What’cha Been Up To? – December 2024 – Adventure Rules
Consistency, on Adventure Rules? Say it ain’t so! It’s time for our third monthly check-in and with Christmas around the corner, things are busy at the Adventure Rules household preparing to travel and visit family. It’s the beginning of my two-week vacation and I’m anticipating the opportunity to pick up some new games right after the holidays, so before all that gets rolling it feels like a good time to reflect on the stuff I have been up to during the month of December.
Video Games
December has been defined by jumping around between a bunch of different games. After hitting credits on the Ace Attorney Investigations collection I tried to pick up Unicorn Overlord, but that game didn’t really hit for me. With Christmas so close, the timing financially isn’t great for picking up a replacement for Unicorn Overlord, so instead I’ve been playing a little bit of a lot of different things in order to try find something I wanted to stick with. Most of the fascinations I developed during this period of time lasted only the course of a single evening; maybe a full day if it happened during the weekend. One Saturday for example I dove back into FTL: Faster Than Light, a game I’d only played for a couple of hours before. I significantly increased by playtime during a run that almost made it to the end, but I died against the final boss. My impressions of the game haven’t really changed since my initial reactions, but it wasn’t a bad way to spend an afternoon.
The game that ultimately stuck was Elden Ring, in which I have finally been playing through the DLC. I picked up Shadow of the Erdtree when it first came out but quickly bounced off because I don’t particularly care for the new mechanics centered around the scadutree fragments and the revered spirit ashes. Those little fragments are so fundamentally important that any item pickup that doesn’t grant them feels useless, every catacomb or dungeon that doesn’t have one inside like a waste of time. I understand the design philosophy behind it – if people could just carry over their progress from the base game and already be strong enough to clear the DLC it would make it less engaging – but personally I would have liked to see a different solution for that design problem.
My solution to my issue with the DLC’s structure was to finally crack open a guide and just crit path the fragments, clearing major bosses as I went. Over the course of a couple of days I was able to quickly handle Messmer and the dank bud priestess or whatever and enter the final dungeon, making my way all the way to the final boss. Now the final boss on the other hand…not going as smoothly, perhaps needless to say. Even at max scadutree blessing level and max spirit ash level the final boss absolutely melts my health bar and tanks my attacks pretty well, especially once their health bar gets halfway down and their transformation is triggered. I’m at the soft cap for health so there’s not much I can about my defenses other than learning the fight, but since I have some room to grow offensively I’ve been focusing on activities to increase my rune level. Take a few practice swings at the boss, level up, try again, etc. My goal is to prevent the burnout I experienced fighting Radagon during the base game, and so far that approach has been working okay.
Shows
I recently have made my return to a series I thought I was done watching: JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. I’ve started JoJo’s a couple times throughout the last few years. The first time I bounced off after two or three episodes. The second time I made it a pretty good chunk into part three, Stardust Crusaders. I know this is perhaps an unpopular take, but I found Stardust Crusaders to be much less compelling than the previous arcs. The more episodic, monster-of-the-week structure of that season compared to the previous ones was a turn-off for me. I also found season three’s humor to be a lot more (for lack of a better term) “potty humor,” which is my least favorite attempt at humor.
That said, a streamer I enjoy was talking in a video about his ranking of JoJo’s and put Stardust Crusaders at the lowest. He ranked all of the parts after part three significantly higher, and that got me interested enough to push through Stardust Crusaders so I could get to what comes after. It has been totally worth it. I really enjoy Diamond is Unbreakable so far. I like Josuke a lot better than Jotaro (although I don’t mind the older, more mellowed out portrayal of Jotaro in this season), the pacing of the conflict this season is more interesting, and while rude humor does still make an appearance it’s not a constant feature. Some episodes have even dabbled in a quasi-horror tone, which I’ve really enjoyed. I’m about halfway through part four I think and am looking forward to what comes next.
I would be remiss if I gave one of these updates without also giving an update on my Dropout viewing. Recently I have been really appreciating their recordings of live improv shows. There are three on the service right now: Bigger, From Ally to Zacky, and The Big Team. The Big Team was the most recent to release and it was a really fun show. Compared to the longer form scenes in the other two shows, the Big Team’s rapid-fire brief scenes feel much closer to the kind of improv that I did back in college. The cast were a dynamic ensemble with lots of energy and a variety of personalities. There was a particular moment where an audience member mentioned Dungeons and Dragons as a prompt, confusing half the cast while Ify Nwadiwe looked like someone just whispered his sleeper agent activation code and got a big laugh from me. I also found myself heavily appreciating Zeke Nicholson’s performance, who I thought had some particularly fun callbacks throughout the show.
Books
My reading recently has been highly focused on nonfiction work. I’m actually reading a physical book for once – please clap – and it has been one I have been very glad to have a hard copy of. The book is A Spectre Haunting by China Miéville, an academic text on the Communist Manifesto, its history, and its relevance in the modern day. Miéville is my favorite author and a wickedly smart writer, and the Manifesto is something I have always heard about only in fantastical framings. Whether American red-scare propaganda or the hyper-politicized communism of Disco Elysium, I have never actually read the Manifesto and I definitely did not learn about it in school. So it has been interesting to actually read about it not as some kind of hyper-mythologized or demonized text but as a piece of writing by real people in a specific historical context. I just finished the history section and am starting to move more into the praise and criticisms of the text, so I’ll probably report back in a future month on the second half of the book.
My December audiobook was Invisible Women, a book on how many key data systems are missing important data about women. I work in data so this was kind of a work-related book, but it’s relevant to my interests in social movements and politics as well. It was highly educational to read about the many different systems in which men are the assumed default and the ways this causes issues in data collection. I was particularly moved by the sections on city engineering and economics as well as the healthcare chapter; these are fields I find interesting but know little about. As far as the book’s applicability to the work I do, I think the biggest shocker was how many organizations don’t report or even collect data by gender. It got me reflecting on how often my organization includes gendered data in our reports, and where we might have room for improvement.
That’s it for December, adventurers! I would be lying if I said that I am excited for 2025 (hurray depression!) but I have to exist for it whether I am excited or not, so I’ll still be here next month with some new games, shows, and books to talk about. In the meantime I’d enjoy seeing comments from you about what you’ve been up to this month, either here or on Bluesky. Happy Holidays!
