Cav's Place

As I’m starting to write this, at 9:30 PM, I can say that I’m done with Forsaken World. I will log on one more time tonight to pick up the spare change Calad will earn from the last items he put up for auction and will keep the program installed until I’ll write a review, which I certainly plan to do next week if at all possible, in case I’ll need to check something out, but I won’t be playing anymore. Right now I’m saying that I won’t be using any time set aside to check things out for the review to poke around the Gloomy Forest and Hazed Wilderness maps to look for landmark screenshots to submit for the game’s entry on MobyGames, and that the new Breeze Valley map has no landmarks so there’s no point in looking for any on it, but I may eventually end up doing that before actually uninstalling the game.
Including the brief phase four of the closed beta, I played this game for over three months, which is highly unusual for me, being an on-line game. Then again, playing such a game at all is unusual enough. But it’s a month since I started to seriously consider quitting and over a week since I last was in any instance, so it was about time, even though the decision to end it today came quite suddenly last evening. I didn’t want to miss the content update, both out of curiosity and to have more details when I’d submit something about it on MobyGames, but that came earlier this week and it truly left me with no more goals or reasons to keep playing, so I was just looking for an appropriate moment to quit and thought that the end of a week that’s also close to the end of a month is quite good enough.
Still, I wanted to leave both my characters at the same level, so played last night and today far more than I have in a long time, earning over four million experience points for Calad to finally get him to level 48 as well and grinding quests from Henry on Kalee as well until he gave me two Wish Card ones, so she’ll finally become a level two Socialite. Not that there’s any point in any of this, of course, but I wanted to have a proper closure… And probably also wanted to wear myself out, so I’ll be sure not to want to keep playing. Yet I won’t delete my characters because I may want to install it again when they’ll release the first proper expansion, just to look around a little and be able to submit a more appropriate entry on MobyGames, assuming my characters won’t get automatically deleted for inactivity by then, that is.

I’m wondering what I’ll be playing now, but I’ll figure something out… Or I won’t and I won’t play much of anything yet again, as I was doing before starting Forsaken World. Either way, it may translate into some chance of once again having two proper posts on here each week instead of barely struggling to write one and then squeezing something out of myself Sunday evening just to say there are two and I stuck to my original plan. That’s highly unlikely, seeing as writing here never worked properly and it’s been a very long time since it was anything other than dreadful, but we’ll see.
In the end, it’ll most likely translate into a couple more hours of doing nothing but feeling like shit and feeling sorry for myself each day. But there will be one less thing to think about at night, as so far I logged on at least a few times late at night in order to get a few things out of the way, which means that I should be able to just wait for things to get quiet enough around me, then turn off the monitor and simply sit and think in silence and darkness. It doesn’t help in any way, but I need to do that again… Even though writing works far less badly late at night as well, so I should probably use the time for that instead.

In other news, the book fair was this week and, after going each year since 2007, I didn’t go. Not that wandering around there for a while, alternating between being frightened, frustrated and infuriated by the people around me, did any good, but I wanted to go. Also wondered if there was any chance to find any good fantasy books in English at a reasonable price, of course, though that bookstore that specializes in them once again didn’t participate. They are relatively close to the fair’s location, however, and announced a 20% discount for the duration of the fair, but considering how I felt when I poked my head into that tiny place in previous years, it seemed unlikely that I’ll do it again. Still, I was planning to try, so I woke up on Thursday, tried to get out of bed… And realized there was no way I could make it. I just want to hide under a rock, not go to crowded places!
Besides, since it’s really too far to walk, there’s the issue with the transportation as well, as the company handling it completely got rid of the plain paper tickets and switched to personalized RFID cards. I’d need to specifically ask dad for one, and I’m not even sure he could buy it without me around, and that can’t happen when I’m not talking to him. But it couldn’t happen anyway, because I’m completely against the concept and wouldn’t even touch one! Don’t need personally identifiable information on yet another thing that required none so far, especially one I’ll only use a few times per year, and most certainly don’t need such information on an item I’ll always take with me and could theoretically be read without even being removed from my pocket, and nothing anyone can say or do will ever persuade me otherwise! So I had some plans a few months ago, to write a protest on a piece of paper and in case I’ll bump into a ticket checker I meant to hand it to them before obviously paying the fine, as I wouldn’t have a card. But that’d require a lot of guts, so really can’t imagine how could I think I could ever actually pull it off. Which means my range is as of now clearly restricted to only the places I can walk to.
Yet I still wanted to at least go out, because I needed to go out once per week to stick to what I said back in 2007, after all… So I eventually got out of bed, got dressed, raised the blinds and saw those two old people, this time aided by a small child, once again busy destroying just about all the vegetation behind this fence that’s behind the building here! It was done last year as well, twice, both behind and in front of the fence, though I’m not sure the same people did all of it. This time they no longer struggled to pull the little trees out with their bare hands, as last year they failed to pull a few of them out like that and they had to leave them be, and brought a hatchet as well! They keep turning a place that, if left alone, would turn into a little forest into nothing but piled up dead leaves and branches surrounded by dried out grass, yet last year they said they were “just removing weeds” when me muttering about it all the time made my parents ask what was going on…
That sight almost made my cry, yet of course I can’t cry, so had to sit here and whimper until I could turn the sorrow and frustration into anger and glare out the window, straight at the man. Somehow managed not to look away when he looked right at me either. If they’d at least do something with the place… It used to be a vegetable garden when I was little, so it could be nice if it’d become one again, but the owner died many years ago and I’m not sure if anyone even owns the place anymore, so until last year it had gradually turned itself into something of a tiny forest… Then they came along and destroyed it last spring, then again last autumn, then again now… Whenever it starts to really be covered in green yet again, they come to destroy it for apparently no other reason than because they can!
So this week’s walk turned into just aimlessly wandering out of the building, taking a few steps one way, then turning around and going the other way, around this group of buildings, until I got to have a look at them more directly, though still from a distance… Until the man noticed me again, at which point I turned on my heels and quickly made my way back inside, shivering all over…