There is this expression I first encountered in playing Magic The Gathering (which is probably used in a lot of card games, but I don’t really play many card games so I’ve got no idea) that I wish more people were familiar with so I could actually use it as much, and in as wide a variety of situations, as it pops into my mind. Sure, the explicit meaning of “top-decking” is that you’re using whatever you draw from your deck as you draw it, but the actual meaning behind that says a lot more. You see, when you’re playing one of these card games, you are generally using a deck built around a specific function or theme. You’ve assembled cards to enable types of play to help you win and the rest of your deck is usually built to get those cards into your hands or to respond to other types of play so you have the time you need to get a winning combination in place. So, when you’re top-decking, what that usually means is that you’re out of options, you’ve done everything within your power at the moment, and all you can do is respond in the moment with whatever comes into your hand. You have no ability to respond to other players’ actions and all you can do for the future is hope that you eventually draw something you need or that will get you what you need. Which is how living my life feels a lot of the time.
Continue readingReflection
A Life’s Worth Of Problems To Solve
Last week’s anger is still around. It’s currently locked in battle with my exhaustion in a way that is amplifying all my other emotions in ways I do not particularly appreciate, but then very little that’s positive has happened. I mean, I had a nice weekend, that was good, but I haven’t been able to make much headway on any job applications, nor have any of my floating problems resolved themselves. They’re not even closer to being resolved than they were before. Hell, I feel like I’ve made negative progress on some of them. I’ve tried talking through what’s going on with some people and that hasn’t actually helped at all. Normally that helps a lot–normally thinking out loud like that helps me push towards a better understanding of what’s going on with me but I feel like that hasn’t worked lately. To cap it all off, I feel like this is all pointless because I’ve got practical problems I need to solve now and all this theoretical stuff, while incredibly important to my sense of self, doesn’t matter as much. I just got my lease renewal which stands to raise my rent by over one hundred dollars, there’s some big changes happening at my employer that necessitate reconsidering stuff I thought I’d already settled about my future, and everything I thought I’d settled about how and why I spend my energy is suddenly in question again as a couple interactions that should be inconsequential have bent me out of sorts.
Continue readingReflecting On My Relationship With Trigun Over The Last 15 Years
I’ve begun to watch the latest season of Trigun (Trigun Stargaze, to be precise) and while there’s still more to watch before I share my thoughts on it, it did kind of jiggle something loose when I started watching it last weekend. You see, I first watched Trigun about fifteen years ago and it quickly became my favorite anime. A cheerful, happy protagonist (Vash the Stampede) who endured endless suffering but still managed to get out there every day and crow about love and peace? That was what I aspired to be for quite a while. It was easy to admire his dedication to not killing anyone, his ability to endure in the face of unspeakable pain, and his willingness to sacrifice himself in order to save others. After all, that aligned him with the vision of myself I’d been raised to hold and it fed into the still-unhealthy parts of said vision that I carried forward into my adulthood. It was easy to take his side as he preached against killing, as he tried to redeem his ally (Nicholos D. Wolfwood) who would kill as he thought he must, and just as easy to mourn but celebrate Wolfwood’s death at the end of the first anime (the one from the late 90s) because Wolfwood ultimately chose the path of nonviolence and self-sacrifice. These days, it is much less easy. These days, after decades of self-sacrifice and burning myself up (and out) to keep others warm, I find my perspective has shifted. I still appreciate Vash and his optimision, I still appreciate his commitment to protection, but I can’t really align myself with it any more. I like what he does, I like the way that he is perhaps the least gun-using gunslinger in this western-adjacent anime of the last few years. But I find myself on Wolfwood’s side more and more now. Sometimes, no matter what you want, no matter how much you sacrifice, no matter how strongly you will it, some one needs to be stopped and you won’t be able to redeem them.
Continue readingAt Least My Thoughts Are More Directed While I’m Still Unable To Sleep Enough
More time has not fixed my sleep problem. It has gotten better, but it hasn’t fixed itself yet. I’m able to think fairly clearly. I’m very tired still, and a day at work is still very draining, but I think I’m getting through the worst of the mental muddling that has left me in this state. I haven’t really figured anything concrete out, but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how I feel about all of the stuff going on in my life (namely my tendency to throw myself into projects with a dedication rarely reflected by those I work with, what part I wish to play in the various communities I’m a part of, how much should I temper my passions in order to avoid further burnout, and so on) and I think I’ve at least figured out what I don’t want and taken a couple steps on the road to somewhere. I know I don’t want to return to my old quiet days of playing games by myself and going entire weeks without talking to anyone save my coworkers. I don’t want to do nothing but what I need to. I also don’t want to give up on some of the things I’ve started, not entirely, even if they can be draining. I know I need to continue to work on balancing the energy I spend against the rest I’m getting. I also know that I want to be a part of communities and that community doesn’t happen without people to oragnize it and do the work. Someone has to be the person to say “let’s do stuff” and while it doesn’t have to be me all the time (and shouldn’t be me all the time!), I am a very organized person who does enjoy logistical work, so I need to figure out how to find balance between this truth and the just as real truth that I’m burned out and constantly exhausted these days.
Continue readingKeeping My Anger On A Slow Burn
There was a period in my life when I did not consider myself an angry person. A pretty long one, actually. I only began to question that assertion once I no longer had a (sometimes healthy) outlet for any aggression I felt, which was in my mid-to-late twenties. I spent my entire childhood miserable, my teen years surviving, my college years starting to get in touch with my emotions, and still didn’t realize how angry I was about a lot of stuff until I was forced to grapple with the emotional toll of my grandfather’s death and my separation from my parents. You see, I survived most of my childhood by repressing my emotions in a way that had a lasting negative impact, as perhaps best exemplified by the fact that I didn’t experience any kind of mixed or nuanced emotions until sometime in my twenties. I only ever felt one thing up at a time up to that point and it was only as I began to unpack the way that my grief touched everything else I felt that I started to recognize the complexities of what I was feeling prior to that. And thus came the anger. It had been sublimated into so many other emotions, into so many parts of my life, that it was differnet to pull out and understand on it own, especially because I was raised in a particular masculine tradition where not even anger was a “proper” emotion for a man to have. The only proper emotions where love (for god, of course) and remorse (for not loving god enough), so I tamped down a lot of stuff in order to play the part I was assigned.
Continue readingInsomnia And Caring Too Deeply And Existential Identity Crises, Oh My!
I have not slept much the last couple days (as of writing this). It has been difficult for me to wind down these past few days because I am currently caught in an exhausting vortex of my own creation. It isn’t video games or TV shows I’ve starting watching (though my tendency to lose track of time while doing those things certainly hasn’t helped me these last few weeks), but just my good ‘ol insomnia. My mind will not spin down in the evenings and, in fact, seems to kick things into high gear when I’m trying to go to sleep. Most of the time, though, I can attribute a period of restlessness to a spike in anxiety or stress. These days, it’s all anxiety and stress to the degree that I’ve stopped registering it as anything but “normal” everywhere except in how much anxiety and stress I can manage in a day: that just keeps getting smaller as the world around me gets messier and messier. Still, despite this, I am pretty sure I know why I can’t fall asleep easily lately (this has been going on for a while but only recently has it prevented me from sleeping for long periods of time): I am having a small-to-moderate existential crisis. I joke often about having those, or at least have joked about that once or twice over the course of this blog, but my sense of purpose and self has been relatively stable for a while. After last year’s burnout (which is continuing into this year), deciding to stop my D&D campaigns troubling my self-identity as a storyteller, and the way that my thoughts about why I stopped that D&D campaign has grown in my mind to be applicable to so many of the difficult and draining parts of my life, all my mind can do is spin its wheels and get nowhere.
Continue readingWaiting For Something To Change
Hell is anxiously checking for a response to a message you haven’t even typed yet, much less sent. It is having made a decision that you haven’t followed through on yet, essentially forcing you to make the decision over and over again as your mind picks at it. It is knowing that you have to keep making a decision every day for years if you want it to ever pay off, despite how far away that moment might be. It is knowing something and being unable to act on it, not now and probably not ever. It is all these moments of anixety and powerlessness and more besides. These days, I find myself steeped in such things: conversations I don’t know how to start, things I feel foolishly compelled to heavily qualify before sharing, decisions made long ago that I must stick to because nothing’s changed enough to reevaluate them, and recognitions of problems I can do nothing positive to resolve. All my other choices are worse than whatever I’ve picked, acting on anything will most-likely return bad results, and no amount of practice is going to make it any easier to start conversations I feel weird for having because I was trained to ask nothing of people and still struggle to ask for anything that might require other people to put in effort on my behalf. I hate being in these kinds of no-win-but-the-long-run situations and even my therapist agrees that my life is pretty much entirely made up of them these days. I just want problems that are easy to handle, a society that doesn’t feel like it is on the verge of collapsing, and the ability to ask things of people without feeling the need to preempt all the potential negative directions the conversation could go if I was misinterpreted.
Continue readingFighting The Tide So Current Events Don’t Sweep Me Away
It’s all kind of a lot these days. The invasion of Minnesota, the planned invasion of multiple other cities, Trump posturing to stake a claim (likely violent) on Greenland, Trump’s government trying to manufacture consent for the invasion, the ever-present spectre of the Epstein Files looming over everything, and all of the patently obvious politically-motivation prosecutions of democratic-run states, democratic officials, and any of Trump’s perceived enemies. There’s just no end to it. I’ve been trying to rest, to get away from the constant churn of misery and awfulness long enough to unwind at least a tiny bit, and every time I go back to the internet or social media, I discover some fresh hell has been unleashed. More killings by cops or feds, increasingly violent rhetoric meant to justify the invasion of Greenland, cops and feds attacking protesters, some new neo-nazi has decided that it’s their turn in the spotlight, and so on. I can’t even remember everything that’s happened this week because it’s just so much all the time and I’m certain I didn’t even see all the most viral of this week’s events. The media environment is too fractured by all the big names joining Trump’s side or attempting to rehabilitate the bullshit he’s spewing as more and more of how we communicate and learn about the world beyond us gets consildated into the conservative grasp of a cadre of malignant billionaires. Our would-be leaders throw up their hands and repeat a bunch of out-of-touch bullshit about prices being too high and citizens being unable to afford groceries like it’s a mantra meant to summon donations or an additional term, all while people are yanked out of their homes and kidnapped out of their cars in the violent blitz that Trump has brought down on various cities in the US. And the pace seems to only be increasing as this desperate attempt to break Trump’s political opponents begins to turn the neutral parts of the country against him.
Continue readingAt The Heart Of My Desire To Run TTRPGs
As someone who has more than a passing interest in tabletop games, scholastic pursuits, and reflecting deeply on things, following Dr. Emily Friedman, a professor studying games with a focus on tabletop roleplaying games and the Actual Play media created using them, on social media was a no-brainer the instant I first came across her posts. I also wound up following a bunch of people she communicates with regularly for their insights on these interests of mine and, after the fall of Cohost, saw the tabletop scene of that website merge with the growing one on Bluesky, such that it isn’t uncommon for me to find someone proposing an interesting idea and them mutliple other people examining the idea or thought through different lenses. Lately, this has been especially important to me because Dr. Friedman has been writing more and more about how being a Game Master (or Dungeon Master) is a form of labor, how the labor of game-making happens falls so heavily on them, and what that means for the community that exists in the form of players and GM. It has given me a lot to think about as I reflect on what I want out of running games, why I care about games, and what am I actually getting out of all the time and effort I put into running games. This, itself, has sparked a lot of thought about the various games I’ve run over the years and the one lingering campaign I still have these days, even if we don’t play that often, and all of it came to a head when I read a follow-up post to the latest idea proposed by Dr. Friedman (that a specific corner of the hobby that is tabletop gaming is likely comprised almost entirely of poeple who did all the work in group work assignments to make sure it all got done right): RPGs are, in a sense, an unwelcome activity even while doing them.
Continue readingNowhere Left For Escapism
Once upon a time, I used to take breaks from the work I was doing to go on social media. I’d see some art, look a whatever had gone viral, post back and forth with some friends, maybe idly browse for a bit, and then return to whatever I’d been doing. It was fun. It was enjoyable. It was a small hit of happiness during my long, often-boring days. Nowdays, I feel like I do everything else in my life as a break from social media before I eventually have to return to doom scrolling so I can keep up with whatever hellacious, objectively evil thing has happened since I last looked. There is no joy to be found there and, more and more frequently, not even any escapism. All I can count on getting from the internet these days is at least a modicum of despair and yet my brain keeps telling me to go back and check again. After all, maybe this time I’ll actually get that little bit of serotonin I’m craving. Maybe this time I’ll just see some nice art or a funny joke or an announcement about something of interest to me and not spend an hour scrolling up and down the page as I trepidatiously follow whatever unfolding disaster has occurred (such as “law enforcement” of various types killing someone in what can only be reasonably described as an execution or the various media and government personal talking about just how reasonable it is for Trump to consider acquiring Greenland through whatever means he desires). Nothing I have seen on social media in the last year comes even close to making up for how much absolute misery I’ve experienced as a result of scrolling around and yet I can feel the need to scroll, to bear horrified witness to these unfolding tragedies, tugging at my attention despite not wanting to see yet another post about how surely, this time, they have gone too far.
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