Thank you! Genuinely, that means a lot to hear. I’ve never heard anyone compliment my prose, but it’s something I value a lot in other literature, and have a hard time getting into novels that are lacking it.

I’ve been wanting/trying to write a fiction book for years, but I have a horrible habit of knocking out a few pages and then getting into my own head and picking apart my work. I’ll end up reworking it sentence by sentence until I hate whatever’s left. Your nice comment makes me want to try again. All the best to you!

Thanks! Very kind of you to say.

Ah, the old Coon Hill Rd. special. Grew up near a wooded country road that was full of trash like this. People apparently came from all around the township to dump their trash and furniture up and down this road, and the county never bothered to clean it up. My family was never down with that, but my dad used to catch possums in his livetraps and relocate them on this exact road. I guess he didn’t know how beneficial it was to have possums around. Coon Hill may have been lined with trash, but it was likely 100% tick free.

I had to do a school project once where we took disposal cameras and snapped photos of things that we found beautiful, and things we found ugly. I knocked out almost all of the ugly ones just on Coon Hill, but I did snap a few beautiful ones off the beaten path a bit. It was in the dead of winter and mostly snow and rotting vegetation, but beautiful enough at the right time of day. There was a duality down Coon Hill.

I swear I wasn’t a redneck, but it sure sounds like it.

I swear “quietly” is the new “slams”.

No problem. I don’t know what it is about 6am bathroom time that makes me write novels.

It functions well enough that I haven’t noticed anything off, save for maybe two occasions in 40+ hours where I was unlucky enough to have bandits spawn in near me. Once out in the woods, and one time they literally appeared sitting in chairs in the room I had just passed through, then attacked on my way back through it. You can’t help but laugh when it happens, but it’s nowhere near like it was on release.

I know that several of the squads I encounter in the wild have been artificially spawned in just outside of my exclusion radius, but they move organically enough that I’ve never had my immersion broken with the impression that these aren’t just stalkers on their own mission. Sure, if I reload a ways back and travel the same route, it may well be a different assortment of them, no one at all, or maybe bandits or mutants the next time, but rather than feeling tacky it keeps the Zone feeling unpredictable. Retracing my steps after reloading often results in a wildly different experience from Point A to Point B, so I can’t cheese my way through much of anything.

I’ve also encountered large, roaming packs of mutants who, when avoided, travel well outside of my exclusion radius and continue to be heard far off in the distance (Flesh are a good example) even though they’re no longer rendered on my screen. I’ve traveled in that direction a short time later just to run into the same pack having changed direction, so there definitely are some persistent A-Life doing their thing out there. It’s just sprinkled with some chance encounters.

All in all, the A-Life isn’t exactly where they/we want it to be, but they’ve taken enough corrective steps that I find it very enjoyable, and I say that as a long-term fan of the originals, as well as hardcore versions like Anomaly. Honestly, the only thing I truly dislike about STALKER 2 is the number of bloodsuckers. They’ve become a lot easier to dispatch with my better gear, but if I’m ever going to run into three bloodsuckers in the wild, it should be like one time. But there are times where I encounter packs of them several times per day, and on Veteran difficulty that is absolute bullshit.

STALKER 2, and I haven’t felt this frightened to climb down into the basement of a decrepit waste processing station since the original trilogy. So in short, it hits just right.

I actually stood in my kitchen last night eating some yogurt and two Lucky Charms cereal bars just to procrastinate what I knew I had to do.

They all have cousins, so…

As a career produce manager I can confirm that we average about a Spock per minute. Usually elderly, and determined to destroy this year’s crop of peaches from BC.

“It’s like my grand-dad always told me… If ya don’t squeeze the peach in’ta noodles it might not be a real peach. Ya doin’ the next guy a favah…”

That’s unusual. Yeah, I had only played on mobile. Couldn’t tell you whether or not it contained spyware, but the game itself is fantastic and the only paid content (additional classes/decks) are well worth it.

Night of the Full Moon is excellent.

Being an entomologist would be sweet as hell. You walk into the lab on a Tuesday morning and Jerry, a gray-bearded researcher with spectacles and a friendly demeanor is like, “Hey, come over here, Kevin. Come look at this bug.”, and you go over there and see the coolest fucking bug.

I imagine he spent the entirety of the ban raging like Dennis Reynolds and counting down the days. “IDIIIOOOTS! IDDDIIIIOOOOTSS!!!”

STALKER, Stardew Valley, No Man’s Sky, Skyrim, Morrowind, WoW Classic/Vanilla, Mass Effect, Fallout 3/New Vegas.

I love that cats universally smell and rub their cheeks on groceries.

When I worked at Kmart years ago I was just a layaway employee. Since I was kind of fat and and of average height, the security guy asked me to stand-in while he dealt with this huge dude, maybe 6’3", as some kind of intimidation tactic while he asked him questions. My job was apparently to block the security office door to prevent the guy from leaving. Security guy starts asking about warrants and the guy is like “Fuck this” and rapidly approaches me at the door. Towering over me. This job paid minimum wage and I had zero training to deal with Brute Squads. I just let him go past me while the security guy desperately chased after him, asking him to stop repeatedly.

Security guy talked a lot of shit about me after that. Couldn’t give less of a fuck. Not my job to get knocked out by giant dudes who got caught trying to steal a pair of Basic Edition sweat pants.

Obviously this has nothing to do your situation or how you handled it, but it definitely speaks volumes about what the point of Security even is if the train security officers can’t even do anything.

EDIT: Looking back, that job was pretty fucked. It was on the bad side of town and Sears Holdings wound up getting rid of security entirely. Word got out extemely fast and it became a free-for-all for shoplifters. Groups of middle-aged women would come in with huge purses, fill them to the brim and casually walk out, laughing and saying “Nothin’ for us today, thank you!”. Got to the point where friendly deterrent didn’t even help. We just stopped giving a shit. I had been threatened with violence over refunding a TV that had been forced into a back seat so hard that the box still had red paint on it, had a gun flashed at me over making eye contact with a dude I recognized, and used to have to chase a kid around who would ride the bikes, steal candy and kick fragile shit off of shelves. That job is why I will never work at a department store again. Picked up some great customer service skills, though.

Something about this sentence really makes me want to be a pirate. Like a lot.

Sorry. That was a stupid word choice on my end.

You’re right. It’s not something I generally use in conversation (not since the early 2010s anyway) and I’m not sure why I thought it was cool to say it on here. Just a shitty reactionary thing that I blurted out.

What an immensely gay fucking thing to plaster on your window.