April 2020 archive

Happy… no Easter Vigil, or something, y’all.

Well, it’s been a decade since I rejected Catholicism. I still feel content that I did so, knowing that I made the right choice since I disagreed with all of its doctrine… and I mean all of its doctrine. You have to agree with all of it, or at least agree to submit to all of it, in order to “become” Catholic as an adult convert, so me “going through the motions” to shut someone up would have culminated in me lying to people at various stages in the process (RCIA, as previously mentioned) and I didn’t want to waste my time or anyone else’s time dragging that whole process out, especially because Catholicism artificially inflates their numbers by “not allowing you to quit” once you are on their rolls. And furthermore, I didn’t even want to crack the door open of “well, Bub needs to be baptized because that’s what our family does! and you’re the custodial parent, so we need to get your consent for it some way! and the easiest way to do that is just to shotgun convert you!”.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, anyone who is getting… certain public benefits that may come due for a renewal automatically has those benefits renewed for the length of time that they had normally been getting them, so my medical insurance through the state was renewed for another calendar year. I am glad that I don’t have to worry about that. I mean, until they find some excuse to take it away from me. Well, that.

My state governor apparently wants to sign an executive order next week “helping businesses start to get back to work here soon”. In a global pandemic. Okay. Once you start to talk more about that, I’ll see what you “have in mind”, and then I guess I’ll see how hard I have to go in on you like Barret Wallace from Final Fantasy VII on your social media because we still have someone in power who does not understand science.

So far, we are on day one of this game.

As predicted, wandering around (getting lost in) Midgar is great fun, but what’s not to be expected?

I think Bub is calmed down, and mellowed out, by Barret Wallace… if not a bit amused by him. This is how I approach activism and advocacy. So this should really have come as no surprise to me. It shouldn’t have…

My child sees enough of me in Barret Wallace to be comforted by him, and this is actually amusing to me.

Some things I’ve learned about in Animal Crossing.

And in general, because today is the day that Final Fantasy VII: the Remake came out! Actually came out!

I did not know about the concept of “time traveling” until now (such as going back to the most recent Sunday to buy turnips in case you missed the turnip NPC, whose name I almost always seem to forget until I actually see her), or turnip exchanges, which you can actually do on this site. Some of the more popular ones whose islands allow you to sell turnips for high Bell prices take… a little while to actually get in on (you know, getting high enough up in the queue to get the Dodo code to get in on the island), but for the islands with really high Bell prices, it kind of is worth it. I’ve participated in a few turnip exchanges so far, both on that site and with friends who have lucked out with high turnip sell rates, and now I’m participating in a Discord for Animal Crossing players over 25 (even if I’m primarily playing this game with Bub, I count as a player!).

We’ve also pre-loaded all of Final Fantasy VII: the Remake onto our PlayStation 4. Finally. The first… part. There was absolutely no way that I was going to start that at midnight when it “rolled out”. I may like games, but nowhere near that much. Nowhere near as much as I actually like sleeping, my friends. Games can wait. And although I wish that they had just put the whole remake into one game so that we could be one and done with it at some point, I mean, I really don’t mind that much. The remake got made, my friends.

One thing that I actually did not realize…

I found this out through talking about the Catholic religion with some of my friends, but apparently you are supposed to be interviewed prior to enrolling in RCIA classes. Bub’s paternal grandmother knew about this, and she was able to hide the fact that this was an interview from me by interrupting the interviewer after nearly every single question that he asked me so that I would not catch on as to what “classes” I would actually be attending, let alone had signed up for (since, prior to the “interview”, these things being put in quotations because I would never have filled out the forms in the first place if I had actually been given a chance to read the forms or had been told what the purpose of the classes actually were, let alone even been given the name of the classes so that I could read about them at any point — remember, Bub’s father and his grandmother were adamant in making sure that the name of these classes were not even given to me for this reason). They also had me put down on these forms that I “was raised” in the Mormon faith, even though this was a blatant lie. Not only was I not raised in any faith at all, seeing as how my parents respected my lack of belief in anything, but Bub’s father was also pretty adamant about “sticking with this story”, even though he himself knew that I didn’t believe in the existence of anything supernatural and did not want this to come out at any point. I’m assuming that he wanted me to “fake it until I made it” and lie my way through these classes so that he did not get in trouble for knowing that I did not believe in anything, or he thought that somehow these classes would actually succeed in making me believe (or want to believe) in the existence of the supernatural and somehow “reason” that the Catholic church was right all along. Fat chance on that given how his mother would not stop running her mouth about how wrong all of my relatives were, even though I wasn’t particularly close to that many of them, having met very few of them in person.

But this should speak to how nefarious my ex and his mother were, that they would go to the levels that they did to hide the fact that I was “being interviewed” (because apparently they interview you before the classes even start to get an idea “where you’re coming in from”), and she had apparently told a lot of people that she went to church with that I was “excited about converting” and that I “wanted to convert”. Yeah, no.

Sony and Microsoft had a baby, folks. Just look.

This is the controller that the PlayStation 5 will apparently have. It looks like Sony and Microsoft had a baby, which I don’t like. Sony had a good thing going for it with the DualShock controllers that they had, making minor changes to them to improve things. But this looks so different, and so far… out there that I honestly don’t know if I like it. This just feels a lot like the two most major gaming consoles are trying to be each other.

In case this wasn’t already glaringly obvious…

Bub and I have been playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons since it was released.

That was one of the games that I switched our pre-order from a physical copy of to a digital copy of, thinking that this pandemic would likely delay the arrival of that game of, and if possible I wanted to be able to play that game with him as soon as I could… and I am really glad that I did, especially because we had the space for it on the microSD card that we got for our Nintendo Switch this last Christmas. Even though Animal Crossing isn’t exactly a game that I’ve dove into myself, so to speak, I have friends that know more about the game than I do, and I’ve made it a point to Google things when I’m confused about something or want to know more about something, and the franchise isn’t bad at all! It’s actually quite fun. I’m not put off by it. And Bub enjoys it a lot, so I enjoy it a lot. So far, Bub is all about the “build the best possible bridge for our island” life (he would be, he absolutely would be, so the fact that he is should surprise exactly zero people reading this blog post, I mean, come on now). That seems to come part and parcel with doing storyline quests, which I have done both with him and on my own if he has made it clear that he doesn’t particularly enjoy those. Some people seem to have FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) with these games. I just have WTBBBWB (Want To Build Best Bridge With Bub). And Tom Nook is an asshole, always wanting loans.

I also did manage to switch our pre-order of Final Fantasy VII: the Remake to a digital copy on the PlayStation Network! I managed to go whole hog and get the digital deluxe version of it, because… well, why not? Quarantine and chill. Quarantine and Bub’s going to summon Carbuncle, Chocobo Chick, and Cactuar.

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