Life is strange is the first episodic game I've played. At first I was annoyed by the format, having to wait 2 months after each episode seemed difficult. But unlike TV-series, where each episode is no more than an hour and for the most part quite uneventful, each episode of Life is Strange takes about 2-4 hours to finish, depending on how much you explore. And as most TV-series have 10-20 episodes per season, there's quite a lot of time to fill out. Life is strange has only five episodes, and therefore each one has to contain quite a lot of story, enough to keep you satisfied during the wait for the next one.

Let me start by saying the first episode is quite slow, since it's an introduction to both the characters and the universe in which they live. You are also introduced to the core gameplay mechanic: Max's ability to manipulate time. As its been a while since I played this episode I can't remember the exact details, but I remember thinking that the episode was not really ...enticing enough to convince you to continue with episode 2. But if you do, you're rewarded with four great episodes.

The game's protagonist is a teenager named Max Caulfield. She attends Blackwell Academy, where some strange things are happening. Throughout the game we're introduced to her friends Chloe and Warren, both of whom play a big role in the story. 

It's hard to go deeper into the actual story without spoiling at least some things, therefore I won't do that. Though I will say that while the first episode makes the game seem like a typical high-school teen drama, the four other episodes will certainly make you see that few stories deliver as well as Life is Strange.

Technically this game is somewhat underwhelming. It looks like most of the graphics has a distinct "cartoony" look which works great for the environment, but not so great for the characters. 

However the worst part is undoubtedly the facial animations. The game is inherently very emotional, which is reflected well in the voice acting, but since the characters faces fails to display the emotion it often falls flat, and sometimes even look silly. Paired with non-existent lip-syncing made me often look away and just listen to the dialog. It appears Dontnod improved the lip-syncing in episode 4 and 5, to being only stiff monotonous mouth movement. In the first three episodes it often looked like the characters said something entirely different than the voice actors.

While the graphics department had some troubles, the audio department has done outstanding work in Life is Strange. The voice-acting is mostly very well executed, but what really stands out is the soundtrack, which is so perfectly matched with the environment and situations. The song below is the main theme, and it's just outstanding.

All in all this is a truly great game, which I strongly recommend. While it is a shame about the character graphics, the story, gameplay and soundtrack make up for it big time. 

Its available on most platforms, but I do recommend using a controller if you're on PC

The host I built is hosted(yes pun intended) in a mini-itx case, with a 4-core i3 CPU @3.40 GHz, with 16GB RAM and a 128 GB SSD for the hypervisor OS and some of the most used vms. I have currently installed a 1.5 TB HDD and as soon as I have migrated my current physical server to a vm I plan on fitting the 2 TB HDD from that in the new one.

For the hypervisor part I opted for Arch Linux with qemu using kvm for optimal performance. This together with webvirtmgr makes the vm management fairly painless, although not quite. Currently autostarting vms with the host is not working, due to the bridge interface not being started before the vms are started, so the start fails.

At the moment I only have one vm active, called NAS. My plan is to use this only to host files, nothing else. The server shares each users home folder using the users credentials on both scp + ftp + samba right now, which is very convenient.

EDIT: So I finally managed to get the vms to start, although it is not pretty...

I put a script  in /root/start.sh

#!/bin/bash
sleep 20;
systemctl restart libvirtd

and added this in my /etc/netctl/bridge

...
ExecUpPost="/root/start.sh"
...

So while it may not be the best solution, I will probably settle for it since it works at least.

But all good things must come to an end. And that time has come. Next on my agenda is to move all my stuff back home, a good 140 mil, which is harder than I first envisioned. The current plan is to rent a car from Avis, stuff it with stuff, drive all the way, and then return it at Sturup airport. And I recently found out that my parents would pay for the rental car as my graduation gift, which is really nice.

And while I do this I'm also working on a game together with a graphical artist which we hope should be finished by the end of August, perhaps with some bugfixing though.