some down time, offline time, and time to progress in something that is indifferent to the universe being screwed up.

Post: Crashed into the Galactic Centre
Monday the 29th of July, 2024, before dinner.

I’ve been vying for the centre of the galaxy for a long time. I mean, for starters it’s just a big tease, isn’t it? The centre of the galaxy? It’s just calling out for you isn’t it?

And for seconds, it shows up as a perpetual navigation destination on the galaxy map, your waypoints always kinda nudging you closer and closer. Go towards the core!

Well. I reached it today. I didn’t even realize it was that close. It suddenly was just: there you go. Click to travel. And it turns out it’s kinda a disaster. My ship is crashed and I’m kinda stuck at the moment. I’m gonna need to play me some macguyver to get back to civilization, I think.

Post: No Man's Sky - A Video Diary
Tuesday the 23rd of July, 2024, in the mid-afternoon.

Screenshots capture some of the vibe, but I thought I would try posting some video as well.

Post: A Gamer Vacation
Monday the 22nd of July, 2024, in the evening.

Onward. I seemed to get sucked into this game with some regularity, usually after an update or something inspires me to load it up again and push forward on my save. That’s not a bad thing.

You probably don’t visit here often enough to notice, but as there seems to be this growing resurgence in personal blogging I am starting to consider this one of my many landing spots.

See, as it was, I used to blog quite frequently. Personal blogging stuff mostly. But mixed neatly into all of that for all the years I posted was a gaming category. I would write about what I was playing, throw mini reviews up on that site, and wax nerdy on my popular culture knowledge, largely centred around video gaming. So much of my gaming life was documented in those digital pages.

When I built this little micro-blogging applet platform thingy, I had really intended it mostly to replace my Instagram account, and to post travel photos and to share the kinds of stuff I had been posting on the socials but in a place that was both (a) somewhere i owned and controlled and (b) a place that lacked that pressure to post on a theme or to have more purpose or function behind what I posted. In short, more ownership, less shade.

But I was personally reluctant to clutter that space with gaming screenshots, so I built this little side space which is basically running as a multi-site backend and allowing me to talk about games, movies, science fiction, and whatever, but without the sort of “why are you following me then” vibes I was getting on other places. A whatever, this is my gaming log space, get it?

But the funny thing is that the freedom of this spaces has spurred me to add features and functions that I wouldn’t have bothered with on the simpler site, and now both of them are sort of rocking this low-res blog thing and are becoming my favourite places to drop pics and words and sounds.

I guess what I’m saying is that expect this space to keep growing and blossoming and that I might actually put stuff here worth checking out as I work towards that vague goal. Or maybe it’ll just be a lot of gaming screenshots. I dunno.

Post: Welcome to Paradise-ish?
Saturday the 20th of July, 2024, posted before bed.

Do you ever play a game so much that you start to feel like you need to switch up your style a little bit? I had that vibe this evening. With the latest Worlds update to NMS I was feeling a bit like I was missing out on that feeling of a BIG change because, frankly, I’ve done so much exploring and building and questing that it’s just more of the same but nicer, see? But how do you switch it up, you ask? Well, my approach was really stupidly simple. I’ve been playing in first person view for most of my play time. In fact, I started this current profile as a #vr playthrough and then just got over the hassle. I mean I still VR it, but there’s something chill about just picking up the controller and no-fussing it. So, yeah. I switched my view into the over-the-shoulder third person perspective, summoned the space station so I could change my appearance a little, and then wandered over to the roulette portal and transported myself blind to a rando planet. The result dropped me into a pretty nice, near-paradise world by sheer chance and there wasn’t a sole on it save for what seemed like an auto-generated empty base. So I flew around for a bit, built a new base there, and just—played. This little screencap series is all from that session.

Post: Distracted by No Man’s Sky
Saturday the 20th of July, 2024, in the morning.

I hate that I get distracted by this notion of new content. I mean, we’re all seekers of exciting novelty, I get that. We have these games that make our #comfortplay list, the stuff where we zen out to not think about it and just sit there and grind through tasks or crafting or whatever. Minecraft did that for me for a while, and there is a totally different vibe playing through a story like in Final Fantasy and needing to pay attention to details and plot beats versus loading up an exploration sim and just drifting in the wind seeking out something interesting. I mean, ultimately that’s the curse of it tho, right? Newness temporarily negates the zen because the universe where the unexpected has become normalized suddenly is unexpected in a different way so the curiosity gets piqued and you can’t just sit there and waddle through it. So that’s what kinda bugs me, that I take that bait and since I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t do jump scare movies that translates right over to the kind of guy who wants to poke around the universe making sure there is nothing creeping in the dark corners as I’m putzing along building bases and refining ore and being zen. So I take the new-content bait and walk around with my metaphorical flashlight to see what they dropped out there in the darkness.

Post: Even More Exploring the 5.0 Update
Wednesday the 17th of July, 2024, in the evening.

Getting over the supposed subtlety of the latest update, I’m just revelling in the fact that it distracted me from my other adventures. While I should be down in our cool cool basement where my computer is flying a virtual plane across North Dakota, instead I find myself upstairs in my hot hot living room where the #ps5 lives so that I can add a couple more hours to my NMS playtime tally. Of course it never fails to awe me that I can spend a couple hours in this universe and discover this near limitless variety of colours and shapes and sights just by flying a spaceship from planet to planet. In fact, sometimes just waiting a few minutes for a storm to clear or for the time of day to shift, the whole feel of a place will change.

Post: Exploring the 5.0 Update
Wednesday the 17th of July, 2024, in the evening.

With barely a couple days warning the good folks who make No Man’s Sky released another big #featureupdate earlier today. Of course, it took a solid half hour to download and update my game, and so I bumbled around watching an episode of the Simpsons while the download meter crept ever closer to zero. After I got into the post-update game I thought I would poke around and see if I could find any of this supposed new on-world content. Some of it might be pretty subtle, which is nice because no one wants all their hard base-crafting work to get swamped up in some major overhaul. After noticing a few subtle upgrades in my base systems, I hopped from my established solar system over to a brand new discovery to see what difference that made. I’m in no way critical when I say I’m not sure my old gamer guy brain picked up on much of the changes, which is fine. The game is still a great way to kill a few hours.