Observation : most people would consider “crappy” and “cruddy” to be synonyms and yet if you told people you needed to “take a crud” they would look at you funny.

There’s a deep lesson about language in there somewhere, I am sure.

Anyhow, I am feeling extra excremental today. Woke up feeling more terrible than usual and realized my throat was sore and my chest felt heavy and there was an ache that went from the bottom of my throat all the way up my eustachian tubes into my ears.

So maybe I am coming down with something. I hope not, not only because being sick sucks (obviously) but because I am still an immuno-compromised sickie and even minor illnesses can blossom into something truly horrid like pneumonia with me.

So I am keeping an eye on things. Paying close attention to my symptoms to see if they start getting precipitously worse so I can get my sorry tuckus to the ER if they do.

Not going to dick around with potential pneumonia this time. The last time, the time when I ended up on oxygen in the hospital for ten days, by the time I actually decided things were bad enough to warrant a trip to the ER, my blood oxygen was so low that the nurses checked to make sure the machine was working properly.

Is it weird that I find that story funny now? Like it’s just another of my wacky hijinks. I suppose that’s better than being crushed by fear as a result but it still seems like there must be something wrong when your response to nearly dying is a fit of the giggles.

I guess it’s an extension of that “emergency mode” response I have mentioned before. A mode that clicks in when I feel like I am in real danger, like when I had a low blood sugar incident when I was downtown at VFS, and had to very carefully pilot my failing body to my fave sandwich shop and buy a life-saving cookie and eat it.

And on the one hand, on one level, I was very calm and careful and did exactly what I needed to do to get myself out of the situation.

But on another level, I was laughing hysterically on the inside. I was like, “uh oh, guess I’m in trouble now!” and then laughing like a demented hyena on nitrous.

Again, better than having a total breakdown, but a long long way from normal.

Makes me wonder if somewhere in me is a potential adrenaline junkie. Someone that gets a huge thrill out of danger, like the title character from Archer, and could have ended up living a very, very different kind of life.

Hopefully I will never know. Both because I would rather not be in that kind of danger and because I am pretty sure that version of me would be a horrible human being.

That’s the side of me that identifies with The Joker way, way too much.

I uh, don’t like that side of me very much.

But he exists for a reason : to be a focal point for all my darkness.

It’s easier to manage that way.

More after the break.

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The Robot War

And not the fun kind with Mick Foley or that guy that played Lister.

I’m not great with names. I mean, it took real effort for me to memorize the names of the cast of my favorite sitcom, Night Court, and I still can’t recall the name of the guy who played Mac the court clerk.

Something…. Robinson, maybe? ^[1]

Anyhow. Yanking myself back to the topic like a bad comic getting the hook in Vaudeville, in Fallout 76 I have finally run out of ways to dick around and had to launch my assault on Alpha Base and all its robots so I could launch a goddamned nuke.

I don’t even want to launch one. It accomplishes little and will no doubt raise phantoms of weird Cold War guilt in this overworked brain of mine.

But it’s all I’ve got left to do. I’ve sucked the whole game dry otherwise.

And I was all prepared to keep fighting for as long as it took… or thought I was, anyhow. Had almost 2000 rounds for my beloved .50 caliber machine gun, the Final Word. Plenty of plasma cores for my Plasma Gatling. My trusty Super Sledge for the kinds of problems you can solve by hitting them with a rocket powered sledgehammer.

And lots of Stimpaks for healing.

The sledge was the first to go. Should have brought backup melee weapons. My guy (in his current form) is very good at the hitting things very hard until they die.

Then I ran out of ammo for the Plasma Gatling, which I was using as my main weapon because I wanted to save the Final Word for whatever godawful monstrosity they were going to throw at me at the end of this battle.

So inevitably, I was running out of ammo for the Final Word. You can go through 2000 rounds pretty fast, it turns out. So I decided to risk leaving Alpha Base to get more ammo, Stimpaks, and hopefully some Fusion Cores to keep my power armor going.

Do not want to be fighting legions of killer robots without being a walking tank.

It was a risk to leave because I am not sure all my progress was saved. The game can be a real bitch about that. That’s why I was hoping to do it all in one long assault.

But it turned out not to matter because the fucking game crashed when I tried to leave. And I almost certainly lost all my progress when the game closed.

So I am kinda bummed about that. But at least when I do it all again, I will know to bring even more ammo and multiple melee weapons so I can just keep on bashing.

It’s clobberin’ time!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.