Alarms are Overpowered

I’m Late!

This blog post is going to be relatively short and sweet since I may or may not have forgotten to set the alarm last night.  My life tends to revolve around rituals and when one of those rituals is interrupted I forget to do something.  It is like I have committed entire segments of my life to muscle memory, but I can only actually do the things if I do them in the correct order.  For some reason I decided in my infinite wisdom to go ahead and check the front door and make sure the cars are locked early in the evening.  This is generally part of my whole “putting the house to bed” routine, and because I ran part of it… I never actually got to the part of the segment where I check the ferrets food and water and the cats water in the bathroom… and FINALLY just before crawling into bed set the alarm.  It kinda sucks to be a slave to my own systems, and the problem is I am extremely highly functioning…  until someone interrupts me when I am in the middle of one of them.  Then like a remote control car that got knocked on its side I flail hopelessly for a few minutes until something finally helps me reorient my mental processes.

It does worry me at times that I will be sitting there lost in a process and be unable to shift gears quickly.  Like if I am thinking about one thing, and need to conjure up the name of another person not connected to the thing I am thinking about.  I am horrific with names in general, but in those moments I seriously cannot for the life of me figure out what to call this other person.  There are social skills that I have figured out that smooth these moments, like how to effectively say hello to someone… while sounding sincere… at the same time attempting to pretend that you DO remember their name and you are just a casual person that doesn’t always say names.  I think more than anything… I have some really bad indexing systems in my brain.  I can see someone in the office and remember intimate details about their wife or kids or that they like this or that television show…  but cannot for the life of me remember that name is associated with their face.  I guess I have gotten used to the handles we all use in the virtual space that ARE extremely unique to the person, and often times adequately represent WHO they are, and as a result normal names just feel like an arbitrary system.

The Unlikely Patriot

Last night exited in two very distinct segments.  Before my wife got home I spent that part of the evening playing Destiny and made my first attempts at raising my faction with the Gunsmith by testing weapons.  Up until this point I had no clue how this worked, and I probably should have been doing this from the moment I could equip one of the weapons.  However I failed miserably and am just now getting started.  When my wife did get home we went out to eat and ran errands, and when I finally sat my butt down afterwards the evening became all about trying to make progress in Star Wars the Old  Republic.  At this point I have finished Hoth and Belsavis and am now starting my way into Voss.  One of the things that I have enjoyed the most about the smuggler missions is that they make this weird overlapping pattern, where you end up revisiting places you have already been multiple times because the storyline leads you there.  For example when we realized we needed to go to Voss, there was a problem… that it would take some time to get the right docking clearances for me to land.  As a result I was asked to go take care of an issue on Belsavis while waiting, which filled in some details that I would ultimately use on Voss.  Essentially the progression feels more significant than simply following a course of planets, each time I land there is a reason for going there connected to the larger story arc in a way that was not quite so evident when playing some of the other characters.

The other thing that I find interesting is just how much of a “manwhore” my captain happens to be.  It seems like every single conversation there is the opportunity to flirt with whoever I am talking to.  The best moments however is when he gets shut down harshly.  The expression on the characters face is like someone broke his toy.  As such I find myself using the flirt option far more often than I would on any other character because that seems to be a significant part of the smuggler experience.  The thing is… the characters in game expect it from my character.  So when I receive negative faction for doing it… it is only 2 or 3 points at a time rather than the 20-30 points you lose on say a Sith Warrior when you flirt with a character and Vette catches wind.  I find this equal parts interesting and disturbing… because it is setting up a kinda bizarre paradigm with this character.  I mean everyone thinks of the smuggler as having this roguish charm… but I guess that also means being a lush about everything?  Then again if you think about it… all of the similar characters like Nathan Drake or Mal Reynolds tend to do the same thing.  It is funny how much the “Han Solo” lovable rascal trope has embedded itself into game media… the problem being…  I’ve never actually met this character in real life.  When you meet a guy that flirts with literally everyone around them… they tend to be a complete jackass that just happens to have an overdeveloped libido.