Normally, if I stop regularly blogging, it’s because I’ve gotten hooked on a new MMO, and I am always fairly disappointed in myself when this happens.

I am happy to report that this is not the case.  Woo!

I’m dealing with a lot of work stress, however, and my way of handling it has been to basically get off work and then play video games until I am too exhausted to keep my eyes open, then repeat it the next day.  I also did a lot of Deep Cleaning and Organizing, which was at least productive.

Oh, and I’ve broken two teeth from grinding them.  My dentist has a daughter that is entering college next year, so at least I’m helping her tuition fund a bit.

Helping somewhat with my stress levels is sticking to getting at least a half hour on the exercise bike nightly, generally playing Overwatch.  It really is the perfect exercise bike game – you can get into matches quickly and the random cycle of king-of-the-hill to push-the-cart to assault-mode games gives a little variety.  When I am feeling really unambitious, I play the “Vs. Ai” mode on easy and just mash hapless computer opponents for a few minutes.  When I’m feeling a little more masochistic, I play Ranked mode.

That leads me to the reason I’m actually remembering to post on here, because I managed to hit a milestone that I honestly thought was completely out of reach:

I have officially graduated from “silver rank scrub” to “GOLD rank scrub” and now I will stop playing Ranked for the rest of the season so as not to lose any matches and fall back into the Silver Pit.

One very unexpected thing about playing in ranked on Xbox Live is that the people on the team who are talkative are generally positive.  I had rather assumed that it would be, you know, hive of scum and villainy and all that.  Maybe the scum and villainy are playing Apex Legends now that Overwatch is three years old.

I’ve also finished over half a dozen games since my last post and my backlog is firmly under the fifty game mark and trending downwards.  The one I’m happiest to finally knock off the shelf of shame is The Last Guardian, which I just HAD to preorder and just HAD to buy the Extra Special Version With The Statue, and which I originally got about two hours into and then stopped playing.

That probably deserves its own post.

Right now, I’m grinding my way through Tom Clancy’s The Division, which is the sort of gritty military mans-shooting game that I usually don’t find myself getting into.  It turns out that the comfortable Ubisoft formula of running around an icon-cluttered map and doing chores to clean up the map works pretty well for me, even if it’s not in one of my normal genres.