July 29, 2017

 This morning I slept in a little bit and got a solid nine and a half hours of sleep. I needed it after sleeping very little Thursday night. When I got up I let the dogs out and fed them, started my laundry, and then took a shower. I planned on doing a lot of reading today but I ended up only reading for about thirty minutes. Not great. I'm not really sure what happened with the time today. There seemed to be a lot less of it than usual.

I watched Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and that drained me. I enjoyed it because it was very well written and the actors nailed it, but it was also really sad. Something that can be inferred from the title. Also, I asked one of the other librarians about it and she told me what was going to happen. Given the title, it's kind of like going to see Titanic and hoping the ship doesn't sink, but I always hold out hope for unrealistic but happy endings. I do think realistic and sad endings make a movie better and more powerful, but I also find them draining and I often avoid them. I'm glad I decided to go with the movie instead of committing to the book, but if the book is even half as funny and witty as the script it is something I would like to read at some point.

After I fed the dogs dinner I packed up and headed home. Once everything was unloaded I ate my own dinner, the last of my stir fry, and watched YouTube videos. After dinner I tried playing Playerunknown's Battlegrounds (forever after known as PUBG) but when I launched it my keyboard shut off. That has happened a few times lately and I'm not sure what's going on. Sometimes I can unplug it and plug it into a different USB port but this time I had to restart my computer. I then tried updating a couple drivers, a Razer one for the keyboard and an AMD one, but both seemed to freeze on me and then wouldn't run after I tried starting them again. I gave up on the updating but then PUBG just gave me a black screen and I couldn't get the sound to work in my headphones. It was all super annoying.

But I've got a new computer now, so I said screw it with my old one and went down to the basement. It didn't take long at all to install PUBG on the new computer thanks to the ethernet connection I set up the other day. I should have forsaken wifi a long time ago. I do still need to try my new wifi adapter, but I'm loving the wired connection at the moment.

I ended up only playing one game of PUBG but I ended up coming in fourth place I think. And I died from the gas, not another player. I was moving to the new zone but was already low on health and my timing was off. I was hiding in one house and I knew there was a player in the house next to me and was waiting for him to leave but the timing didn't work out. I also made it that far without firing a single bullet. My passive style worked this time. I feel like if this was a real thing, I would play it by hiding and trying to avoid contact as much as possible. And in the game it seems like a viable option. I would like to get it working on my other desktop where I have a better mouse and a bigger screen so I can change keybindings to my mouse buttons and so I can actually see things. Then I will feel better about actually engaging other players. I would have been a little screwed if I got into a fight tonight, and not just because I didn't find any good loot.

After that I played Elite Dangerous in VR. I can't remember exactly what it looked like before but I bumped up the supersampling on my headset to 2.0 and I think it looked a lot better. It may be all in my head but I would like to think it isn't. As for the gameplay, I made a lot of progress on my exploring quest. I'm getting better at inputting destinations and navigating the system map. I can still do better, though, because at the moment it involves a lot of peaking at my desktop under the headset, which can get annoying. Baby steps.

I heard back from CyberPower and they recommended running Windows Memory Diagnostics. That ended up being confusing because when I tried running it the first couple of times my screen went black when I restarted the computer. I think it was working but it wasn't showing up on screen because it was treating my monitor as the second display and the Vive headset as the first display, even though nothing was showing on the headset. Once I unplugged it from the computer all was well. Minus the fact that there weren't any errors, which I guess is good, but it would have been nice to have something to point to. They also asked if I tried disabling XMP mode. Enabling XMP mode was the only thing that reliably allowed me to start the computer, so disabling wouldn't be good. I might try it though, which means I'll have to move the RAM sticks again, but maybe the diagnostics tool will show an error when XMP mode is off. I'll mess with it tomorrow.

I got my first match today on my dating app. I was wondering if I would actually see matches or if I would only know when I actually got a message. Turns out you see when you get a match but it is still up to the girl to send a message within twenty-four hours of the match. This is good to know but it also means after all the swiping I have done over the past few weeks, I've only had one match. Dating, even online, is a numbers game but I'm apparently not that great with numbers. Oh well. The girl actually messaged me, though, and we have been texting throughout the evening. It's an interesting experience. It's kind of like a modern day pen pal.

And it's now after one o'clock and I need to record my audio journal so I can go to bed. I don't work until noon tomorrow but I would still like to get a full night of sleep and not have to run around getting ready for work.