I’ve now played two sessions of Pathfinder Second Edition with this new group of people and I’ll have to say that, so far, I’m not impressed. The group is off to a bit of a rocky start, most of which can probably be explained away by varying levels of comfort with the game system we’re playing, most folks being new to the virtual tabletop we’re using, and the as-yet unsettled group dynamics we’re all seeing. I’m also not entirely sold on Pathfinder 2E yet. There’s plenty of crunch and a ton of customization, but it’s been incredibly difficult to adapt to the rules and the way things are explained in the various texts of the game. The only reason I’m doing better than the other players and the GM (at least, as far as I can tell), is because I’ve made a habit of studying linguistic patterns in writing and language (not to mention that I studied literature in college and am good at interpreting language). I write a lot and I do my best to be aware of how Authorial Voice influences writing, which translates pretty neatly to understand the patterns of specific types of texts. Most games I’ve played were written in a way that made it as easy as possible to understand them, so I’ve rarely connected this skill to my ability to read and understand a tabletop game. Pathfinder, however, was not written to be easily understood. It has all the exacting lexiconical precision of a legal document but without the helpful definition of terms section.
Continue readingAvoiding Codependency And Fighting The Habits That Enable It
Content Warning for discussion of codependent relationships and the unhealthy habits that create them; non-specific mentions of childhood trauma that makes codependent relationships seem fine; and discussion of the struggles inherent in managing those things while under a great deal of stress and anxiety.
Continue readingI’m Finally Figured Out My Streaming Schedule
I spent most of my weekend streaming and trying to get back into The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. It wound up working, thanks to me stumbling from what I thought was just exploring something that looked interesting into recruiting a new sage. I sat down at just before midnight on Saturday with the thought to take an hour, work out how much ground I’d maybe need to go over again thanks to playing my first eighty hours without the sensor, and then do my actual best to reinvest myself in my existing save file. The deal I’d made with myself was that if I put in a genuine effort and still couldn’t get myself caught back up in the game, I’d allow myself to start the game over and then spend most of my stream time doing major quests and storyline stuff while my offline gaming would be exploration, shrine hunting, and resource collection. About four and a half hours later, as I blearily looked out my window at the lightening sky while I finally shut my Switch off, I knew I was back in it for good. Being back into the game felt nice enough that I didn’t even mind royally messing up my sleep schedule during what was supposed to be a proper recovery weekend.
Continue readingNo New Infrared Isolation Chapter This Week, Sorry
I spent a couple hours trying to find something to post today, or come up with a project I could complete in a reasonable amount of time. I found nothing and eventually had to admit that doing an entire extra writing project for this update would be too taxing. I’m still recovering from the last seven months of stress, exhaustion, and worsening burnout, so I’m trying to opt for rest more often than I opt for stress, which is why there’s no chapter of Infrared Isolation today. Sure, I finished the chapter on Wednesday, but that’s barely any time for me to review and edit it and too little time for me to ask this to be finished by my usual editor, especially when she’s still recovering from being sick. Plus, I’m trying to avoid being in this position again next week and that’s not going to happen if I grind out another short story or don’t let Chapter 22 spend time in my buffer before it goes live.
I wish I’d been able to write more during the last three months. I feel like I really fell off the writing wagon starting in March and it’s been a struggle to get back on it since then I returned from Spain in April. I’ve had so much going on. Still, I finished a chapter and I’ve got the energy to at least do a bit of work on the next one, so hopefully this will wind up being a good step toward getting the old Weekly Update train rolling. Time will tell and I have learned not to make promises in these updates, but I sincerely hope there will not only be a chapter next week, but a chapter the week after as well. I hope you’re having a restful weekend and thanks for stopping by.
Obligations To The Self (Past And Present)
Content Warning for: tangential discussions of cancer; more detailed but mostly non-specific discussions of abuse, neglect, and childhood trauma relating to those topics; and discussions of the results of surviving abuse, neglect, and childhood trauma.
Continue readingThe Legend of Zelda: Barriers to Play Is The Worst Sequel Ever
I haven’t played The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in three weeks. Three of the five weeks (as of writing this, anyway) the game has been out. Sure, I got maybe one hundred hours in during those two weeks (though I actually played eighty to nintey of those and the balance is me just leaving my Switch on while doing other stuff), but I’m maybe fifty percent of the way through the game if I’m guessing its depth correctly. My sporadic ability to play the game made it difficult to focus on getting anything specific done (not to mention the executive dysfunction I’ve been struggling with over the last two months), so I wasn’t even playing through things efficiently. I don’t mind a lack of efficiency so much, since I was definitely having a lot of fun building things and driving weird contraptions around, but it does mean that I feel like there’s still so much game to play and that it’ll take another one hundred hours to complete it.
In actuality, I bet I could finish it in fifty if I stopped messing around and focused, but that feels a little beside the point of playing a video game I enjoy as much as every entry in the Legend of Zelda franchise. Regardless, I’m now four days into being done with unpacking and I haven’t touched it yet, despite having the time to play some games. I can definitely chalk some of it up to the newness (to me) factor of Diablo IV and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, both of which feel more compelling and urgent than Tears of the Kingdom does, but that’s really just a drop in the bucket. Most of the bucket is full of a terrible mixture of executive dysfunction and emotional exhaustion. Which is also why Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is the easier game of the lot to play right now and why all my thoughts of playing different games involve things that aren’t Tears of the Kingdom or Diablo IV.
The explanation for why it’s difficult to get myself to play Diablo IV is easy. It is a very noisy game. There’s a lot going on. When I’m stressed out or tired (or both), it can be incredibly overwhelming, especially when my old PC audio system had to get thrown out after I started packing it up and discovered some of the cables were a little melted. Listening to something on headphones makes it feel much more immediate and present than listening to it in the environment around me, so I tend to avoid headphones when I’m stressed out and tired, and that’s just with normal music or podcasts, all of which has a lot less sensory input than a game like Diablo IV does. Once I feel less drained and emptied out by life, it will be a lot easier to play Diablo IV and I’ll be able to do it for longer than a few chunks of an hour at a time.
Tears of the Kingdom is a much more complex situation. Part of it is sheer distance in time now, since not only has it been three weeks, but it was an entire apartment ago. Packing, moving, and unpacking separate me from my last experience with the game and the stress of all that colors my perceptions of it. Not to mention that I was gearing up for the game’s release when my friend finally explained why she was ignoring me, or that most of my gameplay happened around an incredibly fun but also incredibly stressful trip to the East Coast to be in my friends’ wedding. There’s a lot of emotional baggage, good and bad and just overwhelming in general, attached to the game in my mind. None of which is the game’s fault, but sense memories and emotional associations are difficult to unravel and counteract. I mean, it’s been more than half my lifetime since I first played Luminous Arc while listening to the first official soundtrack from Scrubs but I still can’t hear most of those songs without remembering myself sitting in my armchair in my bedroom, playing on my DS as I battled through the early levels of the game. I mean, most of them even conjure up images from the game when I just think about the songs, let alone when I am actively listening to them.
The stresses of this year have continued to build upon each other without me ever getting a chance to release the pressure or address any of the issues that either resulted from the stress or that caused the stress in the first place. Right now, as I’m writing this in the middle of June, I’m finally facing a mostly-empty social calendar so I can finally catch my breath and still I can’t seem to escape petty drama, hefty emotional issues, and the growing anxiety around people not responding to my messages when I try to reach out to them (the thing with my friend took one of my oldest anxieties and fed it until it has become difficult to ignore, deny, or cope with right now). I mean, I was invited on a trip in September that I know I shouldn’t go on, but I’m putting off telling the group because that will require emotional energy I don’t have. I know the answer. I know I could techincally afford it but really shouldn’t spend the money. I just don’t want to have to cope with the feeling that I might be letting people down or missing out on another chance to connect with these people.
These are all hurdles I will overcome eventually. There’s just a lot of them right now and I’m so tired I can barely stand, let along start trying to jump or dismantle them. Eventually, I’m sure, I’ll start playing Tears of the Kingdom again and driving around in a weird car will be a ton of fun that doesn’t involve any of the weird emotional associations I’ve made. I’ll slowly break through them all and be able to just enjoy myself without needing to tackle any of the emotions or issues my mind and heart have associated with the game. For now, though, I’ll probably be sticking with something a little less emotionally complex.
Getting Stuck On Visuals in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
I’ve begun to play Star Wars Jedi: Survivor during what limited time I’ve been able to put toward video gaming (which isn’t much between unpacking, settling in to my apartment, recovering from total exhaustion, and my busy day-job). It has been a lot of fun, even if it feels like a weird experience compared to what I remember of the first game. I’m not certain the game itself is any different, but the way I’m experiencing it very much is. I played Fallen Order on my PC the first time, struggling through what felt like odd computer controls as I stubbornly refused to consider playing it on a console. I’d already bought it on the PC, after all. Why should I spend MORE money on it just to make my experience better? Eventually, my protests faded away and I played my two subsequent play-throughs (one full and one partial) on the PS4, though most of that was during my “listen to a podcast while playing a video game so my eyes, ears, and hands were completely occupied at all times” phase, so the experience of the game didn’t really stick with me.
Continue readingThe Nature of Rest and My Need for Proximity
I write a lot on here about my levels of stress, of anxiety, of exhaustion, and how difficult it is for me to deal with them in a healthy manner. I often say that I’m bad at resting or I’m not sure how to rest and recover when it comes to mental and emotional drain. One of the things I typically leave out (ultimately, anyway, since I’m pretty sure half-explanations of what is going to be the topic of this blog post are my most-deleted writing on this blog) is that I know of ways for me to get rest. I know of things that soothe me when I can’t seem to unwind or relax. The main problem is that they’re difficult for me to access in ways that keep them soothing or in sufficient quantities that I can actually recover enough that my progress doesn’t vanish the instant something stressful happens. I’ve written before about my need to escape civilization, to get far away from cities and noise and the humdrum of my daily life (I call it “Tree Time” in my head, since I associate this with being in heavily forested areas). What I havent written about is that probably the most restful or soothing thing I can do is connect with other people.
Continue readingPlanning My Rest Around My Exhaustion
I finished unpacking over the weekend. I still have some cleaning to do, and there’s plenty more stuff that will get done in time such as hanging lights, putting up art, figuring out if I need more rugs, and deciding what to do with my balcony. All of that is work that will take weeks and isn’t really a part of unpacking. It sort of is, in the case of the art and lights, since I packed those up for my move, but none of them are things that I feel inclined to do immediately the way I felt the need to empty boxes and get things situated. In short, I’m done with my immediate grind and while there is work to be done on the horizon, none of it needs to be done today or tomorrow or even this week. Now, finally, after an exhausting four weeks, everything is done and I can finally rest. And I’m finally out of obligations for the year, so hopefully I can actually get some this time.
Continue readingNo New Chapter of Infrared Isolation This Week
Between my total exhaustion and my editor being sick, there will be no new chapter of Infrared Isolation this week. Despite my exhaustion, I’ve kept writing, so there WILL be a new chapter next week. I just need to give my editor time to rest up before she reviews it and myself more time to rest up before I try to crunch out another one. Rest is important.