I’ll get to the chili thing in a moment, but first, an update :

I got all the lich stuff working eventually. It took a lot of fiddling and trying things and trsting things and dealing with every new way the universe concocted to fuck meover just when I thought I had it fixed^[1] and driving myself into a near fanatical frame of mind, but I made the god damned thing do what it was supposed to do.

I would like to say that I was overjoyed at my definitive triumph, but I wasn’t. At best, I felt a grim satisfaction and relief that I could finally relax.

But joy? Victory? Jubilation? Nope.

Part of my diseased mental state, I guess. This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened. Past a certain point, the stress and strain the stalwart striving poisons the pond of my emotional state and makes it so that joy and triumph are simply not possibilities any more.

GRim determination has seen me through to triumph but at a loiss.

I don’t know what the dividing line might be between happy victory and grim satisfaction. I suspect it is neurochemical in nature. At some point, my brain runs out of serotonin or dopamine and has to switch to a different mode in order to keep going.

And I always keep going.

And it does make me wonder what the hell is wrong with me, and wish there was some way to reset my entire body and mind so I can restore it back to its factory defaults and do my best to do better this time.

Had chili for breakfast this morning. Breakfast, in my case, being the meal I eat right before I go to sleep for the night, or rather, the morning.

I’ve managed to make it to bed earlier a few times lately. Like, at 3 am instead of 9 am. And the first time I did it, I woke up feeling great. Waaaay better than usual. And I thought, so that’s the secret.

But no, of course not. It didn’t really make much of a difference the other times. Maybe it is better in some way, maybe not.

I will try to go back to it soon and continue the experiment.

Last night and the night before I ended up doing something kind of random and nuts. I went to my room at the usual time, but instead of sitting down at the computer, I took a nap. Slept for a couple of hours, then got up and had my pitched battle with Skyrim and liches and everything that is wrong with the world today.

My world, anyway.

Then I had my main sleep – defined as the one that follows taking my sleeping pill – at around 9 am, woke up at 11:45 am, played Skyrim for a while, then pulled my lunch together and sat down to type for all you nice people.

Dunno if the nap improved my sleep or made it worse or what. I know that I am not done sleeping today. I need more. I can feel it. Even though I am not particularly sleepy right now,. I know that I will be when I stop typing and eating, and I am probably going to sleep throughout a large portion of this afternoon.

Not sure if eating while blogging is a good thing or not. On the one hand, it means I am eating during a state of higher activation and agitation than usual,and that can be quite bad for my delicate digestion.

On the other hand, it slows me down and keeps me from wolfing (or rather, foxing) down my food, and that’s definitely a good thing.

The two probably cancel each other out.

Anyhow, that pre-sleep meal of chili was mighty tasty. But also depressing because it reminded me how my tastes are getting blander by the minute.

I mean, this is just your perfectly normal can of Stagg chili we are talking about here. And yet, to eat it, I have to prepare like I am eating fuckin’ ghost peppers or something.

I have to have ice water, celery, garlic toast, and an apple handy so that I have plenty of things to counter the hotness of the chili in between bites.

And that’s just too much. I used to be able to eat that stuff and the worst that happened was that I would sweat a little. Now, it’s a whole operation.

I hate it. Like I have said before, the single most depressing thing to me about getting older is the blandening of my palate. I just can’t accept it. I just know I am going to be one of those lunatic old guys who keep on eating things they know damned well they are too old to eat because they are far too stubborn to admit to themselves that they can’t handle it any more.

I mean, it’s not like I was ever into super spicy food. But I could handle the usual consumer level of spiciness in foods like chili and tacos and curries without a problem.

And I just can’t accept that things have changed. There is something so fundamentally offensive to me about the idea that I have to eat blander food now that my mind rebels against the thought.

I guess we all have limits as to how sensible we can be.

Eating spicy foods right before you eat is probably a bad idea too. If I was a character in an old timy cartoon, it would have led to me going on some kind of psychedlic nightmare journey, probably involving the devil, long legged busty women, and movie stars that nobody remembers any more.

No such luck. That might have been a lot of fun. I’d enjoy my nightmares a lot more if they were animated.

No pac-man eyes, tho. Those creep me out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m going to talk Skyrim for a bit, but don’t worry, I was do my best to keep thoings general enough for non-players to understrand.

So for a long time, I have wanted to complete this addon for Skyrim called Undeath. It’s a very tough and challenging quest and previous attempts have met with frustration and just plain giving up.

But this time I had a plan. And after many, many hours of gameplay, involving a great deal of effort and a lot of thought, and just a teeny bit of cheating right at the end, I finally did it. My character died and then was reborn as a lich.

A lich, for those of you who have never played D&D, is a powerful undead mage. Picture a zombie wizard and you are fairly close. From all I can see, being a lich is everything I wanted it to be, complete with my character floating above the ground like an apparition, exactly as I have been picturing it in my mind since way before I ever heard of this addon.

And today, I finally made it. Performed the ritual, died, and rose again as the sort of creature that makes the gods themselves consider changing their plans.

But there was one teeny tiny problem.

My character keeps falling through the floor.

Not to the point where I fall to the center of the world, so to speak, but just enough so that my character isn’t even with the doors any more and therefore can’t go through them at all.

And not being able to go through doors is kind of a huge handicap for a character.  Doors are rather important. Both our world and Skyrim have a heck of a lot of them.

The gloitch also messes with the graphics so that I can see the seams in the backgrounds and cracks in the walls and so on.

So even if I decided to lead a door free lifestyle, it would still look like ass.

And it’s so goddamned frustrating because I am achingly close to my goal. It’s like a kid being stuck in the parking lot of Disneyworld. What I want so bad is just barely out of reach and it is stressing me the fuck out.

And don’t tell me “it’s just a video game”. This is my life, or at least, what passes for it.

And of course, I have wrestled with Google trying to find a solution, but of course, this is a problem unknown to the mind of man and so there is no fucking help THERE.

I swear, something about me and technology makes it so that when it breaks, it does so in the most bizarre, unheard-of way possible so that whoever I get to help me fix it stares at the problem with slack-jawed disbelief and says “I’ve never seen this kind of problem before. What did you DO?”.

That’s why I think I would be a whiz-bang product tester. All I would have to do is try to use the product and the combination of my strange luck, my tendency towards being easily confused by instructions, and my general cluelessness, it would not be long before I had accidentally found a dozen problems that are so gobsmackingly weird that it defies the laws of physics.

Lab Guy : Just play around with it for a little while, Mister Bertrand, and tell us what you think of our new product.

Me : Sure thing, no problem.

Lab Guy leaves. Five minutes later, he hears a strange otherwordly humming followed by a wet bang. He rushes to my cubicle.

There, he finds me looking hopeless and hapless and vaguely guilty, with the product in jagged and irregular pieces in front of me. It’s coating in a thick red substance/

Lab Guy : Oh my god. What did you DO?

Me : I just used it!

Lab Guy : What the fuck… how did you even…. holy shit, is that JAM? Where the hell did that even come from? How is this even possible?

Cut to a newsreader announcing a product recall due to “problems that might lead ro product failure and/or violating the tissue thin wall between realities. “

I should make sure my siblings read that. They would recognize the situation instantly.

SO I will continue to fiddle with my Skyrim in order to make that fucking lich thing work. I have come too far to give up now. I may even go as far as to disable every single other mod I have except for the really vital ones and see if that fixes it.

And I have to admit, the whole thing makes me kind of regret moving back to the original Skyrim. Somehow, in the wave of horniness/nostalgia that made me go back to the original, I had forgotten how fucking buggy the original is when you are using a lot of mods and how frustrated I used ot get trying to make things FUCKING WORK.

Special Edition has its problems too. It was, in fact, my inability to make sexytimes fun stuff work in Special Edition that sent me back to the original game.

But now I am thinking that the sexy stuff is highly overrated and I wish I had just endured the lack of it and stuck with Special Edition because it worked, on the whole, a heck of a lot better.

Or maybe that’s just nostalgia talking too.

All I know is that this is way more stress than should ever come from a video game. I am not too upset about that because, frankly, I could due with some stress in my life to give me a sense of struggle and movement.

Lack of stress can be very stressful. It’s like our boduies refuse to believe that there are no predators stalking us and so it tenses for confrontations that never happen.

At least, that’s how it works with us white people.

I really hope other sub-breeds of humans do better.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.