I Went Outside. It Was a Mistake.

While my business partner was recovering after enjoying a short spell in the IT sick bay (This happened a couple of posts ago - now he is presumably recovering from whatever existential crisis caused them to temporarily transform into an interactive FAQ page), I did something unthinkable.

I went outside.

Now, before you start applauding my bravery, let’s be clear—I wasn’t off on some grand spiritual retreat or embarking on an epic journey of self-discovery. I went shopping. For food. Like a medieval peasant stocking up for the winter.

Still, it was outside.

And let me tell you, it was exactly as bad as I remembered.

First, the graphics were terrible. I don’t know who’s in charge of rendering reality, but they’ve clearly given up. Overcast skies, a weird yellowish tint to everything, and textures that hadn’t loaded properly—it was like walking through an early 2000s RPG with a half-baked lighting engine.

Then, there were the NPCs.

My God.

It was like someone had left an AI-generated character generator running overnight and forgot to filter out the rejects. Nobody moved with any sense of purpose. People just stood in the middle of aisles, frozen in place, staring into the void as if waiting for a quest prompt to appear. Some wandered aimlessly in unpredictable patterns, clearly programmed with the worst possible pathfinding algorithm and the offspring that some of them were programmed with seemed to be contaminated with rouge ‘fortnight’ code based on how they were glitching around the space,

And the dialogue?

Bugged. Entirely bugged.

Ever had a full-grown adult stop you mid-walk just to say, “They’ve changed the packaging on the milk, haven’t they?” with the kind of grave seriousness usually reserved for war veterans discussing fallen comrades? No follow-up. No elaboration. Just that. And then they vanished into the frozen foods aisle.

At one point, I saw someone trying to use the self-checkout like it was a mystical relic from an ancient civilization, pressing buttons in a desperate attempt to summon assistance from the gods (or a store assistant, whichever came first). The machine, of course, did what all self-checkouts do—it coldly announced that there was an unexpected item in the bagging area, which is bold talk for something that has never once worked correctly in the history of its existence.

By the time I made it back to the car, I realized I had spent more time navigating the absolute nonsense of reality than I had actually shopping. I was exhausted. I was irritated. I was questioning my life choices.

But most of all—I was done.

So, what’s the moral here?

Honestly? I still don’t know. Maybe it’s that the outside world is just a poorly optimized open-world game with a bunch of outdated NPC scripts. Maybe it’s that I should just get my groceries delivered and avoid this nonsense altogether.

Or maybe—just maybe—it’s that I belong right where I was in the first place: indoors, in my little digital corner of the universe, where the only NPCs I have to deal with are the ones I choose to interact with.

And they don’t stop me just to talk about milk.