The snow came. Half my brain is still in a non-winter state. Half is resigned. You know the sidewalks will burn off the first flakes - they've stored up the sun for months, waiting to repel the invaders, but it's really Leiningen Versus the Ants from here on.
We got the last of the leaves up this afternoon. Well, the last ones that were bound for the big bags. There are others. At this point the battlefield is too great they must lay where they fell. Up and down the block there are lawns completely smothered in leaves, and I wonder what they're waiting for. Perhaps they've no intention of gathering them up. I admire that sort of indifference, really. It's nature. It's been doing this a while. No particular need to interfere.
This was what we raked up after two visits of the fall-cleanup crew. Yes sir yes sir three bags full, plus 18.
Today’s subject, I see, is “the problem of waning passions.”
You are no doubt eager to know how my wonderful amusement park is going. Planet Coaster 2! So dearly desired, such a surprise when announced. Better pathways and - wait hold on you can’t be serious we dreamed of this - water parks!
I got a refund.
It is a clunky mess that seems profoundly less engaging than the first version. No custom signs or music. This is not a review because who cares; I have a larger point. The problem reminded me of everything I read about Cities Skyline 2, which I also was keen to play. I do not want to play complex simulations and balance industry and traffic and other such tedious things. I just want to build something. Cities Skyline 2 was released to a friendly audience entranced by spectacular teaser videos, certain they wouldn’t sell us something that wasn’t as good as the game everyone loved. But the first release was junk. The lamentations were enough to make me sigh with relief: I don't have to spend hours laying out streets and zoning things and dealing with powerlines. I just . . . don't.
Why does this happen?
Yes, yes, o wise gamers, never buy the 1.0, wait for the fixes and improvements. I suppose. I should’ve known. But it’s like going to see a sequel for a movie you liked, and the FX aren’t finished, there are visible green screens and boom shadows, the movie stutters at some point and has to start again.
This would not be acceptable. But gamers are used to it all the time.
Why should you care? Well, it’s a big industry. It has problems. Premature launching is one. The other is injecting wokery into games. If you’re completely removed from the discussions, this might not surprise you - what isn’t tainted and tinted these days - but you might underestimate the effect it has on the audience. There is an absolute straight line between changing the lore in Warhammer to make it more diverse and turning half the audience off anything “progressive” for the next ten years.
Anyway. It’s probably just as well, because the game requires a lot of mousing around, and my mouse arm hurts. It’s intermittent. Never when typing, which is good; typing is life. Typing is expression, the act of transferring the accretions of the mental maelstrom into bits and bytes. But there’s a lot of mousing that goes into this site - screen capturing, file resizing, placement, mousing up to the little box to establish the path that links the page to the image. The entirety of my creative work is performed by a hunk of meat and gristle and bone that extends from my elbow to my fingertips.
This, perhaps, is decrepitude, or a prefiguring of it. On the other hand: the forearm line of pain, a thread of burning mercury, does not bother me anymore. I can do three sets of 30 lbs. curls. Yay me. That act used to aggravate a particular set of muscles on my back, but no longer. My biceps and back muscles have stepped right up, smart and keen like volunteers in the first week of a bright new war. Thirty is the new standard, the baseline, and I will probably measure decline against this. There will simple be no argument about decline when I can’t lift 30 anymore.
But I am, these days, eyeing 35.
It’s not outside consideration. When I do the ab crunches - it’s my first machine, most days - I note whether there’s the arrow on the ON position, which indicates an additional five pounds have been added. The next step is 90 pounds, OFF position. It will hurt to hoist. But I’ll be good. I will stare across the room at the same bright blonde rowing in a broad river somewhere, on the screen of another machine. She, too, is there every day, and she's never tired, and never less than enthusiastic about all this.
A model for us all. But I don't know how she'd feel about the new Planet Coaster. She too might be irritated by the inexplicable reduction in the number of animatronic scenery.
We flew to New York. On the bus into town, Wife was wondering where we were going to stay, and I remembered I had no recollection of making hotel reservations. Called up my itinerary on my phone, and saw that I had - Hotel Stanhope, Brooklyn. I said Brooklyn. She sighed, as if she expected that, but it was okay, Brooklyn was interesting. The Stanhope was very old, with a vaguely Mayan decor in the public spaces.
The room was at the top of a staircase without any landing. A basket on the table looked as if it had ashtrays, and I thought good, I can smoke, but they turned out to be candle holders, and I thought that odd, as no hotel would want to encourage the guests to light candles.
And now, a related feature that will provide some Friday amusements:
In preparation for next week, I asked the AI to render Reddy Kilowatt serving Thanksgiving dinner. It didn't go well. First I got a synthesis of Reddy and Homer with a Muppet expression:
Then it went back to the 30s
Well, let's try again, and see what -
This is getting worse. It's the Caillou family forcible bred with ducks. Let's try again
Maliciously Suessian, somehow. Okay one more shot with a different model. One of these models has to know what Reddy looks like.
And that's it for Fridays! Ha ha kidding, of course it's not.
Remember,
we're working up from the bottom.
English Invasion song that begins with extraordinary dissonance. It's not uncharacteristic for the era, but seems dialed up to 11 here. You can imagine all the girls in the audience at American Bandstand nodding along and pretending to like it a bit but you could tell this wasn't connecting.
Robert Shafto (circa 1732 – 24 November 1797) was a British politician who sat in the House of Commons between 1760 and 1790. He was the likely subject of a famous North East English folk song and nursery rhyme, "Bobby Shafto's Gone to Sea."
Probably a different guy. Searching . . . ah. Real name, Robert Farrant. "British pop/beat singer very famous during early 1960's
Discovered by musician Lionel Bart when he was working in his offices, was supposed to make a million quid/pounds within a few years."
Well, did he? I don't think so.
Now we're done. Substack up at 11 AM for those who subscribe; some Lucre, which is one of my forgotten favorites. Have a great weekend! Come Monday, something you've never seen before. I guarantee it!
