I give up. I can't fucking take this shit

I had two things to do today.  One was to get stabbed in the arm and drained a bit so tests could be run to check that my endocrine system is endocrining well.

I've never liked needles, I've never liked any process that involves my blood leaving my body, and I've had one catastropicially bad experience getting blood drawn that was so horrible it overshadows every experience since then which have all uniformly been not-that-bad.

So that's not exactly something fun for me.

The other was to bring my computer into Best Buy so it could be sent out for repairs and I'd have a working primary computer again.

Those two things are not remotely in the same direction.  That was a lot of walking I was going to have to do but then it turned out that someone could give me a ride.  That meant I'd get three out of four legs of the journey taken care of for me, with the only walking being walking back home.

At around 6:30ish I arrived at Best Buy, computer under one arm, the other arm with a fresh blood drawing hole covered by those gauze pad things they tape over the hole.

My ride had to leave to do her stuff, but that was ok, I'd dealt with the Geek Squad before for computers and cameras and they'd always been good.

That all was about to change.

But before we get to that, this computer, the greatest of all secondary computers and by best hope of not becoming completely disconnected from the internet, is so damned slow.  I'd forgotten how slow it is.  Oh my fucking god is it slow.  It took so long to get me to blogger I was worried that it wasn't even connected to the internet at all and my habit of doing multiple things at once in multiple tabs is near fucking impossible.

Don't get me wrong, I love that I have this computer because without it my next best shot is the one where where I have to twist the power-cord just so and whisper prayers to arcane gods just to have it open for more than a few minutes without it abruptly turning into a paperweight.  After that is the one that cannot be charged or plugged in so I have to use it in battery long increments, remove the battery, shove it into another computer that doesn't function as a computer in any way, plug in that non-computer computer, wait for the battery to charge, move the battery back to the first computer, and use it for another battery long increment.

The list gets worse from there.

So I very much like having this computer as a fall back, but falling back to it is not fun.

Anyway, what I just looked up (which is what made it so clear that using multiple tabs at once taxes this computer) is how old the computer I brought in is.

It's nine months old TO THE FUCKING DAY today.  Asshole behind the desk told me that because it was over a year old (I didn't know off the top of my head) it wasn't under warranty.  I paid to have an extended three year warranty.  I paid extra to have it cover accidental damage in addition to part failure and defects.

Asshole behind the desk told me that it was accident to the exclusion of ordinary failures.  So apparently if I'd said that I was trying to post an image from my camera to Stealing Commas while a friend was jumpstarting a car and we accidentally switched the wires that would be covered but since I admitted that I didn't know how it overheated to the point of melting and he could clearly tell just by looking at the outside that it was obviously an equipment defect, it wasn't covered.

Asshole behind the desk told me that they're not repairing that model anymore anyway.  That was the first thing asshole behind the desk said that made sense.  I know this.  It's how I ended up with the computer in the first place.

I'd had a computer that was very much to my liking and it was acting up a bit, then the weasels were alone in the house for a bit and when I came back they'd broken the damned monitor off at the hinges.  That didn't concern me.  The hinges are hunks of metal attached to other hunks of metal and greased.  They're purely mechanical and even I can fix them.  It isn't pretty when I do it, but they're not the computery parts of the computer and thus easily fixable by anyone with a drill, some metal shit, appropriate screws, and a hacksaw.

Hell once I replaced an entire laptop monitor case with a wooden and plexiglass construction I'd made to fit on the existing hinges and house the existing LCD and backlight.  It wasn't pretty, but it worked.

The parts of a computer that concern me are the computery bits because those are complex electrionc shit and I can't fix them.

As it turned out it didn't matter.  Hinges or computery bits, that model wasn't being repaired anymore.  No one understood why, but it was the way of things, the way of the force.

So they fucking replaced it.  Sort of.  I had the option to take a step somewhat down for free or a step slightly up for additional cost.  And either way I lost the ability to play bluray.

And thus I ended up with the computer I brought into the store today.

So, where did this do not repair order leave us.  Did I again go looking to find a laptop as close to the one I'd brought in as possible?

No.

Apparently it meant that the only thing that could happen is the computer, which no longer works, will be sent to tech support to determine what is wrong with it, and then whatever is wrong with it will not be fixed.

Glory felt her stomach drop
Like a bubble just went pop

Um ... causawha?

There is still hope.  After spendng too much time in the slow that is this computer looking up how old primary is, it occurred to me to check the documentation I'd been given in exchange for my single most valuble possession in all the world.  While asshole behind the desk might have claimed it was more than a year old when he could see the data on Best Buy's system and I couldn't, the documentation knows it's only just turned nine months old.

Asshole behind the desk isn't the one who will be looking at it.

There's hope.

But it didn't feel that way at the time.  I took my folder and walked away from the desk despondent.  I looked at their laptops and noted that I could never afford to buy one.  I can't even raise money for home, dentist, and internet access.  Where could I get the money to buy a new computer?  The reason that primary computer was such a good computer was that it was supposed to be able to last a long time before it became obsolete.  It was an investment.

Apparently it wasn't one that paid off in the end, but I don't regret making that investment because the time spent with the original and then the replacement was time well spent.  I'd never have been able to play things like Alien: Isolation, that I so recently talked about, if I hadn't invested in a computer that was so far above my usual however long ago it was that I got the primary computer before the one I just brought in.

It's hard to say what games mean to me.  Not hard to understand, hard to express in words.  They occupy a place that books once did.  I've lost my taste for books.  One of the things that really drove home how bad my depression was in its depths was standing in a bookstore and feeling nothing.  Nothing at all.  Once I would have gone from shelf to shelf wanting to read all the books (but not really because my tastes are fairly provincial, I don't give a fuck about artistic quality, I want likable characters, a non-traumatic experience, and an up ending) wanting to buy ALL THE BOOKS (but again, not really.)

I've never experienced a "kid in a candystore" feeling, but I think the phrase is meant to describe what I once felt in a bookstore or library.

I lost that, and I mourn its passing.

I was once the person who read a novel for a short story project because I was given time to read in fucking school and good god I used that time.

But I lost that.

And somehow, into the void, crept games with plot.  I think King's Quest VI was the first game with plot I had.  Nothing like Donkey Kong or Burger Time from the Commodore 64 days, nor anything like what we had on the TI that sat next to the 64, this was a game with characters who had faces and voices and stuff.  Plus we eventually ended up getting a game guide for it, while the entire family sucked at Stellar 7.

My love of Star Wars brought me to my first love in games.  Dark Forces, in which you played as Kyle Katarn, with Jan Ors as your mission officer, and were going up against an Imperial plot potentially more dangerous than the Death Star.

The head of the project had opposed the Death Star.  On moral grounds?  Of course not.  No, he had read his Heinlien and knew that the power to destroy a planet was insignificant compared to the power to send troops onto a planet to kill only those people you actually wanted killed while leaving everything else intact and he was trying to make the god damned mobile infantry in Star Wars.  Not the version from the movies, the stuff from the book because he read his damned Starship Troopers and, gosh darn it, he internalized it.

Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II had Kyle become a Jedi.  Mysteries of the Sith, which featured Kyle and Mara Jade working together, followed.  Then Jedi Outcast, and finally Jedi Academy where, as Kyle's student, I can save the galaxy in a skirt as a Twilek who favors a Wookie crossbow because FUCK YEAH that's why.

But before those games were made I was given Lucas Arts collections (they each featured six CDs) so I also met Rebel Assault (one and two), the Monkey Island series, The Dig, Full Throttle, and so forth.

Resident Evil 2, which I came to sideways, would introduce me to the wonderfully convoluted world of Capcom conspiracy that the movies utterly fail to convey.

It was in Deus Ex that I would find my true love in gaming.  It called to me before I had a computer capable of playing it (I misread the system requirements on the box because I was in a hurry) and it waited for me to get something that could actually support it.

I don't remember what I expected, but whatever it was was far surpassed by the game.  I cannot help but compare every other game to it in my mind.  Even if I never consciously think of Deus Ex it's still there, shaping my sense of possibility.

Deus Ex was sadly never equaled.  The sequel ignored canon, the prequel was hostile to it, and too few things are willing to take its iconoclastic approach to game genre.  In Deus Ex the player told the game what kind of game it was by playing it the way they felt it should be played, while most games insist on forcing the player into playing how they think they should be played even when that doesn't make sense.

Deus Ex is fifteen years old now and it was quite constrained by the limitations of the day, modern games are more often limited by the limited imaginations of their creators.  But that doesn't mean there's not been anything worthwhile since then.  Far from it.

While the first Aliens vs. Predator was ok for what it was, AVP II was a masterpiece of interwoven storytelling.  It couldn't allow the same freedom of approach as Deus Ex because it had to have three simultaneous stories going on each of which profoundly affected the others.  You can't do that if you don't know the details of any given story until the player plays it.

In more recent years I have dashed across rooftops to save my sister Kate, and I have waded through a flooded plague infested city to save an 11 year old whose only crime was being heir to the throne.

I've come home from Europe to an empty house in 1995 to and pieced together my sister's variously wonderful, heart breaking, and triumphant love story with a girl she met while I was away.

I've gone on a quest to save my little brother only to become a dragon riding world saver instead.

I've visited the future of 1979.

I've done so much more.

Games don't just fill a void that my loss of interest in books left inside of me.  They also provide a much needed escape.

For all of the problems of Alien: Isolation, at least it gave me time during which I was Amanda Ripley trying to stay alive and make a difference (the inability to actually do the second is the single biggest problem) instead of chris the cynic worried about an inability to pay bills and having difficulty coping with life.

The ability to go back to the nameless city of Mirror's Edge and simply run like Hell (which runs quite fast, apparently) has taken the edge of some pretty bad developments I've had to face in real life.

This computer can't take me to those worlds.  It can't let me live those lives.  It doesn't have the power.

If I can'r get primary computer repaired or replaced, I lose those horizons.  (Though the pixelated 2.5-D world of Dark Forces where people and objects are represented by 2-d sprites will always be availible for as long as there are DOS emulators, though getting it onto this computer, which lacks a CD drive, would be complicated.)

But moreover, this just isn't primary computer.  It's always been secondary computer because it is slow, it's a literal and figurative lightweight that was struggling earlier to load a web page or two.  And this is by far the best I have without primary.

If this is the best I can have, which it is if primary can't be repaired or replaced, then I can't fucking take it.  I want to give up.

I walked through the mall despondent after turning in my computer.  I didn't even notice as I left through the wrong exit.  I ended up pointed at a McDonalds and I went there and probably ingested more calories than I've had in the past week.

I drank my soda slowly and sadly.  I drank it as if it would magically become a hard drink and innebriate me out of my state of mind.  I walked home in the darkness.  I think it took two hours.  On the way I tried to cultivate rightious indignation at Asshole behind the desk because it would have been better than what I was feeling.

I failed.  I wanted to let all my muscles go limp and collapse on the ground there and then.  Which happened to be outside of an Airforce recruiting center surrounded in barbed wire topped fence that gives me a serious case of WTF.

A recruiting center is supposed to draw people in, surrounding it in barbed wire seems to send the wrong message.  Mind you it could be worse.  The barbed wire was angled to keep people out, if it had been angled to keep people in, to keep them from escaping, that would be a much worse message for a recruiting center to send.

Eventually I made it home and I started typing this.  It's now well passed my bed time, which is especially bad considering I stayed up for the moon to darken last night.

As much as I want to give up, want to curl up in a ball and have the world go away.  I'll wake up tomorrow, disturbingly early because I need darkness to sleep and the sun has some kind of anti-darkness campaign going on, and face the day.  It's possible, though unlikely, I might even write a post.

You'll have a post to look forward to regardless though.  I've already written one (this morning, when I still had primary computer and it had a charge) and it's scheduled to go live at 9 AM.

I'm more uncertain than ever about what the future holds.