Cav's Place

Since they recently turned five years old, GOG.com have been giving away games since last week, and I won two $9.99 ones. Both wins were direct, for being among the first 40 to send the correct answers, with the correct title, for the word search one and then for being among the first 20 to send the correct answers, with the correct title and in the correct format, for the quiz. And I’m not sure if they made any of the draws yet, seeing as at the start of the week they were saying they hadn’t made any for last week’s contests, so there may still be some chances to grab something else from my wishlist. After all, since they still won’t offer any payment methods I can use to actually purchase anything, this is the only way I have to do that.
Either way, the games I picked were Age of Wonders II: The Wizard’s Throne and Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic, since I remembered playing the first Age of Wonders way back and the series was also recommended to me when I asked for suggestions of games I may actually enjoy and not be too frustrated by on the MobyGames forum, not long ago. I even installed and started Wizard’s Throne yesterday and mean to see how much I can stick to it, seeing as Shadow Magic is seen as being better than it in every aspect and therefore I’m quite sure I’ll never be able to get myself back to it if I’ll also try that before I’m done with this.
Then again, so far I just keep losing, and I’m only at the first scenario of the campaign, so I’m not sure how long this will last. If I’ll want a break, I still have that little thing called Blades of Heaven which I started at some point, plus of course The Witcher, which I also picked from GOG.com, along with its sequel, when I won two games without a price limit at the end of 2012, but then very suddenly gave up on at some point in chapter two and can’t get myself to get back to since, being too afraid I’ll mess something up. In that situation of being installed and started but very suddenly given up on, there’s also Divinity II, but that’s fourth on the list at the moment and I find it unlikely that I’ll even try to get back to it before making very serious attempts with all of the other three.

On a related note, seeing as I still linked to the games’ pages on that site, you might have noticed that MobyGames was destroyed by being redesigned. That piece of shit being forced down our throats without warning destroyed the community, and the way the founders and the owners chose to deal with the consequences, while entirely expected, made it even worse, so the site is basically dead now. I mean, even if a few would still want to contribute despite the concept behind the new design and the way we are being treated, there are so many major bugs that it can be impossible to do so, and the risks of losing your work make it unwise to try even when it is possible.
That said, it might have been better if my ban wouldn’t have been lifted, because I’m not going to submit things anymore under these circumstances anyway… Unfortunately, that also means I probably won’t be writing reviews for any game I’ll somehow manage to finish anymore either, since I was doing so for those that had too few on that site, but finishing a game is a very distant prospect at the moment, so we’ll see…

The part about sleep has to do with the fact that this week’s Formula 1 race is in Korea and therefore in the morning for me, so I woke up at 7:45 AM today for the qualifying and will need to wake up at 8:45 AM tomorrow for the race itself. Before these protests started, that wouldn’t have been a problem because I could just get a couple of hours of sleep in the morning and then get back to bed later, but tomorrow I’ll have to leave no later than 3:30 PM and will need to prepare first as well, so I’ll be marching and protesting for the rest on the day on something between two and a half and, at the very most, five hours of sleep, depending on exactly when I’ll fall asleep in the morning and whether or not I’ll manage to nap for a while after the race is over as well. Worse, this will come after only getting some four hours of sleep today, since waking up so early meant I got at the very most two hours in the morning and then I only crawled back in bed close to 3 PM, finding myself awake again at 5 PM and being unable to get back to sleep after that point.

At least I won’t be worrying about the antivirus anymore, since I found myself needing to stick to BitDefender after all. I did finally manage to persuade myself to send an e-mail to ask for some more information about Kaspersky at the start of the week, but the reply I got from the Romanian branch only asked for a phone number so they can call me and offer the answers on the phone. I got nothing else back after I said that’s not happening and I seriously wonder why would it even be desirable, not to mention necessary, so I assumed that not being too shy to talk to their employees directly is one of the requirements for using their software and took that option off the table at a time when I couldn’t afford to keep looking anymore, the BitDefender license I had having expired today. Now this most probably can’t be a solution all the way to the end of 2014, when the new license will actually expire, seeing as it covers 15 months, but it at least offers me more time.

Otherwise, the writing is going poorly and this time, without attending any protests or related events since Sunday, I don’t even have that excuse for it anymore, but it was going very poorly before as well, and usually has been, so that definitely comes as no surprise. The one good thing is that it’s at least easy to figure out what to post here, covering the protests like I am, and I find doing this to be noticeably less difficult than making myself write serious non-personal posts was before, so you should expect another post covering days 31 to 40 next week, though I’ll have very little to say about the first half of this period.