Construction Zone

During the reconstruction of our first-floor, the bulk of items that needed to be “out of the way” went to one of three places: the garage, the supposed “three season porch”, or the basement. Being in the Northeast, anything that needed to remain temperature-controlled went into the basement, which turned out to be a lot. So much so that the basement is still overflowing with stuff that our new configuration simply doesn’t have a home for. Couple that with years and years of simply dumping stuff into the pit beneath the house, and you can imagine that it’s pretty difficult to envision it as a living space.

Thing is, it’s a finished basement, compliments of the yahoo from whom we purchased the house. He fancied himself a carpenter, and while he managed to really futz up a lot of things according to our town inspector, he did a pretty good job overall. He even kept one side of the basement open and relatively unadorned, which is what I’m using for my computer room.

Because the construction bug is still somewhat present, I wanted to finally sweep out the original setup we’d used when we moved into the house and re-do this computer room to my own specifications. My wife had a computer desk there, but she refuses to go into the basement these days and uses a laptop upstairs from the couch. My daughter has moved to college, and I always took any opportunity I could to evict their stuff from the area anyway.

My efforts were accelerated last week though, and I won’t lie: someone RT’d this in my timeline, and it provided me with a very, very high bar to reach in this project:

I was breaking this setup down on Discord with some friends this weekend on how best to achieve something on this scale. What it came down to was either A) use what I have, which is currently still parts of the original desk I broke down and am now using part of as a simple desk surface, B) buy counter tops, which could run me as much as $800 to make a decent design in the space I have available, or C) go all This Old House, learn woodworking, and create everything from scratch. That’s just for the desks; we didn’t even really touch on shelving, or lighting (though I do have some of those Nanoleaf light panels that I am dying to install somewhere).

To be honest, none of those ideas feels right to me, but I at least spent part of this weekend removing things from the walls, spackling holes, and even started to dismantle my wife’s desk. Unfortunately, this process displaced more paperwork and mementos than the overloaded basement can currently handle, so I have to remember where I put everything should we have need of it.

Deep Rock Galactic

Deep Rock Galactic is apparently two years old, and has been on and off my wishlist for about as long. I never really looked hard at its gameplay, believing that it was some kind of sci-fi Minecraft with specific goals. As the game was free to play for the weekend, I figured I might as well give it a shot, and what I found was far less Minecraft and far more GTFO.

I won’t go over the specifics of a two-year-old game but suffice to say the game was super fun, but insanely frustrating as well. I played the first post-tutorial mission three times solo before I was able to complete it, and then completed it again with Enforzer. Our attempt at the second mission turned into a total fustercluck, though, as we were constantly being captured and dropped by flying bugs and weren’t able to make it back to the rescue pod on account of the fact that we were dead.

Still, it was on sale for 50% off, so I bought it.

Errata – PAX East, The Division 2 Expac, Star Citizen

My daughter messaged me last night that “everyone was at PAX”, which I took on face value as her college’s most popular course of study is in game development. She said that the event “looked fun”, which I’ll take to mean that she might like to go some day. I’m OK with that, as my local friends have seemingly lost the desire to do so again.

The Division 2’s expansion launches this week. Several of my friends and colleagues are excited, but I’m not anywhere near powerful enough in the game to really care, so I’ll pick it up when it’s on discount sometime later this year.

After the excitement of “The Gibbening” of the Carrack last week, things have quieted down in the Star Citizen universe…apparently annoyingly so. The Carrack is a classic case of “wanting is better than having”, as there’s no gameplay loop for an exploration ship right now; it’s cool to run around the ship for the first time, but after that it becomes either a glorified cargo hauler, or a target for griefers who feel the need to burst the bubble of those who are excited about having finally gotten their ship. With no upcoming release to entice them, the community is waking up to the reminder that development is painfully slow, and all eyes are on the 4.0 release in the hopes that it brings more promised features than it lets slip.