This episode, the latest in the “I’m Tired And Sad” series, is brought to you by escitalopram and it’s horrible withdrawal symptoms! Everything I do is exhausting and I now know what it is like for your brain to skip a beat the same way your heart can, so I’m going to take it easy today and talk about one of the first video game accomplishments I ever felt proud of: getting to 1000 hits in Orca’s Sword Training without ever once using my shield, no forward jump attacks, and only dodging via the counterattack system or, as my friends and I called it, “Sword Master Mode.” Prior to the game’s release, I didn’t have a lot of local friends since all the kids my age had moved away with their families some years prior, but when a kid moved in down the block who was my age and shared my interest in video games, I started to actually feel competitive about video games and my accomplishments. Before then, I’d only ever played against my siblings with any regularity and I was hopelessly worse than my brother at everything and untouchably better than my younger siblings at everything, so there was no real competition for me to engage in. This new friend was at my skill level (largely determined by our age and coordination) and I got my first taste of competitive gaming. I didn’t much appreciate it, though, since it didn’t really feel fun to win and always felt bad to lose and have other people so visibily (and often vocally) enjoy having beaten me. When the latest Legend of Zelda game dropped, though, it gave me something I could compete in that actually provided me with something when I did well (a sense of personal accomplishment) and avoided the whole competitive nastiness thing I dislike so much about directly competitive gaming.
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Putting My Annoyingly Competitive Coworkers To Work
Last week, I wrote about how I was feeling better and how I was kind of excited about being able to actually put in some effort at work without feeling awful for a week or more. I wound up setting a personal record for testing cycles performed entirely on accident. I’d forgotten that my previous record was counted using only half of what I’m now calling a cycle (since I was testing something else then), so I’d only done thirty cycles in a single day back when I was still feeling fairly hale despite all the pain I was in last summer and on Friday I wound up doing thirty-seven (specifically to smooth out the total count to a nice round number). I paid for it all weekend, of course, but I was feeling mostly better by Sunday and back to about ninety percent by the time I hauled myself into work yesterday morning (or, well, a week ago yesterday as you’re reading this). I felt well enough to log another thirty cycles, even, and woke up today feeling mostly alright. My hands are in the worst shape, between the blisters, the muscle tightness, and the lingering tenderness from my burns almost three weeks ago, but even so I’m able to keep up the work and wound up logging an impressive fifty cycles. The problem is, while I’m making great progress on this testing, it will take me weeks to get to the total number I need to call this test finished. After all, even if I can keep up doing fifty a day–or even get it up to my target of one hundred–that’s still ten to twenty days of work to get to one thousand (the number we’ve picked for this test). I need it to happen faster than that and I’d really prefer to not be exhausting myself every day given how much OTHER work I still need to do before this project is finished.
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