Tamriel Revisted

Point Click

Yesterday I kept being reminded by co-workers of just how horrible I sounded, so after I finished with my critical meetings I took off and headed home around 12:30.  After eating a hastily grabbed lunch of convenience store pizza…  I collapsed on the sofa trying to force fluids while finding something comforting to watch.  I guess my version of comforting is a little different than most people, because I wound up watching the entire first season run of Rick and Morty.  Granted I have watched a lot of this show, but it turns out there were a handful of episodes that I missed when they originally aired.  Whatever this thing is that I caught down south, it is very much kicking my ass.  Blogging has been a real struggle because it is very difficult to string thoughts together into enough of a cohesive mass to make into a blog post.  It is my will along that I am committing fingers to keyboard and producing words… because I simply do not want the streak to stop.  I am a couple of months away from my official three year anniversary on the whole daily blogging thing, and the seventh anniversary of my blog.  So until I hit that at the very least, I will keep up doing the daily thing even if I have to struggle to make words happen.

Lately my crutch while sick has been Diablo 3, but I feel like I am running out of things I care to do right now.  I’ve gotten the seasonal rewards, but more than anything I am farming content in the hopes of getting the last few items I need to drop for the build I am working towards.  Clearing regular rifts and doing bounties is the sort of mindless interaction that works well when I am sick, but I am quickly reaching the point where I am questioning why I am bothering?  The other side mission has been to gear my monk, but once I found out from several folks that you only get one set of gear per season…. a lot of my gusto was lost.  I thought I would be able to go kill the bosses I needed to get my first set of gear, on my second character and be up and running and clearing content pretty quickly.  Alas that is very much not the case, and my best option is to ride along with Rae who is regularly clearing TX stuff… but honestly after being able to participate, going back to just having to pray to stay alive…  makes it pretty uninteresting.  Yesterday my big problem was the fact that I had a very needy game install going on in the background, that kept slowing down my teleportation to the point that the battle.net would disconnect me before actually ending up in zone with Rae.

Worst Install

On a whim yesterday afternoon around 1 pm, I started installing The Elder Scrolls Online.  I guess I had forgotten just how painful the install process was, because it took until roughly 8 pm for it to finally complete.  During the last hour of that time I was pretty much unable to play anything else on my laptop.  The thing is… I have installed much larger games in far less time…. so I have to fault the launcher for just how painfully slow it was going.  I mean I say this as someone who was installing to a laptop that is using a AC Wireless card capable of 650 MB connection on a total internet connection that generally runs around 150 MB down.  I should have been able to completely saturate my pipe and had this game down in short order… but it took quite literally 7 hours to finally get installed.  Now for a good chunk of that time I was still playing Diablo 3 so that could have been slowing things down…  but the total download was tortuously slow.  The last hour or so it was thrashing my hard drive badly enough that I really could not do anything else functional on the machine, so I wound up mostly fiddling around on my phone while watching television.  The problem with ESO was that I honestly can’t remember why we stopped playing, other than the fact that one by one we just stopped until I was one of the last four or so people still active.  For me I guess the Veteran game system was so bloody boring because it felt like I was no longer making reasonable process.  I made it roughly two zones into the Aldmeri campaign, when finally my desire to keep playing petered out.

I guess recently I had been curious about what was going on in game, and they have done a few high profile DLC releases.  So around 8:30 last night I finally was able to log in and poke around.  Firstly I have to say I guess playing this game for roughly two years in testing…  means that I have some serious muscle memory going on.  While I had to reset all of my talent points, I can still for the most part remember exactly how I played it.  All of the little things like dodging, and blocking attacks…  came back without any effort and before long I was up and running and questing again.  I feel like maybe this is the speed of game that I need right now.  What I am struggling the most with in my current state is interacting with other human beings.  I have been pretty much oblivious to twitter and slack since coming back from Pax South, and as a result I am kinda cocooning in my own little world again.  Much like SWTOR…. ESO was a great single player game…  and as a result I found myself really enjoying questing around last night.  That is of course until the nyquil kicked in and I simply couldn’t hold my eyes open any longer.  I figure I will put in some more time today playing and maybe talk a bit about my experiences on AggroChat tonight.  That is of course if I have any voice left.  Right now my voice is pretty damned squeaky so I am thinking we might have to rely on someone else to do the bulk of the talking this evening.