Like it says above : I’ve had more bad sleep.

And man, am I getting sick of this shit.

And to think, I didn’t even take my sleeping pill this morning, I shudder to think what my sleep might have been like if I had.

Then again, maybe I would have slept more, but slept better. Woken up actually feeling rested and refreshed and ready to take on the world.

Yeah right. And monkeys might fly out of my butt.

I am obviously not in the best of moods. If my life was a comic strip, there would be a little black cloud of smoke over my head, indicating my being in a cranky funk.

This too shall pass, however. By the time I do the second half of my blogging later today, I will feel a lot better.

I always do.

Still looking for my next big game. Got some very useful feedback from my feline friend Maelkoth about some of the items on my Steam Wishlist this morning.

I have a LOT of stuff on said Wishlist. Way more than I thought I did. So I have a lot to think about right now.

No hurry. In the meantime, I can play a silly game called Murder By Numbers.

It’s a game that combines two things I like : murder mysteries, and picross puzzles.

Picross is a sort of logic game where you have to figure out which squares on a grid are filled and which are empty. When you are done, the end result forms a picture, although said picture generally takes a certain amount of imagination to see.

Kind of like a constellation.

The murder mystery half of the equation is more like a simple text adventure, or what is called a “visual novel” these days. It has the superficial trappings of choices but it’s pretty much totally linear underneath.

And boy, is it trying way too hard to be quirky. The main characters are an actress who plays second fiddle to the bitchy prima donna star of a TV detective show, and her amnesiac flying computer screen robot friend.

The plot is unraveling more like a soap opera than a mystery, and sometimes there is just way too much text to get through to go to the next picross puzzle.

And that’s the content I enjoy : the puzzles. The rest is kind of annoying. It sounded good on paper but I probably would have been better off just buying a straight up picross game and not this odd but amusing hybrid.

Still, it’s kind of fun, despite how much it insists upon itself. So odds are, I will keep playing through the silliness and doing the puzzles.

I will also keep trying to find my Next Big Game. I’d love to find another open world with lots of quests type game, but preferably one that isn’t MMO at all.

So a lot more like Witcher 3 or Fallout 4 than Elder Scrolls Online or Final Fantasy XIV Online, the two I have played most recently.

Makes me wish Fallout ’76, the latest installment in the series, hadn’t turned out to be a clusterfuck of Biblical proportions.

You remember all those clusterfucks in the Bible, right?

Like the ones on Noah’s Ark? Shit got freaky, y’all.

Of course, you have to kind of read between the lines…. but it’s in there.

More after the break.

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The Wrong Reaction

All right, time for another bold attempt to kick one of my issues in the taint.

As patient readers know, for my entire life, I have disappointed people by not giving them the reaction they wanted or expected.

I really wanted to give them what they wanted. My high degree of empathy made it painfully clear that my response was not the correct one. I could feel their frustration and confusion and disappointment.

But whatever it was they wanted, I did not know how to give them. And I took this very personally. It was hard not to. I felt like I was a crushing failure of a human being who couldn’t give a normal reaction even if he tried.

And oh, how I’ve tried.

And I have to wonder what effect this lack of proper response has had on my life. Because when people do not get the right response, sooner or later they stop trying. The fact is that when they interact with you, it causes them pain and confusion, and there’s only so much of that anyone can take before they conclude that you are just to unpleasant to endure.

The fact that I was just innocently being myself made precious little difference. If dealing with someone is a punishing experience, people are going to stop doing it, and what you “deserve” doesn’t enter into it.

The fact that you are getting something “wrong” on a social level of which they are not even consciously aware only makes it worse.

They can’t even put a name to their pain. They just know you’re “weird”.

Well that ends tonight. No, I don’t think I can suddenly acquire all the socialization I missed as a child and start giving people the reactions they want.

So broadly speaking, that issue is beyond my control.

What ends tonight is my taking these failures to connect personally. I will no longer beat myself up over them. Nor will I assume they mean I am fundamentally defective.

I mean, I am. But that’s not important.

What is important is that I cannot do better. It’s not in me to be normal. I’m a strange man with strange ways and my operating system is only partly compatible with the standard one everyone else gets.

That’s who I am. And I refuse to blame myself for it any more. People get the reactions they get from me, and if that means they are disappointed or confused, tough.

Yes, I really want to connect with people. But I will no longer take my frustrations at not being able to do so out on myself.

I will never stop looking for people and places that can interface well with the strange little moonlet on which I reside.

But until then, it makes no sense to hate myself for being lonely.

Being lonely is pain enough.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.