PixlBit

Yes, I'm alive. Busy and burned out at work and it's not even June. More about that at the end. I've been gaming more these days, so I actually have something to blog about for a change. And yes, true to form, they are all "late to the party" games that I'm sure everyone else played ages ago.

I'm still on my Ratchet & Clank kick, but mixing it up with some other games in between entries.

R&C Going Commando - Finished it and then replayed it to see how much of the game I could play with only the Black Sheepinator. The answer is quite a bit, but some enemies you just have to have a ranged weapon for. Still didn't manage to get all of the skill points, trophies, or platinum bolts, though.

R&C Up Your Arsenal - Also finished and replayed, trying to get all my weapons upgraded to the maximum. Did manage to get a skill point I didn't already have, but still couldn't get all the skill points, trophies, or titanium bolts.

LEGO Ninjago Movie Video Game - Got the heads up from a friend from 1up that I occasionally hear from that this was free from PSN, so I grabbed it. Not familiar with Ninjago or the Ninjago Movie, but I am a sucker for the LEGO franchise. It was fun, and I am one stupid race away from managing to get everything that will allow me to get the platinum trophy for this one. After failing for what seems like the millionth time, I gave up and deleted the game from my hard drive to make room for something else. It was fun, don't get me wrong, but I swear that almost every LEGO game has one race that is rigged. I liked the way they did the True Ninja part as leveling up throughout the game instead of in each level. There was a lot to do, and did I mention it was free?

Uncharted - I downloaded the collection when it was free on PSN. Haven't made it very far, mostly because I am terrible at the combat part and I get frustrated easily.

Journey - Also a free game on PSN, and yes, I know I already have it on the PS3, but it's one of my favorite games and it was free. Played a little bit, and decided to come back to it later (I was in the caverns and didn't feel like dealing with the scarf-eating beasts at that moment in time).

Yonder - Life and work have been stressing me out, so I felt the need to play something gentle and fun. I already have all the trophies, but accidentally deleted my original save, so it was fun playing through the game all over again. I still have a few things left to do, mostly finding the last of the cats scattered through the world, taming the final animal, and catching the last of the fish.

LEGO The Incredibles - It was on sale, and I've been wanting it for a while. I liked it, it has the hub world thing like LEGO Batman 3 and LEGO City Undercover, lots to explore and discover, a ton of easter eggs, and none of the trophies were impossible to get. Another Platinum Trophy in my collection.

R&C Future Tools of Destruction - Just started it for the second time Monday night. I don't remember if I finished it the first time, though. I played until the first space battle and got frustrated and stopped before I got too frustrated. I do like the Groovitron.

Concrete Genie - It was on sale and it looked intriguing. I'm having some issues trying to figure out what exactly the genies want me to paint in order to get the lights lit, but hey, that's what walkthroughs are for. The concept is kinda cool, the execution is where I'm having a hard time. I did put it down and move on, again, because I didn't want to get too frustrated.

R&C Future Quest For Booty -  I bought this a long time ago and played it and was mildly disappointed. It's an OK R&C game, too short, not enough fun weapons or gadgets, no skill points or trophies, and not much of a story. Kind of felt more like a teaser for R&C Future A Crack In Time or a filler to keep the fans happy while they were working on Crack In Time.

Back To the Future Episodes 2 and 3 - Going through unplayed stuff on my PS3 and realized I had several of the telltale games series that I've never played through, including this one. I finished Episode 2 and started 3 and then wandered back to R&C. There's only so much point-and-click you can play at a time, especially when moving Marty around is painfully slow. These are fun, don't get me wrong, but better in small doses than binging them.

Looks like I played more than I realized in the last couple months. Granted most of them are replays, but that's kind of the mood I've been in.

Been watching a lot on Netflix and Prime. I binged all four seasons of The Expanse over the last two weeks. That may be one of the best science fiction shows I've ever seen. I'd put it in the same company as Firefly and Babylon-5. Also watching Goliath, kind of a mystery/crime/lawyer show on Prime. Billy Bob Thornton plays a down and out lawyer sticking up for the little guy. Not a very good description, but it's a great show. I also watched all six seasons of Grimm. I'd given up on it when it was airing, but decided to give it another shot. It was worth it. And I've been watching a few movies I missed the first time around on Disney+, when I can get it to work. It keeps telling me I'm not connected to the internet, which is bullshit, since I have no trouble streaming any of my other channels. So far, I've seen Tangled, which I really liked (any movie where the heroine wields a cast iron frying pan as her weapon of choice has my vote) and Frozen, which was merely ok. I really don't see what all the fuss is about. Many much better Disney movies out there. Also watching October Faction and the second season of Altered Carbon on Netflix.

Been trying to read more, too. The highlights have been Kinslayer, the second book of The Lotus War (think Steampunk during the shogunate with griffons), All Systems Red, the first book of The Murderbot Diaries, Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology, a couple of Alistair MacLean's WW2 adventure novels (Where Eagles Dare and South By Java Head), and a book of fantasy short stories called The Faery Reel. Other stuff, too, but mostly fluff.

And now the part I know Snee likes the best, the ranger stuff. It's been stupid busy at the park since the end of March. They closed ten of the other parks in the area because those parks didn't allow for physical distancing. This left us as the only coastal park open from the New Hampshire border to Moose Point in Belfast, which may not even have been open yet, but at least wasn't posted as "stay out or we'll bust your ass for trespassing" like the others. That's a 150 stretch of coastline. We did ok until May, then we filled the parking lot every single weekend day and some week days, too. So we've spent a lot of time doing traffic control, disinfecting restrooms, and cleaning up all the trash people have been leaving behind. I thought maybe when they reopened the other ten parks it might slow down, but that doesn't seem to be the case. So yeah, stressed. And frustrated. The ONE place in the park where people are supposed to be wearing masks is the bathroom. Are they? Hell, no. And we aren't allowed to say anything to them. We're also experiencing a huge amount of litter being left behind, Sometimes, they leave their entire picnic remains on the picnic table like they expect a busboy to come around and clean it up. I've picked up more trash in the last week than I have in a month, pre-pandemic.

That's the bad. There's some good, though. We have three nesting pairs of osprey on the bay side of the park, and one, possibly two, on the river side of the park. I know two of the nests on the bay have chicks in them, and one is close enough to the trail to see the babies popping their heads up and begging for fish. We've got a young whitetail buck with his antlers in velvet that I see pretty regularly. On Sunday evening, I walked around a corner on the park road and came face to face with him. Talk about two startled creatures! We both jumped and he took off into the woods, making far less noise than the squirrels a fraction of his size. Monday, as I was showing the osprey babies to our Americorps service member, I realized that there was a porcupine in a tree down the bank from us. I'm pretty sure it's the one I named Stinky a couple of years ago. She's very big, probably close to 40 pounds (porcupines are the second largest native rodent in North America, after the beaver). She was just hanging out, waiting for everyone to go away so she could nap until evening. As we're admiring Stinky and I'm telling Amanda cool facts about porcupines, we hear a commotion in the leaves off to our right. We look over, and one of our resident Broad-winged Hawks had just caught a chipmunk. Probably the male from the nearby nest, and he sat there looking at us like "Whoa! Didn't see you there!" before taking off with brunch for the babies in his nest. And my last wildlife encounter for the day was my booth person calling me on the radio to let me know the nest of Eastern Phoebes on the side of the booth had fallen off with all the chicks in it. I met him at the booth, and he'd gathered them all up in a hat from the lost and found and was keeping an eye on them. I went up to HQ and found a piece of scrap lumber and an L bracket and went back down and put up a shelf for them. Aleksei had by that time put the remains of the nest in the hat and four of the five babies in it. The fifth one took off across the road and we couldn't find it. We put the hat on the shelf and let them be. They were about to fledge anyway (nestling -  a baby bird not ready to be on it's own, fledgling - a baby bird ready to leave the nest and fly), so we didn't worry to much about the one already in the woods. And by lunch time, the other four had also bailed. Ungrateful little boogers, they could have at least stuck around for a day of so and appreciated all our efforts. Anyway, the shelf will stay up, because the parents will be having a second clutch of eggs after these little ones can catch their own food, and this way, momma will have something a bit wider that the window casing to hold up the nest. This fall, we'll clean off the board and stain it brown to match the rest of the booth. Phoebes are pretty tied to the same nesting spots and will return to the same nest year after year. Might as well make it easier on both the birds and us, with the shelf up there, we won't have to constantly clean bird poop off the window and the wall.

And that's pretty much what I've been up to since my last blog post.