Cav's Place

Once again, it’s Sunday, so I need to throw together a second post this week. But at least I wrote something non-personal a few days ago, so now I can just do what most people usually do on blogs. Personal posts are something I generally wanted to avoid when I started steadily writing in a blog, but we’ve all seen how that ended up, haven’t we? Still, I do manage to stick to my rules. As long as that remains the case, even if just barely and at times perhaps even by cheating a little, this will continue to go on as planned.
You might have noticed that the posts did tend to get shorter lately, which is something I’m rather bothered by. I had a rule regarding the length which I largely stuck to for quite some time, in part because I found that it helped me come up with another angle or another argument which otherwise I was likely to only remember some time after posting and then get pissed at missing it the first time and not feeling like editing to add it later. At least in the recent shorter posts I deliberately left things out, for various reasons, but that’s hardly a good thing either. After all, as I keep saying, the purpose of this blog was to help myself put my thoughts into words. When I’m not doing that, something’s certainly not working.
The other writing is going somewhat better lately, however, which is a nice surprise. It’s largely because I know this part will really need to be rewritten almost entirely anyway, so I’m giving myself more freedom to just throw some ideas out there and leave details and other concerns for later. It’s still a snail’s pace, but I do manage just a little more per day than I used to before and it also gets done noticeably faster. Instead of struggling with it for one hour and a half or two per day, it tends to get done in no more than one hour, and maybe as little as 30 minutes, unless I actually get in the proper mindset to write noticeably more than usual. If nothing else, this makes for less frustration and as a result I also procastinate a little less when it comes to it.

In other news, bumped into someone from Norway on OkCupid some time ago and so far we seem to be getting along quite well. I guess the first thing that caught my eye in her profile was that she said she’s very good at driving everyone away with her negativity, which obviously meant she wasn’t annoyingly optimistic or cheerful, while I supposedly surprised her by paying close attention to what she wrote and showing no interest in trying to get into her pants in any way. So we probably started from the fact that the other didn’t exhibit certain very common characteristics that bother us very much, added a few shared opinions and common interests, and probably also a general loneliness, though mine obviously far worse than hers, and then we went from there. Eventually, after exchanging other contact information as well, Friday we talked for several hours straight, and quite a lot yesterday and today as well. It’s been a very long time since this last happened, so enjoying it while it lasts.
And then there’s this other person who rather suspiciously approached me some months ago, saying that she really wanted to talk to me but not saying how she knew me because I would supposedly send her packing the moment I’d figure it out. After a couple of chats she pretty much vanished, logged on one more time just when I was about to delete her, then vanished again and logged on again now, a couple of days after I actually did delete her. In the meantime I came up with a pretty solid theory about who she is and how she knows me, but she wouldn’t answer when I tried asking about that, which is really annoying. She does seem like a generally pretty nice girl and her dedication to certain causes, particularly animal welfare and rights, should deeply shame most people, myself obviously included, but I’m staying suspicious as long as the situation remains as it is. Now there is a chance that I won’t get much less suspicious if my theory would prove correct, but confirming it certainly wouldn’t make it any worse. In fact I don’t realistically see how she could make it worse by telling me the whole story even if it’s not what I suspect, no matter what it is.

As for the ranks you see in the title, I’m talking about essentially critic reviews of games that I’m submitting on MobyGames, which are officially called “MobyRanks” on the site. Got a few more in these past few days, but I still have a list of games I’d really like to submit more for, including big titles that I’ll need days to go through everything for. Hope I’ll get to do at least part of it next week and not end up with a perhaps even longer list and still nothing, or all too little, done.
It’s not that submitting these is of that much use, the point of MobyGames being to be a games database, so actual information about the games is most important… But getting an accurate critic score and providing links to as many reviews as possible can in fact be considered a way of providing information about the game, right? One or a few may well be biased, but have enough of them put together and a more accurate picture will emerge. For example there are currently 83 reviews listed for The Witcher 2, there was one more in queue last night when I started and I then submitted 18 more myself, so that’d bring the total to 102. (For comparison, Metacritic only has 73.) That should be more than enough for anyone to pick a few from and form an accurate picture, right?
Unfortunately, as can be seen in the comments on a recent news item, in fact nothing more than an advertisement, posted by practically the only remaining active founder of the site, MobyGames is really going down the drain. There were issues before, which is probably why it was sold in the first place, but the fact that absolutely nothing happened in the nearly one year since it was sold is troubling for many. Of course, it’s nice that at least nothing bad happened yet, but bugs piling up and feature requests going unanswered make some of the most active users decide that they have better things to do with their time than keep struggling there, which in turn means that the other users have even lower chances of getting a reply to their messages and also that the approval queues are likely to get longer and longer, making even more contributors give up. But we’ll see what happens next I guess…