Nesting Instinct

When a bunch of guys in white suits with close-circuit breathers show up waving geiger counters, someone will probably call them a "NEST Team."

Well, I've decided. The White Sands story is happening on a giant-ass military base and they have radiological people already but there was ongoing NEST training and lectures (Los Alamos is not far geographically. The NTS and Livermore are not all that far organizationally). So this really is real NEST guys taking the opportunity for a little practical exercise.

But that just underlines the directions I'm going with this. To go a bit further over the top. To go ahead and do some of the things that are popular in fiction. And, yeah, I am using many details of the actual White Sands paleontological discovery, but this is a clearly fictional dig with various things changed about it (I mean, besides the lack of a dead body in the original!)

Meanwhile I'm still piteously weak, unable to do much more than eat and sleep (and not much of the former, either). I don't see it plausible I'll be recovered enough to plan a trip for mid-October. But the main reason I wanted to visit the Trinity Test Site was more for the things they don't let you photograph; how built-up it is around there and whether it is at al possible for me to have a chase scene and climax happening there, in a chunk of far-from-deserted desert covered with cameras and sensors and some rather tight security.

I'm making a lot of progress with Jackson, Freeman, Specialist Lopez, the Ray Cats, "depressed" and "greasy" (two key characters that don't have even stand-in names, not yet). And more and more about Dead Guy, but nothing I've worked out so far about what we was working on and why it is secret is telling me how his body ended up in the national park.

My concentration is just about up to reading a bit of my growing stack of references over a meal. Then I go away again, to the point where even playing a game is too much for my concentration and energy (and my lack of interest in, well, anything.)

Did make a distinctive bit of progress with Starfield. Got a bit further on a faction quest, which is better than the main quest but still incredibly bad. A lame sneak session that was so poorly put together I'd actually completed it and was crouch-walking past confused embassy guards before I realized I'd completed it.

There's a bit where you are in a wrecking yard of people scrounging an old battlefield where mechs were employed against nasty alien "bioweapons" (the usual, "this creature killed a bunch of our soldiers so obviously we want to get more of them.") There's a part you need to finish the quest that either costs a bunch, or you can assemble from available scraps. The NPC is so very proud to lead you towards the game's crafting system in hopes that this time, you'll actually get interested in it.

Except that unlike every single other craft-able item, this one requires three other nonsense parts that can only be found on this one quest. In heaps of wrecked warbots with dangerous aliens crawling around the wreckage. You gotta search that old battlefield while not getting eaten.

Well, that sounds cool enough. Except...said battlefield is about two hundred meters, the lootable containers are lit up on the HUD like neon signs, and if you've sunk even one point in jetpack you can hop on top of a wreck and the aliens can't do squat to you.

Except...the things you need are randomized, the loot boxes remain on the HUD even after they are searched, and after two hours walking back and forth across this very very very tiny sandbox searching and re-searching I finally realized the game had never bothered to code it to make sure you'd get at least one of each!

And then it crashed again, locking up the computer so badly no key combination would even get me to Task Manager or otherwise in a position to do a soft quit. I had to power cycle the computer. When it restarted in good shape, I immediately DELETED Starfield forever and applied to Steam for a refund.