Skyrim and Sawed Fingers

Okay, you've got to be wondering what Skyrim and sawed fingers have in common.  Lucky you, I'm going to explain!  :D




A week ago (That means Monday the 7th) I get a couple of calls from my father while I was sleeping.  I promptly ignored them and went back to sleep. (if you know me you realize how completely normal that is for me.  In most cases I hear a noise, and am back asleep no more than a few seconds after that.)  Then my sister called me a few times and instead of managing to go back to sleep I groggily look at my phone and see that I have 4 missed calls and 2 voicemails.  The one from my father just says he'd like me to call him ASAP, he's really got to talk to me.  His voice is a bit panicked, and he sounds like something is really going on.  Then my sisters message is that she has to work and she'd really like to be there for daddy and can I please call him right away and maybe go see him since she can.

I was like, "Wait, what?"  Calling my father illuminated the situation.  Apparently he was working on a table saw (I'm pretty sure it was a table saw, at this time it's been called (by me) a hand saw, a table saw and simply, "a saw" since I kind of don't really know the difference) and was doing something with a board and there was a kick back.  Said kick back caused the board to smoosh him.  Well, and snip off the tip of two fingers.  Actually, take the tip off of his pinky finger, slice open his index finger and pretty much ravage his thumb, all on his left hand.  The thumb seems like it's the worst of the injuries, it's got a fracture in it and there's a lot of bleeding involved, well, there was a lot of bleeding involved with all of them obviously but the thumbs the worst, and then there's the issue with it begin injured through the flesh into the bone.  Like, opened up to the bone I think they said.  (I hope no one was eating)

Anyway, the upshot of it all was could I please come out to him and pick up his medications at the pharmacy and maybe stay the night in case he needs me.  Well, yeah!  That was sort of a duh, except, how was I to get out to him?  Wife was working and there was a lack of sleep issue going on and <3 Ra! because the doll not only took me down to Sanibel (about an hour drive) but also waited until I got the prescriptions and took me down to the pharmacy and walked around with me while I waited for them to be filled out.  Then, I went to grab my father's car (he'd been working over at his mother's house and had to call the emergency from there) and she went on her way while I went back to dad's.

That was a long night.  Not because there was a lot of bleeding or a mess to clean up or anything like that, but you know how when you haven't gotten enough sleep, everything seems to take forever?  It was like that.  I kept doing things and trying to stay focused (I even attempted to blog, btw, which would have been about monsters and I might actually finish one day if I can focus long enough to do.) and then my poor father would be awake and needing to take another pain pill because he was in such bad shape from his hand.  He can't open bottles, *snicker* because of his inability to curl his hand.  I have to laugh, because now it's been a week and we're all amused by the things he can do and can't do.

So then the week went by with the whole, which sister will be able to be there for dad thing happening.  Luckily I'm awake during the night and she's awake during the day so even though there were bumps in the road, sorry about that, we managed to make certain that Dad was taken care of.  Over the weekend he had his grandchildren down and they helped him out during the day.

So, what does this have to do with Skyrim?  On 11-11-11 Skyrim came out.  How many of you know what Skyrim is?  Raise your hands now!  For those who don't, let me illuminate you.  It's basically the next installment in a series of games put out by the people who decided that the players in a RPG should determine their world.  Let me expand on that.  They wanted an open world that players could explore on their own and they could make choices in that world that would matter.  Now we all know how well rpg's do in this department.  Usually the stories are either small, or they suck, and they have to be very generic about decisions you make because they have to decide what decisions count towards the overall goals and such.  Well, the folks over at Bethesda have been working really hard to make games that we'll love again and again.  They want us to love their works and love the way the worlds are, and want to play in them multiple times with different character types.  Oh, and they also want us to grow our characters based on what *WE* want to use as far as skills and such go.

So many long years ago they made a game called Arena.  By many long years ago this means 1994.  I was 14, never really played the game, didn't know it was out, but I played games back then.  Just... not on my computer much 'cause I wasn't really aware of what all computers could do back then.  I was young, I grew, now I'm a junkie.  It happens.  Anyway, they did Arena and it gained them some success.  It was the start of their nice long Elder Scrolls line of games, and I believe it did fairly well over all.  They had the desire to make decisions count and they wanted an open world.  So they created one.  Depending on who you talked to it went well, or it did poorly.

Then they went on and put out another game, which is near and dear to my heart, Daggerfall.  My sister, *waves*, got me addicted to this one over the course of a summer.  She was playing, I got to watch her do so, I played, I enjoyed it, and then spent literally YEARS trying to track it down and get it.  I'm not joking, years.  It was out in '96, I was sixteen and I thought it was awesome that you could run around naked to talk to people.  Hey, teenager here!  It was perfect in so many ways.  Even though I spent years, and years tracking it, and then playing it, I never really got very far into the game itself.  There were so many things to do, so many quests to take, and unfortunately it had this random dungeon feature that made it difficult to know where you were going, and some of the dungeons were SO big that you literally couldn't finish them on time to turn them in.  Yeah, you had these time limits on when they could be completed.  Talk about irritating.  But I loved it, and I keep going back and starting it up again *shifty glace to the side* even though now you need a DOS emulator these days to install the game.

Oh, and Arean and Daggerfall are both available for free download on the Elder Scrolls website: Arena & Daggerfall  Which would be the reason why Daggerfall is installed on my computer again.  *grin*

Anyway, they gained fame and put out two other games, one of which I don't particularly recommend (here's looking at you Battlespire) even though it was super pretty back when it came out and I tried desperately to actually finish it.  Somehow I got lost, couldn't find the way to the next part, and I eventually stopped playing because of it.  Wife played Redguard but I never did.  Which is interesting but probably because I was beating my head up against Battlespire at the time.

Then there came the amazing thing.  The wonderful thing that transcended all awesomeness.  A Bethesda game that crossed out of computers and hit the console world.  This game would be known as Morrowind!  I didn't even know it was out on console for a long time, as I got it for the computer.  I'm an interesting study in gamers.  I was a female gamer back when there really weren't a lot of them, and I kept getting and playing games that I didn't finish but a company that I raved about even though I couldn't manage to get through a plot line.  I feel the need to mention that I have never in my life completed an Elder Scrolls game, and was beginning to think it was a complete and total myth that it could be done until I lived with someone who did.  *waves at Tanzy*  Anyway, Morrowind came out and it was awesome in whole new ways, and cool and fabulous and so amazing.  I even ended up getting it on XBox when I finally caved and got one of those machines because it was looking like Morrowind wouldn't really cross platforms to PlayStation.  *cry*  No, I think I really did cry because I couldn't wait for it to cross over.

Morrowind spawned two expansions, which was unheard of from Bethesda at the time (or at least to me it was unheard of, I don't know if they did it with any other game.  I'm sure they did other games, but I'm completely ignorant of them. ((OMG, they're everywhere!  Holy crap, they did something with the Atari!  Bethesda Softworks is also responsible for Fall Out games, or at least the new ones)) And now I can't even say that anymore.) and they were good enough expansions that when they moved on to their next game the repeated the procedure.

Oblivion.  *sighs*  Oh my, Oblivion.  You'd think I was talking about something crazy, but no, I'm talking about the next installment to the Elder Scrolls main line games.  (Just realized there were games put out for mobile phones.  Wow... that's actually... a little impressive and disturbing.)  This game was so amazing I got it right away for the PC (because it was launched out on pc and XBox 360 and I didn't want to support xbox, I didn't even want to think about getting the next one) and put it on my computer.

It ate my computer.  Took me 3 complete reformats to fix the thing, and in an angry huff I went back to Best Buy and had my famous "You will take this game back and let me get the XBox version of it or I will stand here and complain about how it ate my computer until you are so sick of seeing me you bleed from the ears or allow me to make the switch" hissy fit.  See, I knew if I couldn't play it on the computer, I would have to get an XBox eventually.

Remember that roommate I mentioned? *waves at Tanzy again*  Well, said roommate took pity on me (actually, I'm pretty sure what roomie said was, "I was going to get the 360 eventually anyway.") and when I came back with Oblivion for the 360, quivering in rage because I couldn't play it and I couldn't believe it ate my computer (my stats were almost completely on par with their min. req's.  My processor was a little (very little) too small.) and now I had the awesome addition of the game but couldn't play it, Tanzy went out and in a few days came back with a 360.  Ah... those were the days.  The game was so beautiful that a person could cry just staring at the sun rising in the sky.  Oh, wait, I think I did.  Tanzy would stare at the landscape sometimes and say, "It's so beautiful." and I would nod my head and say, "Yeah," in this dreamy voice.

Oblivion was such a good game, and we didn't want the 360 for anything other than it, so the 360 became known as "The Oblivion Machine".  Heh, yeah, to this date even.  Not that I have a 360 anymore.  When we made the move to FL from OH Tanzy took the 360 and Oblivion and we ended up getting a ps3 and Oblivion.  Because *unlike* Morrowind that was *supposed* to cross platforms, Oblivion actually did!  It was very exciting, and maybe I'll finish it.

Or maybe not because now there's Skyrim!  You knew I'd come around to Skyrim eventually, right?  Skyrim is like, everything only better.  Because it's new I'm allowed to say that.  It's actually pretty okay to play in 3rd person, instead of 1st person like all the other games really needed to be played in.  Although Oblivion was a lot better as far as that went, I have actually been known to wander around in Skyrim just to look at my Argonian's tail.  (Argonian's are a lizard race.  I like playing them because they talk funny, have awesome tails and scales, and they can breathe underwater.  I like swimming.)  I have to admit that the character creation was better in Oblivion.  Much better.  You could turn your character when making them so you could see the back of their hair.  And you could change hair color by fiddling with the individual colors.  You could really make faces in Oblivion, now there's all these sets and you can fiddle somewhat, but not nearly as much.  So I suppose my main complaint so far in Skyrim is the character creation.

Oh, and the tiny print and the fact that words are cut off at the top and sides of my tv screen because my television is so old.  I have to scrunch up my face to read things, and I can't look at some notes and I miss text at the top corner all the time because of it.  So apparently Oblivion made me need to buy a game console and Skyrim is going to make me buy a tv....I suppose it was time to update the TV thing, but I am broke.  So broke.  So very much I can't afford a TV broke.  *sigh*  Well, I can still play and enjoy the game even if I can't read when it tells me I'm over encumbered.

So the upshot of everything is that I'm doing NaNo (I'm over 30k words now!), I'm helping my poor father with his injured hand (guy mostly needs someone to open things for him.  *hugs* dad), and trying to play as much Skyrim as I can without going blind.  (aw, who cares if I go blind, I can probably still play!)

I think I'm going to rename my PS3 to TESM, or The Elder Scrolls Machine.  What do you think?