This is Kenzie. In one of the yesterday’s photos she was the one laying on my legs while Allie was laying beside me. She is my crazy monkey girl and is currently screaming at me to throw a hairband for her to fetch while I am typing this. Along with everything I talked about yesterday, we got some bad news about Kenzie recently as well. It turns out she is Diabetic and after taking a second round of bloodwork to verify it… we will have to very soon begin giving her insulin shots every morning and evening. Insulin is nonsensically expensive and while an injection pen is in theory going to last us a good while with Kenzie, I am now deeply concerned about the expense for those who have to take way more doses.
I was at first appalled when the vet said that in a lot of cases folks end up putting the animal down when they have diabetes. I could never consider something like that with Kenzie, but when the cost of upkeep is going to add one to three hundred dollars a month depending on severity I guess I can see how that would put folks in a really tough spot. I am thankful that we will be able to weather the burden and that our Vet did a ton of legwork for us and found the cheapest place for insulin pens and needles and we just had to then go acquire them. At some point this weekend we will be taking her into the Vet to be taught how to deliver the shots correctly, and then this gets added to my daily routine.
I am also thankful that Kenzie takes meds well and will pretty much tolerate us doing anything. I hope that streak continues when that “anything” is poking her with a needle twice a day. She has finally stopped screaming and is laying down beside me now on the box that a PC Tower Case came in. I was so slow getting my system transferred over into it that she claimed the box as her domain, giving her a way to be close to me while I sit in my office chair. When I finally swapped over to the new case, I put the old case in the box and taped it back shut so she would continue to have her own personal perch. For the longest time she laid beside me on my desk, and there is a blanket sitting there still for that purpose… but she prefers the cardboard box.
Now we get on to the title of this post that is both figurative and literal. We are going through a nonsensical amount of rain right now and coming home from the store yesterday I got completely drenched, along with the four sacks of groceries I was carrying. When I got everything into the kitchen I went back into the living room to take off my jacket and lay it up to dry when I noticed a bunch of water on the coffee table. I had a moment where I was trying to figure out if I accidentally sat the wet sacks down on the table, or if it was something else. Then while trying to figure this out I heard a distinct drip coming from the rafter above the table. We have a very slow leak and it has happened once or twice before, generally speaking when the rain is blowing horizontally due to the wind. So that is another thing on the list that will have to be dealt with as we get someone to come out and look it over. I am hoping it is just a case of the flashing pulling up or something like that.
Tonight however… I am hoping to get some relaxation in the form of mindless Diablo 3 grinding. It is the opening of a new season and with it comes something I have never done before. I have a plethora of Demon Hunters, Crusaders, Barbarians and Necromancers… but I have never before gotten a Wizard or a Witch Doctor to 70. Grace confirmed that the Haedrigs set this time is a good one for Wizards and as a result I am planning on pushing myself well out of my comfort zone and running up a finger wiggler. If this works I might even knock out the Witch Doctor next season.
There is just something relaxing about our quarterly ritual of grinding up fresh characters in Diablo 3. Given all of the nonsense happening right now in my life I really need something peaceful and relaxing. I’ve had pretty fraught evenings of late where I never could quite settle into playing anything in particular. So I am looking forward to having a purpose tonight.
Lastly before I close things out. I want to take a moment to thank everyone for their comments yesterday. They really do mean a lot even though I told you that you didn’t have to make them. I mean I knew that my admonishment would do nothing, but I also sorta felt like I needed to let people off the hook. We all have a lot of things that we are dealing with and my burden is by no means more significant than anyone else. That said I really do appreciate the constant reminder that I have a bunch of people out there that care about me.
This is Allie. She has been my baby girl since shortly after we got her. I can’t tell you exactly how long we have had her because it legitimately seems like forever and wildly predates the time when I was keeping track of things through the blog. Best as we can tell she was somewhere between 13 and 16 years old because as a feral rescue, we have no real clue how old she was when we adopted her. She had a bit of a rocky start in our lives because we thought she was fighting some sort of kennel cough. The entire time we had her she would go into these sneezing fits, which we eventually came to realize were just brought on by allergies.
However this meant that we kept her isolated up in my wife’s office for a good chunk of time after we first got her. During this time I spent an awful lot of my free time hanging out in the office and just spending time with her so she wouldn’t be lonely. As a result we developed a pretty strong bond that continued on throughout her entire life. She had been sick for the last few years, realizing she had a thyroid condition too late to really be able to do much to fix it other than offer palliative care. Even when I knew she was not feeling amazing, she never stopped wanting to be on top of whatever I happened to be doing.
Long ago I had to learn how to play on my laptop while she was draped across me like a seat belt. We were legitimately surprised she made it through last winter, so as we entered this winter we were on constant watch. There were so many times she would be sleeping somewhere curled up and I would have to check on her to make sure she was okay. She remained “my” sweet and loving Allie right up until the end. Roughly and hour before recording the podcast last week, she had a massive seizure and within the span of ten minutes she was gone. My wife held her wrapped up in a towel as she passed.
I’ve not really been able to talk about this, because I am still processing. I knew it was coming which has helped, and Allie was a shadow of her former active self which has also helped me to realize it needed to happen. However no matter how much rationalize it… she was still my baby girl and one of the most loving cats that I have ever known. Talking about this sort of thing tends to spawn a deluge of support, and I am not sure if that helps. I mean I know you all at this point and I know you have my back, but I think this is just the sort of wound that needs to scab over a bit before I can move on with my life. The two remaining girls are adjusting and it has sort of reset the balance within the house causing a momentary truce which has helped.
It is also within this raw state that I am trying to process the news about the death of Brad McQuaid. I don’t have any personal stories about him, because I was just another player in a sea of players. However Everquest was a very important and foundational game for me, and with it came the legend of Brad McQuaid and the Vision. I also played quite a bit of Vanguard and was ultimately going to play some Pantheon. On some level I think Brad had this idea in his head that he never could quite reach and each time he set out with a game he failed somehow to render it quite the way he could see it in his minds eye. On many levels Vanguard felt like a higher fidelity version of Everquest and similarly so Pantheon was shaping to be the same higher fidelity version of Vanguard.
I am not sure if my life supports the style of play that these games were trying to present. However I still have a good respect for the ideas behind it. Brad was one of those folks that I looked up to and wanted to be when I was still entertaining the concept of making a break from corporate development and going into games. I am not even sure if he was a personal hero of mine, but he was definitely someone I kept tabs on each time he did anything. The world is going to feel smaller without him out there somewhere chipping away at trying to finally render this vision he had, in the same clarity he seemingly saw it in his minds eye.
On that note I am going to wrap up the post. I am knocked off balance right now between the sequence of events. I am sure I will be back to my normal self over the coming weeks, but for now I am just processing everything.
Yesterday I said there are times when I am an old man yelling at the clouds and to be warned this is going to be one of those times. Yesterday Stadia “launched” and by launched I mean a handful of people who pre-ordered on day one managed to get equipment shipped to them in time. I remember getting caught up in the whirl of the Stadia announcements and wound up putting in a preorder because I was curious exactly what this new era would bring. However as more details leaked out about the experience and how it would function I suddenly became significantly less interested and put in a cancellation of my day one preorder.
How Stadia works currently is that you need to have ordered the $130 hardware bundle that includes a special chromecast and a special controller. This gives you access to Stadia as a platform and gives you Destiny 2 bundled in as software. After that you end up purchasing the games on the Google Stadia storefront like you would purchase any other game. Above is a list of the games available at launch and the prices associated with them screen captured from an Android Police article. The prices are not horrible but they also are not exactly amazing given that most of the games on that list are pretty old at this point.
The last point becomes important when you consider how this has been marketed. This is being directed at those who already consider themselves mainstream or early adopter gamers. These are the same people who probably already have a handful of consoles capable of running all of these games save Gylt the sole platform exclusive, and in many cases also have a gaming PC that can similarly run the majority of these games. So again I find myself just not getting this. Stadia feels like a gimmick more than a legitimate way of providing access to something you didn’t already have access to. Stadia being a storefront and not a subscription service granting you access to all of these games makes even less sense.
The nail in the coffin for me however was when I realized that Stadia was being treated as a 4th platform and not simply co-opting the audience of an existing one. The game that comes free with the bundle is Destiny 2 and it requires access to a bunch of other players to be able to play it effectively. Sure Cross Save seemingly works perfectly fine on the Stadia platform, but you are limited to queuing with other Stadia users, which is a pretty tiny pool of players at the moment. If you wanted to play with your friends, you would in theory then need to somehow convince all of them to swap away from whatever their current platform of choice is over to Stadia. A lot of players just uprooted themselves from the consoles to the superior PC experience, and I can’t see anyone that did that willing to downgrade their experience to a streaming one.
The best article that I have read so far is one put out by the Verge. However pretty much every article or video that I have consumed over the last day and some change comes up with the same conclusion. Stadia works but there are compromises made to play a game on the platform. These compromises include a tangible amount of input lag and degraded image quality while playing the game. The Verge article that I linked has a good image slider showing the same scene on Xbox One X and Stadia in EDZ area of Destiny 2. Is it good enough to get in some gaming on the go? Absolutely. Is it going to feel like a console or PC gaming replacement? Probably not.
I think the biggest confusion for me is that being a 4th platform makes no sense for the long term longevity of the platform. Additionally it makes no sense to market this platform towards already indoctrinated gamers. I have said this before, Stadia absolutely makes sense in its free version that won’t launch until 2020, where you can simply buy a game and play it on either a mobile device or through a Chromecast without the need to buy any additional hardware. That lets people who might want to dabble in serious gaming do so without the initial upfront costs. What doesn’t make sense is selling this as “gaming without the console” when the only way to get access to it currently is to essentially buy a “console” in the form of a dedicated version of the Chromecast and a dedicated controller.
The other aspect that I don’t want to get into fully is the fact that Stadia has already missed the market. XCloud is currently in preview mode and offers support for playing around 50 games on mobile devices as part of the Xbox Game Pass service. It really is the “Netflix for games” and there has been a renewed push of trying to improve the Playstation Now platform as well. These are both platforms that have dedicated player bases and won’t essentially be isolating you into a multiplayer wasteland. Steam similarly is ramping up to make its own push into cloud gaming and there are already great PC based services like Parsec. My fear with this platform is it is going to go the way of Google Glass or god forbid Reader and be yet another product that Google has abandoned.
I am going to lead this post off with a general confession. While I enjoy Pokemon games, I am in no way a massive fan. I grew up at the wrong time. I first played Pokemon Blue on a Gameboy Emulator and the first Pokemon game that I legitimately played when it was something current was during X and Y. Pokemon came out while I was in college and while I remember playing Pokemon the card game when it showed up in the place where I was playing Magic the Gathering, I never got heavily into it because I was more or less turned off by the massive crush of kids it brought into the shop.
So while I “get” the controversy surrounding this game, I also don’t really grok it on a deep level. I’ve never moved my pokemon from one game to the next game. I’ve only ever traded pokemon with Ashgar and a ton of random Wonder Trade connections. I fundamentally of not of the mental calculation that makes up what a diehard pokemon player is. So while there is raging about this game or “Dexit” talk on the internet… I think they are mostly old people yelling at the clouds. I get it… I am also an old man that occasionally yells at the clouds for stupid reasons. If this was your first occasion of being mad on the internet, I am sorry… you will be mad about more important things in the future.
What I see when I look at Sword and Shield is a super charming game that finally works more or less than modern 3D games do… with dual stick action and big free roam areas to wander about in. There are a lot of functional improvements this game brings to the table, like I really enjoy the wild Pokemon aspect of being able to see what sorts of critters are hiding in the tall grass. I also really like seeing significantly higher Pokemon in the wild that serve as targets for when you finally get your levels up enough to capture one of them. I love the quick button for Pokeballs, and I love that I can just tell motion controls to screw off and that unlike “Let’s Go” this one lets me play comfortably while docked with a pro controller.
While Gigantamax is a weird gimmick… I absolutely love it. I love fighting with my giant sweet monkey boy. If you chose any of the other starters, I regret to inform you that you chose incorrectly because nothing is as perfect as my monkey boy with his stick. But what I love more than anything are the weird raid like encounters that you can get into in the Wild Area. You can in theory play with a group of friends, or if you are like me and have none… the computer invents friends to play along side you.
Defeating one of these “raid” encounters allows you to catch the Pokemon in question and also rewards you a ton of candies and even occasionally TMs. I have to admit I have done nothing useful so far other than attending the induction ceremony, because I am spending all of my time wandering around the Wild Area catching critters and doing raid battles. I think at this point I have gotten four different TMs from these random raid dens.
Another adorable thing is the camping system where much like Breath of the Wild or Final Fantasy XV you can assemble a random assortment of the berries that you find out in the world… apparently into curry? Like I have issues with the fact that I am making savory berry curry but whatever. I do feel a little bad eating it while my Pokemon watches, because that just seems mean. Like I totally want to see my sweet monkey boy chomping down on food as well so he will be happy.
My sweet monkey boy sadly turned into an edgy monkey teen last night, but I am going to get through these awkward years. I am pretty sure Lime Kong is now into obscure dubstep remixes that I have never heard of. It’s okay when he reaches adulthood we will finally learn to see eye to eye again as I continue to force him to fight random strangers for fun and profit. Really the concept of a Pokemon game is sorta jacked up if you think of it. Lets try not to think about it.
And just to prove that I am still a twelve year old boy inside… when the game asked me to pick a number for my jersey I of course chose the only option. For some reason the writing up top looks like someone wrote “Asse” upside down which only serves to improve the asthetic of the 69. All in all it is a perfectly fine game and I think the grousing about it is largely without merit. The Switch is a relatively underpowered system and I more or less expected a mainline game that looked like Pokemon Let’s Go. I was not disappointed, and in fact a lot of the animations are way more charming than anything I have seen in a Pokemon game to date.
I have no clue what these cards do, so here is mine. I am not sure if this is a sort of friend invite system or what. Whatever the case you can see me as an adorable noob poke-trainer. I went for the glossy finish for extra cringe.
Also while we are trading digits… feel free to friend me up. I am probably never going to do anything that requires friends in one of these games but I like knowing that there are other players out there doing things. Switch time is more or less time when I am either playing it docked or hanging out in bed. All in all though I am pretty happy with Sword and Shield, or at least what I have played of it.
