As with most liberal minded Americans, the national news has been one constant horror show ever since the orange baboon was sworn into office. Never in my life has my president so reviled and disgusted me. Sure, I hated George W. Bush's policies -- most of them, anyway -- but with that did not come the revulsion for his person that I get when I think of the Cheeto Nazi. I can't even use his real name. My fingers forbid me from typing it out.
This has left me with a constant sensation of helplessness. What am I to do? I didn't vote for him, yet now he's in power. I didn't vote to give the majority of congress to the conservatives, yet now they have it. I contacted my representatives and told them that I did not want them to vote for the president's appointments, but it didn't matter because even if they listen to me, they still don't have the majority and thus are powerless to stop any of these confirmations. And every time I see a bit of political news, it's another executive order or another decision or another remark that just plain horrifies me. I can't afford to donate money to organizations that will try to fight this kind of thing. I can't afford or get the time off to attend rallies or marches to protest what's happening. When every decision the president makes causes me to go, "No, that's WRONG. How can he DO that? Why isn't anyone STOPPING him?", I'm left with this feeling of utter helplessness and anger. The simple fact that I'm forced to follow alternate versions of NASA, the EPA, the National Parks and Services, and other government agencies in order to get real facts is, quite honestly, terrifying.
I do believe that we'll be okay. I see how many people are out there fighting for what's right, fighting to stop all this potential stripping away of human rights, all this damage that could be done to the economy and to the environment, and it helps. But it doesn't stop that feeling of helplessness, of feeling that there's nothing that I can do to help.
The answer to this dilemma came to me in the strangest of circumstances.
Yet another news article entered my feed, and I found myself once again dismayed, angry, and filled with a desire to DO something. But this one wasn't about a pipeline that could ruin the lives of hundreds of Native Americans, or another story about a racist/bigot/billionaire/old white person being appointed to a position in which they have no experience, or about American's worldview reputation being flushed even further down the toilet. This was a simpler article stating that the president's administration was delaying the addition of the bumblebee to the endangered species list, and how scientists were worried that this could put it on the path to extinction.
I went through all the familiar motions, sighed in defeat, rolled my eyes, and scrolled on. But then, I was suddenly struck by inspiration. There WAS something that I could do. I could help with this, even if just a little bit. Adding a species to the endangered list provides it protections and raises awareness. It spurs actions to help to preserve both the species and its habitat. I realized that I could help do that myself, regardless of my incompetent government's decisions. I have a large yard, and I'm a gardener. I have the means to do something about this.
And so, after just a short bit of research, I found a great online resource on bumblebees. I learned the best types of flowers to grow that will benefit them, that it's important to provide nectar during all parts of the warmer season (especially early on), to watch for grounded bees in the early spring, and how to build a nesting box for them.
While it may not be much, and it's not as compelling as going to a march or getting involved in some other, direct way, this is something that I can do, and it helps me feel a little bit better about the awful political climate that we're in right now. I'm just one person, but I hope there are a lot of others just like me doing the same kinds of things. That's the only way we're going to make things better.
Thursday, February 09, 2017
Wednesday, January 18, 2017
OC Height
I have always considered Ma'tiki, my Troll, to be above-average in height just like I am in real life. He's always been sort of an extension of me, in a way, as original characters tend to be. He's a better version of me who's smarter, kinder, and better. And of course, in better physical shape, too. Since I'm about seven inches taller than the average human, I consider Ma'tiki to be seven inches taller than the average Troll. Now, it's sort of difficult to canonically determine the average height of a Troll male. Some simple research on WoWwiki provides information gleaned from the World of Warcraft: Official Beginner's Guide, and states that the average height of a Troll male is between 7' and 8'. However, it also states that the average Tauren is between 9' and 10'. This is a conflict in some regards, because in-game you can determine that when a male Troll is not slouching, they are taller than Tauren males. So, one of these measurements is inaccurate.
I'm inclined to think that the 7' to 8' measurements for Trolls is correct, which would put Tauren at 7.5' to 8' thereabouts. This is, of course, open to conjecture. I've come to this conclusion for a few reasons. One, I have seen corroborating height charts, such as this one, which supports shorter Tauren. Second, 10' is really, really freaking huge! In-game, it just doesn't make sense for them to be that tall when you see them next to the other races. This could be a gameplay mechanics choice, but since I'm only using these measurements to determine the height of an OC, I think it's fine to use this information and make these assumptions.
So, going with an average height of 7' for male Trolls, that means that Ma'tiki is 7'7. Slouched. Standing up straight, which I consider him to be doing quite a lot of the time, he's an insane 9'. This is assuming that they gain a foot and a half when standing up straight. This is supported by the previous image that I linked. In looking at their in-game models, it seems like a pretty safe assumption. They are slouched over quite severely in their idle stance, and gain what looks like a considerable amount of height when they do their little shoulder roll animation. This is what he would look like standing next to my puny 6'1 frame. It's easy to forget that when I imagine him in my head.
Going by this information, it's easy to determine his weight by using one of those "ideal weight calculators" that gives you an ideal weight based upon your height. Using nine feet, Ma'tiki's ideal weight would fall somewhere around 350 pounds. I think for him, I would bump that up to between 360 and 370 pounds, to take muscle mass into consideration. While he's not an active warrior any longer, he's still very active and regularly trains himself physically. Adding an extra 10-20 pounds is probably on the conservative side, but it feels right to me.
So there you have it. I'm really not sure what prompted me to do this little bit of research. I suppose I just had the inspiration to talk about Ma'tiki a little bit. Leave it to him to finally break my 6-month long dry spell on blog posts. Thanks, buddy.
I'm inclined to think that the 7' to 8' measurements for Trolls is correct, which would put Tauren at 7.5' to 8' thereabouts. This is, of course, open to conjecture. I've come to this conclusion for a few reasons. One, I have seen corroborating height charts, such as this one, which supports shorter Tauren. Second, 10' is really, really freaking huge! In-game, it just doesn't make sense for them to be that tall when you see them next to the other races. This could be a gameplay mechanics choice, but since I'm only using these measurements to determine the height of an OC, I think it's fine to use this information and make these assumptions.
So, going with an average height of 7' for male Trolls, that means that Ma'tiki is 7'7. Slouched. Standing up straight, which I consider him to be doing quite a lot of the time, he's an insane 9'. This is assuming that they gain a foot and a half when standing up straight. This is supported by the previous image that I linked. In looking at their in-game models, it seems like a pretty safe assumption. They are slouched over quite severely in their idle stance, and gain what looks like a considerable amount of height when they do their little shoulder roll animation. This is what he would look like standing next to my puny 6'1 frame. It's easy to forget that when I imagine him in my head.
Going by this information, it's easy to determine his weight by using one of those "ideal weight calculators" that gives you an ideal weight based upon your height. Using nine feet, Ma'tiki's ideal weight would fall somewhere around 350 pounds. I think for him, I would bump that up to between 360 and 370 pounds, to take muscle mass into consideration. While he's not an active warrior any longer, he's still very active and regularly trains himself physically. Adding an extra 10-20 pounds is probably on the conservative side, but it feels right to me.
So there you have it. I'm really not sure what prompted me to do this little bit of research. I suppose I just had the inspiration to talk about Ma'tiki a little bit. Leave it to him to finally break my 6-month long dry spell on blog posts. Thanks, buddy.
Friday, June 03, 2016
Longterm Storytelling
Overwatch is a rousing success for Blizzard, and not in the primary ways that everyone expected. Yes, the game is being praised for its gameplay, style, audio, music, and Blizzard's may-as-well-be-patented "easy to learn but difficult to master" formula. However, I feel that there's one certain part of Overwatch where Blizzard took a bit of a gamble, and from what I can tell, it seems to be paying off in spades. It's also got me thinking about the concept of something I like to call "longterm storytelling", which will be the entire basis for this post.
People are fascinated by Overwatch's cast of characters, which is something of a misnomer when it comes to a game such as this. It's a multi-player only, team-based shooter with MOBA elements. We're talking about a specific set of genres that are known to have either sparse or completely non-existent story to them. Let's look at the precedents. The major behemoth on the field is League of Legends. Let's have a show of hands. How many people know the lore behind even one of the characters in that game? They have lore, sure, but the point I'm making here is that no one really cares about it. LoL is insanely popular for its gameplay and e-sports scene, not its story. The same holds true for all the other big multi-player only team based type games out there, like Dota 2, Team Fortress 2, and Counter-Strike.
To take it a step further, even games like Call of Duty or Battlefield have this problem. These games have single-player campaigns, certainly, but they are usually about four to six hours long and are totally forgettable. The main draw of those games is the multi-player aspect of them, and within that half of the game there's zero story to be had. In all of these examples, we're talking about games that really don't try very hard to inject any story into their gameplay. But using games like Destiny as an example, sometimes even when they do try, it ends up not working at all.
Enter Overwatch. Here is a game that has all the formulas listed above. Multi-player only. Team based. MOBA tropes. No single-player campaign. And yet, my Tumblr dash is literally overflowing with people talking about Overwatch's characters. Discussing their backgrounds. History. Drawing them. Shipping them. Making up silly lists of what they like to eat for breakfast. Everything that you can imagine. People are in love with these characters, despite all of the evidence above suggesting that they shouldn't. So, what has Blizzard done right? What magic formula have they found here?
I don't think there's a singular answer to this question, but I have some pretty good ideas. Obviously, Blizzard has created a very interesting foundation for these characters. They are very colorful and have personality. A cowboy with a BAMF belt buckle. A pro-gamer in a mech. An international pop-star that heals with music. A gorilla scientist. These are pretty cool concepts, and lay a foundation for interesting characters and story. But, League of Legends has interesting character concepts, too. A living tree that tosses saplings. A knife-wielding jester. An Amazonian that can turn into a cat. These are really cool concepts, too! What makes Overwatch's characters stand out?
I think the answer is how the story and character information is presented to the players. This, I feel, is THE defining point that is driving this fascination with the characters in the game. And now I'm about to make the strangest, most out-of-left-field comparison I have ever made. The fascination with Overwatch's characters is very much like the fascination with the world of Dark Souls. Both of these games do something similar with their lore, and I think it really appeals to their playerbase. They both let the story trickle out to the player slowly, in little tidbits, a lot of which are quite difficult to notice or catch. This adds a level of mystery to things that really gets people's curiosity.
In this day of hyper-connectivity, I think people crave that sense of discovery and mystery that they once had, back when you couldn't just look up everything on the Internet. But at the same time, it also feeds that community, because there's no other way to find out every scrap of information that you can without scouring the game for hours and hours yourself. It's a lot different than a straight-forward game that says, "Right! You're the protagonist. That's the antagonist. You're good, he's bad, you fight, you'll win." And then the game is over and that's it. We know some things about Overwatch's characters, but we don't know all the things. And this makes people hungry for more. It makes them talk about them, makes them create their own headcanons about them, and makes them search and scour and ask for more. And all of this contributes to the health of the game's community and playerbase.
I think this concept is one of the reasons why World of Warcraft's story has been failing me lately. Everyone knows that WoW's peak was during Wrath of the Lich King. Why? I think one of the contributing factors was because the Lich King was this character that existed all along, mentioned and referenced at differing points across the game's history until we finally faced off against him. The feeling that I got when hearing about the Lich King pre-Wrath was the same as the feeling that I get from learning about Overwatch's characters. That feeling has been absent from WoW for a while now. Expansions feel more self-contained, even though Warcraft's cast of characters has been expanded upon and grown.
Cataclysm wasn't too bad in this regard, but I think it didn't live up to Wrath's precedent because Deathwing was too much of a cookie-cutter villain. From there, that overarching sense of bigger and more mysterious things on the horizon has been dulled by the expansions being so isolated from one another. Blizzard has been trying to link them together in a way, but it hasn't been working for me. I think that they haven't been doing a good enough job at setting up later storylines within the content that precedes it. With Legion, the potential is there, but I fear that it's going to be dulled for me because of how grim the story is. I'm excited for Legion, but in different ways than I have been for previous expansions.
That's enough of a WoW tangent, so let's get back to the topic at hand. Regarding the longterm storytelling of Overwatch, I hope that Blizzard continues to do this "trickle-down" method of storytelling, because I think it's working. I think they've found the perfect solution to the problem of applying a story to a game that doesn't really have a good support mechanism for one. What I would love to see are special events that take place in the game, using those to nudge the story forward a little bit. Perhaps the Second Omnic Crisis escalates into all-out war, and we get a new map in the game to introduce us to it. It would also be cool if Blizzard would use quality-of-life adjustments to the game as opportunities to add in a bit of story. For example, they've recently been talking about nerfing McCree and buffing D.Va. It would be cool if we'd get story-based tidbids that help to explain why these changes occur in the context of Overwatch's story. Perhaps McCree had a run-in with his old gang of bandits and was injured in someway, explaining his nerf. Stuff like that. There's tons of potential there.
People are fascinated by Overwatch's cast of characters, which is something of a misnomer when it comes to a game such as this. It's a multi-player only, team-based shooter with MOBA elements. We're talking about a specific set of genres that are known to have either sparse or completely non-existent story to them. Let's look at the precedents. The major behemoth on the field is League of Legends. Let's have a show of hands. How many people know the lore behind even one of the characters in that game? They have lore, sure, but the point I'm making here is that no one really cares about it. LoL is insanely popular for its gameplay and e-sports scene, not its story. The same holds true for all the other big multi-player only team based type games out there, like Dota 2, Team Fortress 2, and Counter-Strike.
To take it a step further, even games like Call of Duty or Battlefield have this problem. These games have single-player campaigns, certainly, but they are usually about four to six hours long and are totally forgettable. The main draw of those games is the multi-player aspect of them, and within that half of the game there's zero story to be had. In all of these examples, we're talking about games that really don't try very hard to inject any story into their gameplay. But using games like Destiny as an example, sometimes even when they do try, it ends up not working at all.
Enter Overwatch. Here is a game that has all the formulas listed above. Multi-player only. Team based. MOBA tropes. No single-player campaign. And yet, my Tumblr dash is literally overflowing with people talking about Overwatch's characters. Discussing their backgrounds. History. Drawing them. Shipping them. Making up silly lists of what they like to eat for breakfast. Everything that you can imagine. People are in love with these characters, despite all of the evidence above suggesting that they shouldn't. So, what has Blizzard done right? What magic formula have they found here?
I don't think there's a singular answer to this question, but I have some pretty good ideas. Obviously, Blizzard has created a very interesting foundation for these characters. They are very colorful and have personality. A cowboy with a BAMF belt buckle. A pro-gamer in a mech. An international pop-star that heals with music. A gorilla scientist. These are pretty cool concepts, and lay a foundation for interesting characters and story. But, League of Legends has interesting character concepts, too. A living tree that tosses saplings. A knife-wielding jester. An Amazonian that can turn into a cat. These are really cool concepts, too! What makes Overwatch's characters stand out?
I think the answer is how the story and character information is presented to the players. This, I feel, is THE defining point that is driving this fascination with the characters in the game. And now I'm about to make the strangest, most out-of-left-field comparison I have ever made. The fascination with Overwatch's characters is very much like the fascination with the world of Dark Souls. Both of these games do something similar with their lore, and I think it really appeals to their playerbase. They both let the story trickle out to the player slowly, in little tidbits, a lot of which are quite difficult to notice or catch. This adds a level of mystery to things that really gets people's curiosity.
In this day of hyper-connectivity, I think people crave that sense of discovery and mystery that they once had, back when you couldn't just look up everything on the Internet. But at the same time, it also feeds that community, because there's no other way to find out every scrap of information that you can without scouring the game for hours and hours yourself. It's a lot different than a straight-forward game that says, "Right! You're the protagonist. That's the antagonist. You're good, he's bad, you fight, you'll win." And then the game is over and that's it. We know some things about Overwatch's characters, but we don't know all the things. And this makes people hungry for more. It makes them talk about them, makes them create their own headcanons about them, and makes them search and scour and ask for more. And all of this contributes to the health of the game's community and playerbase.
I think this concept is one of the reasons why World of Warcraft's story has been failing me lately. Everyone knows that WoW's peak was during Wrath of the Lich King. Why? I think one of the contributing factors was because the Lich King was this character that existed all along, mentioned and referenced at differing points across the game's history until we finally faced off against him. The feeling that I got when hearing about the Lich King pre-Wrath was the same as the feeling that I get from learning about Overwatch's characters. That feeling has been absent from WoW for a while now. Expansions feel more self-contained, even though Warcraft's cast of characters has been expanded upon and grown.
Cataclysm wasn't too bad in this regard, but I think it didn't live up to Wrath's precedent because Deathwing was too much of a cookie-cutter villain. From there, that overarching sense of bigger and more mysterious things on the horizon has been dulled by the expansions being so isolated from one another. Blizzard has been trying to link them together in a way, but it hasn't been working for me. I think that they haven't been doing a good enough job at setting up later storylines within the content that precedes it. With Legion, the potential is there, but I fear that it's going to be dulled for me because of how grim the story is. I'm excited for Legion, but in different ways than I have been for previous expansions.
That's enough of a WoW tangent, so let's get back to the topic at hand. Regarding the longterm storytelling of Overwatch, I hope that Blizzard continues to do this "trickle-down" method of storytelling, because I think it's working. I think they've found the perfect solution to the problem of applying a story to a game that doesn't really have a good support mechanism for one. What I would love to see are special events that take place in the game, using those to nudge the story forward a little bit. Perhaps the Second Omnic Crisis escalates into all-out war, and we get a new map in the game to introduce us to it. It would also be cool if Blizzard would use quality-of-life adjustments to the game as opportunities to add in a bit of story. For example, they've recently been talking about nerfing McCree and buffing D.Va. It would be cool if we'd get story-based tidbids that help to explain why these changes occur in the context of Overwatch's story. Perhaps McCree had a run-in with his old gang of bandits and was injured in someway, explaining his nerf. Stuff like that. There's tons of potential there.
Friday, May 27, 2016
Lifesuck
My blog posts have been very inconsistent over the last several months. I was giving this some thought this morning, though my actual thoughts on it aren't all that clear to me. That's one of the reasons why I'm writing about it, because that always helps me to compartmentalize my thoughts and put them in order. As with everything, the reasons for my erratic posts are complicated and multi-layered. The reason "I just haven't been inspired to write anything." is not a reason at all, but a symptom of other things.
Lack of time is always the first reason most people give for no longer partaking in an extra-curricular activity, but I see it as more of a scapegoat. Or an escapegoat if you're my boss. It doesn't take long to write a blog post. If I've got a good topic that I'm really interested in discussing, I can knock out several good paragraphs in a very modest amount of time. The actual issue that a lot of the time, there are simply other things that I would rather be doing. I see this as different and separate from just not having the time to write, and more of a window into what I'm currently prioritizing. I could write something, or I could play Fallout 4 for an hour. As they say, decisions were made here.
Let's get to the heart of the matter though, shall we? Simply put, my life has felt like an exercise in futility and exasperation lately. I'll refrain from saying that things haven't been all that great, even though it would be well within my rights to do so. I don't want to label things as bad because nothing catastrophically terrible has happened. It's just been many annoying, frustrating, frightening, or stupid things, one right after another. A steady chain of suck that has sapped the life out of me for the greater part of six months or longer. When I'm dealing with things like a cat with diabetes, a husband with IBS, a father with cancer, a flooded basement, an internet service that won't work correctly even after doubling the cost of our service in order to fix the problem, a drive to work that has doubled in length and will be so for two whole years at least, or moles in the house, it's pretty fucking difficult to see the point in talking about video games, or anything else.
The bad thing about lifesuck (that's totally what we're going to call it now) is that it affects everything. It exacerbates other minor, pointless annoyances in your life that wouldn't otherwise bother you. It drains you of enthusiasm for the things that bring you joy. It makes getting up for work in the mornings more difficult than it used to be. It makes things like missing a light, getting cut-off, losing a match of Overwatch, or reading a negative news article piss you off way more than it should. And, yes, it makes you sit in front of your computer thinking about that new video game that you love, open up a blank blog post because you want to talk about it, and then pausing to say, "What's the point?"
That is a terrible place to be, and I would not recommend it.
Therefore, I'm going to share the things that I've been doing to try and lower my lifesuck quotient, in the hopes that anyone who reads my whiny ramblings may find some inspiration to do the same. Some of these I have been actively pursuing, others I am still in the process of taking the time to think through and implement. But, I think they all have important points to make in the grand scheme of things.
The first thing I've been doing is taking the time to consider all the things that are going right. It's very easy to get into that rut of constantly agonizing over all of the things that are going wrong, and that's unhealthy. So, I make sure that I put all of those worries aside as often as I can and take enjoyment out of the things that are good. It's hard to do sometimes, but it really does help.
Next, I've found it extremely important to focus on the things that I can change or improve, and try to let go of the things that I cannot. For example, I cannot change the fact that my father has cancer. So, while I worry about him and try to help him out in any way that I can, I also do not let it consume my life. Alternatively, there was something I could do about the annoying, fat fucking mole that decided to use the inside of my drop-ceiling as a racetrack. I caught that little fucker and caved his little annoying head in. A bit extreme? Certainly. But it was a problem that I was able to solve and remove from my lifesuck quotient.
This next one totally sounds cliched, but I assure you that it works. Spend a bit of time with nature. I'm fortunate in that I have a very large yard that is overflowing with wildlife. We have many trees where birds make their home, along with a few bird feeders that attract them out into the open. Hummingbirds buzz around constantly. Bees and butterflies dart along the flowers. Squirrels run around and sometimes annoy us. There's the occasional rabbit. I'm pretty sure a deer was snooping around the vegetable garden. I also maintain both a vegetable garden, and several flower beds all around the house. With all of that coming into full swing, with the advent of summer, I've been spending more time outside. It makes me feel better. Whether it be the calming presence of nature, the feeling of accomplishment at growing flowers and vegetables, the fresh air, or whatever, the reason doesn't really matter. It makes me feel better, and that's important.
Segueing from this, another important thing is to surround yourself with positivity. (Interesting note, positivity isn't in google's spellcheck dictionary.) For me, this one is a bit more difficult for a number of reasons, lifesuck quotient not withstanding. The main problem is that a lot of people around me are being very, very negative right now. I can't blame them for this, because their lifesuck quotient is just as high as mine. I counter this with being positive myself, as difficult as that is to do sometimes. I also try to watch positive things, read stories that are inspiring and hopeful instead of dark and grim, and rely upon my husband, who is the greatest source of joy in my life.
Finally, within the category of things that I'm working on, I'm trying to be a nicer person. It's difficult on a normal day, and even more so when lifesuck is reaching new heights. Sometimes you just want to lash out. When I sit in not-moving traffic every day, I wish Satan was real so I could sell my soul for the ability to pick up cars with my mind and hurl them into the sun. But, you've probably heard people say that you get out of life what you put into it, and that's very true. Putting a little bit of positivity (damn you squiggly red lines!) into the world will not only make the world a little bit better, but will also help YOU more than it will help anyone else. So, while difficult to remember that sometimes, especially when it's just a really bad day or just feeling really angry, it's very important that I try.
Lack of time is always the first reason most people give for no longer partaking in an extra-curricular activity, but I see it as more of a scapegoat. Or an escapegoat if you're my boss. It doesn't take long to write a blog post. If I've got a good topic that I'm really interested in discussing, I can knock out several good paragraphs in a very modest amount of time. The actual issue that a lot of the time, there are simply other things that I would rather be doing. I see this as different and separate from just not having the time to write, and more of a window into what I'm currently prioritizing. I could write something, or I could play Fallout 4 for an hour. As they say, decisions were made here.
Let's get to the heart of the matter though, shall we? Simply put, my life has felt like an exercise in futility and exasperation lately. I'll refrain from saying that things haven't been all that great, even though it would be well within my rights to do so. I don't want to label things as bad because nothing catastrophically terrible has happened. It's just been many annoying, frustrating, frightening, or stupid things, one right after another. A steady chain of suck that has sapped the life out of me for the greater part of six months or longer. When I'm dealing with things like a cat with diabetes, a husband with IBS, a father with cancer, a flooded basement, an internet service that won't work correctly even after doubling the cost of our service in order to fix the problem, a drive to work that has doubled in length and will be so for two whole years at least, or moles in the house, it's pretty fucking difficult to see the point in talking about video games, or anything else.
The bad thing about lifesuck (that's totally what we're going to call it now) is that it affects everything. It exacerbates other minor, pointless annoyances in your life that wouldn't otherwise bother you. It drains you of enthusiasm for the things that bring you joy. It makes getting up for work in the mornings more difficult than it used to be. It makes things like missing a light, getting cut-off, losing a match of Overwatch, or reading a negative news article piss you off way more than it should. And, yes, it makes you sit in front of your computer thinking about that new video game that you love, open up a blank blog post because you want to talk about it, and then pausing to say, "What's the point?"
That is a terrible place to be, and I would not recommend it.
Therefore, I'm going to share the things that I've been doing to try and lower my lifesuck quotient, in the hopes that anyone who reads my whiny ramblings may find some inspiration to do the same. Some of these I have been actively pursuing, others I am still in the process of taking the time to think through and implement. But, I think they all have important points to make in the grand scheme of things.
The first thing I've been doing is taking the time to consider all the things that are going right. It's very easy to get into that rut of constantly agonizing over all of the things that are going wrong, and that's unhealthy. So, I make sure that I put all of those worries aside as often as I can and take enjoyment out of the things that are good. It's hard to do sometimes, but it really does help.
Next, I've found it extremely important to focus on the things that I can change or improve, and try to let go of the things that I cannot. For example, I cannot change the fact that my father has cancer. So, while I worry about him and try to help him out in any way that I can, I also do not let it consume my life. Alternatively, there was something I could do about the annoying, fat fucking mole that decided to use the inside of my drop-ceiling as a racetrack. I caught that little fucker and caved his little annoying head in. A bit extreme? Certainly. But it was a problem that I was able to solve and remove from my lifesuck quotient.
This next one totally sounds cliched, but I assure you that it works. Spend a bit of time with nature. I'm fortunate in that I have a very large yard that is overflowing with wildlife. We have many trees where birds make their home, along with a few bird feeders that attract them out into the open. Hummingbirds buzz around constantly. Bees and butterflies dart along the flowers. Squirrels run around and sometimes annoy us. There's the occasional rabbit. I'm pretty sure a deer was snooping around the vegetable garden. I also maintain both a vegetable garden, and several flower beds all around the house. With all of that coming into full swing, with the advent of summer, I've been spending more time outside. It makes me feel better. Whether it be the calming presence of nature, the feeling of accomplishment at growing flowers and vegetables, the fresh air, or whatever, the reason doesn't really matter. It makes me feel better, and that's important.
Segueing from this, another important thing is to surround yourself with positivity. (Interesting note, positivity isn't in google's spellcheck dictionary.) For me, this one is a bit more difficult for a number of reasons, lifesuck quotient not withstanding. The main problem is that a lot of people around me are being very, very negative right now. I can't blame them for this, because their lifesuck quotient is just as high as mine. I counter this with being positive myself, as difficult as that is to do sometimes. I also try to watch positive things, read stories that are inspiring and hopeful instead of dark and grim, and rely upon my husband, who is the greatest source of joy in my life.
Finally, within the category of things that I'm working on, I'm trying to be a nicer person. It's difficult on a normal day, and even more so when lifesuck is reaching new heights. Sometimes you just want to lash out. When I sit in not-moving traffic every day, I wish Satan was real so I could sell my soul for the ability to pick up cars with my mind and hurl them into the sun. But, you've probably heard people say that you get out of life what you put into it, and that's very true. Putting a little bit of positivity (damn you squiggly red lines!) into the world will not only make the world a little bit better, but will also help YOU more than it will help anyone else. So, while difficult to remember that sometimes, especially when it's just a really bad day or just feeling really angry, it's very important that I try.
Wednesday, March 30, 2016
At First I Was Afraid...
Fallout 4's newly revamped survival mode is currently in open beta, and last night I gave it a try. Yes, I was petrified.
First, let's talk expectations versus reality. People keep referring to this as "survival mode", but I find that to be a bit of a misnomer. It's true that the game changes a LOT, more than when you bump the game up from Normal to Hard. It's also true that changing to Survival will dramatically change the way that you play the game. When I heard a game "mode", I think of something like...an Iron Man mode, where the game ends when you die. Or, something like in Diablo 3, where you can play in Campaign Mode, or Adventure Mode. Fallout 4's Survival setting is sort of in between a difficulty setting and a game mode. As a result of this sort of technical misunderstanding, I had some hopes for this that were not exactly fulfilled.
I was hoping that I could start a new game and immediately set out on my survival adventure. Unfortunately, this is not the case. You still start the game in the same place, which means you have to go through all of the pre-wasteland stuff, which is not affected by the new setting at all. After that, I found that the start of the game is actually a horrible place to start survival mode anyway, due to settlements not yet being unlocked and there being no beds in which to sleep. (This is necessary in survival mode, for....survival. Also for saving the game.)
So it was a bit of a disappointment that I had no easy, direct way of starting a new playthrough in Survival. It seems my choices are to start a new game normally, play for a few hours to get the first settlement unlocked, and then turn on survival mode from there. Or, load up one of my hard saves that's in mid-game and start from there. Since I was eager to get into actually playing around with the new setting, I opted to load one of my hard saves. My character was at level 45 in the one that I chose.
I was in Sanctuary, which was perfect. So without further ado, I turned on Survival. And then my legs immediately broke. Okay, perhaps I'm exaggerating a little bit. First, I was informed that I was over-encumbered. The weight I was carrying ballooned from around 300 pounds to almost 2,000 pounds. Ouch. Since ammo has weight in Survival, that was the main source of all those extra pounds. I started to unload it all into containers. (That's when my legs actually broke. Carrying too much for too long cripples them.)
Using logic, I decided that the best way to keep my carry weight under control was to choose two weapons that I would carry with me, and keep the ammo for those two weapons while dumping all the rest into containers. This worked very well, and I was able to move freely once more after doing this. I unloaded a few other things, too, so that I could actually pick some things up during my adventures. I kept my 10MM pistol, and my .50 gauge sniper rifle. I knew that I would need plenty of food, so I kept most of that. After about 20 minutes of inventory management, the game informed me that I was dehydrated. It took two bottles of purified water to rectify this, and it was then that I realized that water was going to be the most precious commodity now, since I only had about 20 bottles in my inventory. Also, as an amusing note, alcohol does nothing to help dehydration. I had plenty of that, and it did me no good. Except to make me addicted to it. So I dumped all of that, too.
After hydrating, I took a nap in my bed. Upon waking, I was informed that I was now dehydrated.
Well, shit.
Two more bottles of water later, and I set out on my first adventure. While I was doing my inventory management, I received a message about a settlement that was under attack. Knowing that these are somewhat time sensitive, I decided to tackle it first. I opened up my map and had a look at where the settlement was located. Ah, yes. On the complete opposite side of the map.
Have I mentioned yet that fast travel is disabled in Survival?
Well, shit.
Undeterred, I set out on my first adventure! Things went very well at first. Since the markers for enemies showing up on the compass are disabled, I took it slow and careful, crouching in sneak mode the entire way. I first ran into some Bloodbugs, and dispatched them quite easily. This first encounter showed me how much the dynamic of the game changes in Survival. Charging into a pack of creatures with guns blazing is a stupid idea for a lot of reasons. Obviously, ammo is scarce, so you don't want to waste bullets. You take much more damage, so it's a better idea to keep your distance. Getting the 2X damage bonus for sneak attacks is SUPER useful. Taking damage comes with the chance that you'll catch some sort of disease. Healing is much more difficult to do, since the regeneration provided by stimpaks is much, much slower. And sometimes, it's just a better idea to RUN AWAY rather than fighting, depending on the circumstances. All of this, in addition to not being able to see the red dots on my compass that tell me where things are, led me to freaking the fuck out any time my sneak meter changed from HIDDEN to CAUTION.
After dispatching the Bloodbugs, I continued on my way until I encountered a small camp of Gunners. I picked them off one at a time with my silenced sniper rifle, taking advantage of the 2X damage bonus from the sneak attacks before destroying their turret with my pistol. I then raided their supplies, leaving everything behind except the ammo, food, and the precious, precious single bottle of purified water. A little further on, I stumbled across a trio of people, two of which were accusing the third of being a synth. Given the new dangers of the world, I was much more inclined to use diplomacy to resolve the issue, which I managed to do successfully.
I then reached another one of my settlements, and had traveled about a third of the way towards my destination. This was about 30 to 45 minutes of gameplay. Tense, engaging gameplay. All of which would have been nullified and nonexistent had I been playing the game normally and merely fast traveled to the settlement that was under attack. I was starting to see the appeal of this new feature. I used one of the beds in the settlement, drank two bottles of purified water, ate some food, and then set out once again. I soon reached a small neighborhood, and one of the houses had a bomb shelter, though it was more of a cellar. There was a single ghoul inside, and it managed to sneak up on me. It was the first time that Fallout has made me scream for quite a while, due to the added lethality that enemies now possess. I dispatched the ghoul and found a few more bottles of precious water. There was also a barrel of radioactive waste in the cellar, because we all have one of those, right? In any case, I stacked up a few rads and used a RadAway. Oh, right. RadAway wrecks your immune system and makes you more likely to contract a disease.
Well, shit.
I was actually sort of disappointed by this, because I was hoping for something out of Oregon Trail's book, where you just sometimes randomly contract a silly and amusing illness. That didn't happen to me. In fact, I didn't catch any kind of diseases during my few hours of playing Survival. I don't think that you can just randomly contract something, which I think is a bit of a shame. I would like that to happen. Instead, I think it mostly happens from eating uncooked or old food, and to a lesser extent from being injured by enemies. I think that I would like the diseases to play a more integral part in Survival. It is an irradiated wasteland, after all.
Moving along, I soon arrived at a very large lake. The quickest route to the settlement was straight across it, but there was no way I was going to swim through irradiated waters. I would rack up a ton of rads, and then have to injure my immune system even more with another RadAway. I had to go around. I chose to go to the right. That would prove to be a big mistake.
Near this lake was a neighborhood that was mostly flooded, and getting through it required either going through a marsh (lots of water and thus lots of rads), or through the neighborhood itself. The ground was flooded (so lots of water and thus lots of rads), but there were platforms on the roofs of the buildings that would allow me to get across. Simple enough. I start making my way across, using the platforms to traverse the rooftops. Things are going well. Then, suddenly I hear a splash, followed by a whine. Then I get a message that my companion needed to be healed, and that if I abandoned them, they would return home. Dogmeat had fallen off of the fucking roof.
Well, shit.
I find a place to make my way down to the ground level, trying to stay out of the deepest of the water so that I didn't stack up a lot of rads, and start looking for him. A ghoul appeared around a corner, and I quickly dispatched it with my pistol. This then informed the other ghouls that it was time to wake up and have their murder-breakfast, and I started to get swarmed by the things. I backpedaled my way between the buildings, trying to get out of the close quarters, while popping off shots at the pursuing ghouls. I killed about 6 or 7 of them and, seeing that there were no more pursuing me, I turned around to run properly out of the area. And two ghouls were right behind me, and proceeded to rip off my limbs. Ouch.
Thus ended my first foray into Fallout 4's new survival mode. I can totally see the appeal of it. I don't usually go for things like this, and this is certainly one of the exceptions. Perhaps it's because I love the Fallout games so much? It's far from perfect, but there's so much potential here. Sadly, I think that it will be left up to the modding community to do something worthwhile with this. I just don't feel like this mode works with the entirety of the Fallout 4 campaign. It certainly doesn't work with the first 1 or 2 hours of the game. I think that there should be a separate starting point for people who want to play survival. I think it should be a mode that is offered AFTER the completion of the main story in the game, not as a mode that can be turned on from the start. (I more firmly believe this after seeing that after activating survival, and then de-activating it, you cannot activate survival ever again on that save.) I also think that the main story quests should not be included at all. It should be more like a roguelike, where the focus is on survival and traversing the wasteland, and the main questline will distract and take away from that.
I also seriously doubt Bethesda will do any of these things.
Consider the potential, though.
If I were to re-design this survival mode, I would set it up like this: When you start the game, all of the settlements are unlocked. You are plopped into one of them at random, making your starting experience different each time you play. From there, it's up to you to go out and scavenge and find the things that you need to survive. Build up that settlement if you'd like. You also get random quests about settlements coming under attack. You can choose to travel across the wasteland to save them, or let them be overrun. All of the side quests and random encounters can remain intact. This would solve a lot of the major problems I have with this mode. For one, it would allow you to start a new game immediately, and get right into the whole "survival" aspect of it, without having to go through a few hours of the main story up front. It would also make the experience much different from the main game, which is what I was hoping for in the first place. The current survival mode is more of a reason to play Fallout 4 again. I was hoping for something that gave me MORE of the game. It ALMOST does it, to be fair, and I'm sure I'll spend some more time messing around with it. It's all just a means of biding my time until the next DLC, though.
First, let's talk expectations versus reality. People keep referring to this as "survival mode", but I find that to be a bit of a misnomer. It's true that the game changes a LOT, more than when you bump the game up from Normal to Hard. It's also true that changing to Survival will dramatically change the way that you play the game. When I heard a game "mode", I think of something like...an Iron Man mode, where the game ends when you die. Or, something like in Diablo 3, where you can play in Campaign Mode, or Adventure Mode. Fallout 4's Survival setting is sort of in between a difficulty setting and a game mode. As a result of this sort of technical misunderstanding, I had some hopes for this that were not exactly fulfilled.
I was hoping that I could start a new game and immediately set out on my survival adventure. Unfortunately, this is not the case. You still start the game in the same place, which means you have to go through all of the pre-wasteland stuff, which is not affected by the new setting at all. After that, I found that the start of the game is actually a horrible place to start survival mode anyway, due to settlements not yet being unlocked and there being no beds in which to sleep. (This is necessary in survival mode, for....survival. Also for saving the game.)
So it was a bit of a disappointment that I had no easy, direct way of starting a new playthrough in Survival. It seems my choices are to start a new game normally, play for a few hours to get the first settlement unlocked, and then turn on survival mode from there. Or, load up one of my hard saves that's in mid-game and start from there. Since I was eager to get into actually playing around with the new setting, I opted to load one of my hard saves. My character was at level 45 in the one that I chose.
I was in Sanctuary, which was perfect. So without further ado, I turned on Survival. And then my legs immediately broke. Okay, perhaps I'm exaggerating a little bit. First, I was informed that I was over-encumbered. The weight I was carrying ballooned from around 300 pounds to almost 2,000 pounds. Ouch. Since ammo has weight in Survival, that was the main source of all those extra pounds. I started to unload it all into containers. (That's when my legs actually broke. Carrying too much for too long cripples them.)
Using logic, I decided that the best way to keep my carry weight under control was to choose two weapons that I would carry with me, and keep the ammo for those two weapons while dumping all the rest into containers. This worked very well, and I was able to move freely once more after doing this. I unloaded a few other things, too, so that I could actually pick some things up during my adventures. I kept my 10MM pistol, and my .50 gauge sniper rifle. I knew that I would need plenty of food, so I kept most of that. After about 20 minutes of inventory management, the game informed me that I was dehydrated. It took two bottles of purified water to rectify this, and it was then that I realized that water was going to be the most precious commodity now, since I only had about 20 bottles in my inventory. Also, as an amusing note, alcohol does nothing to help dehydration. I had plenty of that, and it did me no good. Except to make me addicted to it. So I dumped all of that, too.
After hydrating, I took a nap in my bed. Upon waking, I was informed that I was now dehydrated.
Well, shit.
Two more bottles of water later, and I set out on my first adventure. While I was doing my inventory management, I received a message about a settlement that was under attack. Knowing that these are somewhat time sensitive, I decided to tackle it first. I opened up my map and had a look at where the settlement was located. Ah, yes. On the complete opposite side of the map.
Have I mentioned yet that fast travel is disabled in Survival?
Well, shit.
Undeterred, I set out on my first adventure! Things went very well at first. Since the markers for enemies showing up on the compass are disabled, I took it slow and careful, crouching in sneak mode the entire way. I first ran into some Bloodbugs, and dispatched them quite easily. This first encounter showed me how much the dynamic of the game changes in Survival. Charging into a pack of creatures with guns blazing is a stupid idea for a lot of reasons. Obviously, ammo is scarce, so you don't want to waste bullets. You take much more damage, so it's a better idea to keep your distance. Getting the 2X damage bonus for sneak attacks is SUPER useful. Taking damage comes with the chance that you'll catch some sort of disease. Healing is much more difficult to do, since the regeneration provided by stimpaks is much, much slower. And sometimes, it's just a better idea to RUN AWAY rather than fighting, depending on the circumstances. All of this, in addition to not being able to see the red dots on my compass that tell me where things are, led me to freaking the fuck out any time my sneak meter changed from HIDDEN to CAUTION.
After dispatching the Bloodbugs, I continued on my way until I encountered a small camp of Gunners. I picked them off one at a time with my silenced sniper rifle, taking advantage of the 2X damage bonus from the sneak attacks before destroying their turret with my pistol. I then raided their supplies, leaving everything behind except the ammo, food, and the precious, precious single bottle of purified water. A little further on, I stumbled across a trio of people, two of which were accusing the third of being a synth. Given the new dangers of the world, I was much more inclined to use diplomacy to resolve the issue, which I managed to do successfully.
I then reached another one of my settlements, and had traveled about a third of the way towards my destination. This was about 30 to 45 minutes of gameplay. Tense, engaging gameplay. All of which would have been nullified and nonexistent had I been playing the game normally and merely fast traveled to the settlement that was under attack. I was starting to see the appeal of this new feature. I used one of the beds in the settlement, drank two bottles of purified water, ate some food, and then set out once again. I soon reached a small neighborhood, and one of the houses had a bomb shelter, though it was more of a cellar. There was a single ghoul inside, and it managed to sneak up on me. It was the first time that Fallout has made me scream for quite a while, due to the added lethality that enemies now possess. I dispatched the ghoul and found a few more bottles of precious water. There was also a barrel of radioactive waste in the cellar, because we all have one of those, right? In any case, I stacked up a few rads and used a RadAway. Oh, right. RadAway wrecks your immune system and makes you more likely to contract a disease.
Well, shit.
I was actually sort of disappointed by this, because I was hoping for something out of Oregon Trail's book, where you just sometimes randomly contract a silly and amusing illness. That didn't happen to me. In fact, I didn't catch any kind of diseases during my few hours of playing Survival. I don't think that you can just randomly contract something, which I think is a bit of a shame. I would like that to happen. Instead, I think it mostly happens from eating uncooked or old food, and to a lesser extent from being injured by enemies. I think that I would like the diseases to play a more integral part in Survival. It is an irradiated wasteland, after all.
Moving along, I soon arrived at a very large lake. The quickest route to the settlement was straight across it, but there was no way I was going to swim through irradiated waters. I would rack up a ton of rads, and then have to injure my immune system even more with another RadAway. I had to go around. I chose to go to the right. That would prove to be a big mistake.
Near this lake was a neighborhood that was mostly flooded, and getting through it required either going through a marsh (lots of water and thus lots of rads), or through the neighborhood itself. The ground was flooded (so lots of water and thus lots of rads), but there were platforms on the roofs of the buildings that would allow me to get across. Simple enough. I start making my way across, using the platforms to traverse the rooftops. Things are going well. Then, suddenly I hear a splash, followed by a whine. Then I get a message that my companion needed to be healed, and that if I abandoned them, they would return home. Dogmeat had fallen off of the fucking roof.
Well, shit.
I find a place to make my way down to the ground level, trying to stay out of the deepest of the water so that I didn't stack up a lot of rads, and start looking for him. A ghoul appeared around a corner, and I quickly dispatched it with my pistol. This then informed the other ghouls that it was time to wake up and have their murder-breakfast, and I started to get swarmed by the things. I backpedaled my way between the buildings, trying to get out of the close quarters, while popping off shots at the pursuing ghouls. I killed about 6 or 7 of them and, seeing that there were no more pursuing me, I turned around to run properly out of the area. And two ghouls were right behind me, and proceeded to rip off my limbs. Ouch.
Thus ended my first foray into Fallout 4's new survival mode. I can totally see the appeal of it. I don't usually go for things like this, and this is certainly one of the exceptions. Perhaps it's because I love the Fallout games so much? It's far from perfect, but there's so much potential here. Sadly, I think that it will be left up to the modding community to do something worthwhile with this. I just don't feel like this mode works with the entirety of the Fallout 4 campaign. It certainly doesn't work with the first 1 or 2 hours of the game. I think that there should be a separate starting point for people who want to play survival. I think it should be a mode that is offered AFTER the completion of the main story in the game, not as a mode that can be turned on from the start. (I more firmly believe this after seeing that after activating survival, and then de-activating it, you cannot activate survival ever again on that save.) I also think that the main story quests should not be included at all. It should be more like a roguelike, where the focus is on survival and traversing the wasteland, and the main questline will distract and take away from that.
I also seriously doubt Bethesda will do any of these things.
Consider the potential, though.
If I were to re-design this survival mode, I would set it up like this: When you start the game, all of the settlements are unlocked. You are plopped into one of them at random, making your starting experience different each time you play. From there, it's up to you to go out and scavenge and find the things that you need to survive. Build up that settlement if you'd like. You also get random quests about settlements coming under attack. You can choose to travel across the wasteland to save them, or let them be overrun. All of the side quests and random encounters can remain intact. This would solve a lot of the major problems I have with this mode. For one, it would allow you to start a new game immediately, and get right into the whole "survival" aspect of it, without having to go through a few hours of the main story up front. It would also make the experience much different from the main game, which is what I was hoping for in the first place. The current survival mode is more of a reason to play Fallout 4 again. I was hoping for something that gave me MORE of the game. It ALMOST does it, to be fair, and I'm sure I'll spend some more time messing around with it. It's all just a means of biding my time until the next DLC, though.
Monday, March 14, 2016
Old McDonald Had a Farm, Your Mother Sucks Cocks in Hell
I was attacked by four moths at once on level 19 of the mine and died. I was then presented with a message that I must have "hit my head pretty hard" and therefore "forgot the last 9 levels of the mine". This was the event that prompted me to uninstall Stardew Valley from my computer. For one thing, I didn't hit my head. I was attacked by four mother fucking moths at once, which was pretty fucking unfair. And two, how the fuck did I forget 9 levels of a mine, but still remember my name, where my farm is, the names of all the people in the valley, and every other task I've ever done over the last 15 hours of game play?
I'm arguing semantics, of course. This is simply a means of offering punishment for dying in the mine, and I'm complaining about it because I don't like it. I do not play games that punish mistakes by deleting progress, so that is why I will never play this game again. It got me thinking, though, because this is yet another game that a vast majority of people ADORE (no, really, check the Steam reviews. 98% of them are positive), and my opinion ended up being MEH. This has been happening more and more as time goes by, and it makes me wonder if I'm just out-growing games in general.
It may just be the result of living an adult life. My biggest complaint about Stardew Valley, before dying in the mine, was that it took too fucking long to get anything done. In the words of Sweet Brown, ain't nobody got time for that. This is a direct consequence of my adult life. I don't have that kind of time any longer. This isn't a fault of the game, but I'm not going to speak kindly of it, either. If I feel like I'm not getting the best use out of my exceedingly precious spare time, my interest will quickly wane. It's exceedingly apparent that I'm in the minority here, though. Either no one in a similar situation as me plays these types of games, or there are way more people out there with too much time on their hands than I thought.
Either way, it's difficult to have to accept the fact that I will probably never again be in a position where I can enjoy games that I cannot pick up for 30 minutes and make meaningful progress. And thinking about this makes me feel even worse, because then I start thinking, well, at least it's not cancer, flooding, pest invasions, or any of the other real, adult problems that seem to punch me in the fucking face every day of my life. That really doesn't help.
It's a shame, because SV is such a quaint, charming little game. I guess in the end, it just didn't have the focus that I'd expected. I think I would have been much more inclined to stick with it if it had focused more on the farming and less on the wandering around gathering/adventuring. I would have liked a farming game. But, as adult life teaches you often, you rarely get what you want.
I'm arguing semantics, of course. This is simply a means of offering punishment for dying in the mine, and I'm complaining about it because I don't like it. I do not play games that punish mistakes by deleting progress, so that is why I will never play this game again. It got me thinking, though, because this is yet another game that a vast majority of people ADORE (no, really, check the Steam reviews. 98% of them are positive), and my opinion ended up being MEH. This has been happening more and more as time goes by, and it makes me wonder if I'm just out-growing games in general.
It may just be the result of living an adult life. My biggest complaint about Stardew Valley, before dying in the mine, was that it took too fucking long to get anything done. In the words of Sweet Brown, ain't nobody got time for that. This is a direct consequence of my adult life. I don't have that kind of time any longer. This isn't a fault of the game, but I'm not going to speak kindly of it, either. If I feel like I'm not getting the best use out of my exceedingly precious spare time, my interest will quickly wane. It's exceedingly apparent that I'm in the minority here, though. Either no one in a similar situation as me plays these types of games, or there are way more people out there with too much time on their hands than I thought.
Either way, it's difficult to have to accept the fact that I will probably never again be in a position where I can enjoy games that I cannot pick up for 30 minutes and make meaningful progress. And thinking about this makes me feel even worse, because then I start thinking, well, at least it's not cancer, flooding, pest invasions, or any of the other real, adult problems that seem to punch me in the fucking face every day of my life. That really doesn't help.
It's a shame, because SV is such a quaint, charming little game. I guess in the end, it just didn't have the focus that I'd expected. I think I would have been much more inclined to stick with it if it had focused more on the farming and less on the wandering around gathering/adventuring. I would have liked a farming game. But, as adult life teaches you often, you rarely get what you want.
Monday, March 07, 2016
Mole Your Enemy
We recently had a mole in the house. This is, quite honestly, a very strange and rare occurrence, because unlike a mouse, moles don't particularly like being inside of a house. They eat grubs and earthworms, which they're simply not going to find indoors, even if it's a basement. If you look up how to get ride of moles in the house, the most common answer you will find is "Open the door, they'll leave on their own." Obviously, this isn't really an option in a basement. I'm assuming that it came up through one of the floor drains. I've noticed that there are quite a few mole mounds outside in the yard, so I know they've been active in the ground around our house. One of them probably found the exit drain from the basement and followed it up.
Moles aren't destructive creatures, unless you don't like mounds of dirt in your yard. They actually help to aerate the soil. However, that doesn't mean I want one in my house. And, as I've learned over the last few days, they are incredibly annoying creatures. They're also very intelligent, as well. Getting it out of the house proved to be a challenge, because there's really no bait that will work well in catching them, unlike with a mouse. As I mentioned, moles eat grubs and earthworms. Putting cheese or peanut butter on a trap isn't going to really get you anywhere, and no stores sell bait that attracts moles because moles aren't a common household pest problem.
I learned that we had this tiny visitor in the house one night when I was just starting to doze off in bed and heard a scream coming from the bathroom. John was the first to see it, and after spending a few minutes trying to track it down we decided to get some traps. This was Wednesday night. We got three traps on Thursday evening, the humane, live-catch variety, and I set them out that night with some peanut butter on them. I figured that was better than nothing. We had no luck after a day, and we noticed that the mole seemed to really like taking one path along the wall past the couch. So, we moved one of the traps against the wall in that path. It was then, too, that we realized that it was somehow getting up into the ceiling. I still don't know how it was doing that. There must be a hole in the wall near the floor somewhere that I don't know about.
The really annoying part of this whole experience happened Friday and Saturday nights. It crawled into the ceiling during the night, and it would run back and forth across the ceiling above the bed constantly, all the time, non-stop, without rest. Back and forth. Over and over. In the dead of night, the noise was beyond grating. I wanted to rip out the entire ceiling just to get it to stop. I couldn't sleep, and I started hearing the noise even when it wasn't there. I think that if ever I have been on the brink of insanity before, it was during this point in time. I threw humane methods out of the window and purchased lethal traps, including old-fashioned spring traps and glue traps. I also purchased some bait, which is designed for mice, but I figured it was worth a try. I also purchased electric high frequency repellents that plug into the wall.
I put two glue traps in the ceiling and one in the path that it liked to take next to the couch. This was Saturday night. Sunday morning, I got up and the glue trap beside the couch was gone. I looked around a bit, and found it near the door to the back room. There was one of Buyo's toy mice stuck to it. The -logical- explanation for this is that the mole got caught in the trap, but not entirely, dragged it with him a ways before getting itself unstuck, and the toy mouse just happened to be there in the way and got stuck as well as he was dragging it along. It wasn't difficult to imagine, however, that the vengeful litter fucker mockingly stuck the mouse to the trap while thinking, "You'll never catch me, you fucking cunt." I was furious.
I saw the thing not long after that, and proceeded to chase it through the house, attempting to beat it to death with my shoe. In case you didn't know, moles are fucking fast. I probably would have been successful if I had a lot of open space to work with. But, obviously in the house there are couches and doors and chairs and everything else getting in my way. I have very few opportunities to actually tray and smack the little fucker, and it was moving from cover to cover too quickly for that to be possible. I chased after it about two or three times that day, and John chased it at least once, too.
At this point, we began to think about what else we could do. Our next step was probably to bug bomb the back room when we were fairly certain it was back there. It's a pretty small creature, so a bug bomb may have killed it even though those things are designed for insects. Of course, then there would be a dead mole in the house somewhere. Fortunately, we didn't need to worry about that, because soon after the thing ran into one of the live-catch traps. John heard the door click shut, and we saw that the trap was wiggling. I took it outside (after terrifying my mother with it), and let it loose far away from the house, in the middle of the golf course. If you're waiting for some touchy story about how it looked up at me before happily going on its way, or some funny story about how it bit me in one last act of defiant cunt-fuckery before scurrying off, you're going to be disappointed. I dumped it out of the trap, it looked around in confusion for a little while, and then burrowed into the pine needles.
The silence during the night was divine.
Moles aren't destructive creatures, unless you don't like mounds of dirt in your yard. They actually help to aerate the soil. However, that doesn't mean I want one in my house. And, as I've learned over the last few days, they are incredibly annoying creatures. They're also very intelligent, as well. Getting it out of the house proved to be a challenge, because there's really no bait that will work well in catching them, unlike with a mouse. As I mentioned, moles eat grubs and earthworms. Putting cheese or peanut butter on a trap isn't going to really get you anywhere, and no stores sell bait that attracts moles because moles aren't a common household pest problem.
I learned that we had this tiny visitor in the house one night when I was just starting to doze off in bed and heard a scream coming from the bathroom. John was the first to see it, and after spending a few minutes trying to track it down we decided to get some traps. This was Wednesday night. We got three traps on Thursday evening, the humane, live-catch variety, and I set them out that night with some peanut butter on them. I figured that was better than nothing. We had no luck after a day, and we noticed that the mole seemed to really like taking one path along the wall past the couch. So, we moved one of the traps against the wall in that path. It was then, too, that we realized that it was somehow getting up into the ceiling. I still don't know how it was doing that. There must be a hole in the wall near the floor somewhere that I don't know about.
The really annoying part of this whole experience happened Friday and Saturday nights. It crawled into the ceiling during the night, and it would run back and forth across the ceiling above the bed constantly, all the time, non-stop, without rest. Back and forth. Over and over. In the dead of night, the noise was beyond grating. I wanted to rip out the entire ceiling just to get it to stop. I couldn't sleep, and I started hearing the noise even when it wasn't there. I think that if ever I have been on the brink of insanity before, it was during this point in time. I threw humane methods out of the window and purchased lethal traps, including old-fashioned spring traps and glue traps. I also purchased some bait, which is designed for mice, but I figured it was worth a try. I also purchased electric high frequency repellents that plug into the wall.
I put two glue traps in the ceiling and one in the path that it liked to take next to the couch. This was Saturday night. Sunday morning, I got up and the glue trap beside the couch was gone. I looked around a bit, and found it near the door to the back room. There was one of Buyo's toy mice stuck to it. The -logical- explanation for this is that the mole got caught in the trap, but not entirely, dragged it with him a ways before getting itself unstuck, and the toy mouse just happened to be there in the way and got stuck as well as he was dragging it along. It wasn't difficult to imagine, however, that the vengeful litter fucker mockingly stuck the mouse to the trap while thinking, "You'll never catch me, you fucking cunt." I was furious.
I saw the thing not long after that, and proceeded to chase it through the house, attempting to beat it to death with my shoe. In case you didn't know, moles are fucking fast. I probably would have been successful if I had a lot of open space to work with. But, obviously in the house there are couches and doors and chairs and everything else getting in my way. I have very few opportunities to actually tray and smack the little fucker, and it was moving from cover to cover too quickly for that to be possible. I chased after it about two or three times that day, and John chased it at least once, too.
At this point, we began to think about what else we could do. Our next step was probably to bug bomb the back room when we were fairly certain it was back there. It's a pretty small creature, so a bug bomb may have killed it even though those things are designed for insects. Of course, then there would be a dead mole in the house somewhere. Fortunately, we didn't need to worry about that, because soon after the thing ran into one of the live-catch traps. John heard the door click shut, and we saw that the trap was wiggling. I took it outside (after terrifying my mother with it), and let it loose far away from the house, in the middle of the golf course. If you're waiting for some touchy story about how it looked up at me before happily going on its way, or some funny story about how it bit me in one last act of defiant cunt-fuckery before scurrying off, you're going to be disappointed. I dumped it out of the trap, it looked around in confusion for a little while, and then burrowed into the pine needles.
The silence during the night was divine.
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