I’ve spent a few days digging into Unfiltered Audio SpecOps like it deserves, and wrote up my notes on it.
Next I’m going to release Slow Teleport on Bandcamp and go back to just making music for a bit, before doing another one of these deep gear dives. But I feel like this one was especially enlightening, and I’ll be able to wring a lot more out of SpecOps. Already have in fact, with a captured bit of glitchy weirdness that’ll surely find its way into a release.
Work got a bit crazy. We were very close to a release candidate, for a long-delayed release that has a TON of improvements and new features in it. But we’re held up by some cybersecurity certification that requires us to update 3rd-party libraries that we were going to wait to update until the next release. We’ve fallen behind on these updates because Thing1 requires OtherThing 35.0 while Thing2 only supports OtherThing 32, but it’s time to cut through the Gordian knot with either Occam’s Razor or the Sword of Damocles so we can launch the Ship of Theseus.
And my parents’ house stuff is a mess too. The plumbing waste stack had to be replaced, an expensive job that dug a hole in the concrete of the basement floor and other holes in the bathroom wall; that’s all done but the county inspector says they have to do some other thing, and we’ve been waiting on that so the hole can be filled, drywall redone and the fixtures put back. My folks are moving in 3 weeks.
I traded my Mutable Instruments Blinds for a Meng Qi Wingie 2, which was kind of a lucky accident. I didn’t expect anyone to actually have a Wingie, PiezoThing or N0b Control for trade, but it happened. But the Wingie arrived DOA: lights lit, no audio, firmware wouldn’t update. The seller is sending me another one and we’ll sort out the return of this one, but that delayed my getting to play with it for a week or so. Fair enough, there was stuff to do anyway.
I’ve been playing Guild Wars 2. I got an Elementalist to level 80 using a hammer, and that was quite cool. I’ve got a Thief using a staff and rifle to 71, and that’s been fun but considerably more risky. I’m still not sure what character I want to do End of Dragons with, and may start up a Revenant… except that the expansion that brings additional Weaponmaster choices is probably coming soon and I’ll want to dig into that for sure.
Also Soulstone Survivors, still — unlocking the second costume for each character, currently on the Paladin. The class balance really isn’t; some classes simply have access to better skills and special features than others. Stacking buffs (Arcane Power, Might, Bloodlust etc.) with a couple of the strongest damage skills seems to really be the way to go. Pretty much every class has at least a couple of strong damage skills, but having access to two buffs by default and then getting a third through Skill Mastery makes a big difference.
They’ve announced a whole new character (The Monkey King) and a ton of new spells including a new category (Earth, which several existing spells could fit into alongside new stuff), so things certainly keep moving with this game.