Questaholic - August 2020

What are you currently studying?
I wouldn't say I'm studying anything, as such, but I'm currently teaching myself about authentication protocols for job-related reasons. When I was at school, I double-majored in computer science and business administration.

What do you currently do for a living?
I'm a software developer at a large software company. More specifically I'm a DevOps engineer: my team works on ways to make things easier for the product developers, and I specifically help maintain our version control system and the tooling that surrounds it.

What's your favourite sport?
To watch, probably either baseball or ice hockey. To play, golf, though when I was a kid I played both hockey and lacrosse. Yes, I am a bit of a stereotype (I even say "eh"!).

If you could have any superpower other than invincibility, what would you choose and why?
Teleportation, the Jumper kind where I can go anywhere and bring other people/objects with me. I like travelling, but I hate the act of getting myself places (long drives, plane rides, etc.).

What are your favourite outdoor activities?
Well I already mentioned golf. Other than that, I sometimes enjoy hiking, depending on the location, and I like kayaking but don't do it much.

Which is your favourite movie?
I like so many movies, it's hard to pick just one. A good one that springs to mind is Clue, the 1985 film based on the board game of the same name (Cluedo in Europe), starring Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, and more. It's the sort of movie I wish was made more often: a mix of whodunnit and black comedy, with a frantic energy that keeps you hooked. A recent movie in a similar vein is Knives Out, which I also wholeheartedly recommend.

What sort of music and artists do you listen to?
I rarely listen to music for myself, but when I do I tend to go for jazz; some favourite artists include Dizzy Gillespie, Glenn Miller, Miles Davis, and Charles Mingus. If I'm in the car I'll turn the radio to a classic rock station and listen to whatever they play.

Which books would you recommend?
I'm a massive fan of the Lord of the Rings, to the point where I'm collecting not only the History of Middle-earth series, which is the twelve-volume series released by Tolkien's son chronicling the 60 years worth of drafts and rewrites to his father's mythology, but also works of literary analysis about the series (A Reader's Companion by Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull is a particular favourite). I even made a pilgrimage to New York City last year to see some of his manuscripts, on public display for the first time since 1990. So, somewhat selfishly, I would recommend those, but I understand they're not for everyone.

A more accessible book that I read recently, and that may be of interest to a broader audience, is The Irregulars by Jennet Conant. It's a non-fiction biography of Roald Dahl (the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory guy), focusing on his service in World War 2. After his RAF career ended due to illness, Dahl was a British spy stationed in Washington, DC. His mission: monitoring and subverting anti-intervenionst sentiment, with a long-term goal of influencing America into joining the war. He accomplished this task mainly by partying with Washington elites and sleeping with their wives. It's an endlessly fascinating, occasionally darkly comedic (in a very Dahl-esque way, ironically) story.

I'd also recommend The Innovators, by Walter Isaacson (who's more famous for his biography of Steve Jobs), which goes through the history of computing technology, from Ada Lovelace (considered the first computer programmer, despite dying in the 1850s) to Larry Page and Sergey Brin (the creators of Google). If you're at all curious about how we got from computers the size of small buildings to magic glowing boxes that fit in our pockets, I heartily encourage this one.

What's your favourite type of food?
I like almost all food, but my comfort food is literally meat and potatoes, of pretty much any variety.

Do you prefer mom's food or restaurant food?
Restaurant. It's not that my mother is a bad cook, because she isn't, but there's a relatively limited menu of foods she can make. Meanwhile, I enjoy not just food but variety of food (it's sort of a running joke with my SO that I almost never order the same thing twice when we eat out), so I appreciate having my options open.

What are your biggest dreams in life?
To own a house that has both a garage and a dishwasher.

My dreams aren't very exciting, I'll admit, but damn if they aren't handy.

If you could have any 3 animals in the world (only real animals, no fictional), which would you pick?
One would have to be my dog, a picture of whom I included in my introductory post on the forum. She's pretty much the cutest thing I've ever seen, and is a light in my life. I want to keep her forever.

Beyond that, I'm struggling. I already have a dog and two cats, and watching Tiger King really killed whatever desires I may have had to own anything too much more exotic than that. Can I pass? I'm going to pass.

If you had to give up one of your senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste) which one would you pick?
Touch. Obviously I'd prefer not to lose any of them, but I like food and movies/TV too much to go without any of the other four.

What's the toughest thing you've ever had to do?
I've been very lucky in my life that I haven't had to deal with much overwhelming hardship, but in terms of what I have had to struggle with...

First thing that comes to mind is probably university. I mentioned before that I double-majored, but that's a simplification: I actually did two complete degree programs, at two different schools, simultaneously (it was a cooperative effort between the two schools, so I paid tuition to one school but was considered a student at both and had to meet the graduation requirements at both). It was a five-year program, and I had essentially no "breather" classes (all of my electives in one degree were occupied by the core classes of the other). When I finished, I attended two convocation ceremonies and I have two bachelor's degrees hanging on the wall of my home office. That was a very long five years.

[Ed: *respect noises* My university offers a similar five-year program for BSc/BEng in Chemical Engineering and just looking at the schedule makes me want to sleep for a week. It's great to see that your work paid off!]

Which are your favourite childhood cartoons?
Classic Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, and the animated Spider-man show from the 60s. I'm a little odd in that I grew up watching very old television (not for any particular reason, it's just what I was exposed to); so despite being a child of the 90s, the age of Rugrats, Animaniacs, Friends, etc., all of my favourite shows from childhood ended decades before I was born.

How would you describe yourself to others?
I'm a massive, massive, massive nerd.

What is your most used item in your daily life?
Aside from my phone or my laptop, which feel like cop-out answers, I'm going to go with my coffee maker. Especially since I'm working from home (and therefore not taking advantage of the free coffee in the office), I'm making a fresh pot of coffee pretty much every other day.

....wow, that sounds really bad when I write it out like that. Maybe I have a problem...

Nah, it's probably fine.

What's your favourite skill in Runescape?
Maybe this is a cliche answer, since it just came out, but Archaeology. I play the game for the narrative elements (that's what attracted me to Clan Quest in the first place), so I skill as a means to an end: I want the next quest requirement, or the next MQC requirement, or whatever. Archaeology is the only skill I enjoy training on its own merits. That doesn't mean it's perfect, there are valid criticisms to make about how grindy and AFK it is, and I don't love the pay-to-win aspects (especially Chronotes being both buyable on the GE and directly tradeable for experience), but I like how the narrative is woven into the fabric of the skill. There are the mysteries, obviously, which are great, but also the background storytelling in the environment design, the artefacts and their descriptions, even the examine texts.

What's your favourite quest in Runescape?
I don't know who I'm doing this bit for, but this is now the third time I've been asked this question on the site, and every time I've given a different answer. I'm doing this on purpose because there are, at time of writing, almost 230 quests in the game, all of which I've completed (though not all of which I remember very well; I did some of them over a decade ago), and many of which are truly excellent either in whole or in part; picking a single favourite out of that feels impossible.

In the past I've said Blood Runs Deep (and the entire Fremennik quest series by proxy) and Desperate Times (for a particular sequence; I acknowledge and agree with many of the criticisms of the quest), but today I'm going to say The Lord of Vampyrium. The Myreque quest series was one I greatly enjoyed when I first became a member, back in the halcyon days of 2006, partly because it was very different: it was a grungy horror-movie affair, in contrast to the medieval high fantasy of the rest of the game. I was always sad that I never got to finish it (I took a long hiatus from the game starting in 2013ish, and I didn't have the stats for Darkness of Hallowvale at the time). So it was nice to finally achieve the overarching goal of killing Lord Drakan, even if that didn't end the conflict. But LoV also did two other things that I think make it unique among quests.

First, it did an excellent job of keeping the tension high as Drakan chases you through his castle. Runescape rarely a sense of urgency, which can really take the air out of scenes that require that sort of tension. But LoV did a very good job of averting that feeling.

Second, the boss fight against Lord Drakan. I've heard a lot of people complaining about how hard it is, but I think that's because it makes more of an effort to level the playing field. Unlike other tough fights (Nomad, Sliske, etc.) you can't rely on equipment, or familiars, or potions to a lesser extent (you can apply them before you enter the fight, but you can't use them inside), so it feels like more of a challenge, but a very fair one. That's always kind of bugged me about PVM in Runescape, probably because I'm pathologically opposed to buying gear, and even more so to degradable equipment, and a lot of PVM feels like they're expecting you to have all of this endgame equipment I either can't use, can't afford, or don't want to buy: overloads, titan pouches, yak pouches, T80-90 kit, etc. In contrast, because you're so restricted in the Drakan fight, it feels like more of a skill challenge than a game of who has the most cash. For the same reason, I appreciated that the limited food supply was free, meaning failed attempts didn't cost anything. Until very recently I wasn't able to make any food more nourishing than monkfish, so any boss where I had to use sharks, or Guthix help me brews, was very expensive to attempt let alone to fail and re-try. I shudder to think how much Nomad cost me.

Which are your favourite games?
I would say that Mass Effect 2 takes the top spot, with the rest of the trilogy (3, then 1) sprinkled in there. Other than that, I've greatly enjoyed the Assassin's Creed series (especially 2 and Black Flag; I haven't played past Unity), the Arkham series (especially Arkham City), and a few entries in the Legend of Zelda series, notably Ocarina of Time (one of the first games I ever had) and Breath of the Wild.

Some other notables include Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Spider-man 2: The Movie: The Game (not to be confused with The Amazing Spider-man 2: The Movie: The Game; I mean the GameCube-era one), and the Knights of the Old Republic series. I don't know if I'd consider them "favourites", but I also have major soft spots for the LEGO Star Wars games and the Banjo-Kazooie series.

What are your favourite video game genres?
Based on my answer to the last question, I guess I'd have to say Western RPG, Superhero Sandbox, and whatever you'd consider the 3D Zelda games (Action/Adventure/Dungeon Crawler?). That seems pretty fair to me.

Which was the most difficult video game you ever beat?
Splinter Cell, the first one (I don't really play many hard games). Stealth games trip me up because the more mistakes I make the more flustered I get, and then I just make more and more mistakes. So Splinter Cell isn't really what you'd call a super-hard game, but it was tough for me.

What's the toughest thing you've ever accomplished in a video game?
I'm not sure what I'd classify as tougher, but several Runescape boss fights come to mind: especially both Nomads, Sliske, and Seiryu. My SO and I have also been playing Crash Bandicoot recently (the Nintendo Switch re-release), and some of those levels I think should qualify.

When playing with friends, do you prefer video games or tabletop games, and why do you prefer one over the other?
Tabletop. I primarily play video games for narrative, and narrative is either negligible in multiplayer games or very much not improved by multiplayer gameplay (looking at you, Assassin's Creed Unity). Also, when I do play multiplayer video games, I tend to get either frustrated with my lack of skill (in competitive games) or anxious that I'm letting people down (in cooperative games). With board games, which typically have more of an element of luck, I feel more able to relax and just enjoy the company of friends.