So for me, I understand people who've lost their livelihoods and are desperate to get by. "I'm a Tesla factory worker and Elon Musk is demanding that I go back to work or not get paid, even though he could afford to pay all of us our salaries for the duration and it wouldn't noticeably affect his net worth, so I'm going in."
Some people just can't avoid this catastrophe, and are forced to endanger themselves by circumstance.
But... a barber?!?!?!
"Gee... I could stay at home, send my barber the check that I was going to spend anyway, be slightly inconvenienced, and yet keep both the economy and the people around me alive, or I could just say, 'Screw everybody and the rules they rode in on,' and go get a haircut!
I'm going to go get a haircut!"
It soooooo frustrates me because worship of the almighty dollar has driven virtually everyone to make irrational decisions.
I was going to spend the money anyway. I send my serviceperson a check. I am not out anything I wasn't planning on being out. They aren't out anything, and are actually a bit ahead of the game because they didn't work. We both stay safe.
How hard is it?
Apparently very, very hard.
Spoiler:
See, I don't really share your mindset here. In that, if I was going to pay for a service, I'm not flush with cash enough that I can still pay for it, and not get the service. I can't afford that kind of flippancy. And I reckon the average person can't either. So the barber gets no money, unless they re-open. It sucks, and it doesn't happen here because we set up a social safety net for people who had to stop working because of the lockdown right away, but in America? I can totally see where a barber has to open illicitly, or go homeless.
I would like to say that the full version I got of X-com 2 didn't crash and that it was only your hacked copy.. I would like to say that...
At least it auto saved often.
He told me that it crashed when he gave it to me, so I kind of expected it. But it was frustrating because I wanted to keep playing it.
Yeah their fun games. definitely worth picking up.
I just saw that there is a bundle of the 5 original games on steam for $15. Maybe I'll pick it up sometime.
Alternatively, there is currently a Humble Bundle that includes the first X-Com of the most recent series for $18.50. It comes with a bunch of others games as well. If you're interested in X-Com and even one or two of the other games in there (Borderlands, for instance, is a fantastic co-op FPS), it's probably worth it.
One good thing about living in a religious country? Good Friday and Easter Monday are both paid days off. :D 4 day week, yeah!
I woke up at 04:30 this morning. Not because I wanted to, or needed to, or even because the little one woke me. I just did, and am wide awake now. So that's fun to do on the first day of a four day weekend. :P
But this is a f***ton of extra work and I am f***ing exhausted.
Oh, and our head of school wants me to call or email parents every time a kid skips a lesson, "just to check in on them".
There is a very real lack of expectation management. I am going to get into it with my boss, I just know it.
This working from home malarkey is more nonsense than I realised. I have no sense of time anymore, and it seems neither does anyone else in my office, as I find myself getting work emails up to 22:00 at night. I'm actually looking forward to being able to go back to the office, which is something I never thought I'd find myself saying. :P
Also, anyone seen Kipo and the age of wonderbeasts on netflix? Because its amazing and I need to talk to people about how cool it is and how it needs an RPG adaption.
It's amazing and I love it and I can't wait for the next season. :D I kept trying to watch it with my son, and wound up just watching it myself. :P That and Hilda. :)
Shiro and GothBard showed me how to buy the COVID-19 Humble Bundle, and encouraged me to do so since the money goes to charity. And, looking at a single humble bundle, I was thinking, "There is no way in my lifetime I will ever START all of these games, much less PLAY all of them!"
I dunno; I guess if you look at my old Sega Genesis collection I did collect maybe as many games as are in a single humble bundle, but... holy carp!
I guess as you get older you just find other things that consume your time...
And this is how I wound up with a list of 600-odd games that I have spare Steam keys for. :P Speaking of, if anyone wants to browse the list, it's here. Free games up for grabs!
Freehold:
I have a selection of games that I have been holding aside specifically for when you joined Steam. Let me know if you're interested and I'll send them on. :)
Good to hear from you man, been a while and we were starting to get worried. =)
Thanks man. :) It's been hella busy, between working from home, the new baby suffering from colic, teething, and having to get his first vaccinations, and the mouser being home from school. Also, the wife's scoliosis is acting up, which ain't helping either. So it's been hard to sit down at the computer and catch up on FaWtL. :P Glad I got the opportunity to today though. :)
The Emerald Isles are in full lockdown currently, advised not to leave the house unless for essential services. The pubs have all been closed, which should give some indication of how seriously we're taking this. :P The family are all bunkered down in place, and while I am currently under the weather, the symptoms thankfully bear no resemblance to the covid-19 ones. Working from home currently, which isn't really working all that well, but it's better than having to go to the office, or being laid off.
Howdy FaWtLanteans! Finally managed to catch up on all the posts. My heart goes out to all my fellows here having hard times at the moment. I hope things can improve for everyone soon. Potentially doubtful given the current pandemic, but I'll still be hoping for the best for ye all. *internet-hugs*
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So I just watched "Ishuzoku Reviewers" - Which is about a couple of adventurers in a standard fantasy setting, who's quest is to visit all the brothels of every species in the world.
The main part of me can't believe something like this even got animated
a smaller part wonders why it didn't happen sooner.
and a really tiny part, deep down in the darkest parts of my soul is saying "you ARE going to keep watching this, aren't you?"
I'm kind of amazed I didn't hear about this series from Freehold first, but I've definitely enjoyed it so far. A concept that I'm very surprised hasn't been expanded sooner, though it hadn't really occurred to me before seeing it. Great stuff anyways.
Morning FaWtLy folk! Hope everyone is keeping happy and well, and taking care of themselves this side of the new year. Ain't getting much time for anything these days, work and new baba keeping me busy, but I try to keep up with the posts and like where I can.
HumbleBundle changes its formula. Now it picks a number of games each month and you can pick some of them to keep...
The price is higher for keeping 9 games ($15, I think, compared to old $12, $5 or something like that for 3...), though those who were subscribers prior to the change (*waves*) have a classic price of $12 per 10 picks. The catch is that skipping a month ends the classic without going back. So this is clearly a ploy to prevent me from pausing anymore...
You can still pause, you just can't cancel. And you wouldn't want to. The best level currently on offer is Premium, which is €18 for 9 of the games. But staying on the "Classic" gets you 10 games for €10. Not too shabby.
A few (depending on your definition of few :P) pages back, TL wishes me congratulations. I finally have time to post here and say it was on the birth on my new son, born 27th of November, 10:44am. :)
Helyo every-FaWtL! I hope everyone is keeping well and your weeks are off to a good start. For everyone who isn't, I hope things improve real soon. And for those whose families are having a hard time, I will be wishing them all a speedy recovery from their troubles.
Morning every-FaWtL. I hope everyone is staying healthy and well this weather, and that life is treating ye right. For anyone who's not, I hope you all feel better soon, and things start going your ways. *hugs*
woran may be a monster girl.
Things are looking up.
Speaking of, there's a new zip file in that dropbox we're both in.
If this morning's announcement is true, I think it may be one of the laziest IT decisions I've ever seen.
As I think I've mentioned, our file sharing systems here are pathetic; by default you get 50 MB (yes. Megabytes. NOT Gigabytes). By request you can up it to a whopping 500 MB. You need special permission to go higher.
So, we just got the announcement from IT that we're moving to a new file management system. Hooray!
Except... they're not going to migrate anything for us. Every single one of the 100,000+ affected employees has to manually migrate his or her own file systems.
In my opinion, "We're an IT department, we're fundamentally changing your infrastructure, and we're going to make YOU deal with it all with no instructions or tools," is a serious IT fail.
you mean that's not how its supposed to work? That's what they told us to do years ago when we migrated.
(1) Meet Woran or Vanykrye in person (or LordSynos? Aren't you in IT?)
(2) Say, "We will let the users be responsible for their own critical data migrations."
(3) Repeat until they are quivering masses of "no" on the floor.
You will then understand just how monumentally bad of an idea this is.
Finance, not IT, but I am the go-to person on the Finance team for IT related things. Because I play computer games.
A lot, particularly recently. Usually I try and distract myself with things that don't have a "skill" level involved, that I can't feel I'm faking, or with things that I know I'm actually good at, so that I feel better for succeeding at something. Neither of those things improve my work situation though, so while I feel better temporarily, it can actually make things worse long term.
Morning every-FaWtL. I hope everyone is staying healthy and well this weather, and that life is treating ye right. For anyone who's not, I hope you all feel better soon, and things start going your ways. *hugs*
All the keys from Humble Bundle that weren't activated yet should be accessible from your Humble Bundle account.
True, but because of how I maintained the list, all the keys are "claimed". I was just giving away the ones it then wouldn't let me activate on Steam, because I already owned the game in question.
When you have 2,980 games on Steam, the easiest way to check if you owned a game or not was to just try and claim the key. :P
So, that'll show me how many keys I have for a game, but not which ones have actually already been used, either by me, or by being gifted to others. Hence the trial and error that I'll probably have to go through.
Not rightly sure what happened, unfortunately. I ran a windows update and the next time it turned on, half my desktop icons were gone. That was a few weeks ago now, at least. I just didn't think much of it at the time, because I couldn't remember what all of the icons were, to know which ones were missing. It was only when I went to update it yesterday that I realised that the file was one of the ones that was now gone.
At the end of the day, they were just games. Duplicates of games I already owned, in fact. It's upsetting, as I wanted to share them, but it's not the end of the world. In fact, I'm already putting together a plan to remake it, using my google drive version as a reference file to know which games I need to search my Humble account for the keys of. Theoretically, it can be remade, it'll just wind up with some/a lot of duplicate/already used keys on it, that I'll just need to test on other people over time to narrow down. :P
Recently, a number of documents and shortcuts went missing from my desktop. I didn't think much of it at the time, because I couldn't put my finger on what was missing, so figured nothing important was. But it's gone. The original copy of the list, the one with all the keys. Gone.
Its not like having kids here is cheap either, but most companies have very flexible rules for part time work. So generally most families with two parents working can make it work.
From what I've read, childcare stuff, like creche or after-school care, is cheaper there, and there's non-means-tested government assistance for it. Also, rents are much cheaper, with somewhere in the range of €700 for equivalent sized apartments between the capital here and there. So, it may not be cheap, but I'll take cheap-er any day.
While sick and bed-bound, I caught up on a bunch of anime series I've been meaning to watch. DanMachi S2, Dr. Stone, Isekai Cheat Magician, Machikado Mazoku, and Maou-sama, Retry! ICM and M-SR! are both fairly typical "isekai" (transported to another world) anime, though I'm enjoying M-SR! a bit at least. Dr.S is an interesting premise, but kind of slow going. I'm kind of hoping they pick up the pace, as I'm losing interest. MM is cutesy and hilarious. I've actually laughed out loud a few times while watching it. Definitely not to be taken seriously though. DM S2 is the second season of DM, and if you enjoyed the first, you'll probably enjoy this too. If you didn't enjoy DM, or haven't seen DM, I'd hold off.
WW's fiftieth birthday is Thursday, and his big party is Saturday evening. At our house.
I am trying to stay positive and not devolve into a mass of insecurity and anxiety to the point of hysteria, mostly because I've got work to do, but we're going to have about fifty people in our backyard and I'm making most of the food. And there's cleaning and baking and various other preparations, not to mention my actual job.
I hate parties.
I mean, I like the idea of parties, and other people, existing, in theory, I just want them all to go far, far away.
In other news, while digging the party supplies out of the garage last night, I finally found my good flannel sheets and my GM mug. Only took me thirteen months.
Happy birthday in advance to WW! Hope the party planning/prep, and party itself, goes smoothly!
I've spoilered a whole lot there. It's mostly just not wanting to force people to read my rambling, I don't think there's anything really controversial in there. :P
Can anyone recommend a game like State of Decay? I'm itching for some kind of base-building/developing, resource scavenging, survival management game. Something on the PS4 or Switch are best, but I would take PC recommendations as well.
It feels like it's been a while since I've plugged it, so BEHOLD! The great Steam Games list! I'm up to 646 unique games on the list now, with multiple copies of lots of them. All are games for which I have spare Steam activation keys, so if anyone is interested in playing any of the games on the list, just let me know, and I'll pass it along. :)
We also have a Steam FaWtL group. I think Orthos is the administrator.
Recently beat Spider-Man (the newer one) on PS4, including the DLC. I find I have a lot less patience for combat in these games recently. The main game was fine, but they upped the difficulty in the DLC, to the point that I found myself cursing out the game more than once (good thing I wait to play until the munchkin has gone to bed).
Similarly, I've started God of War (also the newest one) on PS4, and having gone with medium difficulty (a balanced experience, they call it), I'm already considering reducing it to easy (story mode). I'm not sure if it's patience, or I've lost my touch in action games, playing PC FPS's and RPG's for so long, but all these combo moves and perfect-timing-required parries and blocks just don't make the game fun, they make it frustrating. But maybe that's just me.
Things are going well, if a bit tough, at the moment. The partner (need to come up with a FaWtL acceptable nickname, all the partners seem to have them these days :P) is doing well, despite a series of health problems around the pregnancy (kidney infection, anemia, sciatic nerve aggravation, and more recently, the flu). Our baby boy is growing healthy and strong, though is apparently as impatient as his mother, and they are currently expecting him to arrive several weeks before his due date (so mid-November). The munchkin is having a hard time adjusting to the idea of a little brother, sometimes being quite excited about the idea, and other times being very possessive of us. For my part, work is keeping me well busy during the day, and I'm doing what I can around the house in the evenings, though that dropped off last week with the sinusitis. We're currently planning on getting married on the 11th of November (just a civil ceremony in the registration office), so we're hoping our new arrival waits at least that long. :P
We're currently giving serious consideration to moving abroad as well. Specifically, the Netherlands. Ireland is great and all, just don't be a parent unless you're rich. Childcare costs and rent are both exorbitant, so we can't really save for the future where we are.
Generation 5 (Black & White - the Unova region) was just released in Pokémon Go, and there's an event on currently for getting Generation 1 (Red & Blue - Kanto) regional Pokémon through friend eggs (7km), with the possibility of shiny variants. Between that and the newish addition of Team Rocket Grunts to battle, I am really enjoying it again. :)
I got shiny Tauros and Mr Lime so far, so hoping for a Farfetch'd and Kangaskhan before the event's end next Monday. :D
On Epic, I had heard what Woran was saying, that the traffic is too high for what it needs, and that it scans your Steam files without permission. Also, all the exclusivity crap, which I had long thought was a console problem, and seeing it on PC was annoying as heck. And also the yet-another-client issue. I've got Steam, uPlay, BattleNet, Origin, itch, it's already way out of hand.
Epic may not be going anywhere any time soon, but that doesn't mean I have to use it.
My Dad came over on Saturday and we put together four pieces of Ikea furniture. My little munchkin helped out, so it was fun having three generations of the family working together on a project.
Slightly Silly:
My Dad was also proud of me, because I was doing a DIY thing with him. It may seem silly, but he worked in construction, so he's always been a very hands-on, get-things-done kind of guy, while as a lazy-ass gamer and office desk-jockey, I am very much not. So he was pleased as punch to be working with me on putting furniture and stuff together, and I guess seeing me rise to a man-around-the-house kind of role. It was nice. :)
Also, my partner could not get over how strong the family resemblance is, when all three of us were together. It's a serious Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V situation. :P
Birthdays have always been a big deal in my family, and I've got lots of positive memories of them, so it really cheeses me off when I hear of people being s@#!ty to others on their birthdays.
Sorry you've been left with negative birthday memories CY & VE. :/
