2023-01-19:

Fri:
Got the new onedrive app in so most of the day was spent poking at that.
Found a few things, most of the fixes were in the admin panel. You know, that the majority of the users of the product won't see. Hey let's fix your awful scrolling algorithm or the speed at which typing happens (it's unusable on our new products) maybe?
Snowed. Yuck. got through that go to the store. Saw my parents.
Came home, put stuff away.
Checked sites, then xbox.

Sat:
Got up and started the somewhat yucky day.
First one went fine, didn't take as long as I feared. Had an SSD which helped, and he gave me the old one. I won't do anything to it rigth away, I have some refurb systems already in "inventory" so I need to get rid of them first. Hasn't been much call for them lately.
Of course we were carrying out the parts and so I forgot my case. Didn't realize it until I was getting on the expressway.
So, I asked myself, do I get off, having just called the next person I would be an hour early and thus, be late there, or just call him to make sure he would be around later once I arrived at my destination? I chose to call and he was. Sigh.
So I did the second one. Nothing really wrong, but it was a win7 machine in the beginning so it's getting a bit old. An SSD would probably pep it up.
Drove back to the first place and got the case, and went home. So I didn't save myself any driving, that's for sure. As I had somehow forgotten to plug the car in the night before, I got down to almost half capacity. Never been that low before. Stupid winter, does blowing hot air really take that much more power than moving a hunk of steel down the road at 55 miles per hour? If so why?

Then sites, mining in warframe so I can get gems so I can increase my standing with that faction, videos, and my parents over. I got enough gems, now I just need to do missions to get debt bonds, because it's always something in that game.
Xbox with the others.

Sun:
Started and finished the Warframe stuff. As it was what I did most and I have thoughts, you will now hear those thoughts. If you hear your own thoughts as you read, as it turns out studies are beginning to show not everyone does. Like not everyone can visualize. Brains. Very odd. What was I saying? Oh right, warframe. Skip ahead if uninterested.

WARFRAME SECTION BEGINS ----------

Warframe, if I had to describe it, is a fast paced, looter shooter, with deep customization mechanics and a crafting system. You sit down to play warframe, and that's the experience you will achieve. It's awful single player, but an okay multiplayer experience. These missions are single player, so already it's strike one. I spent the last months carefully crafting my warframe loadout. Getting guns I really liked, abilities I liked, and then found the super weapon I so very, very much want to have by my side in every single mission from this point on I need no other weapon wait is that a bow with infinite energy arrows that explode somehow? Okay I'll take that but... where was I? I was ready. I was going to slaughter these missions and they would not know what hit them. I knew starting the mission locked you in and you couldn't do anything else until you completed it, so I sat down to do just that. Get it done and back to normal so we could all do the new content together. I was ready.

And what they did was take everything about warframe and chuck it right out the window. Probably because they knew I would do just what I did, and prepare (because I am a wizard), but it's still a betrayal in a way.

Now Sean liked the fact they mixed up the formula, so to speak. But here's the thing- no, I'm getting ahead of myself.

So what it turned into was the opposite of what Warframe the game is presented as- a slow placed, stealth based, no waframe in sight until the very end, game. Now I played another stealth game (or tried to) that was free on Gold. I hated it. I played it once, discovered I hated it, and never played it again. So imagine my surprise when this opened not with me (i.e my warframe and her amazing weapons) doing a mission, but with a faceless minion you spend mission after mission mowing down like grass doing a mission. What? How is this guy suddenly a super soldier? (Simple; the addition of plot armor) So I got past that, and then did a mission as a different guy, who uses, uh.... swords. And a boomerang thing, I mean it's a disk but it comes back so what else am I supposed to call it. Wait, did they steal that from Tron? All the various projectile weapons in the universe from guns that shoot raw electricity, acid, yeast spores, beams, rockets, bullets, heck there's a gun you can deploy a radar from and use to shoot through walls! But no, this guy picks as his standard two swords. Sure. That's what I would go with. I mean at least pick a bow if you're going to go with something old fashioned. (Did I mention the bow, the one good thing about the mission? It's becoming my favorite weapon, even beyond my electricity gun. Favorite main weapon I mean, my staff is still the best weapon.)

So we get past that and finally back to my character. And they immediately take all my powers, abilities, weapons, and warframes away. They're gone, never existed. Don't know where you got that idea. They even took my ship decorations away, which was just, huh? Why? Did I... pack them up for some reason? A bit od tiding on the run? Such a mental disconnect. Anyway, now I get to do missions as a powerless human. Is this... Warframe?

And don't get me started on all the stuff that's just... there. Never answered. Here's a short list of what I recall;

I get stabbed clean though the chest and tossed into a portal. Yet there I am back in the fight in the very next scene. How did I get back? How did I live? Was I helped by beings on the other side of the portal? How long was I laid up? Don't ask, because the game isn't going to tell you. At least Dragon Ball Z has a magical bean they show the characters eating.
What's the lotus now? Some sort of energy being? How? Why? How did I get her back there, (to my space ship, how did I find it again) did I carry her? How? How does she get more corporeal by feeding her... crystals? How does she fly around and shoot energy blasts after you do? How did the ugly guy eat the crystal? How did she take the crystal energy back by kissing him? Who knows!
And now we're into parallel realities and time travel junk? Why? How did it happen? Is one reality leaking into another? You have to "choose" between your different "selves" why can't both exist, as they're sitting and talking to each other. Who knows!
Why are so many antagonists the borg? We did the borg, many years ago. Maybe have a guy that actually inspires people to follow him with promises of, oh I don't know "draining the swamp" or some crap to pick an example out of the air. Not just mind controlling them with a helmet. Then they (the boss man) could be turned on when it comes time for the sudden but inevitable betrayal. But no, let's just do the borg again. They are now all against you not for their own reasons, but for his reasons, which is somehow different. Or is it? And I still really didn't see the different factions working together like the borg would, huh was I not paying attention enough or was that just not done? That would have drove the point home that former enemies were now working as one.
Why did he want to blow up the sun again? For love? Is he just mad?
Why did the helmet not turn me into a borg when I put it on? I'm just a human at that point.
Why did I bother putting the helmet on when the guards (That were floating around. How? Don't ask!) that saw me just exploded my head anyway because they could somehow tell I wasn't a borg? It was pointlessly dangerous.
Why is it a stealth mission, but if I can get past everyone by just running past them and tanking the hits, to hide and regenerate health later, do I have to still kill them all to proceed to another area? I got past them already, just let me walk through the door.

And I still haven't gotten to the complaint of having to do the same things over and over again. Oh, you opened a door by hitting some energy crystals or whatever in sequence? Sure, that's how doors work. Well, to get into the next room you have to hit 2 MORE energy crystals than last time. It's called "greater security" look it up (I guess). And guess what? To get into this room you need to hit nine energy crystals in sequence. Don't mess it up, or you'll have to start again. You only get a few seconds to get past the hoards of guards and hit the thing. Good luck. Over and over. Half the time I was like, didn't I do this exact thing already? Why must I do it again and again, I have shown mastery of the mechanic let's do something else.

And the bosses were the worst. They all regenerated health. So the battle went like this: I damage them. They go into health regen mode and I can't do a thing about it. (because again I have no powers, and an unmodded bow of all things to work with as my main weapon) So I regen my health too. What else am I going to do while it's just standing there, unable to be damaged for reasons? The battle starts over basically from scratch because we're now both close to full again. I damage them. They regen health. I take the opportunity to regen health. The battle starts over. I damage them... you see where I'm going with this? They took way too long because it was just however much I could knock them down past what they could recover each time. Which wasn't much per time. They weren't exciting battles won by the skin of the teeth they were a slog, because neither side could kill the other and we just went back and forth a dozen times.
Oh, and the developers sort of knew this? You couldn't "die" if you got knocked to zero health during a mission you just went back to the last checkpoint. Which I mean is somewhat standard video game logic so I don't have a problem with that as such, it's just a little funny to see warframe needing to do it. But you don't have anyone to get you up, and they can't use Boarderlands mechanics (but they can steal the borg sooooooooo why not steal something similar if you're just going to set us back 20 feet have some way of recovering) so that's really all they could do. There were a lot of checkpoints. How do I know? I think you know.

And so that's why those missions were so painful. I knew going in doing it solo would be a real pain, but I had no idea it would be that bad. Warframe people, please, please stop making single player missions. They're not fun, they're not Warframe, stick to the fast paced, looting and shooting and crafting and modding that you at least do fairly well. But thank you, for the bow. That thing is far, far better than it has any right to be and it's replaced my electric gun for the moment. It's just too good!

WARFRAME SECTION ENDS ----------

Made calls. Not working tomorrow but the guy down the street needs help with something web related, because I'm a babysitter and not a troubleshooting specialist. Ellen didn't want Wednesday (but I do, if you know what I mean) to install her cable box, something that is really made as brain dead simple as possible because the general public has to do it. She also wanted me to install a pull chain in a closet and repair weather stripping on her door? I told her I'm not a handyman that's not what I do. Can you even imagine if I was doing something like that and broke one of the many valuables she has scattered about her house? No thank you.

Mon:
Sunny! Neat. Figured I would mess with the snow blower, see how it handles with the small amount of snow we have before I have to try it in the dead of night in a blizzard. Worked out okay.
Wrote up that whole dissertation on warframe up there.
Sites and lunch.
Made tasty soup!
More pony folder, I think I need to run my duplicate finder on it.
Didn't finish it. So many pony pictures... If I felt shame I would be embarrassed about it, but eh.
Did some reading, some comics, a bit of warframe to look for more corrupted mods.
Had some yummy soup.
Got ready for tomorrow. No calls today.
And finally finished the map in Warframe with the others. Ha, done!

Tues:
Raining? Odd. It was 31 so it should have been snow. Hope it warms up and doesn't start getting an ice coating on everything.
Nope, looks like only melting happened, so that's good.
Not much excitement at work. Had an extra meeting. The normal Joe meeting and then another Joe meeting about a new feature that's coming about plug ins and cloning for versalinks.
Otherwise nothing new.

Went to after work job. He's got issues, and I have to wonder if they're even of his own making this time. He's got some crazy $900 trash bill he can't explain, so that's fun. And when I went to sign him into his MVP account he of course doesn't know the password so I try to reset it. Tells me there is no account with that email. Then why did you send me the code, pray tell? So I go to sign him up. But it tells me there's already an account under that name. Oh really? So which is it, MVP?
So I printed the bill out for the trash thing, and he's got a bunch of places to call. Good luck.
Back here, yummy soup, checked sites. No calls, got ready for tomorrow.

Wed:
Spent much of the day trying to reproduce a bug to get screenshots. I am ashamed to say I have failed to do so. I'm certain I saw what I wrote up, but I can't come up with any combination of factors that, once upgraded, produce that state again. Frustrating.
What isn't frustrating is my having an "ah ha" moment for this pony game people want me to run, because I came up with series 1 content and the first bunch of episodes. Oh no details apart from a paragraph or two of "this is what I want to happen" but it's coming together. Got the character sheet from Sean, and it's, uh, it's a mess? Very odd, I hope the book is a bit better???
Checked sites, ate dinner. The usual. Did some warframe on my own as I need to get "debt bonds" and Sean won't want to do that, he's max rank in that faction.

Thurs:
Got some busywork to do, at least in my opinion. Basically Don was like, hey you know all that stuff you've tested time and again on D4.0 and D5.6 and D7.6 and D7.7 yeah we want you to do all that stuff again but on the little machine. Uh, what? Now luckily some of it I had already done on that device, so there. But others I have not. So I spent some time getting the device ready. There's a weekly email that goes out about this machine specifically because there's so many problems with it, detailing all the workarounds you have to use. It's going to be launched in like a few months! Yikes. Anyway, I knew the one machine had a fault, and the directions for fixing the fault were "in the attachment." What attachment, my self asked. There is none. So I emailed the lady and said could I please have the attachment I needed to know how to fix the fault. She sent me the attachment. I followed the directions. Whoops, they're totally wrong. I emailed back- now can I have the actual procedure? So I had to wait for that. Finally I got the real, honest, actual, working directions and cleared the fault. Nice. Upgraded the machines, started the test. Huh, now the other device has the fault. Sigh. I didn't clear it yet, the fault relates to printing and I wasn't doing any, but I'll have to do the same thing to that one tomorrow.
Got through all but one of the tests, we'll be getting some new stuff in tomorrow so we'll be pretty busy the next week. Because of course it all comes it at once.

Had the usual meetings as well, don't forget that.

Otherwise worked on the adventure a little bit, and got a strange haul. Mostly breakfast stuff. Some salad, some yogurt, but no sandwiches just breakfast ones. Weird. I'll keep some and give the rest to my parents I guess.

Came back here, checked sites, Sean wasn't doing his usual stuff today so we're doing xbox.

Let's see, the future. Busy tomorrow like I said. Some onedrive stuff in my case, some versalink stuff for Christina. Finishing the D7.7 on the tiny machine, so pointless. Shopping, seeing my parents, and we're back to the academy, the Friday game is back on this week. Time to save the town!

Saturday I'm going to Sean's for some Terminator movie action, he's been itching for some time to watch the first couple movies again. Otherwise no big plans.

So it's half over, the first month of the year. Rained today, so all the snow is gone. Not complaining! Let's hope it stays that way.

See you next week.