selenicseas

Mild spoilers for the taxi sidequest in Control Resonant and lots of wild theorizing below.
( Click to read the rest of the post. )

Neotropic cormorant standing in front of a rock in front of a Ring-necked duck and an unidentified other duck in the water. I've seen these cormorants for a while and wasn't able to identify them until today. That one duck in the back, though...it mystifies me. The Merlin Bird ID isn't helping, either.

Great egret in a tree. There were a couple at this one particular pond and this particular one kept going from the shore to a tree.

A flock of pelicans in the water. They were pretty far away and moved around fast enough that I couldn't get any decent photos of them.

What I finished reading

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.

What I'm currently reading

Believe it or not, it's still On the Origin of Species. I actually don't have all that much left of it. I'll be done by the end of the month.

What I plan on reading next

It will be either 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson or Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. Leaning toward 2312 solely because it's shorter.

What I finished reading

Handbook of Chinese Mythology by Yang Lihui and An Deming. It was much more scholarly than I expected.

What I'm currently reading

I'm still making my way through On the Origin of Species. I will be surprised if I finish it before the end of the month.

I also started reading Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir because I need something easy to read right now.

What I plan on reading next

Not sure. I think both books will take me until the end of the month to finish. I'll pick something from my TBR pile at the beginning of November.

Have you ever forgotten a word so hard it ceased to exist?

Or maybe the word never existed in the first place. That's probably the most likely scenario here. I thought a word existed but it never really did, and that's why despite looking through dozens of thesauruses and dictionaries over the past two decades, I haven't found the forgotten word.

I don't know why I remembered this all of a sudden. Maybe because I'm writing again. Maybe I could work this into a future story.

For anyone who's wondering, the missing word is a synonym for "impressment" – specifically, the kind the British Navy was engaged in.

I suspect a few of these questions will be answered once I finish Resonant, but I want to get all of this written down now before I forget something. I'm sure I've forgotten some things already.

Since there are spoilers for all Remedyverse games, all questions are hidden below the read more.

( Spoilers past this line! )

Originally posted to Pillowfort on 7 October 2026

What I finished reading

I wanted to get something done this past week, so I started and finished Banned Book Club by Kim Hyun Sook and Ryan Estrada.

What I'm currently reading

It's still On the Origin of Species. I'm going through it very slowly.

I'm also reading Handbook of Chinese Mythology by Yang Lihui and An Deming. This one's a little easier to read. And by a little I mean a lot. It's got an introduction that goes over the types of myths, their functions in a culture, and who passes the myths on from generation to generation.

What I plan on reading next

I'll make that decision once I'm closer to finishing On the Origin of Species.

Hours played: 27 hours

I thought this was going to be a shorter game, but that wasn't the case at all. It took me 27 hours to complete, and that's without doing all of the sidequests.

This is the first Zelda game where you actually get to play as Zelda, and I had a lot of fun with it. Rather than using weapons like Link, she uses echoes (summons) that fight for her. There is a special form where she gets access to a sword, bow, and bombs, but it has an energy meter and runts out quickly. It also goes away near the end of the game, since those things actually belong to Link.

I liked most of the dungeons, though the last one I did (in Eldin Volcano) had a much easier boss than all of the other dungeons. Though I may be thinking that because I had the whole rest of the game to get used to the dungeons.

The final boss fight had so many stages and I didn't die once! I did have to use a lot of healing items, which aren't possible to create in the final area.

I think that's my major criticism – consumables for healing and buffs can only be created in certain locations around the overworld, and hearts very rarely drop from pots and grass. If you go into an area without healing, you're going to have a rough time. There is a way to heal without items, but it isn't very accessible in the middle of a fight.


 

Hours played: 12

There are no plot spoilers here. It's mostly discussions of game mechanics in no particular order.

I've played 12 hours of this game and taken 150 screenshots already. It's a real shame that photo mode won't be until November. There are a lot of whiteboards with stuff to read and there's no way to zoom in on them.

Collectibles – documents, recordings, ID badges, whatever – are categorized by topic and there is now a number counter. You actually get to see if you've obtained all the collectibles in a certain area, which wasn't a thing in the first game. It's a very welcome change.

You can also play audio recordings from the collectibles menu, then exit the menu and go around the world doing stuff. Unfortunately, you can't do the same with the music.



The collectibles menu, with a bunch of redactions by myself because I'm serious about not spoiling people.

Most of the FBC agents are either wearing armor with helmets or wearing bags on their heads. There are hundreds of agents all over the city and they chatter constantly, so it makes sense that the developers wouldn't want to animate all of them talking. It's still very creepy to look at. I was actually relieved when I met a guy through a sidequest who had an actual face.

Speaking of sidequests, some of them can be started in multiple ways. Some involve finding multiple of a certain kind of object and can be started by finding any of them, some involve talking to people or finding evidence and things will change depending on which of those things you do first.

It's also very easy to get sidetracked by quests. At one point, I was working on a main quest, got lost trying to find the next part of it, dropped into an area where I got a sidequest, and followed that into an area where I found another sidequest and started that one on accident.

There are also little puzzles around the world to solve. Some of them give you materials that are used for upgrades, and some have collectibles that explore more of the world, or the characters. Some of them also give Dylan the opportunity to draw things.

Now, combat. It took me a couple of hours to get used to the combat, mostly because I actually kind of suck at video games. Things did get a bit easier after I got a few upgrades and learned how falter works. Until then I had to go into Assist Mode and adjust damage dealt & taken.

By the way, Assist Mode is available from the very beginning of the game! You can make things easier or harder for yourself.

The first boss was less than an hour into the game, and it felt like a real video game boss, not like the ones Remedy's done in the past. I guess they really listened to criticism there, because the bosses in their previous games haven't really been that inspired.

There is way more character customization than I expected, and the sound design, particularly for the Board, is amazing. And you get to hear a lot more from the Board than you did in the first game.