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Check out that little breath out that Joel gives when he sees the wound, like he’s just been punched in the gut. Again, I really don’t want to encourage this industry of motion-capture obsessed wannabe movie-makers, but that’s really something. It’s like… acting.
And here’s the end of the story, which you probably guessed. The thing about apartment hunting is that it's all failure, because if you succeed you stop doing it. All the places are losers until you find the winner.
We finally found a winner. We met the landlord, toured the place, and signed the lease in the space of a couple of days. We were ready to accept any hovel, no matter how ugly or sketchy, just so I could escape the cats. But when we did find a place it turned out to be more than we could have hoped for. It was actually nicer than any of the other places we looked at.
“This place feels like it's too good for us,” my wife says.
I nod. My oldest daughter said the same thing earlier, and I've been thinking it to myself all day.
We had a list of stuff we needed. (Three bedrooms, no pets, good wiring, in our price range, available NOW.) We had a list of stuff we wanted. (FOUR bedrooms, two bathrooms, a place for my office, nice neighborhood.) We had a list of stuff that we would wish for if we found a genie. (Laundry appliances. Four bedrooms. Nice view. Good sound insulation. Whole-unit air conditioning. New appliances. A spot for a bit of a garden.)
This place has everything except the dedicated office space. Aside from needing to steal half the living room for my office, this is better than we could possibly have hoped for.
Everything came together quickly. We saw the place, signed the lease, transferred the utilities, and moved the bulk of our stuff in the space of four days. This is the most panicked, ad-hoc move we've ever done.
I was in really bad shape by the end, walking around glassy-eyed and open-mouthed, pumped full of inhaler that did just enough to keep me out of the hospital. I wasn’t in physical danger yet, but I had pretty much stopped being a functioning adult. I didn’t really grasp how bad I was until a couple of days after we moved in. My lungs cleared up, my head cleared up, and I got some blissfully peaceful sleep.
Now that I’m alive again, I’m anxious to get back to work. But we’re on day two of a five-day internet blackout. So no work. (Except for writing this.) So I’m running a massive decontamination operation here at the new place. Everything has to be cleaned as it enters the house, or we'll end up dragging the poison into the fresh clean new place. All the clothes need to be laundered. All the furniture needs to be wiped down. Instead of packing the empty cardboard boxes away (like we did after out last move) we throw them away. (Boxes are magical dust magnets. Dust can even stick to the sides!)
The vigorous cleaning is a lot of work on top of the move itself. It might be overkill, but we're better safe than sorry. I don't fully understand the mechanics of how dander works. I doubt anyone really does. It's not like there's an animal dander equivalent of the Geiger counter that I can just point at some blankets and know how sick they'll make me or how much they will contaminate the air around me. The only testing apparatus we have are my lungs, and exposing yourself to possible hazards to see if they're hazardous so you can later avoid them is probably the stupidest possible approach to safety. So, we're just assuming that all fabric from the old place is poisonous until washed.
There are many bad things about this move, but the most vexing is the load it has put on Heather. In an ideal world, we would have had friends and family lined up to help with the move, but we couldn’t get help on such short notice. (There was actually a long-planned family event going on the day of the move. There were other family members we might have asked, but all the healthy young people are busy.) I don't dare go back to the old pace, which means she and my oldest daughter (16) did most of the literal heavy lifting. So Heather has been working full-time, then coming home and moving all of our furniture herself.
As if to drive the point home, the neighborhood around the old place has gotten suddenly creepier. Some idiot drove by the apartment building across the street from the old place and fired a shotgun through one of the windows. (At the old place, my son could look out his bedroom window and see in the window where the attack happened. Thankfully, this was a couple of days after the move.) While my wife and youngest daughter were loading the car, a sketchy guy walked up to her, grabbed heather firmly by the arm, and started telling her how sexy she is and how big his dick was. The water company is back for some reason, and even swiped my wife's parking spot in front of our old place, forcing her to lug furniture half a block. The thoughtless jerk could easily have moved anywhere he liked, since he was just sitting behind the wheel, but instead the guy from Pennsylvania American Water just sat in his truck and watched my wife and kid schlep stuff down the street while he sat in our parking spot at the bottom of our steps.
Basically, the old neighborhood is like this twilight zone where people are always thoughtless, mean, and dangerous. We had a good first year at the place, but I don't think I'll be nostalgic for it anytime soon. While I wish we could have moved under less panicked circumstances, I’m really glad to be out of there.
We’re doing good now. The worst of the move is over, and the family was able to help clean the old place up. I’m healthy again, Heather has recovered, and it looks like we’ll end up better off in the end. The house is nice, the neighborhood is nice, the water isn’t cloudy with bits of plastic, and I’m not suffocating.
I’ve run the numbers. Because we couldn't properly plan the move ahead of time, we're going to have a full month of overlap where we're paying for both places. Rent for the old place, then (modestly higher) rent for the new. Plus the security deposit. Plus utilities at both places. Plus the cost of missing out on an Escapist column. Plus the cost of the stuff that got broken in the move. (My main monitor, and some random bits of furniture.) Plus the incidental costs of moving, which actually aren't all that incidental. The final cost of this move will be thousands.
Here’s the thing: The only reason we were able to do this was because of my Patreon money. It probably sounds like hyperbole to say that the campaign saved my life, but I honestly don't know how I would have gotten out of that jam without the support. You folks really did make a huge difference and saved our family from all kinds of heartache, uncertainty, and (much worse) financial loss.
So thanks. To all of you. Thanks for giving, thanks for reading, and thanks for taking interest in our little adventures.
– Shamus Young
My column this week is actually a Diecast mailbag question that I ninja’d from the rest of the cast. Wide and Nerdy sent in this one:
Dear Diecast,
I don’t understand this argument fans make about “after all this work we put in” in reference to playing a video game and the payoff that comes at the end. I’ve seen people defend this point.
It seems to me that if a game is work, you should be playing a different game, not hanging in there and then getting upset when the bit at the end fails to justify 20 to 30 hours of what is apparently considered “work.” Am I missing something?
It seemed interesting enough that I stole the question and used it for my column. Although, I might have drifted away from the question he posed. I dunno.
Hopefully I managed to answer his question somewhere in the column.
And yes, I avoided Mass Effect 3 on purpose. If you bring up ME3, then ME3 will overshadow the topic, and I really did want to discuss game endings in general. I’d be thread-jacking my own column.
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Hosts: Josh, Shamus, Rutskarn, Chris, and Arvind.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #76: Titan, Alien: Isolation, Steam Curation”
The story of Why I Moved continues…
The music roars from downstairs. I was just sitting at my desk, enjoying a hot cup of PVC herbal tea when someone downstairs decided to pump up the volume. Downstairs, Wilma has brought her sisterI assume. Betty to live with them, who likes to crank up the music until we can feel the furniture vibrate.
On the upside, she does this during reasonable daytime hours. On the other hand, my wife sometimes works nights and needs to sleep during the day. I try not to get upset about this. It's entirely possible that we're worse offenders when it comes to noise. We're on the top floor and we've got three teens. That can't be quiet. Moreover, they’re probably blasting music to cover up the the furious tunneling of the water company. Judging by the sounds I’m hearing, I figure that they have uncovered a balrog, which they are now fighting.
I kept hoping the problems with my asthma would blow over. I really don’t want to move. Apartment hunting is ruinously time consuming, tedious, and stressful. Moving is expensive. I have multiple projects going right now and I can't bear to have everything interrupted with that hassle. So I've been foolishly hoping that the cat wouldn't be a problem. Or that it would be a nuisance instead of a danger. I've been telling myself that my recent allergy problems were just seasonal pollen, and that the apartments should be isolated well enough to keep me safe. I've been ignoring the signs, huffing on the inhaler, and hoping for the best. In the meantime, the dander has been building up.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Something in the Water, Part 3”
I have a ton of content in the queue, but it’s all sort of stuck at 80% complete. I have some programming posts in response to Jon Blow’s language proposal. I’ve got this massive 8-part series that I’m simultaneously ashamed and proud of. I’ve got the end of my “Something in the Water” series. I keep getting yanked from one project to the next without finishing things up, which isn’t usually one of my vices.
The move is still keeping me busy and distracted, but at some point I’ll get back into my groove and the content will flow again. Right now I’m going slightly crazy. I have this thing where I get really antsy if the front page of the site has content that’s more than two weeks old. I realize this probably only matters to me. Most of you use RSS and the rest just hit the back button when there’s nothing new. But the desire to push Old Stuff off the front page is one of the drives that keeps me going.
In the meantime, here is some more of my alleged music:
The title doesn’t mean anything. I’ve just always found the phrase “shotgun wedding” inherently funny, like “chainsaw birthday party” or “gatling gun bat mitzvah”.
I just realized recently that I’m getting pretty close to have an “album” of music content. That’s really strange.
One final note is that if you’re looking for good electronic music, check out Corporate Lifestyle Simulator. It’s cheap, it’s modestly fun, and it’s the best soundtrack since Hotline Miami.
The story of Why I Moved continues…
The water company is still at it. I’m up on the second floor, so I have a really good view of the spectacle from here. As before, they’ve blocked off one of the major intersections and they’re turning perfectly good asphalt into rubble as fast as they can to get at the rottenOne assumes. water pipes underneath. They’ll tear up the whole street, blocking off traffic and making noise and confusion for days. A one-way-street passes right in front of the elementary school, then in front of our house, and then into the waiting arms of the water company’s obstructionist demolition team. This – coupled with the triangular street pattern in this corner of town – creates a really bad case of “you can’t get there from here”. Especially when the school buses show up. It's madness.
I go downstairs to check the mail. I have to walk down the precarious wooden steps and all the way around the house to do this, which makes up 90% of the exercise I’ll get today. If the postal service ever went on strike I’d probably gain 50 pounds.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Something in the Water, Part 2”
When the source code for Doom 3 was released, we got a look at some of the style conventions used by the developers. Here I analyze this style and explain what it all means.
A videogame that judges its audience, criticizes its genre, and hates its premise. How did this thing get made?
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
I was trying to make fun of how Silent Hill had lost its way but I ended up making fun of fighting games. Whatever.
Few people remember BioWare's Jade Empire, but it had a unique setting and a really well-executed plot twist.
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
There are two major schools of thought about how you should write software. Here's what they are and why people argue about it.
Why was this classic adventure game so funny in the 80's, and why did it stop being funny?
A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely knows anything about music.
This is a horrible narrative that undermines the hobby through crass stereotypes. The hobby is vast, gamers come from all walks of life, and you shouldn't judge ANY group by its worst members.
T w e n t y S i d e d
