Hey gang. Quick, late-night update this week.

LinkedIn Learning

Big week in my IT Security Specialist course - I finished 4 lessons. I now have less than 3 hours across 2 lessons of content until I have finally completed this! I have certainly learned a lot more in the back half of this, and I'm sure I will find myself returning to these lessons in the future to really cement some of the concepts and make sure that I actually absorbed it all. 21 hours is a lot of content to consume and process. It's about 55 episodes of an average 23 minute long show! To think that you could sit through all of that in just a month's time and remember every detail is kinda crazy. Will you remember the broad strokes and if someone brings up a scene it might pop back into your mind? Yeah, probably. But it's still enough information that it's unlikely to have all been taken in properly and retained in one watching.

It feels very good to be so close to finishing this big project of a course that I decided to undertake. It now makes up a little over half of all the time I've spent in LinkedIn Learning! I thought I would have gotten through it faster, but considering the time comparison of how long I spent on this vs everything else I've completed on the platform, it's still a pretty impressive rate of consumption made even more noteworthy by the fact that in that month I also spent several days just grinding through new video games with relentless fervor (more on this later), a few days dedicated only to the job hunt, I spent a few days mostly just spending time with family, and never did any lessons on weekends. So even though on paper it took me a month to get through this, it really took about 2 weeks worth of days where I sat down and said, "this is what I'm gonna do today." Not too shabby, I must say.

Job Hunt

Big news on the job front, friends! I heard back this afternoon from a medical company and scheduled my second round of interviews with their hiring manager for a junior database administrator position early next week. This is one of the positions I was most excited about when I applied and after looking into the company a little deeper, I'm loving them more and more. Otherwise, not a lot changed in this category. Applied for some positions; got rejected for a few. It's the nature of the beast in job hunting - you're gonna get a lot more no's than yesses.

General

My big news this week in my personal life is getting a PS4. I spent most of my sophomore year in college playing my buddy Matt's copy of Bloodborne, and I've spent the last 2 years in a pretty much constant state of yearning to play it again. It's arguably my favorite game; easily in my top 5. So when I came into some unexpected money, I decided I was going to treat myself a bit and indulge in my first console since I was 16.

Unfortunately the store I got the console from didn't have any copies of Bloodborne in stock (I ordered it online. It'll be here early next week), but they did have a deal going on where you get to pick a free game when you buy a console. So after looking at their selection, I came across two games that really caught my eye: The Evil Within 2 and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.

It was a tough choice because I really enjoyed the first Evil Within game. It got a bad wrap from critics because it was written by the mind behind some of the most iconic Resident Evil games and unsurprisingly had scenes that looked like scenes from those games. Survival horror is a fairly niche genre, it only has so many wells to draw from. After a decade of working on titles in that field, you're gonna recycle a few things that worked particularly well. Some argue that the writing is dry, leaving the characters feeling pretty generic and unremarkable copies of classic tropes. I think the "generic aloof detective with a drinking problem" Castellanos is actually quite well written. In Japan, maintaining your composure and not showing a lot of emotion is something reserved for the most badass of characters. Flat affect in the voice acting means you know this person is in charge; that just translates poorly to Western audiences. Even ignoring this, the fact that you see how troubled he is explains his reactions pretty well. This is a man who lost his daughter in a fire and watched his wife go mad, insisting that their daughter wasn't dead and was kidnapped. Soon after, his wife disappeared. That's trauma if I've ever seen it. This character is maybe a bit one-note, but as someone with a background in psychology who has lived with depression and seen plenty of trauma victims I can attest that things like this can just make you like that. It's a very realistic portrayal of a very serious problem, whether the idea is overused or not.

In the end, I decided to go with Sekiro. I knew very little about the game, and that intrigued me. I knew it took place right around the beginning of the Meiji era in Japan. I knew it won game of the year when it came out. And I knew above all that it was a From Software game - the same company that made Bloodborne and the Dark Souls games that I loved so much. "How bad could it be?" I rationed, "It won game of the year and it's from a studio that has shown me nothing I didn't learn to love by the end of a title." (Well, Dark Souls II is kinda mediocre but it's hard to stand up to its predecessor and successor.) And so my journey began. I got home and set up my new console like a kid on Christmas and rushed into my new game. I then proceeded to spend all day for the next 2 days playing it. I can't make heads or tails of it yet. There are aspects that I absolutely love (the more free movement to climb rooftops and things instead of just roads) and aspects that I don't like much. In particular, I HATE the combat in this game. The Posture mechanic feels kind of arbitrary and makes combat more complicated for no clear reason. It works like this: whenever you hit or block an opponent, their Posture meter rises. If it gets full, you get to make a deathblow, a one-hit kill. So if you're doing enough fighting and slashing to get this meter full, you get to kill them. Okay, so it replaces HP? HA! WRONG! They also have HP as a way you can kill them, but it's usually significantly higher than their maximum Posture, so throwing raw damage at them for HP kills is practically overshadowed but still exists for some reason. I don't like it. Either make me do a combo kill with the Posture system or just let me beat the hell out of it until it falls over like every other RPG, but don't try to put them together. Additionally, it is very clear to me after something like 13 hours of dying to the same bosses and mini-bosses that this game's combat was made explicitly to go counter to the playstyle that Bloodborne fosters. Enemies with shields in every other game this company has made will act super defensively and wait for you to attack them. In this game, they charge you with it. You don't get any "i frames" (frames of an animation where you can't be damaged) from dodging, meaning that the hyper-aggressive bob-and-weave tactic from the old games doesn't work and in many cases enemies are made almost explicitly to punish you for trying to play like that.

Alright. It's midnight. I'm going to bed.

Unknown Coder, signing off.

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