Aaron's Status

6:42 am

Apart from this sentence I’m going to do my best not to mention the fact that it is election day in the United States. The name of our country continues to feel less and less true. I’ll leave it at that.

Doors! Doors! Doors?

After weeks of waiting we received the new new door, to replace the broken new door (which is installed in the house at present). It was supposed to come last Thursday but ended up coming on Friday, so we missed the window to have our contractor work on it. He told us he could come Wednesday, but due to some other unexpected schedule change, he’s coming today.

My fingers are crossed so hard I might break them that this door is not full of cracks and dents and gets installed properly and smoothly. There’s also a giant hole in our kitchen floor where the subfloor was rotted out that they need to replace.

I’ll be glad to have this all done and dusted. This is not the season to have a giant hole in the back of our house for hours of the day.

I’m falling apart

I trained overhangs on Friday and that made me quite sore and I strained my other knee so now both of them are yelling at me. I felt good to climb again on Sunday as usual and I worked on this terribly difficult V4 (which may be more like a V5 but it’s debatable) and that strained my whole body a lot.

After climbing we all got flu shots and I really felt it yesterday. On top of the soreness and everything else, I had some major fatigue and brain fog and spent basically the whole afternoon staring into the void.

I am feeling overall much better today, but my back is a little off, so I am going to hang back and not climb today as we usually would. I have to remind myself that not too long ago I couldn’t even conceive of climbing and I’m in such a better place now, I’m truly grateful for that.

Thief (2014)

I’ve been playing this 2014 remake of “Thief,” a game in which you play as a medieval-times-ish “black hand” running thievery missions to save the country from an evil baron. It scratches the rogue itch a little bit, but I have notes.

My biggest gripe is that the map sucks. I think what they were going for is a play style where you memorize the paths through the city’s two districts, but because you can only see one district of the city at a time, you can’t see any of the marked locations outside of the district you’re in.

On top of that, the spots where you can move from one district to another are not marked, so you do have to memorize which adjoining parts of the map are connected and which aren’t. This all just leads to more frustration than realism in my opinion.

Maybe the thing that bugs me the most is the overall stealth mechanic and the NPC AI. Sometimes you’re crouched in a shadow and you’re all but invisible, or you “swoop” past an NPC in the light and they just do a “huh what was that?” but then other times you are standing in a clear shadow but the light touches you for one second and everyone goes into high alert and starts shooting at you.

It’s those moments where the whole stealth experience falls apart for me. Granted it’s an older game and also not the most popular. Hardcore fans of the series pretty much hated it and I knew that going in. I’m still having fun with it, but I’m a little disappointed given that it’s a Square/Enix game and they should know what they’re doing.