Whoops. FFXIV. I added it to the original post now.

This weekend is oddly bittersweet as tonight will be my last raid in FFXIV. It sounds goofy as shit but I've been playing with the same group for well over a year. And in that time, I've spent 100s of hours raiding. But it's stopped being fun so it has to stop even though my quitting may spell the end of the entire…

Rarely, do I read something in these that I agree with so completely. Well said.

I met the guy at a comic book convention. He refused to tell me anything about the script. But he did call me a "cheeky fellow" for asking.

She will be the best part of True Detective Season 5.

From what I remember, they actually changed some of the classes in one of the updates to specifically accommodate some of Salvatore's characters. And holy shit did he have a lot of them. Fucking Cadderly.

On the bright side, it mostly gets better from there. My parents got me hooked with The Hobbit and Lotr, but it is my undying shame that my first purchases after that were all the Xanth books. I managed to read the first 25 of those books, and it makes me sad.

There is a podcast interview with Salvatore on Geek's Guide of the Galaxy that provides a lot of interesting context on the relationship between the authors of D&D books and the owner of dungeons and dragons. Even though Salvatore is not one of my favorite authors, it is still a fascinating interview if only to get…

I read the Salvatore and Brooks in middle and high school. When I had so much free time, that I didn't have to develop a sense of taste to separate good from bad fantasy.

I've always thought that some of his premises were at least interesting. I enjoyed the heritage book where they have a city besieged by demons created through genetic experimentation, and a small group has to magically transport the entire city representing the entire elvish race off the island. I'd at least watch a…

At least, they are intelligent and beautiful - if cruel. Seems like a step up from the darker skinned races in other fantasy works.

The heritage series would work extremely well as a YA series. It's basically a bunch of teens with a mysterious heritage working together to collect mcguffins to bring down the evil, racist totalitarian regime.

Re: post-apocalypse. I don't think it was foregrounded very hard until much, much later in the series. These books were far more interested in traditional fantasy. I will say it probably has the simplest map in all of fantasy. Even 15 years after I read these, I remember dwarves in the east, humans in the south, elves…

I'm thinking Jared Leto would be perfect for the lead role.

The Shannara series is easily in the top 30 or 40 dozen or so imitation-Tolkien, fantasy serieses. Almost as good as R.A. Salvatore.

I pre-ordered Fallout 4 because I want that stupid CE. But for the most part, I'd rather just buy the digital copy so my dog doesn't destroy/choke on all those goofy doo dads.

Maybe part of it is just being burnt out after finishing the Witcher 3? As I grow older, I find that I take breaks as I weight for the ever smaller list of games that I'm actually interested in (probably won't play anything new until fallout 4).

Final Fantasy VII, Baldur's Gate 2 and Final Fantasy Tactics are games that I can literally extemporize every plot beat and the order in which basically quest and location goes. I still remember even small easter egg/secret stuff from memory. For example in 7, I still know how to breed a gold chocobo and get every…

Giant Bombcast and Giant Beastcast are probably the most well-produced podcasts and they are excellent.

This weekend I'm going to make a giant pitcher of Sangria, get some breakfast taco's at Torchy's, play some more of the Lord of the Rings Card Game with my girlfriend, and then continue a BG1 - Throne of Bhaal good PC play through interspersed with some savage Alexander in FFXIV.