Guess I am not going to make it to 7-11 today.
I just don’t have the spoons. I feel frazzled and vulnerable and shaky and I am barely keeping it together enough to blog.
Leaving the apartment is out of the question.
Thing is, it would be all too easy for me to put a lot of pressure on myself to do it, and then beat myself up with a vengeance over not doing it, but that would be pointless.
Putting pressure on myself never works. It just makes me avoid the thing all the harder. That’s how I respond to that kind of pressure : not well.
Of course, a lack of pressure yields the same result. Hence the paradox.
The only way out is to find my inner motivation for going and fan that flame. And that takes time and energy I do not currently have.
Maybe I will find it some time soon. Maybe not.
Either way is fine.
Either way, I am fine.
And so forth and so on.
Well that was fucking irritating.
I tried to route around the problem by ordering some groceries from Real Canadian Superstore via Instacart, and got through the whole process of ordering and was getting quite excited about the whole thing – especially because they have a kind of sugar-free Voortmans cookies (orange creme) that Sav-on does not – but at the very end of the process, it rejected my credit card because they don’t car prepaid cards.
Son of a fucking bitch, why not? They get paid exactly the same as if I was using an old-school Visa, so why discriminate?
It’s especially galling from Superstore, because prepaid is the exact kind of Visa their demographic is most likely to have.
Visa is not normally keen to sign up the working poor and people on welfare.
Plus I was willing to pay them $8 to deliver! Presumably that’s the weekend price.
And I was so happy that their minimum order was only $10. Sav-on’s minimum was $40 last time I checked, and that’s just plain looney tunes in my opinion.
I mean, true, that’s how much I spend when I do my weekly shopping there, so I suppose if things go totally tits-up tomorrow and I don’t get to do my usual Sunday shopping, I have that as a backup.
But still. $40 is a lot of money.
And I am still pissed off at being a victim of credit card classism.
Oh well, at least the Epic Store took my credit card.
I finally bought a brand-new game yesterday. And I mean REALLY brand new, as it was actually released yesterday.
It doesn’t get any more current than that.
It’s called The Outer Worlds, and because it was the day of its release, it took around 10 hours for it to download. Yikes.
If it had been on Steam, it would have taken about three hours to get a 40 gig game. But that’s under normal conditions, not the release day for a hotly anticipated game.
I was originally going to get Borderlands 3. I just beat the previous game, the Pre-Sequel, this morning, and it would have totally made sense to keep going with the latest game in the series, which came out earlier this year.
But then I was on Metacritic poking about on their Best Recent Games list, and I read the description and the reviews for The Outer World, and it sounded so much like my kind of thing that I decided to spend that sweet GST check money on it instead.
I’ve played it for about four hours now, and so far, it’s pretty damned good.
Which is good, because it cost me $83!
I suppose I should record my impressions of the game itself.
It’s very good, and totally derivative.
It’s good in that it is exactly the kind of open-world, quest-filled, RPG type game that I love. The graphics are great, the writing is somewhat amusing, and so far anyhow, I have having a great time.
However, it is rather nakedly a clone of two big game series : Bioshock and Fallout.
Mostly Fallout. It’s clear that Obsidian, the game’s devs, wanted to make themselves something like the massively popular Fallout series, and by golly, that’s what they did. There isn’t a single game element that doesn’t feel like it was lifted from Fallout 4 thne given the barest of scrubs to make it not, technically, the same thing.
Bioshock mostly influences the art design, with all kinds of cheesy old-timey advertising motifs from the age of the horse and buggy and the cracker barrel, mixed in with sci fi high tech like spaceships, plasma rifles, and FTL travel.
So yeah. The game is totally derivative.,
And I don’t care.
Originality is great and all. but nowhere near as important as quality. I would much rather something high quality and corny than any brilliantly original failure any day.
Especially if I am paying $83 for the game.
So as far as the game how she plays, I am 100 percent on board.
The game, how she runs, however… well….
In a word : poorly.
There is a fair bit of frame dragging and a lot of long pauses, especially, for some reason, with the dialogue.
I will start talking to a character and they will just sit there impassively, saying absolutely nothing, for up to fifteen seconds or more, making the whole thing seem awkward.
Like they are giving you the silent treatment because they haven’t made up their mind whether or not to talk to you yet.
At first, I thought the fault was with my computer. I figured the honeymoon where I could play everything with top settings was over because this was a game from right now and my computer is three or four years old.
But now I am not so sure. After all, my computer plays some recent-ish games quite well. So that can’t be the whole story.
More likely is that part of the problem is that I got the game on the day it came up and am I therefore getting it before it’s been patched a million times to make it run right.
Plus, changing the settings from high to low barely improved things. So it can’t just be that my beloved ‘puter is lacking in the horsepower to make the game go.
Oh well. The game is great despite the issues, and it’s time for me to finish blogging so I can go back to playing it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.