Feeling sluggish, sleepy, and depressed right now.

Definitely need to stop dicking around in Fallout 76 and make another run for the nuke. Finding new places is getting absurdly hard. To the point where I am seriously considering looking up a complete map of the region online (you know they are out there) just so I can find whatever places I have missed.

Which is cheating. And my rule on cheating in video games is and has always been that I only do it when I am sure I have wrung the last drops of legitimate fun out of a game and cheating is the only way to get whatever is left.

That applies to my current situation.

The other, somewhat similar rule is that I will use cheats to deal with a game being what I consider to be irrationally difficult.

This rule is almost never invoked, though. Too much of a slippery slope, because the line is mighty fine between making the game more reasonable in its challenge level and just compulsively cheating because I’m a giant pussy.

I’m talking a vagina you use as a boathouse.

And that ultimately destroys any true enjoyment of the game. Overcoming difficulties is fun and meaningful and makes you feel good about yourself.

Cheating might be fun for a bit but ultimately ruins the game.

I found that out back in the days of Doom. Found the cheat codes, put on God Mode and Unlimited Ammo, thinking, “wow, this is going to be awesome!”,

And it was. For a little while. But then things were way too easy and I grew disgusted with the game and stopped playing.

Lesson learned. Cheating sucks.

Effort invests activities with meaning. That’s why nothing worth doing comes easy.

It’s not that the universe is some kind of bastard taskmaster demanding way too much effort for minimal rewards.

It’s that if it comes easy, you won’t value it. It won’t have any “worth” to you. You might enjoy it, even have fun doing it, but you will feel empty and depleted when you’re done.

Probably a pretty important life lesson for myself in there. I have been a victim of my own timid avoidance of anything that seems too scary or hard or whatever for a real long time now and the corrosive effects on my self-esteem run pretty damned deep.

I would be far better off if I learned to seek and find challenges I can overcome rather than trying to get by doing only things for which I have ample natural talent.

That’s a pattern I have followed since I was an uber-gifted kid who found most of school absurdly easy and so it was natural to resent the things like gym and arts and crafts that I found so hard.

What was not normal was my flat out refusing to do them. The idea that if I tried hard and stuck with it, they would become easier and more rewarding was alien to me.

I had never done that. Still haven’t, really. So many things come so easily to me. And so many other things, even very normal things most people can easily do, are so hard for me because of my coordination and visual issues.

I should tap into my bloody minded determination and sheer stubborn refusal to know when I should quit to overcome this mental block.

More after the cut.

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Robot Wars Part 2 : Sad Trombone

As in this :

I am sitting here burned out and pissed off after a marathon gaming session that lasted over four hours and ended not with a bang or a whimper but the sound effect above.

I am eating my usual type meal of popcorn and trail mix and fruit instead of ordering in because it was 9:30 pm when I shut down Fallout 76 and it would have t0 pm but the time the food arrived and I am eating again at midnight as I hang with Joe and Julian so eating a big meal two hours before that would be silly.

So, a light meal now. Then another later.

I made another run at launching a nuke in Fallout 76 and over four hours I fought like hell through endless waves of robots and annoying puzzles and running out of healing Stimpaks almost right away and getting lost a lot and all the other hardships we gamers endure in order to secure victory only to get fucked over by the game at the very end.

See, when I was around 7/8 of the way through the missile run, two other players joined me. And I was delighted to see them, because I knew from previous runs that the last bit of the mission was crazy hard and complicate and I appreciated the help with it.

So when the two buddies got to the actual launch control room ahead of me, I thought,. no big deal, they’ve earned it. I will just wait my turn.

They launched their nuke. The silo’s calm neutral female voice told me there would now be a period of missile construction. That’s fine, I can wait,

But then she said that everyone would be kicked out of the silo while it happened.

And I was like, what the great and terrible fuck?

And sure enough, it kicked me out. All that effort gone to waste because I wasnice enough to let someone else go first.

So now I dunno. I can do it again once I have recovered, but knowing someone can just take it all away from me by launching first is very dispiriting.

I will probably try again. I am too stubborn to quit now. But if anyone joins during my assault I am going to be very tempted to either quit or wait till the end then do my best to kill their ass.

And I never would attack another player normally. I don’t like PVP at all.

But if it’s you or me, pal, trust me… it ain’t gonna be you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, it looks like I’m not getting stents.

My cardiac surgeon, the mild mannered Doctor Bui, said that if I didn’t hear from the team responsible for such things^[1] this week, that meant they had told him they did not think I was a good candidate for stents, and he’d call me to discuss options.

I doubt he’ll call me. I will probably have to call him. Remembering to call a peasant like me is beyond the powers of the Cardiac Department of St. Paul’s Hospital.

In fact they seem to have trouble remembering me at all. That’s why I had to luck into getting the one receptionist at Doctor Ebtia’s office who gives a shit before I even got an appointment with Doctor Bui.

Hey, remember me, the person whom you told they needed immediate cardiac surgery that would be happening Real Soon Now and then ignored for three months?

Of course you don’t. Sigh.

I don’t know how to convince the world that I am important. That I matter. That I am worth consideration and even (gasp) time and effort and energy to keep around.

I know that I am part of the problem. That my easygoing accommodating eager to please nature sends a strong signal that my concerns are very unimportant and you don’t need to worry about them at all.

I make myself very easy ignore, basically. So people do.

And people tend to project their own opinion of themselves into the world, so people treat me as unimportant because I think I’m unimportant.

It’s how I was raised, after all. I was not important to anyone ever as a kid. I wasn’t valued or treasured or wanted.

I was tolerated at best, resented at worst. No, scratch that. Downright persecuted at worst. There was no place where I felt welcome.

Home was just the place where when I went there, they had to let me in.

Further down the rabbit’s hole is the question of how much my own shy nature played a role in all that. Was I always a doormat?

I am not saying I should not have been treated a whole lot matter. I deserved all the love and affection and attention I needed to thrive and it certainly wasn’t my job to make sure I got it, especially when I was younger.

But somewhere along the way, whatever fire I had in me to demands my needs be met and pursue my own self-interest was put out.

So I just made do with whatever I happened to get, without complaint, and that is a great way to make sure nobody takes you into consideration at all.

Unlearning that self-destructive pattern will not be easy. We teach the world how to treat us, whether we know it or not. Learning to send a different kind of message, one that suggests there will be consequences if I am ignored or treated poorly, is going to require me to rethink my entire approach to life.

Just trying to think along those lines fills me with confusion and fear and feels very unnatural, like I am trying to bend a joint the wrong way.

But change is never easy.

It’s just worth it sometimes.

More after the break.

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Minimize to tray?

What I was talking about above the line is often called self-minimizing in pop psych circles. In response to psychological threats, the individual learns to making themselves as metaphorically small as possible in order to minimize exposure.

It is the “hide” adrenaline response as a primary defense mechanism.

In humans, taken to the extreme, it’s called Avoidant Personality Disorder.

Like in myself. I minimize myself so hard that I can barely interact with society at all. I hide from the world in this filthy fucking bedroom and live my life in virtual worlds because I can’t handle reality at all.

Deep down, a big part of me still feels like I don’t even deserve to be alive. That I deserve absolutely nothing, that it is always dangerous to remind people of my existence at all because that will only anger them, and that I should apologize for even taking up space and wasting perfectly good oxygen by breathing it.

My only safety lies in remaining hidden and forgotten.

And what do you know? That’s exactly what I get. I hide so well that people forget me. My intuitive powers of concealment are profound.

And I can’t turn them off. Whether that it because I literally cannot or because I am far too scared to abandon my primary defense mechanism is academic.

However you slice it, it’s not an option for me at this juncture.

So I will continue to be ignored, neglected, pushed aside, stepped on, and otherwise mistreated by the world because that is exactly what I am telling it to do.

No matter how much my conscious mind might intend for me to be noticed, taken seriously, and so on, my unconscious mind is projecting a combined cloaking field and Somebody Else’s Problem field that tells the world, “forget what that foolish conscious mind is saying and ignore me so I can feel safe”.

Hurt, angry, depressed, and worthless. But safe.

That’s the true cruelty of the “safety above all else” mindset of an abuse survivor. Your permanent panic leaves no room for concerns about what will make you happy or help you to thrive or any of that.

It is a fascist regime that views hope, joy, and life-affirming confidence to be dangerously subversive threats to the universal order and attacks and destroys the slightest ember of life’s warm fires before it can kindle dangerous ideas like wanting to feel alive for once.

And like all such regimes, it cannot be reasoned with. It cannot be talked down. brought to reason, taught the value of mercy, or otherwise peacefully reformed.

Those are all the tools of people with the luxury of being reasonable. In order to protect itself the fascist regime has to shut down anything like reason. It knows, deep down, that free thought would destroy it and only relentless numbing fear can preserve it.

So the only way to get rid of it is to rise up and wrest control away from it by any means possible, and bar it from power forever.

But how can you do that when you’ve been taught from birth that this fascist regime is the only thing keeping you safe from a hostile world?

There are things far worse than oppression, or so it would like you to believe.

Revolution can only come when people are hurting so bad that they don’t care whether they unleash chaos and horror any more as long as the bastards pay.

Not sure how that would work on an individual level.

But it’s certainly something to think about, isn’t it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

Observation : most people would consider “crappy” and “cruddy” to be synonyms and yet if you told people you needed to “take a crud” they would look at you funny.

There’s a deep lesson about language in there somewhere, I am sure.

Anyhow, I am feeling extra excremental today. Woke up feeling more terrible than usual and realized my throat was sore and my chest felt heavy and there was an ache that went from the bottom of my throat all the way up my eustachian tubes into my ears.

So maybe I am coming down with something. I hope not, not only because being sick sucks (obviously) but because I am still an immuno-compromised sickie and even minor illnesses can blossom into something truly horrid like pneumonia with me.

So I am keeping an eye on things. Paying close attention to my symptoms to see if they start getting precipitously worse so I can get my sorry tuckus to the ER if they do.

Not going to dick around with potential pneumonia this time. The last time, the time when I ended up on oxygen in the hospital for ten days, by the time I actually decided things were bad enough to warrant a trip to the ER, my blood oxygen was so low that the nurses checked to make sure the machine was working properly.

Is it weird that I find that story funny now? Like it’s just another of my wacky hijinks. I suppose that’s better than being crushed by fear as a result but it still seems like there must be something wrong when your response to nearly dying is a fit of the giggles.

I guess it’s an extension of that “emergency mode” response I have mentioned before. A mode that clicks in when I feel like I am in real danger, like when I had a low blood sugar incident when I was downtown at VFS, and had to very carefully pilot my failing body to my fave sandwich shop and buy a life-saving cookie and eat it.

And on the one hand, on one level, I was very calm and careful and did exactly what I needed to do to get myself out of the situation.

But on another level, I was laughing hysterically on the inside. I was like, “uh oh, guess I’m in trouble now!” and then laughing like a demented hyena on nitrous.

Again, better than having a total breakdown, but a long long way from normal.

Makes me wonder if somewhere in me is a potential adrenaline junkie. Someone that gets a huge thrill out of danger, like the title character from Archer, and could have ended up living a very, very different kind of life.

Hopefully I will never know. Both because I would rather not be in that kind of danger and because I am pretty sure that version of me would be a horrible human being.

That’s the side of me that identifies with The Joker way, way too much.

I uh, don’t like that side of me very much.

But he exists for a reason : to be a focal point for all my darkness.

It’s easier to manage that way.

More after the break.

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The Robot War

And not the fun kind with Mick Foley or that guy that played Lister.

I’m not great with names. I mean, it took real effort for me to memorize the names of the cast of my favorite sitcom, Night Court, and I still can’t recall the name of the guy who played Mac the court clerk.

Something…. Robinson, maybe? ^[1]

Anyhow. Yanking myself back to the topic like a bad comic getting the hook in Vaudeville, in Fallout 76 I have finally run out of ways to dick around and had to launch my assault on Alpha Base and all its robots so I could launch a goddamned nuke.

I don’t even want to launch one. It accomplishes little and will no doubt raise phantoms of weird Cold War guilt in this overworked brain of mine.

But it’s all I’ve got left to do. I’ve sucked the whole game dry otherwise.

And I was all prepared to keep fighting for as long as it took… or thought I was, anyhow. Had almost 2000 rounds for my beloved .50 caliber machine gun, the Final Word. Plenty of plasma cores for my Plasma Gatling. My trusty Super Sledge for the kinds of problems you can solve by hitting them with a rocket powered sledgehammer.

And lots of Stimpaks for healing.

The sledge was the first to go. Should have brought backup melee weapons. My guy (in his current form) is very good at the hitting things very hard until they die.

Then I ran out of ammo for the Plasma Gatling, which I was using as my main weapon because I wanted to save the Final Word for whatever godawful monstrosity they were going to throw at me at the end of this battle.

So inevitably, I was running out of ammo for the Final Word. You can go through 2000 rounds pretty fast, it turns out. So I decided to risk leaving Alpha Base to get more ammo, Stimpaks, and hopefully some Fusion Cores to keep my power armor going.

Do not want to be fighting legions of killer robots without being a walking tank.

It was a risk to leave because I am not sure all my progress was saved. The game can be a real bitch about that. That’s why I was hoping to do it all in one long assault.

But it turned out not to matter because the fucking game crashed when I tried to leave. And I almost certainly lost all my progress when the game closed.

So I am kinda bummed about that. But at least when I do it all again, I will know to bring even more ammo and multiple melee weapons so I can just keep on bashing.

It’s clobberin’ time!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.