Emotionally Amputated

I'm not going share this entry on Facebook or Google+, because I don't want it to look like I'm trying to milk the subject for clicks, because right now it seems like everyone has something to say about it.

I had to write a little news article about how Blizzard are going to pay tribute to the late Robin Williams by including him as an NPC in World of Warcraft. The first thing that annoys me is the ever-repeating wave of wisecracks bringing up that same old argument: thousands of people die every day and now we're all acting sad and depressed, just because some celebrity died. And there's only one thing I have to say to you guys. Fuck you.

Just because you don't personally know someone, just because they weren't friends or family and you didn't hang out doesn't mean you can't be sad when they die. Many people grew up watching his movies, enjoying his standup comedy and just like some of you get overly attached to ancient 8bit gaming systems or Saturday morning cartoon shows, others get attached to certain films, actors and the characters they played. Some draw inspiration from them or find their role-model. I wasn't a huge fan of Robin Williams, myself, but it pisses me off when people want to dictate what one should or shouldn't feel sad about. Just shut up.

What annoys me even more are people, who argue whether or not depression is a "real disease" and call Williams a selfish coward for ending his life. Depression is the darkest, most soul-crushing form of loneliness. Imagine seeing your firstborn child for the first time, hearing their first words, watching them make their first steps and you feel absolutely nothing. You know you're supposed to feel something, there is this magical bond everybody talks to you about, you know there should be something, but you're completely detached and watch the whole thing like a neutral bystander. If anything, there is despair, because you know there is something wrong and everybody around you expects you to feel something, so you pretend to make everybody happy.

Imagine your father dies, suddenly, unexpectedly and without warning and week after week you're waiting to cry, you're waiting to grieve and there is simply nothing. After you've already felt nothing when both your grandparents died a few months earlier. Everyone around you at the funeral cries, everyone is sad and heartbroken. And you try to fit in. Be normal, even though you know you're not and there's something wrong with you.

My friends, readers, fans, people I work with, nobody has ever met me face to face. I get dozens of people asking to meet me at events like Gamescom right now, role-playing conventions, people want to come over and meet me here in the UK and I always ignore them. I don't want them to see me. I don't want them to meet the real me. My blog, my columns and articles, everything I do online makes people laugh. When I have to meet with neighbours and family I make them laugh. I'm good at that. It's a persona. It creates a safe distance and distracts from the real me.

As a child, I had to deal with more abuse, alcoholism, violence and other bullshit than I want to bore you with. I tried to talk about these things with my father a few years back, just before I left the country and moved to the UK. He felt like I was attacking him. Told me it's ancient history and I should get over it already. But that's not how it works. You don't just "get over it", without ever being able to talk to the one person, who was responsible for all the drama and pain. Nobody cared, nobody listened and I didn't matter at all. Wouldn't have made any difference had I not existed at all.

You don't want to know what it's like to just exist from one day to the next, having absolutely no reason to get up in the morning. For the most part, I didn't feel "sad" on the bad days. I just felt nothing. I didn't care. About myself. About life. Swallowed a whole box of pills once to see if I'd stop waking up altogether. It's hard to describe. It just felt more interesting than life, if that makes any sense.

My partner loves me and cares about me today. I'm building a decent relationship with my son. I'm looking after our ever-growing collection of pets. I have the one job I always dreamed about as a kid. In a way, everything turned out okay for me in the end and I'm glad those pills just severely fucked me up and didn't kill me. I enjoy life and I'm happy with things the way they are, though I'm still far from normal.

I don't miss my family back in Germany. Everyone was happy to see me at the funeral, but I didn't stay in touch and it doesn't feel like it matters. I'm still not crying over the loss of my father or my grandparents. And I'm still pretending.
I'm not suicidal. I'm not sad. I've learned to deal with the whole thing my own way and I'm leading a reasonably normal life. But that shit doesn't just go away over night.

-Cat

Back To Amalur

I want to see a cooking show on tv where the chef has Tourettes. "Now you just add a pinch of salt AND SOME FUCKING PEPPER, give it a good stir and you're done. HITLER! PENIS!" I'd watch the crap out of that.

If you happen to own an account on EA's gaming platform Origin and you're even remotely interested in RPGs, go download Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. They give you two whole days to try it for free and it's 50% off after that, so there's a pretty good deal on a fantastic game, which most people didn't have on their radar when it came out, what with all them Fallouts and Skyrims and Witchers around.

It's a damn shame, too, because wow - this game is so much fun! Like every good game, Amalur begins with your death. But you get better and it turns out you have no fate. You see, everyone in Amalur has a fate and the whole place is destined to be fucked. A bunch of super hateful humans wage war against all the elves, dwarves and other weirdos and they're about to win, but then you show up and you're in control of your own fate and you can change the fate of the whole world, so everyone is hoping for you to save the day - unless you need gear or potions or something. You still gotta pay for those, saviour of the world or not.

"Not tonight, I'm about to have a splitting headache."

What makes this game so great is its combat system. It's not as visually impressive as Skyrim, it doesn't have the epic story of Dragon Age: Origins and the clunky console interface on the PC version is actually worse than Skyrim. But the battles, holy shit, those battles. You can sneak up on enemies and backstab the crap out of them, hack them to bits with "fae blades", which is just fancy speak for warglaives. Pound them to pudding with hammers and greatswords or shoot them from a distance with a longbow. Or just throw a pair of burning chakrams at your enemies, because that's totally possible.

The game lets you map two different weapons to your attack keys at any time, so you can combine attacks and combos from your two favourite weapon types and chain them up as you please. Alternatively, if you're reeeeally into, say, swords, you could map a flaming longsword to one and a frozen longsword to another attack button, so you'll be able to take down enemies, who are resistant to one and vulnerable to the other.

You get warrior, mage and rogue skilltrees, which you may power up upon level ups as you please. Be the ultimate warrior, be a rogue spellcaster or do a little bit of everything. On top of that you get adventuring skills like lockpicking, blacksmithing, persuasion and lots of other cool, self-explanatory stuff. So creating just the kind of character you want, something to match your preferenes and play style is really easy and lots of fun.

Getting through the main storyline roughly takes 20-30 hours, but you can easly slap on another 100 if you want to do ALL THE  THINGS, like side quests, dungeons and so forth. For instance, there's this cursed wolf, who has been turned into a human by a bunch of bored spirits, and he reeeally wants to go back to his animal self, because he hates having to wear pants. Sure, the quest itself plays out like any generic RPG sidequest, but the story is great and I had lots of fun with it.
There's also some DLC content, which adds even more stuff to do, but even without it, Amalur is absolutely massive and you can go pretty much anywhere you want, anytime you want. It's not as completely open as Fallout or Skyrim, but it offers a lot more visual variety.

Eat up!

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning also features elves with goofy Irish accents and some of the best music you'll ever hear in any RPG. Even if you don't usually give a crap about my videos, click on that thing at the end of this entry and just play the first two minutes and tell me that tune isn't awesome. It sounds like something taken straight out of a Batman movie. Well, one of the cool Batman movies, before they were about nipples or stupid voices and shit.

Sadly, this game never got the attention it deserved and lots of people completely ignored it. Give it a try. Look at the combat in that video below and tell me it doesn't look fun. I never finished the game when it first came out, because there were too many other great RPGs around and I completely forgot about this one. But this time around I'm gonna finish this.

-Cat

One More Crimson Dragon

Okay, one last quick update on the game, then I'll spare you with it. I've almost completed the whole thing now and unlocked the chaos version of my favourite dragon, which was immensely fun. That said, it's starting to feel more and more like the game was maybe 50% done and then they just pushed it out to have an XBone launch title.

Crimson Dragon is supposed to play on a planet called Draco, because wow, how utterly inventive. But said planet apparently only consists of a lake with a cave underneath, a forest and some abandoned high tech city and that's it. Some planet! Sure, that's still more variety than Hoth, Endor, Tattooine, Dagobah, but... come on! The city levels start off in a desert landscape, which suggests that there were actual desert levels planned for this game at some point. In fact, the description for one of the dragons claims that it is native to Draco's desert.

When the story takes you into that abandoned city, a cutscene claims you're being sent away, because you've stumbled across some super secret conspiracy or something. Except, when you go back to the mission selection, it takes you right back to the city, so whatever story arc they had intended to put in there to take you back out of the city only appears in the narrative, but is never actually played out ingame. The fact that two of the "different locations" in the game are essentially the same but at different times of day suggests that there might have been various day/night time versions of other areas in the making, as well.

Apparently, the game's original soundtrack also happens to contain a few tunes, which are nowhere to be found within the game itself. So, um - why would they need more bgm tracks than actual levels in the game, unless they had originally planned to make the game bigger than it is today?

It's sad. It feels like I'm playing an alpha version that shows off the basic elements and features, but at least another half of the game is yet to come. Instead, I only have three more missions ahead of me. There's always multiplayer if I want to show off my beefy dragon to random strangers and I can always power up and evolve some of the other dragons, but I'm not a huge fan of repeating content over and over again. I know I said I don't mind the RPG-style grind, but that usually happens with some greater goal or higher level content in mind, which you'll access after the grind is done. Of course there are also achievements, but anyone who considers those actual content is an idiot, who only contributes to the content shortage within many modern games.

-Cat

Xbox, Go Home!

Update 3 for TESO is live. Well... half of it, sort of. They've now added armor dyes, so 90% of all players are running around in black and red armor. And I jumped on the bandwagon.

Unfortunately, the rest of the game is still so incredibly average that I just can't get myself to enjoy it very much. I've unsubscribed again and I don't think I'll be back before the introduction of champion levels.

One problem I have with this game is how they announce new guild features like custom tabards and stuff much like on WoW and some other MMOs, then they disable guilds completely upon release of the stupid update with zero information on when we even get to use these new features. Meanwhile, the news and update notes proclaim that stuff is already in there when it really isn't.

According to the patch notes, experience for killing people in pvp has been increased a lot, but when I was only two percent closer to my level up after a solid hour of pvp I just lost interest. "Progress" still happens at a dreadfully slow pace and it doesn't help that people get kicked off the servers every ten or so minutes. "An unknown error occured", welcome back to the login screen! That's not what I had hoped to see after the EU-Megaserver had finally migrated to the EU from fucking Texas.

Up next I was actually hoping to show you some self-recorded footage of Crimson Dragon on the Xbox One, but the powers that be have decided otherwise. The Xbone allows you to record ingame footage, trim it, edit it, add all kinds of neat special effects and intros and what have you. And then you're supposed to upload it to OneDrive, a cloud storage, which allows you to share your footage with the interwebs. Only I keep getting an error message whenever the upload is 90something percent done, which has been happening to lots of people since fucking day one.

Instead, enjoy random press release screenshots.

Of course, none of this would be a problem if this console hadn't been developed by assholes. You see, my Xbone is connected to our home network, where it shares internet access with all the other consoles and PCs in the house. Does that mean I can just access the damn video files through the network? Of course not, because that would make sense and be user friendly and convenient. So can I just plug a USB flash drive into one of the console's many USB ports and store video and screenshots on it? Noooope. I can, of course, buy an external HDD, which must be USB 3 compatible and at least have 256GB of empty space available in order for it to be even fucking recognized, but I'm really not that desperate to share five minutes of random gameplay with the world.

So until I can fix my annoying upload problem or Microsoft decide to support flash drives and/or network capabilities on their stupid "next-gen" console, you're just gonna have to imagine videos of dragons fighting, growing, evolving, racing and doing all kinds of shit while I talk about the actual game some more.

UPDATE: Well, what do you know - sometimes all it takes is trying the same shit over and over again for two hours and a lot of bitching. I have finally managed to get a whole five minutes of fucking gameplay on the 'net after only about a dozen or so error messages. Enjoy:

If you're into dragons and rail shooters, then this game might look tempting, especially if you're a fan of the old Panzer Dragoon games. Unfortunately, what little gameplay I'm showing off in my video pretty much covers 90% of what this game has to offer. Crimson Dragon offers about as many levels, enemies and bosses as the first ever Panzer Dragoon, which could be finished in under an hour. However, they're stretching this content with RPG-style grinding and leveling mechanics in order to make it last for several days, maybe weeks.

Crimson Dragon lets you ride half a dozen different dragons, all of which come with their own strengths and weaknesses. They can be taught new skills and upgraded and evolved into ever bigger, deadlier, cooler-looking dragons. It's a pretty neat feature, which brings with it an awful lot of content-stretching. First of all, in order to even unlock all dragons you need to gain levels and earn credits by playing the game. Evolving dragons requires special items from rare monsters, which will only spawn if you're lucky - and then you'll still have to kill them before they disappear in order to get that item you need. If your dragon is ready to evolve, he'll stop gaining any more levels or stat points until you've acquired all the stuff you need in order to evolve him to his next form.

And technically, the game really only has five different levels: A cave, a lake, the exact same lake but at fucking sunset, a forest and some ancient, yet somehow sci-fi city. That's it. And each of these levels offer half a dozen or so different missions, meaning you'll be returning to the exact same areas over and over again killing slightly different enemies or hunting for more rare items in order to progress further through the game. And that's about all there is to do on there.

You can also team up with up to two extra dragon riders in cooperative multiplayer, which is an experience I'm simply too old or too civilized to enjoy. Basically, the game threw people named xxSP0Og3m4st3r5000xx at me, then tossed me into whatever mission this wonderful member of the human species has selected, whilst forcing me to witness what I assume must have been open mic night in a random apartment in Italy. I heard a man and a woman shouting Italian insults at each other, while one or two little children were crying in the background.
Their constant fighting and moaning completely drowned out the ingame audio and I got to enjoy it all via 5.1 surround sound with no obvious possibility to mute that shit without having to completely disable all audio altogether.

The amount of people, who plug in their microphones without giving a shit about what they pick up during play is mind-boggling. That is, if you get into a multiplayer session at all. 90 percent of the time you get stuck on a popup saying "accessing session" and then nothing happens for a full minute before it either boots you right back to the title screen or puts you in an empty lobby with no other players. In other cases you get stuck with people, who repeat the exact same mission over and over, because they're after a specific item or achievement.

Despite what I'm writing here, I don't actually hate the game. Quite the opposite, actually. While I absolutely hate the multiplayer experience with random strangers, I quite enjoy playing this game in singleplayer mode and I could see myself enjoying multiplayer with friends (I totally have those, shut up). I don't mind RPG-style grinding mechanics, gaining levels, slowly turning my dragon from a weak, scrawny wimp into a hulking beast that brings death and destruction to the five or so different enemies in the game. And then I spend my hard-earned credits on randomized item packs, which contain boosters and new abilities and skills to upgrade my dragon with. They work more or less like the reinforcement packs on Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, up to the point where you can spend real cash on them if you're impatient. So far I didn't feel the need to spend any real money on random upgrades and I don't think I'm going to.

Crimson Dragon isn't a great game, it's probably not even a good game. But it's okay, I'm having a lot of fun with it and it's still free for Xbox Gold customers for the rest of the month. So, if my description doesn't totally put you off and you're still tempted, you may as well give it a try. Nothing to lose but time.

-Cat

My XBone And The Shitty Rez

Gaming is always more fun with people you know and love. Claire's mother is making her first curious steps into Warframe, so we've been playing that a bit over the weekend. I'm converting the footage right now. We also had Claire's sister over for some Castle Crashers. The game is incredibly fun!

We've battled our way through the forest of shitting animals, mounted the diarrhea-deer and defeated the mighty catfish and I may have decapitated my significant other and her sister with a chainsaw, because in the end only one of us can have the princess. Castle Crashers also features the coolest resurrection system I've ever seen in any cooperative game. When the last breath escapes one of your dear team mates, you may provide first aid. Now, if you're really into it and you use proper timing during the CPR-minigame, you'll bring your fallen comrade back to full life House MD style. Of course that's not always an option in the middle of a heated boss battle, so more often than not you'll end up providing what we're referring to as a "shitty rez", which puts a downed knight back on their feet, buuuuut they'll usually topple over after getting nudged ever so gently.

I have also booted up my Xbox One for the very first time. I got it for free many moons ago, because I've agreed to review games on it, but so far I haven't received any, so the ol' box had been more of a luxury doorstopper. And what can I say - it pays off to be a natural pessimist. Most of what I've read about the Xbone was largely negative. The thing is more expensive than a PS4, yet seems to offer the weaker hardware, many games either run at only 720p and/or 30 FPS and none of the launch titles really look all that "next-gen". That said, it almost seems like we have reached a point where games no longer improve all that much in the graphics department, unless you want to scale everything up to 4k resolution. I really don't think that's even remotely possible on this new generation of consoles, so it's probably not going to become a new standard anytime soon.

My first pleasant surprise was Killer Instinct. Sure, KI isn't exactly Street Fighter and the ridiculous combo-system isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I find it a lot of fun to play. What's so great about the Xbone version is how the game is basically free. You get all the game modes, all the characters, all the content for free, BUT you may only play one of the characters yourself. If you want to unlock any of the other characters, you'll have to pay a small amount of money. Alternatively, you can pay 20something monies and unlock everything. I think that's a fantastic system, especially if you're a veteran to the series and you already have one or two favourite characters and you know you're only gonna play those, anyway. Just pay for the character you want, beat the whole game, go online, compete in the leaderboards, do all the things. You can't make monetization any fairer than that.

Visually, it's really not any more impressive than games like Soul Calibur V on the Xbox360, but it's a Free2Play launch title, so maybe I shouldn't expect too much here in the first place.

What really surprised me about the Xbone is how user-friendly and fun to use it is. I had no idea, because frankly, everything I ever read was about hardware and resolution and exclusive titles and there's a shitty tv ad with Jesse Pinkman, which provides a vague idea about how the whole thing works, but they're not really explaining any of the features too well. So I was pleasantly surprised when I fired up the games browser.

You see this library of games with their box art, a description, a price tag and an option to buy and download them all straight away. What's more important, each and every game comes with trailers, screenshots and live streams of people, who are currently playing the game you're looking at. For instance, I was checking out Crimson Dragon and when the screenshots weren't totally convincing, the menu highlighted the stream of some guy, who was playing the game at the time, so I could just watch him for a while and get a good impression of what the game was all about. There was also a whole library of recorded footage, which had been uploaded by other players.

What impressed me the most was the overall quality of it all. Select a stream or some pre-recorded video footage and it all plays instantly, in super high quality, no load times, no buffering, no hassle. Compared to how long it takes to get my shit up on youtube or find decent quality settings for a Twitch stream on PC, this almost feels like magic. Checking out new games has never been so fun. Also, I think I'm gonna go grab Crimson Dragon. I know it scored some pretty shitty review scores, but as a day one Panzer Dragoon fan, this title is pretty much a must-have for my collection.

Had another dream about my zombie grandparents and they still seem happy. I want to ask them what it's like being dead and all, but somehow I never do, because it seems rude. The loss of my father is starting to settle in a little more, as well. Usually during the weirdest moments. Sometimes I look at some new game or I try an upcoming new MMO and I think to myself, 'Yeah, I should tell him about this one, I think he's gonna like it'. And then I realize... well, you know. My son is also crazy about gaming, so in a way, the whole thing just started over, but this time I'm playing the role of the father. It feels weird.

Oh well. There are videos to convert, news to post and emails to send. I should go. We'll bang, okay?

-Cat

ArcheAge First Impressions And Fat Dogs

The awesome folks at Trion Worlds were nice enough to send a bunch of ArcheAge founder's packs to the editing office and I was one of the lucky people to receive one. I have just taken my first few steps into the game and while I haven't seen the game's most promising features like siege battles or travel at sea, what I did see was a bit... underwhelming. I'm converting a gameplay video right now, so be sure to check my Youtube channel or this blog later.

It looks decent, but it runs like shit.

ArcheAge uses the CryEngine 3 and is easily one of the most visually stunning MMORPGs I have ever played. It's also the MMORPG with the poorest performance I've ever seen. The game stutters and freezes like crazy and apparently my GTX 780 and my quadcore CPU are no match for this title. Another thing that bothered me right away was the music. I have picked the race of freaky, bipedal cat people for my starting character because duh. And the music in their zone sounds like the kind of stuff they play at Chinese restaurants. It's slow-paced, whiny, annoying and the first thing I turned off right after disabling public chat.

The varied landscapes are a lot of fun.

It's a Free2Play MMO and while access is currently limited to founders and a lucky few, who have been invited to the beta, I've already stumpled across players named "Pussy" and there was a whole lot of flaming, trolling and talk about boob milk going on in public chat. That's hardly the fault of the game, but it servers as a gentle reminder why I don't really care much for online games anymore these days. On that note, be prepared to compete over quest items and mobs with other players, because there is no GW2-style sharing on here, where you can just gang up on the same monster and every player gets their progress. Well, I assume it still works if you group up first, but I don't want to be in a group with a guy named Pussy.

I choose to fight alone.

Everything else I have seen so far was utterly generic. You fight baddies by clicking stuff on your hotbar, just like every other MMO before ArcheAge, save for the handfull of titles with more active combat systems. It's a lot faster than, say, WoW, and there are no long cooldowns, but in the end I found myself winning most battles by simply mashing one or two buttons. I'm sure things will get a little more entertaining at the higher levels, but the noob experience was dull and not remotely challenging.

The quests offered nothing new, either: kill 5 of these, loot 3 of those, rinse, repeat. You do get some speech here and there, which is usually accompanied by some still artwork or even a little engine-cutscene, which is nice. That said, this feature wasn't fun or entertaining enough to keep me interested in the boring quests.

Worst ArcheAge feature: My fucking mount.

Founders get a certain amount of item shop currency, so I went and bought a mount - and immediately regretted it. If you dismount your four-legged companion, he'll follow you around rather than getting unsummoned like they do on WoW. Sounds amazing, but I found myself randomly clicking and mounting the damn thing whenever I wanted to rotate the camera or interact with quest items and the stupid animal just got in the way.

Another fun feature is being able to have an extra passenger on your mount. People would constantly hop on my mount, even when I wasn't riding it, because I was fighting monsters or waiting for a boss to respawn (hellooooo 2005!). There's a button to kick unwanted passengers off, but it only took about five minutes until I had some asshole following me around and hopping on my mount over and over again, no matter how many times I booted him off. Great feature, thanks a lot!

Some quests come with cutscenes, which usually run at or below 5 FPS.

My biggest concern is a resource called "Labour". You see, enemies don't simply drop coin when you kill them. They drop a purse. Wanna open the purse and get the money out? That'll cost you a certain amount of labour. Want to identify an item? Costs more labour. As a premium player I never ran out of labour, but limiting your amount of daily actions is a dick move and it'll probably be a much bigger problem to free players.

A good Free2Play game should reward you for paying a little extra (e.g. cool costumes, experience boosters), but not punish you if you can't or don't want to afford paying up. And if you can only perform so many actions a day and then you're forced to wait for several hours before you can loot money or identify items again, that's not okay. That's punishing people for not wanting to pay and it sucks.

This is by no means supposed to be a fair, objective review. I've only played the game for an hour or two and those were my first impressions. That said, the only reason why I've stopped playing the game so early is because it didn't grip me at all when I started it and it bored me to tears a few minutes later. Again, I should probably see the PvP, the exploration and combat at sea and the post-noob content before I can fairly assess this game, but until then we're off to a bad start.

On a funnier note, Claire has hatched a new Kubrow (read: space dog) on Warframe aaaaand... well.

Oink!

Both the most fun and the most annoying feature of these companions is that you don't know what you'll get until you've hatched and raised them. My Kubrow turned into a tall, slim, gracious, almost regal creature wit long, pointed ears and long legs. She runs across the battlefield alongside my character, fights by his side, turns bad guys to shreds and everyone is happy. Like so:

And then there's Claire's new pet. Heh.

Her Kubrow is the one on the right. Eat ALL the pies!

She raised a fat, disgusting little pig, whom we can almost smell through our computers. That thing is about half the height and five times the mass of my kubrow and when it tries to keep up with its owner it causes little earthquakes and lags the servers. Okay, it's not that bad, but let's just say it's very comical and a bit tragic to watch.

I'm actually quite pleased to see just how much diversity there is from one Kubrow to another and I don't hate the little fatty or anything. Pretty much the opposite - it gives them personality. It's just funny to see a rather nice, slim, dangerous-looking Kubrow and then Claire ends up with this... pig. It's dirt-coloured, it snorts, it has a dull look on its face and it wrestles enemies like a bear. Which is pretty cool, I suppose. A bear kubrow.

And then he ate Obelix.

She said she hates her Kubrow and thinks about neglecting it until it dies (which can actually happen). Can you believe she runs a pet shop for a living? I hope she'll change her mind and that ugly, hairy booger will grow on her over time.

-Cat

Antisocially Awkward

One thing I hate about renting a place, aside from having to pay rent and being stuck with asshole neighbours, who pay just as much rent as you do, is how they check on your place every year or so to make sure you don't shit on the carpet and invite families of gypsies to live with you or something. There's an inspection happening here in a few hours, first one in well over two years and I hate that shit. Our house had just finished decorating itself with assorted spiders and an absolutely marvelous collection of webs.

I used to hate spiders. I couldn't look at them, let alone touch them, had a bit of a phobia, thanks to some traumatic childhood moments. But our house is constantly getting invaded by the little fuckers and I suppose they have to live somewhere, right? I mean, if it's rainy outside and they're cutting down all the trees in our garden, where are they supposed to go? That's a bit of a stupid argument, I suppose, but we still ended up tolerating them after a while. The result being that we had at least three of them in every corner of every room, but we had no more mosquitoes, no moths, not much of anything that wasn't a spider.

The other day I was taking a bath (yes, that time of the year again) and I saw a spider in the corner of our bathroom, which had caught something in its web and started rotating its prey and webbing it up and it was all very fascinating. When they get too close to my computer or too close to my pillow at night or some other spot where I don't want them, it's usually enough to poke them and they get scared shitless and run off. I actually got the idea from some animated .gif, though I'm glad we don't usually get anything the size of that monster.

But today I had to get rid of all the spider webs and all my favourite garbage and old cardboard boxes and stains on the walls and doors and floors and we had to clean aaaaaall the things, because stupid inspection day. I know they don't come here to make sure we're neat and tidy, but it's always good to pretend we don't treat this place like a dump.

And then that guy will walk through every single room, stare at the ceiling as though there was something interesting going on up there, he'll take notes on his stupid little clipboard and not tell us what he's writing on there and then he'll tell us we need to paint a wall or put up some wallpaper or fix some shit that had been broken before we even moved in here. It's a fucking invasion of privacy and I don't like it. I don't like people in my bedroom. Or my bathroom. Or anywhere, really.

Aaaaand we may not have told the landlord about our new dog.

Him.

They were okay with our snake, the little lizards and the cats. But a giant monitor lizard might be pushing it a bit. I don't know. I honestly don't know what to expect. The thing is, Hugo doesn't make any noise. Okay, he can cough like an old man, especially when he's asleep and dreams up weird shit. I'm not making this up, he twitches and moves and makes weird noises in his sleep. But he doesn't bark or howl or make a mess or do much of anything, really. He produces no noise or odors. If you hate animals, he's the best kind of pet your neighbours could have. There's just the small problem that the inspection guy might not see a peaceful monitor lizard but a terrifying small dinosaur and that could cause drama.

Then again, we've lived here for well over four years, never caused any trouble (unlike all the other fuckers who live in this house), we're always on time with the rent (again, unlike certain other parties around here), so surely we've scored a brownie point there or two, right?

Still, I'm gonna have to be awake much earlier than I want to, some guy is gonna judge our home and the way we live and there's a small chance for drama involving my favourite pet, so... yeah, not looking forward to that.

On a happier note, I had the chance to record some warframe pet action footage, which has instantly scored a dislike for some inexplicable reason (seriously, if my videos are so shit, at least tell me why, so I can improve them!) and now I can't play, because Warframe is getting hit by constant DDOS attacks, which seem to be related to some stupid clan-related bullcrap on there and lots of people hating each other. I hate online games. Can we please go back to offline titles with optional multiplayer, where I can only invite my friends and loved ones and ignore everybody else? That'd be great.

-Cat