Let me tell you something about my with and in Skyrim.

I have LOT of mods. And they all do something fun. So, like I have said before, I tend to keep adding mods until the damn thing breaks, then hit restart (which in this case means the “disable all mods” button in Nexus Mod Manager) and start over from scratch, as it were.

And for a while, I was doing this literally once a day. Which is totally crazytown. And it got me thinking about my relationship to the restart button, both in video games and what I am pleased to my real life.

At least one half of “real life” is probably true. But sometimes it’s hard to tell.

Anyhoo, the urge to restart has pecked away at me for a long time. It’s even making me want to start a new character, even though my current one, an Argonian (aka lizard man) warrior who specializes in fighting with a sword in each hand, has tons of experience and I’ve done huge swathes of the game with him and invested many many hours in developing him.

So why would I want to start over, and throw that all away?

It’s this kind of thing that brings out an inherent problem in my astrological chart. I won’t bore you with too many details, but basically my Sun sign, the primary sign of my personality, is Taurus.

And we Taurus bulls like things like reliability, permanence, investing hard work in things that are worthwhile, and things that last.

So far so good. The problem arises when you look at the rest of my chart, which is nearly all mutable signs and mutable signs hate things like permanence, hard work, and things that last.

Mutable signs need the freedom to switch from one thing to the next when they get bored or restless. They have to be able to change the channel in life or they will start to feel trapped and anxious.

That is, more or less, the exact opposite of being a Taurus.

So I have this conflict where part of me is sensible, practical, and reliable, and part of me is a freedom and autonomy loving restless soul who never wants to be tied down by things like responsibility and commitment/.

It makes it hard to know who I really am.

The Taurus in me finds the idea of starting over before I have completed the game with my current character absolutely insane. Total madness. I have accumulated so much value in this character. Why would I throw that all away to start over? That would be like stopping your car 100 meters from the finish line at the Indy 500.

The thing to do is see things through to the end. Only then do you ponder starting over.

And that is perfectly logical and sensible. But I can’t totally agree with it either.

Because the rest of me really wants to start over with a fresh slate, free of prior history and ready to explore anew. It would let me try a different kind of character (probably sneaky archer) and a different race (one of the sneakier types of elf), and it would renew my interest in the game, which has been flagging lately.

And it’s been flagging precisely because I have accumulated so many quests and so much loot and a whole gang of followers and I long to be free and fresh and unattached and uncommitted again.

It’s the desire for renewal, basically, and I should not dismiss it out of hand. I have a real problem with renewal in the spiritual sense. It’s a chronic issue with us Taurus types. We tend to hold on to things and keep trudging ever forward with giving ourselves the chance to refresh and renew ourselves.

In fact, we often violently resist our own renewal because we can only view it as sudden change, and we hate sudden change.

Even if it’s a super positive change.

It’s kind of tragic, really.

But now I am wondering what would be so bad about starting over. I mean, this is a game I play for fun, so whatever makes it more fun should be fine, right?

It’s not like I have promised someone I would finish the game with this character. I don’t owe it to the game to stick with one  character till the end. Starting over certainly isn’t a crime even if it isn’t “necessary” and it wouldn’t mean I was some horrible kind of person who can’t see anything through.

All it would me is that I got bored of being a hand to hand fighter and decided that I wanted to try being a sneaky sniper type.

And what’s wrong with that?

And my current character would not cease to exist. He’d still be there, in the save game,s ready to resume his adventure any time I wanted.

And yet, when I think about starting over, I get this stab of guilt. A stab that feels suspiciously like being gored by a bull.

So I dunno. It’s crazy in here, that’s all I can say.

I probably will end up starting a new character. One as different from my current one as I can get, more or less. And who knows, after playing her for a while, I might get bored and frustrated and go right back to my current guy and his awesome stats and gear.

I know there’s one thing I have to try first : taming a dragon. There’s this one quest where you can acquire your very own dragon by using your “tame beast” spell, and I have tried to complete it many times but the dragon always completely kicks my ass.

And the thing is, acquiring this dragon works by Pokemon rules, namely that you have to beat the shit out of the critter before you can capture it.

So I have been diligently working towards being able to lay a pounding on the thing until I can force it to love me. I have been building up my own power and strength, and equipping my followers with the best of the gear I have acquired, and hopefully I will soon be ready to take on the dragon and win.

SO I have to do that, anyhow.

But after that, who knows? No if only there was a reset button for life…

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First, an update :

I still haven’t written that thing I went  on and about in yesterday’s post. I chickened out.  I started thinking about all the heavy social fallout I might have unleashed with it, and how it would hurt everyone I know and care for, and I chickened out.

I still plan on writing it. I have to, the words need to get out. And I still might post it where I planned on posting it. But not before reading everything I can get my hands on about how to do things with total anonymity in this day and age.

I wish it didn’t have to be this way. I wish I could post it under my own name and let the chips fall where they may. And if the only one who could be hurt by it was me, I would go right ahead and do it.

I relish the thought of being a lightning rod for my people. The one who dares to come out of the closet and into people’s faces with the message that we are people too, and the things you believe to be true about us are rank prejudice.

Being the public face of my people would suit me. I have the right skills. I’m highly articulate, very intelligent, a dragon level master at arguing, and I have the right combination of stubbornness and charisma to put my points across in the face of massive opposition from a society that has been fed the message that we are the absolute worst kind of people for decades and does not want to even think about what I will be talking about and thus would have a huge allergic reaction to my message.

To be honest… I think I would really enjoy that role. I suppose that'[s the trickster in me. Like I have said, the trickster’s highest role is to make people think about things they don’t want to think about and thus advance the conversation and bring about change.

Or something like that. I am still working on that definition.

Plus I have a very combative side to my personality that has lain dormant for over twenty years because I realized that other people aren’t there to be my intellectual sparring partners and I should really stop picking verbal fights just to feel the thrill of mind to mind combat.

I will still argue my position sometimes, but when I do so, I am acutely aware of how those with whom I argue are feeling and I am always ready to back off and disconnect if I think people are going to get hurt.

There is a lot of power in this bruised and broken brain of mine, and it’s up to me to make sure that power is used responsibly.

However, were I the public face of an extremely unpopular group of people, I would have lots and lots of opportunities to use my powers for good, so to speak. The whole world would be my sparring partner then, and I would have a nearly infinite challenge ahead of me that would let me truly explore my powers.

And what can I say….. I love to fight. Maybe that means I am crazy. I don’t know.

But I can tell you this : the times when I am passionately arguing my position in the face of massive opposition are the times in my life when I have felt the most truly alive.

It’s like I am an intellectual Klingon.

So if it was just me that could get hurt – and I mean hurt as in assassinated, my views would be that unpopular – I would go’er and never look back.

But it’s not just me that could suffer and that is something I really have to think about.

It makes me wonder how the families of other passionate articulators felt about them. surely they must have, in private at least, wished their loved one had never opened their big fat mouths and that their lives could go back to normal.

Surely some of them even got ostracized big most or all of their family for their views both as a moral reaction to them and as a pragmatic measure for keeping themselves from getting sucked into the social black hole said articulators would be generating.

Public statements of disavowal, disapproval, and distance most likely were made. And I wouldn’t blame people for doing it. They never asked to go on this crazy trip with you.

It makes sense that they would feel the need make that really, really clear.

And yet, these heroes of mine, like Martin Luther and Nelson Mandela, still went through with it. They had the courage to speak up for their group and call the lightning down on their heads because they knew that things had to change.

I don’t have that courage yet. I hope to have it some day, preferably sooner rather than later as I ain’t getting any younger and it will be a very long road to acceptance for my people and their needs.

A road I might not survive. Kinda gotta keep that in mind. I would sure as hell get a fuckton of death threats and threats of grievous personal harm.

You might think I am making too big of a deal of this, but I know what I am talking about. There are lines you just don’t cross because society holds certain things to be sacred and beyond argument, and I would be challenging one of the deepest of said things.

Often these topics are referred to as “third rail” topics because, like the third rail of a subway or light rail service, to touch it would be fatal and once you touched it, you would be locked into it till you die. ^[1]

Well my message would walk right up to one of the biggest of third rails and French kiss it with gusto.

And that’s something I am going to have to think about before I pull the trigger.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Tomorrow is Back to Work day!