Low energy mood this week. I am at about a 3/10. The news and whatnot has me pretty down.

I write part of a post and then the next day it's like cold leftovers and I have to start over. Between the supreme court case of Texas vs PA, MI, WI, GA that has states picking sides, government shutdown now pushed to next week, and the covid bill, frankly it seems like our government is either insane or incompetent or both. And that's very grim.

There's supposed to be another red hat protest in the city tomorrow. I'm glad spouse won't be working. The city is raw about the last red hat gathering. Red hats didn't respect the local mask mandate and tore down protest art. It's just posters and stuff, but when I saw the videos I was surprised by how furious and sick it made me. I don't even live in the city, and due to covid haven't risked attending a protest, but it still felt like a punch in the face. Everyone knew the red hats came to provoke a confrontation and there was a mass call to stay home and ignore them. This time I think people are fed up from the ongoing election chaos and they may not be as inclined to look the other way. I suspect the chances of a larger confrontation are high.

Spouse's red hat family has been pressuring him into talking politics. Spouse doesn't know how to tell them that if they get the civil war they say they want, he won't be on their side. It's wearing on him.

Everything just seems a mess. It's one thing when you're stuck home 'cause of plague, fun stuff you might have looked forward to is not possible, and 3k people are dying a day. That's terribly sad but endurable. But the rampant insanity is so much harder to take, because there's no vaccine coming to fix people so convinced of conspiracies that logic ceases to work on them.

I think I'm just going to burrow in until Monday.

Spouse got the Cyberpunk 2077 game, which we've both been looking forward to even though I don't "play", I just play peanut gallery. I didn't own a console growing up so I am just garbage at working a modern controller. It is so frustrating to not be able to look the right direction, fumbling around to open a loot box, disaster in combat, always slow and struggling. It's no fun for me. As an adult I have accepted that I'm not interested in spending the time it would take to get to basic competence. But I like following the story and we choose dialogue options and make funny in jokes and I help with puzzles and such. So we've both been looking forward to 2077. I've played the original D10 pen and paper RPG Cyberpunk 2020 quite a bit and it's one of my favorite settings/systems. I'm unsure if spouse has played it, but I know we've both played Shadowrun (I wanted to like Shadowrun, but I never got the dice pool system and I thought some of the races and magic were just distracting, so personally I much prefer Cyberpunk). Anyway, game came in the mail yesterday and I promptly started installing it 'cause I knew there would be a big patch file. The damn thing is 45GB. On our wheezy sad DSL connection. OUR HAMSTER POWERING THE MODEM WILL DIE. 70 hours to download. Jesus Christ. This is after installing from the data disc. We are currently down to just 29GB and supposedly 44 hours remaining. Spouse has the weekend off, but by the time this fat bastard is loaded he'll be able to play for maybe 3-4 hours and then it'll be bedtime. Sad.

I'm just waiting for Sunday, when we finally get this patch loaded, and then it has to download a second patch file of only 20GB. We'll be downloading patches forever, never playing ...