Yet Another About Me Post

Books

Love to read books. When I was still in Primary and Secondary I must’ve read every one of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series that the school libraries had on its shelves. Later I would go on to read titles from big authors like Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, John Grisham, and Dan Brown to name a few. One of the longest reads I’ve had was the Wheel of Time (WOT). A 14-book saga by Robert Jordan, although the last 3 books were completed by Brandon Sanderson. Also read New Spring, a prequel to WOT. Which may be the only book I bought a physical copy of for myself for all of RJ’s WOT-related literature, but can’t remember where I placed it. Now how in the world did I manage to finish the 14-part series without even owning a single copy? 🤔😅

Reading has taken a back seat lately. I haven’t had the pleasure of turning the pages of a good novel since 2019. If I am not mistaken, I think my next good read after the long reading hiatus was Jonathan Stroud‘s – Bartimaeus: The Ring Of Solomon back in 2020. This is a prequel to a 3-part series about Bartimaeus, a sarcastic and mischievous djinni (genie). Need to hunt those 3 books when time permits. Had the opportunity to finish The Art Of War by Stephen Coonts last March 2021. Trying hard to flip to the last pages of Peter Mountford‘s novel – A Young Man’s Guide To Late Capitalism.

I’ve put down the Peter Mountford book on indefinite hold for the moment. Will get back to it. Because I’ve recently acquired a copy of the first book of the Bartimaeus Trilogy – The Amulet of Samarkand. This is still a read in progress up to this day. I cannot seem to find the time to sit down and read through it until the very end. Pretty soon I will have to re-read the first several pages to refresh the story when I take up this book again. It’s been months since then.

Media Streaming

Well I blame this sort of reading drought, and inconsistency, on lots of easy to digest and readily available media content nowadays from YouTube and Netflix. One where I won’t have to imagine so much because the format does that for me. The younger generation truly has it really easy-ish for them.

It gets worse. Recently I’ve expanded to having access to Amazon Prime Video and AppleTV+ for more content than I can care to watch.

Bingeing on multi-season, 10-12 episode series, devouring never-before-seen full-length movies, while watching reruns of old favorites certainly takes up a lot of time. With new ones coming in steadily, there just doesn’t seem to be an end to this streaming marathon.

Games

While I spend most of my time in front of a computer, what with the job and everything connected over the Internet nowadays, I have gotten past the addiction of games out of my system that I don’t even have a single game on my Android Nokia smartphone Samsung Galaxy A52 / Galaxy Tab A devices.

However, at one point I was a serious World of Warcraft (WOW) raider. This massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) was my life for roughly 3 years. This was during the Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King expansions. I have lead (ineffectively 🤣) 25-man and 10-man dungeon raids. QQed incessantly (QQ is WOW slang for whine and complain). Topped the DPS charts easily. Played countless battlegrounds and arenas too.

Before that there was the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) phase, namely, Defense of the Ancients (DOTA). Played dusk until dawn with friends for numerous nights for I don’t know how long in the original incarnation of this game. Wasted hours battling bots in AI maps, even at thousands of feet above ground. The Internet was still in its infancy that time. Online games were not much heard of yet. LAN games were the norm. What I thought was the end of it after I discovered WOW, only resurfaced years later when DOTA 2 came out. Valve’s Steam platform revolutionized online gaming sort of. Not only was this sequel free to play, with very improved graphics and design, it was also now easier to play with just about anyone as long as you had an Internet connection. I played hundreds of hours with friends in other countries, or random faceless dozens in 5 vs 5 match-ups. Those were fun days.

In the action role-playing game genre (ARPG), my most-played title would be Diablo 3. I still play it every now and then up to the present. Its addicting to collect pets, wings and other achievements. Not to mention, trying to get as high up as I can in Greater Rifts for the challenge. My highest is GRift 122 on a Solo Barbarian (around Season 20). But it gets boring over time thus the long breaks in between. There were other games in there too. Both on PC and Android. Among those game titles are Neverwinter Nights, Diablo 2, Dragon Age, Plants vs Zombies, and Angry Birds. Heck, even Flash-based games on Facebook when that was still a thing! 

My latest fascination so far is with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on the Nintendo Switch console. Down on the 2nd and last expansion pack. I still have to defeat the final boss, Dettlaff. Witcher 3 was the 2nd Switch game I bought, also comes 2nd in most hours played as of this writing.

It has been over a year and I still have not finished The Witcher 3. Not because I couldn’t, but because I’ve been procrastinating. At one point I resolved to clear out all those question marks all around the map, including those ridiculously in the middle of the sea. I think I cleared out the western half of the map before I stopped. It was becoming very much of a chore rather than a fun game. Not that it was forced on the player or storyline to go through all that. It wast just me. 🤷🏽‍♂️

Anyway, I’ve finally completed The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt up to the Blood and Wine expansion last week (March 2022). That Dettlaff was one mean son of a bitch. Took me a while to down him (Imagine the loading time waits after several repeats. Ughhh!). Plus after over a year of not playing, I was really rusty.

Now I’m thinking of getting one of Capcom’s Monster Hunter games for my Nintendo Switch. Either Rise or Stories 2: Wings of Ruin. I’ve played through the former’s demo version. Only starting on the latter’s trial version, and I haven’t gotten past the village yet. Between the two, it looks like Stories has more engagement outside of the actual monster hunting. But I don’t know, maybe that’s just me. Then after getting to the first guided monster fight, the whole thing is turn-based? Okay. After much deliberation, I’ve eventually settled with Monster Hunter Rise 🏅. I would have loved to play MH titles on PC, but alas, my old laptop does not have the muscle to run such games. 😝

Only a few Hub quests to finish. Mostly the Apex quests that had more than one apex monster to hunt. Completed all Apex Monster quests, including the Advanced: Born of Paradise with the Narwa the Allmother upgraded version of Narwa.

I’ve subscribed for Nintendo Online so I am able to play cooperatively with other hunters. That has made it so much fun, especially on Rampage quests. The latter one is really a bore to do solo, but not with 3 other players. Not so soon after I had to end the sub though because work has been kinda hectic. Not able to play much. Basically wasted money not being able to make use of online play that often. On second thought I might sub again. That save-to-cloud feature is a good reason why.

For now I’ve set aside my dual blades in favor of Zelda: Breath of the Wild which I bought a few days back (29th March 2022). It’s been fun. Spent hours taming horses and scaling cliffs. Gonna lay low on monster hunting for a while. But not really. There are more weird monsters to hunt on BoTW. That is, until the release of MH Rise expansion Sunbreak. Coming on June 30, 2022. Haven’t pre-ordered yet. Not sure if it’s digital only. Want to have a physical copy of the game.

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Notice: This article was published on June 2, 2021 and the content above may be out of date.
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