Okay so I lied. You didn’t really expect me to never play this DLC through, right? I mean, things needed killing, and they weren’t going to kill themselves, despite me saying, and wishing, that they would.
In summary, the plot involves traveling to a large raider camp inside a derelict theme park, becoming one of them, re-taking the other areas of the park that had since gotten overrun with various threats, distributing the spoils, and solving the raider factions’ political problems.
Yeah, that sounds miserable, or…
You can travel to the raider camp, become one of them, re-take the other areas of the park that had since gotten overrun with various threats, then go on a bloody rampage and murder every raider. As I usually default to the harbinger of justice, I chose the latter option which, after the painful trudge of retaking the parks and listening to this large group of psychopaths complain about their problems, was way more fun. Besides which, it seems a little unsporting to team up with the psychopaths and go kill regular people just going about their business. Violence needs a proper motive, and if my predilection to save innocents wasn’t sufficient, the desire to silence all the whining certainly was.
There’s my very brief synopsis, now funny photos:
Yeah, whoever did this just needs to die for obvious reasonsA nice little homage to Psycho hereIf this is a reference to something I sure don’t know what it is–death by flamingos? Is this a Hitchcock nod?After killing the raiders, the merchants are freed. I think the game was scripted to remove their slave collars, but it looks like it glitched and removed all of their clothing as well. Now there’s a market filled with people in skivies.
I have 3 monitors up currently, running at maximum resolution and with the sizing adjusted to cram as much information as possible onto these screens without feeling eye strain. I casually peruse the internet. Every tech site I visit has followed a similar theme–they’ve used the entire monitor’s real estate for its intended purpose and filled it with information.
Then I visit a blog and there’s large segments of white space and the articles are crammed into tiny columns with large verticality. Now, I do know why, as I’m in the industry and have had experience with web design (I’ve even attended a seminar that touched on this): the human eye is lazy and wants to float through text as comfortably as possible, and varying studies have revealed anywhere from 45-70 characters per line to be the most comfortable. And to this I say quite frankly: bollocks.
I can’t remember the last book I read, aside from a children’s story, which adhered to this philosophy. Oh I know the argument has been that paper reads differently from digital, which has also been the primary argument in the running debate regarding deprecating serif fonts; but how lazy are we really when we want to read something of interest? Personally, I don’t find it all that difficult to adjust to varying font sizes and widths, and my eyes are far from 20/20. I do find it irritating, however, to have to continually scroll down a page as I read.
It was a lingering gripe I had with this default WordPress theme, that it was capping content width at around this 75-character mark, and no obvious means existed by which to adjust it. The whole point of using an authoring program like WordPress was to not have to dig into code to add content and make changes. Adding to that, it’s much more difficult to dig into code that someone else made than it is to modify my own, so this issue is doubly aggravating. Further still, each version of WordPress and each separate theme has different settings, so consulting the usual Internet discussion was fruitless.
No matter, it’s all CSS after all. How hard could it be?
As it turns out, it’s relatively easy to make the change. The difficult part was finding the styling info I needed. But thankfully, WordPress not only has an engine for modifying the stylesheet within WordPress itself, they were kind enough to also have left a comment trail throughout. I found what I was after in a little section called Layout.
Post-modification, additional comments are mine to remember default values
“.wrap” encompasses anything under that umbrella, and after experimentation I found that 1200px made much better use of a full desktop monitor without overloading visual elements. Then I adjusted the percentile ratios of “#primary”, the main content column which contains posts, and “#secondary”, all that sidebar stuff to the right. Above are my changes.
Like all web design, visual layouts are trial and error, and I may tweak things more in the future. But for now, I find the posts’ width to be much more practical. And now my embedded images appear bigger as well.
I’m sure much of this is personal preference, but I really hated wasting all that space. Whether or not anyone else might agree with my assessment, at least this post shows the means by which it can be changed to suit other’s needs.
That statement carries heavy implications, to which family men everywhere shudder from mild PTSD.
Seriously, it’s a lot of effort for such a bizarre holiday decoration. In years past we had opted for an artificial tree, mostly because we lived in rented property, but also because I didn’t want to deal with the mess. That’s when we acquired would would be known thereafter as “The Martha Stewart Tree”, because we bought it at K-Mart (of all places that’s where Martha Stewart had her brand sold at the time), and it looked better than any artificial Christmas tree we had seen elsewhere.
But the tree came with very questionable pre-wiring (which I later removed), and the clipped wires of the tree’s frame were lethally sharp. And the damn thing dropped fake needles everywhere which the vacuum refused to pick up. Fuck that tree.
So we’ve since made the switch to real trees.
Of course, real trees have their own set of problems, but whatever kind we got this year has been especially awful. This one doesn’t have any real branches, just a bunch of fluff that can’t support any weight, so I only have half the lights on it that I would normally. And the sap gave me an allergic reaction.
Plus, the ornaments keep falling off. Look at the kid’s consternation as she debates their placement:
This was a terrible species for a Christmas tree. I sure hope Liz remembers what it was so we don’t get that kind again. I’m about to go Griswold on the neighbor’s spruce.
I’ve never been to a ballet. Of all the presumably highbrow experiences I pondered whilst sipping bourbon poured from my crystal decanter, ballet never crossed my mind. I’m game for orchestras, but I never felt orchestral arrangements needed the visual aid. Then again, I do seem to enjoy auditory experiences more than most, so perhaps this was to be expected.
Liz wanted to take the kid to see the Nutcracker. I was dubious about the prerequisite attention span required, but part of being a parent is forcing culture into your child whether they want it or not, so I was on board. Off we went to the Schuster Center’s Mead Theatre!
Why do they cram men into those? Can’t they just wear some sweatpants or something?
One of the consequences of an active mind is the need for discourse. Lacking any prior relatable experience, the kid endlessly asked questions about what the hell was going on, which is a fair reaction really. To a child’s mind, I imagine it would be very confusing to watch people dance around to instrumental music, vaguely acting out a story that wasn’t based in any sort of reality.
And one of the consequences of an introspective mind is the tendency to zone out. The familiar melodies invoked thoughts of Fantasia, naturally. I also recalled hearing that Tchaikovsky never considered the piece one of his better works, yet it became one of his better-known pieces. Then I started thinking about the dancers and their well-known anorexia problems. Then I awoke with a start, embarrassed that I had fallen asleep (though no one seemed to have noticed). Damn is that music peaceful!
Conclusion: The kid wasn’t old enough for this type of venue, I found it incredibly boring, and Liz was disappointed that they had apparently modernized it from the version she knew. That’s culture I guess–an experience not terribly fun at the time, but something that forms a lasting memory to live on as nostalgia. I hope that’s how the kid recalls this experience.
It’s been unexpectedly difficult finding a TV stand. There isn’t a shortage of course, but their contemporary designs don’t trend toward accommodating my setup. They tend to be too tall, with compartments too small. Were I to use a common design, my TV would be uncomfortably high, and my audio receiver would need to sit on top–obviously not a practical configuration.
Wondering why this was even a dilemma, I discussed the problem with coworkers. I quickly discovered that most people do indeed mount their televisions up high, like a movie theater. I also found out, to my surprise, that people don’t generally use audio receivers. No one wants to bother with wiring speakers, and so forego surround sound configurations in favor of sound bars which provide a small improvement over TV speakers, and they don’t require an external receiver since they have built-in input switches.
Older TV cabinets have massive compartments, probably due to technology being physically bigger back then, and in a time before high-resolution viewing there seems to have been a greater interest in high-fidelity audio, and so audio receivers were more commonplace. But these older cabinets can’t accommodate a modern TV’s size, so again we were stuck.
And so we’ve kept an old and ugly particle-board stand, bought on the cheap from Target. And ever since, Liz has been on the lookout for a new stand. And then, finally, she found something. We took very careful measurements of all components, and behold! They would fit! My normally frugal nature gave way and I not only didn’t dissuade her from making the purchase, but I actively encouraged.
Although she probably would have bought it anyway
I spent 2 hours rearranging and rewiring everything, but now we have completed our setup of adult furniture. And since everything’s now behind glass I don’t feel quite so nervous when the kid walks past with a beverage.
“Adult” maybe being defined a bit loosely here (note the Elder Scrolls YouTube soundtrack on screen and the Ghost in the Shell DVDs on the shelf
Liz then immediately decided we needed a bigger TV, now that there’s more room on the stand. Sigh.
