If we were having coffee, I’d be grateful: it would mean I was sitting down and out of the house and talking to an adult who is not my wife.  I love my wife dearly, don’t get me wrong, but this “unemployed/full time author” thing means I speak to no adults other than her on a typical day, and I miss contact with grown-ups.  Hell, I’m even starting to miss contact with kids, as the only one of those I ever see is my own son.

Yes, fine, I admit it, I’m starting to miss certain aspects of teaching, and all aspects of having a job.

You know what else I miss?  Video games.  I’m hoping you’re a gamer, because I kind of want to talk about them.  When winter break rolled around and I stopped having uninterrupted blocks of time during the day because the boy was around, I stopped playing Fallout 4, and I haven’t been back to it since.  I have three or four games on my iPad that get a lot of attention, but I just don’t seem to be able to carve out time for console gaming any longer (winter break has been over for nearly a month, remember) and when I do whatever I’m playing inevitably pisses me off somehow.

An example: I just heard from someone on Twitter that she bought The Witcher 3, a game I’d previously decided not to bother with, and she had to download twenty gigabytes of patches and updates before actually getting to play:

@nfinitefreetime Went to bed, woke up, went to the store and it was still updating.

— Carolyn Velociraptor (@Arumi_kai) January 31, 2016

Which … holy crap, I’d never even fucking play the thing.  That would literally make me so angry that I’d abandon the very idea of playing the fucking game.  (Think I’m kidding?  I’ve done it before.)  I cannot properly express how much I hate what has happened with this generation of consoles.  I mean, that’s, what, eight hours of downloads, and who the hell knows what kind of shit your cable company pulls afterwards if you’re with the wrong people.  Bah.

For someone who spends ridiculous amounts of time sitting in front of his computer, you’d think computer gaming would be a viable use of my time.  Also no, despite being able to name several games off the top of my head that I’d like to be playing or that I actually have on my computer and have never actually opened.  Why?  I dunno.  I just don’t.  And I miss it, but despite having loads of free time and the means to be doing whatever I want, I’m not doing anything about it.

So I’m hoping you do, and we can talk about the games you’re playing, so that I can live vicariously through you.

The end.