06/04/202 | Johannesburg
Lockdown Diary: Day 11
A new age of screen-time
Monday, April 6th
Sweet shit-all to report today, so I’ll talk about the weekend instead.
If the first weekend of lockdown was about wanting to resist the inevitable, the second one was about embracing it. Funny how quickly people can adapt to new circumstances (especially when those circumstances include indoor plumbing, electricity, and the internet).
Ya see, that’s where I’d gone wrong before. I’d unwittingly been rationing our screen time through a low-cap LTE bundle that couldn’t possibly sustain our new levels of consumption. So I contacted our ISP and told them to crank that shit to eleven. Absolute game-changer.
And so broke a new-dawn of internetting. With it, came unbridled streaming (we binged the sheol out of Unorthodox), video calls (shoutout to my little sister for “showing me” Hangouts) and — for me specifically — a surprising return to online gaming (RIP to my lower-back). But, predictably, my mates and I had to work hard to get said gaming right.
When we were kids, we loved to LAN.
It was how cool people used to play multiplayer PC games, sans the internet. Alright, maybe not cool people. But people like us. We’d pick someone’s house, and the others would happily lug their gear over for a night of mouse-clicking merriment. Those old-school monitors were a real bitch to get in and out of the car, but boy was it worth it.
If you could get the fucking LAN to work that is.
Every time we’d set things up with the naive expectation of getting things started right away. Plug in the cables, connect the machines, double click on that shortcut and Bob’s your uncle. Except that’s hardly ever how it went.
PCs would fail to see each other. The integrity of cables was scrutinized. Accusations were made. Check that you’ve got the right IP address… When’s the last time you defragged? Maybe you have a virus? Have you tried building a shrine to Microsoft?
It could take hours of educated guesswork to get it right. Sometimes, nothing worked. And that was absolutely maddening — going to bed in the early hours of the morning with not a single game played, the Doritos chip-dust under your fingernails a sad reminder of what could have been.
Some games were less troublesome than others. Age of Empires though? That was a notorious repeat offender — loads of fun but hardly worth the effort. One day we wisely decided to leave its multiplayer world behind us. Never again would it make a fool of us. No, when it came to AOE, it was single-player only from then on.
So on Friday night, Dylan, George, Tasso and I decided to play Age of Empires online. Wololo!
It was just like old times. Except way, way sadder. We struggled for ages, fuckin’ around with VPNs and firewalls and settings — desperately trying to enter an imaginary world of strategy while the real one world around us burned: the Four Numbnuts of the Apocalypse.
Some time after midnight, we gave up and slunk off to our respective beds, with that old familiar feeling. Thwarted again by the multiplayer powers-that-be. Some things never change.
But, you’ll be glad to hear, that’s not where the story ends. After getting on with our lives for a bit on Saturday afternoon, we cracked the code that evening and by nightfall, we were a happy bunch of 30 year-olds furiously collecting resources and building pixel-y fortifications once more. Bliss.
And now we can play whenever we want. 15 year-old me would be proud… I think?
Update: There is in fact something to report for Monday. Nicola’s crazy-good (vegan) blueberry muffins.
And now I must go. My settlement needs me.
