Weeknotes #4: Flop week
In last week's weeknotes, I said I was going on holiday. Illness derailed those plans just a few hours after I posted that, and instead we spent the week at home and on the sofa.
It also means I'll have to do battle with the travel insurance company in an attempt to squeeze even a drop of money out of them, so wish me luck there (ugh).
Week of no Dog
We dropped The Dog off for his own holidays before our own one went to shit, and decided we may as well leave him there just in case we were well enough to travel later. The Dog's holiday is him staying with a very nice behaviourist who understands all his many neuroses and he gets to run around in the woods playing with other dogs and generally having the time of his life, so he's fine. He's probably having more fun than we are.
That said, I miss The Dog a lot. Partly for the obvious reasons (I love him) but also because it's been four years since we got him, and it turns out the structure of my life completely falls apart without him being there.
The Dog is an extremely strict disciplinarian. He wants to get up at a certain time, he wants to go outside at a certain time, and he wants to go to bed at a certain time. I am not joking when I say that The Dog fixed my sleep schedule. If I try to stay up past 10pm, he will get right in my face and just stare intensely at me until I finally give in and go to bed.
Living with The Dog also gets me out of the house daily, which requires me to actually put on some clothes fit for human eyes, and neither of those are things I've had much motivation to do this week. On top of that, I have to keep the house tidy for The Dog because if I leave food lying around, he will get into it and make a mess or get sick or both.
So basically I used to think The Dog spent his days lying around napping and farting and generally contributing nothing to the household but an extraordinary amount of hair, but it turns out he's actually been single-pawedly keeping my shit together this entire time. Dog, come home!! I need you!!!
Playing Civ 6 is an act of self-harm
So the two of us had a week off at the same time with no work but also not feeling well enough to go out and do stuff. Guess what we did instead!!!
Eyes? Sore. Head? Aching. Sleep schedule? Beyond fucked. I love this game but I've never had fun playing it in my entire life.
I love Bingo Brawlers and I don't entirely know why
The other thing that ate up a big chunk of time this week was the Elden Ring streamer series Bingo Brawlers. We had the last few round robin matches to catch up on, plus the playoffs, and then yesterday was the third place matchup, and tonight is the season 5 finale. I'm completely hooked.
I bounced off Elden Ring pretty quickly when it came out (I can appreciate FromSoft games from a distance but they are just not my thing) so I don't entirely know why I'm so into this series. I think it's just a really good format: there's a five-by-five bingo grid of objectives (like "Kill 5 bosses with 'Tree' in the name" or "Restore Godrick's great rune") and players win by getting 5 squares in a row or, if that's impossible, getting a majority. It's also lockout, so if one side takes a square, the other side can't complete it. This makes for a lot of tense races and mindgames while everyone tries to predict their opponent's next move.
To make matters even more complicated, this season's competition is made up of two-person teams, one playing the base game and the other taking the DLC. Some squares can only be done by one person, while others need both players to work together to complete it (like killing a particular base-game boss and a particular DLC boss). I thought that watching four different players at once would be kind of brain-melting, but actually it totally works.
So now I, with my feeble two hours of Elden Ring playtime, am intently watching five hours of Bingo in one go while saying things like "There's great Stormveil synergy on that diagonal if they can do a hitless Godrick".
Here's to a good finale tonight. I'm hoping for another Wendy's four-for-four.
Media consumption corner
Speaking of watching other people play games, The Celebrity Traitors finished this week. I love this show and I don't care how much of a basic bitch that makes me. Honestly I was a bit skeptical about the idea of a UK celebrity edition (I didn't really like the one season I watched of the US version) but this season was fantastic and now I'm going to frame a portrait of Alan Carr and hang it in my house.
I listened to the entire Danny Brown album feeling like Sarah Conner's skeleton clinging to a chain-link fence in Terminator 2 (complimentary).
It also got me to check out the latest single from underscores, "Do It", which is a Grade-A banger in itself.
I did finally buy a CD player so I'm looking forward to actually listening to all these CDs I keep buying on eBay. (In fact I should really do that before I buy any more of them.)
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