Bran's Life Update

In the last few days, I came to what should have been an obvious realization. It should have come to mind earlier, but most of my SMITE gaming has been in the presence of a somewhat rotating cast, and one almost constant. That constant was typically the infamous Taco.

Not THAT Taco. OUR Taco. He of the SS Tier.

My last 2 SMITE gaming sessions have been with 2 people in particular...DV-8 and Gulfwulf. Apparently, Taco skews the difficulty scale away from our favor. Not that he doesn't still thrive, the bastard, but the rest of us scrubs, we struggle a bit more.

It's pretty crazy how much easier most of our games have felt, at least in my opinion. Some examples:

• Arena game w/ Discordia: 50k damage (DV-8 was right behind me with ~45k)...this one went absolutely down to the wire. Both teams had 1 ticket left, and the enemy was chasing one of ours that had maybe 50 health left.
  
  
• Joust game as Nox with/ OhHolyDuck's Athena + Nox combo again. Enemy teams keep going all squishy. Why?
  
  
• Clash match as Athena, who has re-established herself as my favorite Guardian.

My favorite gods to play right now include: support or damage Nox, Athena, Artemis, Ratatoskr, Arachne, Ares, support or damage Ne Zha.

If you're interested in proposing a new name for our PC clan, give me some ideas. Right now, it's a very retro reference...SfBc (SMITEFire Bulletin Chat, shortened to "SF Bullet"), which refers to a group started years ago with some historic SF members, including FemFatalis, Devampi, Ferrumslash, ThePerfectPrism, Stuke99, GameGeekFan, Zilby, Wolfman5665, Taco, and others.

These days, the group of active members has shifted...it continues to include Stuke, Taco, and GGF as regular members, but has added newer SF members, including boogiebass, DV-8, Gulfwulf, and IceColdPappsi. (Bernardozomer and xZeroStrikex are also members but they don't play on PC, and we hardly ever see Wayne3100 due to him being on the other side of the world)

As such, I feel SfBc could use a name change. I feel SF should remain part of the name, but it would be fun to incorporate something that's more appropriate to the current group, or just funny overall.

My first thought is SF Deathbringer...because, you know, DB should be built on everyone, especially Scylla. (Unfortunately we can't call it Deathbringers - plural - because it doesn't allow any additional characters)

Anyway...anyone have any brilliant ideas? Would love to hear.

As you may or may not know/care, I'm a pretty avid fantasy book reader (with some Sci-Fi/post-apocalyptic/zombie **** thrown in). In the past couple of months or so, I've gone through some pretty good series...

• N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season trilogy (post-apocalyptic sci-fi with a bit of magic thrown in)
  
  
• Brian McClellan's The Powder Mage trilogy (fairly brutal fantasy fare that blends magic and guns)
  
  
• Octavia Butler's (RIP) Xenogenesis trilogy (sci-fi, where humans basically destroyed their own planet, and a spacefaring alien species saved the survivors and incorporated them into their lives)
  
  
• Re-read Will Wight's The Traveler's Gate trilogy + 3 novellas (fantasy, super cool magic system)

My future list includes quite a bit of re-reading. Up now is Ready Player One...and after that, I'll probably saddle up and prepare to go through perhaps my favorite series of all time...the 10 book Malazan Book of the Fallen series.

Speaking of Ready Player One, it was quite a bit different than the movie, but even so, I amazed myself by enjoying it a lot (only saw it last week). I usually want the movies to be as true as possible to the book it was based on. I know that is typically extremely difficult to do, because books portray so much additional information, and how the hell do you cram that down into 2ish hours?

Other book-to-movie adaptations I felt were done well include The Martian and Fantastic Beasts. In the case of Fantastic Beasts, that one was written as a screenplay, so I'm not as surprised there...it was basically meant for the big screen.

Ones I've been at least mildly disappointed with, in at least little ways here and there, include The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Harry Potter series. Those are perfect cases where they did a great job with the visuals and a bunch of other things, but just couldn't fit in things that I felt were important in the books.

Other movies I've enjoyed recently...well, they've almost all been Superhero movies, damn you Marvel! Black Panther, Deadpool 2, Avengers 3, and Star Wars Episode 8 are on the short list. I should also mention the live action trilogy of Rurouni Kenshin, which I felt they did pretty damn well.

Next up is to see Ant-Man and the Wasp.

We have too many animals. We've had a series of die-offs recently, but they've been balanced with an influx of new.

Our old siamese passed away a few months ago. He (Bodhi-San) was my wife's cat through and through. To help her heal, she found foster Siamese cats to adopt...and some bunnies. One of our bunnies, as I talked about in the past,

Here are some pics of 4 of my 5 cats.

This is Kashi. He's one of our two new Seal Point Siamese kittens. He's a polydactyl, not only with extra toes up front, but also on the back. Looks like he's got mittens, doesn't he? If you're interested in reading about them, check the Wiki. This is Kabooki. Yes, I know, in Japanese it would be Kabuki 歌舞伎...but "boo" just seems so cute. Now, his brother Kashi looks like he's got mittens...but this guy has a legitimate thumb. Look at that thing stick out!!! (He also has an appendage in the webbing between his "thumb" and his fingers. LOL and partially gross) This is my 9 year old girl kitty, MyLie. She came to us with that name, and because the girl cat we had before her was KyLie, we thought it was fate. I'm 100% her person. I can carry her for hours and she doesn't get tired of me. She's also the reason all of my clothes are covered in cat fur. And this is 2 year old Niko, one of our two foster fails. His brother, Nori, looks nothing like him. He's a good boy. His person is my eldest daughter, Noelle. She likes to make "forts" out of couch cushions and whatnot...and he goes straight in and falls asleep. What a life.

We've also lost 2 of our 6 adult chickens recently, and one is recovering from perhaps almost dying, due to what, we're not sure...sour crop or some such thing...and we've heard there's a pretty bad avian virus going around locally. To replace the lost egg production, and because one of our adults became broody, we stuck some baby chicks under her butt at night, and in the morning, she was like "oh look I'm a mama!!!" (Chickens aren't very smart XD)

I think we have 8 chicks. One has cross beak, and is unlikely to live long. 2 we got a week later than the others because they were replacements for 1 that didn't live and for the cross beak. Those weren't accepted by the broody hen, so we have them separate. They like me and prefer to sit on my shoulder. They'll be much friendlier than the other chicks when they grow up.

And finally...we have 2 bunnies. Both are dwarfs. One (Tsuki) is a half-breed white lionhead, and the other (Kai) is a black full lionhead. The person we got them from sexed the white as female, and the black as male. Then we found out the white was male.

Then we found out the black was female. Wife realized Kai was pregnant. The bunny had babies THAT NIGHT. WTF???

Of a litter of 6 (and this happens with dwarfs), at least 2 had a genetic defect, and we now only have 3 babies. Bunnies aren't the most nurturing mothers, so my wife has had to manually attach them to mommy to nurse, as well as hand feed them watered down kitten food, which they apparently can eat as babies.

We have to get rid of those bunnies. We have no freaking room for any more animals (I didn't mention my blue Parrotlet, or our 55 gallon fish tank, or the colony of bees).

I wrote somewhat recently about my bartop arcade. (Sad note, by the way, EmuParadise is no longer hosting ROMs)

It's gotten me thinking about old-school games. RPGs, in particular, on the old consoles.

So I dusted off my PS Vita, and as I own several PSOne games, I am now starting to tackle Final Fantasy VI...for the Umpteenth time.

See, I never finished that game on the SNES (known in the US as FFIII). My cartridge, at a certain point, would glitch or crash out...so I couldn't complete it. It was probably 3/4 through the whole game, so you can imagine how disheartening it was. Multiple times, I've gone through most of the game, but never finished it. Well, this time, I plan to.

In thinking about some of my favorite JRPGs of all time, my list is likely very similar to others. My top list includes:

• Chrono Trigger
• Final Fantasy II US (IV Japan)
• Final Fantasy III US (VI Japan) - the one I'm starting now
• Earthbound
• Final Fantasy VII
• Secret of Mana
• Secret of Evermore
• Suikoden
• Super Mario RPG