July 31, 2017

 So I didn't go to the store today. That is not surprising. I did leave the house but that was only to step out on the front porch and water my flower. I don't know if that counts.

I slept in a little bit and then read in bed for awhile. I then spent a decent chunk of my day researching monitors and really fell down a rabbit hole. I decided I wanted a bigger and better monitor for my new computer. At the moment I'm using one of my 24” monitors from my old computer and I sit too far away from it. I also want to take advantage of my GTX 1080 Ti, which can walk all over a 24” 1080p monitor. I ended up going with a 27” 1440p monitor with a 144hz refresh rate. I spent more money than I would have liked but paid a lot less than I could have. My fingers are crossed I don't get a lemon because it looked like that was a possibility based on some of the reviews. I do know that I'm going to take a break from spending money on electronics. I need to go back to just spending money on food. It's much easier to save money when you just buy food and pay bills.

Throughout the day I uploaded twenty-five audio journal videos to YouTube. That only catches me up through June 11^th. I've still got a long way to go, but it is progress.

I did not play video games as much as I would have liked today due to the monitor rabbit hole. But tonight I did put in a little time. I tried out Tilt Brush, which I got as part of my free month subscription to Viveport. It was a lot of fun. I'm not that artistic but I can see the potential and I might have to buy it the next time it goes on sale. I do still have the $50 Steam gift card but I don't want to waste it on full-priced games.

I successfully played Star Trek Bridge Crew thanks to being plugged into the internet. I only went through the tutorial but that took me nearly an hour. I'm looking forward to jumping into the game itself. It would be fun to play with other people but I don't think I'll ever jump in with random people. Luckily I can do the solo thing. The strangest part was that the tutorial character was a girl and it really weird looking down to use one of the buttons on the captain's chair and seeing a non-male chest. It's an odd experience.

I jumped into the regular Elite Dangerous and created bookmarks for the next several systems I needed to jump to. I still need to peak out from under my headset to see which planets I need in the system, but I'm at least not having to type or cut and paste while in VR. I'm going to look around for mods to see if there is a way I can get a notepad or something in-game that I can write down individual planets on. Once I was in VR, I upped the in-game supersampling to whatever the highest option was, 2.0 or 2.5. I also upped it in SteamVR to 2.5. I've read that some people have issues going too high when they are in a highly populated station, but most of my time is spent out in the middle of nowhere and I haven't noticed any issues after bumping everything up. I also haven't experienced any of the slight motion sickness I felt the very first time I tried out the game in VR. I also haven't done any crazy barrel rolls, which might explain it. I think I have become more accustomed to it, though, and I think it helps a lot having a computer that can maintain a high FPS so the game stays really smooth. Just to test it I went into combat training and that went pretty well. It is a lot easier to keep track of the bad guys when you can turn your head and look out of the top, sides, and back of the cockpit. Before I was having to rely on the map but I didn't look at that a single time in VR. The game was a lot of fun without VR but it is definitely turned up to eleven in VR. I'm also about nine hours away from buying an in-game bobble head for my ship. I know I said I was going to take a break from electronics and whatnot but the bobblehead has been a 60-hour goal since the beginning, so I'm sticking to it.

It is now nearly midnight because it wouldn't be a journal entry as of late if I wasn't constantly sidetracked during the process of writing it. Tomorrow I open, so waking up in the morning is probably going to suck a little bit. I'm not sure what I'm going to do tomorrow. I need to give the LEGOs back to the childrens department and put up my DVD display sign. That won't account for very much of my day, though. I imagine I might try and continue working on the tutorial thing. And I might count some prize tickets. So there will be things to do. There are always things to do. And things to be avoided because they aren't immediately necessary to worry about.