Sighinide

Holy shit, does TV suck.

Yeah, I know, but I hold out hope that maybe if I point this out enough that somehow, someway, some of this… stuff… might change, somehow, for the better, at least at little bit.

I mean, it never does, but… one can hope.

I’ve given up on watching T.V. I mean, I just can’t take it. Have I said this before? I’m getting the feeling now that I have. I might have; I’m not sure. But it’s true regardless. Nothing’s changed, then.

A question: Why does everything on television have to suck? Is there some kind of law or something? Something I’m not aware of? Something not public, perhaps? And I mean everything. All channels, every show, every single fucking commercial, etc.

I have Amazon Prime available to me, and I’ve been streaming some nature docs every now and then. They are nice, but there are distressingly few of those on offer. The rest of Prime is filled up with utter shit. If .1% of the media service of Prime is nature docs, this means that 99.9% of it is… other stuff. The garbage, I’m assuming. I’m not going to bother watching 10 hours of a show to find out if it’s “good enough” to watch the rest. That’s idiotic.

Well… there’s always Map of Tiny Perfect Things. But that’s only one movie.

Other stuff… Mom has a subscription to Discovery+. I decided to check it out. I was pleasantly surprised when I found some nice nature documentaries, but then, to my utter horror, my surprise turned to revulsion when I discovered that they had commercials. And not just any commercials- they had the ugly, stupid ones that accompany mainstream television. I was utterly aghast. There I was, watching Blue Planet, when some nasty ad for something like Tide or whatever popped up, randomly. Quickly, I scrambled for the remote, desperate to mute the TV. A Google search told me that Discovery+ had begun inserting ads into some of it’s plans, and I guess that my parents’ plan was amongst those.

Yuck.

The ads on the offer during the nature shows are particularly grating because, I think, the rest of Discovery+ is schlock TV. Logging into the service, I didn’t see nature stuff advertised. Instead, I saw a banner for My 600 Pound Life.

And that’s basically what Discovery channel is, these days. It’s one of cable TV’s fortresses of garbage. So that’s what the subscription service offers, then: a lot of trash, with a few token other offerings to give the appearance of variety.

So, with a service that’s 99.9% trash, and .1% not, you get commercials that reflect that ratio. You get the worst of the worst. Commercials with the ugly people, or, rather, with the ugliest people. I couldn’t bear to finish the first ep of Blue Planet, but with mainstream commercials being what they are most of the people I saw in the ads were black and I think all were fat, which is probably not coincidental considering the banner for My 600 Pound Life I had just seen minutes before.

Gods, what a disgusting shithole television is.

If anything, it’s getting worse the more I write these, if that can even be believed.

Everything on television is ugly, and stupid. Everything. It’s baffling. There is truly nothing I can find that isn’t.

Every month I try. I flip through the channels and try to find something to watch that seems pleasant that isn’t forty years old or older and I always come up dry. Everything new is stupid or ridiculous.

It’s kind of… pointless, really. So I feel like I should give up, and I likely will.

I still have that Netflix gift card but man, I am really struggling to actually put it to use.

Which… is kinda sad in comparison to the other news this week, which is that I took advantage of the Steam Summer Sale to buy a bunch of stuff for my new laptop. I purchased the complete Grim Dawn collection, for example, and also… well, a bunch of other stuff; a lot of other stuff. A lot of amazing games were on sale for… very cheap- I mean we’re talking anywhere from fifty cents to three dollars. And Steam is wonderful when it comes to offering bundles from different devs and publishers: buy a franchise, and you can get further discounts, etc. I spent a couple hundred dollars but walked away with a huge collection of games that I will play for years.

Money well spent, for sure.

When I was thumbing through Amazon Prime the other day I was… stunned, honestly, at how… expensive everything was. It was baffling. A movie rental for one movie cost like six dollars. 6 bucks, for a 2 day rental! Wut?

I bought the “Game of the Year” Edition for the first Borderlands on Steam for 8 dollars. I suspect it will give me weeks or possibly months of casual use.

To purchase a movie on Prime it’s like 15 dollars at least. Wut? I checked and the new Little Mermaid thing from Disney is selling for 20. WUT?

Insane. Utterly insane. I also bought “The Handsome Edition” of Borderlands 2, the one with all 52 pieces of DLC, for like 12 bucks the other day. It will likely provide months of on again, off again fun.

For like 20 dollars here and there, I bought bundles from and drained all the inventory from multiple publishers and developers. I walked away from the sale with hundreds of quality games. I mean, some of these were good to great games from independent publishers that were discounted to twenty cents, thirty cents each.

Movies today are… really expensive, in comparison to what you get. Any place you look, in any format, anywhere. Rentals, purchasing, streaming, anything. They are expensive in money, time, or attention, or… anything. This is why I stick to kid’s movies, mostly, when I watch them, or my girlfriends’ movies.

Because then, there might be something personal, and that’s worth it.

But the rest of it?

Well… no.

The old media is really stuck, isn’t it?

Movies suck, they are always too big, too long to watch, too expensive to make and watch and stream, too… weird and complicated to understand, etc., and TV is just… a godforsaken shithole, lmao. There is literally nothing good about television as a medium, at all, anymore. Everything about it is terrible, lol.

It’s dying, too. You ask kids what they watch now, and they tell you Youtube, or twitch. They don’t tell you anything on TV. It’s not even streaming services. It’s twitch they watch. They sit and chill and watch an ordinary guy play Minecraft for 4 hours. And why wouldn’t they? I would rather watch that myself than anything on the cesspool that is TV, lol.

TV is just… Gods, it’s just so vile, isn’t it? I mean, it’s uncanny how every single thing on it is ugly. It’s like a reverse Midas touch, or something, where instead of it’s touch turning something to gold, it just turns it to shit.

lel.

Seriously, tho.

Another question, here. Why does every TV commercial that features a relationship show an interracial one? Seriously, I ask. It’s bizarre. Like… seriously. It’s confusing. I don’t get it, at all.

I think that the real problem that TV has, and broadly speaking movies have this problem as well, is that TV has an overwhelming lack of “normal people”, which explains the rise of youtube and twitch, naturally.

Everyone on TV is weird, somehow. Nobody is just… a normal person.

Scrolling through the TV channels what you see is a gallery of freaks, oddballs, and assorted “others”. And I know that this sounds cruel, but that is basically what you get. And watching movies, this is also the problem.

Nobody is “normal”.

It’s the usual problems. I mean, I can list them, we all know them, but here we go: too many tattoos, too much interracial stuff, too much weird and probably fake facial hair, too much bizarre… ways of talking, weirdo politics, weirdo sports shit (yes, this is a problem), muscles that are too big and cartoony looking, dumb drama and ridiculous theatrics, and… I don’t know, everything is awful, lol.

In my down time I’ve been curiously investigating some of the media related things I’ve talked about before on this blog that have irked me, like the ridiculous facial hair that we see on so many of those professional douchebags these days. I’ve realized that those beards are fake: they’re glued on. I mean in some cases you can actually see it. Like, there will be a huge bushy irritating big fake mustache on some guy, but if you look closely, you can see underneath it a small reedy looking thin stubble of a different color that is “growing” in a different direction.

And in many cases with these big meathead muscle guys, so too are the muscles fake: those are not actually muscles, those are implants. Well, that, or synthol or other injections. But I think most of the fake muscles are in fact implants.

And I think the abs come from liposuction, not exercise. And the ab muscles themselves there might be silicone, not real tissue.

I mean, this is a separate essay, but God almighty, the fakery involved in looking “hot” is unreal. It’s all so fake. For years, decades, I wanted to look “hot”, and that was part of the reason why I started exercising so much.

But gods, it’s allllllllll fake. It’s all just plastic surgery. There’s no “diet and exercise” there with these people (celebs). It’s lipo, implants, body contouring, hormone injections, steroids, silicone, and cgi (which is used more often than people think, I think).

Uhm, well, separate essay.

Other stuff…

Disney sucks, something like the last 9 of their movies bombed at the box office, and their new haunted mansion movie is going to bomb, too.

Christ, what on Earth are they doing?

I already dissected the disaster that is Lucasfilm on here, so I won’t do that again, but that race swapped abomination that they call The Little Mermaid really needs to be picked apart, here.

First, let’s get the obvious out of the way. Why did that movie bomb so hard? They miscast the lead, of course. Why oh why, in all of fuck, did they race swap the lead of The Little Mermaid? Oof.

Yeah. That… was a bad idea. A terrible, terrible idea.

I don’t… get these people. Seriously. What were they thinking?

Mermaid bombed horribly overseas, basically because of the casting.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/box-office-the-little-mermaid-gets-doused-in-china-south-korea-after-racist-backlash-1235505682/

Hollywood has a problem. It wants the Asian market more than anything, but as I’ve explained before on this blog, the Asian market is the market most resistant to race swapping. They are the people who like it the least, and are thus not going to take to the stuff being peddled by the studios.

This is… a stupid, stupid problem, made by the studios themselves, since they have some kind of hard on for race swapping red heads with blacks.

The thing is, the people who make this shit seem to have some unnatural and a-historical hatred for whites that other people do not share and do not want.

The diversity crowd does not seem to understand that white people are not bad; that they are good people fundamentally, that their history is a good, just and positive one, that they have brought good things to many people and that they made the world a far far better place with their presence and actions. Replacing them on film like this is ugly, stupid, and just… monstrous. It shows an absolutely tremendous arrogance and a fundamental lack of understanding of history.

Minorities in the US are arrogant, small minded and stupid regarding racial matters. They think only domestically. They do not see the “big picture”, and thus do not understand the tremendous good that whites, and especially white men, have brought to the people of the world.

Other countries do not have a chip on their shoulder regarding whites that minorities in the US seem to have. Universally, whites are regarded as having a history and culture worth valuing and honoring… except by the shitheads and cretins running the show in the West.

The morons that run Disney do not seem to understand that the Chinese do not give two fucks about any black domestic racial struggle yadda yadda about whatever blah blah. For the record, I blogged about this back in 2016, lol.

I don’t remember the context of this post, but I thought it amusing. IDK what this is even about anymore, lol, something with Will Smith, IDK, I guess, lol, but I think I made some interesting points:

Thoughts on the Oscars’ Race Row

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This tide must be arrested if Hollywood is to survive over the long term. Jettison the Smiths. Just get rid of them, and make an effort, a real effort, to make inroads into the culture of the young WCWMs. It needs to happen!

Or not, and Hollywood can just sink into further irrelevancy with the most important demo in America. It’s up to them.

Secondly- Asians, in Asia. Black actors in general will never find appeal with them, and “black experience” movies do not appeal to them for obvious reasons. Why should rice farmers in Indonesia care about the “plight” of black slaves in 1800’s America? They shouldn’t, and they don’t, and they never will. Hollywood needs to stop with this B.S. if it wants to succeed in the global film marketplace.

In no way, with the world as it is now, should Hollywood be indulging in liberal schmaltz, not with the reality that competition is coming soon from China and other places. China is big enough that it can make it’s own film franchises to rival Hollywood’s- and they’re not going to cast black actors. And you know what? That’s what the global audience really wants. The danger here is real.

I think that if Hollywood gives in to the Smiths and the others, they’re going to lose ground and it’s going to be much faster than even their most pessimistic predictions will be.

The fact that Hollywood refuses to face up to reality is what is going to destroy it in the long run. The 90’s are gone. The liberal project has failed. It’s time to move on.

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Interesting post. Perhaps people should have listened to me more back then.

And so Disney sinks into the mire, along with the rest of them.

I saw some on set pictures of the new Snow White movie, and… gods, what an ugly, ugly… ugh, yeah.

It looked bad.

As in like cheap, bad. It’s baffling.

We are told these movies cost like 300 million dollars, or something, and… I mean… how? Where does the money actually go, then?

Google “Snow White Set Pictures”. I’ll paste one of them below.

Does this look like a 250 million dollar production to you?

I mean, what the fuck am I seeing here?

My Junior High School drama teacher, Mr. Brian, would have been livid with anger if his students were to show up to a performance of Snow White looking like this. I mean, this looks cheap. Like CW cheap, and their stuff looks almost like bad cosplay at times.

This is not exaggeration. Google “Snow White Cosplay”. You will see better looking costumes than this Disney shit.

Seriously. 250 million dollars, for this? WHAT?!?!

Uncle Walt was adamant during his lifetime that nobody touch Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. No remakes, no sequels, no continuations, no novels, comic books, nothing, nada. He understood that Snow White was Disney’s foundation, and that to touch it was to risk everything, image-wise.

Snow White was sacred; it was the first ever full length animated film, and thus one of the most important and influential movies ever. Possibly the most important movie ever released. Maybe even the best. It’s a human cultural milestone, similar to the Mona Lisa, the David, the Taj Mahal, or the Sistine Chapel. I mean… you don’t touch those things. You just don’t.

I mean- imagine the world today if Snow White had never been made. No Disney. Maybe no full length animated movies… literally, like, at all. I mean… no Pixar, no Dreamworks, no Ufotable, no Madhouse. I mean, none of it.

And… yeah. Just… look at that picture, up there! What the fuck IS that?!?!

I do not think Walt would have been happy!

Well… I know. But I take this personally because I know that Ariel was me, originally. She was based on me, and my formerly bright red hair… the blazing hair I had in childhood. So it means something to me.

Back to the new Snow White… they’re no longer Dwarfs, even. Wut? I know this rant is getting long, but apparently Peter Dinklage said something jaw-droppingly dumb about “Dwarf” being offensive and Disney changed it to “magical creatures” or somesuch nonsense and that’s just… idiotic beyond belief.

“Dwarf” is not an offensive term. Literally nobody thinks this! Dinklage is an idiot.

Three quarters of the role playing games released in the last fifty years feature “dwarves” in some capacity, and usually in a major one.

Arguably the most popular video gaming franchise in the world, Warcraft, uses dwarves as their mascot!

Here’s the World of Warcraft entry on “Dwarves”. Note the sheer, overwhelming size of it:

https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Dwarf

For me it would take days to parse through and understand all of this!

Dinklage is a dumbass, and Disney here is in real danger of looking like a laughingstock. They’ve gone wayyyyy too far overboard with the “woke” shit, and in the worst possible ways.

And seriously, what is even the problem? Dwarves are awesome, right? Whenever I play a D&D based game I choose a Dwarf fighter, because those rule. I mean, Dwarves are cool, right? There’s a reason why they’re in so many fantasy games. So why is he complaining so fucking much?

Well, I’m kinda tired and blogged out, but there you go.

I think that the major takeaway from this post should probably be the racial stuff, at least in regards to the international market.

When it comes to the international market, I suspect the key to unlocking their wallets is whiteness, and lots of it. Redheads, blondes, European fantasy. There is a reason Barbie broke records and Little Mermaid bombed, and the racial angle is it. The international market loves loves loves them some white people.

Little Mermaid could have been the movie breaking those records. It could have wiped the floor with Endgame, but nah, gotta have the right politics, right?

Movies are primarily escapism, and to the masses of the world, there is no better escapism than beautiful European fantasy. There is a reason why Warcraft has been so popular worldwide for so many many years. Ditto for DOTA, and for LOL. And, hell, for Minecraft, and a bunch of other stuff. It’s all different kinds of European fantasy.

This “woke” stuff is purely American. It may do well here but I suspect it will continue to struggle if not fail completely overseas, likely forever.

Seriously, though. 9 bombs in a row. Then 10, with Snow White. The stock continues to dive. At what point are the share holders going to get angry? If they had just stuck to their traditional European centric formula, Disney would be swimming in god knows how many billions right now. One of media’s greatest missed opportunities.

Well, this post is too long and meandering, IDK.

But, there you go.

I guess that the takeaway here is that I’m done searching, both for things in others and myself. I don’t need to experiment anymore, with anyone or anything. In regards to sexuality or even relationships in general I can just zero-in now on those very specific things and particular types of people that are most fulfilling for myself and safely ignore 99.99% of everything else.

And with that being the reality, nothing impresses me anymore, and TBH everything outside the very specific zone that works best for me no longer seems to even register. At best that stuff is casually ignored; at worst, it’s repulsive.

It’s kind of amazing, actually.

Life is so much simpler this way, and so much more fulfilling. It’s quite nice.

And it frees up a lot of time, too.

Pretty sweet deal.

Random relationship stuff tonight… IDK, I need something new to talk about lol.

Well, I think I’ve reached peak internet. Porn just grosses me out completely these days.

I’m… really, really tired of porn, or frankly anything sexually explicit, at all. Even nudity, save for very rare exceptions, seems boring at best. I just… don’t like it. It looks horrible, or maybe sad. I don’t like it.

It’s finally happened, lol. After twenty five years of living my life online, I am truly sick of pornography, lol.

Is this a function of just getting older, or something else? Maybe I’ve just seen so much of it that I’m just… desensitized, or… I don’t know. But I’ve gotten to the point where I’m actively repulsed by it now.

Porn, I mean, or anything else. Sex scenes in movies, grossly sexual music, or like, any of that.

By accident I saw part of one of Lily-Rose Depp’s sex scenes in The Idol and I actually threw up in my mouth a bit. And no, I’m unfortunately not exaggerating. I actually tasted it. It had a chicken-y flavor, since I had chicken for dinner that night. It was horrible; truly nasty.

I’m over it. Long gone is any desire whatsoever to dredge up anything in my old “porn” folder. If I ever find it again I’ll probably delete it, or at least all of the big stuff in it, whatever that might be.

I’m officially “porned out”. I would die a happy man if I were to never again see two gross people bumping uglies. Honestly, even the thought of it is rather nauseating.

I saw, much to my unfortunate dismay, a “leaked” sex tape of TikTok personality Olivia Dunne. Ugh, gross. At one point I had considered a relationship with her but no thanks, not if that is what she’s going to be famous for. If you want to be a gross slut fine, but I will be looking elsewhere for love, thanks.

Instead of Dunne, I think I will be hanging out with the amazing Lily Brooks O’ Briant instead. She’s prettier and younger than Dunne and more talented as well. Her music is amazing, especially for her age. Or at least it’s music I can identify with. And she seems… IDK, my type. She seems like someone I could get along with over the long term. Or I guess, that’s how it seems now. We’ll have to see.

But Dunne… ick, no. She comes across like a dollar store Paris Hilton. Not really my type these days.

For what it’s worth, a fully clothed picture of Kathryn Newton or Kaitlyn Dever is more of a turn-on for me than… pretty much anything else I can think of, lol. IDK, perhaps that’s what love is. And maybe that is why porn is such a gross thing, to me. I have something better. Why would I settle for a sloppy, smelly substitute for love when I can have the real thing?

Love is physical yes, but also spiritual, and emotional. Porn is… watching someone else do a base physical act. It’s love, minus everything that makes love transcendent. If love is a famous diamond, porn is the gravel in your driveway.

Kind of an awkward analogy but I think it fits. Porn is common; it’s everywhere online and everywhere else today; everyone has seen it, and so it has no value. It’s worthless. Love… is rare. Most people, I think, do not ever get to really feel it, or even see it in others. Of the two, love is vastly, almost infinitely superior.

That having been said, someone famous for being in porn is beneath me. I choose not to hang out with those that have no value, or who seek to not cultivate value in others. If you want to roll in the mud with the swine, good for you.

But I have finer tastes.

I also saw a few random pictures that purport to be intimate shots of Ashley Benson and Cara Delevigne together, back when they were an item. Yuck, as well. Not interested. IDK what the deal is with this stuff or where it’s coming from, but it doesn’t seem… pleasant. Not my thing, whatever this is.

I suppose that there are others interested in these things. Maybe younger people, IDK. But I’m not, and I think it probable that I never will be, again.

IDK.

Other stuff…

Well… I have other things to write about here, concerning other relationship topics. I might talk about that stuff later on in the weekend.

But for what it’s worth, I can understand much better now about the old conservative position against pornography. It’s like… I could understand it before, but now I get it.

I will probably always be a libertarian type at heart, but yeah, I can see it, now.

Well, I’ve been playing more games, lately. It’s pretty fun, and useful.

Random stuff… I’ve been going through my Steam catalog and just… trying stuff, games I bought years ago but never got around to playing. For example- I’m trying the Anomaly series of tower defense games. Those are fun, I like tower defense. I’ve also been playing Warcraft III again, and… well, that’s a story in and of itself.

I think I know where Warcraft III came from, now. I’ve been tracing its roots back to me, and the stuff I’ve done and thought. I’m like 99% sure at this point that I inspired the character of Arthas, for example. I mean, just look at me, lol. Big guy, nordic, strong, and… good, and evil, etc. I channel both the powers of the light and dark, of life and death, in equal measure.

I think I might be Kerrigan, too. At least partially. I can see it. It’s a feeling. The hive mind, and all that. At any rate I think I pieced it all together. But… I won’t bore with the details.

And I need to keep some things personal. I mean, as much as someone like me can, lol.

But suffice it to say I understand the underlying bits and pieces of where this stuff came from, now. At least I think, lol.

Other stuff… I’ve been playing Heroes of Might and Magic III again. Man, that is a great game. I really appreciate its understated aesthetic. Warcraft tends to be very cartoony and “over the top”, and that isn’t bad- it fits the franchise well, but it’s overwhelming success as a franchise means that fantasy games have tried too much to copy its style, I think. Regardless HoMM3 is amazing.

I ran through the campaigns in college, and TBH I think on some level it did me good. Helped me to learn how to strategize, or something, IDK. Or maybe it was just a way to blow off steam, lol.

I think I have some saved games somewhere. I mean, from college, seriously. Twenty five years ago.

It’s not impossible for me to dig them out. I also installed the GOG version of Diablo/Hellfire, dug out my old saves, and installed them. One of them, a wizard character decked out in the game’s best stuff, was last used on this very day (July 18) twenty three years ago. So July 18, 2000. That’s when the save file was last modified. Amazing!

I remember playing Diablo I at nights, after my shifts at Office Depot. lol. What a world. It was a good way to wind down after a hard day at work. Wow. Twenty three years ago. Man, that’s a long time.

Looking back- would the person I was then be proud of the man I am now? Yeah, I think so.

For sure.

I guess that’s the test, really.

Other things- somehow, a game called Fight ‘N Rage ended up in my Steam library. No idea how this happened, lol. Tried it; it was fun, a stylish amalgamation of Final Fight, Streets of Rage, Denjin Makai II, 64th Street: A Detective Story, and I think D.D. Crew. And probably some other stuff. But regardless of it’s origin, I played it once and got to the fifth level boss, whoever that is, and quit the game because I was tired of playing. IDK, I’ll try it again, someday.

I’ve also been playing iOS games. Most of that store is… bad, most games are deliberately broken or otherwise extremely sketchy. I’ve gone over this before, but I’ve downloaded and played simple puzzle games that drained my battery and caused my device to overheat. I think a lot of games and apps in that store secretly use peoples’ devices to mine… stuff, crypto, data, or other things. The iOS store is really toxic and dangerous.

There are a few games, though, that are not horrible or alarming. I play them while using my exercise bike. I crank the resistance up to max and just bike away, for hours at a time.

I have some old clothes that I need to lose a handful of pounds to fit into. It isn’t much, it can be done pretty easy. The bike + pilates + dumbbells can accomplish that, no problem. But still, I need to work at it. Once done, I’ll rethink the rest of my life, I think.

Other thoughts- the typical midwestern diet just… isn’t working for me. It’s too much food, just… too much food. It’s not bad food, but the sheer quantity of it can sometimes be a real problem. IDK, that’s kind of another post.

But… yeah. It’s too much, really. Sometimes I find myself taking the food I’m given and secretly disposing of it, somehow. I feel guilty but… it’s just too much, but I don’t want to refuse it, because that would be rude, so…

Well, it’s alright.

It’s late, time to pack it in.

IDK, random diary stuff…

You know, I need to start putting just… normal things in here again. I think it would be a good idea, just to talk about non-huge things, and ideas and such. Honestly, it’s just… yeah.

Well, I’ve done some more thinking about video games, lately. IDK, I did go ahead and buy the remastered Starcraft after all. It turns out that I hadn’t used one of my credit cards in a while, and the bank was threatening to close my account if I didn’t use it. And the remastered SC was on sale, so… I got it, and charged it on the card. Might as well, I thought that I should probably keep the card, so…

I did the same with a few other things on Battle.net. I used another card I really should use more often on the Diablo 3/Diablo 2 combo pack. I also got the Arcade classic collection, and yes, since it was on sale, I got the Warcraft 3 remaster. Honestly, just to keep my credit lines open, lol.

And I’ve been doing a lot of searching for video games, too, lately, and Christ, the market today really is a confusing, dangerous quagmire. Wow.

Many games today are online only, or have a small single player campaign designed solely to push you into online play. I mean, even more then SC II. It’s kinda… unfortunate, since I don’t play online. That entire scene is just toxic, utterly. There isn’t a multiplayer game on the market that I can find that doesn’t require you to, ugh, practice. I mean, you need to like, actually schedule time to play the game, and keep up your skills, and stuff. Like, actually practice. A video game. Like for real!

Wut? No, lol.

No, not a chance. There is only so much time in a day. I mean, I could do pilates, or practice DOTA. I could romance Laura Marano, or I could practice Counterstrike. Or… you know. I don’t get multiplayer. At least for me, it doesn’t click. Is Overwatch 2 really that great of a game that you need to spend a thousand hours playing it just so you can get good enough to really play it? I don’t think so.

And the expenditures! Lordy, the cost! A World of Warcraft monthly subscription is needed just so you can buy the game, lol. Holy shit! At least, for any WOW game released in like the last 10 years, lol. Seriously- you need to pay a monthly fee for the opportunity to purchase the new WOW game, like the one advertised on the front page of Battle.net these days, Dragonflight. Paying money for the chance to pay more money, lol. The mind boggles.

I looked at Overwatch 2. I didn’t look much since it seemed too much like a mobile game- the store was advertising “Overwatch coins”. Pay 100 USD for an invisible basket of “Overwatch coins”! Great deal, huh? Um, no thanks, lol.

And they were advertising “premium passes”. Wut? The game itself was “free”, but man, looking online, people really want to you to pay for these “premium passes”. The impression I got was that the game was technically free, but if you really wanted to play it properly, you needed to pay a monthly fee. And of course the pressure to “play it properly” is pretty severe in Overwatch 2 since it’s a multiplayer team game, so if you lose, you’re making other people, real people, sad, and who wants that? So yeah, you’re going to be “part of the team” and fork over the cold hard cash on a monthly basis, lol.

Yeah, so, there you go. Not really the experience for me, I think.

I looked at other developers too. Since I’m on an RTS kick I logged onto Steam and did a search for “Warhammer”, since I’ve heard that that franchise has made some good RTS games in recent years.

Christ! A general search brought up 500+ results, and I checked them over and I swear a good 500 of them were actually about Warhammer games. I mean, the games, and their DLC, and other stuff. Wow, 500 results, that’s a lot. Like, a lot a lot. That’s 500 games, then, and DLC, and expansions, and early releases, and other stuff, and ye gods, it would take days to even sort through all of that- figure out what games in the franchise were the RTS ones, what their DLC was, which ones were the good ones, which ones I might like, personally, and then you have to find the right package to buy, and… yikes!

I mean, I know I sound kinda curmudgeonly but… still. That’s a lot to go through. And RTS games aren’t like platformers- you need to take the time to learn the games and the mechanics, and that’s more time spent, and gods, is it even worth it?

I looked up Age of Empires, too, since I heard the old ones were remastered, and that they had a new one out. The new one looked like a great game if you were into multiplayer, not so much for a single player only gamer. I looked up the remasters and… yikes, I found out that the remaster was apparently farmed out to some other company, and they didn’t do a good job with them at all- apparently there is/was a bug in Age of Empires III that caused the game to delete your entire C drive and all of it’s contents! Holy shit! Yes, seriously. See here, from Steam:

I’ve been hearing about buggy games for 30 years but that review gave me a double take. Wiping entire C: drives? Wut? That’s not a bug, that’s assault and battery, lol. I googled this and yup, it is/was an issue with this game; other people were talking about it on other sites and platforms.

I’m sorry, but you have got to be kidding me. That is so far beyond inexcusable that it’s hard to even describe. The rest of that list is deal breaking, but that one is just… nuclear. It’s so unreal that a steam game could do this that it makes me wonder if one of the devs was an aspiring supervillain and had some kind of secret grudge against humanity, lol. Regardless there is no way in hell am I approaching any of this, ever.

So… for now, it’s back to Starcraft, lol! I got the cartooned thing, too. I might decide to give that a full run through some day, IDK.

Um… to summarize though, I’m still glad with my decision to not multiplayer anything, really. I mean I’ve tried it and inevitably, any kind of experience like that becomes a horrible time and money sink. It’s not worth it, it really isn’t. I mean, with the kind of demands these stupid games put on players, it really would come down to being Kathryn Newton’s boyfriend or playing League of Legends of whatever. Of the two options, I think that right one is obvious, lol.

I might look into the C&C remasters, tho. Maybe they won’t be horrible. Let’s hope so.