After I spent the last hours of yesterday afternoon playing Baldur’s Gate 3 (a 97 on Metacritic, well deserved), and this morning on the train rereading Asano’s Nijigahara Holograph (one of his earliest, lesser works), I entered the office only to be greeted by the secretary and a coworker giving me a weird look. I greeted them, I walked to my workstation, then I heard them speaking in hushed tones, which, as far as I’m concerned, is extremely disrespectful in an office. I felt someone looking at me, so I glanced over my shoulder only to realize that the secretary was staring at me. What the fuck is wrong with people so early in the morning?

What was wrong is that the prick whose medical leave I’m covering has returned to work, and is currently sitting at his workstation. I have covered his suspicious leaves plenty of times (they sometimes take months, for no apparent reason), and whenever he returns, he never informs anybody of it, which is the least you can expect from a worker who knows that someone’s contract will end the moment he comes back.

I started laughing, then walked to my boss’ office. He had noticed that the prick was back. My boss seemed more pissed than me. “If we had known that he was going to return, we would have hired you to cover the vacation of X coworker, and instead we’ve gotten someone who has never worked in the field before. It’s not right.” Nothing we can do; it’s legal to refuse to inform in advance that you’re returning to work, and I’m not sure that the guy is aware enough to realize that others will get pissed at him because he’s screwing them over.

You see, this idiot is one of the craziest motherfuckers I have ever met, that are still somewhat able to hold a job. Whenever he has nothing to do, sometimes for hours, he browses Explorer windows idly, looking at the same files over and over (I know it because often I have sat down at a workstation from which I could see his computer screen). Other coworkers have told me that they think he speaks to himself on the phone, maybe to pretend that he’s working; most of the time he does talk very low into the receiver, and the snippets of conversation didn’t seem like the kind produced in the process of trying to solve a ticket. To be fair, though, we also had a coworker who would take calls and waste about fifteen to twenty minutes talking to users about her personal problems, to the annoyance of my boss and everyone around her (at least me).

Regarding the prick, he’s also done more troubling shit like following coworkers around in the hallways, standing very close while staring them in the face, and waiting outside of the bathroom when the coworker he was following clearly intended to lose him. When asked irately what the fuck he was doing, he answered with some variation of “Oh, nothing.” My main boss doesn’t engage him anymore, because the one time he yelled at him, the prick sicked some union guys on him and nearly got his job in trouble.

As you can imagine, most coworkers avoid that guy, and pray that they won’t get paired with him alone during the afternoon shifts; the times I had to endure that shit, I was forced to do the work of two people, usually because he refuses to do any work that his bosses don’t explicitly assign to him, even though the bosses, who don’t work afternoons, have made clear that in the afternoons the worker on the phone is the one assigning the tickets, so when I’m on phone shift, I would end up forced to resolve those tickets because the users would chew me on the phone otherwise. He has also resolved erroneously some tickets to the extent that my boss, suspecting the results, assigned me his tickets, only for me to realize that either he was incapable of resolving the incident, or screwed up deliberately. And those are the cases I know about.

Anyway, I’m thirty-eight years old and I’m always glad when I become unemployed. That means more time to write, to read, to play Baldur’s Gate 3, to work out, to go on walks in the woods, and to masturbate to vile shit. What’s not to love? I don’t have a social life nor expensive hobbies, so I have dozens of thousands in savings for when the world inevitably comes crashing down on me.

I’m about halfway through writing the current chapter of my novel. You know, in case you happen to be one of the very few people in this dying world that cares about my fiction. So I can look forward to waking up at six in the morning, sitting at my desk in my underwear, and losing myself in my inner world of unhinged depravity. Oh, what a joy! For a possibly brief time, I can disappear from reality and its many burdens.

What about that Baldur’s Gate 3, huh? Best, most immersive gaming experience since The Witcher 3 in 2015 and Skyrim in 2011. Some fancy game designer said that good games are a series of interesting decisions, and BG3 has taken it to heart.

A small example: at one point you come across the member of a society of intellectuals (two members of which I already met: one a hobgoblin and the other a mind flayer), who asks you to steal an egg of a brutish sentient species, so they can raise it in a kind, peaceful environment and prove whether their brutish ways are a matter of nature or nurture. My fighter, a member of that sentient race, suggested that we killed the stranger for her impertinence and devious ways. This issue seems black and white: stealing a future child for profit is a rather evil choice. But once you find the hatchery, you find out that the sole egg they have left has taken so long to hatch that they’re about to destroy it. Stealing it is right then? The face of my party is a beast at persuading people, so I managed to convince the custodian, who also wanted to avoid destroying the egg, to give it to me, after ensuring him that I would raise the child in a loving environment. After I left (more accurately, escaped) that building, I considered whether we should keep the egg and potentially ruin it, as we are a band of adventurers who know nothing of raising a kid, or give it to a society that wants to use the future child as a lab rat, but in a peaceful environment in which the child will be taken care of. What’s the right choice?

The team behind this game seems to have gone through every choice in the game and balanced the sides. There’s a point very early in the second act when you are supposed to meet the inquisitors of a race of multidimensional aliens who call themselves the githyanki. One of your team members stole an artifact from them, and they want it back real bad. They explain that the artifact, which belonged to them in the first place, is instrumental to stopping the evil designs of the worst people in the D&D universe. You should give it to them then. But the person inside the artifact tells you that under no circumstances should you return it, because the artifact is the only thing keeping your team from turning into mind flayers due to the parasite they put in your brains. Should you lose the one thing that keeps you and your friends alive in order to potentially save all sentient beings in the many dimensions? Are the githyanki lying? Is the sentient being trapped in the artifact lying?

Here’s one possible resolution to that extremely tense encounter, which involves meeting the goddess of those interdimensional aliens. This game has a cast of about three hundred voice actors, who were motion-captured as well to properly depict their facial expressions.

Regarding the people you come across in your bizarre adventures, treat them kindly or like a bastard, and you can be sure that you will experience the consequences, although often not in the ways you expect. During a potential siege by goblins, I convinced a couple of young people to be strong and fight. After I took care of the goblins by slaughtering every single greenskin freak I found (except one in a village, because he was cool, and another one who ended up in a cage), the two young people managed to get captured by some even worse people because they confronted them instead of fleeing. Now their remaining family member is pissed at me.

You have come across a special game when you want to avoid upsetting the nice characters in it, and want to brutally murder those who hurt others who don’t deserve it (like when, for example, someone pushed an innocent gnome lady into lava). Can’t wait to expend a significant part of the upcoming couple of weeks (hopefully) of unemployment losing myself in the grand fantasy that is far better than anything I have access to in real life. And in fifteen days comes Starfield, the next Bethesda RPG, biggest one they’ve ever done.