Wherein I discuss an upcoming drought, an upsetting upgrade, and arbitrary human constructs that I am unable to change nor shift.
Long story short, my mother fell this past week and damaged her wrist (again). I need to help her with work and serve as her hands for the next few weeks, which will limit the amount of time I can work on my usual Nigma Box content. This, of course, happened a literal day before the release of Student Transfer Version 6.0, meaning that my review of the game will be delayed until further notice. However, I was able to update my flowchart, which you can find on my Student Transfer page.
The first story to break after the Fourth of July holiday deadzone was the announcement of the long-awaited revision to the Nintendo Switch. People were expecting an overhauled souped up Nintendo Switch Pro with a better chipset, up to 4K resolutions when docked, and better performance in-game. But instead, what we got is a far more modest upgrade.
The Nintendo Switch (OLED model) is a Nintendo Switch with a moderately bigger higher quality screen, a dock with a built-in ethernet adapter, 64GB of internal storage, better speakers, a dock with a built-in ethernet port, and a chunky adjustable stand, instead of the flimsy little flap of the base model. All of this sounds more like a straightforward hardware upgrade to me, but instead, it is a new separate model in addition to the standard Nintendo Switch, available for a premium price of $350.
Considering how universal the rumors and supposed specs of this revision were, this is… a bit disappointing to see. Insiders more or less told people to expect a Switch that had better performance when docked, but the OLED model is just a marginally better cosmetic upgrade whose core benefits are seen when playing the device in handheld mode. It is a nice upgrade, and I think the new white and black color scheme looks pretty fly, but I don’t see Nintendo fans clamoring to upgrade when the revision hits on October 8th. Honestly, it’s so minor that I would ask why this would not simply replace the original Nintendo Switch, but then I remember that they are charging an extra $50 for this thing, and it all makes sense.
Next up… there really was not much else to talk about this past week. Sony hosted another State of Play event, but there were no major announcements from the showcase, as per usual.
Details dropped from Version 2.0 of Genshin Impact, so I could talk about that game again. But just a few months ago, I talked about how I worry that Genshin Impact will go on to influence the games industry deeply and thoroughly and lead to a generation of repetition-filled engagement-driven service games, instead of more deliberately designed packaged games. As such, I would rather not go on a bitter yet accepting diatribe about a game I want to like, but also represents a trend that I am becoming increasingly less comfortable with.
I could also go on about something personal, I really don’t have much to say. This past week has been filled with helping out my mother, playing Student Transfer, and getting mad at the idea of holidays… actually, I can rant about that last bit.
Despite how weird and creative my mind might seem to an onlooker, I am an incredibly boring person. I like routine, I like doing mundane tasks, and I genuinely miss the strong schedule-driven structure of school, because I knew what every day would bring. I do not like it when my schedule or flow is interrupted by… anything, really. Whether it be a doctor’s appointment, an irregular trip to a store, or holidays.
Holidays are presumptuous bastards who think that they can boss you around and force you to celebrate something just because it is a certain day in the year, and they can piss right off! Why should I, as a worker, feel compelled to take a day off just because there is a federal holiday? Why should I indulge in a festive celebration just because it is a particular month or season? And why are they so scattershot and nonsensical in their placement? They are not evenly distributed throughout a year and have arbitrary date conventions, ranging from a numerical date to the fourth Thursday in the month of November.
Holidays are sporadic and disorderly things that happen awkwardly throughout the year and for no clear rhyme or reason other than tradition and putting a significant degree of purpose behind the idea of a specific date or time in the year. I get that every holiday has a reason or justification behind it, but their placement in the calendar is seldom ever consistent, and that just irks me on a fundamental level, as this is a type of disorder that everybody needs to deal with.
It is not even that hard to imagine an alternative, such as making it so that holidays only ever fall on Mondays or Fridays. But oh no, it would simply be too much work to change the current system for holidays. That’s the same sort of coward logic that keeps the US using the incredibly flawed imperial system and keeps the world using the uneven Gregorian calendar with its garbage 7 day weeks, when weeks should be 5 or 10 days. EVERYTHING should be in increments of 5 or 10!
I hate how disorganized and sloppy these systems are… but there is NOTHING I can ever hope to do to change it! And that sucks. That sucks HARD!
Header image, obviously, comes from Student Transfer Version 6.0.