Tag: gaming

Long Day June 29, 2022

So today’s been kind of adventure from a phone perspective. Well, in general, really. 

First, I had a nightmare about Thomas and the end of our marriage and that was distressing. I mean come on now my 17 year marriage ended. That was by definition pretty stressful. And it has been on my mind a bit lately. That woke me up at 5:30 this morning, and I had trouble getting back to sleep. Mind you, I had to be up at seven to go to work. It took me a while to get back to sleep. I ended up getting up at 7:10, got myself together as fast as I safely could, and got to work 10 minutes early. Additionally, thanks to a clerical error that I didn’t catch until too late, I was actually scheduled for half an hour before the pharmacy opened. So I was there 40 minutes before the pharmacy opened. I got some steps in, so that was nice.

The day went okay, mostly, and, well, I have a Pokémon Go friend in Houston who always sends me raid invites during Raid Hour on Wednesday (from 6 PM till 7 PM in your local time). I always feel bad, because I’m in the suburbs and there’s not really anybody playing at that time. I mean, Walker Ranch Park usually has someone, but the parking lot is small and the overflow parking areas are now taken up by construction. So I almost never can send invites back.

So, after doing some research, I realized that I could be at the Pearl by 6:00 pretty handily, and there’s lots of parking there. So today I decided to go down to the Pearl after work. I could get some more steps in and hopefully get some Pikmin Bloom . . . I’m not sure what to call it. It seems that the game has new Pikmin spawn in places where you spend a lot of time. Like, there are always a bunch up by my work and a whole lot by my house. Since, as I said before, I live in a suburban area, that means I have a lot of Pikmin with stickers that say “S” for, near as I can figure, “Street.” So I’m always on the lookout for new locations. I figured that after I did my raid or raids, I could do some expeditions around the Pearl and maybe get some more expeditions out there in the future.

So after work, I headed off. I don’t like the Google maps navigation thing. The last time I used it, for example, it literally told me three times what street I should be on, then said, “turn right here” with no warning, so I ended up having to go around again, which was a waste of time and gas. So I just memorized the street names and the direction I needed to turn and headed out.

Okay, time for an interlude. When Thomas got his first cell phone it was on his work plan with Sprint. Once he left that job, they let him take the phone and number with him. His new job also gave him a phone, so I took over that original phone account. Basically, someone in Alex’s family has had this phone number for 25 years. Then after the divorce, I took over the account. Well, once T-Mobile bought Sprint, they said they’d shut down Sprint’s network and they sent out Sim cards. The deadline for the shutdown of the network was June 30, 2022. Which is tomorrow. Turns out, they shut it down right at midnight Greenwich time. I intentionally sat on the chip until the network went down because as fond as I am of my current phone, it’s starting to show its age (locking up, overheating, etc.). And in order to get a new Samsung phone at my store, I need to be fully on T-Mobile’s network. So I figured that once Sprint’s network shuts down, I should be fully on T-Mobile’s network and can get the Samsung phone I want.

I was not expecting it to go down just before I arrived at the Pearl. I was approaching McCullough, preparing to turn right, when my phone beeped. It was the notification that I no longer had service. So, rather than turning right and going to the Pearl, I had to make a left and head home. OMG.

So I headed home. Once I got connected to my Wifi, I discovered that I’d missed a raid invite. After doing another raid, courtesy of my friend, I installed the SIM card. I restarted the phone, which was apparently not restarty enough, so the phone restarted again and then it started to overheat. Eventually it settled down, and now when I boot the phone up, it has that nice violent pink color of T-Mobile instead of Sprint’s yellow. I am giving the thumbs up now, but you can’t see it.

I ate a little dinner and then decided that I wanted to do some more walking, partially for my health, partially for my Pikmin Bloom weekly event, and partially because it’s something I enjoy doing. Unfortunately, it was still way hot outside. So I went to take a one-hour nap, which ended up being a one-and-a-half-hour nap. Now I have to give my dad his eyedrop, eat a little something else, get rid of some more Easter candy (I still have a little more than one bag of jelly beans), maybe take a brief shower, since it’s really humid and I’m sweating like whoa, take my medicine (including my tretinoin for my acne scars), brush my teeth, and head to bed.

Now for a Gratuitous Amazon Link. Hm. Where was I? I think that The Witch’s Heart, by Genevieve Gornichec, is up next. The Witch’s Heart is the tale of Angrboða, Loki, and their three children, Hel, Fenrir*, and Jörmungandr.

*I have the worst time trying to remember Fenrir’s name. I keep wanting to call him “Fenris,” as in Fenris Ulf, from the Chronicles of Narnia, and Fenric, from the Sylvester McCoy Doctor Who episode The Curse of Fenric. I’ll figure it out someday. I hope.

Wizards Unite Is Ending, Part II

I realized that I feel about the departure of Wizards Unite like I did when a dear friend’s girlfriend broke up with him. He was devastated and, while I empathized with his devastation, I was kind of expecting their relationship not to work out.

One of the reasons that I saw the end of Wizards Unite coming is that they clearly weren’t making a lot of money from players — the daily goal list had an optional “get a reward for watching a commercial.” And that, by itself, wasn’t what made me think that Wizards Unite wasn’t long for the world. It was the fact that the button didn’t work.

I mean, it would work eventually. Occasionally. I’d click on it and nothing would happen. I’d click again. Still nothing. I’d tap it repeatedly. Nothing. Sometimes closing the game and opening it again would work, but even that was no guarantee. I mean, I’m trying to get your sponsor to pay you and I can’t? Why?

There have been a lot of things that WB Games dropped the ball on. Wizards Unite has an event that rotates through where the player is interacting with things from the Fantastic Beasts movies and it requires the player to open portkeys by walking. Only one cannot open portkeys without the game open. Notice that in other games that use the same engine as Pokemon Go the game counts steps even with the game closed. Wizards Unite, not so much.

And the folks at WB Games kept dinking around with things. They had a nice set of tasks for their “brilliant events,” and they started messing with them. My personal favorite was when you had to interact with other players. Only, there are no other players, as far as I can tell. Okay, that’s a bit of hyperbole. I mean, there’s a fairly active community on Reddit, for example. However, both of the communities that I participated in before discovering the Reddit community have died. I finally had to strongarm Evelyn into starting to play so that I could get her to be my friend for those events.

I had a lot of fun playing Wizards Unite. It’s just that if I were to list the things I enjoyed about the game, a lot of it would sound like the same things I find fun about Pokemon Go, and whoever is running the servers for Pokemon Go (Niantic, I think) cares more about keeping stuff running and relevant than the people at WB Games did.

I’m giving Pikmin Bloom a shot. That’s the game that the people on the subReddit seem to be migrating to. So far I’m not sure I get it, but at least it counts your steps when you’re not playing the game.

Gaming

Back in, oh, 1990, I guess, Thomas’s roommate had a Sega Genesis system.

Wait. No. It goes back farther than that.

I was in high school in the early 1980s and I’ve always been something of a science fiction/fantasy geek (and I really love books and series the blur the line between the two, like Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series). Long about, oh, my sophomore year of high school, I found the science fiction geek corner of my high school’s social structure. I was the only girl in the group.

Every year we had one day when we had open lunch and the science fiction geeks would go to Friar Tuck’s arcade. Maybe it was my junior year, since Friar Tuck’s opened in 1982, but whatever. The point is that all of the science fiction geeks except for one went to Friar Tuck’s. They never invited me to come along. Not that I would have had the faintest idea what to do, but I would have figured something out. Probably. Instead, I went to the Fannie Mae candy shop with my female friends. It was a good time, but the Friar Tuck’s thing sort of put the idea in my head that I wasn’t good enough to game.

There was an Aladdin’s Castle at the mall where my friends and I hung out, but, again, girls. So I never crossed the threshold of the store, even though I really, really wanted to

In 1988, I started dating Thomas. He was a gamer and hung around at gaming places (maybe Friar Tuck’s? Not sure). I was still kind of bitter but also had internalized the idea that I didn’t deserve to learn to game and so I kept quiet about it.

*Now* it’s 1990 and his roommate’s Sega Genesis system. They were only roommates for a semester (Thomas got a single room halfway through the year), but I had enough exposure to it that my bitterness finally broke through and I asked Thomas, point-blank, to teach me how to game so that I could finally figure out whether I could do it or not.

Oh, God. I’m starting to cry. This is so stupid. Such a tiny little thing, but it’s a tiny little thing with deep, deep roots, and it hurts to dig those roots out.

In 1994, Thomas and I met Frank. Frank is also a gamer. And they’d sit around and talk about Doom or Wolfenstein 3D or whatever and I’d sit and twiddle my thumbs despite the fact that I’d talked to Thomas about this. This just dug the “you don’t deserve this” message in deeper.

Sometime in the late 1990s or early 2000s, they opened a Dave and Busters here in San Antonio. They allowed smoking in the game room and I have asthma but I didn’t want to be a wet blanket so I’d go along and wheeze while I watched everyone else play because, all together now, I didn’t deserve to learn.

Thomas offered to “teach” me on one of these outings. His version of “teach” was sink-or-swim. He wanted me to take the other controller of whatever he was doing and compete against him. Did I mention that I couldn’t breathe? When I refused, he said, “I thought you wanted me to teach you.” I didn’t know how to tell him that I was more imagining sitting on the sofa together with the controller of his PS2 while he showed me what all of those X’s and triangles, and blue diamonds and green clovers do and less competing against him when I couldn’t fucking breathe.

This is when I figured out that Thomas was never going to follow through on his ten-year-old promise and stopped going to Dave and Busters at all. It just rubbed in my lack of skill and made me feel lonely.

When Thomas and I split up in 2008 I was seeing two mental health professionals. I’d started seeing a psychiatrist in 2002 when I had my cancer and I kept going through my mom’s death in 2006 and the end of my marriage. I also started seeing a counselor on top of that. When I was at the counselor’s I suggested that maybe Thomas was so contrary because he was afraid I’d be good at it. Because several times I started working on something that I thought we were doing together (like learning Chinese) and when the rubber hit the road, he backed out because I progressed faster than he did.

He did teach me to play Tetris and Larn, which is something, and he gave me the opportunity to use the WII Fit (and left it here when he left), but so many people I know play, like, Zelda and things that use consoles and they’re still just a mystery to me, no thanks to Thomas.

In 2014, we had our pharmacy Christmas party at Dave and Busters. We ate a nice dinner and then Alex convinced me to try one of the racing games. I can’t remember if we did it once or twice, but Alex went to Dave and Busters fairly often with his paternal grandmother, so I figured he’d get use out of the cards we got with dinner even if he wouldn’t use them that night. So once someone else left, we followed suit.

In 2016, I woke up and saw one of my Facebook friends had posted a picture of a bird that looked to be made from Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and pipe cleaners*. I was kind of nonplussed but kept reading and for some reason that I’ll never fully comprehend, I decided to download Pokemon Go and give it a shot. And I’m pretty good at it, if I do say so myself. Not amazing — I’m not dedicated enough for that — but better than a lot of people I know. And several times in the last couple of weeks, when I made a new Pokemon Go friend (I’m up to 54!) they said, “Oh! You’re Olivia!” which is always a nice feeling.

I’m dabbling a bit in Jurassic World Alive and intent to give Wizards Unite a chance (particularly since I have a friend who really wants to play it and this will give me a chance to maybe see her once in a while). And one of my online friends said that I don’t necessarily need to use a console to game and that there are a lot of good games for the PC. So maybe I’ll try one or two of them.

Maybe this bitterness over gaming will pass someday after all.

Wow. What do I do for my Gratuitous Amazon Link? Something about gaming? Science Fiction? I mention Diane Duane’s Young Wizards books. Have I linked to So You Want to Be a Wizard yet? If not, well, there it is.