i have been floated

the life and times of brad root

I’m not ignoring your message – I’m overwhelmed by the tyranny of being reachable

I’m switching lanes like a Subway Surfer. Digital whiplash has branded itself on to my cheek. My psychological tabs are maxed out, and there’s no alert to clear storage or update my internal OS.

This is a good read. I feel fortunate in that I, for some reason, have always been this person. I do this naturally. I recently heard a friend appreciate the fact that I am someone who always responds to messages.

Also… reading these two quoted sentences out of context make me think, “Did AI write this?” But we live in a new age where language is now shaped by LLMs, everything is suspect because nothing is immune, as the second you read LLM-generated text, you are susceptible to it.

I had to abandon my PSI-only playthrough of System Shock 2 because I am a giant baby and the game is very hard. I was only an hour and a half into it, so it wasn’t a big deal. I respec’d as a Navy boy, like 41% of gamers on Steam, and seem to be going for a gun-focused jack of all trades with no psionic ability at all.

I’m finally past the point that I got to as a teenager, which means I got to Deck 4 and saw the (in retrospect, as an adult, obvious) big reveal. But even with some more careful choices, I am still finding myself getting utterly schooled by this game on normal difficulty. No wonder teenage Brad, who was bad at video games and impatient, bounced off it despite the wonderful everything about the game.

I’m not quite sure what I am going to do. The worms and the flies are pretty brutal and now there are zombies who can throw grenades at me. How the fuck is anyone supposed to survive this? I feel like I should go back and respec again as some sort of mutant melee tank hero, because you’re always lacking for heals and ammo.

Maybe I am just not playing smart enough. It took me a while to figure out I needed to play Prey (2016) as if I was really there, and I’m still not quite there with System Shock 2. I should be noting down which replicators have stuff I need and be doing more backtracking. The maps felt massively huge when I was a teenager, but now they seem quite small and it’s very easy to cover them quickly… so why am I so stubbornly insisting I never leave a floor except to get chemicals for research? I am being a silly goose.

Ah, well, we’ll see what happens…

Nintendo finally sent me an invite to buy a Switch 2, so against my better judgement, I bought one. (Backstory: Nintendo kind of pisses me off, from releasing underpowered hardware, to their terrible online play systems, to never discounting their games, to …)

But, you know what, Mario Kart World is pretty good. I expected to be pretty underwhelmed both by the overall gameplay itself (I wasn’t a big fan of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe) and the graphics.

In actuality, the gameplay is pretty great and appears surprisingly deep (if you want to get crazy into wall riding and rails), the tracks are a lot of fun, and the graphics are pretty good. Could they be better? Sure, but they do the job and the game runs buttery smooth and looks great on my OLED. The new Rainbow Road specifically is a joy to race on and a spectacle to behold.

Is Mario Kart World worth a full $500 asking price to get the console and game together? I mean… no… but that’s the Nintendo tax for you.

Tonight we saw EMF and Spacehog live. EMF was great. Spacehog was… Spacehog? Their music is… not that great. But they were very entertaining: the guitarist got very mad about his equipment not working and at one point shoved his brother and lead vocalist over. Literally shoved him hard and he fell flat on his back on stage for a bit while everyone looked around in confusion, trying to figure out if it was a bit. But it didn’t seem to be a bit, and they got it together. I guess brothers fight, I wouldn’t know, having never had one.

I’m eight hours into Death Stranding 2 and it’s pretty fantastic. There are moments where you’d swear they swapped in actual filmed video because the graphics are so good.

I had a good time last night just completing aid requests and picking up random packages to try to grow my connection level to in the first area. When I played the first game, I stubbornly avoided all the side content, so by the end of the game I hadn’t even unlocked the truck. So I’m trying to avoid making that mistake this time around.