Once you hit a certain point in your progress in the game called Satisfactory you find yourself in need of a way to track things outside of the game. The game gives you several tools such as the equipment codex and the mathematics calculator feature and the To Do list and the Notes sidebar but those can only carry you so far. You’ll see jokes online about how you’re not a real Satisfactory player until you start making spreadsheets and… well, that’s not wrong, honestly.
Maybe just not in the way you might think.
This image has nothing to do with the topic at hand, but by golly it looks neat, so here you go.
Let’s get into the note-taking aspect, the part of the game you engage with outside of the game.
In February I ran into a tricky problem having to do with tracking the movement of agents in our RMM (“Remote Management & Monitoring”) system. I opened a ticket (01916099 just for the sake of record-keeping) with the vendor.
I updated the ticket in April asking if anyone was going to get back to me.
I updated the ticket in May asking if anyone was going to get back to me.
Along the way I pinged our account rep who insisted someone would get back to me.
Today? More than eight entire months later? Someone got back to me.
We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. I will be closing this case now.
Fern, from the FREIREN anime, eloquently expressing the same reaction I had, only far more calmly.
Fine, fine customer support they’ve got over at [redacted]. Lovely. Their ticketing system won’t even let me reopen the ticket, despite a button being labeled for such. And they wonder why clients are jumping to other vendors’ products.
There’s an old line which goes something like, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” It’s hard, incredibly hard, to convey one’s thoughts and information about one medium in a whole other, wildly different medium. Just ask any of those YouTubers trying to get their takes about film and song across, I imagine they’d agree.
The release of 1.0 hit just a few weeks ago, and I’ve played… a lot. Not every day, though! In fact I took several days away from the game over the last week or so. Burnout is real and to be avoided.
With that said, I have finally hit my actual favorite part of the game:
Of course, true to form, after taking the above screenshot I almost immediately removed this station so I could move it over a few foundation tiles’ worth and raise it a bit higher above sea level.
It’s phone refresh time for everyone on my Ting plan. Spud’s phone just up and bricked itself after several years of stalwart service, so I got his replacement sent out and that seems to have gone well. And then I started thinking, hmm, it has been a while since my Pixel 4a (5G) fell out of regular updates support. And Vyx’s phone has been giving her fits for a while.
So… new phones for everyone! She’s got a Pixel 8a due to arrive soon, and my Pixel 8 arrived today. I can’t really say if I like it better than the 4a (5G) or not yet, but the only annoying thing about it so far is that I can’t find a way to get rid of the “AI Wallpaper” app it comes with. Yuck. I got Signal, Duo, Discord, MediaMonkey, and Medisafe installed and settings/music/etc migrated with no particular difficulty, and my Jabra 65t earbuds are paired & tested.
I originally wanted to get a face-on shot so there’d be a partial reflection of the old phone in this picture of the new phone… but the autofocus kept locking onto the reflection. So you get a 3/4 angle view instead.
In spite of my advancing age (and the decreasing visual acuity which comes with that) I’m happy that this is a slightly smaller phone. Fits in the pocket easier, doesn’t feel quite so bulky to grasp. And with the font sizing features I can make the phone more-or-less usable by my “old person eyes” even before I’ve got my readers on. Helpful, that.
All things being equal I’m going to miss the 4a, it was quite the workhorse, but eventually it will give up the ghost and now I’m freshened up for the future. Yay?
