Daily Wordcount Project · 1:14pm Feb 19th, 2016
As a few of you might have gathered from my relative dearth of stories and my numerous 'I Am So Behind and A Human Failure' blogposts, I've had an on-and-off problem with productivity since forever. This week has been particularly bad, because a game got its hooks into me and didn't let go until I'd put in a decent 30 hours in 3 days. Instead of using my multiple days off this week in anything resembling a productive manner, or even doing things that can help me be productive like housework, grooming, basic human interaction, I've been huddled away in my Dork Cave shooting Rome: Total War cosplayers in post-apocalyptic nevada.
I've changed my habits before to improve my output, and it's time to do it again. This time, it's simple:
At 8pm GMT every day, or before, I'm going to post my rough wordcount for the day on FIMfiction. If I'm lucky, this will remind/motivate me to write more, because hey, I'm going to be putting up a blogpost anyway. At the very least, it will give me an accurate record of how much I'm writing every day, and on what.
Today, I have written two paragraphs of a Pipsqueak's Day Off sequel. Now, I'm getting some sleep.
Was it XCOM 2? That's what got me.
Are you saying playing video games isn't productive?
If you think it'll help, I will cheerfully take up the burden of being one of the silent, faceless mass providing implied judgment and hence accountability. Alternatively, feel free to hit me on IM at some point so we can goad each other into writing. I should be getting back into the habit myself.
Oh, New Vegas... yeah, it can do that.
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You and me both, man.
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He's referring to New Vegas -- Roman cosplayers in Nevada -- but I'm having to throw myself on the XCom pyre here too.
Not just because the game was fun. I beat it last night and now I won't have to touch it again for a long while.
No, because it was so broken thatI got a perverse amount of joy attempting to fix it.
I think I spent about a 3:1 ratio playing the game to working out how to fix it, and even then my little duct-taped together engine came crumbling apart over the finish line, audio still desynched from video, game still crashing on certain loads, user profile still corrupting itself whenever possible... but having been beaten.
Within a folder within a folder of the game is an executable simply called "Start Debugging". Not only can you use it to get the game to keep its shit together over certain gamebreaking bugs, but when it happens you get little popups sometimes of the QA personal personnel notes to the developers telling them to fix their shit in a red overlay.
... I didn't write as much this week as I should have.
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Oh, is that stuff a problem with the game itself? I thought something was wrong with my computer to make the game crash so much. I might have beaten it by now too if I hadn't had about half a dozen or more crashes and counting.
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art.penny-arcade.com/photos/i-2LSPZNw/0/1050x10000/i-2LSPZNw-1050x10000.jpg
And the accompanying blog post about it
No, you're not the only one, and it's most likely not (just?) your machine. XCom 2 was shipped out the door in an incredibly dodgy state, and looking at the Steam discussion boards to see just how broken and bad it is. It's turned some proper gaming rigs into utter toasters from mere proximity, while some utter toasters play it comparitably flawlessly. The game's odds of working are about the same as your soldier's odds of making that damn shot.
K night.