So, the last two weeks or so, I’ve been incredibly low energy. Tired, sleepy, easily distracted, uncharacteristically moody – if it wasn’t bad enough, the last week I’ve also been having insane headaches, felt like my mind was “split and shifted”, as if the left side of my mind was slightly shifted to the right and my right side of my mind was shifted slightly backwards and down to the left. It sounds stupid writing it out like this, but I can’t really describe it better. It’s kind of like a broken glasspane.
It’s better now though, it’s as if I still feel the “crack”, but it’s not as bad. I’m still very tired and can’t focus properly though, so I havent been able to hang out with the guys in the company as much. I’ve tuned in on discord, talked with them some, but then I just feel like I’m so drained of mental energy I’m sleepy and even forget I’m in a call. There’s people talking, but I’ve stopped listening, like I’ve tuned out a TV in the background. Trying to do something ingame is equally weird – I’ve pulled stuff out of my storage from another settlement in order to have it on me so that I can put it on the trade post, and running between the storage and the trade post I’ve forgotten what I’m doing and just open up the trade post to browse wares. I also spent all my savings yesterday, because a song I’ve been looking for actually was on sale. Instantly bought it – didn’t even recognise the fact that it cost 97% of what I owned at first. I was then extremely surprised that I didn’t have any money left. It wasn’t just a case of impulsively buying something – I saw the cost. I knew how much it cost. I also knew how much money I had. I just didn’t realise it was going to be withdrawn and leave me with nothing left.
So yeah, that was a fun realisation.
So I just gave up New World for the moment and decided to occupy myself with other stuff. The kids are home with their mom this weekend, and because she picked them up Saturday instead of Friday, the kids aren’t going to come home today, on Sunday – she’ll keep them until Monday morning and prepare them all for school instead. Which means I’ve got all until Monday afternoon until I’ve got the kids back. What am I going to do until then? Movies? I’ve spent all week with my youngest at home because he was sick – and I’ve honestly didn’t mind, because that meant I didn’t have to walk him to and from kindergarten – and all we’ve done is walking the dog and watch movies. I would like some variety. Granted, we’ve mostly been watching childrens movies and Gigantosaurus on Disney+, and on the evenings I’ve watched anime, but still. I did get a game on extreme sale, but even that I can’t do – it’s an FPS, and I simply dont have the reactions for it at the moment. I can’t even doomscroll on Facebook anymore, because I got hit with the lock-out info that is “hey, subscribe for a bunch of money so that you still see ads, but we promise you we wont sell your info *wink, wink* – or you accept that we sell all your info to advertisers”. So, curiously, I looked up what they’re selling, and…they’re selling everything.
Ever thought it was kinda funnily weird that you suddenly got ads for something after you’ve posted a meme? It’s because they scan every photo you post, and then sell that info to advertisers. Post a beach picture, and you’ll get sun-travel ads. Post a birthday picture, and you might get “relevant ads” for it. Write a comment? That’s scanned and sold to “relevant advertisers”. Your religious and political view? Scanned and sold. Your liked groups? Scanned, compiled and sold. Ever wondered why stuff you wrote in Messenger to people ended up as ads and then chalked it up to just “weird”? No, it’s not. They go through everything you post in messenger as well and sell that stuff. Your cellphone data – that’s scanned and sold, everything from your model number to your current battery level. Everything they’ve got access to on your phone that you’ve ever told them once that they could get access to, they sell – including when you’re uploading cellphone images, you give them permission to access your images; those are scanned and sold. Think about that for a second.
Then I’ll tell you that they revealed that other cellphone info are sold as well – like your actual, current GPS info, or whatever your phone picks up through the microphone. Every sound you save, everything you say near the phone, everything. The microphone is very rarely actually off, there’s almost always something that keeps it active – ever used the “hey Siri” function? Then the mic is on, and facebook have access to your mic. Which they scan and sell info of.
So they basically give you the chance to “hey, pay a subscription fee that is ridiculous for what you get and still get ads, or you sign up to have everything about you, your phone and everything you’re currently doing sold to advertisers – nothing is private”. And that subscription fee? That’s insane. If you’ve got instagram, that counts as well, but as a separate fee. So if you’ve got an Instagram and it’s connected to your facebook, you’ve got to pay for both (although the instagram-fee is lower than the facebook-fee), because if you only pay the facebook-fee, and not the instagram-fee, they’ll still get your facebook-info through your instagram that you aren’t paying for, and sell that. So if you actually want to keep your privacy, you’ll have to pay €21 each month – it’s “lower” if you’re using browser only, but if you pay that fee, and then go on using the facebook, messenger or instagram apps, then that fee “doesnt apply” and they get access to your info and sell it regardless. That’s €252, or £220, every. Single. Year.
It’s “hey, either we drain you dry and still give you ads, or you give us everything about you and your phone and all that is on it and we’ll sell it to advertisers”, on top of the stupidity that is, if you pay the “web browser fee’s” and then use it on a cellphone – either through mobile browsers or the apps – it doesn’t count. They’ll sell your info because now they accessed it through the service you didn’t pay for them to exclude – the cellphone. So yeah. I actually downloaded all my photos and videos I’ve posted and then deleted both Instagram and Facebook. It wasn’t even a hard choice as such, social media is awful and doom-scrolling Facebook is mentally unhealthy after all. But you dont realise how much time you’re spending on it until you’ve deleted it.
So I did what I also realised I do every November. I booted up the Blizzard client and bought myself a month game-time on WoW. I’ve got to be honest, I dont have the reaction times to play that game either, because I’m dying over and over just trying to kill 3-4 enemies in a group. But I noticed that they’ve apperently changed their payment model – you dont have to buy every expansion they’ve released to “be caught up”, as long as you pay for a months playtime, you’re good to go for every expansion up to the current one. So if you dont want to pay a lot of money, you pay for one months gametime and you can do everything except for the things in the latest expansion – which, to date, is the Dragonflight. Meaning, you can get everything between World of Warcraft original, up to Shadowlands, for just the cost of one months playtime. The next expansion that comes out next year, The War Within, seems kind of nice as well, and when that thing launches, one months gametime will also include Dragonflight.
As I dont really have an interest in WoW anymore as such, I’m not going to buy the expansions. As it seems, I’m apparently content of playing WoW a few days every November and then forget about it for a year again. But I do admit that it’s a very kind monetisation model – you don’t exclude too many people from being up-to-date with huge paywalls. Although, if I were a “WoW-fan” still, I probably would still like to have the physical Collectors Edition boxes.
The reason I dont have the Vanilla and Burning Crusade box, is because I started to play in 2009, the summer after Lich King came out, so I didnt buy the separate boxes – that’d be way too much money, so I bought the physical “Battle Chest” that contained “everything previous in one”. I figured that I’d try the game out and buy Lich King if I like it, and oh did I. I spent basically that entire summer in Azeroth, mostly just slowly leveling my Night Elf.
Then I just kept playing for a while, although not as intensively. But for some reason, I stopped after Pandaria, having joined a guild an all, Immortalis on Argent Dawn. They were a wonderful bunch of people, and I did have lots of fun. I think that the lonewolf in me just couldn’t handle “lots of people” back then, and eventually I just… stopped coming back.
Now that I think about it, it’s almost the same thing I did with Destiny 2. I played solo for so long, and eventually found a great clan to play with – UK Nightfall Raiders. We played so much, did tonnes of raids, ganged up to grind all the weapons and such. Then life came barging in and I just…stopped. I tried to go back a year later, and they let me – but I just couldn’t get back into it. Not counting the times I’ve logged in and played for a few hours and uninstalled the game again, I haven’t played that game for the last few years. Looking back at my Playstation and Steam Purchase history, it seems that I swapped out Destiny 2 for Monster Hunter: World, Path of Exile and about that time I also bought New World for the first time. Between the last time I played Destiny 2 and when I bought New World, it was just a few months, as I dropped Destiny 2 somewhere around February-March 2020 and I bought New World Deluxe June 2020. Granted, New World didn’t actually release until late September 2021, but I played a few betas, and I played some of the new Tomb Raider games, BioShock collection, Vermintide 2, loads of Satisfactory, some Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen, kept playing the souls game a bunch, and as I said, Path of Exile and Monster Hunter: World for a while – and I cant forget Elden Ring when that game launched.
I’ve got loads of games bought and played since, but not to an extent that I’d say I “swapped over” to them. Buying and playing Vampire Survivors for 30hours in total, getting Back4Blood and playing 190h, or buying Borderlands 3 and getting disappointed for 65 hours isn’t really “swapping over” in my book. Sure, ok, 190 hours of Back4Blood might seem like I play alot, but in reality it’s not. It’s 190h over the span of one and a half year, and besides, there’s plenty of hours of that, that is just me sitting in a menue while I’m doing house chores, like cooking, doing the dishes or something. Sure, Back4Blood was kinda fun, but it got stale real fast, and even though I did buy the first expansion, Tunnels of Terror, and played that a lot, I didnt play the second expansion, Children of the Worm, at all. I bought the expansion. I just never played it. There’s supposed to be a third expansion out now, River of Blood, but I haven’t seen any of it, not even when I’ve tuned in on Twitch and watched some of the “B4B-streamers”. They’ve always been playing the tunnels or the stuff with the Children of the Worm, so I guess the third expansion didn’t really grab people?
Anyway. I’m way off tangent here. I’ve ranted for so long now, and what I initially wanted to say, was that I wanted to play one of the new races in WoW that came with the expansion Battle for Azeroth. They’ve changed up so much in the character creation that it actually took me over an hour to realise that you’re supposed to right-click the race-profiles to see their racial abilities, and it took me even more hours to realise that I didn’t have to buy the races, but that I’m supposed to play through longwinding quests to “unlock” them.
So that’s what I’ve been doing. Since yesterday, I’ve been playing hours and hours on end, just to level a character up to 40, so that I could start unlocking the new races.. and I’m lucky I already had a level 34-something Alliance Pandaren, and that I had a free character boost to 60, because actually leveling up a new character to 40 on both Alliance and Horde would’ve been a pain.
So I kept playing my Mistweaver Alliance Pandaren until I was 40, and then I played through all of the “unlock-quests”, so now I have all the Alliance races to my disposal. Then I used the character boost to boost my goblin mage to 60, and started to play through those quests, and I’m still not done.
You know what the funny thing about all this is? The last race to unlock is the Vulpera.
The actual race I wanted to play.