August and Promptapalooza Arrives

8/1/2020, 9:50:41 AM

The Blaugust Promptapalooza is starting, and I’m in it! I’ll be perfectly honest: I’ve been so completely out of it lately that I’m still not completely sure I understand the exact details of what I’m supposed to do. I think I’m going to be writing a post about a super secret topic on August 28th. As of this writing, I have no idea what to say about the super secret topic, so that should be fun.

I think in Promptapalooza we can also write additional posts about the other super secret topics? Or make up our own super secret topics? Or write every day? Or not? Because I don’t think anyone is scoring this? I’m getting the sense that everyone is going to end up doing something different. I suppose, since it’s my blog, I can do whatever I want, but perhaps I’ll get kicked out of Blogger Society if I mess this up. I’m not feeling particularly confident in my writing at present so that might actually be a relief.

Today (or was it yesterday?) the subject is/was fandom, based on Belghast’s initial post. I have nothing to say about that, except, based on the behaviors (good, bad, or indifferent) I observe of most people in fandom, I would be embarrassed to self-identify as a member of any fandom. Just call fandom what it is: A cult. A religion. Stans are indistinguishable from Scientologists or Branch Davidians. I’m happy to report that it’s possible and even desirable to like things without the need to pledge one’s life and immortal soul to it. You too can retain your independence of thought, free from the influence of any mind-controlling prophets selling indulgences or, as they call it now, hawking merch.

Anyway, speaking of societal pressure, I stopped talking about Assassin’s Creed because corporate malcontents at Ubisoft poisoned the well for me. In brief, I finished Odyssey, which completes my playthrough of every Assassin’s Creed game in my backlog. I’d like to extend my thanks to Ubisoft for rendering all of that content I painstakingly recorded over several months completely useless, and also for taking those initial creative game and story concepts and flushing them down the toilet over the course of a decade.

Playing the Assassin’s Creed franchise truly is a merry trip through the death of all creativity in the AAA games industry. I feel like I was ripped off by Odyssey and I only paid $15 for it. It was a 64-hour tedious chore to play what could have been a fun 15 hour game. I’ll be taking a hard pass on Valhalla and every other future Ubisoft game until they figure out how to put some meaningful content in their bland generic game engines.

So now I need to find something else to do. I don’t have any games on my list to play in the immediate future, and I can’t think of any games I’m looking forward to being released in the near future, so I’ll be stumbling around trying to find something constructive and/or creative to fill my time for a while.

I also kind of need a job. Having to need a job at the exact time that the economy is collapsing harder than it did in The Great Depression is not a good feeling. There is also the minor issue that back pain prevents me from sitting in a normal office chair doing computer work for 8 hours a day, rendering my entire skill set that I’ve cultivated for decades entirely useless. Tiny mid-life issues. Sigh.