Gas was at forty gwei this morning, so I scrambled to get a lot of stuff done that I’d been planning all week: moving tokens to centralized exchanges and staking, claiming, unstaking various positions. Of course the rest of the market was in turmoil today as BTC continued it’s drawdown. As predicted, my last BTC buy is under my two percent limit, but I’m holding, come hell or high water. This seems to be another thirty percent pullback, I hope that we’re at a bottom or I am going to be begging for my job back before the end of the month is out. I kid.
I’ve been playing games with Elder. We puttered around in Project Entropia for a few hours last night. I’m not sure I want to get into an MMO with her, but it was mentioned as an influence by the CEO of Star Atlas, so I figured that it was another look. And it’s certainly better that those games that she plays on Roblox. Most of them are mindless, grindy click games. The obbies, short for obstacle course are somewhat okay, the worst are the tycoon games. They’re basically grinding games where you’re dependent on a timer to build up money that you need to build the next piece of whatever you’re building, and requires a lot of running back and forth from point A to B, to A, to C, and so on and on. The whole point of these games are to use every addictive game mechanism known to man to hook players, and then offer them bonuses like 2x walking speed or whatever to get them to shell out Robux to the developer. They’re extremely exploitative.
I don’t think I’d hate them so much if they weren’t being so completely transparent about it. While one could argue that they’re not that much different than other MMOs at the core, at least there’s an element of story to most games, and some level of interaction and space to form friendships. Most of that has been stripped away there.
The two of us spent a couple hours running around in a game today. It had RPG elements, we were mainly running around swinging swords at goblins and other monsters, for skulls, but we were limited by how many skulls we could carry, and had to respawn back at the start to sell them for coins, which we then used to purchase larger skull capacity. That should tell you all you need to know about that game. There were pets that gave you skull bonuses, but it all built up so fast that you eventually spent more time respawning and running back and forth than you did attacking monsters. And it was garish, like the RPG version of a casino. There was so much visual noise on the screen that I about had a fit, but thankfully I had the option to turn off all the money effects and pets.
After a couple hours of that I needed a detox, so I took the girls out. We stopped by the dollar store for some treats, then I took them to the nature park for some canoeing. Younger almost had a fit when we took off, but it was fun. The playground there was open for the first time since COVID started, and was a bit crowded. So we left there and I took them to the beach and let them run around in the surf for a bit. They had a great day.
So now they’re in bed, and I’m going to hopefully spend some time with Missus. She’s going to be working at the office this next week as part of a coverage rotation, so I’m going to be on my own all day with the kids tomorrow, a full time househusband. Her job hasn’t announced any “return to work” plans for her yet, but it’s coming. We’ll just have to see how much deep work I can get done with the kids around. It’s going to be a challenge.