This review of Grounded by Jim Sterling caught my interest. It’s one of those survival games where the hook is that you’ve shrunk to the size of an ant and you have to kill stuff and collect stuff and build stuff, and it’s full of spiders. I could get into that.

Then, the catch: it’s for XBox. Nope, sorry, never gonna get a console — I don’t play games enough — and I’m definitely not getting anything Microsoft.

Also, it looks like the spiders are just your implacable enemies, which is appropriate, but not as much fun as playing as the spider. Years and years ago, I played SimAnt, and would only play as an ant long enough to see the colony grow to a large size, and then I’d type in a cheat code that let me be the spider, with laser eyes. Now that was a game!

There’s a rumor going around that we’re in the midst of a pandemic, and that it’s unwise to gather in large groups. The disease is getting worse, not better, and the half-hearted lockdown of previous months has clearly failed, and we’re past the time when the whole nation has to this thing damned seriously.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey:

In the most recent incident, three residents were charged for violating the governor’s order limiting the size of gatherings after at least 700 people were found partying in an Airbnb rental on Sunday, police officials said.

700 people. Partying. I was shocked at the stupidity of the idea of a massive gathering of people exhaling on each other, but then, in the next sentence…

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy’s order limits outdoor gatherings to 500 people and indoor gatherings to 100 or 25% of a room’s capacity.

Wait, the official limit is 500? What kind of feeble Mickey Mouse restriction is this?

Also, I thought Airbnb was known to be a criminal scam.

Hey! Sitosis, the free minecraft server, just generated a new map, with spawn right on top of a village. It looks like an interesting map!

I’ve jumped in, built a boat, and sailed northeast to stake out a little shack at 230, -605. If you want join me in the neighborhood, great! Let me know when anyone would like to do a group session, maybe we can coordinate something.

While this is a good example of satire…

…it also effectively reduces my interest in ever visiting a restaurant ever again, even in the absence of a pandemic. I don’t think that’s what was intended.

For some reason (and this post will probably make it worse), social media have been slamming me with ads for model rockets. Maybe they’re digging way, way back into our commercial history, because I was last personally into them back in junior high — the early ’70s. I do have to admit, though, that these latest models look pretty sweet and tempt me into trying.

I’d probably face the same problem I did in junior high, though: I’d scrimp and save to buy a model to fuss over, and then I’d have no money to buy the engines you need to launch them. There were also all these accessories you needed, like an ignition system and a launch pad, and I couldn’t afford that, either.

Oh, well. Just mentioning this ancient interest means that Big Brother will helpfully dig up all kinds of pretty pictures of spaceships to sprinkle into my mentions. That works for me! Especially if they displace all the crappy ads for insrnce and fnerl services and mle enhncem*nt services I usually get.

Those of you who tuned into my youtube livestream yesterday know that the presentation was terrible — the audio was thoroughly screwed up. I think I fixed the problem now, though, so I’m going to test my setup tonight at 9pm, and just open the floor to any questions. If no one shows up and I only do an audio recording test, that’s fine too.

My wife is obsessed with our lawn, and I hate it. She sends me out to mow the stupid useless thing in the morning, a task made even more difficult because it’s covered with dew-speckled webs, and I have to destroy them.

It’s like a regular village out there, with all these little spider homes everywhere. And if you look closely…is that a hobbit hole?

Surely it is. It’s gone now, though — I scoured this little shire thoroughly, and now it’s just a wasteland of stubby, wounded grass weeping volatile semiochemicals into the air, the grieving survivors rallying and swearing to rebuild and maybe planning their vengeance.

Against me. Am I the implacable, inscrutable monster in this scenario? Would Sauron have felt a sense of relief when the oppressed rose up and destroyed him? I don’t think I would have minded if a swarm of spiders had scurried up to end my reign of terror.

I just returned from the optometrist, and it’s the last piece of the ensemble I need to complete the look.

I don’t know why Charles is hovering over my shoulder like that, but he keeps whispering, “Turn to the Dark Side!”