Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1429
Initial Civ VII impressions, Wien Air nostalgia, Milla appreciation, grocer gripes, RAID 10 delays, billboard erections
Morning everyone. 1429. Just looked it up. Big year for Jeanne D’arc. Won the battle of Orleans, leading the final charge while wounded. Tried to attack Paris but was wounded and failed.
I should rewatch thast Luc Besson movie. Oh wait he’s problematic now isn’t he? Or am I mixing him up with every other french director. Anyway, I love Milla so I don’t care. I’ma gonna watch it again. Her big single? “Gentleman who fell?” Great song. Milla, man. She’s awesome. Actually I have the CD Single of “Gentleman who fell.” I feel like it had an awesome B-Side? Ahh yes, thank you, Discogs. “You Did It All Before.” Great tune. Milla makes those movies she’s in with her husband. They just crank out an A-minus-level sci-fi horror film every couple years and bob’s your uncle. Paul WS Anserson. I hope they’re still married.
I learned all this late one night at Sophie’s Station hotel in Fairbanks, Alaska, when their collaboration Monster Hunters was on the television. This is fitting since I am headed to Sophie’s Station in Fairbanks, Alaska this evening. Maybe there will be a Milla film on.
Oh shit it turns out that “You Did it All Before” is actually an album track off of The Divine Comedy, Milla’s one album.
Milla, man. You did good for a Ukrainian/Russian immigrant.
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I have today off. I am tired. Do I go back to sleep? I am torn. I might, I might. I did not go to Walmart this morning because there was nothing on my grocery list that required going to Walmart so I just popped into the loathed Harris Teeter, which is on the way home from school. It wouldn’t let me scan my grapes and called me a thief, like all grocery stores do, all the time, when you self-scan. Really is the worst. Universally an adversarial retail relationship these days, grocery stores. No, sir, I will not put my groceries in the bagging area. Because it is not really a bagging area, it is a cop. Except at Walmart, at Walmart the bagging area is not a scale that narcs on you: they leave that to the AI cameras above your head.
Played Civilization VII with most of my free time yesterday. It is… okay.
The good: It’s smooth as butter, 80fps on my Mac Studio M2 Ultra, and it is amazing that it came out on Mac on launch day, native to Apple Silicon, no less.
There are more hotkeys than I was lead to believe: everything but “b” for build a city. Though “r” for ranged attack often doesn’t work. And for some reason every time you use a hotkey, the computer beeps at you not sure what is up with that.
The bad: I don’t like the UI, it’s as terrible as everyone says. I actually don’t like the graphics at all. Maybe I’ll get used to them? But I can’t tell where anything is in my cities, I can’t tell what buildings I’ve already dropped in a quarter when I am putting another building there. It’s just a big jumble of pixels. It looks awesome when you stop, zoom in, and look at the art and the graphics of the game, but it is basically unusable. The damage bar on units is so fucking small I can’t tell how badly hurt my units are. You cannot queue the tech tree, actually the tech and civ trees are unusable.
The lack of quick movement and quick combat is borderline intolerable. Despite the 80fps and the graphics being so buttery smooth, this game feels slower than the old one. Also I am sick of how long it takes between turns in Civ. I played Civ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and now 7. I played all the spinoff games. Civ 1 came out for, like, a Mac LC or some shit. It took about 10-20 seconds between turns. Now, in 2025, on a computer 10,000 times more powerful, it still takes 10-20 seconds between turns. The AI is not that much better to justify this! Just give me quick turns! It is so boring sitting around waiting all the time.
The AI is mean and keeps attacking me, all the time, even on a middling difficulty, which is.. fine I guess. You just have to build a strong military and defend the hell out of your civ, which is, you know, reality but depressing in a “civilization simulator” where I would like to, you know, built a utopia.
I get the benefits and ideas of picking a leader and a civ separately but it is close to unworkable. But what really sucks about it is when you meet a leader you really don’t know anything about them, because you’re meeting a leader AND a Civ, and you don’t have the matrix of, like 500 differeint leader-civ combinations in your head, so you can’t quickly draw any conclusions like “oh it’s just robert the bruce on my borders he’s not much of a worry.” Who knows! Forever! I am a 52 year-old man with shit to do, man. I’m not a professional civ player. I am never going to have this all memorized!
There are too many city states and the drive me crazy and I just want them to go away.
So far, I have found “crises” annoying and I want them to go away. Luckily, you can turn these off. I will probably do that soonish. I did like the graphics of the vultures hovering over my civ when we had the plague, though, that was pretty awesome.
The game crashed twice — once when I did a speed benchmark, even though my speed was fine — and once when I finished the first age and headed into the exploration age.
Speaking of the exploration age, I sailed off shore and the “distant lands’ were a wall of hostile city states with absolutely nowhere to settle, and they just kept shooting me and it sucked. Also, I don’t WANT to go to distant lands, leave me alone. There was still plenty of settleable land on my own continent and I want to settle there, but it’s unclear what happens if I do.
The settlement cap sucks and I hate it and it is dumb. Dude, Ohio has six cities, I think an entire civ should be allowed to.
I expect the game to get better. And to be fair, there were (fleeting) moments where I was having a lot of fun and things were clicking and it was kind of cool. I will play again in a week or so, but I don’t envision “getting addicted’ until at least the first major patch/revision, and not just DLC. We don’t need any more DLC, there’s too much as it is. Though it is stupid and annoying I can’t just play Russia with Catherine the Great in the ancient age.
Yeah. Bed is starting to sound pretty good. I don’t land tonight until 2:15 AM Fairbanks time, which is 6:15 AM NC time. It’s gonna be a tall order. May as well get some rest.
You will all be sad to learn that Unifi lied to me and that my RAID 10 formatting did not, in fact, have 22 hours left yesterday when I wrote to you and, now, 24 hours later, it says it has 2 hours left. It will be down to the wire getting the next phase of BACK DAT NAS UP going before I head off to Alaska on Alaska Airlines, the airline that only exists because Noel Wien had to sell his stock in Wien Air Alaska to a corporate raider so he could pay his wife’s medical bills. Wien Air Alaska walked so Alaska Airlines could fly. Wait that is a weird metaphor for airlines. Wien Air Alaska flew to Seattle so Alaska Airlines could fly to Raleigh.
I should put an eBay alert on Wien. My grandfather was the man who converted them from a charter service to a scheduled airline, did all the grunt work with the FAA and everything. I have a hat. It is 70’s and poofy and I love it.
Not psyched about having to fly in this era of idiot robot AI air traffic control or whatever the hell they are going for.
Also I have not gone anywhere but to Boston in so long I nearly forgot to pack my CPAP, because I keep a spare up in Boston, and I never go anywhere else anymore. There was a time I was such a road warrior: debating the merits of high-end luggage with the cognoscenti, keeping a bag packed at all time, being one of those people who mailed themselves suitcases to hotels. It was great. But I am so glad it’s over. There are better ways to spend your time than flying in a fart tank to another town with a McDonald’s.
Yesterday one of our crews put the billboard I made up along Farrington Point road, announcing our boat and RV storage facility. It is not my finest work (the manufacture, to be clear I did not design it). I may fix it when I get back from Alaska, but it seems not terrible from the road. Billboards are very forgiving. Also I kinda like the DIY vibe: we are a small local business. You can trust us. Also it is working! Only been about 18 hours and we have gotten like 300 new visitors to the website. I am… semi proud.
I am sad I won’t see Jane for a few days. She was very nice for me in the car this morning. She let me do the whole Wordle myself, on the condition that if our first word only had an E correct, the second word had to be GRAPE. She drew me a picture and it said POOP POOP POOP on it. She let me brush her hair. She had Girl Scouts last night and she brought home my cookie delivery of 12 more packs of cookies, so that was nice.
She asked me in the car how my cousin died (since I am headed up for his funeral) and I simplified (because who the fuck knows how anyone dies, mostly you have to guess) and said he had a heart attack. She asked what that was, and I explained it in seven-year-old appropriate terms. She said she was going to never get old and she was always going to stay healthy.
I told her I would like that very much.
Moody and quiet playlist for you today. Mostly new stuff, bands you have been and will be seeing a lot of for the next few weeks because they are my current jams: Varnalaine, Chandeed (four albums deep now), Bonnie Prince Billy, WU LYR. Some new entries: Like this Willie Watson album and only learned last night at dinner while ranting about “corporate country” that Willie Watson is in Old Crow Medicine Show. I was confused who someone could make such a confident debut and that explains it. New T Bone Burnett is swell, and the new Josh Ritter is great. Added a Milla song for your benefit since I know you’re dying with curiousity about her now. And I added this Cocteau Twins song because I was thinking about it yesterday and how I wonder if there are any other Cocteau Twins songs named after a real human being, and how cool it is that I know Cindy, and how it is interesting because back in 1984 when the song came out, she was still going by Gordon but I guess Liz Fraser just knew.
I am flying back Sunday night, 1 AM alaska time, which is 5 AM east cost time. So I don’t know when the Monday edition will come out. Maybe never. Maybe before I fly. Maybe while sitting at SEATAC except of course I gotta go to the Sub Pop store while I’m there. But I will do my best.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.