Masterclass

Finished Dishonored 2, Clean Hands as Emily, and wow. The Dunwall levels are kinda meh, but those bookends remind us how this sequel is a leap forward for the series without forgetting its roots. Exploring Karnca is gorgeous but also more of the same, then the Addermire Institute is a great kind of creepy with a fun little twist, and THEN we get to Jindosh's house and holy shit - steampunk Portal(!) is just the best thing ever, especially given how many ways you can approach that level... The genre just peaked right there. The Conservatory was fun to look at, but I wanted it to go further with how it explored the concept of the Void; and then the Dust District introduced some very nifty mechanics in terms of both how the dust storms affect the core gameplay and how there're so many different solutions for getting past the factions - I especially liked the word puzzle that was solvable in real life with actual logic :) A Crack in the Slab threw another curveball that was one of the best implementations of time-travel/light-and-dark world mechanics I can recall... Ever. The Grand Palace sported some pretty great architecture but kinda disappointed after the previous missions, and then we're back to Dunwall. Good ride. AAA game right there. Good story, and whatever bugs and design issues that were present at launch aren't present anymore - quick load times, quicksaves, new game+, stable... Looking forward to Death of the Outsider, but taking a break first.

Up next is finishing DOOM VFR and then Duck Season in VR; Shadow of the Tomb Raider otherwise. Also grabbed Destiny 2 since it's gone free-to-play and I still find myself hopping back into Anthem... So far, I don't really see the unique appeal of this core gameplay loop, but I've only just begun.

Anyway, the expensive and kinda ridiculous Zalman CNPS12X that's been cooling the CPU in my main desktop was contracting in the cold Canadian winter, the centre fan was starting to make contact with the fins, and the result was a sort-of loud grinding/clicking noise... It's fine, but it was also getting kind of really annoying waiting for my computer to literally warm-up enough for the fins to pull away from the fan. Since there's no obvious way to disassemble and re-seat the centre fan, I said fuck it and bought an Intel BXTS13A - the stock, first-party cooler for the 3930K that was *not* included in the original SKU, and cheekily sports a blue LED :) It was around $35, brand new on Amazon Prime - no more grinding, so much easier to work with, and cools just about as well as Zalman's metal softball without being significantly louder next to all the other fans in my case. Only thing left to maybe do with this computer is get an M.2 PCIe 3 adapter and an 500GB NVMe drive - then I think it's finally done, because bottlenecks :(