LadyCrimson

After all these years I'm still wondering if Guinan was, evolutionary speaking, a pre-Q. Or a race with some abilities that could cancel out the Q's abilities in some fashion, like negative vs. positive, and that's why Q was so wary of her. Or maybe it was just Guinan alone vs. her entire species. Apparently I'm not the only one who's wondered about that.

I've always been an advocate for the idea that as soon as you know you're sick with something communicable, stay the **** home. Even if it's "harmless" it could still be a lost week for someone else. I mean, would that prevent a wild spread of a killer virus - probably not. But humans tending to be lax re: consideration for others (and the design of public gathering points) because something is deemed "harmless" is at least a small part of the problem of why we're never "ready" for something worse. My mother's retirement home had hand sanitizer everywhere in the dining hall and other rules and social politeness long long before covid, because, y'know, old people. It is a polite thing and a safety thing for them. Maybe such consideration should not be something left only for "old people."

I think one issue with games is that my curiosity over them peaked a long time ago. That's a primary motivator for me in most things. I've never been into games for or because of story telling or lore, as I've probably mentioned many times. With games I'm the number cruncher, the what are the limits within these given set of rules, how many different methods can one take to accomplish the same thing, can I figure out the patterns of the AI and use it against them (oh the fun I had with Stronghold Crusader in that regard...), can I build a zipline network within the rules that allows me to never touch the ground, and of course, image framing and composing. On the other hand, I don't care to be a Grandmaster of Chess or learn a programming language. Just saying, there's a difference. More and more games tend to inspire less curiosity... or at least not new curiosity. They can be fun, funny, visually astounding, or of course, "die 1000 times"-challenging etc, but without any intense curiosity factor to motivate me, they are not interesting. Occasionally one comes along that hits a note and I relish when one does, it's just going to be rare now. And as time goes on I find myself not caring as much re: trying to constantly find one that does. Edit: which leads into the maybe I don't "need" games as a distraction anymore. Whether that means eventually I'll just stop playing at all, even by habit, I cannot say. Depends on what else life tosses my way on top.

Re: "are you still a gamer" More and more even when I play games, I'm sort of wondering why I'm playing games. To pass the time mostly I suppose. I don't think I get the same level of "fun" out of it as I did a long time ago, outside of certain "obsessive" tasks like making maps. But I could get the same effect obsessing over editing photos, videos or reorganizing the kitchen, really - my task-obsessive nature isn't confined to only game-related things. Maybe the major reason I personally played games (depression/blank the mind/de-stress) or any other kind of fantasy-immersion just isn't there anymore so it's less compelling to want to lose myself in them. I mean I like games, but I don't spend a whole lot of time on them per year anymore, and 95% of the time when I buy a game, it's on a random lark and I play it for 1-4 hrs, post a screenshot or three here, and never touch or think about it again. Sometimes it feels more like I keep playing out of habit more than real interest. ...I'm still kind of curious about that beaver city-builder Timberborn game tho. For some reason I want to watch tiny beavers running around a town doing tasks.

Goodness, seems like a lot of forumites are getting hit with it now. I'm glad it seems everyone is ok/coping well? Hope it stays that way. We're still corona free far as we know. If we've had it we've been asymptotic and wouldn't know. Still our extreme isolationist selves and wear our masks everywhere when we do need to go out etc. Haven't gotten boosters.

Over the weekend I tried watching some cheap straight-to-Netflix romantic movie called The Royal Treatment. I suppose it had some moments (very brief ones) but yeah that was even more insipid then typical low-rent US romance. Zzzz. Last night I noticed the fantasy/horror k-drama Bulgasal: Immortal Souls only had two episodes left "to air" so I thought I'd start on that. Halfway through the first episode I was liking it a fair bit (tons of background set up, this will be modern-day but with ancient-times flashbacks). Fairly violent. Past lives. Cursed ppl. Blah blah. Anyway, seems like something I'd like but then ... I fell asleep before the end of the 1st episode. It's just something that happens to me more often now. Will watch more later this week. I liked the attention to detail and setup, at least.

Hubby's having a sudden major freak-out over the new house. It's just like what happened the last time we did this (that place was much farther away tho, with other considerations as well) - where he doesn't "feel safe." This did not occur when we bought our currently-living-in Bay Area house. He knows it's irrational/utterly unlike his normal Spock-like self but he's got some kind of trigger I guess. I am talking can't-eat/sleep//disrupts work and using his wife as a walking security blanket all day long type of stress level, way beyond normal "moving sucks" jitters. At any rate ... I suggested just moving bed/clothes and PC's (hahah gotta have those) and trial-run living up there for a month, eg, no major commitment, see if his stress level goes away or not. If not, we can rent that one instead and stay here longer, see what happens in the future. There was always the possibility he would end up not liking being 2.5 hrs. from his main office, 99% remote-work capability or not, anyway, so a spartan-trial before full-move is not a bad thing to do regardless. My poor sweetie. He gets so frustrated with himself when he knows he's being irrational, he's not used to it (unlike me, who's always a bit crazy...). It's ok, we'll figure it out.

Speaking of food...I've reached this point with my diet routine where I can almost forget I technically have T2 diabetes. As long as I keep to: less than 25-30 net carbs per day for at least an average of 5 days a week (not hard, salad and meat), eat once or twice a day (don't constantly pop little bits of food in your piehole every hour) , I seem to be fine. No insulin. No other meds. Blood sugar rating generally 100-125 fasting or 140-150 after (most) meals. Once or twice a week I may eat a couple dark chocolate bars or binge-chow a bag of pepperoni sticks, or have some ramen, pizza couple times a month or whatever. So most of the time it's like just staying in this higher "pre-diabetes" range. Guess I don't have a super advanced case so as long as I don't binge-eat junk a lot it's easy for me to manage it with ez tweaks.

Our cheap carpet was finally installed in the spots where we wanted it. So technically we could move any time we want, now. Course, we're lazy/in no real hurry either. And hubby hasn't routed any room to room internet cabling yet. He said there is that blower-ed in loose insulation in the attic crawl space making it difficult to try to do cables through ceiling/walls from that direction. Wouldn't be impossible, just not what he wants to deal with. So I guess it would have to be through the floor crawlspace or some other method. I told him he could always hire someone to deal with the mess. Or just run visible wires tacked to the walls, I don't care about looks. I ain't moving until the house has a LAN set up properly. It's not just me - hubby has to remote work after all. But mostly ... I needz my internet. Priorities.

"...and Théoden could not be overtaken." Theoden is/was always one of my favorites. I probably like him more than Frodo, truth be told. Sure, he was written/done fuller/better in prose, but his movie version still resonates (much due to the actor who played him) and I loved that they at least put those few seconds in the film of his white horse suddenly pulling ahead of the front.

Dear Amazon, could you at least put up a 1440 trailer, maybe? ...not that we can tell anything about the show itself from this type of teaser video. In fact I like the brief making-of better than the finished product.

Remember my two drones? I made them bigger, because it's funny. Then I found out how to duplicate that glitch. So I could have four. But... ...that's a little too big. ...and that's a little too small. ...that's about right. ...but somehow, maybe not as much fun as a single giant one.

My past cats just used the set of three six foot high bookshelves, jumping/scrabbling up and then squabbling over who got which bookshelf. The one closest to the path us humans walked past all the time was the most coveted. Some would keep trying to reach out to whack hubby's head as he walked by. I am too short, they couldn't touch me. Cats definitely like heights.

I remember Descent. I liked it quite a bit for the time. It was definitely disorienting...I'd get so turned around visually, even if I don't have any motion/vertigo issues. It was one reason I liked the game tho - at the time the perspective gameplay was so different from the rest. Hubby doesn't get vertigo but the first time he played Borderlands 1 - which was basically the first time playing a more modern 3D 1st person - he moved his entire head while playing. And I mean in giant tilts, turns and bobs. Game camera "looks up", his head would go up, he turns a chr. to the right and his head moves to the right. As opposed to me, whose head never moves an inch, only my eyeballs. He's more mild about it now but still does it. I don't quite understand it/why some people do that, but it's kinda cute. And if you're wondering, he doesn't do that with movies/TV.

To be (unnecessarily) clear, I have 11TB of internal disk space and, uh ... 6TB of external storage space. The 5TB is the amount I'd have to sift through in order to try and "organize" it. Organizing to me these days largely means trying to delete a bunch of stuff, but that means I have to look at every single file and figure out if I want to keep it or not. I know there's lots of stuff I don't care about anymore, and it drives me crazy to waste space, but it drives me even crazier spending hours opening files/making decisions for days. Pffft. Sifting through an old box of physical form photos to organize/toss? Kinda fun. Staring at a monitor opening/looking at files until I'm blind? Not so much. -- Edit: I'd like more storage but what I want is more internal SSD storage now, not HDD. 4TB ssd's are pricey. I suppose if the tech had been around in the early 90's, I might've created some huge digital movie/TV collection. I sure did like to VHS record (and buy) movies back then. These days I just don't care/only stream, and anything I like enough (rare) I just buy the bluray and play it from disc. I have no need for digital versions or digital portability. Although I do have a lot of videos from YouTube on one external... Game videos on the other hand ... yeah. Those 4k game videos are enormous, like 4-5GB for 30-40 seconds. It gets redonkulous. Aye. I get more like that all the time. For me it's time and energy. Even if I have the time, I don't have the energy (mentally or physically) for a lot of things I used to think were so vital to my existence. I just want to eat good food, take naps, giggle occasionally, and have a stable emotional contentment. That's it.

Guys, I need one of these. It's $300 and the waiting list to get it shipped is super long, and there isn't much "point" to it I suppose. But I need one of these. Edit: Oh! Oh! And you can get outfits for it. The company only has a couple I think but I hear you can just get tiny cat-hats and use those if you want. I so want one!

Finally figured out the best game map settings, made a few good (to me) maps. Now bored again. All that map making etc. created a big fat file/folder mess on a couple drives tho. I should clean it up, but I probably won't. I used to care so much about keeping PC files super organized. I still do, but ... not quite as much. Or more accurately, it's more like: "5TB storage across several drives ... it'd take hours/days... hey what's on TV."

I need to build something like this in the hallway of the new house. Yes, yes I do.

I am still ... making maps in 7 Days to Die. First it was huge Cities. Then I switched to mini-cities, but oodles of them everywhere. Then I tried to change hills, plains and mts. parameters but I can't seem to force the game to create maps that don't have giant sections of flatland. Then after every map I have to comb the POI .xml to see if it randomly generated most of the specific buildings one would want in a single map (gotta have at least one of certain Tier5 buildings!). If I sorta like one, I then have to recolor the biome map so stuff I want is in the "right" biome/s. At any rate, 100's and 100's of maps later I still have yet to make the perfect map, even considering the limitations of the default generator. ...someone smarter than me make a new version-update of a 3rd party map generator again, before I go insane, please.

These look like they would work well as bookmarks. I would like to order two each of blue, orange, grey and black, plz.

Movie, not series, but Netflix, so in this thread: Seems like Train to Busan zombies (the trailer/show even references it once, which is funny) set in a school? Might be good. The older male actor playing a teacher - I've seen him in a few things and he's always oddball or creepy fun. Tho I'm sure his role will be smallish w/focus on all the teens.

Tried to watch that Midnight Mass short series. The actor playing the priest is fantastic, I'll give it that. The show itself - 3/4 into the first episode I knew it was a Salem's Lot type of plot. 2.5 episodes in I was tired/bored of all the moral/point of view debating dialogue-ing. Is it a bad show. No. In fact I could point out quite a few good qualities. But it felt like a mashup of one old series and one or two modern series with nothing really new to add, with that now-everywhere dreary-grey visual atmosphere, and just isn't for me at this point.

Old stuff, rock of gilbrator. New stuff, marshmallows.

Finished that ballet k-drama Navillera. Towards the end a very ... predictable? cliche? ... health plot point came up and then there were a couple episodes that dealt with that which kinda made me snore a little. It wasn't bad, just too predictable. At least there was no truck o' doom. The leads/some of the supports (male and female, loved the old mans wife and granddaughter chr.) were mostly why I kept watching at that point. The very end was ok but then was ruined by a ridiculous final parting shot bit. At least it was 12 episodes vs. the more common 16. That all said I was still mostly entertained with it, in that slow and "life affirming" sort of way. Hmm...what to get/take off my watchlist next...

I'm kinda hoping I'll have largely given up games, or decided I don't even need a PC at all, or am dead, before I am forced to use Win11 for anything. Mostly because I don't like hassle anymore. I think (new) games should still be supporting Win10 for another 6+ years at least, right? Or maybe I'll just use a console+recliner for gaming by then.