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Contact me - marensdasein@gmail.com
Life is still truckin' along. The biggest news, as suggested by the title is my new tablet. It seems I, myself, am not immune to the call of consumerism and have taken "advantage" of a black friday "deal" to pick up a new tablet. I tend to be a more productive writer when I'm writing away from home on a device that does a lot less than my desktop PC. I have largely blamed my poor writing output on my prior tablet being over a decade old, and practically unusably at this point. I have no excuse now so I guess I have to follow through with actually writing huh. It might seem like I've done a poor job of it so far, but appearances can be deceving. I just wrote and posted a brand new short story! The first fiction work I've completed since Survival back in July of 2024, and the longest fiction work I've completed since The Lycan's Confidant way back in 2019. I pulled this sucker together in less than a week, and it would be disingenuous to suggest that a fancy device is all that's needed to pull that off. More important than that is a consistent schedule. I have one of those now too. Now that I'm not in any community theater productions, and my job is an 8-5 desk job I can be 100% sure I can make a daily writing period in the evenings. For now, that means 6PM-9PM MWF are designated writing times. In my first week of trying this I found it very easy to stick to so I expect I shall be more productive in the future!
What about the other evenings? Well, I started really getting into Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KotOR). As a TTRPG fan it's a skosh surprising to even myself that I've not fully completed the d20 system based Star Wars RPG that is probably the most critically acclaimed Star Wars game of all time. Playing it now (I'm not far, still on Taris), I'm reminded very much about Mass Effect. The first Mass Effect (ME1) really feels like KotOR 3 just not set in the Star Wars universe. It really is a worthy successor and it makes me wish its sequels were too. Not that its sequels were bad games or anything. They're both excellent. They're just not really good follow ups to KotOR or even ME1 for that matter. ME2 kinda ruined the franchise what with the dramatic shift in tone and it's willful lack of meaningful series arc development. Those are fine decisions on their own, but the tone change untethers ME1 from the series, and the lack of arc development placed too great a narrative burden on ME3. ME3 was given too much to cover and it could have spread some of its ideas out into the prior game. I don't think that would have fixed most people's issue with that game which was the endings. I personally like ME3's endings. All of them are bleak as hell, but then again ME3 was a bleak as hell game. It's an apocalyptic story of a struggle against an implacable foe. If overcoming The Reapers didn't require sacrifice it would feel as though victory came too easily. And what a choice of sacrifices we got! Destroy: commit genocide and destroy all synthetic life, Control: Turn the Reapers into a slave race, or Synthesis: violate the entire galaxy's bodily autonomy by fusing organic and synthetic life together. All three of the options are horrific! There is no "good ending", and I think people as a whole always want one. The consensus amongst gamers is that the best ending is the destroy ending if you've maxed out your war assets. In that ending there is a brief bonus scene that implies Shepard survives. That is the closest most people can imagine to a good ending and so they cling to it. That's my thought anyway. There is somthing to be said about it being the most difficult ending to achieve, but I've never subscribed to the philosophy that the best ending is the ending that requires the most from the player, and I think most people would agree with me if pressed. Silent Hill 3 being a great example. There's a bonus ending that requires you kill as many enemies as you can and can only be unlocked after multiple playthroughs. Everyone agrees though it's the "bad ending" as in it Heather, the protagonist, is posessed by the evil god of Silent Hill's cult.
Anyway thats it for now. It's 8:08 as I'm writing this an the library closes at 9:00, and I haven't eaten dinner yet so I better start makin' tracks. I'll probably be putting out more blog posts in the future, as I'm rededicating to writing, but I'm going to be focusing on fiction writing so It's not going to be every day or anything even remotely regular. Till next time!