Over the past year, I’ve been thinking a lot about the place of violence in video games. Pretty much every game I’ve played this year requires some degree of violence in order to make forward progress. In my beloved RPGs, it is the central pillar of almost every game. Sure, there’s usually a story and some excellent character work, but almost the whole thing still revolves around violence. My favorite RPG from the past year, Chained Echoes, features combat as the main mechanic of moving around the world and the method of resolving every bit of story tension in the game (even if the story isn’t really about violence and is actually critical of how “the ends justify the means” style philosophies are almost always an excuse for power getting what it wants through violence). Perhaps the biggest game of the year, Baldur’s Gate 3, is incredibly violent, sometimes moreso than others because there are entirely legitimate, if digustingly evil, paths through the game that involve indiscriminate murder. Sure, both these games involve violence against monsters and people with little to distinguish the two groups from each other (and next-to-nothing to explicitly point out that maybe you’re the greatest monster of them all, in the case of Baldur’s Gate 3), but games with violence exclusively against monsters aren’t much better since they still require violence in order to progress the game. Even one of the cutest, most-delightful games I’ve played (Lil Gator Game) involved violence, albeit violence against cardboard “monsters” rather than against other people. There’s almost no escaping it, which is unfortunate because one of the things that drives my escapist desires the most these days is the amount of violence in the world.
Continue readingMusing
Sensible Precautions In A Wisconsin Winter
It is snowing as I write this. It is not the first snow of the season–that came after Thanksgiving, falling after midnight in a powdery coating that lingered for days, even through warmth and sunlight that should have sent it away. It is the first snowfall that happened during what could generously be called daylight hours, though. A light, gentle dusting that will stick mostly to the snow left over from a week ago as the brined, salted, sanded, or grit-covered roads force whatever lands there to vanish swiftly. There will be more snow, soon, at least according to the forecast, and we have reached the time of year where it will likely stick until we get another mid-winter heatwave of temperatures in the fifties [which has already happened]. Snow in a brown winter can be a deceptive thing, lingering longer than you would think as the regional draughts isolate it so long that it has no choice for survival but to hide in unseen corners and mix with dirt until the muddy slush it becomes is finally melted down by the weight of its disguise. It can last weeks, maybe even months if its cold enough, but people who desire some semblance of the frosted winters they recall from years past will often seek it out and, like a flower plucked for a vase, bring a swift end to something that might have lived longer on its own.
Continue readingReflections In Post-Holiday Silence
After just over three full days of hosting (about seventy-three hours), my siblings have left and I am alone in my apartment except for the occasional quiet cheeps of my bird, Fidget, who is both missing the noise and attention of the last few days but also relieved that there are far fewer humans wandering around in her view. Which is, in its own way, a little bit like how I feel. While I am much more relieved to have the silence than I am missing the noise and attention, I do miss it a little bit. I would be lying if I said it wasn’t nice to have people around all the time. Incredibly exhausting, but nice. Nice to say good night to people as they went off to their beds and nice to know there would be people around when I woke up. Sure, the only time to myself I got during that whole three day period was either bathroom trips or when I’d tuck myself away in my writing closet to continue hacking away at my various writing projects once everyone had either left for the night (my sister’s partner and her friend were both staying at a nearby hotel) or otherwise gone to sleep, but it was also nice to have people to talk to. I’m definitely ready for a weekend to myself, though, especially knowing I’ve got some pre-planned social activities to help prevent me from getting too lonely and melancholic (both of which are tabletop games).
Continue readingConsenting To Being A Part Of A Digital System
I’ve been thinking about the various systems of the world around me, mostly digital, and my place in them. For instance, under a different name (a username), I’m one of Google’s top 10% of reviewers for pretty much every major category they track. I have achieved this mostly by writing clear, sensible, and informative reviews of three to five sentences that touch on all salient points of the business I visited. I fill out all the information I can, answer a question or two, and move on with my life. Sure, that seems like a lot, but when you consider how few places I actually go and how infrequently I actually go anywhere (unlike most of the US, I’m still actively aware that I’m living in a pandemic and avoiding any unnecessary risks in public, indoor spaces), I am writing maybe a dozen of these reviews a year. And that’s enough to get me into the top ten percent. In a completely different direction, I went back to a pizza place for the first time in many months and then got eight emails form the business (with no repeats) in the next twenty-four hours. I got more junk email from them than I got for Black Friday sales in the same time period. It was intense and unnerving. Made me want to never go back again because they seemed to sense my return and, rather than actually offering me things, keep trying to get me to spend money on them without providing any incentive beyond the exchange of money for pizza.
Continue readingThe Drudgery Of My Job Is A Metaphor For My Life
Yesterday (well, yesterday from the day I wrote this a bit over a week and a half ago because of holiday blog displacement and me trying to bank some writing before I’m hosting people), I spent two hours turning a hefty box full of various electrical components on and off. My calculations tell me that I did it approximately eight hundred times in those two hours, using a total of four different combinations of powering up and down steps. I was trying to get it to burn out since we’ve been getting reports of issues in the field with this particular box of electronics burning itself out when users are turning it on in the morning. While this did not make a lot of sense to us, given how hard we hit these things in the lab during the course of developing them and then testing them, we figured it was worth looking into. By which I mean the engineers and my manager figured it was worth looking into and the other testers figured it was worth me testing because, now that my urgent project is done, I don’t have anything that needs to be done yesterday while all the other testers are still working on that schedule.
Continue readingHuman Interaction With The Environment In Scavengers Reign
Spoiler Warning for Scavenger’s Reign. I’m going to be going into detail about the plot and major events of the show in most paragraphs except the one immediately after this one (to hopefully prevent you from accidentally seeing any spoilers before you can read this and can click away if you don’t want to read about what happens in the show). Also, before you read this post, you should probably check out the spoiler-free review from last week to make sure we’re all on the same page.
Also, Massive Post warning. This baby might take you half an hour to read.
Continue readingI Fell Into A Burnout String That’s Dire
I am writing this on the sixth day of November and I am already so incredibly burned out that I’m considering taking time away from work already. Well, not “already” since I haven’t had much time away from work in about a year that wasn’t set aside for a specific purpose. The holidays last winter, visiting a friend/interviewing for a job that I didn’t get, going to Spain, my friends’ wedding, my move, and then labor day weekend (which wound up being preparations for my grandmother’s passing)… All the time I’ve taken away from work has been specifically for an event of some kind or to deal with some kind of major life stress. I haven’t had a proper do-nothing, restful vacation since Thanksgiving of 2022 and that barely counts since I was preparing myself for family therapy with my sister and parents. The last time I took a vacation and didn’t have something horrible, stressful, or upsetting happen immediately afterwards was when I went to a cabin with my friends and siblings for most of a week in the summer of 2022. Which only counts because the stressful thing that happened after that was something I’d mostly gotten used to dealing with (my eye problems flaring up). I really need a proper rest and I really hope I can get one this Thanksgiving. Next week, as you’re reading this.
Continue readingWork/Life Balance Means Spending 12 Hours At Work, Right?
As I mentioned in Tuesday’s post, work has been staggeringly busy. I haven’t even had time to think about my organization project this past week since every single day has been over eleven hours of constant effort and focus. Well, not every day. I had one short day, since my friends where getting married and I wouldn’t miss that for anything, but that was the day that turned my “one long day to make up for one short day” plan for this week into my “every day is a long day since there’s so much that needs doing now, if not sooner” reality. Turns out something we thought wasn’t working for one specific reason actually wasn’t working for an unknown reason, which we know because I proved that the specific reason wasn’t actually at fault. Turns out the assumptions I’ve based my last three months of work on were incorrect, actually. Turns out everything we’ve been doing to “fix” the problem actually only hid it. And, as it turns out, the problem is likely more wide-spread than we thought it was but an incidental quirk of the hardware involved might have hidden it in most cases. As of yet, we still don’t know for certain what the cause is. I have some strong suspicions and a theory I’ve been able to back up a bit, but there are still problems with that theory that I haven’t figured out yet. I will continue to work on this problem all day, every day (well, I don’t expect to come in on the weekends, so hopefully only every work day) until we’ve figured it out and then, finally, we can lay this thing to rest.
Continue readingThe Write Way To End An Exhausting Day
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the years is that, sometimes, pushing yourself a little bit harder than you think you should, taking one more step after you decided you’ve given up for the day, or just convincing yourself that even just a little bit is better than nothing at all… All of that can make the difference between peace of mind and feeling like you’ve failed. I worked for twelve hours today [wrote this on a Wednesday, rather than my usual one-week-ahead, which really only matters to me since I worked 7.5 hours on the 31st and then 12 every work day since then]. I spent the entire thing running around, chasing down a problem, and trying to run herd on a group of people who were placed at my disposal to help figure something out. I ended the day barely on my feet at a quart to nine in the evening, so mentally and physically exhausted that I had to take a break between walking to my car and driving it to the restaurant where I’d made my takeout order. I was done. I had barely enough energy for a shower and to climb the stairs from my main floor to the second floor where I’d planned to eat my dinner at half past nine, watch a little anime, and then play video games until exhaustion overwhelmed me. I had done enough. Even I couldn’t have asked more of myself than I’d already done, because I not only did everything I expected to do, but everything that came up along the way.
Continue readingGetting Attached To A Shiny Pokémon Because Of A Sad Story
As I’ve been slowly working my way through the Pokémon Violet DLC, I’ve been listening to a wide variety of podcasts. I finished working through the entire Patreon catalogue of Friends at the Table and have begun to catch up on my usual collection of podcasts that fell by the wayside while I was incredibly focused on the one thing. I’ve been jumping around, from one thing to another, as my time and attention demand, and having a generally pleasant time half listening to a bunch of podcasts and half playing a game whose structure I’m fairly content to ignore. It makes for pleasant evenings, most of the time, though I’ll admit it gets very difficult to handle plot bits of Pokémon that I run into if I’m also trying to listen to anything. My general answer to that is to spend time wandering the new land and catching Pokémon when I’m more interested in the podcast than in making story progress, so I’ve barely done any of the DLC’s story (or at least what feels like barely any of the story but could easily be half or more of it, depending on how long it runs). What I’ve done plenty of is catch Pokémon and enjoy the scenery of this new area.
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