I told myself I’d write this review after getting 10 hours of gameplay under my belt.  Then 15.  Then 25. Then I told myself I’d write this review after I beat the game. Well, here we are.  Two days out from what was supposed to be the biggest release of the year, Mass Effect: Andromeda.  Yet, I find the sound of HZD to be deafening.  This game was a phenom. It was out of the blue. It was a comet that was caught in our gravity and slammed into our collective conscious from the great beyond.

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Hello, friends. Hello, comrades. Passersby, lurkers, regulars. Hello, hello, hello. We are on Day Three of my Spring Break, which is also Day Three of my wife being away on a vacation in Belize.

Don’t fret! I’ve washed my ass. Don’t fret! My animals are alive. Don’t fret! I’m eating. Don’t fret, don’t fret, don’t fret. Oh sure, it’s a half-hearted scrub. Oh sure, they’re bored of me and I’m bored of them. Oh sure, no vegetables have been spotted near my throat-chasm since last week.

Am I losing my mind? Always.

Am I feeling Cabin Fever? I hope not, because there’s a blizzard coming tomorrow that’s going to pin me right in this house.

Am I hoping you’ll come hang out in Monday Morning Commute? Share what you’re enjoying-looking-forward-to-thinking-about-consuming this week?

Absolutely.

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There’s a stunning, albeit welcomed, banality to my life. To skip two weeks of Desktop Thursdays, the column where I share with you both my virtual and tangible worlds, and look back and find emptiness. Placidity. Nothing much to report, over and out. Nothing much to comment upon, over and out.

I’m here this week, though, with said column. And I’ll share, with you said worlds.

I hope you’ll do the same in the comments.

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There can be something exhilarating and freeing about a condemned, Post-Hope existence.

Sure. I utter this from a plateau. From a monument of privilege.

My wife makes good money, I got a dick, can pass for straight, and sport a blanche complexion.

With those caveats in tow, I mean, this rotting obelisk doesn’t seem so intimidating. It may be a survival technique, these gallantly leapt hoops I am gallantly leaping through. But what else would you ask of me?

The seas rise, the Earth heats, the resources dwindle, the population increases. Those in charge predicate power and greed over empathy and charity.

It’s done. It. Capital “I”, if you will. Shot through the heart. To carry on itself seems a tip of the cap to existential absurdism.

What else to do, what else would you have me do? A little mild resistance during the day. But the heart weakens, the mind fatigues, respite is earned and welcome.

So I fuck, and I smoke a little weed. I laugh with friends, go out to dinner with my wife. Enjoy movies, condemn liberal sophistic think pieces and conservative hate screeds alike. Play some video games, walk my dog. Marvel at the night sky and feel peace in the recognition that We Don’t Matter, We Never Mattered, And It will be fine when we’re gone. It. Capital “I”, if you will.

Every once in a while, I contemplate carrying on my lineage, am reminded that if anyone is getting off this melting marble it certainly won’t be an ancestor of my class and caste. I pass off that condemnation for another week, month, year, maybe forever. Can you imagine that? Willfully procreating at the end of civilization? Sometimes I can. Sometimes I can’t.

I have no words of encouragement other than we’re all down in the bottom decks of this wonderful, wicked, pointless sinking ship together. So fuck it, and fuck it together.

Let’s spend some time chatting. There’s nothing really else to do.

[This is Monday Morning Commute]

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I futz with this game. I futz with this game, hard.

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