Howdy internet friend and welcome back to this weekly update post. I want to start by writing that Black Lives Matter! If you want to skip to the bottom and check out the dog pictures, click here. This last week was rough with things happening in the news. I think instead of writing about that, I'm going to write about something else instead. Mostly video games, so if you are looking for a serious political discussion, this is not the place you are going to find it.
Last week I had a birthday and I treated myself to this collection of three Grand Theft Auto games on the Nintend Switch. I've already played GTA 3 so I started with Vice City. It's been fun but I am struggling to get into it. I subsequently noticed that there is less than week left on the current season of Fortnite and I bought a Battlepass. If you aren't a player of the game, what that means is that you have access to extra rewards by playing the game. Some of them include the virtual currency (known as V-Bucks) and with enough of those, you can buy the next Battlepass. I am only level 41 and I am like two hundred V-Bucks away from being able to afford the next pass. I've been grinding over the weekend trying to make sure that I can get there, and it's been fun because my son is playing with me and he is AWESOME!
I played one match by myself without building (Epic Games recently added the option to play with or without building) and although I managed to finish in the top ten, I took the most cautious route possible. There are many different ways to play, but one of my favorite is to play either duos (you and one other person) or trios (three people) and it's a battle-royale affair. Once a certain number of people out of the original 100 are killed, you are forced by a storm that causes damage into smaller and smaller areas. By the end of the game the area is really small and you are going against everyone who has survived thus far. As I get older I lose some of the ability to find where the enemies are coming from. It probably goes without saying, but this is devastating and more often than not, I am dead before I can figure out where the bullets are coming from. To be clear, even when I was in my teens and twenties I was not good at figuring out where enemies were coming from. I'm saying that this has only gotten worse as I get older! Playing with others, I can ask them where the enemies are coming from or (if I am lucky) point out where I see the enemies so my teammate(s) can engage.
Shifting gears slightly, yesterday I had the chance to hang out over Discord with a good friend of mine and one of his best friends. I was glad for the opportunity to hang out with other adults. We spent a decent chunk of time all trying to find a game to play together. Before the pandemic I might have been annoyed, but my new attitude of (I think the most charitable way to put it is) being less concerned, I wasn't really bothered. We were trying to play Stranded Deep but appearantly you can only have two players together at once. We tried to play Borderlands 2 but it wasn't working on my Macbook Pro.
Whether we were able to play very much together or not, it was still fun to hang out with a friend. Today my wife and I are going to go to a car dealership and see if we can find something that I can drive. Having only one car is a real pain in the neck, but I don't know if the dealership is going to have anything with a manual transmission. She found one car that they listed as having a manual transmission, but I will report back next week about what happens there.
Shifting gears once again, I got my hands on a book about hardware hacking and I have a few others coming my way. Some of them I won't be sharing publicly, but I am going to be getting my hands dirty with some hardware stuff later and I do plan on writing about that on this blog. I've been interested in hardware off and on for the last few years and I am finally going to start diving in!
Turning to something outside tech, we had some big windstorms over the weekend and it looks like some of our roof did not survive. I will be reaching out to the home insurance company this week and see if they can help us out or if we are going to be paying for it out of pocket. Fingers crossed! Our dogs haven't been to happy about the wind either, they only got to play fetch today after like two days of missing out. When the wind wips so hard it hurts your face - that's where I draw the line! While it is nice that the wind keeps the temps down, there is a limit to how much sand I want in my face and the threshold is very low.
That's all I have to report this week, internet friend. Thanks for taking the time to read this. I hope you enjoy this picture of my dogs, that you have a nice day, and a most excellent week. Cheers!