Disconnected

Thanks to Chipzel, whenever I hear the word ‘disconnected’ I hear a pleasing arrangement of bleeps and bloops. Seemed appropriate to throw that song out there before we began.

So we wake up on Saturday morning to find that our BT Hub has decided to stop working. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice to say that BT’s customer service is just so remarkably excellent that we’re not getting our internet back until an engineer comes out tomorrow, through no fault of our own. As somebody who lives much of their life through the net, this comes as a bit of a starvation period, though mobile data and the eventual discovery of a public BT hotspot I can (barely) connect to has softened the isolation somewhat. It’s also an interesting chance to cut out all of the noise of online life, though, and as such I present to you what I’ll hereby name:

Life Without WiFi

Now with 50% more fancy typesetting!

So it goes without saying that my 3DS immediately became much more relevant to my daily life. Since I bought it a couple of years ago, it has sat mostly neglected on my counter apart from when I’m travelling or have bought a new game on it. One of the first things I did when I realised what sort of purgatorial disconnected hell I was to be living in (okay, slight exaggeration) was to jump back in to my Animal Crossing town and poke the villagers and tell them I’m alive. My favourite thing about New Leaf is that by choosing the beautiful town ordinance, your town no longer becomes overgrown with weeds if you leave for a month; it instead blossoms with flowers. I’m so manly.

I’ve also decided to try and rebuild my Animal Crossing town in Minecraft, 1:1. It’s somewhat difficult to determine just what constitutes a tile, so it may not be perfect, and building entire house exteriors in 3×3 is going to be tough, but I’m having fun so far.

No to get too much into my gaming habits (for we have a separate blog for that), but I also booted Steam into offline mode and continued my once-abandoned playthrough of Oblivion. I graduated into Skyrim way before I’d given Oblivion the attention it deserved, and now that I’ve almost 100% completed Skyrim (one achievement left!) I’m able to go back and play Oblivion with a clear head. Plus, with the new mouse I’ve picked up since then, I can map my favourite spells to be equipped from a mere finger movement away, which far improves my enjoyment in Cyrodiil. But enough about gaming.

My two favourite times of the day are lunchtime, and going to sleep. I like going to sleep because I curl up with a book (or an issue of Spider-Man) and read to my heart’s content. For lunch, I always try to watch something while I eat, be it Youtube or Netflix, and hey, I just like food. With the internet out of the picture, though, I’ve had to resort to drastic measures to retain my food-and-watch paradise, and found myself in a great dilemma before I remembered I owned the Complete Series (old series, no rebooted stuff) of Futurama on DVD which I was given a birthday or two ago. I’m going through the entire series, now. I plan on watching the developer commentaries, too, if they’re any good; I’m a sucker for that kind of thing.

I’ve been reading outside of my typical night-time niche, too. Having been after World of Warcraft books on the cheap since finishing the novel Illidan, I was lucky enough to find many on sale for Kindle, for £1 each, and had the foresight to download them all on the day of purchase in case something like my current situation happened. I finished Arthas the other day (which was £5, but hey, I wanted it) and absolutely loved it. I’m currently starting on Stormrage.

I have, of course, been doing things besides staying cooped up in my house and whinging about the lack of internet. Any whinging in this post has been exaggeration for (hopefully) comedic effect. I’d have written about something political and used big angry words to try and sound smart, but without internet I’ve not been keeping up with the news much… and besides, this country’s politics is beyond saving with simple complaint, it would seem.