End of summer tidy up

2022-09-04

Summer, particularly the end of it is a time for tidying up and clearing house for the upcoming year (who really significantly does it in January?)
In my case it involved:

• Finishing up my UPSTaRT internship at UL.
• Getting a sudden bust of creativity.
• Finally get round to completing a few games.

No particular order to these, some of them happened in parallel.
Mostly putting this into text to get them out of my head so I can concentrate on Uni.

UPSTaRT

My time in UPSTaRT was fantastic, learnt far more than I thought I would and I met a lot of interesting people.
I may come back and do a full blog post on it in the future.
Also I did a mini blog post for UL that will be posted sometime in the future.

Creativity

I am not sure why (maybe weather?) but the last week has been really good on a creative level for me.

I made all of these

• Ul Timetable to ical - rust and html/js

  • Backend
  • Frontend
• A joke plugin for Classbot that Bonks a particular user
• I got back and completed a few more days of Advent of Code (in rust)
• Replaced my old TS/Docker program for Dynamic DNS with a rust based solution

Yes there is a lot of rust there, its slowly clicking into place, clippy now is saying less to me as I am preemptively using some of teh things it recommends.
Such as this:

// before
if vec.len() > 0 {
  // do thing
}

// now
if !vec.is_empty() {
// do thing
}

Ganes

There were a few games I started ages ago and planned to finish this summer:

Assassins Creed Valhalla

Ubisoft games are my goto for chilling out, massive beautiful open worlds with plenty travel and some not too difficult combat.
I "finished" it a few days ago, turns out I had almost completed it the last time I played.
The (core) game is now map and story complete.
I have also finished Ireland and Skye (that was a fun one).

I was happy to see there were puzzle tombs added and had a good time finding them.
However I learnt that despite four of them being released 9 months ago teh final two were still not available.
This left a sour taste in my mouth.

Bioshock

I got an itch for a 0451 game and Bioshock seemed like a good choice.
I went in expecting to be sneaker but the level of action surprised me and kept me well entertained.

Arcadia and Farmers' Market ended up beign my favourite levels, Point Prometheus coming in close after.
Strangely Fort Frolic seems to have a cult following but it was just fine for me, this may be because I am coming from games that were inspired by Bioshock.

Because it is a 15 year old game the twist is fairly public knowledge, yet it still hit hard when it happened.
Really really well done.

Far Cry 6

I got the game when it released and had a good fun romp.
I really like Anton, Dani is a really good strong personality as well.
Ive seen folks lamenting the lack of a big boss fight at teh end but I think it would have had a negative effect.

I feel like the ending where we storm the city is the bad ending.
The war continues as teh best leaders are dead.
The country has something the world/rich really want, cancer treatment so with no government they are ripe for exploitation.
Banana Tobacco Republic?

Overall the game reminds me of this song from Malukah where you begin to question if ye really are the hero.

Started playing Far cry Primal lately and teh removal of guns changes up encounters and brings a breath of fresh air to teh series.