Good Morning Folks! The weekend before last I had put up most of the Christmas decorations, but on Saturday I finally got our little tree up. Essentially we have a very small tree on top of the entertainment center because the cats have yet to figure out how to get up there. Prior to that I just had the tree skirt and runner with my two goofy little snowpeople. It is especially sad that the Christmas season is shorter this year because I do love hanging out downstairs with a laptop and seeing the cycling lights out of the corner of my eye. For years we did not do any sort of a tree and then at some point, I got tired of this, and for the last decade or so we have done a small tree on top of the entertainment center to feel festive without the cats attempting to climb it.
The box to the left of the tree in the above picture is the only gadget that I bought in the Black Friday nonsense. I hate airing up tires. I’ve always been annoyed that the process was not as simple as dialing in an air pressure and then having the tire inflated to that pressure and it shutting off. In my brief roaming around I found this doodad, and have now used it and it works beautifully. Essentially it is roughly the size of a double-thick battery bank and you set the pressure on the readout, hook it up to your tire’s valve stem, and then start it, and it will shut off whenever it reaches the desired pressure. Yesterday afternoon I used it and it really was as simple as it sounded, It used about 1/3rd of its battery capacity to air up four tires that were low due to the temperature drop.
This is going to be one of the longest weeks in history, as I anxiously await the beginning of Path of Exile 2 Early Access. I’ve been trying to distract myself with POE1, but I am uncertain that it is really working. I did however get a wild drop of div cards. Not that any of these are terribly valuable, but I came across a Diviners Lockbox and had the bit where I can open it an additional time… proc five times in a row. I would like to hit level 100, but I still have like five pips worth of experience left to go and it is coming so slowly either through maps or delve. I thought about starting a brand new character, but I am not sure it is worth the effort given that I am going to abandon it rapidly.
I’ve also been playing a lot of Starfield, but that is way more of a janky mess than I remember it being. I have no clue WHY I stopped playing it. My guess is a POE League or something similar. Whatever the case it has been on my radar to start back up at some point. I’ve played about 40 hours on this current playthrough and am starting to get into territory that I no longer remember in the main story. As is always the case with any Bethesda game, the side content feels way more engaging than the main story. I talked about this on the podcast over the weekend, but there is a mental disconnect between how good this game looks… and how dated the systems and interactions feel. This is very much Skyrim in outer space, and if you had told me this was a total conversion mod I would probably believe you. It feels like there is about a Skyrim’s worth of content, but it is spread out across many planets that are devoid of any interesting spots save for one or two highlighted ones.
I’ve also encountered a number of frustratingly glitched-out quests. For example, I was trying to join the Freestar Rangers and did one of those janky follow-the-NPC missions. Upon getting into the room… the escort seemed to have forgotten why she brought me to the room because the Marshall that I was supposed to be talking to was busy in the corner reading a book. The NPCs won’t interrupt each other so we sit in this eternal dance of a quest being completely stalled out without a way to get past it other than using a console command. There are also weird interactions with your companions. For example, the companion that I married… will say things like “I saw this and thought of you” and then proceed to hand you 603 Credits. Why that specific 603 credits reminded her of me… no fucking clue.
Then there are things that are cool but also superfluous. For example, at some point, they added dune buggies to the game, so that every time I land my ship it is outside waiting on me. The thing is… every quest lands me a few feet from the entrance to the POI, so there is never much reason to use the vehicle. I could of course wander off and go explore the planet, but also I know that there is nothing of any interest other than the fixed POIs that have already been labelled on my map. It is a game with epic amounts of fast travel so that nothing actually feels like you are really exploring space or the planet’s surfaces. I feel like I want to finish the MSQ at least once, and I enjoy some of the moment-to-moment side quests… but this is very much not a great game. It does not deserve a lot of the ire that it has been given, because everything is hyperbole in online discourse, but it also doesn’t really work.