ELSEWHERE

And now it's raining

My joints are so loose tonight, it's killing me

ough me legs

I fuckin' hate typing on a phone keyboard and I do not understand how Kids These Days live like this

Someone get computer/typing classes back in schools, they need to see the light. Where is Mavis Beacon in this our hour of need

Someone light the Beacon beacon

Yesterday was rough, from a combination of the weather and standing so much on Sunday, to the point that I had trouble standing or walking much at all. Today is better, but my ankles are still bothering me so I'm mostly staying horizontal.

I need to do my final and finish reading the book club book. I have been playing a lot of Oblivion remastered, and am enjoying it! It took some finangling to get it to run nice on the steam deck -- I have a Lot of thoughts about the lifecycles of computers and consoles in gaming these days and how I've only had the deck for two years and it's already being outpaced by hardware requirements, but I also just generally feel like games don't actually need to render individual blades of grass and have them react to dynamic wind effects, I just don't feel like that actually adds to my play experience in any way

I am horrified by what they did to the characters' faces, in particular the mouths are so fucking big?? And they have such smooth talking animations now that it's really distracting. Oblivion NPCs have always been kind of ugly but man, scale the mouths down by like 25%, everyone looks like that video of Heavy Rain with the facial animations turned way up

Maybe give everyone bigger eyes while you're at it

I also am a little disappointed in how buggy the game is, given that it's a remaster of a sixteen year old game and they really should have worked out these kinks by now. Also it's been sixteen years and there's still no way to tell what level you need to be to be able to cast a spell before you make/buy it. They've simplified a lot of overcomplicated stuff that is definitely for the best but also, the overcomplicated jank was a lot of the charm of the original for me.

That said! I am having a lot of fun and it's very nostalgic. I personally appreciate them going woke and divorcing the gender perks from the gender selection and making them background/origin options instead -- so like originally the male argonian gets a speed boost and the female argonian gets an intelligence boost, now you select a 'body type' and you select a character background that either gives you a speed or intelligence boost that has nothing to do with your body type. I like the additional lore you get from it

I'm playing an argonian mage (actually a custom class, as usual, but magic-focused), and I've never really played a devoted spellcaster before -- I always do a bit of magic because why wouldn't you, and I do the mage guild questline because again why wouldn't you, but this is my first time really getting into the weeds of spells. I did immediately join the arena, the mage's guild, the thieves' guild, and the dark brotherhood, and got the skeleton key and the eye of sithis necklace. Aside from that I've been just running around doing whatever's in the area.

@erikavonkaiser Have you been playing any more of it? I think you mentioned also having it but I guess that was in voice chat because I don't see anything in chatlogs, or I just completely imagined it. I'm curious your impressions on it as someone who didn't play the original!

Speaking of Erika, today I played ESO with her and Sophie, and it was fun! We did a couple of questy things for about forty-five minutes and then split off to go do things away from the computer. Sophie was very nice and it was good to meet her, and we'll all get together to do it again some time probably! Hopefully I also made a good impression

Oh!! And Prequel just updated! I'm going to go read that and then play some more video games, ciao!

Also -- and this is huge -- they tweaked nighteye so it doesn't fucking blind you if you happen to have it on when there's a light source nearby

The NPCs all look like Road Rash characters, or that same 90s fisheye effect they used in music videos &c

 
Tiny eyes, enormous mouth

I haven't had any particular urge to switch over to the original at any point, and I consider that pretty good praise

I finally raised my destruction high enough to be able to cast my custom Power Word Fuck You spell, which does 5 points of fire damage, 5 points of frost damage, and 5 points of shock damage in a 10 foot radius for 5 seconds