Bad sleep. This is getting old quick. Having to fight to stay awake sucks. And I didn’t even take my sleeping pill today.
Save me, Diet Coke.
Anyhow, I have now played enough Final Fantasy XIV Online to form a meaningful opinion of it, and I am not impressed.
I’m underwhelmed, if that’s a word.
The game is very repetitive and grind-y.
It’s repetitive in that nearly every quest boils down to “go kill X number of creature Y”. That’s just so goddamned boring. Sure, there’s a minimal amount of exposition justifying it, usually along the line of “Y creature is multiplying out of control and needs culling!”, but the formula remains the same.
And it’s a grind because the combat is so goddamned easy. Sure, I have a ton of abilities, but few of them are useful. In fact, most of them seem to have little real impact on combat. And absolutely none of them are necessary except for the first one they give you, which is basically just a more damaging version of your standard attack.
So all I end up doing in combat is hitting that heavy attack button every second or so. Works every time. I throw the other skills in there now and then just to break up the monotony but I definitely don’t need to.
What makes it worse is that once I complete a quest, the quest-giving NPC goes on about how brave and amazing I am for having done the quest, which given how retarded easy it was comes across as downright patronizing.
So I don’t think I will be pay for the full version when the free trial runs out. For now, I will keep playing, because according to my good buddy and frequent feline head warmer Maelkoth says it gets better once you get through the game’s base content it gets better, but I dunno how long that will last.
Oh, and one annoying nit to pick : The magic user class Conjurers are actually… healers? Then what the fuck do they conjure? Gauze?
On the other hand, I am pondering investing my current surplus getting the game Borderlands 3. I am a huge fan of the series and the reviews for the latest installment are pretty good.
But it’s $80 CDN. Ouch. So I am not quite sold on the idea, to put it mildly. The game would have to be pretty damned good to justify that price.
To be honest, I will probably wait for a sale.
Then again, I might just re-install Skyrim. I am fairly sure that I won’t lose my mind and fall into it so deep that I stop eating this time. I have played lots of moddable games since my deep collapse and while none were anywhere near as moddable as Skyrim, I am still pretty sure that I have developed enough resistance to remain sane.
And even if I did fall into it deep again, it’s not like I would lose much. I already play video games all the damned time so it’s not like I would be losing productivity.
As long as I remembered to eat, sleep, excrete, and blog, my life would be more or less the same. And I am curious to see how much of the game I remember.
Or maybe I will reinstalled Witcher 3 for the fifth time.
God damn that’s a good game.
More after the break.
The hard truth about taxes
All right, listen up, chuckleheads, because I am only going to say this once :
If you hate paying taxes, you are not a patriot.
Any idiot can see that you can’t say you love your country if you don’t want to have to pay for it. When you bitch and whine about taxes, you are basically saying that the country you supposedly love is not worth what you are paying for it.
Grownups know that there’s no such thing as a free lunch and that everything costs money and that money has to come from somewhere.
Only over-indulged spoiled brats think the government only charges taxes because they are big meanies. Real men and women get that taxes are the price you pay for having a country (or a province, or a town, or whatever) and that to act like taxes are the worst thing ever is to out yourself as the petulant whiny brat that you are.
Tell me, Einstein : why do you think your taxes are too high? Take your time, God knows we wouldn’t want you to pop a brain cell or something. Exactly why do you think your taxes are too high? How do you even know?
Ya don’t, do ya? You don’t know jack shit. The real reason you think your taxes are too high is that you’d like to have more money. That’s it.
Well let me invite you to an exclusive little club called absolutely fucking everybody.
Everybody wants more money. The only difference is that actual, real, grown up type people know that money comes from somewhere and that from the point of view of the public purse, tax cuts and spending increases are the same damned thing.
Voting the person who promises to lower your taxes is exactly the same as selling your vote. Well, except for one little difference :
Taxes never actually go down. Think about it. When was the last time your taxes went down? Half past never, am I right? So you sold out your country to some big shot politician who promised you a tax cut and you never even got the tax cut.
All you got was less services from the government. Any savings in expenses those program cuts produce sure as fuck weren’t handed down to you. Instead, they went to your elected official’s billionaire buddies, and you got screwed.
So don’t come crying to me about your god damned taxes. If you hate taxes so much, move to another country. We don’t need your kind around here anyhow.
And if you decide to stay, quit bitching about the rent.
Because people who love their countries don’t try to get out of paying for it.
I’ll talk to you nice people again tomorrow.