As I mentioned a while back, I pre-spent my tax refund money on a new desk chair and an Xbox Series S. I had an Xbox One back in the day, but ended up giving it away because I wasn't playing it. But last year Halo Infinite was released and I wanted to play it, so I found a cheap Xbox to do that.

Halo Infinite is pretty darn good. It's open-world, which is tasty, and the graphics are pretty spectacular. But I'm not going to talk about Master Chief and Halo. I'm here to talk about a game that has really been wasting my time: Disneyland Adventures (which is included in Xbox Game Pass).

Now, here's where things get weird.

As a GAME, Disneyland Adventures is 100% shit. You play "attractions" so that you can perform tasks for various Disney characters. But the "attractions" have shitty controls, are frustrating for me as an adult (NO idea how kids are supposed to play this crap), and I hate them.

But as a SIMULATION of literal Disneyland? This is one pretty great experience. I've been to Disneyland a bunch of times, and they got so much of it right. I mean, some things are missing... licensed properties like Star Tours and Indiana Jones Adventure are missing (the game was made in 2011 before Disney bought Lucasfilm) as is stuff added after 2011 (like Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge). And Jack Sparrow has been replaced by "Black Barty" for some reason. But still... if you've been to Disneyland, it's pretty amazing to see how faithful they tried to be to the park...

Now, as I mentioned, the controls are shitty. It was originally designed to be played via Kinect, a motion controller, but I don't think that Kinect works with Series X|S machines, so you have to use a controller. Which is no problem to run around looking for stuff, filling your photo album, finding hidden Mickey's, getting autographs, and stuff like that.

So that's what I've been doing.

Alas, since the mini games are so awful to play with a controller, there's only so far in the game I can get. You perform all kinds of favors for the Disney characters, but eventually they want you to do something inside an attraction, and I'm not up for the frustration, so I'm blocked from continuing. Eventually I'll be blocked from finishing the game completely and won't be able to finish at 100%, but that's okay. In the meanwhile it's a fun way to visit Disneyland in these COVID times.

Even if my avatar in the game looks creepy as hell.

It's time for yet another Bullet Sunday from the freezing cold Pacific Northwest!

   
• Come One Come All... If there's one thing I've learned over the past six years and eight months I've been writing in this iteration of Blogography, it's that you can never underestimate just how big the assholes are on the internet. And putting yourself out there with a blog is like setting out a giant welcome mat for them to drop by and stink up the place. Thank heavens for the delete key.

   
• I Wasn't Nervous Until Now... Downloadable content for Xbox 360 just keeps getting weirder and weirder. The latest genius from the Live Marketplace? "Don't B Nervous Talking 2 Girls"...

Yikes. Now I really AM nervous talking to girls!

The good news is that I was able to buy a pet monkey for Pooferflargen, my Xbox Avatar!

He's not a very smart monkey, but he does know how to dance.

   
• A Cafe By Any Other Name... This weekend I started poking around the code for DaveCafe, my Hard Rock Cafe fan site. I had redesigned the thing ages ago, but never had time to actually do anything with it. Yesterday while I was waiting for my work computer to run a backup, I decided to take a look. The data is mostly missing, and some of the templates are incomplete, but it's sorta kinda working in non-stupid web browsers. Surprisingly, there's only a couple of gap spacing errors in Internet Explorer 6, which is shocking as hell. Usually that pile of shit browser has a lot bigger problems...

Internet Explorer 7 and 8 are pretty shitty too, but they at least seem to be able to render my sites okay. Usually, I would spend the next two hours trying to find out what in the hell IE6 doesn't like, but I don't have time. A big part of me doesn't want to give a crap, but 8% of my visitors are inexplicably still using IE6. Probably because their workplace forces them to or they don't understand they have a problem. So what to do? My solution is to totally ignore the issue. If somebody using a 9-year-old browser expects modern websites to render properly, there's nothing I really can do. Except perhaps this.

   
I've been warned that a severe winter storm warning has been issued for tomorrow afternoon, which is sure to make my Monday even more buckets of fun than usual. I wonder if I can just forget all about it when I go to bed tonight and be pleasantly surprised?

I need better drugs.