Democracy Failed In Georgia

According to gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, she has not conceded the race to her Republican opponent, Cheatin' Brian Kemp, but instead recognizes that she simply has no further legal recources for her bid for office.  She received an amazing 1.9 million votes, more than Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama ever got in Georgia, but the carefully orchestrated, categorical disqualification of minority votes by the Secretary of State (and opposing candidate) prevented her from winning.

We'll hear a lot more from Ms. Abrams in the future.   But who's got time to think about that?  We've been trying for days now to download the latest video game, Fallout 76, with very little success until tonight.   

One of the things we like about video games is solving the various puzzles imbedded in the content of the games. In the course of a game, you come across, say, a building or a fortress and you can't for the life of you figure out how to get in, or how to beat the boss-level enemy guarding the entrance, or where to find whatever it was that had you at that location to begin with. These are puzzles to be solved, and you need to apply logic and deduction to figure them out.  Sometimes they're frustrating, but you almost always feel a sense of accomplishment when you finally solve them.  These puzzles and challenges give us the most satisfaction in game playing.

Bethesda, the published of the Fallout series, has taken the puzzles to a whole new level, and have made procuring the game itself a challenging enigma.  They decided for whatever reason not to make Falllout 76 available through the popular PC game distributor Steam, but instead from their own website or a handful of big-box retail stores.

We tried to download the game from Bethesda.net but after several attempts were unable to create the online account required to do business with them.  We then tried purchasing the game from Best Buys, but realized before we completed the transaction that they wanted to sell us a BluRay disc of the game, not a direct download.  We didn't want to wait for a disc to arrive and besides, we don't own a BluRay drive.  We were able to successfully purchase a download from Game Stop, but to our disappointment found that the download we had just purchased was available for us over at Bethesda.net, where we had started and where we were previously unable to create an account.

Back over at Bethesda.net then for a second time, we tried again to create an account for the already purchased game, but every time we tried to finish the registration, an error code popped up that simply said, "Something Went Wrong."

No shit, Sherlock.  We can see something went wrong, but an error message that doesn't tell us what went wrong isn't very helpful.  Was the problem on our end or their end?  Was it hardware related or a connectivity issue?  Or is it just that they don't care if we can access the game we had paid them our hard-earned money for?  YOU'RE NOT BEING VERY HELPFUL HERE, DUDES!, we screamed at the computer, but the computer didn't seem to care.

A Google search told us that the enigmatic error message "usually" meant that the screen name we selected had already been taken and all we needed to do was choose another screen name and try again, and if that didn't work, delete all cookies, clear out our cache, and erase our web history, and then close the browser, reopen it and try again.  We did all that, several times, but every time got that goddamned "Something Went Wrong" message.

Okay, just like in a game, we kept trying different things and different combinations of things to see what might work.  After about our eighth choice of screen name and erasing our history all the way back to grade school, we tried hitting the button "Forgot My User Name" just to see what would happen and when we did, we got an email saying that our account had been successfully created.  We're in!  Success!, although we had no idea what we finally did correctly in order to "win."

But now the problem was that with all of the screen names that we had tried out, we couldn't tell which one actually created the account.  We eventually got over that hurdle, and started the download, which is still running in the background now even as we're writing this.

But who's got time to dwell on that?  Today, we spent a lovely day doing field work at The Goat Farm, our favorite Atlanta art colony and work site.  The fun part today is that for the first time, our field sampling actually took us into the pen where they actually do keep a small herd of goats, as well as a couple of llamas and one loud, braying jackass (picture above).  It was a nice day - finally not raining and temps in the 60s - and we enjoyed the work and the company of the livestock, but we're old and tire out easily and right now we are exhausted.  

After being outside and on our feet all day, we're ready to turn in early tonight, and what's more, the Fallout 76 download just ended, so we're off now to complete the game installation and then off to bed. Note to self: DO NOT start up the game tonight, or you will be up to 2:00 a.m. playing (you know it's true).

We'll talk tomorrow.