I'm playing Magic the Gathering again

I've been tempted, lately, so I downloaded MTG Arena. I'm not spending any money though. I wouldn't even pay for actual cards any more, so I'm definitely not buying virtual ones. Fortunately you can pretty easily get by without spending any money at all. In fact, there's very little reason to buy anything if you just want to build a deck and play. Within a few hours of pretty casual play (over a number of days) I was able to get all the cards I needed for the deck I was trying to build.

Victorian State Election 2022

If you just want my advice on who to vote for, skip to the end. If you want to know the who and why, here's where I go through all the parties in alphabetical order. Since I already covered a lot of them (or their equivalents at the national level) for the federal election in May, I'll repeat what I said about them then, but I'll indent those sections so you can skim past them if you just want the new information.

Unnecessary Confusion

The MyGov and Centrelink websites are really bad. They're confusing and inconvenient. For example, you know how on every website ever, you've always been able to enter your username, press Tab, then enter your password and hit Enter rather than clicking on each text field and then the login button? On the MyGov site, you have to click on the username field first. It's not automatically selected. Then after entering your username, you have to hit Tab three times to get to the password field. One press takes you to the "forgot username" link. There can be no good reason for this. They just set the tab stops in the incorrect order and don't care to fix it. But that's not the main thing I want to talk about today.

Game reviews by a guy who's only ever played Skyrim

Civilization

Civilization is an interesting departure from the mould of traditional games like Skyrim in a few ways. Probably the first thing new players will notice is that the first-person perspective has been abandoned in favour of a sort of top-down "bird's eye view", but this is just the beginning. Rather than controlling a single individual, given tasks by the various quest-givers around the world, you function as a sort of quest-giver yourself for your chosen nation, instructing its people on what projects to pursue and what battles to take on.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

This was a much more entertaining mess than the previous one. Too long, too focused on the utterly uninteresting mystery of Peter's parents' deaths/disappearance, and still wildly overconfident about its likelihood to spawn (multiple!) sequels. But I liked parts of it. Specifically, pretty much every part that Spider-Man was in. Not Peter though. This version of Peter sucks.

Hwideo Chames

I started with a game I've played before today because some people on a Discord server I'm in were talking about it and I thought it was about time I gave it another shot.

Still trying out games

Played some more games. Some of them were actually pretty good and a couple of them I'll even play some more of. Some were just not for me. Some were bad. So a real mix this time.

A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear

I hate this book. I'm absolutely certain that a really good book could have been written about these events and circumstances, so it's an absolute tragedy that this one was instead.

Banana blossoms - fake fish?

I saw these tinned banana blossoms in the supermarket and was curious to try them as the can said they could be used as a substitute for fish in, for example, fish and chips. Why not? Could be all right.

So many games still to play

Fallen Angel: Sacred 2 Gold Edition

Please watch the opening cutscene before reading any further. Starts out very generic, but stick with it. About a minute in the music shifts up a gear and suddenly there's a robot with a laser-gun arm in this middle of this fantasy battle. When the lyrics started at about two minutes, that was just icing on the cake. Got to admit, I was intrigued.