A roaring start

So against all odds I got into the Elder Scrolls Online beta!
Holy shit, yet another mediocre WoW clone to ruin a once great franchise?
Could it possibly be that time already?
Count me the fuck in!
And we're off to a roaring start. I can't even RUN THE FUCKING LAUNCHER.
This is the step before installing the game and it doesn't even work.
Bang up job, Bethesda. 10/10 would definitely pay money.
This computer can run Crysis on maximum but it can't just run a Bethesda installer you fucking
idiot
fuck.
Oh there we go.
Obviously I have to let it hang for 10  minutes, then crash it, then wait another 30 seconds for it to say it finished installing.
I guess a crash landing is still a landing.
And the game is 21 GB.
Of course.
That's like the size of 2 games.
This game better be double as good as Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
I haven't even booted the game up yet and already I'm fucking angry and underwhelmed.
I'm underwhelmed from my expectations of this ruining the franchise.
Somehow my expectation of "franchise ruiner" hasn't even been met.
Oh yeah, in a franchise that includes games for the Nokia N-Gage and the award winner that was Redguard, Elder Scrolls Online will somehow be the worst.
The kicker, to me, is when they were drilling me about the lore and one of the questions starts with "of the fivet Elder Scrolls games..."
Five?
What about Redguard or Battlespire?
I'm not counting the cellphone ones.
There are 7.
The company that makes these games doesn't even know what the fuck.
Doomed from the start.
Oh right. Blogs.

I sort of saw this coming. I mean, the question when you're about to retire is "What are your plans?" My answer has been, "To do nothing for a while and see what develops."

And you can't tell me Redguard and Battlespire aren't important in terms of the story. Battlespire in particular introduced the Ideal Masters and the Havoc Wellhead's collapse caused all sorts of long term shit.
In fact if I'm remembering right the number of internal references to other Elder Scrolls games in Skyrim the most was Oblivion, the game that came right before it, then Battlespire, inexplicably.

Why the Cult of Hard Work is Counterproductive, an absolutely wonderful article by Steven Poole published in New Statesman a couple of weeks ago, goes into "why doing nothing may be the best thing for your well-being and your brain."

Though it's a British article for a British publication and doesn't even mention the word "American," it has a huge bearing on a discussion of American-versus-European concepts of work and leave time that several of us were having here on my journal a few days ago.

Oh good.
Let me just sit here and the money will fall into my wallet.
I've been waiting for this to happen.
Also Elder Scrolls Online takes place in the second era.
When Molag Bal tried to pull Coldharbor into Nirn.
Remember when that happened?
All the times in one of the other games when someone said "hey, this is a lot like that time THE UNIVERSE ALMOST COLLAPSED IN ON ITSELF IN THE SECOND ERA"?
Remember that?
No?
Me neither.
Fuck.
It's pretty clear none of this shit matters because the next closest game chronologically is Redguard and no one mentions it once.
It's a mere 300 years after the entire universe almost ended and it's not even a footnote in history.
People still talk about the end of the first era like it personally affects them when that was more than 1000 years ago, but Coldharbor getting pulled into the material universe?
Ain't nothing to it, really.

I'm about ninety percent through Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things, and I'm just...gah! I love it so much, and it cuts so close to the bone for me, that unless Gilbert completely ruins it in the home stretch, it will be one of my favorite novels ever.

It's difficult to discuss without revealing significant themes and plot points, but it probably won't spoil the story to say that for the bulk of its many, many pages (or, in my case, hours of audiobook) it's about a female character in her fifties: an intelligent, erudite, repressed, perfectionistic, obsessive and--not incidentally for me--very big, unattractive--woman who doesn't break out of her chrysalis until late in life.

You know the beauty of the Elder Scrolls was it was a very alien setting and yet nothing that happens in it seems dumb or made up.
Like you could really imagine this shit happening in some far off, alien landscape.
Oblivion kind of fucked that up by making everything look like Renaissance England but they're clearly trying to address that.
Or they were until this mess.
Then they just plonk down this cataclysmic event in the past that no one seems to remember.
It might seem like I'm picking on a small plot point but there was another event that happened in Elder Scrolls mythology called The Warp in the West where all of reality was rewritten due to the providence of this one artifact and yet that history is clearly recorded.
Oh yeah the timeline crunching from multiple paths to linear time is easily documented but a major fuck off event we should have noticed?
No one has time for everything, shit.

Hard drive failure is what I'm (pretty sure I'm) talking about here. This Dell Studio workhorse laptop has weathered four and a half years of my significant demands, but is finally showing signs of...something.

Remember when hard-drive failure was a major catastrophe? Now, not so much. Virtually everything I need to save is in the cloud already. 

The porn cloud.
Also hard drive failure on a laptop is pretty catastrophic.

Does anyone use a solid-state drive? And if so, was it a replacement for an older HDD? How'd that go? 

No it wasn't.
Considering all you do is write fanfiction it's probably fine.
Fucking Elder Scrolls Online.
Fuck this blog, too. Jesus. I was supposed to be updating this blog but I can't even focus on how shitty it is between the boredom of having to read it and staring at the Elder Scrolls Online patcher.