Woke up from some very bad sleep just now.
As my poor awakenings go, this one was a doozy. Took me a long time just to get mentally organized enough to roll over. Then I had to somehow fight both mental pandemonium and the sweet song of lethargy in order to finally sit up.
I’m telling you, some days it’s barely worth gnawing through the straps.
Right now I feel disoriented (check) and dizzy (double check) as well as very, very cold all over (that’s a new one).
Hopefully food and the radical miracle of sitting upright will sort all that out.
Were I a more transcendentally inclined individual, it would not be difficult for me to convince myself that when my sleep goes bad like that, I am actually traveling to some cold dark dimension from which I routinely have to save myself at the last moment.
A dimension called Apnea. I go there when I sleep.
Because of course, that’s all it really is. I smother in my sleep. I am cold and dizzy and so on because my body was not getting enough oxygen and now I am slowly coming back to life as my circulation goes back to normal.
Just another day in the danger filled life of a big fat dude who doesn’t take care of himself nearly as well as he should.
God I hate my stupid fucking life sometimes. If I was as wise as I am smart, I would be eating healthy, using my CPAP, monitoring my blood sugar, taking insulin when needed, and getting lots of exercise.
But no. I am a depressed dumbass, and one of these days it’s going to kill me.
And so it goes.
I’ve gotten back into Thronebreaker : The Witcher Tales.
I remember when I first read about it. How excited I was. A Witcher CCG game?
I love both those things!! Sign me the fuck up.
And luckily, it turned out to be an extremely good game, so I played the shit out of it for quite a while, but then mothballed for three or four years.
Then yesterday, I got a sudden hankering to play it again, so I went to download it from Steam. But it wasn’t there.
Then I remembered that I bought it through gog.com. Phew! I was doubting my sanity for a bit there. I clearly remembered getting the game and playing it a lot and yet… there it was for purchase via Steam and not in my Steam Library.
Oh well. Problem solved! Played it a ton this morning. Good stuff.
The name is a little misleading though. “Thronebreaker” is actually a reference from the main Witcher plotline. It’s one of the things the protagonist, Geralt of Rivia, gets called because he killed a king once.
Don’t quote me on that,though. It’s been a while since I played through the games.
In actuality, you play a queen in Thronebreaker. And you are hardly going to break your own throne. That would just be silly.
In fact, you spend the whole game trying to restore it.
But I guess :”Throneretaker” doesn’t have the same ring to it.
More after the break.
The Passive Cop-Out
Man, am I all about tattling on myself lately.
Remember, the truth shall set you free, but first…
Interruption: Just wanted to say that I had started blogging and Joe came in and asked if I wanted to watch stuff and I said “sure!” and got up to do it without even thinking about it and that is huge for me and I am proud of myself for it.
The passive cop-out is all about pulling back without actually overtly resisting. It happens when people get together to do something together that they don’t really want to do but also do not want to refuse to do.
So instead, they are overtly positive towards the thing but the undertone clearly conveys that they are not really enthusiastic about the thing and are looking for a way out.
And if they are the only one doing it, it doesn’t work at all. They soon sense that the vibe is not going their way and stop sending out those signals, at least for the moment.
But if there are others in the group who are also in that same position of wanting to skip the thing without looking like you are skipping the thing, they respond in kind, and also passively resist doing the thing.
Working together, two such people can resist the thing enough to kill its momentum entirely, and from there it is only a small trip to giving up on the thing entirely without anyone ever having to admit they don’t want to do it any more.
I should know. I have done this many, many times. Only now, I am owning it.
It’s a classic trick for people who have trouble sustaining enthusiasm for things because they have trouble with sustained energy for anything.
They might have depression, or other issues, but it can happen to anyone.
And it kills things. Each passive participant only has to pull back a little bit for it to work. One person pulls back a little, the next a little more, the next even more, and before you know it, the wonderful bright energetic idea is deader than disco.
And it is impossible to place blame, assuming anyone even have the energy to want to place blame. The beauty of the crime is that everybody did it. Like the murder of Julius Caesar, everybody stuck a knife into it, so who’s to say who “really” killed it.
And each individual can justify it to themselves by saying “well, I would have pushed forward instead of pulling back, but I could tell that everyone else was pulling back, and so what would have been the point?”.
And thus, nothing ever gets done. No matter how worthy and brilliant the idea is,. nobody wants to be the one who has to keep inputting energy in order to keep the thing going and therefore everyone pulls back and the thing just plain dies.
The only way to overcome this is for someone to step up and be the leader and the spark plug and the workhorse that pulls the whole thing forward even when everyone else is pulling back on the reins.
But hey, that’s perfectly doable, right? I mean, anyone could do that job. Right?
You agree? Splendid!
So nice of you to volunteer.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.