Everything Is Fine

Latest Posts

  • Gen Con 2026 was fine – Part I – The Trip

    Gen Con was last weekend! So why am I just writing about it now? Because I couldn’t be bothered. When you have lukewarm takes like these, sometimes you just aren’t that interested in vomiting them forth for approximately zero people to read.

    Anyway, this will be a series of posts (approximately three) about Gen Con 2026 – the travel, the events, the shenanigans, etc. This one will mainly cover the travel.

    Travel to Gen Con is boring. At least, it’s boring when you drive from the Midatlantic, because you just get on Interstate 70 and then nothing happens. (Depending on where you get on Interstate 70, you might go through Breezewood!) There were a few notable things, though (or notable lack of things for the first one):

    Nobody’s transmission exploded! I mean, I’m sure somebody’s did, but it wasn’t mine or the one of anyone else I know. That meant that once I was actually on the road, it was smooth sailing. The only stop was near Ohio Valley Mall in Ohio for gas and food, and then to wonderful downtown Indianapolis.

    Downtown Indianapolis is fine, but there is a lot of construction going on there at the moment. Specifically, the block in front of the Sheraton hotel is under construction, as well as various blocks nearby around the city. This meant that I could not put my car in front of the building to unload it, and also that it took roughly 20 minutes to circle around the block to pull into the parking garage because the streets are all one way and the garage is on the wrong side of the hotel to be able to pull in after stopping at the front door. (I did not park in the hotel’s garage, granted – they charge $55 per day for that and the convention affords better uses of money.)

    But once the car was unloaded and stowed, I didn’t need to bother with it again until the end of the convention. It was safely indoors and above ground (which all became relevant on Saturday) and was waiting for me to load it back up and make the trip the other direction.

    As for the hotel – the Indianapolis Sheraton is fine. I’ve now stayed there at least three times for Gen Con and while it’s farther from everything than I’d like, it’s near some good food and walking from there to the con helped me find Jack’s Donuts, which is quite good. (And water didn’t pour in to their downstairs conference rooms. Or at least, if it didn’t, I wasn’t aware of it. Water did pour in other places though – more on that later.)

    I’ve said this before, but not on here – the drive from the east coast (and specifically the Midatlantic) to the Midwest has one big hurdle – the Appalachian Mountains. There are only so many routes across them. From Northern Virginia, you can drive up to Frederick, Maryland and get right on I-70, or you can drive out west on I-66, then pick up I-81 and take that up to I-70. You can either just take I-70, diverting up into Pennsylvania (to Breezewood!) then paying like $9 for the Turnpike, then a segment of the interstate that is specifically described as not up to interstate standards, and then getting into West Virginia and onward. On the other hand, you can divert from I-70 onto I-68, which is a straight shot right across Maryland, passing the future site of Noah’s Ark (that broke ground 50 years ago, but they’re gonna finish it!)… right up until it just sort of terminates in Morgantown, West Virginia. You can take US-40 to get from 68 to 70, climbing the mountains through Uniontown, or you can get on I-79 in Morgantown, spending a significant portion of time going north instead of west toward the destination.

    Anyway, all that’s to say that the eastern end of the trip has a lot of hurdles. It’s a lot of slow going and not a lot of progress. It looks lovely, though. Going to Gen Con, that’s the beginning of the trip. You get some scenic views and crummy roads and a lot of up and down (I’m a little surprised my transmission hasn’t exploded, considering it’s already basically defective) but convention energy gets you going and you make it over the mountains and it’s a nice time. Going from Gen Con, however… ugh. You drive from Indiana, which is flat and boring, into and through Ohio, which is flat and boring, and then when you’re kind of tired and sort of almost home, then you have to deal with all the mountain bullshit.

    So yeah, the trip to and from Gen Con was fine. And there’s a Buc-ee’s along the way now!

  • The World Cup is fine

    So we’re through the group stage of the 2026 World Cup. It’s kind of hard to be patriotic at the moment, what with the everything going on and also the fact that a good number of the USMNT members are shitty people, but it’s still okay to root for your country. (It’s also okay to root for other countries!)

    And sure, FIFA referees were blocked from entering the host countries for various reasons. And the Iranian team is allowed to play games in the US, but not stay overnight, so they have to commute back and forth from Mexico every game day.

    And yeah, FIFA is a terribly corrupt organization, for requiring New Jersey to charge over $100 for train rides that cost $15 other times, and for awarding a “Peace Prize” to someone who then went and started a war (and then basically surrendered in that war, leaving everything worse than before it started), and all the graft that came with hosting past World Cups. Oh, and expanding this year’s cup to include 16 more teams so that there can be more games so there could be more ticket sales and more TV money, but in exchange for bringing in teams that never should have qualified and have no shot at beating anybody ever.

    But some of those “terrible” teams got to make a showing on a grand stage. Curaçao came in ranked #82 in the world (in a field of 48), and of course didn’t win any games, but did score a goal in their opening game against Germany. (A game they lost 7-1, but Brazil, with 5 World Cup championships has also lost 7-1 to Germany before.) They also managed to draw with Ecuador, who’s ranked #23.

    Cape Verde made their World Cup debut, scored 3 draws in the group stage, and plays in the knockout stage against Argentina. (Where Lionel Messi will probably score like 5 goals against them, but still…)

    The stories from Boston of the Scottish fans experiencing tailgating and Red Sox games are also beautiful. (I mean, “beautiful” in the sense of “hey, both countries really just love drinking beer and watching sports”, which probably isn’t the *best* way to form international camaraderie, but I’ll take it.)

    And the stories of people from other countries discovering Americana like barbecue and ranch dressing and whatever is… whatever. I mean, barbecue is good, so I’m glad more people get to have it, but also, a lot of these “hey, see, people from other countries like America!” stories are just to try to cover up just how shitty things are and how poorly we treat foreigners.

    But hey, major sporting events mean more opportunities to gamble! (I’ve won about $200 so far!)

    So watch some soccer (or football), root for a country (that may or may not be the United States), maybe bet a little money (actually don’t – gambling is generally bad to do, but whatever), and celebrate the world watching together.

    It’s fine.

  • Music in a Language You Don’t Speak is Fine

    Earlier this year, Bad Bunny (the most streamed artist on Spotify, by the way, or maybe Taylor Swift has passed him – either way, he’s incredibly popular) performed the Super Bowl halftime show. It was a good time; he really showcased Puerto Rican culture and put on a show that looked and felt like a big party. He also sang in Spanish, because he’s Puerto Rican, and that’s his native language. The FCC received a lot of complaints about this, many mostly about the fact that performing in Spanish is somehow anti-American. (Never mind that Puerto Rico is in America.) Personally, I thought it was a good show. (Technically, I guess I thought it was fine.) I didn’t understand all of the lyrics (despite having studied a LOT of Spanish… it’s been a long time), but to say I didn’t understand the performance would be wrong. It was pretty apparently what the songs were actually about – life, and love, and family – all of the things that featured in the performance. (And some sexy stuff. Turns out, people like sexy stuff.)

    Toward the end of last year, I saw Avatar at the Fillmore in Silver Spring. One of their openers was a band I hadn’t heard of before I saw them on the bill – a band from New Zealand called Alien Weaponry. The band’s members all have Maori ancestry, something of which I know little. The band performs in a way to really express that, though. Their set started with a haka (one part of Maori culture I am somewhat familiar with) and right out of the gate, they were intense. They sing in Maori, so like Bad Bunny, I didn’t necessarily know what words they were saying, but I understood.

    See, you can tell exactly what the song is about, even if you don’t know the words. (And if you’re not 100% certain, you can just look it up – a Taniwha is a guardian spirit that protects people and places, and these indigenous folks are calling on that spirit to get rid of the colonizing forces. (Not gonna get further into any opinions about that, but it owns.)

    More recently, I saw another band that didn’t perform in English, and also made it very clear what they were talking about. I’m talking about The Hu, a Mongolian folk metal band. It sounds simplistic, but these guys are Mongolian; they sing in Mongolian (including throat singing), they play Mongolian folk instruments (some of them – there’s a guitar player and a more contemporary drummer) and their songs are basically war chants or, as far as I can tell, more generally about how badass they are. (There are some more serious ones, like Song of Women which is about how important wives and mothers are, too.)

    You can’t tell me you don’t have a very good idea of this band’s vibe after that. Or that you don’t at least feel like you’re getting a little slice of authentic Mongolian culture. (Maybe it’s a little shallow, but you know what, a lot of American music can be pretty shallow.)

    Anyway, I just wanted to throw those out there. Go listen to some music you don’t understand. It’ll be fine.

  • Final Three Con was Fine

    Okay, so Final Three Con (a local small-ish game convention primarily revolving around “social” gaming (namely social deduction, namely Blood on the Clocktower)) was last weekend, and I would have written this sooner, but you know. Stuff. (And Marathon.)

    I say “small-ish” because it has close to 1000 attendees, but that’s smaller than, say, Gen Con (with its 70,000 attendees) and probably the only Magic Con I’ve been to (Philly 2023), but still, 1000 people is a lot – especially when they’re all there to mainly do the same thing.

    It was a good time. I saw some people I haven’t seen in a while (despite ostensibly being a member of the same local gaming group) and played a lot of games.

    I didn’t do much else but play Clocktower (and The Gang – the unofficial second official game of Final Three Con); the board games I had with me drew some interest, but not from enough people at the same time, and when I had some downtime, I was usually just waiting for another event soon-ish, so I hung out in my hotel room or wandered around for food, drinks, or other stuff like that.

    Also, the Clocktower community is… weird. Like, in a lovely way, and it’s possibly because it’s so much smaller than the gamer community at large (so all the eccentricity is… distilled?) but as an, I guess, “normie” (where I’m not really all that unused to not necessarily fitting into a particular subculture) it’s… I don’t know… off-putting? Not really, but sometimes. Basically, it’s a culture that’s deeply online, to the point where if a game goes around and gives names, a handful will give some sort of online handle.

    And it’s… whatever. I get it (I think). It’s 2026; we’d all rather be somewhere else, or someone else (or I guess maybe these are people who primarily play the game online, and so don’t want to make a link between that identity and their “real world” identity) and that’s fair.

    It’s also an incredibly neurodivergent community. And I say that as someone who’s probably not 100% neurotypical (although I guess it depends on how “typical” one has to be). That’s definitely a good thing – that all of these people are welcome and comfortable and all just hanging out being themselves.

    And so it was a nice weekend of games, friends, weird people, and not really paying any attention to the outside world. (Including the NFL draft that was going on at the same time. Apparently the Steelers drafted the mid quarterback from Penn State.)

    It was fine.

  • Marathon is fine

    I’ve been meaning to sit down and write this for at least a week or so now. The thing is, when I’m not at work or doing something else important like cooking or sleeping, I’m playing Marathon.

    In an earlier post, I mentioned Arc Raiders as a game that I tried and kind of liked. I liked the environment; I liked the aesthetic; I liked the sounds. It just didn’t have the “juice”. Playing it didn’t get me excited or anything. A successful exfil didn’t make me look forward to jumping back in, and getting killed didn’t make me want to try harder next time.

    But Marathon… I played during the Server Slam and it tickled all the right parts of my brain. The environments are cool. The aesthetic is incredibly stylish. Grabbing some loot just makes me want to go try to get more. Getting killed just makes me want to try again. (Ok, getting killed like five times in a row really blows, but I’m getting to where that doesn’t happen as much.)

    The classes feel really different, but not wildly so. I started out playing Recon because I liked having a little spider drone that jumps on enemies, but that’s about it. You get informed when someone else pings you, but if you’re not good enough to do anything about that, well… Then I switched to Triage, and tossing healing drones at your teammates is great. You can help a squad a lot by just keeping everyone put together or getting them back in the fight. (Because it’s an extraction shooter, it’s not quite the same as, say, being a Medic in Battlefield, but there are similar vibes. There’s also a defibrillator that can EMP enemies!)

    There aren’t a lot of maps right now, but the ones there are pretty varied. Perimeter feels like a typical sort of video game map. Some open spaces and buildings with some verticality to them. Dire Marsh has more wide open spaces. Outpost funnels everyone into close quarters. (I have no idea really about Cryo Archive; I didn’t run it last week – maybe this week.)

    There’s a ranked mode, but… why? (I mean, I know why – because some people don’t just want to have the best loot; they want a little tag that says they’re the best so they can put “Top 5 Assassin” in the title of their Twitch stream or whatever.) You don’t need a rank to know when you’re doing well, though. If all your gear is blue and purple, you’re winning.

    But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. Since it is an extraction shooter, you can lose stuff. Losing stuff sucks. The game mitigates it somewhat by both letting you go on runs without stuff (either by using free kits or playing as Rook, which is kind of like a Scav run in Tarkov) and by giving you some more stuff when you level up, which you can do without successfully exfiltrating sometimes.

    And some players will just cause you problems because they can. “There are only 3 minutes left; there’s no way a squad is still camping that room. They have to get out, too.” Haha, no, those assholes are ABSOLUTELY camping that room, just to be dicks. Possibly just to be dicks to YOU. (Probably not, but who knows?) “Oh, that squad is exfiltrating; they won’t mind if I slip in there and get out with them.” Oh, they mind, and they will gangbang you and strip you clean.

    Sometimes, you can’t accomplish anything at all. You just fill into bad squad after bad squad that isn’t communicating, or is basically just doing solo runs in the trios queue. But when you get a good squad (either just randomly or that you found via another community)… man does it feel good. Completing your mission; completing someone else’s mission; finding a big stack of the salvage you’re looking for – it really squeezes some dopamine into you. (Out of you? I don’t know how it works.)

    The guns are varied, but sometimes I look at my vault full of guns and the one I really want to use is one I don’t have at the moment. It works, though; there are weapons for long range and close quarters and in between, and mods that can tweak them more to your liking. It’s a Bungie game; at this point, you know going in it’s going to feel good to play. Halo was good. Destiny was good. (Still is, at least at its core mechanics, or so I’m told.)

    It’ll give you wonderful highs, and punishing lows, but they’re both satisfying. A lot of the time, just matching into a squad is trash, though, and finding people to run with when you’re behind on missions or lower-level is hard. It has all the baggage of extraction shooters, although so far it doesn’t quite have the toxicity of Tarkov. (It also absolutely does NOT have the cooperative vibes of Arc Raiders. Sometimes you might be able to find a Rook that’ll cooperate with another Rook, or maybe a squad is happy to find an ally, but if you run up expecting to not have a fight, you’re gonna have a bad time.)

    I’ve had some great runs. I’ve had some terrible runs. I’ve had some sessions where I can’t even put together a run. The game’s only been out for three weeks, and I’ve played it for 28 hours, and I can’t wait for a chance to play more.

    I guess it’s fine.

  • You probably won’t reach “the top”, but it’s fine.

    I just got back from a weekend at a couple of concerts. On the drive home, I was hit with a few musings about the music and the overall experience, so I’m going to vomit out a couple of posts right here before I go back about my regular life and habits again. If you don’t see any others yet, check back; I’m writing them all at once but scheduling them to publish over the next day or so.

    One of the bands that played was Beartooth, and they played a song called Doubt Me. It’s a “fuck the haters” song about doing things people told you that you weren’t capable of doing. That’s basically a genre – sitting here and thinking about it, so many bands have at least one song in that category. (Several just from the two shows in Baltimore this weekend.)

    It makes sense – it’s probably a good analogue of being in the music industry. Lots of bands and artists come along and most of them don’t “make it,” so odds are, you aren’t going to, either. When you start out playing local venues and submitting demos, you probably hear “it’s not gonna happen” a lot.

    I really enjoy those sorts of songs; it’s fun to throw your success back in the face of the people who tried to stand in your way. But do most of us have those people?

    Personally, I think I might be the opposite. I was told that if I just put my mind to it, I could do anything. (At least by anyone whose opinion mattered – there are always just shitty people.) I just never really aspired to that level. I never dreamed of being the president, or a rock star, or an astronaut or anything like that.

    I don’t really know where I’m going (or where I’m even really trying to go) with this – I just had the though of like “yeah, fuck the haters… wait, who even are my haters?”

    I guess what’s really important, haters or not, is to make sure you have a grounded definition of success. If nothing short of being the best in the world will satisfy you, then regardless of people supporting you or not, you’re almost certainly going to fall short. If you treat each step along the way as another step up, though, then all of the efforts you put in will be validated.

    I’ll celebrate my accomplishments, and I (or someone who actually knows you) will also celebrate yours. To end on another Beartooth line, “come join me at the top.”

    It’ll be fine.

  • “Weird” is fine; “normal” is also fine.

    I just got back from a weekend at a couple of concerts. On the drive home, I was hit with a few musings about the music and the overall experience, so I’m going to vomit out a couple of posts right here before I go back about my regular life and habits again. If you don’t see any others yet, check back; I’m writing them all at once but scheduling them to publish over the next day or so.

    The first of the two concerts featured The Funeral Portrait, and they played a song of theirs called Stay Weird. It’s an anthem for the “weird” (read: emo/goth/punk/whatever) kids to not change and keep being their true selves. Now, in general, that’s a great message, and I’m all for music containing messages like this that people need to hear.

    (There’s a whole slew of what I’m sort of calling “mental health-core” about dealing with depression or addiction or self-harm; I’m glad these topics are out there in ways that aren’t as preachy or “after-school special-y”. Thinking about it, I think at least three out of four bands on Friday and two out of three on Saturday have at least some material like that.)

    But here’s one thing – when you’re playing an arena in downtown Baltimore with a capacity of 13,000 people, is anyone there “weird”? Sure, 13,000 isn’t a football or baseball game, but it’s also still a pretty good-sized crowd.

    I’m not weird. I work in an office at a consulting company. I have a 401(k) and a mortgage. I don’t dress all in black. (Except at concerts – note to bands: sell more t-shirts that aren’t black. At Summer of Loud, I got a Parkway Drive shirt that’s blue. At a Nothing More show, I got their tour shirt that’s red. There were cool Beartooth shirts, but I’m not that huge of a fan of theirs, but both of their live sets I’ve seen have been great. I expected Bad Omens to have something maybe red, but nope.)

    But then again, I’m into curling. Is that weird? I play board games, which feels like the normie-est shit out there, what with 70,000 people at Gen Con every year, but even other gamers often think my games are weird. Is professional wrestling weird? Conceptually, I think it’s mainstream, but it doesn’t draw the crowds it used to (although that could be mostly due to ticket prices).

    I’m reminded of the tagline (or one of the taglines) for the YouTube channel Wrestling With Wregret – “Like what you like, just don’t be a dick.” You should “stay weird,” not by specifically trying to be a non-conformist, but by just finding your lane. Find your style, your music, your hobbies. Enjoy things unashamedly. Don’t “be weird”, but don’t be afraid of being called weird.

    Because weird is normal, and normal is weird.

    And they’re both fine.

  • Formula One’s 2026 season is going to be fine

    Last weekend, we finally saw the first race featuring the new 2026 F1 cars that people have been complaining about since pre-season testing began. The cars are too slow! (Granted, they are I guess a few seconds a lap slower than recent years under the old regs.) They’re not as powerful! (They still put out about 1000 horsepower.) They’re too hard to drive! They’re too easy to drive! (Yes, generally, driving them requires more attention to more things, like the battery and when to brake versus lift and coast, and they do have a little less downforce, but some drivers have said that the actual racing is easier since the cars aren’t as fast as they’re used to.)

    But you know what? We had multiple lead changes in the opening laps. We had virtual safety cars due to reliability issues (and not collisions or cars in the barriers – at least during the race. Oscar Piastri binned his McLaren during the reconnaissance lap and Kimi Antonelli smashed his Mercedes up during FP3 and (due to a lucky red flag in Q1) managed to have it put back together to run qualifying.) letting teams make decisions around pit strategy. (And Ferrari appears to have made the wrong ones, per usual.)

    Mercedes looks like they’re back. Ferrari looks… competitive? There’s less of a gap between Red Bull and junior team Racing Bulls. The rebranded Saubers (now Audi) did ok with the one car that started the race. The new team, Cadillac, was there!

    We’ll see how it goes – right now, there’s basically one team in front and the rest battling for the podium, which isn’t great, but that’s F1. Last year, it was McLaren, before that it was Red Bull, and before that, it was Mercedes. Now it’s Mercedes again, but with McLaren using their power units, we’ll see if they catch up. We’ll also see if any in-season upgrades close the gaps, or if there are any driver shakeups.

    As I’ve said before, the “drama” in F1 isn’t who wins each race, but all the other nonsense up and down the field and between the races. It’s fine.

  • Marathon is fine

    Several posts ago, I mentioned Arc Raiders as a game I might get into. I played their Server Slam (or whatever they called their demo weekend) and had a decent time, but then I never picked up the game. As I read more about it, it seemed fine, but people were progressing through it quickly, so jumping in later seemed like a bad time. Now it has (basically) dedicated PvP or PvE queues, which sounds nice, but also kind of boring. The world of the game was nice. It’s very distinct; everything really does feel cobbled together out of scraps. The enemies come in pretty distinct forms. It’s all-in-all a nice time. I just never felt “grabbed,” you know?

    A couple of weeks ago, I played the Marathon Server Slam. Visually, it’s incredible. The sounds in the game are immersive to the point of being almost a downside. (Was that lightning or some sort of energy weapon? Is that robot I hear a UESC guard, another runner, or my squadmate? (Or me?) Is that banging in the next room someone looting, someone shooting, or just a machine running?) Overall, it went ok. I had some good runs, and I had some terrible runs. However, each terrible run made me say “damn, wanna try one more?” Maybe it’s just because I found people to play with (some via online communities, and some just organically in the game), but even everything falling apart and losing a pile of gear doesn’t make me want to quit, like it kind of did with Arc. I’ve basically put my other games aside for the time, so my last week or so has been work, curling, watching wrestling, and playing Marathon. Time I would spend in the evening idly searching YouTube for things to watch is now doing terrible runs on Tau Ceti IV.

    The rest of the player base is progressing much faster. The parts I want/need to do for missions, everyone is already past. That’s a little bit of a pain. Luckily, I think some new people are still joining the game, so there are still people early in the progression. Or maybe people are just not playing as frequently. I hope I don’t just end up hopelessly behind until the season resets. (And I hope whatever I miss due to not being ready for it before season reset isn’t just gone forever.)

    Is Sony going to kill off Bungie because the game isn’t selling billions? I hope not! Is the game going to last as long as Escape From Tarkov? Probably not. (Although technically, Tarkov just released in November, despite being in alpha/beta/whatever early versions since like 2016.)

    It’s frustrating. It’s exciting. It’s incomprehensible. It’s beautiful. It’s weird. It’s fun.

    It’s fine.

  • Not Having Anything to Say is Fine

    Hey, look, it’s been a month and there’s nothing new here! I had such high hopes coming into 2026. (Said nobody, right?)

    Anyway, I think I was hoping for this to mostly be longer “essay” type posts (not like “long form” but in the 1000-ish word range), and then I just sort of ran out of ideas in my immediate queue. I do still think I want to have those, but I don’t want to just post about That Fuckin’ Guy all the time. That’s the job of everybody else. I also don’t have any other weird niche content to write about like subway trains or weird maps or fake video games like some of the content creators I’m into. I’m just a content consumer posting into the void.

    But I guess that’s okay. Creators wouldn’t create without people watching/reading/playing their stuff, and while I hate that some days, I just sit and watch random things in my YouTube recommendations, I guess I at least like “educational” stuff? (Oh, and people gambling – I watch a bunch of that, too. I don’t know why.)

    So going forward, I think I’ll try to post more frequently, but less seriously (about games, food/drink, media… whatever is occupying my brain at a given moment), with occasional “essays” on bigger topics that have drawn my attention, and then for those quick one-liners that I have to vomit out into the void, I’ll put those on Bluesky, where my username is the URL for this site, so that’s convenient. Branding! (By the way, I’m still salty that I couldn’t get vice.rocks as a domain name. Who owns it?)

    I can only confirm one thing. Whatever state this site continues to exist in – it’ll be fine.