Melissa Avery-Weir 🎮 @melissa@irrsinn.life

Anyway, I don't know if I'm *good* at Beat Saber, but I do know that I like playing new-to-me custom songs, I like beating songs that are juuuuuust at the edge of my skill range, and I'm inclined to keep working at a song until I beat it.

Given all of that, I thought it might be interesting to share a map or two I was charmed or frustrated (or both) by in my session on any given day. Might even record a little video or two, although I'm still tweaking my OBS settings for this.

I acquired a Quest 2 back in September, and took to Beat Saber like a fish to water. Since early Sept, I've played ~130 hours mostly through Steam.

The timing for starting to play was great: I was in the final stretches of in-office physical therapy for my shoulders, and BS is a solid way to improve my shoulders' stamina and assess tightness. I could only play 15-20 minutes on easier difficulties when I started. Now I can play 60-90 min of Expert+ on an average (pain level) day.

I've been playing some truly awesome small indie games in the last few months. I archive my streams over at https://irrsinn.video/video-channels/melissa_channel/videos, and I work to get closed captioning on them within a week of uploading.

If you're looking for some game recs, I'd suggest checking them out. Just about all of them take between 10 min and 3 hours, so these are quite small games by conventional standards. You can subscribe to a Peertube channel w/ a Mastodon account, too.

#indiegame

An #introduction: I'm Melissa (they/them)! Some of my projects are in my bio, but in general I am and do:

#gamedev & #podcasting

#gardening #succulents #cacti

#asexual / #grayace / #queer

#polyamory #relationshipanarchy

I write. I #webdev. I play way too much Fallen London. I collect tattoos. I will not call posts "toots".

I like learning to be more imaginative in devising solutions to difficult problems. 🎊

The highlight of my last couple of sessions is definitely "a.i.ngel (Become God)" by Virtual Self (https://bsaber.com/songs/5d71/), which I stumbled upon in the Anniversary Pack playlist last night. I haven't been able to beat it on E+ yet, but holy shit, I'm having fun trying. 😁 Highly recommended. #beatsaber

I'm live on twitch! Come hang out with me while I play Can Androids Pray: Blue: https://www.twitch.tv/averymd #magic

I only did a few songs, and enjoyed both the brain issue of everything being flipped, plus the switch in difficulty. For instance, on "Balearic Pumping" (E+), it was a little easier when my right hand was doing some of the complex asymmetrical shit, but the slowness of my left arm made the cross-body swings real tough.

I guess I'll keep playing around and see where this goes. 🤷🏾‍♀️

When I started BS in Sept last year, I was doing another round of in-patient PT on my shoulders, and I couldn't complete the easiest single saber levels in the campaign tree without being in pain for hours. I had surgery on my left shoulder years ago, and if the handy too-many-stats mod is correct, it swings a full 20 km/h slower than my right arm.

Once I was in left-handed mode yesterday, though, I figured why not keep doing it? I've read about folks switching sides to get better. 😁

I only had about 35 min yesterday, so I mostly splashed around rather than practicing anything hardcore. I discovered that one of my favorite maps, "Walls Down" by MEMBA/mapped by Izzake (https://bsaber.com/songs/5332/), has a single-handed mode!

I don't normally fuck with single saber stuff, since my shoulders are already imbalanced, but I wanted to see if I could do it. (I could.)

...then I wanted to see if I could do it with my left hand. (I could.)

There are some strong Kanye influences in both the musical writing and performance, which I didn't expect. Even the politics of that era of Kanye, I guess. 🤔

Anyway, I'm glad I finally got to see it. Bryson Bruce absolutely crushed it as Hamilton, and Will T. Travis was such a good Jefferson.

So I've finally seen Hamilton. I went in rather inclined to be "meh" on it (Obama-era politics; corny delivery of rapping in the bits I'd heard), but the performers here did a really good job of making the show their own. They genuinely had style and flow, and rarely had that after-school special rhythm. 😂

The politics of a musical doing this race switcheroo are still what they are. Few bits were more jarring than these folks of color singing about abolition (historically accurate, tbf). 😬

There are some things that are still a little rough in the UI right now. Clicking to select Agents on the board actually selected the adjacent hex half the time. The autosave process unselects what you're in and changes the zoom. Sometimes when I hit "space" to end my turn, I actually changed the action my Agent was doing. 😒 Some additional clarity around where I can use certain agent actions would be nice, too.

All of that said, I'm 1000% going to keep trying this game. 🤩

Most of the important actions took a long time (13-20 turns), which was partly a result of me not focusing my skill points correctly, but partly also just the challenge of the game.

Every 10 turns, an Event happens that typically sets back the work of one of your Agents by a couplefew turns. That's rough on a 20-turn action. That extra time lets Heroes catch up to you to attack, or for rulers to notice you and put anti-Shadow shields up that undo your work.

It wasn't immediately clear to me if I should have focused up on disrupting Heroes—in part because finding where to use those more social agents' actions was most difficult—but social Agents also need bodyguards, which require money and being in cities, which are high-security.

It's a whole chain of setup that I flubbed in that first play. I'll definitely try a different approach next time.