Hello Everyone!

Apocalyptic Homesteading Day 322-409!

More Misadventures In Online Gaming, A Wasted Winter & Reaching The Bottom Of The Rabbit Warren

I took another day off from writing yesterday and once again found out that taking such a one day reprieve is really good for me. It is definitely more about not stressing over the writing than actually doing the writing that I enjoy having a break from. Ultimately it is only a grand total of four days off from it per month. After doing this stuff more or less every day for so long now I can assuredly take a day off now and then without much fear of falling out of the habits that I have worked so hard at instilling in myself. Repetition is a beautiful thing and most mornings (after letting the dogs out and setting the espresso brewing) I do not think much about opening the text editor as soon as I wake up and beginning to slowly type out whatever emerges. I do not give much thought to the process very often at this point in things and although doing it seldom bothers me... if I fail to do it... well that is an entirely different story so those one day 'guiltless breaks' are turning into quite the treat. I guess that the big difference there is procrastinating versus intentionally not doing something and although the end result is the same they both bear very different side-effects and impact my overall mood in very different ways.

Anyway, I better not get lost trying to spell all that stuff out too much because although I have been up for almost an hour now, my mind is still in slow motion and I am not quite in a hurry to jostle it awake with too much focused thought. The last many days have been a bit exhausting mentally with how much time I have spent cooped up indoors due to all the rain and foul weather. For the most part it has left me feeling rather restless to do anything besides sitting in front of the computer all day and has made me long for those daily hikes that I had been going on before things got stormy and stayed that way. Supposedly the weather will be clearing up over the next few days so that will be nice and as with most things I just firmly fix the idea in my head that it will eventually pass and there is not anything that I can do about it except not let it get me down.

So, here I am after waking up super early in order to try playing that new game online but the severs are down... for what must be like the two dozenth time now since they launched the game a little over two weeks ago. I finally overcame the majority of the technological hurdles I was facing (in order to play the game) by tinkering with a bunch of settings until I eventually landed on ones that work well for my setup. I am still using that cloud gaming service to pull it all off and after switching to a different internet connection (the one for the camp) everything seems to work much better and considering it has a lot more bandwidth (and better routing hardware than my phone running as a hotspot does) which is cool because it made it where I could eliminate poor connectivity from my list of potential problems.

I actually had a lot of fun over the weekend and even got to play with a friend on there but the servers got super unstable and at one point my character that I had put way too many hours into lagged out and I returned to the main menu to see it had died and given that I only play the game in hardcore (perma-death mode) all my efforts were rendered null in a mere few seconds of stuttering gameplay and lagging to the point where I could not do anything... not even by rapidly exiting the game by closing it in an effort to save my character's life and all my time invested. It was a risk that I knew I was taking and although dying is part of the game I would prefer it not be because of technical glitches. I am still rather amazed at how they took a twenty year old game and completely botched it so badly but will stop myself right there before I get off on a well-deserved tangent about it.

Ah, it is another morning here and somehow I managed to sleep in beyond sunrise even though I went to bed a little after eight in the evening last night. I awoke a few times throughout the evening and once super early today to let the dogs out but aside from that I snoozed almost twelve hours straight and could probably sleep more if I had not woken up and felt so damn moody that I did not want to go back to sleep. That does not make a whole lot of sense but it is the best way to describe what motivated me to get up and get in motion for the day.

Well, that did not go as planned and I wound up writing out a long post for a forum and spent way too much time on editing it along the way. Mainly I just had to get a bunch of stuff related to that game off my mind and 'put it out there' for my own damn peace of mind. Gah, the time invested at this point could have been spent in better ways and just yesterday I realized one of those ways was by adding to the collection of videos on my gaming channel. I should have known to look at it after the launch of that recent game but somehow overlooked it. It usually gets a steady two thousand views a month (for like four years now) but since the game launched it has gone to twenty thousand views in two weeks. My subscribers on there have also increased from like nine people to ninety people so I guess it is gaining some kind of traction. Anyway, I would have been better off answering comments on my old videos and making new videos and posting them... than tinkering with that new game!

Okay, its once again Thursday here and I did not write anything at all yesterday. Honestly looking over what is in this entry I have not written much at all over the previous week which is probably playing a factor in my feeling a little more moody than I usually do. A few days ago I even had that same friend stop over once again and just spending time with someone, talking, laughing and swapping stories sure was a nice change of pace. Even though we stayed up pretty late into the night 'shooting the proverbial shit' we were both up early the following day and after a nice breakfast we did a bit of hiking around the place. Considering their previous visit was rather short they had not got to really see much of the place beforehand so it was fun giving a little bit of a tour even though we both got covered in 'hitchhikers' (little seeds that stick to everything) and did not go all that far off the beaten path into the woods.

Late in the afternoon yesterday after my guest had departed I busied myself doing a bunch of small stuff around the shelter site and more or less doing chores that I had been putting off doing like collecting all my clean socks off the fence where I had them hung up to dry. The day my guest came I had cut up a bunch of firewood and hauled it to near the fire-pit (in case we wanted a fire) but since I had not unloaded it from the wagon (and we did not have a fire) I went ahead and got it all ricked off the ground and stacked near the fire-pit for later use. Mainly I cut up a bunch of the skinnier material left over from when I originally cleared the site and over the coming weeks I think that I am going to go ahead and cut up more of it because it is well beyond the point of being good for anything aside from firewood. I guess the important part is that it will not get wasted but it sure would have been nice to have had somewhere to store all that stuff out of the weather so that I could build things with it also. As I said about that material from the beginning: It will get used for something one way or another!

It has been five days shy of a month since the last time that I wrote anything else for this entry and in that time all that I have really done is binge out each day playing that video game. The only writing that I have done during that time is some trash talking the poor state of the game on its official forums and filing more bug reports than I can recall. How the developers managed to introduce so many bugs to a twenty year old (rather refined and balanced) game I have no idea but they sure did bugger it up real good! The game is quite broken for playing in 'hardcore' (perma-death) mode for a number of reasons like game crashes which result in the client not immediately disconnecting from the server and hence the character dying during combat. Or the even more game breaking flaw of the long loading screens between different areas during which the character can be attacked and killed while the loading screen is still active. There are also numerous glitched monsters that are either way faster than they should be or deal entirely more damage than they should which makes some areas of the game unplayable unless a person really just wants to see their character die. There is of course also the possibility of getting double-whammied by a combination of both those major flaws where the glitched monsters attack the player during the loading screen which almost always results in the character's death.

The general response to the game-breaking stuff seems to be 'do not play hardcore' but honestly I have never played the original game in any other mode and I sure will not be doing so now just because a bunch of 'copy and paste developers' buggered up the most exciting thing to happen in the Diablo II universe in nearly twenty years. The other sage advice from the official forum trolls (oops I mean moderators) seems to be to not play the game if someone does not like it which in and of itself really gets my hackles up given that I paid for the game so that I could (wait for it) 'play the game' and not so that I could simply own it and not play it. It is all a frigging mess and meanwhile all these new players (and returning old ones) are flocking away from the game due to its many problems. Furthermore players like myself that know the game very well (and are even good at it) are simultaneously struggling with the problems and trying to help new players survive something that we ourselves know is just one long load screen (or client cash) away from dying through no fault of our own. It is both disheartening and quite sickening that a sixty something billion dollar gaming company pushed a broken game to a loyal fan-base and seem rather un-remorseful or even ashamed about it while continuing to push the narrative that if the consumer is not happy with the product then it is the consumer's own fault.

So, why is all of this even important to me? Why did I just spend almost five weeks 'eating, breathing and sleeping' this game in the first place knowing that it is a broken mess? I guess that those would be the questions that I should get to the bottom of answering in a way that helps it all make some kind of sense to folks beyond just me saying that I love the Diablo II universe and leaving it at that. A lot of folks fail to realize that gaming is about the experience(s) the player (or players) have and not necessarily just about entertainment because lets face it there are a heck of a lot of easier ways to be entertained that require less focus, less thinking and strategizing than gaming and especially so with online games that have a social aspect to them. That last part is the real clincher for me and hopefully in this post I will get to spelling some of that out from my own perspective in a way that helps folks understand why to me it is way more than 'just a game' or whatever other catchy phrase that folks use to dismiss the legitimate experience of others as insignificant.

I am going to have to rewind the proverbial clock to somewhere close to the end of 1996 and the beginning of 1997 when the original Diablo video game was released and I got introduced to playing it not just in single player mode but online as well. There was just something about it all that really sucked me in right from the beginning and to this day I am unsure if it was the challenge of fighting progressively harder monsters (and finding cool stuff) or doing so with people that I met online but at this point I doubt that such a distinction matters. The fact of the matter was that during that time I was struggling with a lot of post traumatic stress as well as depression and I guess what could be called acute social anxiety. I was also very anti-social, struggled with anger management problems and a slew of other things that are not really worth the effort of spelling out. To not get over-involved here with all that I will put it to you this way: In playing that game and my experiences with it I found something that I actually enjoyed and perhaps more importantly something that I would let myself enjoy. Meeting other weird (and potentially fucked up) people online made me not feel quite so 'alone in the world' which inadvertently lead me down a different path in life than the one that I had previously been on as an ill-tempered maladjusted twenty year old with more mental and emotional issues than any damn twenty year old should have in the first place.

During that phase of my life I spent a lot of time carrying around a Zip drive disc (another antiquated technology at this point) and on the disc I had the game installed. Lacking a computer of my own that could play the game I would lug the disc and sometimes the disc reader around with me and use it on any computer that folks would let me use to play it on. In hindsight I sure do appreciate all the folks that let me do so because in the long run it probably helped me sort myself out mentally more than anything else had up to that point. Those long hours of staring at a computer screen and fully immersing myself in the gaming world were undoubtedly exactly what I needed because I would zone out to the point where I could begin to notice not just what gears were turning in my mind but also why they were turning in the first place. In other words with my full attention focused on the game I lost the ability to bullshit myself that my own problems were unsolvable and un-treatable. To be clear gaming was not the only thing that helped me along the way to sorting myself out but it damn sure was not insignificant either.

Anyway, turn the clock ahead a few years and its mid 2000 when the much anticipated sequel to the game is released. By then I actually have a computer to play it on and let me tell you after years of anticipating the game it was indeed awesome to play it and made even more so by a friend also purchasing it and me and them getting to play online together rather routinely. The original game lacked the 'hardcore' (perma-death) feature and for whatever reason (but mainly because we both found the 'softcore' mode lame) we began playing it only in hardcore mode. I was not much of a team player back in those days and I constantly did things that really pissed my friend off but thankfully they were always a good sport about it and were able to set me on the path of learning to be a team player. Something that I will never forget is selling an item to a vendor just for the gold without looking at the items stats and realizing just how valuable and useful that it would be to my friend's character. Gods was he pissed when he realized what I had done and me just doing it blindly (in order to get gold) made it somehow even worse. To this day that single event sticks out in my mind and I guess that it always will because to this day I look at items before selling them and ask myself: Will this item help anyone? It is strange that I would learn that lesson the way that I did but there you have it.

It has been a few more days since I last wrote anything here so I should get back to it and try to get this all wrapped up (or closer to it) so that it is no longer lingering in the back of my mind.

I am unsure for just how long me and my friend played together but I think that it was for somewhere around a year before we stopped doing so. At the time I only had one copy of the game and my friend had two copies and I was always kind of envious that they could run two copies at once and hence could transfer items (between different characters) without the need of anyone else's assistance. To give an example of how difficult it was to transfer items between characters on a single account a player would have to either open a private game, wait like five to ten minutes, drop the items to be transferred on the ground, leave the game and hope that it was still available after switching characters and trying to rejoin the private game. It was a lot of years before all games were 'permanent' once created so the alternative to the first method was to join (or create) a public game and find a place to drop the items and hope that the game did not close and that no one found the items and stole them before getting back in the game (with a different character) and retrieving them. This method actually worked better than the first method but sometimes the game would get full of other players and re-joining it was no longer an option so really it was an incredibly risky endeavor either way.

Alright, well I have not added to this entry in a few weeks and although it keeps nagging at me to do so I keep avoiding it. Part of my mind has been entertaining 'how' to write about what comes next in this particular story without it turning into some novel-sized piece consisting of too many words and too many inadvertent branchings of the story. I have also been over-indulging in playing the game online and enjoying the formation of new friendships with some folks that I have met on there which in the grand scheme of things is probably what I need in life more than anything else: Folks to communicate with and have fun with. It is by far no excuse for not writing but it is the 'reason' why so I do not know what else to say about it besides that. Here it is two months since my last post and I guess the escapism of playing the game has been 'working as intended' because all of those days (and nights) have passed and I have barely noticed their passing even though my sleep cycle has gone largely unchanged.

Anyway, back to the story at hand here. So, without my friend to play in private games with I began playing more in the public games. It was not all that long after doing so before I realized that I would never get anywhere that way because folks not-so-affectionately called 'player killers' (abbreviated to PK for short) were rampant and of course most of them were using hacks or exploiting bugs in the game to make them nearly unstoppable even by what became known as 'player killer killers' (abbreviated PKK for short) and folks like me that just wanted to legitimately play the game had pretty much zero chance of making it to the 'end game' portion of things while playing in public games. Lets just say that it was a hostile and very unfriendly space to try to operate in and trusting anyone eventually lead to getting 'PKed' (player killed) either by them directly or their friends. For someone like myself who at the time was incredibly cagey and traumatized to start with... it is a wonder that I even kept trying.

Of course during all of this 'life was happening' and it is not like I could put all my time into playing a video game but I sure as hell tried to do so as often as I could and often at the expense of friendships and relationships going neglected in the process. To this day I can not define (into a single reason or even a set of reasons) why the game has so captured my attention (and held it all these years) but it assuredly has.

For the sake of keeping this all to the point (whatever the hell that is) I am going to not detail all the times in my life where the only place that I found any real solace was in the playing of the game and all the scrapped together desktop computers, laptops and even servers that I used to run the game at different junctures. I do not recall exactly when I began running two instances of the game (so that I could transfer items safely) but I always had to use multiple computers to do so and while on the one hand I had always been 'into' technology it was not until the original Diablo came out that I got really into it and with its following iterations I just kept getting more and more 'into' it because after all I needed to either maintain (and/or repair) the computers to play the game(s) on or as was often the case scrap them together from various parts to make a working machine. During all of this I learned a good bit about hardware mostly through trial and error because unlike today's internet which is flooded with helpful information... the internet of that age was... to put it bluntly: Not all that helpful.

Not having much money never helped my computer scenario and the option of buying new hardware (or paying for repairs) was in no way a feasible thing for me and considering the cost of either in those days... I am kind of thankful I got forced down the 'do-it-yourself' route with it all and learned what I could on my own and with the help of friends that were more savvy than I was. I know that it is hard for folks to wrap their heads around but the level of buggy hardware and software on the consumer market was astounding. Largely it (the buggy unreliable nature of all things computer related) was the product of it all being an emerging technology at the time. Not to mention that what we call 'the internet' and its various protocols and systems were also still very young and were by no means as refined as either are today. Hell, my phone has more computing power and reliability than any computer during that age of things and honestly its a pretty low-end device by today's standards but hopefully you understand the comparison there of how far things have come since that time.

About five or so years into my Diablo II journey I had grown very tired of the buggy operating system(s) that I was using to run the game and somehow I got very fixated on getting the game to work on a Linux based system. Mainly I wanted to do this because (according to someone that I had met while playing the game online) I could run multiple instances of the game at one time which was not something that was possible to do conveniently on the other operating systems available at the time. Given that I had been using a few GUI (graphic user interface) based Linux distributions since they first started appearing for free online... I figured that it would not hurt to try. Whoa did I 'try' (and fail) repeatedly in the process of getting first the operating systems to work and then eventually the game to work and I repeatedly found myself falling back on using the other operating systems that I was trying to get away from just so that I could play the game.

What a sordid time that turned out to be but eventually I got things figured out and was not only able to ditch the other operating systems entirely but the game itself ran smoother, faster and with less crashes than it ever had before and yes eventually I was capable of running two instances of the game on a single machine with relative ease. Of course why run just two instances when the maximum permissible per IP address was four... and furthermore with four characters in my solo, private games perhaps I could finally experience the game at a higher difficulty without having to do it in public games while trying to dodge all the player killers which if you have not figured it out yet... made playing the game in public games an un-enjoyable experience to say the least especially given that their was almost always some bigoted, and often racist rhetoric spewing forth from whoever was doing the killing just to make my hardcore death all that much more depressing.

The way the game works is that with every character in the game the difficulty and rewards are increased by a certain factor and while yeah having four characters in a game sounds like an advantage I was only playing one of them but at the difficulty level of four players. The challenge of it was awesome and playing the game online ensured that I would not grow bored with the game and use mods or character editors to alter the game in my favor. In other words I really wanted to become better at the game and do it by actually playing the game and not taking shortcuts or using cheats or hacks. During this same period is when a third-party trading site started and in every public game folks were hawking the sale of their items or making offers to purchase the items of others. I never had much interest in going that route because hell if I just wanted to gear my characters I could do that with a lot less hassle in single player mode with a character editor which as stated would sort of defeat my purpose of playing to start with. So I stuck to my private games and ignored it in the public games that I did play in.

Okay, I cannot really tell more of this story without including the role that bots played in my online gaming experience especially since they had such a large impact upon the game online itself. The first iteration of bots that I recall were spam bots and then bots that automated tasks within the game and eventually bots that played the game. As a side note, for the last several years their are bots that exist that require no human interaction besides someone pressing 'start' and the bot does everything to level itself from level one to level ninety-nine (the highest character level possible) and along the way it stores items on other characters (often called mules), does crafting and all sorts of other tasks required by a real player to play the game. In other words there is literally zero human input required after the bot is started and while some folks bot for fun the majority do it for profit in either 'real world dollars' or for digital currency.

That is not to say that some bots and the folks who operate them (who are often called botters) are not actually helpful and they do perform useful services like buffing characters in game, or hosting games where the bot clears areas of monsters by killing them so other characters can 'leach' experience points and possibly find items that they otherwise would not... so in short (in my experience) not all bots are bad and not all botters are good and regardless of folks opinions they have been a part of the game online for a really long time now and their is an argument commonly made that the game would have died years ago without them. Which is also something that gets said about that trading forum I mentioned but when it comes down to it its the players of the game that have kept it going and whether folks like it of not there are actual humans making those 'out-of-game' trades and operating those bots and although folks might not agree with how they are playing the game... they are nonetheless playing the game... or in the case of the 'zero input' users they are having the game played for them. I am getting lost in the details here when all I want to do is say they are all a part of the fabric of the online community and unless they are hacking to kill other players (and especially me) I do not give a damn how folks want to play the game or what they do with the items they find in the game.

With all of that said back to the bots and their emergence online and what I wound up doing along my journey of playing the game. The bot games were by far the easiest route to gain experience and whoa did I burn up many long hours running along beside them, leaching experience points and snagging whatever good items I could along the way. For a number of years I would make a character build explicitly for running with the bots that could stay up in the fray of battling monsters to snatch items before the bot could automatically pick them up. In hindsight it is kind of sad and pathetic but I sure had a lot of fun doing it along the way even though I of course got killed many times by player killers in those public games. The route that I wound up taking was to play the game in private games during peak play times and then run along beside the bots during the non-peak play times so as to avoid the player killers.

Doing all that 'running with the bots' stuff always infringed upon my idea of playing the game 'legitly' but since I was not operating the bots I always brushed it off as not that big of a deal especially since it was often the fastest route to gaining both experience and items... or so I thought at the time. What I did not realize for many years is that unless your character is the one killing the monster you are only getting a fraction of the experience points you would have gotten. In other words the better way of gaining experience was by killing the monsters myself and it was taking me four times longer to level the character (by running with the bots) than it would take me just playing the game which eventually lead to me playing more private games and running less with bots and more with actual players who I had met online. As far as actual enjoyment goes it was definitely much more fun playing with other humans even though at that point I pretty much still sucked at playing the game. I had learned to 'survive' the game but actually 'play' it... not so much.

Oh, I tried and tried and tried... and then tried some more but have I mentioned that the game is insanely difficult and the entire thing is designed to kill your character and being a hardcore player (having only one life) the game itself and its complex mechanics can be very unforgiving at even the easiest settings at the lowest possible in-game player count and difficulty level. Not to mention hardcore deaths from technical problems like sluggish hardware, server instability, lag, game client crashes, power outages and basically a number of things that have nothing to do with actual gameplay... and through it all I just kept playing the game and trying to learn how to play it better and eliminate as many technical problems as I could. That last bit came in the form of forcing me to learn my way around Linux systems better and of course all the hardware aspects of whatever machine I was using at the time. There is no larger motivator in my life than playing that game that has caused me to learn what I have about computers and although it might seem odd its just how things panned out. I do believe that those two hobbies will always be inexorably linked together and I guess recent events sort of illuminate that given the lengths that I went through to play the 'remastered' version of the game.

Ah, more days have passed and I have yet to add more to this entry nor have I given anyone online a heads up as to what I have been up to. I have assuredly withdrawn from the world to the point where there can be no excuses for my long silence and all I can say is that yup I have over-indulged myself in the game world and binged out to the point where it is probably unhealthy.

Okay, now months have passed and I have not written anything. I can only describe the last many months as one long slow slide into something akin to madness but lacking all the excitement or fanfare that doing so usually involves. There is no way for me to put into detail what has been going on but I can sort of outline some of it and try not too get too far into the damn weeds on one tangent or another.

Lets see here. I was playing that game for a time by using that 'cloud gaming' platform which worked okay for the most part (I guess) as long as there were not any clouds to interfere with the cellular data connection... and as long as I was okay with the minor delay in everything that I did in the game. The in-game chat being quite broken to start with made communicating with others a tedious affair and often more frustrating than it was actually worth but hey I had met some decent folks on there and I did my best to be social even though most of the time the chat simply would not work or I would have to copy and paste things from a text editor and into the game chat because typing in the buggy chat window often resulted in extra letters, spaces and numbers... as well as a horrible delay in everything typed. The worst part had to be that I would often tediously spell things out just for no one in the game to see it because like I said the chat feature is horribly broken and often prevents players from seeing what other players have written. Yeah sure I could have worked around this by using some external chat platform which is something that would take my focus outside of the game and of course eat up more of my precious bandwidth... but maybe a better route is the item that I bought (the game) working as it was supposed to.

As I have stated many times before I love the social interaction and the bulk of my social interaction each year occurs during the times that I am gaming so you could maybe imagine how frustrating it all was. With that in mind I decided to go ahead and order a better graphics card and after lots of shopping around and doing some research I landed on a graphics card well above what is required for the game but still within my meager budget as long as I was willing to skimp on some groceries for myself. Long story short the graphics card eventually arrived and I was pretty happy with the results once I got it installed and configured. Technically it is the first video card that I have ever owned that is worth a damn in the first place so you could imagine what a difference it made to me and how noticeable that difference was performance wise. Anyway, I tested it out on a windows system and yup it ran the game. Now there are assuredly things I will compromise on in life but using the computer virus (oops I mean 'operating system') known as windows is not one of them. Given my research the game supposedly ran fine on several Linux distributions so I did not see that as being a problem for me given that I have such a long history of gaming on such systems and am pretty good at figuring things out when a game will not run on such a system... but gods damn it I was wrong about that one this time around!

This is where things went from bad to worse because the same time I got the new graphics card the game company announced that the online ladder would be launching 'soon' and since I only really play the ladders this was quite exciting. So I dove into getting the game running on Linux and abandoned the cloud gaming (which was just making me neurotic anyway) and flat out refused to play the game on windows after doing it a few times and enduring the feeling the entire time that I was playing that my operating system was probably doing all kinds of stuff that I would never want a frigging operating system doing... like spying on me or sending off 'telemetry' or whatever the fuck else that virus masquerading as an operating system does without user consent.

I knew that if I was to play the ladder and continue the online friendships that had emerged during my time of cloud gaming that I would have to get it working on Linux. To be quite blunt here I felt physically ill using windows and like a total hypocrite given my long stance against using it and buckling on that stance for a game barely worth playing to start with just is 'not in the cards' so to speak. To make matters worse the game itself is closed source and ran by a company not known for being all that ethical (nor even decent) and one that I have heavily criticized both online and offline so the very notion of running their black box software inside a black box operating system would require a level of trust on my part that I do not possess and can never bullshit myself into having. Sorry not sorry but I dislike the idea of some shady developers having a backdoor into my system under the guise of 'anti-cheat' software which is constantly scanning the system, recording keystrokes, altering files and again doing who knows what without my explicit user consent. At least on a Linux system I can mitigate some (if not all of that) and breath a little easier that my privacy is not being absolutely destroyed just so that I can have some entertainment and a social life.

Anyway, I dove into getting the game running and it did not take all that long for me to get it up and running on Linux... but although the game ran, I had a mouse pointer in it, I could hear the sound and everything seemed to be working the screen would remain black. Heck I could even click the buttons that I could not see and enter into games but no matter what I did I could not get rid of the black screen. At this point I have tried I think six or seven different Linux distributions (some of them multiple times) as well as every method of running windows games on such systems and all with the same resulting black screen. I even ran it in a windows virtual machine and got the same results so of course I had to figure out what was going on there. The deeper that I dug the more that I realized that maybe I was just shit out of luck because pretty much everyone with that particular graphics card architecture had encountered the same black screen and the buggy game code causes a fault in the graphics driver that would have to be patched by the manufacturer (who has discontinued support for that line of graphics cards) and lets face it game companies like that are not interested in fixing things that cause bugs in platforms they are not designed to play on. Believe me when I say that I tried everything to get it working and anything that might make it work (like writing my own driver code) is way outside my realm of skills.

At first only days went by and then it was weeks and I had spent every waking moment that I had available trying to resolve the issue to no avail. I am sure that most folks cannot imagine it but spending eighteen hours a day troubleshooting a game (without access to its code nor the graphics card driver's code) is a frigging nightmare all its own but I persisted in patiently and methodically doing anything that I could to shine some light on what the heck was going on and eliminate every possibility that I could along the way. Which meant lots of very granular configuring of systems, reading lots of debugging and error logs, updating of firmware and basically making a massive mental checklist of things that were not the problem. Along the way I did manage to brick a few distro installations but I did not brick any hardware so I took that as a win. The need to keep a decent log of what I was doing and the steps that I was trying became obvious early on and between those text files and the terminal I probably typed out a large book worth of frigging words. I wound up having to learn a heck of a lot of new stuff along the way and gained a much larger understanding of things going on 'under the hood' than I had ever had before... but in the end I never resolved the problem of the black screen.

Where it all lead me though was to re-examine why I wanted to play the game in the first place. The game's release effectively turned what had become a ghost town of the original game into a graveyard and like I said many months ago all my friends on there were switching to the new game so I felt quite compelled to do the same especially given that is where the bulk of my social interactions occur each year. Looking back over the last many months it has been a horrible experience and at the end of it I have slacked off on every other aspect of my life, spent entirely too much money on the endeavor and ultimately could of (and probably should have) spent my time on more fulfilling activities. Even now I am barely beginning to regain some sort of cognitive cohesion and realizing the depth of how much I have let my actual life go to the wayside in an effort to maintain that tiny sliver of a social life. What a messed up journey it has been to get to this point but of course I have found some caveats along the way and also had some realizations that might (falsely justify to myself) all the aforementioned efforts.

Lets rewind here to when the game first launched and I decided to express my opinions about it in the official forums where of course my opinions were not just unpopular but I got a nice fat dose of bullying for them. Bullying not from just some of the community members but also from the moderators as well. Yay for bullies that are beyond arm's reach! We can all agree (well maybe not 'all agree') they are so tough when someone cannot physically beat the bully out of them like they deserve but I will not get into bullying the bullies here because yeah that kind of terrifies everyone and I know that folks who fear bullies fear people that bully the bullies even more so I digress.

Anyway, it made me take a closer look at things in regards to the forum and ultimately decide that it was in no way shape or form worth my time so I just filed bug reports and left it at that. There are plenty of toxic cultures on the internet and unfortunately there really is not a 'good' way to interact with them so why bother. What it did illuminate to me was that the things written on there by users could be altered by moderators and also completely censored to boot. Lets just say I found that quite disturbing especially coupled with how the in-game chat censored certain words and changed them to random characters on the screen, even some rather innocuous words that have nothing to do with profanity. To say that it all rubbed me the wrong way does not do it any justice... it got my hackles up.

Alas though I set all that aside because after all I had met some nice folks and wanted to continue the fellowship that I enjoyed with them and maybe the buggy game would become less buggy over time. Basically I figured they would sort it out eventually and regardless of cloud gaming lag, actual server lag, the game randomly crashing, in game censorship, toxic community 'leadership', shitty developers, close sourced software, in game spam bot advertisements and actual advertisements every damn time I had to use their shitty proprietary launcher to start the game... it was all worth it... right... fucking hardly!

In all actuality it was not worth it at all besides it leading me back around to this fundamental appreciation that I have for the open source community, for un-censorable interactions and at the very heart of it my own inability to back down on my stance in regards to such things. It also absolutely destroyed any hope that I (perhaps foolishly) held onto that the company would ever produce another game in that particular franchise worth playing and as a whole they are pretty much the epitome of an exploitative game company out to make a quick buck and to hell with how that might impact folks. Any idea that I had before that I could maybe get another twenty years of gaming via this new game are dead in the proverbial water at this point. Hell, it was all so effective of a disappointment I do not even want to play the original game anymore and for the folks that know me they know that is really saying something! It can also be said that 'it is just a game' but I am not all that into undermining my experiences in such a degrading, demeaning and flippant way by agreeing with that sentiment.

Looking back on things I should have stuck with my initial impressions of the game and avoided it from the very start but once again that social aspect was just too damn appealing and remained that way right up to the point where I realized I would have to either compromise and play it on windows or invest even more money in yet another graphics card. The idea of waiting around for either the game developers or hardware manufacturer to patch whatever is broken is of course an option but both seem highly unlikely. It is also already a bit too late considering the unstoppable force of my desire to play the game and have social interactions has already collided with the immovable object of my stance against being censored and all things closed source and there just is no returning from that for me... and nor should there be. In other words I am so over it all at this point that all I can do is question my rationale of trying it all in the first place and how the hell do I recover myself from the fucked up mess of a human that I have become in the process.

What a head trip it has been to have something I love so much be utterly obliterated by the realities of the scenario but it made me ask an important question and that was: If the original game was released today instead of twenty odd years ago before I had headed down the open source path... would I be interested in it at all considering its closed source nature. Just that one aspect is what I have been looking at and all the other factors aside (the shady gaming company, the censorship, the buggy game code, etcetera) would I be interested in the game? In all honesty the answer would these days be a flat no. But all of that was not the case because it all 'hooked into' twenty years of playing the game and all the emotions, and memories spanning two decades of my life. Obviously all that 'its the same experience as the original game' stuff was just a very effective marketing campaign and my naive hope blinded me to the reality of that fact or at least got me to ignore it long enough to find out for myself and whoa I sure found out in a way that I will not forget it!

So where do I go from here now that my main avenue of social interaction each year is gone and perhaps more significantly what will I do with the time each year that I used to spend on having said social interactions. Well, after much thought I think I am going to part with that version of social interaction and instead of replacing it with another game just live without it altogether. Considering the role it played in my mental well-being I am sure that having no such social interactions will have some kind of effect but more than likely I can compartmentalize it in such a way that it doesn't lead me to feeling isolated and alienated nor seeking out less fulfilling interactions as a compromise. One way or another it will sure free up a good bit of time each year and perhaps I will even be 'happier' for it whatever the heck that means. Don't get me wrong here because I think it is a horrible idea to close the last window of a social life that I have but the alternative at this point is not at all appealing unless what I am looking for is a psychotic break or an episode of mentally crippling depression.

Basically I rode the neurotic-inducing train ride of that new game to the end of the line (okay perhaps it was a little further than where the end of the line should be) and like any good passenger its time to simply depart and leave the train behind. After all instead of improving my life it has done the opposite and I have neglected so much other stuff along the way that its downright disturbing that I allowed it to happen in the first place. At this point I should probably make apologies to the folks that read this stuff over my long silence and just do my best to get back on track each day but I am unsure about my ability to follow through with all that and cannot (and will not) really make any assurances in that regard. Hell, I won't even make those assurances to myself at this juncture so there you have it.

An old image because I have not taken any pictures in months!

Thanks for reading!

That Is All For Now!

Cheers! & Hive On!