Unfinished Business

Yesterday, I published a post for the first time in about two years. I say “published” instead of “wrote” because I’ve started posts in that time but never actually published them. I was wallowing in “what would be the point”. Now, I’ve come to recognize the point is to do it, so I did.

Looking back at all I had written but not published I was surprised at how much of it there was. I knew I had done it a few times, but I thought that means 3-5 times. There were 40 unpublished articles. Now, some of those were nothing more than a title and a few bullet points, but that covered no more than a quarter of them. Then there were a handful of half written ones. I’d started with some idea and then got distracted or ran into a wall.

That still leaves quite a number of practically complete posts that I went to the effort to write but then didn’t publish for some reason. Reading over some of them, that’s for the best. And then there are a several more that would have been worthwhile at the time, but looking back I shake my head at. One reason I haven’t touched Aristeia in over a decade. It was the best I could do at the time and I’m proud for having done it, but if I read it now I would do nothing but cringe.

There are more than a handful that I can still agree with. Maybe I’ll go ahead and let them see the light of day now that I’m blogging again. Maybe they’re best left to history.

Unrelated to this but tied directly to the title I chose completely at random (or at least not deliberately when I started typing), I’ve also been playing with a mod for the game Solasta called Unfinished Business. Solasta is a fairly faithful adaption of Dungeons and Dragson 5E into a computer game. I picked it up in the Steam Summer Sale after hearing it compared favorably with Baldur’s Gate 3, which I played a ton of over the last year. Now, Solasta doesn’t hold a candle of BG3 in terms of overall acting, scope, and presentation. That doesn’t make it bad though.

After playing BG3, the cutscenes of Solasta are a bit hard to get through. But that is also part of its charm. It feels like a bunch of awkward gamers playing out a campaign. Combined with the rules and system following closer to the official rules gives in the genuine feel of a dungeon running campaign.

Now, there’s very little roleplay or investment in character growth. But that’s okay. The story is decent enough to get by. The combat is the main focus and it does that well. For one thing, you can actually fly which you can’t do in BG3.

The world is far smaller and emptier than BG3. But it is also more varied. I thought about replaying BG3 but the story and locations would be the same. Solasta has several official campaigns and a lot of player created ones. I have yet to try player made ones, but I feel confident there will be at least a few high quality ones.

Overall, I’m having fun with it.

So this is what you can expect in the future. I don’t know where a post might end up. But such is life.