Was scrolling through my Steam library when I came upon a lil ol game called Fallout New Vegas, and realized I hadn’t played that one hardly at all, so I figured what the heck, and downloaded/installed it.
It’s a legendary game. Some consider it the best of the Fallout series, beating out Fallout 4, its successor. I love the franchise. Some of the best games out there.
Yet I remember getting it, downloading it, installing it, trying it, and not being all that impressed by it. Yet I can’t remember why.
And I still don’t know. Seems fine to me, to be honest, at least so far.
Well that’s not entirely true. There are some maddening deficiencies in the UI department. Having to open my Pip-Boy to do every damn thing is annoying AF.
I am used to being able to access things like my quests and the world map without a single keystroke. Having to press TAB to open the Pip-Boy then click around slows things down a fair bit.
But overall it seems pretty good.
It sure as hell opens with a bang.
I decided not to go immediately for my usual science and sharpshooting type character and be a melee specialist instead.
I’ve played them in Fallout 4 and while getting close enough to stab someone shooting at you with a gun can be damned tricky, it can also be a lot of fun.
And if that fails, I can always fall back to my tried n’ true Fixer character.
“He never said his name, but he sure cleaned up this town. First he killed all the bandits. Then he fixed the town water pump, added a scope to my grand-daddy’s hunting rifle, sewed pockets into my leather armor, and taught the grandkids about the physics of energy weapons!”
The idea of being a deadly gun-toting nerd will never cease to amuse me.
I also still have my second run-throughs of Borderlands The Pre-Sequel and Pillars of Eternity 2 going. Both games have surprisingly high replay value.
Plus there’s some bullshit games I got from a bundle I bought on Fanatical. None of them are what I would call winners.
But WTF, I paid 4 bucks for 5 games. So whatever.
Took forever for me to find a character to play for my second time playing Borderlands The Pre-Sequel. The problem was that I couldn’t find one with a special power I liked, and you don’t get your special power till you have played a while, so it takes a while to sample each one.
Thought I had finally found the right match when I played The Baroness, as her special power was very cool (literally – ice powers) AND she was a sniper, my fave, but there was no way I could put up with her horrible speech.
She speaks in a truly atrocious attempt at a posh British accent and says awful things about being too wealthy to die and how much she hates poor people and does it in a way that is so trite and fake that there is just no enduring it.
So I finally tried the cowgirl-type character, and she is great. I was worried that she’d be all y’all this and other corny cowboy crap, but she ain’t. She’s just a very cool chick who is good with guns and carries a whip.
And her special power lets her blast away at enemies with vastly improved damage and speed for a few seconds, and that’s fun AF.
Oh. And she’s a psycho battle monster who loves killing evil.
In other words, she’s perfect for me.
More after the break.
Between neurosis and psychosis
The line can be mighty fine.
I’ll start this off with a joke nobody likes or gets but me.
It’s from the late great Phil Hartman :
The difference between psychosis and neurosis is that the psychotic thinks that 2 plus two equals 5, whereas the neurosis knows that two plus two equals four, but it really bothers him.
Phil hartman
In other words,. psychotics see things that aren’t real, whereas neurotics only feel things that aren’t real.
An example would be the persistent feeling I have that nobody likes me, nobody wants me around, and they all wish I would just go away so they didn’t have to pretend not to be utterly revolted by me out of pity any more.
This is more or less the opposite of reality. There’s lots of people who love to have me around and find me quite delightful.
But the chemical distortion of depression and the damage done by a lot of regrettably formative memories drives my emotions to the wrong conclusions and it takes a specific act of will to remember the truth.
And even when I do, it still doesn’t feel true. Not completely.
I’ve been thinking about this subject because Joe, Julian, and I have been watching the new season of Castle Rock (great show, BTW) and one of the main characters is a woman with a history of mental illness, and the times when she is breathing hard and freaking out because the forces of evil are fucking with her head (like they do) I find to be rather triggering for me.
Not overwhelmingly so, but they are enough like the kind of panic attacks I have experienced to get some bad tapes playing in my head.
And that got me thinking about the times when I have been very, very ill and my emotions have gotten so intensely negative and anxious that people start to seem like monsters to me and I am imagining all kinds of things about them – that they hate me, that they are outraged that I dare to show my face in public, that any second now they are going to attack me – that are just plain looneytunes crazy.
Again, these are not hallucinations in the traditional sense. I am not seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, or touching objects that do not exist.
It’s all happening on the level of emotion and mood. That’s vastly preferable than it happening on the sensory level as with psychosis, of course.
But I do wonder if hallucinations are easier to ignore.
I mean, everyone knows that there’s no such thing as a purple dragon who farts donuts, so if you see one, you know it’s not real.
But it’s much harder to tell that your emotional perception of something is real or just a phantom of your mental illness.
It’s all just thoughts, memories, and so on either way.
Maybe some day, there will be drugs that are as good at keeping my demons away as the antipsychotics are at keeping hallucinations away.
Until then, the daily struggle will continue.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.