When I moved to my current city, starting a new job in a new place at the same time that all my student loan payments had to begin, I was in dire financial straights. I hadn’t earned enough money in the six months between graduation and that move to have any kind of cushion to fall back on (all my work during those months was at ten dollars an hour which was enough to live off, but not enough to start any kind of savings or financial safety net) so I had to put the entire move on a credit card. It wasn’t that bad since I was living pretty light, tossed out the couch I had up to that point, and had a large Jeep I could hook a trailer up to instead of needing a full moving truck. Still, between that, groceries, gas, and the constant needs of living in a new place while waiting a month for my first paycheck (my job paid monthly), I racked up enough credit card debt that it made me uncomfortable.
Continue readingAuthor: Chris
I’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 16
It has been one fuck of a past 10 or so days for me (as of writing this) and I just need something enjoyable to focus on. So, instead of continuing to reflect on my traumas, things adjacent to my traumas, or traumas I’m starting to realize are becoming more and more common, I’m going to write about a game I’ve played many different times throughout my life and had a different reaction to every time. That’s right, I’m writing about The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening!
Continue readingRest May Be Productive (And Healthy), But I Earn Nothing Doing It
Over the past few years, I’ve observed a pattern in the way that I work and rest. Well, I’ve noticed a lot of patterns, but there is one in particular that I’ve been exploring more explicitly lately and want to write about today. When I have a lot to do and I’m either too stressed to do it or know I’ll need some extra time to get everything done, I take Fridays off of work. Even if it isn’t a personal vacation day but a federal holiday in the US, Friday days-off are always for being productive, getting things done, and making sure I’m prepared for whatever work needs doing. If I need to rest, if I need to actually recuperate, recover, and relax, I need a Monday without work. Mondays aren’t for rest in the same way that Fridays are for productivity, but they mean that I can spend my normal resting day (Sunday) without worrying about being ready for work the next day or combatting the urge to be productive.
Continue readingRecorded and Reposted: Waking Up
The world comes back like musicians
Tuning instruments as the crowd quiets
And the conductor takes a stand
So the concert can begin with a noise,
A cacophony of sound that solidifies
Into a single note as a part of you protests
That everything is out of order.
Eyes blink and the room swims,
A discordant melody played in tune
To a song from the house next door,
As attention builds long enough to
Note that the alarm is going off
Before the hand slapping snooze
Breaks it all to pieces and you fall
Back into the abyss for one minute more.
Enough alarms later, the discord falls away
To be replaced by soft darkness
Welcoming you back to the world
With the admonishment that you must rise
And begin the day laid out for you.
Slowly, like a symphony builds
From the percussion in the back
To the brass and strings in crescendo,
You build yourself into a person
Who can stand for the day
And decide your alarm has done its duty.
Moments later, the world drifts back together
Like music from headphones
Left sitting on your desk
And you discover an hour has passed.
With the passion and harmony
Of a garage band playing borrowed instruments,
You throw yourself together and bolt
For an uncertain future you can only roll with,
A day of discord and low fidelity
That still manages to carry you away
By force of spirit alone.
Some days will be symphonies
But most are improvised songs played
With fumbling fingers that know only
The importance of this moment.
Warm Summer Nights, Grill Smoke, and Soft Conversation
The weather has finally finished the incredible fluctuation it began when the 7-month winter finally ended in early May. The massive heatwave, followed by weather that would have been “seasonable” back in late March or early April has finally settled into the 50s to 70s range that is common to May and early June. I miss the protracted cool period of spring rain storms that used to gradually give way to heat and summer thunderstorms, but I’ll take stable weather if I can get it at this point. Anything is better than this fluctuation that is murdering my joints and aggravating my sinuses. The poor things are already suffering because an entire spring’s worth of tree pollenation has been crammed into the past few weeks to the point that I can’t even go on a walk without feeling out of breath and developing a headache from the sinus pressure.
Continue readingEven The Most Violent Storms Make Me Feel At Peace
Content Warning for brief mentions of childhood trauma (abuse and neglect) toward the end.
Continue readingStardew Valley Lets You (Metaphorically) Kill An Effigy Of Capitalism And I Just Think That’s Neat
I played a LOT of Stardew Valley last year. I got into playing it on the Switch with a friend of mine, but I’d bounced off the game a few times on the PC previously so I expected to only enjoy playing it as a means of socializing with a friend who lived far away. After all, I hadn’t disliked the game, I’d just gotten distracted and busy with other things. Playing with someone made it a lot more enjoyable, thanks to the potential for splitting up the daily tasks, but I’ll admit I struggled with how quickly the days pass when you can’t stop the clock during dialogues, cutscenes, or even the moments of transition between screens. Fishing also becomes nearly impossible because of how quickly the clock moves when you’re catching a single fish.
Eventually, I got tired of asking my friend questions about the game, of always feeling behind and uncertain of what I should be doing or preparing for in the coming days of the game. I decided to try playing solo again, in order to figure out how the game works, improve my farming efficiency, and really dig into the systems of the game on a deeper level than I could during multiplayer. Which is a great way to play the game if you understand the systems or are willing to let yourself be carried by your other player(s), but it’s not great for learning how the game works at any kind of speed since it doesn’t let you stop and think without the day passing you by. I figured I’d get maybe a year into my singleplayer game’s calendar and then fall off again. Instead, I wound up doing an entire year in the two weeks before I played with my friend again and then turned our fun, relaxed farm into an efficient, artisanal-goods-producing machine. Which was, you know, still fun. Just also incredibly profitable in a snowballing kind of way.
After getting into year three of my solo file, I fell off the game. There was still stuff to do, but I was working on increasing my understanding, efficiency, and planning. I was still experimenting with how to automate things, how to get enough of the resources I needed for stuff, and finding new things to explore in the wider world of Stardew Valley. I didn’t really get bored so much as the easy work was finished and I decided I needed a break because my nights were filled with hazy dreams about watering cans, tile selection for tool usage, and the constant grind of swapping out things being processed as they finished. If I ever go back to the game for solo play (which I probably will do, thanks to the expansive nature of the game and the creator’s penchant for continuing to release new content), I’ll probably start over and use what I’ve learned from my solo game to get optimal efficiency in my first year so I can knock out all the achievement type stuff right away and focus on the exploration, fighting, and end-game aspects. And the island. I never quite made it there, though I was right on the cusp when I fell off.
My friend and I don’t play much anymore. A mixture of increasingly busy schedules, her recent homeownership, our stress levels, and just a level of distraction with other things means we haven’t played in more months than I can easily recall. I’ve talked with other people about getting a multiplayer Stardew Vallet game set up, but it never seems to pan out. It seems like it has been difficult to find time to do such things with people lately, as everyone tries to fill out their schedules to either take advantage of the looser restrictions or fill up their evenings with entertainment as they continue to isolate from the on-going pandemic.
Which is too bad, because I could really use the escape the game offers. After all, the idea of leaving an office job behind in order to go live in a quiet little town full of interesting people who all seem receptive to newcomers (with a couple exceptions) and live off the land is incredibly appealing to me. I’d love to just check out of capitalism entirely, but the game is actually pretty reliant on capitalism since you gotta sell all your farm goods for money if you want to make any kind of advancements in the game. There’s no real bartering or community supply options.
Which, honestly, is pretty good for a video game, you know? That its only major failing is that you can’t destroy capitalism. You can destroy an effigy of capitalism though, so that’s neat. I ALWAYS pick that option. I couldn’t stand to play the game knowing I’d sold out a local community to a faceless, shitty corportation if I somehow went that route. Too real.
Generous Reading On The Internet
There is this idea in literary criticism (also writing education and peer-to-peer creative writing) frequently called “generous reading.” The basic idea is that you assumed the best as you read something. You don’t ignore flaws or pass over opportunities to provide the writer with suggestions on how to improve, you just lead with the assumption that the writer is being satirical rather than an idiot. That someone writing about a topic that is typically deeply personal has knowledge of that topic in their own lives. The basic idea has started to creep into some of the more positive social media spheres I’m in, and I think there’s a lot to be said by reading the things people post and say on social media in a generous way.
I won’t deny that generous reading can be abused. It absolutely can and a lot of the worst elements of the internet rely on at least a fragment of it as a tool to bludgeon people who called them out for their clearly shitty opinions. As a result, practicing generous reading on social media can be dangerous if you’re not caught up on all the latest dogwhistles and trolling techniques. Even at my most hopeful, I always suggest taking the time to review a social media user’s history to make sure they don’t have a track record of awful behavior before extending the such generosity if you’re unsure whether or not they’re being an asshole while trying to pretend they’re not an asshole.
Most of the time I think it should be more liberally applied is in the lengthier writings of people on the internet. Blog posts, super long twitter threads, articles, and the various other places media is shared should all get a bit more generosity than most social media, since posting those places requires a good deal more effort. Which isn’t to say people don’t abuse those platforms to hide their dogwhistles and assholery, just that it’s usually easier to tell when they’re actually being awful and someone is less likely to build a whole website around the idea of being able to dogwhistle while flying under the radar.
There’s no hard and fast rule on whether or not you should read something generously, unfortunately. It is difficult to detect satire when it is done well and the longer the internet survives, the more it seems like the people being satirized are just taking the satire as a challenge. I’ve seen articles from The Onion that have passed from “clear satire” into “barely scraping the surface of the awful things we’ve seen in reality” in just the last decade. I spend a lot of time trying to decide if I’m willing to be generous in a reading on social media and I frequently find myself deciding against it. After all, it has been abundantly clear for years now how any attention is good attention on social media, so sharing things in order to dunk on them only helps the thing or person you’re trying to dunk on.
In longer-form media, though, I find it a lot easier. So often, readers know almost nothing about the writer of a work they’re enjoying. Only in recent decades has information about an author become readily available, and that looks like it might not last much longer as more and more writers turn toward anonymity and pen names in order to protect their identities from trolls and the various mobs of the internet. I feel like it is worth giving people the benefit of the doubt by default and only changing my mind when I find a reason they don’t deserve it rather than making them earn it in the first place. After all, we’ve seen countless examples on the internet of people being hunted down and castigated for something a group of people decided was inappropriate only to eventually learn that this person had every right to say what they said. Or that maybe they were right the entire time and people shouldn’t have been so quick to cast judgment.
I just think that trying to feel superior to other people is not a great way to use the internet, even though it seems to be the way most poeple use the internet. I prefer a bit of empathy and extending everyone the grace and generosity I hope they’d extend to me in turn. I just think that maybe most people trying to share something they thought important enough to make a specific statement about should maybe be given the benefit of the doubt about what they’ve said. I know I mess up and stick my foot in my mouth sometimes so I generally like to assume that other people do it as well.
Echoes of the Past Resonating in the Present
One quiet afternoon in my twenty-fist year of life, I decided to figure out what type of disposable cutlery I had used the most. I was a senior in college, enjoying some time in a study room in the library with my friends, and I had finished all of the actual work I had to do. I didn’t want to leave the group since they were my dearest friends and pretty much the only social contact I had at the time, so I invented a problem to research. I spent some time reflecting on the situations I had used disposable cutlery, how often those situations came up, and what type of cutlery was involved. After an hour’s worth of work, I determined that, by a significant margin (using estimated numbers), that the answer was spoons. As I reflected on this, reviewing my data and checking my math against the journal of events I had made, I realized that this was the reason one of my oldest and strongest mixes of obsession and compulsion (in fact, the main lingering component of my OCD) was about spoons.
Continue readingRecorded and Reposted: Grief
It happens slowly at first.
Days drag on for weeks
And months pass with the glacial pace
Of time spent in waiting rooms
With hands folded in thoughtless prayer
For something even your heart couldn’t put to words.