Vanderbilt Fantasy

So it's been an interesting and semi busy week(s). Work has been busier, but it comes in spurts, often at inopportune times, like early morning, lunch, late night, or weekends. Which just takes some getting used to. So with work and adapting to a new summer schedule without the distractions of TV, I found it harder to blog a little. Oh well, life has been pretty boring without much to talk about anyway. Great weather provides some great hiking opportunities which did some up at Ferncliff Forest and plan do hopefully do some more in the future. I also went to visit the Vanderbilt Mansion while I still have some time on my National Parks pass. It was cool to see and being free is also cool. It's a shame that a large portion of the parks and historic sites around me are mainly just houses, don't receive a discount, or are already free. It's a shame I didn't get anywhere further north while I had it since it's pretty much dead now.

I saw a few movies recently. The first was Frost Nixon which I found to be a pretty good political movie, but ultimately moved along at a pretty slow pace and the whole first half was pretty uninteresting. I also saw The Reader. This was a good character driven story drama about a boy who falls for an older woman and then deals with her the rest of his life pretty much. Unfortunately, Netflix spoiled the movie for me having a major plot point in their synopsis. I just wanted to refresh my memory as to why I put it on my queue in the first place, but they ruined it. I thought the movie was good and the rich characters kept it interesting, but it moved along pretty slow as well. Luckily it didn't drone on and on like other life stories and kept it pretty succinct at 2 hours.

I have been finding time to play some video games but wasn't able to give full reviews. I already mentioned how I thought Uncharted was really good and am waiting for the sequel. I played and finished the new Prince of Persia. It pretty much held up to my first impressions. The platforming was fun, but the battles almost seemed tedious. The open world has horrible pacing since it's do the same basic task 24 times. It was still a fun romp. I tried out the Infamous demo. Seemed like a fun super hero game and the reviews I've seen seem to improve on the GTA open world with a more plot driven narrative. So I decided to purchase it since I had a Gamestop gift card, but who knows when I'll get to it. I also decided to pick back up an epic RPG for the start of my summer gaming. Not having TV allows me put in time almost every day into gaming which is great. And choosing an epic 100+ hour RPG now ensures that I won't take almost a year to complete (hopefully). I decided to reach back into my PS2 pile and pulled out Final Fantasy 12. It's one of the few I haven't beaten and feel like I can get into it now. I started to play it when it first came out and got maybe half way in it, but since it's been ~2.5 years, I decided to start from the beginning. So far so good, but I can see why i probably didn't like it to begin with. For one, the game feels very open ended with different areas opening up all the time which was probably a bit too much. Also and probably more important is the pure random of everything. Everything is so random which makes things a chore, like treasure hunting. It's random when the chest will appear, random if it's money or not, and then random which item you'll get. Because most times you won't get the good items out of them, you are forced to buy them from shops which means that you are almost always short on gil. So far though, since I have the time to devote, I'm still enjoying it.