Christmas Loot: MEAT and Caffeine and Videos Game

First of all, my sister-in-law sent us a shitload of meat from Omaha Steaks. 5 boxes of burgers, some steaks, and an assortment of other things that all came in a huge foam cooler with dry ice inside (so it smoked like some scifi nonsense when I took the lid off which was so fun I put the lid back on in order to take it off again for the effect). They had sent us some meat a few years ago when we were at a kind of bad place in our lives and had been eating almost nothing but beans and rice for several months and I cried at that time because I was just so grateful to have something more to eat. This time I didn't have to cry (we're doing better these days, thankfully) but I still felt very warm inside and was reminded that sis-in-law is a total badass and a great gifter.

My dad, who was unfortunately unable to raise me due to being in prison for ~20 years, asked me this year if I wanted one of those button panels for streaming (an El Gato Streamdeck).
I haven't actually streamed in quite a while thanks to moving to a new house with terribly slow internet, and there's not a whole lot of room on my desk even on the best of days,
so I told him I would rather have some energy drinks that are hard to get these days. I suggested Jolt Cola or Bawls, and he ordered me two crates of Bawls pretty much immediately. Its just as tasty and caffeinated as I remembered from my high school days, but I checked the website in case I wanted to order more for myself later and by god they are charging convenience retail prices rather than wholesale prices, even though almost the only way to buy them is DIRECTLY FROM THE COMPANY. $55 and shipping for 24 bottles. I don't know what their production scale is but WOW that feels incredibly expensive for ~300ml bottled soft drinks. Needless to say, I deeply appreciated his gift and am currently enjoying a nice frosty Bawls any time I want one.
In other gift news, my lovely wife gave me some dollarbucks for the Steam store and I was able to pick up the new Vampire Survivors DLC which features the characters and concepts from Among Us. I've already played a few long runs and it is all pretty fun stuff, and well enough done that I plan to once again 100% the content.

Slightly more excitingly, I acquired the "Spacer's Choice Edition" upgrade pass for The Outer Worlds. I had read that it was incredibly shitty upon release but they have had a bunch of patches and fixes now so it should be fun to run through that game once more but with a higher level cap this time.

Another intriguing selection new to my library is Voidtrain. Vehicular Survival is a favorite genre of mine, and unfortunately is not as widespread as I would like to see. Worlds Adrift, Raft, Last Oasis, and Zompiercer are the ones that come to mind at the moment but I'm sure there's at least a couple more.
Anyway, Voidtrain is definitely one of those. You're able to build, maintain, and drive a train through some kind of interdimensional triangle gates and you have to go out and collect stuff that floats around in space, and also fight off space sharks sometimes. Seems pretty neat, and I'm excited to play it finally.

Finally, I got an early access game called Zofia purely based on the fact that I saw in one of the trailers that there's an airship you can drive. I don't even know if it will be any good or not I just really wanted to drive that airship.

As for what I have been playing lately, I finally got my PC to run Cyberpunk with the 2.1 patch installed. They had implemented several changes that required a great deal more effort from the processor than ever before and I had to put in a significant amount of work to get my Threadripper to switch to Game Mode because nothing in Windows can ever be easy, simple, or work the way it was designed to the first time you try it. Anyway, Phantom Liberty is fucking fantastic and I highly recommend it if you enjoyed Cyberpunk's base game post 2.0 update.

My wife and I have also been playing Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, which has been pretty fun. Except for Borderlands 1, we have now played every Borderlands shooter together. Wonderlands takes most of the improvements that have been made to the gameplay and slaps them all together, except for the shop interfaces which are still completely abysmal and make it very easy to accidentally sell something excellent that you didn't even know you were carrying yet because you just picked up 36 pieces of probably-garbage and haven't had the energy to sort through them yet when you've just seen a convenient vending machine and felt the intense desire to empty your backpack in to it in exchange for paltry amounts of currency.

I'm sure I've forgotten something, and if I ever remember what it was I might then also remember to edit this blog entry later (but probably not, right? That's usually how it ends up working out.) I sure hope this is all right and not too much rambling since I have only just realized that I can't find a Preview Post button anywhere. Oh well, POST!