My Top 10 Games of All Time: 1. DIABLO II

Diablo II sits atop my video game list because I’ve dumped more time into this one than any of the others, on and off, over the span of 13+ years. It’s the kind of game that makes you want to make games. It’s the sort of program that makes you want to learn statistics or machine code or something and just roll those dice to infinity and back again in your own worlds.

Need a Hand?

It’s an exciting game, but it’s very simple, too. Hack and slash with your character until everything else is dead. Or almost nothing—you can play it pacifist, too, if you want. The makers took the character creation from DnD and made it even more streamlined. You take on a classic archetype and wear that shell tirelessly; there are no classes or subclasses—you can choose one of several skill trees, but they’re not even equally divided, so maybe don’t bother. But there’s freedom there, too: find the right niche weapon or armor drop and you can completely transform yourself into an unrecognizable fighter.

But those valuable rare and unique items are terribly scarce around here. You can trek through the entire game and find not one valuable item. This game is a slot machine in the worst way, but, somehow, it’s a fun one: the goal becomes—instead of defeating all the devils once and saving the world—a Groundhog Day in Hell, where you defeat the same monsters over and over and over. Hoping they drop something decent this time. Please.

Loot!

Everything I’ve said so far has sounded awful and you may ask what is wrong with me to have put so many hours into such a horrible grinding slot machine. Fair question. Here’s the good, though: combat is fundamentally fun. Trading stuff is fun. Teaming up is fun. Getting a character through the game with no items whatsoever is probably not fun, but possible. Speed-running is fun. Hardcore (permanent character death) is fun—more fun than the other way. That’s where the game tricks you into realizing something that the old-timers always knew: the harder the game, the better. And I say that as someone who in those 13+ years has never even finished the end game matter!

Diablo II is, ultimately, an adventure. I’ve written elsewhere about what that adventure looked like for each of the hardcore characters with whom I was able to survive the entire game. This game comes from a time when computer games weren’t supposed to push you through in a straight line. It mimics the fast action and danger of an arcade fighter, but, instead, it’s an exercise in creating your own adventure; Diablo II is a toy that you learn to play with on your own, and it’s a different run each time, no matter how many sorceresses, paladins, and amazons you go through.

It’s getting spooky around here.

Foundationally, Diablo II has made me think about game creation in ways no other game ever has. It’s oddly fun doing the math on how many runs I should attempt on Pindleskin or the High Council of Travincal to get a 5% chance of dropping the weapon or rune I need. Whenever I play this game I think about the odds of reaching a goal, and weigh options to decide not just what I should do next in this game, but how exactly I would build it out in my own virtual world. (Still need to start that one, though.)

Diablo II is a game of story problems, and stories, of faceless characters who become heroes despite garbage weapons and plastic armor. And you, dear player, become a hero right alongside them. To the whole gang at Blizzard North (RIP), thanks for making a game that sums up exactly what computer games should always be: windows of potential, portals to new worlds.

Friends we made along the way!

Uh oh…

Sometimes they come back! After seven years, my first (chronological) novel, Dreamsick, is finally seeing the light of day!

It’s tough to leave your dreams behind, but it’s impossible to escape everyone else’s.

Small towns aren’t small because you’re packed in tight along with the whole world. Think about the big cities where you’ll bump into bodies all the time, but they’ll be kind enough to leave your head alone. In claustrophobic country towns like Smithton, Idaho, you may not see any souls for days—but you’ll never get them out of your mind.

Jonas dreams of a world that wants to hear his stories; Claire dreams about sloughing off the weight of a lifetime of expectations; Foster dreams about mastering the mind’s eye. And Mary—well, Mary dreams about a particular tree on a particular hillside that might have grown in the wrong direction.

Read it now on Amazon–free with Kindle Unlimited, or $2.99 because that’s the cheapest I can charge for it.

Thanks for reading!

2020: By the Numbers

Here’s some stats to put the last year into personal perspective:

Video Games:

Minecraft

  • Minecraft total hours: 300
  • Minecraft Survival mode hours: 50
  • Minecraft Creative mode hours: 250
  • Minecraft stadiums built: 5 (football, baseball, basketball, track & field, aquatics)
  • Minecraft castles built: 2 (plus several minor towers/forts/royal halls)
  • Minecraft homes built: 25
  • Minecraft treehouses built: 1
  • Minecraft hot air balloons built: 1
  • Minecraft beekeepers’ houses built: 1
  • Invitations to students’ Minecraft servers: 1

Diablo 2

  • Diablo 2 total hours: 775
  • Softcore hours: 700
  • Hardcore hours: 75
  • Diablo 2 Amazon hours: 150
  • Diablo 2 Assassin hours: 50
  • Diablo 2 Barbarian hours: 50
  • Diablo 2 Druid hours: 75
  • Diablo 2 Necromancer hours: 100
  • Diablo 2 Paladin hours: 150
  • Diablo 2 Sorceress hours: 200

MECC Games

  • MECC Odell Lake hours: 7
  • MECC Odell Down Under hours: 3
  • MECC Pizza-to-Go hours: 5

All other computer/video game hours: 100

LEGOs

  • Movies made: 3
  • Houses made: 20
  • Towers made: 30
  • Robot Monsters made: 60

Sports

  • Championships won by my teams: 0
  • Playoff appearances by my teams: 2
  • Happy hours watching the Rams: 10
  • Neutral hours watching the Rams: 15
  • Sad hours of watching the Rams: 20
  • Keyboard drawers broken while watching the Rams: 1

Writing

  • Elegies written: 1
  • Manuscripts edited: 1
  • Rejections received: 3
  • Rejections pending: 12

Teaching

  • Class sections taught/managed: 22
  • College students taught/advised: 1600
  • Preschool students taught/advised: 1

Reading

My Recommendations:

  • Best nonfiction read: Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
  • Best fiction read: Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

James’s Recommendations:

  • The Mario Encyclopedia
  • The Berenstain Bears Go to the Dentist
  • The Beginner’s Bible
  • The Pokémon Essential Handbook
  • The Color Monster
  • Spend It!
  • Rhinos Don’t Eat Pancakes
  • The Very Bad Bunny
  • Fox in Socks

Visual Media

  • Movie, drama: The Irishman
  • Movie, comedy: Back to the Future
  • Television drama: Law and Order: Special Victims Unit
  • Television comedy/reality: Nathan For You
  • Television dramedy: Cobra Kai

Audio Media

  • Rock song of the Year: U2, “Bad”
  • Canadian Rock Song of the Year: Neil Young & Crazy Horse, “Cortez the Killer”
  • Pop song of the Year: Kate Bush, “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)”
  • Alternative song of the Year: The Cure, “Disintegration”
  • Short form Music Performance Video of the Year: U2, “Bad,” performed at Live Aid
  • Long form Music Performance Video of the Year: Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense

Work Emails

  • Emails received: 15,000
  • Emails answered: 51,000

Weather

  • Snow days: 0
  • Smoke days: 20

Food

  • Fast food restaurant visits: 100
  • Other restaurant visits: 10
  • Favorite self-developed meal: Mini-corn-dog-stuffed burritos
  • Weight: 165
  • Potato Diets: 1
  • Weight lost: -10 pounds

Living

  • Houses purchased: 0
  • Years in current apartment: 6
  • Years I had planned to be in current apartment: 1

Wives

  • Wives: 1
  • Wives loved: 1
  • Wives worshiped: 1
  • Wives obeyed: .5

Deities

  • Gods worshiped: 1
  • Idols installed: 100

Sleep

  • Average sleep hours: 6
  • Post-quarantine average: 7

Exercise

  • Miles run: 300
  • Miles it felt like: 3000

Day 52: All Good Things…

It’s taken me over a week to get to this point. You might attribute that to a desire for the never ending pasta pass to never end. Actually it’s just I’ve been busy and tired. Like all of you.

Here are some of the final moments of our yearlong foray into carbohydrate depravity. Final curtain call for our team of pasta fans.

Goodbye to this purple friend. The first one didn’t work right, but the restaurant was always nice about charging meals off anyway until I got corporate to send another one.

Goodbye to these salads. They’re honestly quite solid if you just want some greens and all that nonsense. I do love their dressing, but it’s pretty heavy duty. And the peppers are my favorite. Just nice to have never-ending salads to offset some of the heavy stuff.

Last meal was meatballs. Tradition trumps health. I love meatballs, despite the whole waking-up-at-3am-with-dry-mouth thing from the unholy amount of sodium in these bad boys (and, let’s be real, in EVERY SINGLE DISH at this establishment). Like, I get that things have to be shipped in frozen and all that, or sit on a shelf for a while until somebody like me comes through to eat it. But the levels of salt in all the food here are simply unreal, and that’s one thing I am absolutely not going to miss about this year.

Goodbye to all that. So many stories we found at these tables. It was a refuge from the reality of healthy meal-planning, cooking, and clean-up. It was the kind of conspicuous assumption that makes you both proud and ashamed to have been born in this great American land.

One last SECRET MENU ITEM for those of you keeping track. This is the saddest and least necessary one of them all! See, if you order meatballs on your pasta, and you just take some of the breadsticks and just shove that pork and beef sphere straight on in there, you got yourself a MEATBALL SUB. Just like grandma used to make them back in nowhere, never. Honestly, this is actually probably my best secret menu item, because this is something I would actually eat. I don’t know what that says about me at this point.

Last meals aren’t supposed to be cheery, but this one wasn’t so bad. I think about T. S. Eliot, here at the end. I think about him most of the time, but also here at the end of something. I think about that line, too–Ernest Hemingway, his story, “The End of Something,” even without the story it’s such a wonderful little captured line that I drop into so many situations, that comes up all the time. Just being able to sit there and label some piece of life, “The End of Something.” But I was going to say, before Robert Frost broke in, with all his matter-of-fact about Hemingway–I was going to say that I think of the first line in Eliot’s poem, “East Coker” a lot, and the last line. He begins it with:

In my beginning is my end.

and finishes with:

In my end is my beginning.

…and I like that because it means that time is a circle and things will always come around again and we’ll know what to do better next time. From the start we see the finish line, and from the ending, we know where we began, and we’ve come up upon it again. We start again, over and over, and end the same way all over again, somehow, but we know it when we see it this time around, we know we’ve come once again, to “the end of something.”

I like that realization because it’s not even profound, it’s just there, and it’s just true.

Eliot finishes those Four Quartets with this:

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate…

And he leaves us at the end in the beginning of the grandest mystery of them all: that we might go around this circle again and again and again and maybe one day we’ll know why:

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

And so, at the end of something just as noble and just as ridiculous as most of the things we make our lives out of, I bid thee, goodbye, friend, until we circle back around once again.


Item 1: whole-grain linguine, meat sauce, meatballs


Breadsticks: 2

Final weight: 169

Weight change: +3 pounds

(What does that say about my other eating habits?)