I’m writing today’s post in the brief period between the end of my work day and the start of the September Splatfest. I’m excited to play a bunch of Splatoon 3 with my friends, especially if the fixes I’ve done to my Switch’s internet connection managed to eliminate all of the wireless errors I was getting. It would be amazing to be able to play for multiple hours without getting kicked out of a match because my switch hiccupped hard enough that it lost connection with the internet. I’m still a bit nervous, though, since I’ve been too busy, sick, and tired to do much video gaming the last few days and I’m not sure if the one night of testing I’ve done was a fluke or a reflection of the fixes I did. Only time will tell, unfortunately, but I’ve set myself a pretty relaxed schedule for the next few days so I’ll be able to walk away if I wind up getting connection errors that leave me feeling frustrated.

I actually created myself a schedule for the weekend. Splatfest ran for forty-eight hours, from 5pm eastern on Friday to 5pm eastern on Sunday, and I not only had a full Dungeons and Dragons campaign session to fit in during that, but a character creation session immediately prior to the campaign, my usual weekend chores, grocery shopping, running to the pharmacy for a prescription, and a host of other small activities I needed to include in my weekend to make sure I got enough rest to combat whatever cold or COVID was afflicting me as I went into the weekend. With all that going on, it only made sense to create an actual schedule, with time for meals, breaks to move around, and reminders to change laundry so I could avoid any situations where I was mentally overexerting myself by trying to keep an eye on the clock on top of everything else.

I don’t know why I’ve resisted the urge to do this level of scheduling in the past. It probably involved a decent amount of pride, considering I used to be able to remember everything I wanted to do on any given day or over any period of time and had a precise enough sense of time that I didn’t need a clock to know what time it was. I lost my sense of time to the unreality and time distortion of the early pandemic period and have yet to regain the level of precision I once had, but my memory is fine. It’s just effort that I don’t need to spend, so why spend it? I feel my limits more than ever these days, so it seems silly to spend effort on something just because I used to be able to do it without nearly as much effort as it now requires. Plus, if the schedule winds up feeling too rigid or I wind up missing something, I can always just rearrange or cancel things. It’s a bunch of digital blocks on a calendar app. Easiest shit to change, ever. Zero commitment.

All I have to do is not get annoyed with all of the notifications I’ll be getting on my phone. I’ve had this thing on silent and turned off the notifications for everything except phone calls, text messages, and alarms, so I’m used to ignoring it for long periods of time and not hearing any of its usual beeps or rings or boops. For the next forty-eight hours, though, it’ll be beeping and booping regularly so I remember to change my laundry or go for a walk or eat a meal. If it didn’t make any noise, I’d probably wind up forgetting about my schedule on account of the whole “digital object impermanence” thing I’ve got going on. I could write all of the events down on one of my daily to-do lists to bypass that issue, but writing it all down makes me feel more committed than I’d like to be to a weekend video game event. I need to reserve the right to fuck off and do nothing instead if I wind up feeling burned out and tired. Plus, if I wound up having to cross off a bunch of stuff on my to-do list and replace it with what I actually do, I would be incredibly annoyed, which means I’d probably keep doing something that’s leaving me frustrated rather than change my plans.

Anyway, I have scheduled events that are about to happen, so I hope you have a great weekend. I know I’m expecting to.