That’s how my thoughts and emotions feel right now. Enormous and heavy and movable, like massive stone doors guarding some vast mystic keep and looming over potential intruders very impressively.
It’s not an unpleasant feeling. A tiny bit spooky, maybe. There is trace of that all too familiar “haunted” feeling I get from time to time.
But for the most part it feels good. Like my emotions are far more strong and together than they have ever been. I feel solid, and strong, and that feels good.
Did the therapy thing today. Covered a lot of ground, and good stuff too, but no particularly heavy revelations or discussions of note came of it.
Like I keep telling Doctor Costin, sometimes it’s just good to be listened to by someone capable of understanding me.
As a creature with a very strong need to express himself, that means a lot to me.
Getting really into No Man’s Sky. It’s already passed my first test of whether I am truly enjoying a game : I find it hard to stop playing.
You play a space explorer with a basic one-person starship, a very high tech space suit, and a handy gizmo called a “multi-tool”.
With those at my disposal, I explore a galaxy with literally quintillions of planets and a most fascinating overall plotline involving tracking down a mysterious signal and meeting some very cool aliens with a space station that teleports.
As is always the case with this sort of game, I alternate between blazing through the main plot and just plain dicking around.
Like sometimes I just pick a random planet, land, and explore. The planets have lots to do on them, like scan indigenous life forms for science and cash.
You get the most galactic currency (known simply as “units”) for animal life and least for minerals, with plant life somewhere in between.
I have encountered some really amazing alien life forms. Like something from the planet Pandora by way of Doctor Seuss.
You can also use your scanner to find “points of interest”, like broken machinery you can raid for nanites (another currency), technology modules that are always good for some highly valuable mysterious data and occasionally good for more, and even alien ruins and forgotten settlements.
Unsurprisingly, there is an “explorer” play mode where that’s all you do. No plotlines, no quests, no pirates, no anything at all except the joy of exploration.
Not for me. I need plot. I need narrative. I need quests. Otherwise things start to seem pretty pointless and I end up just quitting.
I need to be working towards something.
There’s hostile conditions to deal with on most planets, which is a pain. IT mostly consists of constantly scrounging for the sodium your space suit’s environmental shielding needs to keep working.
Doesn’t add much to the game, if you ask me. I wonder if I can turn it off?
I managed to stay all peaceful and Starfleet for a while in the beginning, but then the pirates started to notice me and so, after finally learning how the lock-on system worked, I have been forced to blast some pirates out of the sky.
Not that I mind terribly. Pirates are scum. But I still felt a loss of innocence.
So far I have not had to fight planetside, though. I leave all the critters alone besides scanning them. And they do the same for me.
I know this will end. If it’s not a hostile creature I have no choice but to kill, it will be hostile fellow sentients of some sort.
I already had a close call with a fugitive from justice. He took a few potshots at me and I was close to turning my mining beam on him, but he got back into his ship and fucked off, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
Eventually I will need to buy weapon attachments for my multi-tool and become a badass space marine. I just know it.
So I will enjoy my time frolicking in innocence in the meantime.
More after the break.
I don’t wanna sleep
I just wanna bang on the keyboard all day!
Okay, here’s the situation.
My parents went away on a week’s vacation, and
They left the keys to my Mom’s new…
…uh… sorry. Kinda got lost there for a second.
The real situation is that my eyes are very tired from gaming and it’s making me quite sleepy and I don’t have much of an appetite and that makes this an ideal situation for me to end up sleeping when I should be eating and having “supper” at 10:30 pm and being very annoyed with myself.
But I’m not gonna do it! I’ve been fighting back against the urge to nap and building up my ability to go on despite sleepiness and this is a great test of that.
I can sleep when I am DONE eating and blogging.
That needs a portmanteau. Bleating?
I am tired of my tendency to escape into sleep whenever possible.
Talk about a weakness of character, I can’t even commit to consciousness.
Well no more. From now on I am going to resist the urge to nap both to remember how to stay awake and more importantly to improve the quality of my sleep when I do get around to laying down for a nap.
I can’t quit napping cold turkey. I use it as a way to handle anxiety too much. I escape into sleep and my background anxiety level goes back to zero.
But I can nap less, and resist more, and maybe find a way to exit this eternal soft dreaming state in which I have been trapped for a very long time.
When it’s just me alone in my room, even when I am seemingly fully awake and engaged, part of me has one foot in bed, ready to nap.
And that’s no way to live your life, such as it is.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.