So my Kindle Fire HDX showed up yesterday. UPS guy left it propped against the screen door instead of ringing the bell, which is a whole separate complaint I have about UPS in this neighborhood, but whatever, it's here. $229 for the 16GB 7-inch model, and yeah, the screen is genuinely nice, 1920x1200 crammed into that size makes my two-year-old first-gen Fire look like a toy. I'll probably write more about it once I've actually used it for something besides comparing it to my old one on the kitchen table.
But that's not really what I sat down to write about tonight.
I want to talk about GTA Online, because it is still, as of tonight, eating my character.
If you haven't been following this, and honestly if you don't play games you probably haven't, since it's not getting nearly the coverage the GTA V single-player stuff got back in September. Rockstar launched the online mode for Grand Theft Auto V on October 1st. It was supposed to be this huge deal, a whole persistent multiplayer city layered on top of the game everybody already loved. Instead it was basically unplayable for the first week. Servers falling over constantly, characters getting corrupted, in-game cash and cars just vanishing overnight. I lost a character entirely on like day three. Just gone. Not "lost some progress," gone, start over from the tutorial.
Rockstar did apologize for it, to their credit, and they promised something like $500,000 in GTA-dollars to everyone who'd been playing Online, split into two payments to compensate for the lost stuff. That's a real, actual promise they made, and I appreciated the gesture even though in-game money doesn't exactly fix the fact that I'd built up a garage full of cars I actually liked.
Here's the thing though. It's the 19th now. That's nearly three weeks. And it is still flaky. Not "unplayable" flaky like week one, I'll give them that, it's better. But I got kicked to single-player mid-heist on Wednesday night with zero warning, and last night I couldn't even get matched into a session for something like twenty minutes straight, just sitting on a loading screen with that little spinning icon. For a game this size, with this much money behind it (and I'd bet actual money GTA V has already made more than most movies released this year), you'd think three weeks would be enough to get the basic thing — staying connected to a server — working reliably. Apparently not.
I don't say this to pile on. I actually like the game a lot, the parts of it that work are genuinely fun, and driving around Los Santos with a couple friends on headset doing dumb stuff is exactly the kind of thing I wanted out of it. But there's something almost funny about how a single-player game that shipped basically flawless got bolted onto an online layer that couldn't handle its own launch weekend. It's like they spent five years polishing the car and about five days on the garage door.
Anyway. Small tangent while I'm complaining about tech things not working: my router at home has started randomly dropping the 5GHz band about once a day for no reason I can find, which I only mention because it means half my "GTA Online won't connect" moments this week might not even be Rockstar's fault, they might be my own crummy hardware. I've had this router almost three years now, it's probably just tired. Everything's tired by year three, routers included.
Also worth mentioning, because it's been sitting in the back of my head all month: Adobe had that breach a couple weeks back, the one where they said something like 2.9 million customer accounts got compromised along with a bunch of source code. I got the "please reset your password" email from them like everyone else. I'd honestly forgotten I even had an active Adobe ID until that landed in my inbox. Changed the password, moved on, but it's a good reminder that half the accounts you forget about are still sitting there with your old, terrible, reused password on them somewhere.
That's it for tonight. Going to go see if I can actually finish this heist mission before the servers decide otherwise.