1. My living nightmare has come to an apparent end; my new PS Vita Slim arrived yesterday, and it actually appears to work. I haven’t had a chance to do much of anything with it yet, though, as its download speeds are still as dreadfully slow as they were before – Borderlands 2 is maybe 30% downloaded and I’ve had the thing continually running since last night at 8pm – but I’ve held it in my hands and configured settings and such, and it feels… better, somehow. My memories of my original Vita are dim, as you might imagine, being that in my 4 weeks of ownership I only actually had it working for 48 hours. In any event, the new Slim feels nice in the hand; it’s a little light, but that’s probably OK over the long haul. I look forward to the day when I can actually talk about playing games on it.
(Oh – I did manage to import my PS4 save of Fez over to the Vita, and that’s just a super-cool thing to be able to do. I also tried using the Vita as the PS4’s second screen, and that kinda looked a little janky – it looked like a very poorly compressed YouTube video. So I’m not sure how much mileage I’m going to get out of that feature. But, still, hey. Maybe I can use it as a BluRay remote for the time being.)
2. I have a column due on Monday for Gamemoir; it’s a rebuttal to an opinion piece about “The Shame of Playing on Easy Mode” and it ought to be a slam dunk, and yet for some reason I’m having a much more difficult time than I anticipated in making it work. The most important thing for me is that I don’t want to be mean; I mean, I’m writing a column, I don’t want it to read like it belongs in a comment thread. But I have very strong feelings on that topic and I’m afraid that I’m going to screw it up somehow by either throwing too much into the post, or else not throwing in enough, or else dwelling on minutia and rushing through the points I actually want to make.
It’s strange, what writing for other sites is doing to my brain. I mean, I’ve only written 2 pieces for Gamemoir so far (and in the meantime I’ve gone 0-for-2 for pitches to other, bigger sites), but those pieces have reached far bigger audiences than almost anything I’ve written here, and as such I’ve had to craft those pieces a bit differently than how I normally write. I also get a week to write those pieces, so I have a bit more time to think about them and figure out how to say what I want to say.
The stuff I write here is generally pretty quick; I’ve gotten quite good at not self-censoring myself the way I used to (even on my personal LiveJournal account), but I’m also very informal here, and I have a tendency to fully indulge all the weird linguistic tics and tricks I’ve developed over the years as a writer without a formal editing process. Like: this piece is already over 500 words and it’s taken me only about 15 minutes to write. But it’s also more than likely that this post will be forgotten by everyone (and me, too) about 15 minutes after they’re done with it. I’m not necessarily crafting anything here; I’m just putting my thoughts up as quickly and as coherently as I can.
If I want to get better as a writer – indeed, if I ever hope to get some freelance work – I need to get better at the craft. So it’s probably a good thing, then, that I’m struggling with this piece; it means I’m learning something.
3. There’s not going to be much gaming this weekend; the wife and kid and dogs and I are going out of town for the weekend, to hang out with both of Henry’s grandmothers. I keep thinking about maybe bringing the Vita along, but I also know that any free time I manage to wrangle will most likely have to be spent in front of my laptop, writing that post.
Shouts From The Couch 