active_apathy | I have a surprising amount to say when I have nothing to say.

The idea of posting one of those "Am bored; entertain me" kinds of posts bothers me a little. It's not so much the posts themselves - I've no quarrel with them, and they're often quite fun - it's just that to ask everyone to entertain me just seems kind of... wrong. Broken.

But, still. Sometime today I decided to reinstall VtM - Bloodlines, mostly because I've again decided that it's vastly, vastly better than VtM - Redemption. Did I mention vastly better? I hope so. It also makes it far easier to deal with your foes in a sensible and expedient way - i.e., sinking some fangs in and sucking them dry. Or running them through. Or using the sledgehammer, which you'll have to see yourself, but is well worth it.

(Bloodlines is also better humoured; see also, Malkavians arguing with stop signs. Oh, and the description of the Fire Axe - "truly a madman's weapon; who else would attack fire with an axe?" Plus, it's creepier. Ocean House, anyone?)

The obvious problem here is that reinstalling Bloodlines means reinstalling the unofficial patch, which is quite possibly the slowest-extracting .zip ever in the history of file compression. It's currently estimating another 2 hours and 40 minutes to decompress the last 28.7MB, in which there's apparently three thousand and something files made up of a variety of sounds, Python scripts, map files, Python scripts, collision maps for the map files, Python scripts, and other stuff, possibly including Python scripts.

(Not that this is entirely a bad thing. I like Python - it's clear, easy to use, easy to code in, and invisibly compiles itself into something that runs about as fast as the same thing coded in C.)

The helpful thing here is that it puts back a lot of things that Troika took out, like some lines of Malkavian dialogue, or a slew of responses for the Nosferatu, or a couple of problems with Beckett near the end, or that bit where you put the guy in the boat after saving him from the thing.

On the other hand, since VtM-B uses Source, if I'm going to wait five hours in total for an unofficial patch to decompress it should maybe be adding things like, oh, I don't know, a portal gun. (For the people who technically aren't still alive. Hmm.) This may just prove that you can't have your cake at all, let alone eating it too, regardless of how some people may try to lie. The cake not being a lie is also a lie, and I take no responsibility for exploding heads or broken brains.

Anyway, all this adds up to mean that there's about two and a quarter hours of quite bureaucratic file system stuff, like opening files and closing files and creating files and finding places for files to go. The rest is shared in some unspecified proportion between writing stuff into those files, and doing some actual, honest decompression. Joy.

Hence, post, because waiting for all of this to happen is somewhat damaging my ability to self-entertain, because a weighted companion PC is a little beyond my talents and available resources, and because I've gone as far with the planning for the quizpost as I can without having to plan some kind of quizpost intervention for myself.

This is where you come into it. Entertain me. Post a recipe, write haiku, sing songs, recite poetry, talk with just icons, write me an essay about the relative merits of weighted companion cubes and rogue modrons, explain selection sort in lolcat, post links to unusual yet entertaining things, or whatever else seems like it might be fun. Commentspam is encouraged, as is developing a thread with a topic just so you can go right off it.

So, yes. Entertain. Post early, post often.