It feels like I haven’t been blogging much recently, and when I look at the post counts for recent month that feeling is confirmed. There’s been a steady decline in my content production, though the podcast has turned back around to a weekly affair, and I feel like I’ve managed to share most of what I’ve been doing on there. I rarely break off topic to talk about real life stuff, and sometimes that’s the best thing to talk about when you have nothing else to talk about. I do actually have gaming stuff to share too, but they’re smaller bits and not full on post worthy.

Being a gamer can be a full-time pastime. We’ve all had endless discussions of about our passion, and how sometimes that means having a backlog full of games and sometimes that means trying to play all the biggest titles and sometimes that means having to finish or uninstall games to make room for the new ones. Having any semblance of responsibilities or a social life (or both) means not having the time to play all of those games, particularly when you’re subscribing to Humble Monthly and all of the best games from last year keep piling on the DLC to vie for your time — and don’t forget about endlessly playable games like MOBAs or MMOs or Competitive Shooters; they take up enough time on their own. Anyway, I do have the time to write more, or record more videos, but sometimes you need to unplug and get away from it all.

A couple of weeks ago I went out of town to visit my Mom and some friends. Between then and now I’ve had some other excursions, and at this point I’m in the middle of a four day weekend. I recently had a review at work and got a raise, and right after that I was given weekends off for the summer, as a co-worker needs more hours and it just happened to work in my favor. I decided to spend some time with the guys, so from Thursday night to this evening, I ended up hanging out with some of my friends. We spent most of the weekend gaming, but had some fun otherwise and it was fun overall. I’m home now and relaxing for the evening, but for the next couple of days I have some errands to run, chores to do and a new episode of the podcast to produce. It’s been fun bouncing around between work, school, social activities and the newest games, but it still feels like I could be doing more. Perhaps I’m just lazy, I don’t know what it is, but I’m sort of content with the way things have been going, so don’t expect a sudden turnaround in posting or anything like that.

Basically, I’m in a good spot. I’m happy with my work and with life. An old friend I haven’t talked to in years randomly made contact with me a few days ago and we’ve been chatting it up ever since. They no longer live locally, but we are attempting to make some plans to hang out sometime soon, but that will require a road trip for both of us. I’m totally looking forward to the adventure though!

I’ve tried to do some minimizing recently. As I alluded to earlier, my backlog is considerable and I started looking at things rationally the other day. I poured through my Steam library and my PSN account, deleting games that I barely played, didn’t like, and otherwise have no plans to play anytime soon. I don’t mind having a large collection of games. In fact, I’ve been trying to grow that collection and add older games from past consoles to either of those libraries. Between the PS3/4 I can pick up most of my favorite games from its predecessors, and new ports of old classics are popping up on the Internet all of the time. However, I have to be honest with myself. Just because I bought a game, doesn’t mean it has to be installed, nor does it mean that I have to play it right now. I’ve owned games for years before playing them for the first time, and longer still before completing them. Sometimes a game won’t grab you right away, sometimes you’ll need to finish something else before being able to give it its proper due. In the case of many of the games on my Playstation account, they were freebies and I could care less about never playing them. In the case of the big titles I’ve bought recently, those are staying and I’m playing through several titles at once. For my Steam account, bundles have brought in the most crap, and those games have been trimmed from the library like excess fat. I’m okay with having them there for that rainy day when I need something new.

I’ve also done the same sort of thing with my content intake elsewhere. I have a long watch list on various streaming services, and for a while it felt like I had far too many shows on the DVR to really want to keep up. Right now it’s looking good. I’ve caught up on any original series on that I’ve been following on streaming platforms, and I’m only watching TURN on AMC and Game of Thrones on HBO. I know more shows that I like are on the horizon but many of the shows I was watching have either ended or were cancelled, and I’m not really jumping on new shows. I hear the creator of The Walking Dead has a new show coming out, that sounds interesting, but otherwise I’ve sort of kept a more manageable list of things that I’m watching.

I have a happy mix of things going on, and I’ve managed to clear up some of the clutter in my life, while simultaneously adding more. Yeah, I’m a victim of a good buy whenever I see one. I picked up Uncharted 4 for full price, but ended up getting a deal on DOOM. I finished up Stories: The Path of Destinies and The Banner Saga 2, but then Far Harbor and a new DLC for Vermintide came out. I also picked up the Witcher III + expansions for $45 bucks, and now have another long title to work though. I’m primarily engaged with UC4 and DOOM at the moment, but have still been playing healthy amounts of League of Legends and SMITE, plus some Black Ops III for good measure. As I finish one game I’m adding another to the playlist. The new Humble Monthly will be here in a few day as well, so there will be even more shit to sift through. Man, it’s great but stressful at the same time! I still haven’t even touched Mad Max from last month’s bundle! I still need to finish GTAV! I still need to finish Bloodborne! Argh it’s too much. I’m so glad that No Man’s Sky was delayed and that Civilization VI doesn’t come out until later this year, because I simply have far too many awesome games to play through!

Okay, that’s it for my rant of the day. I’ll see you guys soonish. Will try to get some more posts in before the end of the month so that my post count is more respectable.

P.S. NBI posts of all sorts coming in June.