January 19, 2014

I ventured outside twice today. The first time was to go get my car washed. It looks so good now. Afterward I drove around for a little bit listening to music, helping the car dry off a little faster. It was such a nice day outside that when I got home I opened the window in my room to let some fresh air in. It was a nice break from all of the winter recently.

I spent a good portion of my day playing Battlefield 4. I played a bit of the actual game but spent more time playing the Commander mode. I'm getting better at it but it is very dependent on whether or not your team is good. Depending on the mode, various Commander abilities are tied to specific objectives on the map. So if your team is in control of a certain objective you may have access to a gunship or cruise missiles or scans to check for infantry or vehicles. If your team sucks or for some reason can't/won't capture those points, then as a commander all I can really do is drop UAVs and EMPS, which is useful but not nearly as useful as all the other stuff. I got incredibly lucky today and managed to get good teams in all but one or two games. As a commander you can tell squads to go to specific points and in the game they have the option to accept the order, decline the order, or just ignore it. I don't know how prevalent commanders have been in games that I have played but I can't ever remember being told to go somewhere by one of them, so I don't know what the options are like for the person on the ground. Based on the number of times I got completely ignored I am assuming it is a very unobtrusive request that goes unnoticed or the players don't understand that it helps everyone out if they accept the order, even when they have no intention of following it.

I played several games on my tablet as well as on my PC. At the moment I prefer the tablet but that could be because I have played more on the tablet. I like being able to press on what I want and drag it to where I want it. On the PC you left-click where you want something and then right-click on the menu that pops up. Or click on a squad you want to move and then left-click where they should go and right-click on the menu option. It would be much nicer if clicking and dragging was an option. My coolest commander so far, and probably forever, happened on the PC tonight when I sent a cruise missile at a roof that has several snipers camped out on top of it. It takes awhile for the missile to launch and make the journey and by the time it made it to the roof there happened to be a helicopter flying over. So I took out one of the bad guys on the roof and the helicopter. I only wish I could have seen it from inside the game, not just a birds-eye view of the map.

Tonight I was going to watch the second episode of the new season of Psych but it started with a “previously on...” and I had no recollection of ever having seen any of that stuff. I got on Netflix but they didn't have last season (number seven) so I went to the Psych website. They had the episodes but when I tried to play them nothing happened. This lead to my second journey out of my house today, to go rent the seventh season.

I went to Hastings and lucked out because they had all three discs. And I got them for free because I still have a bunch of credit from returning movies the next day. I will be doing the same thing with these. Not only for the credit but because it will give me a reason to leave the house tomorrow.

When I got home I ended up watching the last two episodes of last season. The second-to-last was vaguely familiar but not entirely so I went with it. I had definitely not seen the last episode and I'm not exactly sure how I missed it. Unless it was during a period when my DVR was acting up. Regardless, it was a good episode and it made the first episode from the new season make a lot more sense. It took place mostly away from the normal setting so I wasn't completely lost but I definitely would have been with the second episode of this season, which I watched immediately after the last episode. It is such a good show. It just makes me happy.

While watching the show I played a little bit of Cook, Serve, Delicious, a game I got from a indie bundle or the Steam sale, I can't remember which. It's a game similar to the cooking games on the CoolMath website, where customers place orders and you have to fulfill them. This game is a little more involved though. You have to pick out which food you are going to serve, buy the necessary equipment, and filling orders is timed, so if you're not fast enough orders will expire and you'll get negative feedback. They also throw in chores that you have to try and squeeze in between food orders. To control the game you can either use the mouse to click stuff or you can use the keyboard. For the most part I stuck with the keyboard because it seemed faster. And faster is good because it can quickly become very overwhelming when you have four things to do at once. On numerous occasions I missed out on orders or chores because I was caught up doing other things. Later on in the game the number of orders or chores you can receive at once is supposed to increase and that just seems too overwhelming. We'll see if I make it that far.

I was going to have this finished at a reasonable hour but then I got lost on a YouTube tangent that lasted for way more videos than I thought it would. But now I've made it to the end and I am going to go to bed. We're off work tomorrow and I will probably not do anything productive with my day. Very annoying.