Fallout

[prog]

I am spending the weekend off-and-on attending the Freaks' annual whole-weekend game foo. Ahh, RECOVERY. Played a single game of Iron Dragon with four others from midnight to 0700. It was my first play of a rail-building board game of any kind; lots of fun. I nearly won, too; everyone was expecting me to win, but Rebecca finished her super-long mega-payoff haul about two turns before I could finish mine. (I would have made it home had not my train gotten derailed twice due to bad luck in the latter few turns. Them's the breaks... but I wonder if the presence of sudden, catastrophic, dumb luck feels a little less welcome to me, in an hours-long strategy game like this.)

Then Rebecca bought us all some filled croissant thingies, so I forgave her. After that I went home to sleep. Probably I will meander back nowish, taking a break at the Mobil station on the way to get my car inspected, as my sticker is now a month behind the times. Bother. I hope that Toyota got the Very Large Check I sent them a week ago today... I told them after they called me on Tuesday that it was en route, and they haven't called me again since then. Since the lease is two weeks past maturity now, and they're very interested in settling the matter, I'll take their silence as a good sign, until the title shows up in my own mailbox. That will be nice.

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Inspired to check the mail just now. Got a letter from a bill collection agency that AT&T sicced on me months ago, and which I've been ignoring until my recent car-buying adventures. The letter was their response to my telling them that my affairs with AT&T have been settled. Alas, they disagree.

We don't even use AT&T at Minas Morgul; this silly stuff is the result of my own procrastination regarding the fate of the broadband service to the Chestnut Street house. A month or two ago, Carla told me to cancel it (rather than go through the trouble of transferring the account to her name), since she and her housemates got another provider. Here is the current tally:

• I called AT&T to tell them to stop service. A helpful lady said that they'd already taken the liberty because I wasn't paying my bills, but they'd happily take the amount that I had just paid via the Web, apply it to my debt, and mail me back the difference. Indeed, I last week got a bill from AT&T demanding that I remit negative $50. So far, so good.


• Sometime after that, a cable guy showed up at Carla's house and said that he had to disconnect their cable because I was remiss in my bill-paying. Carla's housemate had to convince him that they didn't even use AT&T anymore. (This is, in fact, the case; unlike any other place I've lived, two cable companies' territories somehow overlap through certain parts of the Boston area. Chestnut house, which is within one of these magic zones, now uses RCN.)


• This letter from the collection agency says that they checked, and I still owe AT&T $112.36, and I'd better send them the money right now or I'll get into big trouble.

Sigh. This is the same AT&T, of course, who accidentally didn't charge me at all for the four months I used their broadband service in my first Somerville apartment. Hello, petty karmic payback.

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This book's post-draft recovery computer game is Fallout 2, which I picked up from Micro Center on Wednesday. I think that its CD is the first Mac OS X-only piece of hard media I have purchased, which is kind of nifty. Even if it is a game that was orginally published for Windows in 1998. New to me.

(Side note: Its publisher, MacPlay, participates in a movement I've seen and appreciated as it slowly creeps throughout software shelves: placing titles in packages no bigger than a standard DVD jewelcase. (The actual Fallout disc came in a retail-ready, copy-covered jewelcase, but this in turn was placed into a cardboard box of similar proportions, just big enough to hold the case alongside the game's thick instruction manual -- even though the same manual shipped as a PDF file on the CD, and the disc itself has a note to this fact printed on its top surface. I sense marketing disagreement at MacPlay. Oh well. I still like the little boxes. That's all I'm saying.))
(Also, 1998!! How long ago that is. Whenever I think my life moves too slowly, I need only look four years behind, and see how many lifetimes ago that was. Wowie Zowie.)

It still contains a silly feature that I turned me off from the original Fallout demo: "townspeople"-class NPCs seem to be utterly complacent with your barging into their homes and businesses, and helping yourself to anything that isn't nailed down. In other words, they act like townspeople in every other CRPG, so I don't know why I feel the need to cosmplain about this. But then I discovered that NPCs can guard doors and things -- one puzzle involves getting past some doors with guards posted, who warn you if you try opening the door, and then attack if you try again. Which is a nice little touch. But still, most of game's people apparently just don't bother protecting their things. Doy...

There was also a bug where I was supposed to pay someone $100 in exchange for training, and received both the skill points and $100. Huh? Between stuff like this and the sometimes ridiculously easy way you can profit through creative kleptomania (in one case I picked up some things from an inn's supply room, carried them back to the bar, and sold them to the inkeeper), I feel that my character's a little richer than she may deserve. But then, I guess I can't complain.

(In retrospect, the selling-the-inkeeper-her-own-stuff thing could have played as a legitimate swindle, if the game had done as little as have her exclaim about the quality and rarity of the items in question -- why, she had been looking for one of these, to go with her other one! -- but the silent transaction looked more like a simple design overisght.)

These are little gripes; so far, it's a fine CRPG. I'm at a point now where the next step on the major quest is obvious, but I have to complete a bunch of little side-quests in order to survive the journey, and it's starting to drag a little. Why do I keep buying RPGs when I so rarely finish them? Becuase I so enjoy starting them, I suppose.