Last night, at one in the morning, I was recovering from covid by playing Starfield; I went through a compelling mission with Sarah Morgan in Cassiopeia to find debris from her past. I needed to take a shit, so I quit the game, shut off my computer, and went to the bathroom as the last thing to do before bed.

It turned out to be one of those annoying shits that I have often, and that involve wiping over and over. After one of the first attempts to stem the presence of fecal residue on the toilet paper, I noticed that it didn’t smell like anything. I thought, “Curious. How could I have eaten so differently these past few days that my shit doesn’t smell like anything?” Alarms went off in my head. I tried to smell the soiled toilet paper from an inch away. It didn’t smell like anything at all.

As someone with IBS, which has in plenty of ways ruined my life by itself, I didn’t think I would miss the smell of shit. Shortly after, I checked other normally odorous stuff around the apartment, only to further solidify the realization that, indeed, everything smells as if their “smell” property had been set to null. Realizing that I had lost my sense of smell was one of the oddest moments of my life.

It’s also very common with covid, apparently. A couple of online articles suggested that sixty percent of those infected with this bioweapon end up losing their sense of smell, only to recover it in about one to three months. About twenty percent of those who lose the sense of smell, though, apparently never recover it properly, or entirely. That would be very unfortunate.

It’s my fifth day with covid, and I’ll likely still test positive, but this is the last proper day of rest/leisure before I consider whether or not I should return to work. I don’t like the prospect of going to the office and sitting between two coworkers while I’m wearing a mask and them knowing that I can still share this wonderful gift with them. However, as much as I’d like to give myself the rest of the week off, the thought makes me feel guilty; my current contract started last Wednesday.

I’ve barely seen the light of day in five days, but thankfully I’m used to tougher periods of reclusion; during my worst times in my twenties, I think I didn’t leave the house for about three weeks. I would do quite well in solitary confinement, if any of my crimes ever land me in prison.

Anyway, Starfield is cool; the internet has been shitting on it quite unfairly. Fantastic set designs, good gunplay, better writing than Fallout 4 and most of Skyrim (except for the in-game books, which suck ass), convincing facial animations (although not remotely as good as the motion-captured ones from Baldur’s Gate 3).

Starfield lacks the magic of Skyrim, but so did Fallout 4, and over the years I’ve gotten the feeling that it’s impossible to create a “magical” game universe unless it’s literally a fantasy world that features magic. Besides, Skyrim itself wasn’t as magical as its ancestor Morrowind, which still has an active community that mainly plays through a fan-made engine called OpenMW. That damn game is twenty-one years old.

I think plenty of players just landed on a random planet, ran through a few of the procedurally set dungeons, which are bleak and generally lifeless, and let that color their impression of the whole game. Many people went to Skyrim and Fallout 4 for the aimless exploration of a county/province on foot, and that doesn’t exist as such in this game. It’s like an open-world Mass Effect but without the aliens.