I’m picturing one of these bipedal robots carrying a ripped, dripping garbage bag all the way through the house, hobbling along in that slow, wobbly gait they have, struggling with the doorknob for 5 minutes and eventually arriving at the sidewalk bin 20 minutes later to deposit a soggy mostly empty bag and then spending the rest of the day attempting to gather all the trash from the ground in this mysterious trail of garbage that leads from the sidewalk all the way back to the garbage can.

The Skyrim modding anecdote I mentioned isn’t related to the story from this post. I see now my wording is a little unclear on that. This post just reminded me of the Skyrim thing.

Very close. It’s actually Mr. Krabs that the boots are driving nuts in that one.

Yup that’s the one. If you’ve got the stomach for it, by all means go ahead. For me, I kinda regretted watching it after because despite being a well-made video, I realized that all I was left with afterward was a lingering anger and and an unintentionally curated list of things that will probably remind me of that douchebag every time I play Skyrim from now on.

Had a gen z coworker once who was a little mind-blown when I pointed out that the squeaky boots episode of SpongeBob is just “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Usually any time I’ve tried to share that fun fact, anyone who’s already familiar with both stories has already connected the dots. It was pretty fun to witness the “holy shit it IS the same story” realization in real time.

I watched an extended breakdown on YouTube of this dude who’s been an absolute villain of the Skyrim modding scene for like over a decade. I honestly can’t recommend anyone watch it because it’ll just make you angry. I was happily playing modded Skyrim for years without knowing anything about him. After I learned of his existence, I realized that some of the issues I’d had with modding Skyrim over the years were actually deliberately caused by this guy when I’d assumed it was due to the general flakiness of modding.

This comment reminded me of a cherished Little Joel video.

The first night I owned an air fryer, I tossed in some shitty frozen tater tots that had been in my freezer for way too long, and they came out so delightfully crispy that I cooked two more servings.

I realized immediately that this would be a problem. It’s a bit too easy to make delicious stuff that’s pretty bad for me. I nearly made myself sick of wings within like 2 weeks. That was a close one. Fuckin love wings.

This is one of the things that I’m pretty satisfied with and grateful for in my life. No romance, currently no job, not much I’m excited about on the horizon, but I’m very happy with the friendships I’ve cultivated with other dudes. I just wish we all lived closer together. A handful of us do a semi-regular video chat where we check in and see how everyone’s doing. We hold space for emotional vulnerability and support each other however we can. We talk about issues with life, family, or sometimes just shoot the shit and have a regular chat about whatever we’ve been up to.

When people talk about holding your male friends accountable for saying sexist things or reinforcing typical toxic bullshit, I feel very fortunate that I just don’t have friends like that. I like to think I’d call it out if it happened, but I just never have to hear that kind of shit from my friends and I don’t think I’d cultivate a friendship with someone who’s comfortable saying that kind of stuff.

We’re all in our 30’s at this point and some are starting families. I don’t get to see everyone as much as I’d like, but any time I get to spend around them always feels so restorative. I’ve never been shy about expressing my true feelings and I tell each and every one of them that I love them. I used to really enjoy making my more guarded friends squirm with an “I love you,” but it doesn’t really work anymore because now everyone is just as comfortable saying it as I am.

I wish every dude could have guy friends like this. There’s a lot of cultural baggage that makes it harder than it should be. I appreciate the question because I often struggle with feeling gratitude for the things in my life that I’m most thankful for. I spend too much time in a negative headspace, but I’ve got a good bench of bros I can lean on and I need to appreciate that.

Trekkie friend of mine has a “Boldly Go” sticker in his bathroom. Always puts a smile on my face.

One time I was in the ER, and a doctor noted that my heart beat has a rather pronounced split s2 rythm which is something that doctors need to learn to discern when listening to a heartbeat, so for the next hour as I was waiting around, I had several other younger physicians stop by and say “hey I was told to come listen to your heartbeat.”

Made me feel a little special in a very peculiar way I haven’t known since.

I have a bit of a reputation among my friends for missing pretty basic stuff in games. My best guess is that I replay a lot of older games that I already know everything about, so it’s kind of a reflex to just ignore text that pops up on the screen. This is how I end up several hours into a game being unaware that there is a block mechanic.

Completely unrelated YouTube video I just felt like sharing.

I can have a little delicious garbage, as a treat.

“Delicious garbage” is how I refer to ordered food to keep myself at least a little aware of the choice I’m making. I can’t rationalize delivery fees, so I still go get it myself, but it’s still just a little too often that I find myself saying “I think I’ll have some delicious garbage for dinner.”

It’s not perfect, but as a huge fan of the game, it’s definitely close enough for me. I’ve played all the way through it like 3 times already and I just discovered how fun it is to play randomizer mode so I can keep playing again and again and it still feels fresh.

I have a higher tolerance for VR jank, but I’d say it’s like 90% of the way to being a proper VR port. I’ll list the most broken things:

• you don’t get to draw your bow with 2 hands how you would want to in VR, you aim with one hand like it’s a pistol. Same for the slingshot. There’s no cross hair, so you just have to feel it out. With the bow at least, the arrow points directly toward where it will hit, so aiming isn’t too hard
• For me at least, I can’t get the game to register c button inputs to play the ocarina. It has half life alyx style item equipping which works very well, but when I equip the ocarina, I can’t play it. Originally, my workaround was to just toggle to my virtual desktop view and play using the virtual keyboard. Eventually I “fixed” this by downloading an app called OpenVR2Key which maps my right stick to the c buttons. This mostly works, but if you’ve ever played on an emulator, you’ll know that using an analog stick for the c buttons is not ideal. It usually takes a few tries to play the song right, but to me it’s still better
• there are certain ledges in the game that link refuses to climb by walking into them in VR. You have to either backflip up, find a way to jump off something so he’ll grab it, or just toggle to desktop view, quickly switch out of VR mode, use the virtual keyboard to walk forward and climb, and then toggle back to VR. It’s a headache, but it only takes a few seconds and the only two spots I’ve found where this is required are Death Mountain where you have to bomb the rocks to reach the top, and the room in the ice cavern with the spinning blade
• the megaton hammer doesn’t always work right. Sometimes it won’t break the thing you’re hitting and you have to do the same “switch out of VR” trick
• the dark link fight is super broken because there are 2 Links and the game gets confused. Dark Link’s movement makes you move too. It’s still beatable in VR, but you’re fighting the mechanics more than the enemy
• areas that were originally rendered from a fixed camera angle with a 2D image for the environment such as the market will just appear as primitive geometry and everything is green. This is fixed easily by installing the right texture pack though

All that said, everything bad I described takes less than 1% of the time you’ll spend playing, and for me it’s a dream come true to finally be in Hyrule experiencing everything I remember so fondly through my own eyes. The first time I stood under the Deku Tree, I just stood there for a few moments taking it all in and appreciating the true scale of it. Every time I’m crossing Hyrule field and hearing the incredible music, I always find myself thinking “I can’t believe I’m playing this right now.” I didn’t realize until typing this out just now, but it’s probably already one of my favorite VR games just because it was already one of my favorite games.

I play VR pretty regularly. The meta quest 3 is objectively a very good piece of tech, regardless of how much Zuckerberg sucks. It’s also a lot more open of a platform than many people realize. You can sideload apps easily and there are at least 3 ways to use it for PCVR without having any meta software on your PC at all. They’ve never come down on Beat Saber modding despite it being very clearly against the TOS of the platform. Ports of classic games have been dropping like crazy because AI is allowing non-programmers to build VR mods for existing games. I kid you not, I’ve learned of more VR mods for classic games in the past 2 weeks than in the past 2 years. It’s really popping off. Some ports still require a PC to play the game and other ports run natively on the headset, such as half life 2 and portal 1.

Lately, I’ve been hooked on playing Ocarina of Time in VR. Also, the Simpsons Hit and Run just got a pretty impressive VR port. I’ve got like 5 other mods in mind for games I want to check out next.

The native quest games are mostly fine with some standout bangers like Resident Evil 4 and Batman Arkham Shadow. My favorite multiplayer games are probably mini golf or table tennis. I think anyone who’s played table tennis in real life would be pretty impressed with how well we can simulate it in VR. If you’re good at table tennis, you can pick up VR table tennis and your skill immediately translates.

I guess Zuck’s focus has mostly shifted to the perv glasses now because the company doesn’t talk much about VR much anymore. The metaverse (or at least Zuck’s version of it) was pretty clearly a failure, so I assume that’s why they don’t like talking about VR anymore. It’s definitely a quiet time for the medium, but with the way mods of classic games are coming down the pipeline now, I’m pretty excited for what’s next.

Meta is still working on their next headset and it will likely be one of the lightest and most comfortable yet. The compute is getting moved to a separate puck which you won’t have to wear on your head. I’m hopeful that now the metaverse phase is basically dead, the medium will become more focused on games.

I once had a roommate who preferred to keep the peanut butter in the fridge for some reason. I didn’t really get it, but it was easy to accommodate so I did. Turns out they were just doing the same thing for me because they assumed that it was my preference. I have no idea which one of us originally stuck the peanut butter in the fridge.

Last time I went to use one of those stupid key kiosks, it was out of fucking keys. Not to worry though, some enterprising genius thought of a way for them to still make a sale in this case, and the best part is you never have to refill the blank keys!

When it’s out of keys, it instead asks you to just scan your key, enter your postal address, pay at the kiosk, and they’ll mail you the key simple as that!

Which means that somewhere out there, there’s a corporate database that knows exactly two things about you: what your house key looks like, and what your address is. We all know how careful corporations are with our personal data. I’d sooner make the key myself than give them that info.