Sadly the very first thing they introduce is a hard multiplayer area. A strange move when most of your playerbase plays your game solo.

Yes i know the arguments. It’s an MMO! Yes I know, and it’s fun to occasionally group up with people for a world boss. You just show up and join the other ppl already there. I really don’t feel like joining groups in this weird Nightmarket setting. Also the rewards are odd. Briarheart set pieces and the like, that i already have collected or are no longer relevant. Shame they didn’t throw in any dailies or related quests for solo players.

Also the dailes for endouvour points have disappeared. They’re now weekly ‘achievements’ or quests if you will. In this atrocious UI as you can see blow :).

The rewards are ok, it doesn’t give you the incentive anymore to log in every day. Which some people like and some people do not. I find myself not logging in daily any more. Anyway, I am still playing ESO, now doing story quests from areas that I haven’t done so far. I am using Caldwell silver quest as a guide. I have now arrived in The Rift! Which has been fun so far. I finished the main story, now doing side quests.

This podcast is well worth it anyway, also to meet some new artists I wasn’t very familiar with before. Norah Jones is always great to listen to.

Mike is very grateful coming from a poor family from Florida for everything he achieved in his career, this is emphasised throughout the book. From school to early mudcrutch career and eventually the move to LA, everything is described in a way that you cant put the book down. And once you get to the ‘Heartbreaker’ part of the story, you can listen to the albums as he describes how they were recorded and what the circumstances were.

Once the story gets to the 2000s or thereabouts the stories get somewhat shorter, otherwise this would have been a two volume book. I loved the side gigs as well, about performing on stage with George Harrison. Playing with Bob Dylan (not just in 1986 & 1987) but also farmaid 2023. And playing with Fleetwood Mac after Tom Petty died. Eventually continuing his own band the Dirty Knobs.

A very enjoyable read, even if you’re just remotely interested! He will surprise you!

Heartbreak on Goodreads for more reviews

As you can see the only ‘new’ game I played quite a lot is two point museum. There was one patch that ruined a few museums i had made and quit the game for a while, but with the Zoo DLC i have gone back and played that a fair bit during the Xmas break! It’s a lot of fun. One day I’ll return to the ‘ruined’ museums and rebuild them. And with ruined I mean, random science expos exploding, running into debt the whole time and other weird occurrences.

Here’s where it gets weird: you can still log into Freenom and see your domain listed there, but they’ve stopped sending renewal notices. The domains just… fade away into the digital ether.

Naturally, I did some digging and discovered that Freenom has been embroiled in legal troubles. They were sued and are facing serious financial difficulties—articles like this one and this one here paint a pretty clear picture. Their website still exists, but they’re no longer renewing or handing out domains. Somehow, I’d completely missed this news.

The silver lining? I still had wickedmessenger.net sitting unused in my portfolio. So I rolled up my sleeves and migrated the site—running some MySQL queries on the database, updating my information with Google, and adding the new domain to their search engine.

Not that I’m drowning in traffic these days. A few old LOST reviews still get the occasional visitor, and honestly, the golden days of blogging are long behind us. But this site remains something I treasure: a living archive documenting nearly 20 years of thoughts, interests, and moments in time.

So here’s to new beginnings: greendale.tk is dead—long live wickedmessenger.net!

The island was released in two parts. As you can see in the shot above, there is a huge wall dividing the west and east part. I thought it was a neat idea to split the content, June the 1st part and October the rest. I was expecting a week or two some events and then we could finish the story. But the execution was pretty bad. There were a bunch of daily quests, that you could repeat over and over and over again!

You can only defeat a camp of Deadra with 100 players spamming AOE damage so many times before it gets boring ;). But anyway, the other part of the island is now open, so I am now in the process of completing the story arc, overall it’s pretty good! If it wasn’t for the opening events dragging along. Anyway, here are a bunch of pretty shots.

The older games I played were a lot of Warcraft and Elder Scroll Online, and of course Oxygen Not Included. They released two content dlcs the past year that I enjoyed a lot.

ESO had a big chapter as they call their expansion, but it might have been the last one as they are now moving over to smaller but more frequent content patches. I had a lot of fun with Gold Road and the new West Weald zone. It was very crowded the first few months, then it started to quiet down a little. But there were also a lot of 10th year anniversary events that brought back a lot of players, even in the usually desolate areas, you ran into players. It was wild!

In Warcraft I played some of the Dragonflight expansion and of course the new one, the War Within that was released in august. The delves were the main new dungeon type instances that were added. And they’re pretty fun, but there being only 8 (and now 2 more after a recent content patch) they’ve grown a little stale. I expect to play wow a bit less now, i’ve seen most of the war within and the recent content patches weren’t that great, so I’ll just level up some characters to 80 and do some of the sidequests I haven’t done yet, waiting for the next DLC.

In October the much awaited dlc for Factorio arrived! Space age! And it was even better than I expected. I should really dedicate a separate post to that. It was pretty much all I played for a few months and managed to even finish it. The dlc added some new game elements, like quality and elevated train tracks, but also as the new suggests, space travel and a few new planets to conquer. It’s definitely one of the best epansions of any game I played!

So that was about it for 2024. There isn’t anything in particular I am looking forward to for this year, currently I am playing some Hogwarts’s legacy, which I picked up for cheap and two point museum! Actually a new game :).

Regarding Steven Wilson, I arrived a little late on the scene. It wasn’t until 2022 I began listening to Porcupine Tree & his solo efforts. And I did so in reverse order because of the release of CR caught my eye, on the Steve Hoffman forums.

Of course I had seen his name popup often at remasters and remixed, for example Jethro Tull’s aqualung, songs for the woods and many others but I somehow was under the impression he was more an engineer type person. I do remember I checked out PT a few times but it didn’t quite click.

I might have checked the more heavier stuff at the time and didn’t really care for it, not quite sure. But somehow since 2022 that changed :).

Favs are now Deadwing, Light Bulb, and of course the solo albums Raven & Hand Cannot Erase.

Last month I read his book. And although at times he seems a little full of himself, but it did make me appreciate his earlier music more. So lately I listened to the earlier PT stuff and his solo albums. They are more about setting a mood
creating an atmosphere with music using electronics, and more inspired by 60s and 70s psychedelic music. This also made me check out other music I usually wouldnt think of like AIR (a french band) or somewhat more obscure concept albums. His podcast ‘the album years’ also helps with that!

It is later that the music get more heavier with Raven, inspired by the Tull etc remixes that earned him the ProgRock label. Which he doesn’t seem to like much, according to the book.

He is a little older than I am but I do recognize some trends and stories about music when he grew up in the 80s. Like the Cure and the Smiths. He seems to especially like the Cure. And browsing through vinyl at the used record store and buying a record just because it looked interesting. Also you didn’t have a lot of money so every lp you bought was kind of precious and you put more effort in, to ‘like it’.

His own lists are interesting Harmony Codes 11 ? weird for a new album. Note that Raven isn’t ranked at all.

1. PT – In Absentia
2. PT – Fear of a Blank Planet
3. PT – Closure / Continuation
4. SW = Insurgentes
5. SW – Hand. Cannot. Erase.
6. SW – The future bites
7. Bas communion – Ghosts on magnetic tape
8. Storm Corrosion – Storm Corrosion
9. No-Man – Together we’re Stranger
10. No-Man – Schoolyard Ghosts
11. SW – The harmony codex

I haven’t heard 7,9 and 10 to be honest. The Storm Corrosion album is interesting but not something I’d listen to very often. No blackfield albums either. I do like those!

His last 3 solo albums are a little meh, especially The Future Bites. A bit too poppy and electronic. Although the Harmony Codex has a few very nice songs. Next year he’s releasing a new solo album and he’s going on tour again. We’ll see what kind of music he’ll bring then :).

Link to hoffman forums ranking the PT albums

Podcast – The album years -> well worth checking out, you learn about new music I never though I would check out, like AIR for example.