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 readingReflection
This Moment And Place In My Life
This morning, as I prepared to take my post-workout shower, my morning playlist cycled over to a song that’s been on there for a while. I added “Wherever We Are Now” (from the game “Cassette Beasts” and the EP Same Old Story (from “Cassette Beasts” Original Soundtrack) to my daily preparation playlist this summer, during July, when I finally had the time to make some decent progress in the game. I then promptly stopped playing it on the weekends where I could be bothered to turn my PC on because I developed a crippling addiction to Baldur’s Gate 3, which took over my life for quite a while. Still, I’ve really enjoyed the soundtrack for the game and plan to get back to it eventually, if only because I’m limiting myself to songs from the soundtrack that I’ve already heard in-game and I really want to listen to the rest of it.
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 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 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.
Continue readingSo Much For Restraint At Work…
It has been a week and a half since my boss told me I could take my side “research” project and work on it more actively. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to really do that since I’ve gotten sidetracked every single day by something that came up and required my attention. I did get to spend one evening of work earlier this week doing research on some of the tools I’d be using and I got to have a chat with a few people about how to make this useful for them, but I haven’t made much forward progress because the other people I need to talk to are busy during every free moment I’ve got. Between not being able to access people and running into my own time and energy limitations, I’ve actually done less work on this project in the last week and a half than I did in the single week prior. There’s just been so much going on and I’ve been unable to pull myself away from most of it since, after all, this project isn’t really my job. It is now a thing my boss doesn’t mind me working on, but I think we’re both aware that he meant I had to still keep up with the stuff that features more heavily in my job description.
Continue readingPassion, Drive, And Pumping The Brakes
Recently, while talking to my boss about what I’ve been working on, he suggested something that I’d been considering for a long time. Something that I’ve been halfway working on and hoped to eventually convince him (and the rest of my team) that there was a need for me to work on it more than I was. Something I would love to be doing instead of my current job. It was a very rewarding moment, to not have to wade into what I expected to be a battle and instead sail smoothly over a calm sea of mutual inclination. It was an incredible turnaround from just the week before (that inspired the Self-Destructive Repetition poem from last week) and that made it feel like the work I’d been thanklessly doing for almost a year now was actually going to pay off for something. I did my best not to react in surprise or shock, and I don’t think he noticed how surprised I was that he had jumped straight to an idea I was slowly building towards, but it was amazing that we both agreed that this thing (which I’m going to avoid the specifics about because it is way too early to do more than prepare and think about, not to mention I still don’t want any of my blog posts to connect to my actual employer or job so my coworkers don’t find out I sometimes complain about them here) would be a cool thing for our team to have, especially if I was the one doing it. Since then, with his express approval, I’ve been able to go from slowly working on this project in my spare moments to actually putting real time towards it every day.
Continue readingEmotional Processing And Pain I Could Once Ignore
Content Warnings for discussion of childhood trauma (specifically neglect and abuse at the hands of my parents and brother).
I wish yesterday’s good mood had lasted a bit longer [it did eventually pick back up again, but today did not help much]. I made it through an entire day with it intact, but it did not survive a night of poor sleep and an unfocused day of finding myself browsing the internet because I needed something more engaging than my work to keep me awake. At least nothing bad has happened. I came by this poor mood honestly. It is a melancholy of my own making. A sadness of my own. Pure, homegrown sorrow. It was, of course, influenced by outside sources, as all such things are. It’s not like I want to think about my miserable childhood. I’ve gotten pretty good at not thinking about it, most of the time, but there’s little I can do in the face of something that will push past the blanket I’ve thrown over that portion of my mind and draw bits of my past out into the light. I’m only half to blame for it this time, though. Sure, I chose to watch last week’s John Oliver deep dive about homeschooling knowing that I was going to get myself caught up in the misery of the past, but I wasn’t exactly expecting it to be so focused on how homeschooling is used by some parents to avoid scrutiny while they abuse or neglect their children. Nor was I expecting an incredibly brief conversation with my friend about her trip to her local county fair to bring up oddly strong memories of the fairs I went to ask a child that eventually revealed to me that all the happiest memories I have of my childhood are from when I was alone or at least away from my entire biological family. But they did and now I’m trying to figure out if I have something I need to work through here or if I need to allow myself to be sad for a while since that’s a pretty reasonable reaction to my reflections and minor realization.
Continue readingPersonal Warmth Thanks To Cozy Blankets And A Good Day
I spent the weekend relaxing. I did my chores, listened to podcasts, played more Baldur’s Gate 3 (I’m currently hopping between a few alternate save files as the mood strikes me), and enjoying the chilly weather. I got to sleep underneath my comforter for the first time in more than five months, maybe six, and I feel like I slept super well both nights I got to sleep past sunrise. I had a few weird dreams both nights, none of which I remember at this point beyond a few vague impressions (well, now that I’m really digging into those impressions, I remember most of one of them), but I slept like a rock. Both mornings, when I woke up, I had to carefully stagger my way to the bathroom because my body was so dead to the world that I could barely keep myself upright until I’d had a chance to go back to bed and lay around for a while, waking up slowly as I luxuriated in the comfortable sensation of being beneath a big pile of blankets and not being so warm that I was sweating through them. I’ve always appreciate a good, weighty blanket pile, but my past couple years of plastic-covered windows and desperate attempts to keep my apartment warm enough that my pipes don’t freeze and my pet bird doesn’t die meant that I couldn’t do my usual thing of opening the windows in my bedroom at night in the winter and burrowing under as many blankets as I could comfortably fit on my bed.
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