Derik Badman's Journal

Ended up writing quite a bit more this week over the course of a few mornings. I've now got two stories in progress. One needs a bunch of gaps filled in and the other mostly needs an ending.

I partially read a whole bunch of books this week that I didn't finish. Marguerite Duras' Emily L was just not doing anything for me, I can't even remember now why that particular Duras novel appeared on my to read list. Deborah Levy's The Man Who Saw Everything had this disaffected narrator that I just couldn't keep reading about, and up to the point it got I just didn't care about the plot at all. Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian was also, just not doing much for me, with a narrator I didn't care for (Hadrian the Roman emporer) writing in the form of a letter. I also failed to complete the Michel Leiris book I was reading.

I have a whole slew of other books on request from the library to wait for, so in the meantime I picked up the next volume of The Book of the New Sun to continue my reread. I've also got a few recent manga to read: more Berserk, the new Tsuge collection, and the new Kuniko Tsurita collection.

I played more of the new game plus of The Witcher 3, and enjoyed it anew. But then yesterday Ghost of Tsushima showed up, so I've been playing that. It is very reminiscent of an Assassin's Creed game if one were set in Japan during the Mongol invasion. While the gameplay has a bunch of features that are specific to the setting, it for the most part has all the things you'd expect from an AC game except the annoying "present day" stuff. The setting itself is quite lovely just to look at.

It has a wayfinding method that I at first found kind of annoying but am getting used to. Instead of a minimap and compass, the wind blows towards your targeted nav point. It makes it quite hard to situate yourself without bringing up the big map, but it also has nice feel to it to just follow blowing flower petals and waves of grass and leaves towards where you want to go.

There are foxes you find in the world who lead you to little shrines (for bonus stuff). We've not seen our backyard foxes in weeks; we think they might have moved on to another den. I've read foxes tend to have multiple dens that they move between, and it tracks with the way we will see them a lot for a few months and then not at all for months. I do miss seeing them in backyard, and I still keep looking just in case they show up.