I know it has been a really long time between blog posts. And I haven’t done any coding on the since I Don’t Know When. Yes, I can hear you, Gentle Reader, saying “WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THAT?”
Well let me just say first of all is that the reason I am even taking the time now to post is that I’m in isolation with COVID (omicron strain, I expect) and I’m running out of things to do. I’ve been here nearly 9 days, so if I was going to have any problems I would have had them by now. I have had a very mild case.
Other than that, what have I been doing? Well, a lot of work. My job is as the sole techie for a small company, so I do the programming, graphic design, database admin, cloud configuration, documentation, requirements gathering and troubleshooting. It’s well within my skill set but with so many different things to do I am a bit pulled from pillar to post, solving a different sort of stupid problem every day.
I do all those same things for Extended Stats as well, and the real problem is that when I have spare time I just don’t want to do it any more. Yes, Extended Stats uses newer technology, but if you’ve seen one inexplicably stupid problem trying to connect to a cloud database, you’ve seen ’em all. Not that it’s any use to you because the new problem seems to contradict everything you previously learnt no matter how much it is. But this means that the part of my brain which needs to Figure Tech Stuff Out is completely over it by the time I finish work, and I am not motivated to work on Extended Stats.
For example, one of the periodic tasks I have to do is to look in the Extended Stats database and look at the errors about deleted BGG users. Extended Stats assumes it has the wrong URL and tries again later, hundreds of thousands of times. And yes, I should fix that, but I’m never clear whether the user has really gone or Aldie has changed something, so I err on the side of caution. I went to do that task last night – it should take 10 minutes – and spent 2 hours trying to figure out how to connect to my database.
I used to connect from my work laptop where I had the correct credentials set up, but that laptop died in December (and due to something stupid in the current Ubuntu software, it still hates being rebooted) and I lost that config. So I had to rebuild it, and I kept getting it wrong. But it was really hard to tell because AWS’s networking and MySQL’s user security only ever tell you Computer Says No, Do This Udemy Course To Find Out Why. So, you know, 2 hours to do a 10 minute maintenance job, when is there time to do coding?
But anyway, the other insidious thing that is preventing me from looking at the site ever is MMORPGs. I’ve been a massive fan of Skyrim for 10 years, and Extended Stats has survived two previous Skyrim obsessions. Early last year I decided it was time for Skyrim VR, so I bought a VR headset – as it would turn out, almost the last one available in Sydney.
Skyrim VR turned out to be a flop because for some reason I couldn’t put my weapon away – it could be a bug in the game or a fault in the controller. But we really got into Beat Saber and I played that for a while.
I was still hankering for an RPG fix, so I downloaded the free Neverwinter game. Oh wow, it was so complicated! I had a whole new thing to learn, so I spent months doing that. I replaced my 10 year old TV, got a headset to chat online, etc, and ended up becoming a guildmaster. But then the Neverwinter developers decided that they had to revise the whole statistics system. It’s not like they had got the previous one working properly anyway. So they revised the whole game, introduced even more bugs, and devalued all of the things I had earned and that I had paid for.
That’s no way to treat customers, and I recognised when I was being played for a chump, so I stopped playing. But now that I knew a lot more about MMOs, I decided to bite the bullet and try out Elder Scrolls Online, which is the same IP as Skyrim.
ESO is a very good game, and the development team seems to be a lot more considerate and competent than the Neverwinter rabble. For example, some online ESO doco is 5 years old but not out of date. In many games, for example World of Warcraft, players need to get the newest stuff or their characters become relatively weak, but ESO tries to avoid doing that. Yes, there are dissenting opinions on the capabilities and ethics of the developers, but many of them come from people who have no money, are not programmers, and think that the world owes them video games. I’m very happy playing ESO.
Which does not help you guys One Little Bit. Nor does it help my board gaming, either – I haven’t even been playing solo games. But rest assured I’ve been doing Extended Stats for 15 years now and I don’t see any reason to stop. One day it will become the project I am obsessed with, again.
