…as do the problems. Dammit.
This morning I went to Wound Care. Update : They switched me back to once a week.
And I don’t like that. I was quite enjoying going there twice a week. It gave me another reason to get out of the apartment once a week and to be honest, it’s pleasant to have a nice woman touch me and take care of me for a little while.
Unmet nurturing needs and so on. It ain’t pretty but it’s me.
But I could hardly tell THEM that, so I will be only going there on Fridays for the foreseeable future. Oh well.
Maybe I need to invest in a once a week trip to the beauty parlor.
Or massage parlor…. I could get a lot of use from a good masseur. Someone who can help drain alllll my tension away…. *ahem*.
When I got back, I went ahead and made that phone call to Pay Power about the fact that my card didn’t work certain places.
Sadly, the fellow on the phone could not see any problem on their end of things. Or at least, I think that’s what he said.
He had a strangely brisk, clipped Indian accent with an odd galloping cadence and that plus the loss of sound quality inherent in the sorts of phone systems gigantic call centers tend to use made what he said land in my ear as just one long incomprehensibly staccato word.
I felt bad for him. I could tell he was struggling mightily with his accent. I imagine that accent makes his life as a phone center worker very stressful.
Interviewer : “Do you speak English?”
Phone person : “Yes…. technically…. ”
I then contacted Instacart via text chat to see if they could help me. The helpful person there suggested I log out, wait an hour, then log back in.
Just tried that. It did not work. Fuck.
And the same goes for the other problem dogging me right now, Baldur’s Gate 3 crashing. I tried doing a full reinstall of my video card drivers to make sure they were up to date and all that accomplished was to get rid of the little nag screen that popped up when I played the game to remind me that my drivers were out of date.
But it still shits the bed and crashes like a bitch not long after starting up.
Eventually I will have no choice but to return it, which will break my heart. But if I can’t get it to work, getting my moolah back is going to have to do, otherwise the thing becomes an $85 white elephant.
I am sure I can find another thing on Steam that I want. Not as much as I want to be playing what appears to be the Best Game Ever, but something new nevertheless.
So far, I have “played” it for 86 minutes, which leaves me 34 more minutes before I hit the return deadline of two hours.
I will keep plugging away at whatever I can think of until then.
More after the break.
Then there’s Beyond Thunderdome, which is about plant based Thunderdome.
(Did I do this joke before?)
A crack in the dyke
$obvious lesbian joke$
Well I manafed to get Baldur’s Gate 3 to work…. for a while.
This time, I managed to get all the way through character creation and into the actual plot of the game before it forced me to reboot.
I did it by going to the loader for the game and choosing to run it using the Vulkan renderer instead of DirectX 11.
What’s the difference? I dunno. But it was one of Larian’s (the people who make the game) official suggestions and it worked. Kind of.
It got me further, which is good. Performance was pretty choppy during the cutscenes.
Speaking of which (slight spoiler ahead), having the opening cutscenes feature an Illithid (aka a Mind Flayer) was pure genius because we all spent a lot of time fighting those evil horrible motherfuckers at the end of Baldur’s Gate 2, so when the camera pans up to reveal the face of our villain, I was instantly seized with frothing a genocidal hate like the hate The Doctor has for Daleks.
They look like this :
And that brought me right back to where I was at the end of the previous game in a way no recap or references could ever do.
They are so detestable because they are completely ruthless and cruel and think nothing of performing unspeakable experiments that would make a vivisectionist puke on live sentient beings and they do it all with the air of implacable calm that just underscores what cold blooded fiends they are.
Possibly literally. Squid are cold blooded, right?
The next step is to a) run the game with as few other programs running as possible so that it has as much RAM and CPU bandwidth as possivke at its disposal, and b) bypass the loader and run it directly from my HD.
Those are both on the “Before you file a bug report….” section of the Support section of the Larian website so I figure I will give them a try.
I may also (sigh) turn down the graphic settings to make the game use less resources. Right now everything is set to ULTRA, max quality, because of my awesome GPU, but my CPU and RAM are still subpar for modern gaming, and that might be the problem.
Would be depressing to have to do that, but… better to have a low res game I can play than to have a high res game that crashes all the damned time.
I resent having to do so, though. But this seems to be a season of fuckery, and I am only going to survive it if I stretch my ability to adapt to its fullest and resist the urge to cry foul and try to fight the tide.
It doesn’t matter what is fair or right for the world to demand of me.
All that matters is making the best of the shitty cards I have been dealt.
And more I make peace with that fact, the healthier I will be.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.