Small Town Rumors, Operating Systems, Word Processing, and Sickness.

(This post is mostly going to be gripes and just a general update on how I've been and how my writing progress has been going lately, and what might be affecting it.)

So, how about that winter weather? To think that spring is so close and the weather is this awful makes me hate winter as a season. Sure, the holidays are great and all, but once those run out, it's back to the grind against the wheel of life.

Winter, as far as I've understood it, has just as much wonderful themes as it does awful ones. The season of rest and togetherness, the season where the most romantic holidays are held, and one of the few times where the world seems to calm down. And yet, at the same time, it's also the season best associated with death, misfortune, and misery.

I think there's more to that phrase, "Now is the winter of your discontent" than just sounding cool. More after the break.

On the weekend of Valentine's Day, I spent most of my free time at the house of an old friend of mine. It was honestly a pretty pleasant time. While not a whole lot was done, aside from watching youtube videos on the smart TV, playing some video games, and just generally enjoying each other's company, the reward for my time spent was a new hand-me-down game from my friend's collection.

A little life-sim called Animal Crossing: Wild World.

I will admit, I am a retro gamer in many regards, if only because playing video games retrograde is often much cheaper than buying them new. Unless of course the game is rare, in which case it may end up being even harder.

Whatever the case, Animal Crossing is a series I never knew much about beyond it's high concept. For those of you who didn't gain an interest in it because of the Villager in Super Smash Bros. 4, it's basically a Life Simulation game in a similar vein to The Sims. Unlike the Sims, however, you only control one character, which is you, a new villager moving away from home to a village whose name you decide at the New Game. As the name implies, the town is filled with Animals, the first of whom you meet include an old codger named Tortimer, the post office manager Pelly, and the real estate/general store mogul Tom Nook.

The lattermost of these three characters gives you the key to your new home, and sets you up with a ludicrously high mortgage rate, and has you do a few menial tasks for you before leaving your to your own devices.

From there, it's a complete sandbox. There are a few core objectives in the game, most of them completion-related, but beyond that, you can do whatever you please. It's like Real Life, with almost no consequence other than shame for doing nothing at all. It's a game about little victories and small-town pleasures. Your villagers each come from various personality pools, ask favors of you in return for nice things, and you can often hold short conversations with them. They even send you letters on occasion for that extra bit of heartwarming.

It's very much a casual game, and many like to call it one of the origins behind Social Games as a whole, and I can see why. It has a pleasant dopamine rush that makes it nice to play each day. It's kinda like having a fish tank or a tamagotchi: The only bad time you can have is when you get bored and watch everything die around you.

All in all, I think I'm a fan, but I'm not fully engrossed in it. It's very much a "Play in short bursts when you've got literally nothing productive to do with your day" kind of game for me.

***

You know, computers are amazing things when they work. But like everything else, technology is always growing, and if my gaming history is anything to go by, I am behind the curve when it comes to personal computing.

This is evidenced by the fact I am using Windows XP, and recently, my go-to Internet browser, Firefox suddenly stopped functioning normally.

I have tried pretty much everything, and now, I've been stuck using Opera. Opera is doing the job pretty well, but on certain sites (including this one), it likes to go blank and I have to remember my place. It's also been affecting my ability to write using GDocs because of the fact that, because either due to the speed of my typing or the speed of my computer (which is incredibly slow by most modern standards), it tends to miss some of my keystrokes, thus forcing me to go back and do it again just to be sure. It's not a huge damper, but it's a problem that is making the desire to write go down a little.

For this reason, I've been considering alternatives like getting a Linux-based operating system on this machine to replace the honestly quite unsafe XP, but because I have a pathological fear of fucking my computer up beyond repair and losing a lot of precious files and passwords and what-have you, I've held off.

I have, however, considered alternative means of word processing so that I have options in case I have to leave home for a while and want to have something besides games and daytime TV to keep my occupied.

To that end, I've considered getting an AlphaSmart typewriter.

For those who don't know, AlphaSmart was a line of digital typewriters based on the PalmOS, designed to save documents as text files that you could then transfer to your PC and pick up whenever. The most popular models, as far as peer reviews go, are the AlphaSmart 3000 and the AlphaSmart Neo, which, based on their availability, must be the Dreamcasts of typewriters; something so revolutionary and amazing that it burned out way too quickly and now is kept alive purely through people circulating them across the internet.

Going off what the reviews say, it's a great thing for people who want to have a no-distractions word processor. Nothing to keep them from writing, and nothing to worry about but the craft. I've heard that many people have even used it for NaNoWriMos!

The reason I want an AlphaSmart in particular is because it's probably the only device of its kind that would be useful for me.

As someone who's always in need of writing shit down, but often doesn't because of how laborious making my own writing legible is with my cerebral palsy, having something that I could record every thought and story onto as fast as I can type it, without having to worry about other programs or applications spiriting me away is great. That, and I can attest to their usefulness, as I had a friend in High School who had the AlphaSmart Neo and used it to take notes (and also bad Inuyasha Fanfiction). So yeah, something that convenient to replace my journal would be super nice.

As for the last thing in this blogpost, I have also recently caught my second cold this season. While it is in no way as bad as the first, it's still a pain, and there were times when I wasn't quite feeling it. It has, however, mostly passed at the time of this writing.

To close out, on things actually related to horsewords, I actually hit a minor snag in writing this chapter thus far, as I accidentally forgot a scene I was going to write, and had to spend a few days thinking how to do it before I could get to the meat of what I wanted to write proper.

And in non horse-words, I've been trying to work out some original fiction. Currently, I have an idea for an Academic Fantasy story set in a gigantic boarding school that exists in its own little pocket dimension. And when I say "gigantic", I mean "large enough to have its own borders and zip code". It also gathers students from across all known reality, and is designed so that, from rules to classrooms, the students have a fair and equal time.

This, of course, has the side-effect of being an exceptionally weird school. I haven't quite gotten a grasp on how weird, but I do have a joke in me about one of the students being a nudist who exploits the "must wear the symbol and/or colors of the school" rule by literally painting her body in the school's colors, so there's that.

Who knows? Maybe that will be my attempt for NaNoWriMo. Or I'll do that Equestria Girls fic I was meaning to write a while back.

Thanks for reading, lads, and here's hoping I get the next chapter done by March.

Still Owes Tom Nook money,

AdamThePony