Rag-Tag Grab-Bag. Sold As Seen. No Refunds

For once, I have several meaty posts I want to write but I can't seem to find the time to write any of them. Certainly not today. Tomorrow I don't have much planned, though, and it's forecast to rain heavily all day so maybe then...

For now, though, I think this is going to have to be a bit of an ad hoc rummage down the back of the bookmarks. Again. 

Let's start with a PSA.

Are You Experienced?

EverQuest II is.  275% experienced. From yesterday until 10.00AM PST on 19 November, all Live servers plus Varsoon and Zarrakon are getting a 275% server bonus to adventure and tradeskill xp. Anashti Sul, the Origins server, where players are supposed to enjoy the journey or something, I guess, are getting just 14%. 

This is in celebration of Darkpaw breaking $100k in donations to Extra Life this year. There's also a 45% increase in the chance of rare drops, double currency rewards and double loot drops in "current expansions". 

This is great news if you want to fill your bags with crap level a character up to 125. Before level l00, a 275% bonus on xp from mob kills and quests is huuuuuge. From 100 to 125 the xp from kills will be meaningless but as I understand it the bonus will still apply to quest xp, which is already huuuuuuge in some of the relevant expansions so presumably it will now be huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge! 

I haven't tested it personally, so don't take my word for it. Go try it for yourself. I also haven't confirmed what I've heard about the final five levels to the 130 cap, which is that in the expansions aimed at those levels, bonus xp does not apply to quests at all. That's by design, not because they've been specifically excluded.  

I have tested it on a Level 125 character in the expansion before the cap went to 130, though, and it seemed to work there. I was getting almost 10% of the level for a basic kill quest hand-in, which seemed like a lot. 

If I can find a gap in my schedule, I'll put in some time and see how far I can get a couple of characters who are sitting at 125. It would be nice to have them at 130 for the new expansion.And I might get one of my lower-levels out and blitz some dungeons just for fun. When it comes to xp, I like big buffs. I cannot lie.

The Whole of the Luna

As I suspected, Amazon's recent withdrawal from the games market has indeed put paid to Prime Gaming. I got one, presumably final, email from the Prime Gaming blog that handed everything off to the Luna website and since then... nothing. I guess it's up to Prime Members to remember to go check to see if anything new is available from now on.

If so, here's where to look. I'm not going to go through the slate for November one by one but just for completeness' sake, here are the games, the dates they become available and where you can claim them from:

Already available: 

New Tales from the Borderlands [Epic Games Store]
Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Sun Series [GOG Code]
Gas Station Simulator [Epic Games Store] 
Lovecraft's Untold Stories [Epic Games Store] 

From November 13: 

Another World: 20th Anniversary Edition [GOG Code] 
Fallout 76 [PC via Microsoft Games Store] 
Fort Solis [GOG Code] 
Dark City: Kyiv Collector's Edition [Amazon Games App]

From November 20:

PlateUp! [Epic Games Store]
Dungeons & Dragons: Krynn Series [GOG Code]
Dream Tactics [GOG Code]

From November 26:

Big Adventure: Trip to Europe 6 Collector's Edition [Legacy Games Code]
Gunslugs [GOG Code]

I don't remember seeing the Microsoft Store come up before as a place to claim Prime giveaways. Not sure I like that development much. Also, I notice there's only one game you can play through the Amazon Games app itself. I imagine that's on the way out, too. It'll all be freebies from third-party platforms by 2026 or that's my bet.

Stranger Than Strange

There's a new trailer out for the final season of Stranger Things. It's the first five minutes of the first episode, which seems to be a thing now. Netflix did the same for Wednesday back in the summer.

I haven't watched it and I'm not sharing it. I watched the Wedneday one and posted it here, because it was really good. But I regretted it later. Watching it, mostly, although if I regretted watching it then logically I should also regret sharing it, unless I was trying to give people a degraded experience when they came to the show itself. (I wasn't, by the way...)

The problem with the Wednesday First Five Minutes Trailer (And this is a spoiler of a kind, if you haven't watched the show yet, although if you haven't gotten around to it by now I'm guessing you 're not really going to care...) is that it raises completely inappropriate expectations for the rest of the season. It makes it look as though in Season 2, Wednesday is going to be working as a kind of bounty hunter, tracking down and capturing dangerous criminals. 

That is very much not what the rest of the season is about . The trailer is basically Wednesday's "What I Did On My Holidays" report. When I came to watch  the full first episode I was a little irritated by what felt like a bit of a bait&switch by the marketing department. It definitely fed into my mild disappointment with the first half of the season.

I have no idea if the Stranger Things trailer plays any similar tricks but I don't intend to risk it. I'm really looking forward to the show and I'm more than happy to wait until it arrives before I see any of it.

I will happily share this with everyone, though:

That's a trailer for the upcoming Stranger Things animated spin-off series, Tales From '85. The Duffer brothers said a while back that they planned on doing more with the Stranger Things IP and this is one of those things. 

It's a cartoon that's supposed to remind everyone of the kind we all watched in the '80s, which makes sense. When Stranger Things first appeared, all the publicity about it went on and on about how it was either an homage to or a recreation of the 1980s. It was one of the things that put me off watching the show until much later.

In the latter seasons that whole eighties vibe seems largely to have vanished. The action may take place in the same decade but all the focus is either on the weirdness or the military, neither of which seems particularly grounded in any time period, not on the everday small-town lives of a bunch of young kids in the decade of Madonna and MTV. Plus the kids aren't so young any more, either.

The cartoon show, which has a completely different cast of voice actors, has the opportunity to reconnect with that original, nostalgic concept. Whether it will, or whether we'll want it to, is another question. We won't have too long to wait to find out. It's coming in 2026, although exactly when it will run is still a mystery.

And Finally

Anyone remember a song called iPod Touch that I included in a music post a while back? I thought it was great. I still think it's great. It's by Ninajirachi and it's from her album I Love My Computer, which is also great. 

At the time I thought she was some obscure hyperpopper I'd been lucky to discover. If I thougt about it at all, I'd have guessed hardly anyone was listening to her. Although actually I didn't think about it at all. 

Turns out she's a much bigger deal than I knew. She just won Australian Album of the Year at the TripleJ awards. She also won Australian Music Video of the Year for Fuck My Computer, which you can find in that post I just linked so I won't link it again here. She won Australian awards as a teen, too. She's a big deal in Oz, apparently.

This will explain.

I didn't even know she was Australian. 

Tomorrow, a proper post. Maybe. Let's hope so.