Blessed by the Potato

I was preparing my lunch earlier: peanut butter and jelly, with the crusts cut off, of course. It was then that I was hit with an epiphany: I am not ready for this.

I don’t even know what this is, but here I am, an idealistic kid cutting the crusts off his sandwiches. I’m clearly not ready to deal with browned and less-tasty bread (or “sandwich handles”), and that is one of the less rigorous challenges life will throw my way.

People have been asking me what I’m going to do after I finish my degree. It’s a big terrifying question, and one I don’t really have a good answer to. I mean that’s still a long way away, isn’t it? (Isn’t it??) I still have no idea what I’m going to do with my life.

So I face the paradoxical fact that I’m also a grown-ass man: I’m going to graduate with an advanced degree in AWESOME any day now (any day now); I have a bald spot, and my metabolism has reached the point that I have to watch what I eat (except on milkshake and cookie days). I have students of my very own, and I teach them things. I’m married; my friends are reproducing — my former students are getting married and reproducing!

How did this happen? Shouldn’t somebody have stopped this? I mean, I recently stayed up to 5 am playing video games (though getting home from work after 1 am made this no great feat). There is no way that I’m grown up and ready for a real job or a family or a healthy balanced diet. I was always a very responsible child, but that’s on the kid scale of hooligan to quiet nerdy type; that’s a far cry from actual responsibility.

I suppose I’ll just have to take a cue from XKCD:

And define what being grown up means my own damned self.

It’s September. I don’t know how this happened. I had so much to finish before the end of August. In fact, according to my timeline, I had to finish pretty much everything by the end of August:

Yet here we are, in September, and I’m stuck somewhere back in May according to my timetable and the progress I’ve made so far.

Urk.

It is also the Season of Spiders. They’re ridiculous this year, especially around the hospital. Some of the biggest spiders I’d ever seen outside the zoo or a horror movie. Yesterday a coworker killed one so big that I felt like I should have earned experience points just for being in the party during the kill; I was a little surprised we didn’t check its corpse for copper pieces or armour upgrades. Today another spider camped out on the wall across from the office, and I killed it with panache (via roundhouse kick to the face, BTW). Then I was there late, on my own. The sun was down, and when I opened the door to the office for a washroom break, I found four spiders lurking there, waiting to ambush me as I came out. And I’m not exaggerating the ambush thing due to the terror they induce: one of them was hanging down in mid-air, right in front of the door, just waiting for me to walk into it so it could paralyse me with its evil spider venom and suck my delicious juices.

I slammed the door and decided I didn’t need to pee just that badly yet.

I came up with a heroic plan: I would call the fire department, who have axes and protective clothing and stuff, and they would come to free me from the spider’s trap. Then I realized that I did, in fact, need to pee rather more urgently than waiting for the fire department would allow, plus I began to think of how that could go badly against me if the firefighters didn’t take the threat seriously, and the spiders caught them and laid eggs inside them, and then I’d face an army of spiders instead of just four (although that is still 3 to 4 more than any man should have to face alone). So, my new plan of attack was to use a piece of paper to smoosh the one hanging by the web in mid-air in front of me, as it presented the greatest danger: while a spider can jump off a wall or the ceiling, they are much harder to see and track in free space, especially with our ridiculous spider-hiding carpet (would a matte white flooring option be so difficult/boring/hard to clean?). Then, get the two on the wall, and run wailing and crying from the one on the ceiling. My only defense against it was speed and blind hope that I’d make it to the safety of the washroom before it could drop on my head.

As it turned out, the one on the ceiling caught a ladybug in its web: the ladybug was thrashing and flailing in the web, which served as an effective distraction, as I’m sure you have all figured out due to the fact that I’m still alive to report these horrific events to you, but also a terrifying warning: “this could be you, delicious human.”

I was explaining my playlist at work today:

“This is a song about a mad scientist who is lonely, and builds himself a girlfriend.”

“This is a song about a giant squid who is lonely.”

“This one’s a love ballad from Charon to Pluto, trying to reassure and cheer up Pluto after we revoked its planet status.”

“This is a song about bedtime and how you long for the comfort of your trusty old teddy bear.”

“A whole song about Ikea! You guys all like Ikea.. for college kids and divorced men…”

“You know, sometimes, the world just wins, you know? It just fucking wins. Every. Goddamned. Time.”

“Uhh… Tater, are you trying to tell us something?”

No, I just like JoCo, ok?

Oh, fun human tricks!

So there’s this yoga pose that involves touching your nose to the ground without supporting yourself with your hands, and then sitting back up on your knees. It sounded impossible to me, but the girls say it’s super easy, and doesn’t require much back strength at all. So they do it: they kneel on the ground, with their bums right on their heels, then, with their hands behind their backs, lean forward and touch the ground gently with their nose, and then come back up. I’m amazed: it looks like magic, like that shouldn’t be possible. So they convince me to try it, and I realize why I think it should be impossible: because for a man, it is. My centre of gravity is high enough that when I start to lean over, it goes in front of my knees, and thud, I faceplant into the ground. Hard. A fun prank you can play on any male friend who doesn’t know better! (Or one who does, but is easily convinced to try stupid things that look like they should be impossible for him).

Wow, what a week for shipping.

First up, as you all know now, my preorder for SC2 didn’t arrive on time (and then the copy I picked up to tide me over wouldn’t activate!). That was with Canada Post.

Two weeks ago, I shipped via FedEx a gift for my mom. It was guaranteed to get there the next day by 5pm, and it didn’t. So, I started the process of getting a refund with FedEx’s money back guarantee. Things on the FedEx end were going fairly well, until they asked for my tracking number. I had dropped the package off at PostNet here in London, a retail store that will send out packages for both FedEx and Purolator, and never got a tracking number at the time. They said they’d email me one later when it went out, but they never did that either. The helpful rep at FedEx tried to look up the package for me in their system, and couldn’t find it. Finally, we found that it was in there with PostNet listed as the sender, not me. We got the ball rolling on the refund process, but they said I’d have to call back after the package did arrive so they knew whether to refund it as a lost or late package.

This week, I called FedEx back to finish that process off, and they tell me the refund’s already been issued. “What?” I say, “There’s nothing on my credit card.” You’ve probably guessed this next part: they issued the refund to PostNet. So now tomorrow I’ve got to schelp on down there and try to get them to forward the refund on to me. Any guesses as to whether or not that’s going to be an easy process, if I can get it done at all?!

Today, I get a call from the Purolator robot: there’s a package for me to pick up at their depot by the airport. First up, I hate the stupid Purolator depot by the airport. It is so ridiculously far from the rest of the city. The busses don’t go anywhere near there, so I don’t know how they expect people without a car to get their packages, and even with a car it’s a 10 minute drive each way to the very edge of the city. Second, they never even tried to deliver it to my house. I was home all day waiting for my StarCraft delivery, so I know the Purolator guy never came either, and there was no “missed delivery” note on the door.

Anyhow, once I get there, this really rude lady tells me I can’t get my package with just my ID & address, I need the tracking number. Their computer system can’t look up by name or address! So I have to phone myself to pick up the message — several times to get all the digits of the tracking number down. During this time 3 other people come in and all get the same treatment — no tracking number, no package. One of them, having driven all the way out to the boonies by the airport with his ID in hand, is sent home to go look up the tracking number because they don’t have internet there for him to check his email. Then I get the package and see a note pasted on in confirming my suspicions: “construction on street, did not attempt delivery”. Seriously, there is construction on my street, a block away, but come on, it’s summer. Construction happens, and it’s not like it was anywhere near blocking the ability to get to the house, or even park the truck on the street here!

Blizzard is a company renowned for its quality. Even with World of WarCraft, which saw unprecedented demand that overloaded servers, they did their best to make the game marginally playable as soon as possible.

So far, StarCraft 2 has not lived up to the Blizzard name, the rollout being much worse than WoW, without the extraneous factor of hordes of unexpected players. My preorder never arrived, and caving to the irrational logic that I had spent the whole day waiting for it, I rushed out to the store in the evening to pick up a second copy (I’ll return the preorder whenever it arrives, or resell it to a friend that hasn’t purchased yet — nudge nudge, Netbug). So far, this is not Blizzard’s fault, but put me into a rather foul frame of mind before the disc even hit the drive.

The install took forever, literally over two hours. What game, from a single disc, takes two hours to install? It was ridiculous! Then, after all that… I couldn’t play!

I was getting a message that the Battle.net servers were “temporarily unavailable”, though nothing of the sort was true. Unfortunately, my account has fallen prey to a weird, rare bug (though how rare is tough to say, because if you have it you can’t post on the forums!). It seems to be affecting Canadian accounts the most, so beware Canuck gamers!

I of course tried all the recommendations, even going so far as to uninstall and reinstall the game (another 2 hours gone!). What’s extra infuriating about the whole thing is that I was most psyched to play the single player game tonight, and the ever fucking DRM won’t let me until it’s connected to the authorization server, which is up (and which I can connect to in my web browser!), but which the game stubbornly continues to tell me is temporarily down!

Arg!

This is so especially frustrating because not only was I looking forward to the game, but I had set aside special time today to jump in and play. This day was supposed to be special, to mark the turnaround point where my life was supposed to start getting better, damnit. Instead I’ve wasted most of a day, and even the work I did get done — submitted author proofs! I’m getting published, bitches! — can’t put me into anything less than a burning rage as I go off to bed. I want to rip my own head off, and send my unfeeling body, powered by rage and frustration alone in defiance of all known laws of physics and physiology, on a holy mission of vengeance towards Blizzard. There it will tear the buildings down around the heads of tech support until the DRM is gone and we can play once more. While that happens, teams of scientists and practised warlocks will hook my disembodied head directly into the machines, improving my reaction speed so that I can once again marshall the forces of the Koprulu sector with unparalleled efficiency and skill, crushing all opposition beneath my boot… as it was foretold.

I must say, I’m really unimpressed with the complete lockdown on SC2: no LAN means the host for a “LAN” party will have to have a robust enough internet connection and router to get everyone connected to Battle.net servers in order to play together. Even the single player requires an internet connection. Yes, after it’s authorized the first time — which is where I’m stuck at — you can play offline for up to 30 days before authorizing again, but that’s still pretty draconian. Some people have reported that there’s a crack out already to beat the DRM… sad that the pirates can play the game and I can’t.

Nuclear launch detected.