Starting the long goodbye with Woot

 Being a creature of habit, I find it good to stop, review, and reflect on some facet of the everyday in my life every so often.  Little could be more everyday than my daily web-surfing routine, and, during this particular holiday weekend (which sees a ritual feast in celebration of who and what we have that we are thankful for, followed by a frenzy by many to get more stuff they can't live without), considering my shopping choices has to be high on the list.  Those two considerations meet squarely at Woot.com.

Ah, Woot.  Once upon a time, it was a fun, quirky little site (founded in 2004, per Wikipedia).  One deal a day, generally on something tech/geek related.  You never knew what you would find there, and much of what was presented there was actually good deals on things you might want, if you fit their niche.  I did, and I found it glorious.  Not that I bought more than a fraction of what they offered, but I came to understand the popularity of things like QVC among other segments of the population.

Well, if success breeds one thing, it's a desire for growth.  They started offering wine deals in 2006, which I figured would fall by the wayside with the various state laws involving alcohol, but it persevered for over a decade.  Next came daily T-shirt deals in 2007, and that brought me in all the closer, as the shirts were similarly tech/geek niche oriented.  It's no exaggeration to say that Woot t-shirts were a major part of my wardrobe for well over a decade.

Of course, growth not only calls for more growth, but it also attracts a certain sort of business professional with a certain mindset.  You know the type, "appealing to a broader market will increase revenue", "reducing costs will increase our profit", and of course, my favorite, "you're leaving money on the table if you don't do X".  More sub-sites, starting with kids in 2009, were launched, and Amazon acquired Woot in 2010.  While at the time I feared there would be a sudden shift to turning Woot into Amazon's surplus site, those changes happened much more slowly.  More noticeable were things like t-shirt quality taking a dive (which was of course spun as providing customer choice, once the option of paying more for a quality shirt was added).

But, fast or slow, things progressed to where they are today.  You have several daily deals, but they seem to be just highlights of select items in vast seas of dreck that Amazon wasn't able to push through their regular website.  Plus, those highlighted deals seem to come back fairly often... whether that's "due to popular demand, we sourced another batch for you to have a go at" or "we're going to keep putting these up until we manage to get rid of them", I'm in no position to say, but, from what I've seen, I would bet the latter.  Even the t-shirts have taken a dive, not in physical quality this time, but just in composition - the vast majority seem to be nothing more than pop-culture mash-ups these days.

Suffice it to say, Woot has changed, and not for the better, in my opinion.  Looking at my order history, I haven't ordered anything from them in the past year, and for quite some time before then it was only shirts that kept me coming back.  So, yeah, Woot is now out of my daily visit routine.  I'm on their email lists, so I'll still get offers for a while, but it won't be that long before I get the urge to reduce my marketing email load, and, barring something unexpected happening between now and then, Woot will be part of the "I don't need your emails any longer" group.  So, goodbye Woot, it was fun while it lasted.

Forza!

 A full two months since I last posted?  Really?  Well, let's do something about that.

Forza Horizon 5 just came out, and I'm having a blast.

Historically, I haven't much cared for racing games, just because of their limited scope.  Which is to say, it's hard to get into racing the same small bunch of cars on the same small batch of tracks and not get bored of it all, if you're not a hard-core racing fan.  The Forza Horizon series fixes that by giving you access to a huge selection of cars, from the all-but-useless to the seriously overpowered, an open world with a wide variety of races and challenges to pursue, some light guidance if you want to follow it, and things like seasonal variations (season changes once a week), so that even the exact same spot is likely to be different from one visit to the next.

This time around, the playground is Mexico, or rather a cobbled-together map of greatest hits of Mexican terrain and environments.  Desert, beach, jungle, volcano, city, town, ruins, agave farms, that sort of thing.  It's a very nice Mexican-themed park to play around in... well, as other reviewers have pointed out, it's fairly saturated with British-sounding sorts, so it's no cultural touchstone, but neither is it populated with egregious stereotypes, It's a nice place to drive through, but I wouldn't go relying on what you see here as being the real Mexico.

As for the driving itself, each car has its own feel, and can be modified to a fair degree, so those who want to spend time fine-tuning their performance (or, for that matter, spend hours modifying the look of their cars) can certainly do so.  Me, I take advantage of the auto-upgrade features built in, because I'm more of an "arcade" racer, enough so that I sometimes resort to taking advantage of the indestructibility of the cars to win a race by "driving by Braille", taking advantage of barriers to make turns at higher speed than anybody in the real world would even attempt.

Of course, the game has its weaknesses as well, but they tend to be small things that can either be overlooked or compensated for.  For example, there's a car radio feature that lets you select different stations to listen to, segregated by type of music.  In my case, I tend to leave it on Radio Eterna, which is classical music... and I understand, licensing costs for music is a thing, but classical should be on the low end of that spectrum, and the small number of tracks on that station is not a good thing.  It's not at the point yet where I need to turn off the in-game radio and pipe in music from some other source, but it's close.

All in all, it's a nice game that will likely keep me occupied for months, and it's part of Game Pass, so the price works for me as well.  If you're part of that ecosystem already, you should really give it a go.

What's that?  My other games?  Well, Destiny 2 is in a lull at the moment, so I may poke my head in on occasion, but I'm pretty sure it's on hiatus until the next major update comes next year.  Psychonauts 2, I really want to play more, but playing these collectathon games isn't leaving me enough time.  One of these days, I'll get back to that, I hope.