Yup, it's WRUP time yet again. I have been bad at paying attention to news this week so I don't have much for you. I'm also headed to a job today so I need to actually make this fairly short unlike last weekend. So let's get to it then.

We have all seen Ubisoft and a couple of other companies jump on the NFT game garbage train and for a little bit there it looked like GSC Gameworld, the studio behind the upcoming, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, was planning to auction off some valueless blockchain B.S. NFT that for some reason isn't criminal... It's a weird ass thing to try and understand. Anyway, GCS Gameworld is backing down from the stealing of people's... money?... I guess... via auctioning off images that represent some "metahuman NPC" that can be re-auctioned as many times as possible until a certain time or some meaningless shit. Crypto is fucking stupid. If you think you're mining cryptocurrency to get away from the bank system and regulation but you still store your garbage money in a place built for that (eg. crypto.com) because you know that cryptocurrency is in fact wildly insecure - it's still a bank. And guess what, to be able to legally have a location where the exchange of money can take place, digital or not, you need to have permits and licenses that are issued by the government. You're fooling yourself if you think it's some kind extra-monetary source of income. It's always traded for whatever the local currency is going for, be it Euros or Dollars or what have you. It's dumb, don't do it. Your wallet is likely to be hacked or you type an extra letter in an exchange address and, poof, all your "hard earned" fake valueless money is gone.  More on the actual subject here from Ars

Tencent is acquiring the parent company of Turtle Rock Studios. I only noticed this because I've been playing Back 4 Blood and pretty soon it'll be yet another Tencent game, though the news from The Verge reports that Turtle Rock will remain independent it it's control and operations. I can imagine the moment B4B starts to underperform that Tencent will step in and call it free to play and start charging money for skins and crap.

This is a very cynical WRUP today. I'm not sure if I woke up on the wrong side or what. I don't feel like that. I think it's just that reading that Ars bit got me to thinking about how scummy crypto really is.

What are we playing?

Greywolfe: i've gotten back into greedfall. it's a laid back sort of game that you can take at your own pace and for me, that's meant playing a quest a day [because the quests can be a little involved and take you all over the place.] - apart from that, i'm about to finish a slew of other games. ff2 is done [and will be replaced by skully], but the lurking horror will also finish tomorrow. [i just have to do a run to get some boots to finish it off.] and that will be replaced by space quest 5. after that, who knows?

Scrooloose: The usual stuff. Deep Rock Galactic and Back 4 Blood have their holiday specials up and running. B4B could do with a lot of balance changes, but it's fun content if a bit stereotypical. I still want to get back to SnowRunner too; I keep putting it off for whatever reason.