. A good number of years ago, I backed the original set of
Magic Puzzles 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles on Kickstarter, and then they sat around unopened because I never got around to setting up a space where I could work on them. A week ago, I finally hauled one out to have something to do with my hands while watching a Youtube stream (which was celebrating the third anniversary of its Youtube channel, and therefore nearly the third anniversary of the first time I said to myself, "You know, I could probably do one of those Magic Puzzles to have something to do with my hands while watching these"), and I've been working on it in spare moments. I finished it this morning, and am now trying to decide how long to leave it out and admire the artwork before I clear it away so I can get started on the next one. (I was a bit worried that the puzzle's gimmick, advertised as a "mind blowing magical ending", would end up being a fizzle; in the event, I think that description is overselling it a bit, but it is pretty neat.)
. The thing about the
XCOM games is that, while I enjoy them, I'm not terribly good at them, or at least I wasn't at first, and I've never got all the way through one without saving before every mission and shamelessly reloading if everything goes pear-shaped. When I first started, this was necessary to avoid complete mission failure and my entire team getting wiped out on the regular, but as I've improved I've also been increasingly tempted to stretch the definition of mission failure, a tendency that was shown up when I found myself taking a mulligan on a mission which had gone entirely according to plan right up until the last-moment death of a single soldier who just happened to be one of the ones I was sentimentally attached to. After that, I promised myself that on my latest runthrough I would only replay missions that were complete disasters and specifically would keep the result of any mission where the objectives were successfully achieved no matter how many soldiers got killed doing it. I have kept to that resolve, even for the mission that ended with only two soldiers still standing; it's been challenging, and included long stretches where I was struggling to field a team for missions (and at least two points where I had to automatically fail missions because I literally didn't have enough active soldiers to do them), but it was very satisfying when I overcame that and started building up the team again. There's some kind of life lesson in that, probably. The funny thing is that, although there were those stretches where it felt like we were limping along, in the end the campaign has taken about the same amount of time as all my earlier ones; I reached the end game in roughly the same number of missions and within a month, in-game time, of my previous longest campaign. Presumably that had something to with the fact that I still took do-overs on the missions that I completely failed; doing a run where I kept the result of every single mission, no matter how disastrous, would be an even more interesting challenge, but one that I don't think I'm a good enough player yet to survive.
. After I completed the latest runthrough of
XCOM 2, I decided it was time for a change of pace, so I've been playing a platformer called
SteamWorld Dig 2, which I assume I got in a bundle at some point because I don't remember ever specifically deciding to buy it. I've been playing it often enough to start seeing it behind my eyelids, and enjoying it a lot, and it's reminding me how much I also enjoyed playing the last platformer of this kind that I played (the excellent
Yoku's Island Express), so I'm thinking maybe I should play this genre more often.
. Another thing I've been really enjoying lately is a new D&D Actual Play series called
Natural Six, which put out some preview/prequel episodes a while back and released its official Episode 1 last week. The players are all charming and invested in their characters, and they and the DM all bounce off each other really well. New episodes are being released fortnightly, on Youtube or as a podcast, alternating with episodes of an after-action series where the players talk about the previous week's session.
. The random book selection for April was based around picking one of the oldest books on the to-be-read list – which in my case didn't actually result in one of the books that's been waiting to be read the longest, because I already had a large stack of unread books when I joined StoryGraph and I didn't make any effort to list them chronologically. Actually, it looks like I started by adding the unread books on my ereader, which necessarily are all more recent than when I got the ereader about a decade ago. I definitely have paper books that have been waiting longer than that.
The book that was randomly selected for me was
The Girl with the Red Balloon by Katherine Locke, a young adult time travel story that I think I picked up as part of a special offer and had no idea what it was about until I started reading. There were some parts that I felt lacked the subtlety that I would have expected if it were a book for not-young adults, but on the whole I enjoyed it well enough and found it satisfying in the end. (Speaking of the end, it makes some interesting choices about which questions it leaves unanswered – although I've noticed that, because of the time travel, at least one of those questions is actually answered in the first chapter before the reader knows what the question is yet...)
The theme challenge for April is "a book about rain, weather, spring, or some kind of new blossoming", and I haven't picked a book for it yet.
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