Recursion Loop

I’m struggling a bit with the whole remaining vertical thing this morning.  I really did not get a good nights sleep, woke up several times.  However each time I managed to get back to sleep relatively easily since I had an army of cats trying to snuggle with me.  I find it odd that while there is one whole person missing from the bed…  they all decide that the best place to lay is on top of me.  After all these years, cat logic still completely evades me sometimes…  but then again so does most human logic.

Curious Bot

I spent most of last night hanging out on the couch, fishing in Rift while trying to clear off the TV shows I had recorded from the DVR.  I had a rather large backlog and I was only 270 fishing so I knew I could do it for awhile.  In the process I managed to push up survival to 375 and I got fishing up to 305 so that now I can at least do the daily fishing quests for the area.  I spent roughly from 7pm until Midnight my time fishing away, the majority of which was off a bridge in the canal behind Tulan on Brevane.  I managed to pull up several nifty housing items so that part is still somewhat exciting for me.

The funny thing is… throughout the night I kept seeing the same player coming by and picking up all the normally non-aggro snapper hatchlings in the canal.  They would run a little path, spamming their AOE abilities… then finally stop and skin them all… pause and continue the route.  I tried to interact with the player but received no response.  When I logged out last night they were doing it… and now that I have logged in this morning from the above screenshot you can see they are still hard at work.  At this point it is obviously a bot, but a fairly advanced one from the looks of it.

The problem is… for whatever reason the petition system is borked.  I seem to have a completed ticket stuck in the queue from ages ago… that I cannot remove to replace it.  I would have gladly reported that Lisxande@Deepwood is a bot but unfortunately the system refuses to work for me.  What I have been doing in the meantime is reporting any issues like this as bug notes… since those will actually submit.  I doubt they will actually end up in the right place, but it makes me feel like I make at least doing something.  As a programmer… I have to give them some credit for scripting a rather complex process…  but it doesn’t make me not want to destroy them.

Recursion Loop

Have you ever had one of those television shows that you are not really into anymore… but you have been watching for so long that you feel obligated to keep up?  That is precisely how I feel about the Anime Bleach these days.  I started watching it during the heady days of WoW raiding, and I was drawn to the interesting and massive cast of characters.  Additionally I thought the whole concept of a soul reaper was extremely cool.  However I realized something along the way somewhere, every single season of bleach is exactly the same.

Ultimately something strange will happen that puts someone or something in jeopardy.  Ichigo then discovers some new and dangerous threat that uses some strange and magical new powers.  He rushes into battle and gets his ass kicked by whatever this new threat is.  Then he spends the rest of the season learning some new even more powerful power from a mentor figure.  He finally confronts the baddest of the baddies using this new power…  and barely manages to defeat them… all because of his unbridled spirit energy.

The current season I am watching feels so rehashed.  There is a definite moment of “no wait… there is this one thing that is the most powerful thing in the world that we haven’t mentioned for seven seasons yet”.  I think to some extent I keep watching it, because the characters that are NOT Ichigo are still interesting to me.  The thing that kills me however is the first third of an episode ends up being essentially the last third of the previous one.  So it feels like there is so much building with very little payoff.

It is like that those ghost and super natural shows where it sounds like they find something… but they will never actually find evidence of anything at all.  I would love to have someone cut together an entire season of Bleach as one seamless show…  and trim out all the repeated content at the beginning of the show.  My fear is that after you cut out ALL the callbacks to other things…  you would end up taking a 13 hour episode down to like 4 hours.  The positive thing however is that I have officially watched down my queue of bleach, so I can comfortably let it stack up again.

Defiance

Additionally last night while on my fishing binge, I decided to try and catch up on Defiance.  I really enjoyed the first few episodes of the show, but by the time I had watched episode three I started to lose interest.  I am not sure what it is about the show but I have for whatever reason not significantly imprinted on the characters yet.  As a whole the series reminds me of this odd mishmash of Firefly and Terra Nova…  but with High Elves and Cathar.  There are a handful of characters that I really like, mixed in with a bunch of other stuff I cannot bring myself to care about.

I keep thinking that if I watch it enough there will be this magical moment when all the sudden it becomes amazing and magical for me.  I’ve made it through I think episode 6 as of last night, but I felt myself fading in and out of paying attention…  so I am really not sure I caught enough of some of the episodes to fully understand what was going on.  It was I think during episode five that someone popped into Rift that I started up a conversation with.  I am going to try and chew through the rest of the episodes so that I can at least say I am caught up.  I feel like maybe since I am not really playing the game, I am not as committed to the universe.

I also feel like there has been a paradigm shift in science fiction.  There was a time, namely the 90s and some of the early 2000s that science fiction shows were a rarity on television.  Since something other than Star Trek was almost unheard of… you ended up watching whatever it was because there was literally nothing better on at the time.  So I feel like there are so many science fiction shows that we view through the rose colored lenses of nostalgia.  Today however the market is absolutely flooded with science fiction shows, and we have a lot more to choose from.  As a result I find myself being far more critical of a given show, because I know there are others out there that I could be watching instead.

I want to like Defiance as a brand… I want to like the video game and I want to like the television show.  I feel like I am watching in part to help support one of my favorite companies… Trion.  All of that said while both game and TV show sound like something I would like on paper…  the result of experiencing either has been lacking something for me.  I keep feeling like I just need to give both more time to grow on me, but I am wondering at what point I will decide that “nope, it is just not for me”.  As a consolation gift… I am at least immensely happy about having my title, pet and mount over in Rift as a result of the show.

Wrapping Up

Well I have pissed away an hour of time writing this long diatribe, and need to finish getting ready for work.  I hope you all have a great day ahead of you.  Mine will be stressful and frustrating as always I am sure, but hopefully I can actually get things knocked off my list that need to.  I am constantly thankful for the awesome team of people I have to work with, I just wish I had a bit more stability in “management direction”.  I am on this vision quest to finish leveling fishing, but I am hoping to finish it up tonight.