Dear Patreon #6

Hello everyone,

I hope you’re all well - this may prove to be a slightly bleary post as this morning my body decided that five hours of sleep was plenty, actually, and I’ve been awake since. Hoping some coffee and toast will sort me out in a bit but, until then, newsletter!

Things I have been enjoying recently

Meursault is one of my favourite bands of all time. Their sixth studio album has just come out and it’s an absolute banger. The first two tracks in particular are instant classics but honestly there’s not a bad track on the whole thing. One for you if you enjoy demotivational Scottish music.

Hunt Showdown is a game I’ve recently gone back to after the developers added a massive alligator called Rotjaw to proceedings. Some friends and I dove back in and immediately fell back in love with it all over again. If you aren’t familiar with Hunt, it’s a game set in the old West only there are horrible monsters about. A bunch of teams drop into a map where there are zombies and hulking great slug monsters and angry ladies full of bees. Hidden away on each map will be one or two boss monsters - players need to gather clues in order to find their location before defeating the boss, banishing it and then - hopefully - collecting bounty tokens and getting to an extraction point. Doing so involves surviving all the dangers of the game world and all the other players on the map, so it’s pretty exacting, especially since Hunt is also a hardcore shooter. You can easily get downed in one shot and stealth is key.

It’s intense but it’s also exhilarating. Some friends and I were playing a few rounds  on Friday night and, with five of us online, there wasn’t room for everyone in a team but it just didn’t matter. We could have had a team of three and one pair but we ended up just having one rotating team of three while the other two watched over Discord. I’m tempted to stream Hunt soon, we’ll see.

This tiktok of a dog getting pampered, mostly because of the noise it makes at the very beginning.

How’s Watson?

She’s doing great, thanks - it’s hot here in London but the summer heat hasn’t yet reached the stage at which it’s hazardous to (most) dogs, so we’re making the most of it while we can. This mostly involves taking her to a big pond every day so she can splash about like some sort of tiny hippo gone wrong. She’s also finding a tennis ball on pretty much every single walk these days, partly because she’s happy to go where other dogs won’t (i.e. into a thicket of brambles, because she is silly)

How’s Blood Bowl?

I played Gutter Bowl for the first time over the weekend - it’s a spin off version of Blood Bowl that takes place in the mean streets of Altdorf - and it was absolutely hilarious. It was nice to play a non-league game for once, too. While the story and the season progression is undoubtedly my favourite thing about Blood Bowl, league games can be quite tense so it was nice to just roll some dice and giggle at the plight of my hapless team of Halflings.

How’s work?

Really enjoying streaming video games at the moment - playing through Return of the Obra Dinn in its entirety was one hell of an experience and, honestly, I think it might be in my top three games of all time. Tempted by Case of the Golden Idol soon but I think I’ll wait for my brain to cool off a bit first - and for the shame of taking pictures of the crew’s feet to subside…

Right, that’s about it from me - feeling quite sleepy again so I need to decide whether to go back to bed (potentially disastrous for productivity) or keep myself up (potentially v gruelling)

Have a nice day!

Edit: I went for a lie down and accidentally slept until 3pm. Woops.