I love this kind of video!

These stories are so freaky and cool. I love the exquisite shiver of alienation and distortion they bring.

Plus, any one of these might be true Fortean phenomena.

Doot dooooo dadu doo.

The most obvious explanation for these things, at least to a brain nerd like me, is that they are the result of some transitory brain event, like a cascade failure of a region or a tiny tiny seizure in your time-processing center. The sort of thing that science doesn’t know about because it happens too fast and is far too rare to be studied.

I mean, how do you study something that happens once or twice in a lifetime to on person in a million when said people show no other signs of mental illness?

The answer is that unless you live in a science fiction dystopia where everyone wears a portable fMRI unit all the time, you don’t.

That is the most obvious explanation. It is also hopelessly boring.

It’s far more fun to speculate that these experiences represent something that genuinely happened to these people in objective reality and try to figure out how.

Could there be things that we don’t know about space/time that cause it to develop flaws and wrinkles that the occasional human falls into?

Could there be holes in space/time that protrude into a dimension we cannot perceive?

Could there be aliens running weird experiments on our minds and bodies in a bid to finally get tenure?

Could we be living in a massive simulation (like in the MatrIx) and these bizarre phenomena are merely software errors?

If so, is there going to be a patch? What version are we running? Is there DLC?

I have experienced a lot of minor glitches in the Matrix in my life. Loads of them, in fact,. My personal reality has always been a tad soft around the edges.

Perhaps that’s why I developed into such a hardcore rationalist. I wanted to conquer these problems with the power of my mighty mighty mind.

Through strict application of logic and reason, I could force my personal reality to make sense and behave.

Explains a lot, dunnit?

The thing is, I have never had ones as clear as the folks in the video had. So I have always just a case of my unusual brain doing unusual things.

It’s always been things like becoming extremely disoriented seemingly out of nowhere, or feeling like a room grew an extra door when I wasn’t looking, or all the many many MANY times in my life I completely missed something obvious and important until someone told me about it and then it was if that thing suddenly appeared.

I’ve always been absentminded, and that suggests something in my mind doesn’t work quite right and never has.

And the reality of the absentminded is always going to be wobbly because of the way things move in and out of our mind according to some inner set of rules to which we are not privy but that we know do not have maintaining a stable sense of reality as their highest priority set.

Add in my recent thoughts about whether my extreme open-mindedness is the cause of my feeling so dark and alone and cold, and my sky high IQ, and it all adds up to my living in a subjective world substantially different from that of most people.

And I choose to view that as a good thing.

Because it’s not like there’s anything I can do about it.

More after the break.

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Being such an alien does come with some superpowers.

The high IQ is one of them, although whether that is why I am such an alien in the first place is debatable.

And while I rarely appreciate it consciously, there’s this thing called “school” which was never the problem for it that it was for others, and that’s cool and all.

Having an extremely tough and free mind is another. For good and for ill, I never had that controversal software called “religion” installed in my little head.

That meant that if i wanted answers, I had to figure them out myself, which i was happy to do. That’s what made me such a deep thinker,

And that, plus the outsider’s perspective on things, gave me deep insights into the way of the world and how things work that goes far beyond what most people understand.

Seems strange, when you think of it, that someone who is such an outsider as myself understands the world so much better than people who are part of it.

It’s all a matter of perspective, I suppose.

It might be lonely out here in the dark and the cold but the view is amazing.

I have my creative gifts too. I am a very talented writer and very funny. i can write stories of enormous scope and impact, and I can write soft and harmless little personal daydreams. I can write things full of sunshine and happiness and I can write things so sad it makes people cry like a waterfall.

This already seems like an embarrassment of riches. All this in one person?

But wait, there’s more. I also have a lot of presence, charisma, and charm. I can mesmerize people with my dream powers, and in theory I could use that to lead a charmed life if I wanted.

Maybe I already do and just don’t know it.

Oh, and I am also sweet-natured and kind and compassionate and very, very sensitive.

All in all, I am pretty fucking amazing.

So why does that fill me with fear instead of pride? What does even talking about my gifts give me a sense of rising panic?

Is it because it makes me feel like doing things that are outside my tiny comfort zone?

Is that the root fear behind all the things I theoretically could do, but can’t? Everything that might lead to actual action is pre-rejected?

If so, it seems like I have one hell of a paradox to sort out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My appetite has been somewhat elusive for the past day or so.

At first, it was just nice to be free of that demonic hunger for a while. Said hunger came back when i stopped my all nut snack diet and went back to my previous wicked ways.

So clearly I need to work out a low carb diet that works and does not cause me to get so blocked up I get super sick six times a day.

But now that my appetite continues to keep disappearing on me, I am starting to worry a bit about my health.

I hope I am not coming down with something.

I mean, I feel pretty crappy right now, but in the usual post sleep way. I feel like I was squished flat by a giant hand in my sleep. I am dizzy, disorianted, queasy, cranky, and I really wish I could just to back to bed.

But I gotta eat, and I gotta blog, so here I am, making the words happen.

And they are not coming easy right now.

Probably doing the comedy open mike thing tonight with Felicity. Don’t feel much like doing it right now, but there’s no need to decide right now.

Odds are I will feel a million times better by then.

I keep gently prodding myself in the general direction of getting up there myself. I know I have all the skills. I am a very funmy dude, I have stage presence and charisma, I’m a total ham, I have serious mental health issues.

You gotta be crazy to do standup, man.

So there’s really nothing keeping me from giving standup comedy a try except blind naked mindless fear.

You know…. the usual.

I know that, for some reason, my mind and my talent balk at the idea of writing jokes. And I don’t know why.

It could be entirely psychological – a way for my depression to sabotage me.

Or it could be that the joke format is too small and restrictive for my expansive talent. Somehow the idea of sitting down and writing jokes or a routine bores me to tears.

Plus, I have this feeling that what I really want to do is just chat with the audience. Get them involved, make the whole thing informal and friendly.

Seems like a very strange approach to comedy, and yet, the idea persists. Just me, a microphone, and the audience, hanging out and having a good time.

Sure, there would be comedy, but it would arise from the moment.

I mean, the connection with the audience is what I want most out of doing standup. Makes the usual joke delivery style comedy seem tense and unnatural to me.

And who knows, I might even be able to pull it off. I might be able to develop my sense oh the crowd to such a degree that I can use it to enhance the interaction and make it something truly positive for people.

That would make me very, very happy.

More after the break.

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Played the other two games. This, then, is the final installment of this chapter of Fru Tries Video Games He Paid Very Little For.

Or should that be For Which He Paid Very Little? Yeah, that’s better.

The first of the pair was Hue. You play as a boy who wakes from a monochrome dream into a monochrome world, and it’s up to you bring the colors back, one by one.

In other words, it’s an art game. Everything about it screams art game. The music, the spare asthetic, the art style, the fact that it is fundamentally just a simple platformer but feels like more because of its artiness…. art game.

Unlike many of them, however, this one is fun. It’s a decently well made game and attractive in a minimalist way to boot.

What can I say, I have always been more minimalist than baroque.

And while I am admitting things, I should add that I am a sucker for the whole “slowly improve the world” type of game. When I found the color blue in Hue, and suddenly the sky was blue, I felt an enormous thrill.

Reminded me of a game called Okami, where you start off in a polluted, barren, disgusting world, and when you beat the bad guys in an area, that area is restored to being all clean and natural and beautiful.

God damn that was addictive. It’s all the pleasure of cleaning but with way less work.

The other game was the intriguingly title Iron Fisticle.

Sadly, not about fisting.

Well, not so far, anyhow.

For the younger folk, it’s a high speed arcade shooter where you have to battle your way through hordes of monsters to save the kingdom’s food supply.

For people my age, I can sum it up in one word : ROBOTRON.

Yup, this game is a lot like an updated version of Robotron, the classic arcade game, including my fave thing about it, the two joystick setup.

I mean, I play it with the keyboard, but the idea is the game.

The left joystick controls your movement and the right one controls what direction you are shooting. This way, you can have a game with both eight degrees of motion and eight degrees of firing without it getting confusing.

It’s a setup I find quite intuitive and satisfying.

Sadly, my slow old guy brain has trouble keeping up with all those moving objects. I might just have to play on an easier difficulty level.

Ow. My pride.

It’s either that, or try to recapture the Zen state I used to get into when I played Robotron. A state where there is no thought, no conscious control, no aiming, only the pure experience of the game. A state where time has no meaning and the world is suspended like it is on pause and the difference between object and subject disappears, and there is no “I” any more.

Wow, that sounds like a lot of work.

I’ll probably just play something else.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here’s my thoughts on the last 4 of the 12 pack of games I bought recently. After this, there will just be the two I got via the grab-bag to review.

Hamsterdam. Yes, you read that right. Like Amsterdam. But with hamsters.

I had high hopes for this game. The art looked adorable and awesome, the premise of fuzz kung fu mastery always appeals to me, and I eagerly awaited trying it out.

And when I did, it seemed to be living up to my expectations…. fun, colorful, fuzzy, but…

But the controls are…. bizarre. This was clearly programmed to be an Androd/ioS type game and then ported to the PC, and the mouse is much clumsier than merely tapping and swiping on the screen.

As a result, I found the controls to be downright confounding. As far as I could tell, I was doing exactly what the onscreen instructions was telling me to do and nothing was happening, or the wrong thing happened.

And that was very frustrating, as the game seemed hella fun.

So I am not giving up on it yet. I will give it at least one more try to see if I can make the learning curve and play the dang thing.

Consider my verdict suspended until then.

Omen Exito : Plague. Here’s the official blurb from the Steam page :

Omen Exitio: Plague is inspired by the gamebooks of the ’80s and ’90s, mixing the alien and horrifying universe created by H.P. Lovecraft with an original plot and characters, all guided by your choices similar to the visual novel / CYOA genres.

Now nothing in that description said “this is a text only game” to me.

Maybe I’m just dense,. The whole “visual novel/ choose your own adventure” bit at the end should have been a pretty solid clue.

I might not have read that far.

What, me TL;DR?

However it happened, the fact remains that I had no idea it was a text game going in, and so there I was, getting increasingly impatient with this ridiculously long text intro to the game and wanting the game to start already.

Took me longer than I’d like to admit to realize this WAS the game. And when it finally dawned on me, I stopped playing.

Because that’s not a video game. It’s an enhanced eBook, and I don’t read books on screens. I read them as actual, physical books.

Screens give me eye strain. The great thing about a real book is that you are not reading it on a screen which refreshes a finite number of times per second.

You’re seeing it in reality, and its refresh rate is infinite.

And to be honest, I am old enough to be getting habit-bound, and I have read physical books for my entire life and am not looking to change that any time soon.

So, no thanks, Omen Exito. As far as I know, you might be a superb example of your genre, but it’s a genre into which I have no interest.

More after the break.

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On Rusty Trails. And speaking of genres I’m not into….

You’re a cute little robot who has to navigate many dangerous hazards using only your puny little metal body and your ability to magnetize yourself to metal surfaces as you try to make it home.

There’s a whole backstory too, but whatever.

First strike against the game was that you are teeny tiny. Not just relative to your environment, relative to your screen. Your robot is squint-inducingly small, and I am not going to give myself an eye strain headache just to play your god damned game.

Secondly, it’s very visually monotonous. So, hard on the eyes more than one way. I get that all games re-use assets, but this was just screen after screen of environments made mostly of one generic brick texture, and it was so very meh.

To the point of almost being bleh.

Throw in the fact that I have played a lot of similar games and hence already done all the sawblade dodging and conveyor belt riding I ever want to do in my life, and this is a game that is definitely Not For Me.

I suppose it’s possible that it’s not as squinty on a mobile device. But I suspect it’s that way because they thought it would emphasize that he’s just one itty bitty robot in a huge dangerous unfeeling world, and screw that.

I am against all artistic decisions that make the thing harder to use.

Form follows function, dammit!

Last but far from least, Robothorium.

Humans made robots with artificial intelligence. These robots got sick of being treated like low-grade shit and sought their rights. Humans slaughtered them instead.

Man, humans suck.

This launched the robot revolution, and that’s where you come in. You lead a gang of various kinds of robots as they fight for their rights.

I’m down for that.

The game is a lot like a traditional JRPG. It’s turn based, action mostly consists of selecting an attack and a target, and the missions are all dungeon crawls.

But with the additional benefit of being science fiction and not more fucking elves.

I am enjoying this game. It has a surprisingly deep plot, the action is fun (if a bit repetitive… hello grind!), and I find commanding my robot army fun.

With this game and Super Panda Adventures, that makes two games out of the twelve from the bundle that I find to be good enough to keep playing.

Not bad for around $7 CDN. Plus I had the fun of trying out various games, and that’s fun even though I ended up not liking most of them.

Stay tuned for my reviews of Hue and Iron Fisticle.

Got to admit, pretty curious about that second one.

---

Did the bandage replace thing today. Still no freaking socks. Wondering if the lady who took my measurements was even paying attention.

Eventually I will just take this fucking bandage off and shower.

Right now, the only thing keeping me from doing it is the prospect of ended up having a stroke out of impatience.

But one of these days….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

Out of absolutely nowhere, this song popped into my head and got stuck there.

So there’s the song so it can get stuck in your head too.

It’s not even one of my favorite Duran Duran songs, damn it.

You know, it really hurts not to be able to express who you really are.

Anyhoo, I am feeling cranky and irritable today. Must be that time of the month.

By which I mean my monthly mood cycle, of course.

Actually, it would be pretty interesting to track my mood like that. I definitely feel like I have some kind of cycle going on. One that follows the same progression of mood to mood over time.

Which is what makes it a cycle, I suppose, and not just a string of things that happen sometimes without repeating.

But that’s not going to happen because when I even gingerly touch the idea of tracking my mood, something deep inside of me rises up and says NOOOOOOOO.

I’m not going to mark down what mood I am in. It would be so weird and unnatural and artificial. And the last thing I need is to make myself MORE self-conscious.

Plus, my mood would be changed by the act of writing it down. So most of the time, I would be writing “annoyed at having to do this”, thus rendering the results meaningless.

Anyhow, I know how this mad mood started – with my masturbating without completion.

That’s enough to make any male grumpy, regardless of species.

And that unspent but accumulated energy discharged back into my bloodstream and sent my mood into the grumpy zone.

Plus, other stuff I can’t talk about.

So I have been feeling irritable and restless today. Like I want to burst into a room and scream like a wounded bear at someone, then kick ass kung fu style.

I suppose what I really need is some really good sex. The kind that leaves you basking in the afterglow, balls empty, heart full, body replete.

I’ve never had it but it sounds lovely.

But we all know that’s not going to happen. I am not even sure I am capable of it. I have so many barriers.

Hopefully, the right (very, very patient) man could change all that. One willing to let it takes however long it takes for me to finally trust him enough to let my guard down and give him the trust it would take for real intimacy.

Otherwise, sex with others will keep being another performance for me. One where all that matters is getting the right reaction from the audience, and then I take my bows and secretly say “phew! Glad I made it through that!”.

That’s like, totally not real sex.

But my partner would think it was. I guarantee it. I am an amazing performer with a strong presence who can use the power of his dreams to simulate anything.

And nobody would know how miserable I truly am.

Maybe not even me.

More after the break.

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The great wyvern, Shaveron, also known as Wrackmouth, scourge of East Vilai, terror of Ten Pin Mountain, demon made flesh to all who knew his name, lay at Sir Martin of Her Lady’s Lancers’ feet, and moaned most piteously.

But instead of triumph, Sir Martin felt nothing but pity, because it was not his lance that had felled the beast but its own folly.

The damned fool thing had swallowed an anchor.

This diagnosis had been swift, because, while Sir Martin was no physick, the six inches of anchor chain hanging from the beast’s lips made the cause of its pain clear, as well as adding an element of bathos to the tableau.

Sir Martin knew how it had happened. Swamp wyverns prized fish above all other treats. They were also excellent swimmers. Wrackmouth clearly had followed a school of fish into human fishing waters, snapped at a particularly tasty looking moorhead or spearfish, and got a mouthful of anchor instead.

And wyverns swallow what they bite. They can’t help it. It’s a reflex.

“Well old boy, ” said Sir Martin to the beast, “time to set you right. ”

Sir Martin ignored the terror in his patient’s eyes – how was it to know he, amongst all metal-clad humans, would help it, not harm it – as he very carefully inserted the tip of his lance into one of the links in the anchor’s chain.

He then very gingerly pulled back, and prayed to the Lady that the beast would figure out what was going on and cooperate.

His prayer was answered when the beast, exhausted beyond all ferocity, extended its long thick neck towards Sir Martin, thus straightening it.

There’s a smart fellow, thought Sir Martin, and slowly and carefully began to back up.

Link by link, then inch by inch, the chain emerged from the beast’s muzzle, and Sir Martin could feel the anchor’s weight moving up out of its stomach,

So much for the easy bit, thought Sir Martin. The beast’s stomach was enormous and had plenty of room to move the anchor. But now he had to pull it through the poor beast’s neck and that would hurt.

Sure enough, Wrackmouth panicked when he first felt the anchor scrape, despite Sir Martin’s best efforts, against the inside of his throat.

But you don’t get to be as big and as old a lizard as Wrackmouth without good instincts, and he immediately settled back down and let Sir Martin continue.

Slowly but surely, the chain emerged from the beast’s mouth as if it was coming off the great wheel of a portcullis, till at last, with a great heave, with only a foot or so of chain left, the wyvern expelled the anchor from its throat with a great rush of bile and blood, and both the beast and the knight cried out in great relief.

Then Wrackmouth and Sir Martin contemplated one another. Sir Martin fancied that he could see the various instincts and emotions trying to sort themsevles out in the massive creature’s mind.

He did his best to beam his Lady’s grace at the poor creature. But he also prudently and sublty readied his lance, just in case.

After a handful of very long moments, the beast finally nuzzled at Sir Martin a little, and Sir Martin, to his enormous delight, found himself stroking the mighty wyvern’s nose as casually as if it was one of Sir Martin’s horses.

Then, with a bounce and a bound, the great beast heaved itself into the air and flew off.

And Sir Martin, flushed with wonder and relief, sat with his back against a stout oak, and basked in the glow of triumph.

He had truly done his Lady’s work this day, and this made him feel closer to Her than he ever had before.

This filled him with such gratitude and glory that he knew it would be folly to attempt the ride back into town in such a gloriously addlepated state.

So he built a small fire, fed and watered his horse, then threw his bedroll down and fell upon it like a raw recruit.

And there he slept, his dreams filled with visions of his Lady, until dawn gentle nudged him awake, and he arose feeling as if he was ten years younger.

Time to break camp, feed the horse again, and figure out how he was going to explain to those who had sent him why he had saved the beast he’d been sent to kill.

THE END

Tried four more games from my recently purchased bundle. Here’s my thoughts :

Archamon.  The basic idea is that you are in charge of a whole bunch of people stranded by a disaster and have to guide them to gather resources and use them to build civilization back up.

That’s an idea that has great appeal to me. I like to lead (kinda) and I love games where I get to rebuild civilization from the ground up.

Which is, I suppose, somewhat supervillain-ish of me. The only difference is that I am not the one who destroyed civilization in order to get to rebuild it.

This game, however, does not appeal to me at this point. I am sure it’s fine, but I am not in the mood for anything like realtime strategy, and that’s basically how the game works.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this.

I can see myself returning to this game when my moods change, though. Like I said, the premise intrigues me, and once I have had time to process the basic nature of the game and get into the swing of it, I will likely give it another shot.

After all, those people need me!

Black Paradox. Sounds like something pithy from a black comedian, doesn’t it? “See, the Black Paradox is that if you assert your rights with a cop, they shoot you, but if you don’t, they beat you up!”.

It’s funny because it’s true.

Anyhow, what the game is really about is a very eighties cyberpunk-ish future where you are the only one who can defeat the galaxy’s most dangerous blah blah blah it’s a side scrolling shooter a la R-type with some RPG elements.

And while I applaud the game’s very enthusiastic attempts to capture a “more-Eighties than the Eighties” vibe, I don’t particularly feel like playing a side-scrollling shooter (a genre I never liked much) in order to experience it.

I miss a lot of things from the Eighties, but that type of game ain’t one of them.

So this is definitely a “not my cuppa” type situation. I am sure it’s a wonderful game for those who are into that kind of thing, but I ain’t one of them.

Plus, full disclosure, it ran a bit fast for my old guy reflexes to handle. Too much happening on the screen at the same time for me to process.

God damn getting old sucks.

Degrees of Seperation. From the opening screen which told me that this game was made in Scandanavia with government grant money, I knew it would be an art game.

And wow, is it ever.

The basic idea is that you control Rime, a boy from an icy world that has started to melt, and Ember, a firey girl whose world has started to cool, as they try to figure out the mystery of what is happening to their worlds.

That’s the plot. The gameplay involves switching between the two of them in order to use their respective powers to solve physics puzzles.

And it is gorgeous. The art is vividly colorful and extremely well drawn. Everything about it seems designed for maximum visual appeal, and it is a true feast for the eyes.

However, I am not in the mood right now for those kinds of puzzles. It’s very tempting because the game looks so damned good, but I don’t want to deal with that kind of frustration and finicky problem solving right now.

Call me old fashioned, but I just want to kill stuff. Is that so wrong?

Actually, don’t answer that.

More after the break.

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Dimension Drifter. Worst game so far. A few okay ideas implemented in a way so crude and inept that it seems like the game was made by aliens who were only vaguely familiar with the concept of a “game”.

It’s clearly trying to be an FPS game but someone forgot the FP part, because it’s actually from a third-person over the shoulder POV. This immediately makes aiming awkward and difficult, as your character frequently ends up blocking your view of the enemy you are trying to shoot.

For obvious reasons, I did not play this one very long. So it is quite possible that I misapprehended the whole thing and it’s not nearly the clusterfuck it seemed to be when I gave it a shot.

But as it stands, sheesh, what a dog. Do not recommend unless you are teaching a game design class and need a good solid example of what not to do.

---

I’ll do the remaining 4 (turns out there was 12, not 16) plus the two I got from a random draw some time soon.

Well, it finally happened. After resisting the urge for months and months, I finally slipped up and took the scab off my wound today.

God damn it.

It happened when I was just waking up. It’s like my subconscious mind was just waiting for the opportunity. I was half-asleep. felt an itch, scratched it, boom, there’s the scab off and in my hand for me to glare at.

Oh well, it’s not the worst thing in the world. The scab will grow back. It bled/oozed for a while, but I solved that problem by tying a clean sock around my leg as a sort of improvised bandage and that soaked up the goop until it stopped on its own.

I’ve changed my sock/bandage since then, as it was getting gross. By then, it had stopped discharging, but I put the sock over it anyhow to give it some extra protection while things go back to normal.

Hopefully, the evidence of my crime will be gone before my appointment on Tuesday.

I haven’t heard anything about the socks that were supposed to replace the compression bandages currently cursing my being, so I will have to stop in at the pharmacy on Tuesday to see what’s up with THAT.

If there is no motion on that, though,I will be sorely tempted to tell the nurse at the health center not to bother putting that goddamned compression bandage back on me because I am just going to take it right back off when I get home.

I need a proper shower, dammit!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,

Bought one of those crazy game bundles today.

I bought it because it had not one, not two, but THREE animal heroes do kung fu games! How could I resist?

Plus it was only five bucks. Five bucks for sixteen games! That’s like, 31 cents and a bit each!

At that price, even if I only get one game I actually enjoy playing out of it, I am still ahead by a mile.

I’ve tried four of the games so far. Here are my quick impressions :

Deployment. After a surprisingly complex and detailed opening about a cyberpunk hellscape, the game reveals itself to be a high speed top down shooter with somewhat primitive graphics and music.

I mean,it’s basically little spaceships made of geometric figures blasting each other.

And when they say “high speed”, they mean it. It is way, way too fast for my old ass. I spent the whole time I was playing it in shock and bewilderment, wondering what the hell just happened and feeling something akin to shellshock.

It’s seems quite fun if you are young enough for it, though. Lively, dynamic, and despite the simple graphics and high speed, quite a sophisticated power-up system.

All in all, a great arcade-ish battle experience I just happen to be too slow to enjoy.

Magrunner : Dark Pulse. After another surprisingly deep intro revealing that the game takes place in a crazy sci fi future where a generic tech billionaire type has invented some kind of magnetism based clean energy system and blah blah guess what, it’s a game a lot like Portal only with the ability to magnetize certain objects with one of two polarities. Like polarities attract, different polarities repel.

That’s like the opposite of how it works in the real world, but whatever.

This one is on the fence with me, because despite it being done in a 3D FPS style, it’s basically a puzzle game and those tend to do weird shit to my head.

Not their fault, mind you. It’s the fault of whatever weird wiring in my head makes me get super frustrated when I can’t solve the puzzle.

Like…. to the point it makes me feel like I am going crazy.

I suppose I have never been super good at handling frustration. I never had to learn to handle it because in school, almost everything came to me so easily that the few things that did not, like arts and crafts, made me feel so frustrated and defeated and that was such a weird experience for me that I just refused to do them.

Not proud of that. Wish I had kept on trying till I got it.

What can I say. I’m high-strung.

Anyhow. my point being that I am not sure I am going to keep playing this game. It might reach me a lesson in calm, methodical persistence. It might drive me nuts.

So we will see how it goes next time I play. I swear, I will try to take it slow and not try to do everything by an application of overwhelming cognitive force like I usually do.

Could teach me a lot of things.

---

Ninjin : Clash of Carrots. One of the three animal kung fu games! In this case, you are a ninja bunny fighting the forces of badness with your awesome ninja skills.

Sounds good, right? But no. Instead of being something normal, like a 2D platformer or a 3D action RPG, it’s this weird blend of classic arcade shooter like R-Type and ninja movies, and I am not a fan.

And it’s more than merely the shock of it not being what I wanted or expected. I just didn’t find the actual gameplay very fun, and I hated the controls.

How in the hell am I supposed to use the arrow keys, the mouse, and the spacebar at the same time? I only have two hands. And there was no way to change them, so I noped right out of there.

Which is too bad. It looks like it had a fun sense of humour and a cute style, but that’s not enough to overcome basically unpleasant gameplay.

I might give it another shot some time. At least to get to more of the fun story bits and see if they are entertaining enough to justify enduring the gameplay.

But as it stands, nope. Not my cuppa. Sorry, ninja bunbun, but you are not cute and/or badass enough for me to put up with that.

---

Super Panda Adventures. By far, my fave of the bunch. A colorful and cute platformer where you are a kung fu panda (what a great name for a movie) who is tasked with saving your world from an invasion of cartoonishly evil robots.

This is the game I wanted Ninjuin to be. The art is great, very colorful and appealing, and the storyline so far is a blend of silliness and seriousness I quite enjoy.

I didn’t like the original controls, but it had the option to change them so I changed it into the sort of “A is jump, B is attack” style setup I am used to.

But not with actual A and B. That would be super awkward to use.

I will definitely be continuing to play it in between sessions of Borderlands 2 (hella fun) and Pillars of Eternity 2 (deep and amazing).

Other than the gaming, I have felt ill and tired all day. I have slept so much and yet I am still tired as hell.

I’m trying ot keep it from making me depressed but it’s not easy. I want to be upo and doing stuff, not sleeping my life away dammit.

The end result is that I am not going to be going over to Felicity’s tonight to hang out like we normally do on Friday nights.

And that means no hanging out with my friends and being ignored by her kitten.

And that’s depressing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

As opposed to ego-y or superego-y.

Just came home from therapy. It was a great session because I got all angry and bitter and emotional, and that means I got some things out of my system, and in a safe environment to boot.

Better that I should get iddy in therapy than go ballistic in real life.

And when I has my blood up, I declared that I didn’t give a fuck if this current version of myself had to die – or as my therapist put it, burn up like a phoenix – in order to be reborn as a happier version of myself.

In fact, I said, I no longer even care if I have to become a worse person in order to be happier. Whatever it takes. I am going to be happy, god damn it, no matter what.

I will become a happier, healthier, stronger version of myself by any means necessary.

If that means I have to take my id off the chain completely and turn into the manipulative, dismissive, flippant, arrogant bastard that has always lived inside me, that is fine with me.

Dark side, light side, sunny side up…. whatever it takes to make me happy, and to hell with the effect it has on others.

In therapy, I said that I feel trapped by all my concern for others. And I do. Like I said before, I feel like Gulliver in Lilliput, unable to move for fear of squishing a Lilliputian.

Well to hell with all these little people around me. I am going to be happy, and woe betide any of them who get in my way, because I will go over, around, or through them in order to get where I want to go.

If they are lucky, I will signal my intention so that they can scramble out of the way.

But I might not.

I am just so sick and tired of being so goddamned sensitive and responsible. There has to be some room to manuever in my life and if that means I have to smash down a few walls – that might be made of people – to get some, so be it.

Like the aforementioned phoenix, I need to burn my old self till there is nothing left but smoke and ashes so that I might be reborn, like a forest after a forest fire, fresh and new and without all the dead wood and parasites I had before.

It’s a lot like dying, in the sense that the true meaning of death is the death of your identity – the person you think of as “you”.

I am therefore announcing my intention to murder myself, metaphorically speaking. Farewell, the person I am right now – you weren’t a bad guy, and had a lot going for you, but you were weak and cowardly and completely incapable of actually capitalize on all your amazing gifts, so new me is taking over and is going to get things done.

There’s a new sheriff in town, and his name is Natural Mike.

More after the break.

---

Well that stuff felt good to vent.

As to how much of it I really mean, I refuse to figure it out. It was something I needed to say and I said it. That’s all that is important.

Whether it is of any use for deducing my “true nature” (pheh) or predicting ,my future actions or attitudes is beside the point.

I am certainly keeping as tight a hold of my determination to be happy as I can. It’s time I started putting myself first at least some of the time and on some levels.

I have only been so weak because my spirit was too weak and/or cowardly to assert my self and my right to exist around the other souls I sense so clearly and who seem so much bigger, more important, and more powerful than my own pale shadow.

This is one of the many symptoms of a severely compromised sense of self and the disastrously and deeply low self esteem attached to it.

It’s hard to be healthy when deep down, you don’t feel like you deserve to exist, and feel the need to hide from everything so that nobody notices that you are still around and remembers how much you suck and kicks you out into the cold.

I wish I was exaggerating.

I also feel like I have to constantly and cringingly apologize for being alive. And I have spoken before about how I feel like I deserve absolutely nothing, not even existence.

Whether or not any of that is “true” in the objective sense is kind of beside the point. My bad childhood and bad chemicals will continue to make me feel this way until the underlying damage is dealt with.

And I am making progress. Every time I remind myself of my extraordinary gifts and sweet nature, those facts come a little closer to actually connecting with my self-worth and making me feel better about myself.

It’s still a long road ahead, though. I have been gifted for my entire life. But nobody in my life ever treated it as a good thing with any inherit value. So I don’t value it like I should either. I never learned to.

I am still too much like the kid version of me who saw my gifts as useless at best and a burden at worst. All I got out of them as a kid is a lot of stultifying boredome in class and a lot of abuse on the playground.

So I know, intellectually. that my gifts are worth a lot, but it sure doesn’t feel that way. Emotionally, they still feel absurdly worthless to me.

Like they are some kind of sick joke suitable only to make my loserdom more ironic.

“Hah hah, there you are with gifts people would give both gametes to possess, and you STILL are a loser who lets life pass him by in favor of playing video games all day!” cackles the demon that is my inner bully.

And I am trying hard to learn to value myself.

But the only road to that goal appears to start in all that shit my id said up above.

And I don’t want to have to go there.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

“I can’t believe how powerful you are!” said the wizard’s new apprentice.

The wizard favored her with a smile. “Honey…. you have no idea how powerful I am. What you have seen so far is nothing. Superficial magic at best. Know that I hold the reins of powers beyond your wildest imaginings. “

“I….see. ” she said.

The wizard patted her on the shoulder. “But don’t be so frightened. Just remember that while I may be a very powerful person, I am also a very nice person. So you have nothing to fear from me whatsoever.”

She looked relieved.”I am glad to hear that, sir. ”

“Good!” said the wizard. “Now, back to the kitchen with you. “

He then, to her great relief, turned her back into a mouse, and she scurried away.

More trying to get a grip on how powerful I am relative to others. I wish I knew how to make my spirit grow until it was equal to the power it weilds.

Religion would probably help with that.

Perhaps my overdeveloped sense of responsibility is partly to blame. I have grown up (no really, I have) feeling like a giant amongst pygmies, and as such, I had to be very, very careful where I stepped or I would hurt people.

That’s mostly bullshit. I can see that now. Just another way my depression keeps me down. People are not nearly as fragile as I imagine them to be, and can handle a lot more than I give them credit for.

It’s just a thin patina of rational justification hiding utter cowardice.

The truth is that I am terrified of my own power.

My culture did not and could not ever have prepared me for weilding this kind of power. As far as I know, there is nobody else quite like me, both qualitatively and quantitatively, and so I have no pre-ordained structure I can fit it into.

It, like me, is just too damned big.

My sadly abused and neglected id wants me to abandon my concern for others entirely and just the best version of myself, no matter how that makes others feel.

If the real me scares people because I am towering over them on so many levels and they have never met anyone else like me, too freaking bad.

I am sick of being a giant in denial.

You know what I would love?

To buy Disney and force them to make X-rated cartoons.

But I would also love it if I finally got out there into the world to test myself against others and learned that I am not nearly as powerful as I thought I was.

That would be such a relief! I would finally be able to just relax and be a normal person instead of trying to find an outlet for all my gifts.

But I know that ain’t gonna happen. The evidence of my being exceptional is too strong. Normal people can’t do the things I can do. The things I have always taken for granted in my life because trying to appreciate them was too damned scary.

I don’t want to be a wizard.

But I am, and I have to learn to deal with it.

More after the break.

---

Back after a nap and a failed attempt to fap.

Today I had to go to the doctor to get a prescription for socks.

No really. Oh wait, that’s right, I already explained that here.

Basically, until I get me some special circulation-boosting socks, I won’t be able to escape this goddamned tension bandage that has kept me from being able to shower for what feels like forever but is probably more like three weeks.

The kicker is that I can’t get these socks without a prescription from my doctor.

So, grumble grumble, I had to go see my GP for a prescription for socks today.

It was pretty routine, other than the fact that I got there and back on my own, without even calling a cab, and I am proud of that.

I keep trying to convince myself that I am not nearly as incompetent as I think I am and that I am perfectly capable of looking after myself if I just give myself a chance.

But before that can happen, I have to somehow defeat the monster of my vast unmet need for nurturing, comfort, and protection.

All that childhood neglect is still inside me, waiting for that love and care and attention that I never got as a child. And getgting past this particular monster will require doing something extremely painful.

I will have to fully accept that it is never coming. That no matter how long or how hard I cry, nobody is going to pick me up and cuddle me and make it all better. That the love and affection in childhood ship sailed a long, long time again and is never coming back and the best that I can hope for is a loving, caring adult relationship where I can get and give all the loving care I want.

And a voice inside me says “But then they will have gotten away with it…. “.

I’m 46. They already got away with it. But part of accepting that the love is not coming is also accepting that there will be no justice for it either.

The family that treated me so poorly is never going to pay a price for it. Same with the teachers and the bullies. There is never going to be a time where I can throw it all back in their faces and make the world see all the damage they did me when I was just a little kid who didn’t know enough to object.

That doesn’t mean I deserved it and it doesn’t mean it was not a horrible crime when it happened. One I may never be able to forgive, much less forget.

It just means that I have to let go to move forward, and that’s all there is to it.

So begone, foul demon os the past. I release you. And now I watch as you evaporate and get blown away by the wind.

You will haunt me no more.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.