World of Warships (2015) - ★★½
On my Gaming PC, I renamed World of Warship’s desktop shortcut to Sad Addiction. That’s a good summary of what I think about this game.
It is a solid, tactical, and balanced game for the most part. Each ship class you choose plays differently, and there are differences between different ships of the same class. You can upgrade and add special weapons and tactical bonuses to your ships, choose different captains, and more. Technically, the game is stable, the servers rarely lag, and the graphics are excellent. And, being a Wargaming game, it’s also free to pick up and play.
Here comes the but.
Being a multiplayer online game, your fun from it depends mostly on who you play with. Unfortunately, this usually means bad experiences are more common than good ones, at a ratio of about 3:1. What’s worse, the developers understand most of their gamers are teenage hornballs (or at least they act like ones) and target that constantly. Game updates are explained in video clips presented by sexualized women. Avatars are anime and even hentai-oriented characters. Many in-game events emphasize stuff from Megadeath to Transformers. So yes bro, there’s no surprise that the gaming experience often feels like a bad high school reunion.
On the technical side, the game includes huge patches every month or so, with 70% of things you won’t care about (Sailor Moon captains anyone?) or won’t affect your gameplay directly (a ship that costs 60 US dollars). There are also other questionable practices, like an annoying Windows system notification that warns you if you switch away from the game to a different program for a minute or a broken reporting system that colors your name in the game pink (Oh no! Not pink! What would friends say?!) for the most idiotic things, like choosing to play a plane carrier, since some players hate this class of ship so much they report you if you play them.
Since I already commented on the price of some of the ships: the game is free, yes, but that means Wargaming will do whatever it can to get you to buy stuff. A premium account, a season pass, a ship with an advantage in the game, etc. In fact, if you play this game long enough and get to high-tier ships, it becomes nearly impossible to progress without spending at least a little bit of money to move up.
So, if this review reads more like a vent, it’s because it is. I love the game, and I hate the game.
I’m rewriting some parts about Micro.blog in the wiki now that I have a better idea of how it stands out conceptually.
I’ve had a weird Stage Manager problem on the Mac for a while. When I switch from a full-screen app (like my browser) to the left to a stage in Stage Manager (using ctrl + arrow ) Stage Manager switches one stage further.
Does Stage Manager has a “command + tab” for stages?
Why doctors in America earn so much
TLDR: the article claims it’s a closed market geared at profiting a small group of surviving insiders.
More than 100 million people today live in an area without enough primary-care doctors (the problem is particularly bad in rural areas)
And:
Nurse practitioners and physician assistants have been given responsibilities typically reserved for doctors, such as writing prescriptions. Foreign-trained doctors have filled some of the gap too.
Yet, the length of training and the cost of becoming a licensed doctor in the US makes it impossible for many.
Another Manhattan sticker-covered manhole. Lafayette Street. 📷
Microsoft keeps me busy - working on technical documentation. In the picture, my personal notes.
I forget sometimes how expensive NYC can be. Coffee and sandwich cost close to $20 with 15% tip…
Porto Rico Importing has been my go-to for coffee beans 🫘 for about a year. They’ve been around for a couple of generations and have three locations in lower Manhattan. Recommended if you’re in the area and need some beans or a cup of coffee ☕️
Anatomy of a Fall, 2023 - ★★★½
I made a mistake. I went in thinking "murder mystery," but the real death in this movie is the fairy tale of a perfect marriage. And it's brutal.
The acting in the film is so authentic and so close to home, this movie feels more like a documentary to me than fiction. Many families go through the same thing, perhaps not to the extreme that is required from a movie to attract an audience, but the drama and intensity are all there. As a matter of fact, I could argue that in a way it's worse since it lasts and continues into your teenage years and adulthood. These things shape you and your opinions of relationships forever.
As someone who grew up with parents fighting constantly to the point of a divorce, this was an odd healing experience. "Someone had the same life I had, but it ended up even worse," I told myself. And I don't even need to feel guilty since this is fiction; yet, it is so real I know the writers of this movie must have gone through the same things I did.
There is a point in this movie where one of the characters explains how deep desperation looks like, the kind that leads to a bottomless depression. I nodded in my seat and thought, I wish I could explain it this well. Thankfully, someone made this movie.
Be warned, if you have a past or familiarity with intense fighting and/or divorce (I want to say, who doesn't these days?), this movie will rip you apart. For me, this proved to be a healing experience, a confirmation of the choices my family made, and later I did, as an adult. The friend who watched it with me was not OK after this movie ended and needed to recover.
Week 45
This was a challenging week. My mind and soul were at odds with each other constantly, most of which is now documented in my handwritten journal.
I haven’t said much on the topic publicly, and I’m not ready to do so yet: the situation in Israel has affected me greatly. It stands in harsh contrast to my quiet life in the US. I have family in Israel, and I’ve experienced the overall fear during the Gulf War firsthand when I lived there, among other experiences. I’ve come to discover this “soul pressure,” for lack of a better term, has started to shape into something else, something that might be positive in a way I never thought about in a long time.
As I said, I am not ready to talk much more about this further at this point, and being able to say the above words is a lot as is. A step in - I hope - the right direction.
Self-care and reflection took a big part of my personal time this week. I started documenting some of my methods in my wiki last week, and I’m in the process of looking over my old notes, and selecting what to combine with my current notes. There’s a new (but in terms of practice, also very old) Elements section on the wiki.
On the blog, the new search function (built with search space for Micro.blog) indexes conversations and comments; the links at the top changed along with the about section, which in turn led me to look into my Ko-Fi page.
For a long time now, I’ve been thinking about how to be able to get some financial backing from my blog, my pictures, and my wiki. I never liked subscriptions and ads. The idea of charging money for something that should be free, like information and opinions, is even more absurd to me today than it was before. This conflict has kept me in an infinite thinking loop, and I think I’m finally able to put it behind me now. In turn, this will lead to more of “me” on the blog and the wiki and less of my “brand,” which, in a word, is bullshit. I am a human being to talk to, not a brand to rent or purchase.
I feel I should apologize for this vague summary. It doesn’t explain what I did this week as much as it explains what I felt. But I think that’s OK. This is important, and writing it down is progress.