Author: Chris

No New Infrared Isolation Chapter Today

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I’m taking a week off to help rebuild the buffer of chapters I once had. The whole thing vanished due to the business of December and January and while I’ve finally got time and energy to write again, it isn’t much and I’m not going to have a chapter done with enough time left to edit it myself, much less ask someone else to look at it. So I’m taking a week off. I’ll be working to get my buffer back in place and to figure out some kind of sustainable writing routines for these multi-thousand word writing projects. I don’t exactly double the writing I do for this blog (by wordcount, anyway) with each of these chapters, but only if you consider the average. I’ve defintely done that more times than I’d like to admit. It’s a lot of work to write, edit, review, and then edit again for each chapter, but this is the process I’ve got and there’s no way I’m posting anything as faulty and poorly edited as the chapters I originally wrote in 2017 and 2018… No, these will be done well, according to my current standards.

Anyway, if you need something to do, I suggest checking out the Poetry category or just browsing through old posts. I’ve written about so much over the last two and a half years that I’m sure there’s some hidden gem you’ve never read. Too bad wordpress doesn’t let you sort by things you’ve never read… Honestly, just type some keywords into the search bar and, as long as they’re specific enough, you’ll find something interesting to read. See you all next week for chapter 31!

Motivation And The Little Things That Irk You

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In my last apartment, I spent a year and a half being woken up way too early during the warmer months by sunlight streaming into my apartment through the blinds on my eastward facing windows. I thought to myself on numerous occasions that I really needed to do something about this fact so I could sleep in late enough to get some proper rest (especially after my insomnia resurgence in January of 2021) and just never did anything about it. I had already put up all the curtains I owned in my bedroom and I couldn’t close the door because I needed the AC from the unit in my living room to reach my bedroom in order to sleep at all, so I didn’t have a ready-made solution I could implement. Eventually, after I was starting to come apart at the seams, I finally did something about it. It took all of an hour, including the forty-five minute trip to and from my local Target to buy curtains and a curtain rod, to solve the problem. I got to sleep in the next morning and went from struggling with how much light was streaking into my apartment to being able to control my environment again in a way that allowed me to priortize my comfort and well-being. Following this event, where I realized I’d been cursing a problem I could easily solve with a little effort, I swore to never let myself be that miserable about something so easy to solve for that long ever again.

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You Can Accomplish A Lot In 10 Hours If You Can Focus

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Today, after a few days of slowly circling the drain that is worsening burnout, I realized I had to find a way to stay focused despite how tired I’m getting and decided to skip straight to pulling out the big guns. I’ve been putting it off for a while now, since I don’t always enjoy the experience, but there’s no arguing with how effective it is when it comes to keeping me on task and at least marginally focused on fairly straight-foward work. So, rather than deal with the various thoughts swirling around my head about my job, my work hours, how I feel about doing this work, and literally anything else that might normally occupy my mind, I blasted them all away by subjecting myself to the ten-hour version of the He-Man Hey Yeah Yeah video (officially titled “HEYYEYAAEYAAAEYAEYAA” but no one I know calls it that). I started the video shortly after I started work and have left it running all day, taking my headphones off when I need to be capable of complex thought and leaving them on while conducting rote tasks, doing simpler thought work (like writing this blog), and running the hours and hours of tests I need to do today. So far, I’ve kept my sanity and managed to be more productive than any other day this week, despite being four days into this parade of mounting exhaustion.

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Waiting Beneath A Heavy Silence

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I spent most of my idle thoughts today thinking about someone I haven’t spoken to in almost nine months. I have a lot of people from my past that I haven’t spoken to in various lengths of time, most of them greater than nine months, but this one occupies me in ways that the rest don’t. Most of the rest of these long silences are the result of walls I built or deliberate choices to make a change in my life that took me away from people. Some are the notable ends of long-running and incredibly unhealthy codependent relationships that I was unable to change for the better as I changed for the better–it takes change on both people’s parts to better a relationship like that and I’ve only ever been able to control my own behavior. Some were relationships I ended because they were unhealthy for me, because the other person only ever took from me, because it was clear I could not rely on them when it really mattered, or because I simply grew tired of needing to overlook the ways they frequently hurt me without ever learning to treat me better. Some just faded into silence as time and distance took their toll. Only one was because someone else set a boundry and I have kept my silence for these past nine months out of respect for their request.

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Come To Palia For The Chill Farming MMO And Stay For The Intricate NPCs

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Last September, I wrote about the end of a tabletop gaming group and, in the last paragraph, mentioned that I regretfully couldn’t get into a game, Palia, as much as my two friends were. Oh, how the times have changed. Mostly for me, since my two friends are just as into Palia as ever, but I’ve been getting into it more and more over the past month and finally hit the point where I was playing it by myself, even when they weren’t online, which is the sign that I’ve stopped playing a game because my friends are playing (which is a perfectly fine reason to play any number of games and the main reason I’ve played pretty much every single massive multiplayer online game I’ve ever played) and started playing it because I enjoy it. Not much of the game itself has changed, aside from various quality-of-life improvements, additional story elements, and some expansions to the core aspects of the game (it is still in pre-release development), but I’m currently enjoying it more than I have before. It took me a couple weeks to figure out why, but as I finally locked into the gameplay loop over the past few days, I was able to figure out what about this game has caught me this time around.

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Mood Music For Themes And Villains I Might Never Use

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When I start building out a world for a tabletop game, if there’s a particular feeling that I’m trying to achieve as part of that build, I will usually create a playlist to help me zero in on it. I’ll do the same thing for villains, sometimes, though I tend to avoid it since I generally want my villains to be a framework with some goals and ideals that will be given greater detail and a final shape through their interactions with my player characters (however remote or limited those interactions are). I make playlists a lot more as a player, usually one for every major step along the path of my character’s journey that go from being vague ideas to solid, smaller playlists as I hit those major beats and see what shape they’ll take, but the practice that started as a player in a D&D game has grown far beyond that point. I’ve relied on it as a part of my worldbuilding and NPC development more heavily in recent years, as I’ve moved away from standard fantasy worlds and instead built worlds to reflect past failures (from when my weekly Sunday game had a Total Party Kill and we decided to start a new game in the distant future of the world they failed to save) or to reflect specific themes (like the one I built and adapted to first a Heroic Tragedy D&D campaign and then to a game of Heart: The City Beneath). For these more thematically focused worlds, the playlists have been super helpful in reminding me of the tone I’m supposed to be setting as I flesh out bits of the world my players are about to encounter or create things out of whole cloth on the spot as I run the sessions.

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Harrow The Ninth’s Narration Made For A Harrowing Read

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There will be spoilers for Gideon The Ninth and Harrow The Ninth in this review, starting in the third full-sized paragraph. There will also be some minor hints at spoilers in the second full-size paragraph, so tread with caution.

Well, I finished Harrow The Ninth. You’re probably reading this a day after I wrote about my initial impressions of the second book in the Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir, but it has been two days since I wrote that. I was too busy on Friday to write a blog post during my breaks at work and then far too tired to write anything once I finished. So, since I was burned out, exhausted, mentally drained, depressed, and incapable of determining if anything would actually be fun, I decided to toss aside my reservations (and cautions) about reading Harrow the Ninth in my current mental state and dove in. Eight hours later, it was half past three in the morning and I’d finished the book. I didn’t exactly disassociate my way through the book, but I basically did. Time left no impression on me and not in the way that happens when I get sucked into a book most of the time. This was a new one for me. It wasn’t a negative experience or anything like that–I actually wound up liking Harrow the Ninth more than I thought I would–but I definitely wasn’t really in control of myself. I didn’t really feel like I could pull myself out of this weird mental state. Normally, I forget that I’m reading at all and don’t even think to stop. This time, I just couldn’t stop. It was like I lacked the agency to stop, which kinda fits with the whole “mild disassociation” thing I had going on.

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Harrow The Ninth Is Tripping Me Up

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After many long weeks of putting it off, mostly to savor the anticipation but also because I started a book series, a TV series, and working my way through Dimension20, all on top of my usual pile of video games, podcasts, and YouTube series, I finally started reading Harrow the Ninth. I’ve had a lot of stuff to read or watch and I didn’t want to start on another book until I’d cleared some of that stuff off my to-do list, but I wound up getting into it because the past two weeks have been rough enough that I needed a NEW escape. Plus, I really enjoyed Gideon the Ninth and hoped that I’d be able to boost my incredibly low mood from the past three weeks by giving myself a bit of a treat. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple, since the second-person narration [which ultimately served a very specific purpose] was a bit too much for me to handle going into the book. I think I made it through about five chapters on my first attempt before I felt just too worn out by the book addressing me to continue reading. I can tell the writer, Tamsyn Muir, is trying for some kind of effect, but I’m not sure what it is yet and I’m not sure that it’s working since all I’m getting from it is confusion. I can only hope that it will resolve soon or that I’ll get past how weird it feels to me. Generally speaking, it’s one of those things that, as a reader and a writer, I can see the author is going for something but I can’t tell whether its just not landing for me or if they’re not doing a great job of it.

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Sometimes You Have To Argue Even When They Won’t Listen

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My most popular post over the last two years is “Don’t Argue If They Won’t Listen” and I honestly find it kind of funny how perennially relevant that is to my life. I was spurred to write that post after being talked over by someone who continued to insist I was wrong despite having no evidence or relevant experience to back up their claim. They were never able to provide a reason for this assertion and their subsequent insistence on ignoring my advice (that they had solicited) on a topic I happened to know a lot about forever changed the nature of our relationship. I was no longer willing to engage with them on anything but a surface level and I let distance grow between us since, prior to that point, I was the one doing most of the work to keep conversation going and make contact. Now, we rarely talk (this greater distance helped by the fact that this person also moved away a few months later) and while I miss the friendship, I do not miss the way it made me feel all the time. Unfortunately, as I’ve come to realize in my professional life, walking away or keeping your silence isn’t always an option.

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