Bay 12 Games Forum

IBUs are confusing. At first glance it sounds like the more the better, but it doesn't really mean bitterness does it? It's more like... hoppiness, or general pungency. Unless I'm misremembering from the last time I looked it up?   

Anyway since we're speaking of beers, I generally despise craft beer (especially anything with an acronym ending in "PA", even though I've had actual "pale ales" that were nice. Weird), but over the last year or so I have made a very tentative discovery of sours. Started when my former housemates down in Melbourne had some locally-made watermelon sour (I think?) that they didn't really like and so offloaded it on me, the alcoholic beverage garbage disposal. To my surprise, I actually rather liked it.   
In more recent times, after moving a couple states north, I looked in this one bottle shop for that brand, couldn't find it, and ended up buying another sour instead. I think I forgot that the other one I'd had was "watermelon", but in any case the "passion fruit (sic) sour gose style ale" I ended up with was friggin' tight.   

It's from a company called Green Beacon. Has a really cool, but understated can design, too. I've tried some of their other beers (this is the only actual sour I've found) and didn't like them nearly as much. Last time I went into that liquor store to grab some they were having some deal where you got a 25% discount if you bought eight cans of "craft beer". Not knowing fuck-all about craft beer other than most of it is really bad, I stood around in front of the fridges for a while until one of the guys working there offered advice and I ended up with this "HPA" with a really cool image of a dead astronaut on the front - I will admit I'd already been eyeing it for the art.   
I figured, it's "hazy" not "India" so maybe it'll be alright, right? WRONG. Tasted the same as IPA, i.e. frickin' awful. Lesson learned: PA = bad. Sorry Pennsylvania.       
Took me a while to drink all four cans of that crap. Most of them I went through in the bath, after starting off with a bottle of nicer beer. I found that holding your nose whilst drinking helps a great deal, too.   

But anyway, this 7 Bells Passionfruit Sour Gose Style Ale is fantastic, even if I don't know exactly what "gose style" means.   

I love killing people too much

Listening to my 'Discover Weekly' playlist on Spotify and it's very weird, as you'd expect. Perhaps slightly weirder than average, but not unusually so - starting off strong with some funk, then a shitty folk song, then bouncing across genres from heavy psych to golden oldies to shitty noise rock to country to old school heavy metal and then, out of freakin' nowhere, comes a few bursts of tinny gunfire followed by a folk ballad from The Irish Brigade, with the charming title of "My Little Armalite".   

I don't even know how Irish folk wound up on my playlist, let alone a bloodthirsty little ditty like that, haha. I guess I might have listened to, like, a single track of celtic folk on one of my Spotify trawls? Or maybe, since my Spotify account is linked to Facebook, they know I dig Karan Casey? Either one of those is a far cry from this sort of thing, though.   

...Annnnd now I'm tapping my foot to the lyrics "a comrade on me left side, another one on me right, a clip of ammunition for me little Armalite". Wtf are you doing to me, Spotify? At least it's better than the fucking RAtM song that somehow wound up in the same playlist. Since when do I listen to shitty rap-rock? Go home Spottas, yer drunk.   
Trust the Irish to pen such a cheerful, whimsical tune about a grim topic like the Troubles. Though I guess that's a pretty long-standing tradition, huh.   

My related gaming WTF: I actually bought Cyberpunk 2077, when my only previous opinion of it was to scoff at the hype.   
Well, I didn't technically buy it, I traded in another game that I did recently buy: CoD Black Ops: Cold War. I know, I know, CoD sucks. I just wanted to try the campaign since it sounded at least somewhat interesting, mainly for the fact that you get to (slightly) customise your character, which is pretty novel for that kind of game. That coupled with the setting seemed like it could be a bit of good fun - spoiler alert: it wasn't.   

Anyway, it just so happened that 2077 had released the very day before I went to trade said piece of shovelware in. This seemed kinda like a sign of some sort, and more importantly its price was the same as the game I was trading in, which made things just that teensy bit more convenient. If I'd swapped it for Wasteland 3 or XIII or whatever I probably would have ended up with a bunch of giftcards or something making up the difference. Ain't nobody got time for that.   

...So, now I'm stuck with the ridiculously over-hyped, dumbed-down, videogame bastardisation of all things Cyberpunk, despite formerly being adamant that I'd much rather play the tabletop game(s) that inspired it. The character customisation is pretty fun so far, at least, even if you get a grand total of one body type and voice per sex/gender. Haven't really gotten far enough into it to judge anything else yet, though the combat seems a tad on the boring side - kinda makes me want to go back and play more of The Outer Worlds, which I made a pretty feeble attempt at getting into back when I bought it. Embarrassing.   

Oh, right! And my main WTF regarding the game! Can't believe I forgot the whole reason I needed to post here...   
My biggest WTF is this: after getting a little ways into the game on the first character I slapped together, I decided to create another one, have a bit more of a poke around the character creator etcetera. Yeah, I'm a sucker for this kind of thing, okay? Even when the customisation is pretty basic. I made a very different character with a different background, meandered through the first few missions, then went to bed.   
Today, when I started up the game again and went to load my first character, he was gone - my new character had overwritten all the autosaves which were apparently the only saves the game does of its own volition. Say whaaaaat?! There's only one quicksave slot, too.   
I guess what I'm trying to say is, save your game manually or risk losing the damn thing. WTF. At least I was only, say... half an hour into the game? Maybe a bit more, but really it felt like I'd barely made it out of the tutorial, if I even had. Still pretty wacky, though.   

((Waitlist me, please!))   

Does breaking an-- erm, urban exploration count?   

Watching The Pacific. It's pretty great, but I just paused it to do a quick google search to check if a certain character was actually the inventor of the thing he'd just demonstrated, only for my stupid speed-reading eyes to travel over some irrelevant info on the page, leading to a pretty significant spoiler.   
Ugh. I should know better by now.