Life’s constant cavalcade of shocks to my system just keep coming.
First, the little : last night at Denny’s I had my order all arranged in my head. Chicken strip dinner, corn, mashed potatoes, extra side : sauteed veggies.
I love me some sauteed veggies.
Then the waiter says they are all out of chicken strips. And I am once more stunned by the unexpected. I am utterly gobsmacked.
I rallied and ordered literally the last thing I remember thinking looked good, which was the Super Bird sandwich.
But it’s crazy how much that threw me off.
It’s also crazy how I keep obsessing over this subject.
So, crazy all around. Enough for everyone. I guess.
Then today, I decided to buy the expansions for Fallout 4. Normally, that would cost a total of $80, but they were on sale for $35, so I figured, WTF.
Then I boot up my newly upgraded Fallout 4, and the graphics are hosed. Big ugly grey lines everywhere. Weird flickery orange patches. Freakiest of all was these heavy, angry-looking purple lines across the night sky.
They looked like a Dragonball Z power attack as drawn by a kid with a lot of issues.
So I run a file verification, figuring one of the files must have gotten corrupted. Nope! Apparently, this is how it is supposed to look now.
Then I escalated (too fast) to uninstalling everything then reinstalling it via Steam. This also did not fix the problem.
And let me tell you, at that point I was quite freaked because for the second time, I had been told the chaos was PERFECTLY NORMAL.
The fuck it is!
So then, once I had calmed down enough to frame a Google search in my head, I Googled the problem.
The only reference to it I could find was this Steam forum thread.
From that, I gleaned that the problem was that I did not have a separate graphics card.
This was a super bummer because that would mean I couldn’t play the damned thing I had just sunk $35 into without spending even more money on a graphics card.
And that would have been TOO FRIGGING MUCH. I was totally going to write a very terse and snippy email to Bethesda, the makers of FO4, thanking them for pushing out an update that broke the frigging game and demanding that they at the very least give me my $35 back, and maybe even what I originally paid for Fallout 4 all those many many years ago as well/
I was very, very angry.
But luckily I did not do that because that was totally not the thing. In a moment of clarity, I ran the problem through the fuzzy friend of mine who designed my computer (Hi Windy!) and she said my computer totally has a separate video card, so chillax.
Before that, I had discovered that I didn’t have the problem if I ran the game “vanilla”, in other words, without mods.
Which made no sense according to the graphic card theory.
Then, while I was talking to Windy about the problem, it occurs to me to check the little nVidia thingy that floats in my system tray and see if there is a driver update or whatnot.
But it ain’t there. Weird.
So I run the program from (gasp!) the Start Menu and it immediately updates my drivers. So I am like, yay.
And that’s where it stands right now. for complicated technical reasons having to do with things I did to try to fix the problem, I can’t just run the game and see if the problem has been solved or not.
But hopefully it has. I wanted to use the nVidia thingy to look for specific “game ready” drivers for Fallout 4, but I don’t recall my password and by then I was too tired and frustrated to put up with any more hassle.
Once I am done blogging, I will tackle it anew.
But at least I know now that all that is truly at stake is my ability to play the game with mods. That’s still a pretty big deal, given how deep I have got into the modding side of things, but at least I have the expansions to play around with.
Besides, I have been seriously contemplating how much time I spend playing games and asking myself what else I could be doing with my time.
I tire of this addiction of mine, and want to expand my horizons to include things which satisfy more of my needs than merely the need to find something to do with myself.
I am a man of enomous talents and gifts. I should be out there in the world making money and doing awesome things.
Lke supporting myself, for one. Actually being able to choose everything in my life – where to live, how to decorate, what furniture to get, where to go on trips, and akll those sorts of things, for another.
Povery circumscribes your options so severely that even the limited amount of autonomy and indulgence afforded by a minimum wage job seems like a life of unimaginable wealth and comfort.
You can decide to go out to a bar for drinks? AFTER dinner out? And you bought a new gaming system with your credit card? Whoa dude!
What’s it like to be one of the one percent?
Anyhow, I suppose my thesis tonight is that life seems determined to just keep throwing me curveballs until I learn to hit them.
Fine by me. I am tired of being a wuss and a coward. I am ready to take my hard knocks and finally grow up and grow a pair.
After all, I have enormous inner strength and integrity. More than enough to handle adversity and rise to challenges, if I only give myself the chance.
If you always run – if your only defense is to melt at the first sign of danger – then you will never know just how strong you really are.
And I am to find out.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.