The sun also sets

Been having one bitch of a “sleepy day” today.

I’ve slept for around 12 of the last 16 hours. And I am still sleepy. I could easily lay down and go right back to sleep, no problem.

I am just glad that I will be drinking fully caffeinated Diet Coke at Denny’s tonight. That should be enough to keep me going for a while at least.

But being this sleepy for this long is really a drag, man. I don’t want to be sleeping, I want to be awake and doing stuff!

Even if said “stuff” is just me playing video games.

Speaking of which, I have acquired a new one. I was moping about getting burned out on Morrowind this morning and decided to check out what I could get for my nearly $8 of carefully hoarded Salad money.

One of the games on offer was A Plague Tale : Requiem, and I had heard good things about that game and its predecessor, A Plague Tale : Innocence, so I decided to give it a shot for $7.

And I am regretting this decision, which unfortunately cannot be reversed.

I can only assume that I am in the midst of a VERY long tutorial section because all I have experienced so far is tiny bits of gameplay in between a zillion Quick Time Events (QTEs[1]) and that makes for a simply terrible user experience chez moi.

And I am almost positive the blurb for the game said it was an open world game and so far the world has been very closed, hence my assumption (and hope) that all I have experienced so far is a tutorial.

I suppose I could blame myself for not taking all that long to pick a game from the Salad store, but honestly there’s no guarantee that would have led to a better choice given my issues with being easily overwhelmed.

In fact, if I had mulled it over carefully, as my inherent caution bids me to do, it’s far more likely that I would have collapsed under the weight of all the attractive options and not been able to pick anything at all.

Still, it’s sad to see that Salad money go. It took six months for my account to accumulate that $7, and I can’t get a refund because it wasn’t sold to me by Steam themselves, so if I don’t like the game, I am SSOL[2].

Oh well, no use dwelling on it. I will play the game at least until I have either finished the tutorial or determined that this is, in fact, all the game has to offer before uninstalling it in a huff and bitching about it to Maelkoth.

Luckily, I still have $20 and a bit in my Steam wallet, left over from previous months, so I can give the whole “a new game for Fruvous” thing a try. I could even buy a game that costs a little more than that as an Xmas gift to myself.

Maybe I should save that for Xmas day, though, so that I have something to “open” (install and play) on that day.

I am wondering if I should order my own little Xmas dinner from a restaurant instead of getting it via my groceries. But then I would have to find a place that is open on Xmas day and serving turkey et al.

Denny’s might work for that.

Presumably a restaurant meal would be better than what I can kludge together, given how limited my kitchen time is.

A TV dinner is looking like the smartest option on that front. Plus something naughty (but not TOO naughty) I can have for dessert.

Details aside, it’s up to me to make my own little Xmas this year, and I am determined to do so rather than what I would normally do, which is just withdraw with a vengeance until the whole thing is over.

I can make things better for myself if I just try. Invest some effort in myself.

After all, ’tis the season!

More after the break.


Live another life

Hah. If only. But life ain’t got no reset button.

Unless you believe in reincarnation, in which case it does have one but you lose all your items, progress, and save games, so you’re really no further ahead.

No, the reset everyone wants is to be able to live your life again knowing what you know now, and that’s not an option, as far as we know.

The best we can do is try to pass what we know on to the next generation so that they don’t have to learn the same hard lessons we did.

But that rarely works because our frames of reference are so different. When I was young the advice Boomers wanted to give us Gen X kids seemed like it came from another planet. They clearly had no idea what we were going through.

And I have only a dim half-notion what our Millennial kids went through, and considerably less about what Gen Z went through,

All we can do is stand on the sidelines and give what help we can when it’s relevant but mostly just watch them stumble over excitingly new yet predictable roadblocks.

I hope a little of what we have to tell them sinks in and proves useful. I’m painfully aware of how little comfort us bitter, cynical Gen X folk can offer to Millennials and their injured idealism and their feelings of betrayal and premature ejection into adulthood.

We raised them for a world that stopped existing. Now they are raising kids desperate for something, anything, to believe in.

And I got nothin’.

We of the Generation of X are products of the death of Boomer hippie idealism as it rotted into Seventies moral nihilism and Eighties selfishness, and so we learned to live without ideals or beliefs or trust in anything at all.

And I was happy when I read that the Millennials were earnest and idealistic because the world needed that and we sure as shit couldn’t provide it.

And then that world stabbed them in the back.

I’m so, so sorry kids.

The world today is one fucked up place and we can’t blame it all on the Boomers any more. We’re the generation in charge now.

And how fucked up is that?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.



Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)
  1. These are moments when, as a cinematic is playing, you suddenly have to do something (usually press a button) or your character dies. The idea is that this makes watching the cinematic less boring. They are universally loathed by gamers.
  2. Sweet Shit Out of Luck, for the less vulgarly inclined.

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