Before we dive into the meat of this post, I feel that a little housekeeping and contextualization couldn’t hurt. This is the Spotlight, a new feature I’m launching here on The Bonus World. It used to be that whenever I’d do anything tangentially related to my hobbies I’d find a way to turn it into a piece of content for this website. As time wore on however, I felt that impulse to transcribe any meandering thought into an article diminish significantly.

The Spotlight is effectively part newsletter and part blog post. It’s meant to encapsulate what’s been going on in the TBW orbit for the past month. Games played, articles read, movies watched, an so on and so forth, The Spotlight is intended to be the big bucket that everything falls into. So here’s the bucket, hopefully you enjoy digging through it.

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Welcome to the Spotlight, a monthly recap of what’s been going on in my particular corner of nerdiness. Whether it’s a rundown of great or miserable gaming experiences I’ve had, movies or television shows that I found engrossing, books, albums — truly anything I can recommend, it’ll be here in the Spotlight. With this being the first one of these, I’m going to cover both January and February of 2024, mostly because at this point I can’t differentiate between the events of each respective month.

Let’s dive in.

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Games

Baldur’s Gate 3

Starting with a big one, Baldur’s Gate 3 continues to be an obsession of mine, although I can feel its grip on me starting to loosen. I thought I did a pretty good job of combing through everything during my first playthrough of the game, but surprising no one else but me, it turns out there’s a lot of hidden goodies left to find and experience.

I will say though, I’m finding it a little hard to muster up the enthusiasm to progress the story forward. Knowing what the main beats are already and being overly familiar with the fights and locations I’ll have to trudge through doesn’t exactly fill me with excitement to experience that stuff again. It’s a tremendous game with great story, but I have so little interest in emptying the Goblin Camp or navigating the Shadowlands ever again.

What I am curious to see is how long until the Baldur’s Gate 3 community goes all Skyrim on me, and creates total conversion mods that reshape the bones of this spectacular game into a completely different experience altogether. It’s bound to happen at some point, especially considering that official mod support is on the way. I think putting BG3 on the shelf for now makes sense, even midway through my current playthrough, that way I won’t burn out on it completely and never return to it.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

Back in the middle of January, I was looking for something I could really sink some time into that wasn’t Baldur’s Gate 3. Coincidentally, I had heard pretty phenomenal things about Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, a search-action game that, by all accounts, was a “must play” for 2024. If you’re deeply into the search-action genre of games then there’s definitely something here for you, but I was left feeling a little cold from the whole experience.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown isn’t a bad game, it just never clicked with me. I found it overly punishing to a degree that really thwarted my willingness to explore and go off the beaten path. In some of the tighter platforming sections, I had a lot of difficulty getting the controls to feel responsive. I know I’m getting older, but I’m not ready to blame my failures at safely navigating enemy-free areas on my old bones and wavering reflexes.

I’m sure that I’m in the minority on this, but I just didn’t have a ton of fun with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. It’s also worth mentioning, it’s basically a full priced game, retailing for 50 bucks which might be a little steep for what you’re getting, but that’s an entirely subjective matter and I get that, so your mileage may vary.

Fall of Porcupine

Fall of Porcupine is the most Night in the Woods-ass looking game since Night in the Woods. Talking animals? Check. An fun art style that makes you think that the subject matter couldn’t possibly be that dark? Check. A lot of talking to seemingly depressed anthropomorphic animals who seem to be trapped in the day-to-day drudgery of modern life? Yeah, that’s there too. It’s eerily similar to Night in the Woods, one of my favorite video games ever, except for that Fall of Porcupine isn’t very good.

Truly heartbreaking for me, but this game doesn’t hold a candle to Night in the Woods. But I can’t just keep comparing it to that game, so here’s what’s up with Fall of Porcupine. You play as a pigeon named Finley who recently moved into a small town named Porcupine where you just started your residency at the local hospital. The game is supposed to shed light on the mental, emotional, and sometimes physical turmoil our healthcare workers experience, which is absolutely a story I’d like to play through. But from the jump, the game exposes itself to be this overly verbose, meandering and listless experience, where nothing makes sense and everyone talks way too much about nothing.

I know that’s a weird criticism to drop on an adventure game, but everyone, especially your main character, talks way too much about everything. Not one ounce of subtext remains as Finley will tell you in excruciating detail his conflicted feelings about the offerings in a vending machine. It’s brutal and the game isn’t great about letting you quickly breeze through dialogue. Everyone pontificates about nothing for so much longer than they need to, and it’s such a slog.

I can’t even tell you if it gets better though, because after about an hour of playing Fall of Porcupine, I’ve reached a point in the game where I need to go to a certain part of the hospital, and every time I reach the first floor, the game crashes. I would love to know if Fall of Porcupine gets any better, and I would probably see it through regardless if it just could hold together long enough for me to do so. I guess I’ll never know.

A Little to the Left

To me, there’s nothing like a good “vibes” game. That doesn’t necessarily mean it makes you feel good, but the overall atmosphere and gameplay are just really pleasant. A Little to the Left is absolutely one of these games, even if it occasionally veers off into obtuse puzzle territory from time to time.

A Little to the Left is a puzzle game about organizing household items, sometimes to an excessive degree. The game starts simple enough, having you adjust some crooked picture frames and put some cat toys back into the wicker basket they came from. Several puzzles even have numerous ways to complete them, reflecting different organizational impulses, one of which involves a shelf of multicolored books of varying sizes. The game accounts for several gut reactions for organizing, and will accept organizing them by color or size. Once you complete the level it’ll let you know that there was another way to do it, so you can go back and tackle it again.

Things get a little weirder later into the game, where the granularity of the items you’re organizing is kind of odd — at least to me. Several levels involve you finding room for single thumbtacks, a gold tooth, and a handful of bent nails. That last one strikes me more as an opportunity for throwing it away rather than finding a way to fit it into your life. Like, when am I going to need a bent nail? A lot of the later levels feel nonsensical in relation to the overall organizing theme, because more often than not it’s a smokescreen for a pattern recognition puzzle dressed up as tidying your home.

All things considered, A Little to the Left is a chill puzzle game that isn’t too taxing. Despite being available on the Xbox, I’d suggest doing this one either on PC or mobile purely because interacting with this game via a controller isn’t spectacular.

Brotato

The first time I booted up Brotato I thought it was a stupid game with bad art. While my opinion of the art hasn’t really changed, I was eventually won over and pleasantly surprised to find a game that played into my love for Vampire Survivors without being a carbon copy. Just like Vampire Survivors, Brotato is an auto-shooter that’s focused on random drops that upgrade weapons and stats that you can then use to make your potato person more deadly and effective against the ever growing onslaught of weird alien enemies.

In Brotato, you start a run by picking a particular potato character from a list of well over 20 potatoes. Each of these guys has stat bonuses, specialties and in some cases, significant drawbacks. You’ll get guys with no armor but incredible health regeneration rates, or classes that can only use melee or explosive items. You pick your opening weapon and difficulty, and square off against your first wave of enemies. Once the wave ends you can buy new or upgrade weapons or bump up your stats if you’ve leveled up during the wave. That’s kind of it, really.

While Brotato can be tough, I found it to be an overall kinder and gentler game than Vampire Survivors is. While the art never won me over, the gameplay certainly did. If you like auto-shooters, maybe give this one a whirl.

Enshrouded

Enshrouded is a game that by all accounts I should not enjoy, but I really do. It’s one of those stick and rock games that has you punching trees to collect resources and what have you, but it quickly reveals itself to be something much different than your run-of-the-mill survival game.

The core conceit of Enshrouded is that the world is covered in these pockets of “shroud,” which is basically an area where zombies and other baddies are spawned from and hang out. These zones range in deadliness, with the earlier and easier versions just slowly ticking away at your health, while the worse ones will just insta-kill you the moment you step inside of it. How do you avoid that? Unsurprisingly, the answer is crafting. But in a shocking twist, it isn’t just crafting.

Enshrouded is a very lightweight survival game, which is probably why I enjoy it so much. The core idea is that if you engage with the survival mechanics, you’ll find it to be exclusively additive rather than punitive. For instance, drinking water just makes your stamina meter bigger, and food makes your health bar larger and helps with regeneration. Not engaging with that stuff isn’t a death sentence like it is in other survival games, it’s just something that only helps you.

Aside from the light survival mechanics it’s also a decently fun action game. Fighting enemies in these kinds of games is usually a slog, rewarding the items you bring into a fight more than your ability to fight. So if you crafted a better sword than your enemy, you can just hold the attack button and whittle away more of their health than they can of yours. Enshrouded is not like that. Combat feels good and weapons have some weight to them. There’s also a good dodge roll that allows you to tumble around your enemies like some sort of bootleg Dark Souls game.

I haven’t dug too deeply into Enshrouded just yet, but I’ve really enjoyed what little I’ve played of it thus far. It’s a game that’s interested in letting you explore the world and spec out your character however you want with a wide variety of skill upgrade paths for you to explore. A lot of survival games I’ve played in the past felt like they were more interested in me building a safe zone where I could be sustainable, whereas Enshrouded feels more about exploring and fighting bad guys.

Ultimately I think Enshrouded is great and I can’t wait to see how it evolves over the course of its early access period.

Warioware: Move It!

I don’t know about you, but I love myself a good Warioware game, and Warioware: Move It! is a very good one of those. There isn’t a ton to say about this one other than it’s got a lot of fun and sometimes inscrutable micro-games that come at you fast and furious.

My partner and I played the hell out of Warioware: Move It! for the few sessions it took us to completely annihilate it, save for a handful of micro-games that are, in my professional opinion, absolute poppycock. The fidelity of the Joy-Con motion controls aren’t great which led to a lot of my frustration, but they were good enough to get us through 90% of the game without issue.

Warioware: Move It! is great and if you’ve liked those games in the past, you’ll enjoy this one too. Oh, also I should mention, if your body is like mine and is constantly betraying you and making new and horrifying noises everyday, try to remember that the game is tracking the movement of the controllers and not your actual human bodies. There is a particular micro-game that was responsible for me throwing out my back, twice, because it encouraged me to dodge something as if I were Neo in the Matrix. So look out for that one.

Return to Grace

Return to Grace is a first-person adventure game that tells the story of a space traveling archaeologist named Adie as she goes out in search of the titular Grace, an AI god who went mysteriously went dormant centuries ago. In the most reductive terms, Return to Grace is a walking simulator that, for better or worse, has a lot to say.

That isn’t a knock on the actual content of the story of Return to Grace, which I think is pretty decent for what it’s worth, but quite literally, this 2 to 3 hour adventure game is mostly about listening to dialogue, whether it be in the form of the many bickering AI fragments of Grace you meet along the way, or the dozen or so audio logs you find throughout the retro-futurist facility you’re exploring.

Exploring the abandoned facility in Return to Grace feels a lot like how I would imagine it would feel to wander through a long abandoned Rapture from Bioshock. It’s unnerving being the only living soul walking around this gigantic (for lack of a better term), space station. This place served as the holy site for all of Grace’s followers from across the galaxy, but there isn’t a body or skeleton to be found. It’s the visual presentation of Return to Grace that really does a great job of engaging you with its mystery and really goes a long way to keeping you on the narrative hook.

But for all of my praise for Return to Grace, it has one massive shortcoming: it’s an absolute slog to play. You’d think that the story wasn’t well written or paced or something to that effect, but it’s none of those things that ultimately slow Return to Grace to a crawl, it’s outrageously stupid gameplay decisions that kill any momentum you start to build. In a game about walking, talking and inspecting things, you would expect to be able to do some of those actions simultaneously.

Truly the cardinal sin of Return to Grace is how often it stops you from doing anything until dialogue is over, and like I said earlier, this game is 99% talking. Those AI fragments of Grace have a lot to say, and bicker constantly. Should they be doing that while you want to open a door, that’s too bad for you. Even worse, if you decide to listen to an audio log, you’re not even allowed to move at all. You just have to stare at your fancy wristwatch as an audio file plays at you. It feels like the developers didn’t want you to miss any dialogue, so they ensured that you couldn’t by stifling your ability to move forward.

Return to Grace‘s biggest strength is in its storytelling, but it suffers dramatically in the act of telling you that story. Because of this weird limitation in your actions, this 2 hour game effectively doubles because your character is incapable of listening and opening a door at the same time. Even with that though, I still think Return to Grace is worth playing or at least watching a playthrough of. Sure, the story it’s telling walks through some well-worn territory, but it’s still effective in how it does it. Just know that this is a game that you cannot rush, no matter how hard you might try.

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Role for Initiative

Updates from the Campaign

A little while back, my TTRPG group and I finally wrapped up our 2+ year long Eberron campaign that much to my dismay, didn’t have the narrative payoff I was hoping for. We were pressed for time and at a weird spot, so I had to basically cut a boss fight in half and rush through a lot of stuff — but we had fun nonetheless. Shortly after that campaign ended we pivoted into our latest one, took a long break because someone (me) had to move, and eventually picked back up.

I found that between moving and job searching, having to write an entire campaign from scratch was going to be a nonstarter, so I opted to run the very well-received anthology book, Keys From the Golden Vault, as a campaign. Me being me, however, I decided to write a whole-ass story to exist in parallel to the missions in the book. Honestly though, I’m finding this story to be infinitely more coherent and engaging than my previous one.

Additionally, I feel as if I’m doing a much better job of taking my hands off the wheel in this campaign than I did in our last one. At some point in our last campaign, I kind of wanted the story to end and was maybe a bit more obvious about which thing they could do would advance the story. I’m sure I’ll get around to telling some of the weird stories about our current campaign, like the time one our characters used a dead body to mulch their garden, or how one of my players is 2 for 2 on ending up in a jail during a mission, but now isn’t that time.

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Watch List

Modern Family

At the time of writing this, I think my partner and I are pretty close to rounding the corner on the tenth season of Modern Family and begin its eleventh and final one. Despite being around for 11 seasons, this is the first time I’ve ever watched any of it, and to be honest, I think it’s a pretty funny yet flawed show that’s just endearing enough to keep me from tuning out completely.

My chief complaint lies in the fact that while there’s a lot of character growth that’s implied to be happening at the end of just about every episode, none of the characters ever seem to stop engaging in the toxic behaviors that we’ve just spent an entire episode witnessing. From season to season the characters never actually learn the lessons of their past and continue to act like caricatures of themselves, continuously neglecting and manipulating one another. Most of the conflicts in these episodes could simply be resolved with marginally better communication, and it’s very frustrating to watch that theme be so pervasive throughout the dozens and dozens of episodes we’ve watched.

That kind of lack of growth normally bothers me in long-running shows. I tuned out of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia a few seasons in because I found none of the main characters redeeming at all. No one grew or learned a lesson, they were consistently shitty to each other and everyone they met, and I felt like I could never root for these people, because they’re ultimately bad people. Modern Family does just about everything I didn’t like about It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, except I think it has a lot of heart that makes it incredibly endearing. At the end of the day, they prioritize their family and make the right decision, even if by the next episode they’re just pulling the same shit again.

The other real sticking point for me is how haphazardly the show adopts and abandons plot points and characters. Maybe it’s intentional, but it feels hilariously sitcom-esque in how new characters and plot devices are constantly rotating in and out. For example, there’s an episode about a character having a job interview that goes hilariously badly, but in the end they still get the position. It’s been like 15 episodes and that has not been addressed again. Does that person have a job? It sure seemed like it, but I’ve yet to see that come back into play.

For all of my kibitzing though, it has proven to be a consistently enjoyable show for my partner and I to veg out on the couch and watch, even if it does mostly serve as background noise these days. The jokes still land and we still laugh. I am scared for what we’ll do once we exhaust all 11 seasons though, because we have a tough time agreeing on things to watch.

Trial By Fieri: An Ill-Advised LTTP Randomized Run

This is probably going to be a theme in these Spotlights going forward, but I’m a big fan of the McElroy Family and a lot of their content, including the very funny Trial By Fieri: An Ill-Advised LTTP Randomized Run. To break the title down for those who just see a jumble of nonsensical words, Trial By Fieri: An Ill-Advised LTTP Randomized Run, is a randomized playthrough of the Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past, where all of the items and enemies have been jumbled up, and Link has been replaced with an excellent Guy Fieri sprite that dies in one hit.

If any of what I’ve said sounds remotely interesting to you, then I heartily encourage you to check it out. Despite having watched it before, I find it to be excellent background noise for when I’m playing a game or half-focusing on something else.

The Daily Show

Not since Jon Stewart retired back in 2015 have I watched an iota of The Daily Show, not because I doubted it was still a decent show, but because I couldn’t really imagine anyone but Jon Stewart behind that desk. That was then and this is now. Jon Stewart is back, only if it’s just on Mondays, and I couldn’t be happier. I’ve always liked Jon Stewart and his interpretation of current events, and it’s good to see him back in the saddle. Here’s hoping that he does more than just Mondays at some point.

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Listening Party

The Artist in the Ambulance – Revisited

If you ask me, 2003 was an excellent year for music. I twas jam-packed with some of my favorite albums of all time, from Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief, The Postal Service’s Give Up, Fall Out Boy’s Take this to your Grave, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s Take Them On, On Your Own, Brand New’s Deja Entendu, and of course, The Artist in the Ambulance by Thrice.

Twenty years later, Thrice decided it would be super cool to remind every fan of that album about the passage of time and our mortality by rerecording and releasing the whole dang thing with some help from some other musicians. Wouldn’t you know it, these 40+ year old men still have got it. This album has always ripped and continues to do so even in its rerecorded state.

Not many things from 2003 have aged particularly well. The Artist in the Ambulance – Revisited is certainly one of the more pleasant time capsules you could open up, granted you’re into that kind of music. Regardless though, 2003 was crazy good for music. Seriously, look at this list, I’m sure you’ll find something excellent.

The Adventure Zone Versus Dracula

I told you that this McElroy Family stuff was probably going to be a consistent theme throughout a lot of these posts, so here we are again. The Adventure Zone Versus Dracula is the latest D&D 5e campaign that the McElroy Family is running, and it’s an absolute laugh-riot.

For the uninitiated, The Adventure Zone is a podcast where the three McElroy brothers and their father play role-playing games together, the first arc of which, called “Balance,” being my favorite campaign by far. It’s ebbed in quality and won’t gel with everyone, especially considering the group’s, “rules-light”, approach to playing games. The priority is telling a fun story over stringently adhering to the rules, which I find to be a great on-ramp for TTRPG-curious folks.

I’ve had a pretty complicated history with The Adventure Zone and a lot of the campaigns they’ve run, often times feeling a lack of grounding or sense of place. In the past I’ve felt that some of the game systems they’ve used in the past weren’t particularly interesting to listen to people play or weren’t conducive to the kind of story they were trying to tell, which is why the return to 5e was somewhat comforting.

I approached this campaign with cautious optimism, but was immediately won over within minutes of the first episode. Not only is it hysterical, but the players have excellent chemistry with each other and just enough familiarity with the game that they’re playing that keeps the pace of play and jokes nice and quick without letting the show from getting bogged down in rule clarifications. The setting and story are fantastic, and I’ve yet to feel overwhelmed by the information that DM Griffin McElroy has doled out thus far.

As of writing this, only a handful of episodes are out, so maybe the quality falls off a cliff or something. But as it stands, I think I’ve listened to that first episode about a half a dozen times, and it still hasn’t gotten old. If you’re looking for a D&D flavored way to kill an hour, I’d give the first episode of The Adventure Zone Versus Dracula a listen.

My Horrible Upstairs Neighbors

If you’re a fan of silence and quiet contemplation, then I’d recommend you don’t actually listen to my horrible upstairs neighbors. I’ve never met these people, which is honestly a good thing cause I don’t think I’d have anything nice to say, but they seem like some of the most inconsiderate folks around.

I’ve identified two of them based on the noises they make. There’s what I presume to be a teenager in school, because the noise they make tends to stop occurring during school days from like 7am to 3pm, and another who doesn’t show up until later in the day, who apparently does everything in their apartment in the clackiest heels you’ve ever heard. Together I think they have bowling ball dropping competitions or practice juggling hammers, and we get front row seats to that every night.

They drop a lot of stuff, they have either one or seventy small yappy dogs, the teenage one may or may not be a streamer because they play video games in the most over-the-top fashion I’ve ever heard of, ever. I legitimately thought there was an actual problem at first cause all I would hear through the ceiling was someone shouting, “Help me. Save me. Stay away,” and other things of that ilk. Soon it was followed by taunting other players or screaming for revives in a way that let me know that they were just a HARDCORE GAMER who occasionally uses some pretty miserable language.

If you’re wondering why I’m writing about this at all, let me just provide some context here and say that my office is directly underneath where the uber-gamer does their thing, and they may or may not be doing it right now. Ultimately, the saddest part about this whole experience is that they aren’t the worst neighbors we’ve had.

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The Rest

Piranesi

Turns out that they make books that aren’t just reference materials for running TTRPGs. I know that because I’m actively reading one of these books, and there isn’t even a single goblin in it — yet. Piranesi is a very tough book to describe, but at its basest form, it’s a fantasy novel unlike anything I’ve ever read before.

The titular Piranesi is an inhabitant of this massive, seemingly endless 3 story mansion boasting decadent halls filled with marble statues and little else. It is written as a series of diary entries that this man is making as he chronicles his days and expeditions into more unknown sections of this endless mansion.

It’s been a while since I’ve engaged with a piece of media that’s hooked me in purely on my curiosity alone, but Piranesi truly has me in its clutches. I want to know more about literally everything that’s happening in this world, which may or may not be a bad thing to some extent. The early portions of this book are a bit of a tough read purely because of how ephemeral everything feels. There’s very little to ground yourself with because everything is being described by someone who may or may not have any understanding of the real world, if there even is one in the fiction of this book.

While I’m still not done with it, I’ve heard it eventually gets to the, “I can’t stop going,” point and really pays off. A few chapters in though, and I’d gladly recommend the one fiction book I’ve read in the past 5 years to anyone who would ask. Although I guess technically my many TTRPG books are fiction.

A+ Certification

I’ve been studying up for my A+ certification test for a few weeks now and boy let me tell you, there is no more miserable feeling than voluntarily watching the rug be pulled out from underneath you. I thought I had a decent grasp on technology, not an extensive or particularly great one, but a decent one. I’ve built computers, I’ve troubleshooted lots of hardware, software and network issues in the past, so I thought I wouldn’t be too far behind when it came to pivoting onto this career path.

It turns out that I knew absolute bupkis before and somehow know less now. Despite hours of reading and researching, tutorials and study guides, the internet to me is basically invisible magic what sometimes makes pornography appear. Seriously, 75% percent of what I’ve learned so far has been jumbled mess of letters and numbers. LDAP, 802.11, 802.3, TELNET, SCADA, DMARC, plenum-rated cables, subnets, octets — there’s so much of this that it feels borderline impossible to learn.

It’s overwhelming and time consuming but it’s also what I want to do professionally. I’ve spent a lot of my life meandering and not committing to anything career-wise, but this is the first time in a while that I’ve felt consistently motivated to fight through those instincts that are shouting at me to “just quit.” It isn’t just about getting my career going so I can maybe be in a better financial situation, but it’s about proving to myself that I’m capable and smart. So it’s back to the IT mines for me.

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News

The Riffmaster

They’re making a new plastic guitar for Fortnite. While not a player of Fortnite, I do play a lot of Clone Hero, and my Guitar Hero 3 Les Paul guitar finally stopped working, so I think I’m legally required to buy this thing whenever it comes out.

Xbox, Everywhere

What’s that behind you? It’s an Xbox. Making a sandwich? That’s not ham, that’s an Xbox. Getting frisky with your partner? That’s actually them, but there will be an Xbox in the corner, watching. There will be an Xbox everywhere, even if it’s on a PlayStation.

Baldur’s Gate 3: The Toxic Community

Oh look, another story about a fan base harboring some truly repugnant figures who just can’t seem to not harass the developers of a game they claim to love because a feature isn’t in the game yet. Seriously, what’s wrong with these folks?

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Thanks for checking out The Spotlight. We’ll be back at the end of March with another installment. Consider subscribing to The Bonus World so you can get an email updating you whenever we publish something new.