Weekend Update

Played Monster hunter World's Beta a bit this weekend. Finished 2 missions before going straight to the hardest and getting my ass handed to me. In the end I nearly got him though, he was desperately limping away from me when the time ran out.

Ugh, the timers.

Somewhere I do understand their continued inclusion, but fuck me, I wish they would have just left that shit out. It always was the most frustrating thing about the game.

I'm an old hand at Monster Hunter. 

I played days and days and days on Monster Hunter Freedom 2 on the PSP back in the day. I'm not sure what Hunter Rank I got but it was high. It was all I did for the longest time. Everything and everyone dropped by the wayside in my dedication. Killed Akantor on me onsies. Dual Rajang too I'm thinking, and to be honest: I did everything by myself.
Nobody to play with and all that. I was in it mostly to get every end-level weapon. Every evolution path to its completion, all neatly stacked next to one another in my weapon box.
When Monster Hunter Freedom Unite came along announcing itself as a magnificent upgrade I held off for a while before finally transferring my save file. It's only then of course, that I checked out the weapon lists and saw that practically every end-weapon of Freedom 2 had further divergent paths to new levels of rarity. A mindbogglingly large amount of them.

I stubbornly tried to hold on but after a while I nonetheless quit in frustration. The mountain was just too big and I just felt cheated.

When Monster Hunter Tri came out on Nintendo 3DS I bought a 3DS just to play it.
But I found the system itself unpleasant to play, the blurry-smooth graphics of the game a whole leap backward from Freedom's jagged familiarity, its 3d functionality was laughable and hideously annoying. And of course, the monsters themselves were dull as old sin.
Maybe I just missed the snowy mountains. I do tend to love snow in video games. And in real life too of course. Cold over heat any time.

And now here comes a new Monster Hunter game, on my dedicated gaming system no less.
Its graphics are a monumental upgrade from what I was used to, the gameplay is stunningly familiar, like riding a bicycle but with so many ease of comfort additions to it, and of course global multiplayer for when you get really stumped. It's tempting, indeed.
So that's what's up: I'm starting to think about purchasing it.

But it would likely kill my reading pace even more and that is a definite problem.
I have a lot of books I want to read.

As for the reading itself:
Sigvald is smooth-sailing and a lot of fun to read. It's always fun to be back in the Chaos Wastes, you never know what you're going to find.

I'm reading a short story a day, and for now that's Time and the Gods by Dunsany, still. I'm also quietly, slowly starting to put together some thoughts on it, but as I've been reading this particular short story collection for more than half a decade, my thoughts are more than a little fragmented.

As for the Write-up for Voice of our Shadow, that will hopefully be up later today. I'm almost pleased with it now.
I tend to sit on the Fantasy Masterwork reviews and hammer at them until I'm absolutely pleased, and this one had some difficulties that didn't crop up before. But the end is a spitting's distance away.

I also saw a really cool quote by Frances Mcdormand on twitter today.

If that doesn't sound appealing I don't know what does.

So now I'm torn between wanting to read The Postman Always Rings Twice, or to just watch the Jessica Lange and Jack Nicholson film. I'd like to do both, but as I have too many books already and when I look at my TBR shelf I'm torn between a giddy 'I can do this' and a despairing wail.
I'd have to search out a collection that would have included it in its list, or choose an edition at random and pretend there's no strings anywhere.

It's not as if it's a long book though and apparently it's a very good classic but the movie (the one I want to see has stuff like this

Jessica Lange and Jack Nicholson looking very good, if I may say so.

Likely there's also a good soundtrack, and you know, if the movie-magic works then there's nothing quite like it.

The question is then, would experiencing the movie first diminish the returns I'd get from reading the book afterwards, and vice versa. Normally the answer to that is obvious. Book before adaptation, no second thoughts, no questions asked.

 But you take a look at that picture and tell me that leaves you cold.
So the question remains valid. Which one first?