Retiring from Bloodstrike

Here we are. I'm done. 300 hours in, on both PC and mobile. I reached Legendary rank several times. My account is level 50. All my guns are level 70+. Then I've hit the wall. 

The core gunplay is outstanding. Responsive and satisfying. It's the best. But sadly, when you play for long enough, everything else is a dumpster fire. 

The matchmaking is awful. You get matched against 12-year-olds with 2,000 hours who play like it's their job. Or you're stomping absolute beginners. The BR ladder means nothing because skill distribution is nonexistent. It's mostly a indicator of how sweaty you are. And things get really fucking sweaty, really fast. 

Cheaters. There are tons of them. If you follow the devs on social media, you'll notice they usually announce how many accounts they're banning every month. It's in the tens of thousands. Let that sink in. Tens of thousands of hackers you're forced to play against. 

Small map pool. 3 BR maps, 1 being rather small, the others rather empty. 6 pretty average Hot Zone maps. You rotate through these same maps very fast. 

An exhausting loop. Get wrecked by sweats, respawn, get wrecked again… Watch killcams of people who clearly have no life, rinse and repeat. There's no learning curve. Just sweats.

I get why people grind it though. The gunplay is great, the guns are cool and the game feels rather good at first. But  it's not enough when every match is against people who treat ranked like a second job

Life's too short for this frustration loop. The fun just isn't there anymore. Moving on.

Writing about Writing Part 4

Oh, no… here we are again! This can't be real!

The last time I went on a rant about this, I settled on Obsidian as my ultimate note-taking and writing application. It sounded pretty final… I mean, the last chapter detailing why was called Endgame. Can't be more final than that—unless you work at Marvel!

So, yeah. Here I am again, ready to switch to yet another note-taking and/or writing application.

Welcome back!

This time, we are starting from Obsidian.

Chindi

Chindi is the strongest installment of the Academy series to date. McDevitt continues to build an incredible hard SF world full of mystery. Things unfold with with so many questions atop questions… You can't stop turning pages. While the previous one, Deepsix, had a much smaller scope, this one goes huge. A very well-crafted story.

The mystery of the Chindi itself — the artifact our heroes are concerned with, its origins, its nature — is at the heart of the story. McDevitt handles it so well. Rather than dumping exposition, he lets our heroes circle around it, finding new angles, new contradictions. Each discovery feels earned. The mythology he constructs around this thing is unsettling, and the implications only go deeper as we progress. It's the kind of SF mystery that makes you want to immediately reread it to catch what you missed.

My one tiny gripe is that we have yet another last-second rescue under catastrophic circumstances. Our heroes pull off the impossible for the 3rd time in a row. It's a minor flaw in an otherwise excellent series, but the pattern is there. Is it a big deal? No. Is the book any less good because of it? No.

Great read!

 

Brave New World

 

The conditioning angle of Brave New World is genuinely unsettling, and cranking the Ford mythology into a full-blown religion is a bold move that pays off. Great dystopian setup. Strong foundation.

I read the abridged version in high school, so my memory of the book was pretty vague. Still, having loved it, I came in with high expectations.

Turns out memory and reality don't always match.

First surprise: they get to the Savage Reserve fast. In my head, that was a second-half reveal. Nope. It threw me off the pacing early on, and I spent a good chunk of the book waiting for a gear shift that never quite came. 

I also remembered Lenina as almost a co-lead, her story arc feeling as central as Bernard Marx's. Reading it now, that's not really the case. Maybe the abridged version gave her more space. Maybe I just projected. Either way, it felt odd.

And the world itself, man, I wanted more of it. Compared to 1984, which practically drowns you in its nightmare, Huxley's society feels a little underexposed. You get the ideas, but not always the weight of them.

Here's the thing though: Brave New World is an excellent book. I'm just pretty sure I read it at the wrong time… right after finishing 1984. That's not a fair fight for anyone…

Does the sequencing of what you read affect how you land on a book? Curious if anyone else has read these two back to back.

Paranormalis: Series 1 - Blocky Worlds

Dropped this new series of t-shirts the other day for Paranormalis. Check it out! 

Paranormalis Store: Series 1 - Blocky Worlds

Have a good day!

1984

When you're about to read 1984, you already think you know what it's about. I did too: totalitarianism, surveillance, Big Brother watching you brush your teeth.

The world Orwell builds feels almost absurd in its oppression. But it works.

Telescreens. Thought Police. Informants everywhere. Sure. But then Orwell goes deeper.

This isn’t just a system that controls what you do, or even what you believe. It controls what you think — and turns your own mind into a prison.

That’s where doublethink comes in.

It’s the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs at once—and accept both as true.

The Party says it plainly: War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.

It’s nonsense. But that’s not the point. The point is submission. If you can accept contradiction as truth, you’ve already lost control of your own mind.

And you don’t need to live in a totalitarian regime to see it.

• Politicians cut programs and call it reform
• A company gets caught — and responds by saying how much it cares
• Your boss lays off half the staff and tells the rest they’re the company’s most valuable assets

The contradiction is right there, in plain sight. The only question is: do you notice it?

Once you understand doublethink, you start seeing it everywhere.

And that’s Orwell’s real genius.

John Titor: Terminal Deviation

I published on Paranormalis my first John Titor fanfiction. Nothing crazy, about 2 500 words, which is pretty short. 

It's mostly a rehearsal and proof of concept of my writing process. 

You're welcome to check it out here: 

John Titor: Terminal Deviation

Deepsix

Deepsix is a smaller story than The Engines of God, but no less engaging. The pacing flows naturally, the action is good, and the archaeology remains the real star. Every fragment of lost civilization we uncover feels genuinely exciting.

My only wish is that we learned a little more about the civilizations encountered along the way. But maybe that's just McDevitt keeping us hungry for more.

Clever storytelling, excellent read. Makes you wonder what's next for our heroes.

Highly recommended.

The Engines of God

I picked this one up at my local used book store. I'm glad I did, what an adventure, for only $4.00. The Engines of God scratches a very specific itch: ancient alien mysteries handled with actual care and patience. No cool stuff. Ruins, dead civilizations, and the creeping sense that something very bad happened to a lot of species a very long time ago. Gloomy!

The alien archaeology angle is where the book really shines. The monument builders and vanished races. Lots of mysteries. You're piecing things together alongside our heroes, and the enigma of OZ — this ancient, inexplicable structure — is exactly the kind of thing I find compelling. It's not explained right away. It just sits there, out of place, old and fascinating.

Pacing is solid. There's a survival sequence at some point that lasts a little too long — minor complaint, here. Nothing deal-breaking at all. The rest of the book keeps you excited and engaged.

If you like the idea of humanity stumbling through the ruins of civilizations that somehow didn't make it, this is worth your time. It's quiet sci-fi with a dark undertone.

Anyone else read this one?

At the Mountains of Madness

Man, I didn't stop to read a book in ages. I hope this will last. 

I'll be honest. I don't scare easily when reading a book. But Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness fascinated me and gave me chills. What a ride!

What makes it work so good is what it doesn't show you. The horror is always kind of out of frame. You get bits here and there, impressions, suggestions… and your brain fills in the rest. That's scarier than any detailed description could ever be, period.

The other thing that hit me was the sheer scale of the evil at hand, here. We're used to monsters our heroes can fight, villains they can outsmart. The ancient eldritch forces in this story don't care about us. They predate us by geological epochs... We're not even a footnote. That kind of cosmic indifference is deeply unsettling in so many ways I never thought of.

And excellent story. Streamlined, atmospheric, and quietly devastating. Highly recommend if you haven't read it.