I’m feeling somewhat better than I did yesterday.

But that raspy feeling in my throat and lungs keeps slowly getting worse. I feel like my immune system is gradually losing a war of attrition. Hopefully, a good Denny’s dinner full of healthy B12 and other nutrients will set me right.

My mode of speech has become more British lately. Must be from all the UK accents in the dialogue in Baldur’s Gate 3.

Ever noticed how there’s no Americans in fantasy settings? It’s like on some deeply cultural and/or genetic memory level, we all have this assumption that naturally, in the past, everyone WAS British.

Because if your ethnic origins are English, that’s true. In a way.

The alternative would be to have all your fantasy characters speak some invented language of their race or culture, with subtitles, and wouldn’t that be tedious.

Not to mention a serious pain in the ass for the (voice) actors.

Speaking of BG3, I have managed to get rid of all the crashing (knock on a whole forest’s worth of wood).

There was one crash left – at the peak of a particularly key cutscene – but when I realized there was no way around that cutscene, I dove back into Googling the issue, found a suggestion about changing a setting on my graphics card regarding a certain pesky overlay later (overlayer?), and that got me through it.

So now it runs without crashing. It runs very badly, but it runs, and I am having a lot of fun with it despite long load times, jerky animations, and various other glitches.

If things continue to run smoothly, I will bump up the graphics settings and see if I can get away with better graphics.

They will still blink, freeze, and twitch, but they will do it in higher resolution, and with dynamic lighting and shadows.

I still feel stupid for having bought the game for full price and so close to its release date. It’s chock full of bugs. I am far from the only person who got a lot of crashes. Every time I Google an issue, there are thousands more of us.

Pretty big fuckup for a game this high profile. I wonder if it’s just happening to those of us whose computers are only sorta good enough to run it?

That would explain why the reviewers went gaga over it. They all have high end PCs. And I know this to be true because if I reviewed games, that’s what I would do with all that money and clout.

And if that’s not what you would do, are you even qualified to review games?

I still need to get the proper memory for this machine (DDR3, not DDR4) and after that I will look into upgrading the CPU.

Might have to upgrade the motherboard at the same time, at which point this will basically be the Computer of Thebes because I will have replaced everything.

Well, except the HD. But I will replaced that with an SSD (solid state drive, basically a giant thumb drive) some day.

After that, all that will be left is the case!

More after the break.

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The suffering of the world

It’s been on my mind a fair bit lately. Possibly because of my own suffering.

It’s a spiritual concept that describes the truth that there is a great deal of suffering in this world and most of it we can do very little about.

This is the first great challenge of empathy. Once the soul is mature enough to look beyond the bounds of its own personal experience and into the lives of others, the truth of all that pain and misery comes rushing toward it like a tidal wave and the individual can feel like it will obliterate them because it is so much bigger than they are.

This prompts a crisis. How will the individual handle this flood? How will they preserve themselves as people while awash with the pain of others? Pain which naturally stirs within them the desire to reach out and help ease that suffering?

The lowly and unevolved response is to close one’s heart to the world. To embrace every excuse to stop caring one can find, no matter how tawdry, flimsy, or debased, and use that excuse as a sword to cut great swaths of humanity out of your heart and sever all connection to them as human beings forever.

To the unevolved,. this is self-defense, because they mistake their own desire to reach out and help others for thousand of needy hands reaching out to them asking for help and threatening to tear them apart.

The evolved response is to accept the truth of the suffering of the world and let it into your heart, knowing that when the tides recede, you will still be there, one human being doing one human being’s worth of good for the world,. unharmed and with a new understanding of the true nature of the world.

This, instead of provoking a mad urge to block one’s empathy, will expand it. It will humble the evolved person with its scope and size, and evoke in them an understanding of just how fragile and weak we all are, and thus how important it is that we embrace our differences and learn to work with and love one another so that together, we just might make it through the long cold night.

See how petty and small all our “big” problems look next to the magnitude of our suffering? See how we share the same suffering as those we consider enemies? See how under the skin, we are all frightned children trying to make sense of it all?

Trust me. It may not seem like it, but it is safe to care. You will not be destroyed. You will not be swept away by a raging torrent of other people’s pain. You will, in fact, be left stronger, deeper, and wiser as the waters wash away false barriers and give you a precious glimpse into the world between souls, where all our spirits live.

You will learn that you are not alone. All of humanity is with you.

All you have to do is open your heart and let them in.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Still recovering from yesterday’s encounter with coldness.

Haven’t confronted Joe about it yet. That will probably happen tonight, when we’re doing out midnight “hanging out to watch things off the PVR” thing.

Still pretty mad about it. I’ve been through this with Joe like five times already, though admittedly, I only deduced that it is probably him yesterday.

I guess there is something about freezing your nuts off in August that sharpened my deductive capacities on that front.

But I have been through it with both Joe and Julian, collectively, like five times before, and each time I was more emphatic about how important it was that nobody EVER lower my thermostat again because incidents like the one from yesterday morning don’t just lead to me feeling cold for a bit, they have lasting health effects that I will be feeling for days and cause a shock to my system that I can ill afford given my fragile health.

Apparently, though, this was not enough incentive for Joe to remember not to do in my room what he presumably does at least a dozen times a day at work which is, like I said yesterday, turning the thermostat all the way down when he leaves a room after school hours so that the school district isn’t paying to heat an empty room overnight.

For most of the year, Joe’s hours begin when the school day ends.

Or maybe Joe naively thought he was saving us money on our heating bill. Which would be very stupid because the heat only kicks in when the room is too cold and therefore only kicks in when it is needed.

Needed especially by the sick guy. Namely me.

And I am always here. That’s what always gets me. I spend the vast majority of my time right here in my bedroom, ergo there are very few times when we would be paying to heat an empty room.

I mean shit, I’m only out of the apartment for like four hours a week. Add in the times I am watching things with Le Gang and it bumps up to maybe twelve hours a week.

The other 156 hours of the week, I am within these same four walls.

So on both a physical and psychological level, it’s vitally important that this little cage of mine remains safe for me.

RIght now, I am worried that being cold gave me a cold. I have a heavy, raspy feeling in my lungs and throat that seems to be getting worse over time.

Plus my nose is running. But it’s always running. So that doesn’t count.

And I am very sensitive to cold. Even the slightest breeze from the one window I still have open (it’s hard to reach) can make me shiver for a few seconds. And even when I don’t feel cold, I still have the urge to huddle under my comforter like a small rodent wiggling deeper into its burrow.

This CANNOT be allowed to happen again. Next time, it could kill me. Or at least send me to the ER.

More after the break.

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The absentminded cripple

Sometimes I forget just how fucked up I am.

Took a fall during my Saturday Night adventure. That’s when I order in despite there being nobody around to retrieve my order from the door for me so I have to go get it myself, and for someone in my condition, that’s an adventure.

Got to the door just fine. Too fine, perhaps.

But for some reason, on the way back with my McD’s, the walker kept pitching forward, and eventually it pitched all the way forward and ended up flat on its front on the ground, sending me down on to my knees.

I am pretty sure the fault lay not in my walker but in myself. I think I got overconfident and a bit too keen and was pushing the walker too hard and that is what caused it and I to have a bit of a spill.

No harm done, really. I’m a little shaken up but apart from a slightly abraded feeling (rug burn?) my knees feel fine, and still work, so I think I am okay.

But that got me thinking about how easy it is for me to forget how disabled I am. After all, I spend most of my time either lying in bed or sitting in front of this here compu-box of mine, and therefore the fact that my legs don’t work doesn’t come up much except when I have to go get food twice a day.

Well, and when I get up to pee. But thanks to my receptacle, I don’t have to get to the bathroom for that very often.

Disability is incompatible with dignity.

And that got me thinking about how other people would not find my condition so easy to live with, and that got me thinking about how little attention I pay to the physical world.

I have always lived mostly in my head. I am intensely internally driven. First I retreated into my mind when I was raped, then I was left bored out of my gourd mostly of the time in school, and these two factors made me a thinker.

For me, the “real world” is something I deal with as little as possible.

And that’s bad. There needs to be a balance or you go crazy. My reality is unstable and insecure precisely because there is far too little of the stabilizing influence of the actual, literal, solid., persistent real world in it.

The world of the mind might be comfortable to me, but it is not safe.

And yet, to change that would be to alter lifelong habits of thought and behaviour so ingrained into me that to alter them seems almost impossible.

Especially because, due to my inability to clean, my immediate environment is not exactly a delight for the senses.

It’s mostly awful, to be honest.

So trying to extend my awareness into that level of reality is a no go. It will only drive me to despair about how helpless I am to do even the most basic things for myself.

Maybe I will finally go through with a plan to go someplace nice where I can just sit on a park bench and soak up some fresh air and sunshine for a while.

That always made me feel better when I was going to VFS.

Of course, Julian would have to drive me there and pick me up after and it would have to be pretty damned close to a parking space.

But I think an hour at Garry Point Park could do me a lot of good.

Even if all I do there is play games on my tablet.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am very angry that someone turne the themostat in my roo ro absolutely nothing ,cause my living environment to be essentially unheated and open to the weather one day where very high winds are sucking all the heat out of my open windows.

This caused me to wake up incredibly cold. As in, I was shivering so hard that could barely use my table, and the cold as usual gave me all kinds of painful muscle spasms and pain all through the muscles of my legs.

My arms and wrists too. Joy.

Because I woke up in pain, I was not very coherent and therefore couldn;t plot a sensible course out of of this frigid morass.

All I could do was lay in bed and sort of flail around trying to move in he general direction of escape even though I had no idea what that was.

I was almost completely disoriented for a while. And I hate that. I did not know up from down or left from right.

And the whole time, I was really mad. about the whole thing. Once more, somebody, probably Joe, had turned mt thermostat all the way down causing me to be cold as ice in the middle fucking August.

It was a total failure of homeostasis. And I am still suffering the side effects. I have cramps and charlie horses all through my body, and I stll feel pretty fucking cold because I am not self-heating efficiently

My back aches like someone stuck me with a pitchfork. and any kind of movement sets off off a string of neuromuscular fireworks as painful cramps pop all over me.

It hurts so much it makes me whimper like a kicked dgf.

And all because apparently my muscles react very badly to being cold. The charlie horses and cramp are part for the course when this kind of thing happens.

And all because Joe can’t stop himself from turning the thermostat all the way down when he is leaving I room.

Is it anyone wonder that I am a tad miffed?

So I am going to have to confront him about this and stick up for myself for once. I am pissed off solid about this incident and I want some degree of justice.

And I am going to stick with it and not buckle under like I have done so many times in the past. Doing what makes others happy, not me.

It’s so hard to tell the difference sometimes. My soul is such a crazy funhouse sometimes. Hard to tell what’s real and what is merely a reflection,.

Jesus Christ, I still have 68 words left to write. This is going mighty slow tonight. Feels like every damned word is a piece of shrapnel plucked painfully from my wounded flesh.

I want to go to the good cage.

I

I don’t even give a fuck any more. Fuck everything forever.

More after the break.

s

i fuckd up

What was I thinking, giving myself only 45 minutes to do 500 words? Talk about overconfidence.I really doubt I will make it but I will go down tryin’.

Hell, it’s more like 30 minutes because it took my groggy ass so long to get out of bed. Sometimes the mere act of getting out of bed seems like a marathon up a mountain.

This has definitely been one of those days. Oy.

I feel very washed out and fried right now. Trying to make the words happen is like trying to get blood from a very tired stone. If I had my druthers. I would just go back to bed and keep on sleeping till I was done.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

But no, I have less than half an hour to get like 400 words out, so all I an do is write these words stream of consciousness style and get as much done as I can/.

It’s been a rotten day. All that muscle pain from the long term effects of waking up freezing fucking cold this morning has colored the whole day. as has a general tiredness and soreness that disturbed my sleep and kept me from resting properly.

Oh well. I am rugged, I am tough. I will weather all this bullshit until it passes and then go on with my fucking life.

Such as it is.

I don’t like my life. This is not who,. what, or where I want to be. If things had worked out the way they were supposed to do, I would have gotten my grad degree in my 20’s – probably a Masters in Psychology – and I would have had my own private practice where I helped my patients with kindness, attentiveness. sympathy,. empathy, and all the other wonderful skills I have for dealing with people’s problems.

That sounds so good to me. I would love to have a life filled with purpose and accomplishment like that. That’s totally how things were supposed to work out.

Instead, my selfish bastard parents were true to their Boomer generation and they decided that what they wanted – early retirement – was obviously far more important than letting my brother Dave and I finish out degrees like they had promised to do for us over and over during my childhood.

I guess, in retrospect, I wa foolish to trust them to come through for me. I naively thought they would pay for my undergrad degree like they had promised..Silly me, thinking my parents would treat me anywhere near as well as they had treated my sisters when they got their degrees,

Don’t I know that I was never even close to being as valuable and important as the other two? I wasn’t even suppoed to be alive, let alone have needs.

My family dynamic was seriously fucked up.

And now here I am, 50 years old and nowhere within a country mile of growing up. Instead, I have a terrible weakness inside me that makes a normal life impossible.

You can’t put weight on a broken limb, and I can’t put weight on a broken soul.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

The beast must be fed, and yet, every time it’s fed, it gets bigger… and hungrier…

In this case, the beast in question is my appetite for mental simulation.

For as long as I can remember, I craved mental stimulation above nearly everything else. Even as a tiny child, I wanted food for mu mind far more than I ever wanted food for my face.

If forced to choose between a good book and a Skor bar, I would have chosen the book without even thinking about it.

After all, as much as I loved Skor, that would only please me for the short time it took to eat it. The book would entertain me for hours.

This hard focus on mental stimulation explains why I never played with toys. Toys don’t DO anything. They don’t provide any mental stimulation at all. They’re just… things.

Like I have said here before, the idea of using toys as part of a play-acting scenario where I make up stories as I go would never have occurred to me.

In fact, I only know that’s how normal kids play with toys because that’s how they play with toys on television.

Ah, television. My one true childhood friend. Channel upon channel of mental stimulation that I could enjoy all by myself, without having to bother anyone, and without having to compete for someone’s attention.

Thus began my slightly parasocial relationship with sitcoms. I never tried to call up Doctor Huxtable or sent Christmas cards to Alex P. Keaton, but it was the warmth and the feeling of family that drew me to the sitcoms I loved.

And that’s “family” as in chosen family, whether they are related to you or not.

Sure, I loved the comedy. I have always loved comedy. But it was the warmth that kept me coming back to the ones I loved and it was the shows with the big warm hearts to go with the wit and sarcasm that became my all time favorites.

Come to think of it, there’s a certain warmth in game shows too, which were another of my staple. It’s a radically different kind of warmth from the sitcom kind, but part of the formula of a successful game show is a host who can exude the kind of warmth and charisma that puts both the contestants and the people at home at ease.

No wonder I liked Chuck Woolery so much back then.

So I suppose that even back then, what I wanted was not just mental stimulation but warmth. Emotional warmth.

Even back then, I was a lonely little fox lost in the cold, looking for a home.

It’s not like I ever felt at home in the home I grew up in. The best I could say was that it was, technically, the place where I felt the least alienated.

But I was never really part of my so-called “family” at all.

Maybe I really am an alien.

Take me to your video games, Earthling!

More after the break.

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This just in : Millions of Gen X’ers Shamefacedly Admit They Have Been Supporting Trump “Ironically” This Whole Time.

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Art is how a culture talks to itself.

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On being bigger

I have a strong urge to expand.

Not physically, of course. God no. If anything, I need to get smaller by like 80 pounds, give or take, of excess adipose tissue.

Otherwise known as “body fat”.

No, I want to expand my soul and my spirit. I want to grown to encompass all the things that my narrowly construed version of “logic” (ha!) has blinded me to all these years.

Things like joy and hope and nature and love and deep emotional truths and the kind of wisdom of the heart that reall matters and all the rest of the real world outside my sordid little cell block of an existence.

Actually, it’s worse than a cell block. In prison I would at least get sex.

Hell, I would probably eat better too.

I wonder if I qualify for Meals On Wheels. That would at least get me one decent meal a day, even if it’s hospital food.

I had perfect blood sugar when I was in the hospital this time last year.

That’s because I was getting three nutritionist approved meals plus one or two snacks a day. Clearly there is something terribly wrong about my home diet.

But I can’t imagine how I could eat like that at home. It’s getting to the point where just getting to the kitchen to grab a few things and come back is a trial for me. My legs are screaming at me when I sit back down, and that is WITH the walker and without my even hanging around in the kitchen for very long.

Under those circumstances, how the heck would I eat better?

 Maybe I should invest in some TV dinners. (Do they still call them that? Probably not.)

Assuming they don’t take long to nuke, that might get me a decent meal a day.

Or I could revisit the idea of a microwave in my room. Or hell, try to figure out some way I can sit down in the kitchen.

Some sort of folding chair or stool I can deploy when I need it then stow it away so it’s not in everybody’s way when I don’t need it.

Sounds potentially doable. But it would, of course, have to be sturdy. Otherwise, my elephantine bulk will destroy it.

Being able to cook sitting down is out of the question because our counters and stovetops are far too high. Any stool tall enough to allow me to cook would be too tall to sit on safely.

But having a place to sit and rest in the kitchen would allow me to cook in short bursts of activity, and maybe make some decent food for myself.

It’s either that or order in for every supper, and nobody can afford THAT.

Though, in my case, not for lack of trying.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s a Hamlet quote.

The full thing is :

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Hamlet, act 2, scene 2

…and what got me thinking about it (sic) is that always vexing problem of mine of thinking versus feeling.

I had been pondering something or other and found myself stuck in a sort of logic loop without any ability to resolve it, and then the Shakespeare line popped into my head.

A lot of things in my life have been bad because thinking made them so.

That’s the heavy price you pay when you take the whole “logical” point of view way too far. The very habits of thought that you once embraced as your salvation from the chaotic and unstable world of emotion end up being the weapons used by your mental illness to hurt you because you inherently trust them.

I’ve trusted my rational intuition and powers of analysis and especially my own judgment for my entire life.

In fact, it could reasonably said that I have trusted very little else. I certainly have never put anyone else’s judgment and/or understanding ahead of my own.

I will certainly put other people’s knowledge before my own. In the grand Western tradition, I know enough to know how little I know.

But I will make up my own mind about things every single time, with no exceptions. In that one sense, I don’t think anyone “knows better than me”.

In fact, when it comes to rational judgment, most people know a lot worse than me.

Compared to me, they are blind lemmings fumbling in the dark.

And what has all this ruggedly noble steel belted rationalism got me?

30 years of failing to launch. And counting.

Because in the end, it takes so very little into account while brashly acting as though it is the master of the fucking universe and understands everything.

And there is nothing quite like thinking you know everything to keep you ignorant of just how ignorant you are.

This brutal truth machine in my mind might be good at applying overwhelming force with pinpoint precision when it comes to figuring out how things work and how it all fits together, but that does nothing to make me any happier or healthier.

Rather the opposite, in fact. Its inherent lack of mercy leads me to brutalize my own emotional self over and over again as my headlong pursuit of The Truth ™ pulls me through knothole after knothole without so much as a pause to recover.

I can’t say that I know how to fix that. We are talking about the fundamentals of how I understand the world and my place in it, and that’s not easy to change.

But I feel like I have taken the first little baby steps towards true enlightenment by admitting to myself and the world that. to borrow from the Bard again, that there are more things on Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy.

And that means I am open to new forms of understanding that owe little to nothing to logical consistency, solid evidence. or any form of analysis at all.

If I am going to be happy I need to learn to see the world outside the cold and cruel cage of reason and embrace the technicolor warmth of the world outside my cell.

There are sun soaked summer days full of love and laughter waiting for me to get the fuck over myself and get out there to enjoy them.

I can hardly wait.

More after the break.

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What is Dark Disco?

This is, apparently.

I can dig it.

What do slugs speak?

For some reason, the moment I most recently stopped playing Baldur’s Gate 3, this wave of lethargy and sluggishness came over me.

It feels quite gross. Like suddenly my veins are full of cold maple syrup. Both my head and my heart feel heavy and dragged down, and it’s getting hard to think.

It’s also getting hard to… make the words with my…. brain… thingy.

I really hope this is not the onset of another attack of flu-like symptoms only a couple of weeks after the last one.

Each one leaves me weaker than before. I haven’t even adjusted to the last one yet.

But I feel distinctly unwell and that worries me greatly.

I did manage to make an appointment with Doctor Chao today, though. Next Tuesday, the 22nd, on the phone, between 3 pm and 5 pm.

I figured a phone appointment would be sufficient because I am not telling him anything new, just reminding him that he still has no idea what is happening with my muscles.

And this time, I swear, I will stand firm and not give in to make things easier for him and I will stick to my guns until I get some kind of satisfactory answer.

My needs come first, dammit, and his needs are his own responsibility.

The line between me and other people can get so blurry sometimes, and the urge to go for the quick empathic hit of making life easier for someone else at the expense of my own self-interest can be very hard to resist.

Which makes me hella tricky to be around, I guess. Because even someone with the best of all possible intentions can’t ever know if I am advocating for my own needs or just telling them what they want to hear.

I can’t tell the difference either. Not while it’s happening. That’s why it is so hard for me to advocate for myself and advance my own interests.

I’m like a reverse sociopath.

I wonder if I would be better off doing doctor’s appointments via email. Or Discord. Something that takes the pressure of immediacy away and lets me think about my answers and remember that I am a person, not a mirror empath.

Sometimes, advocating for myself will make people unhappy, and I will feel that unhappiness via empathy, but I will steel my heart against it.

Because I have needs, god dammit, and I am going to get them met for once.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And now, the next pulse-pounding chapter in the thrilling ancient saga of me playing Baldur’s Gate 3.

So get your spine ready to tingle!

I am confident that I currently can run the game without it crashing. I just have to :

1. Use the Vulkan renderer. More on that in a bit.
2. Close down ye olde browser. (Chrome, if you’re curious)
3. Bypass the entirely superfluous loader by running the Vulkan executable directly from my HD
4. Not linger too long on the Level Up screen

Only the last one is what I would describe as a functional issue. For some of the characters, there’s a lot of options to choose from when you level up. Like my dude,. the White Dragonborn Storm Sorcerer, has to pick spells and skills and such, and that involves me reading a lot of descriptions.

Or it would if I didn’t have to hurry. And I had hurrying. I especially dislike having to make complex decisions in a hurry.

The only other issue is that this Vulkan thingy does not work well with my graphics card. Nvidia, the people who make the chip on the card, are very clear that if you are using their hardware, you should be using the other renderer, DirectX 11.

As a result, graphics performance is, quite honestly, pretty crappy. I suspect that using the wrong renderer forces the game to emulate the right one and that is bound to cause a huge issue with performance.

So thinks blink in an out briefly sometimes, and the character animations don’t click in right away when you move meaning the characters just scoot forward like wax dummies on wheels at first, and textures look a bit off.

Because of this, I have decided that I am going to try playing under DirectX 11 again one last time. After all, I don’t know which of the measures listed above is “the one” that stopped the crashing and it could be that switching to Vulkan was not it.

I doubt it, but it’s worth a shot.

It could even conceivably be that the reason it doesn’t crash under Vulkan is that when it’s using Vulkan, it isn’t using my fancy schmancy graphics card at all.

That would certainly explain the poor performance.

Technical SNAFUs aside, I am enjoying the game. But I don’t know if I am getting out of it what all the orgasmic reviewers are getting out of it.

It’s good but it’s not like, paint the ceiling good.

Part of the problem with me has nothing to do with the game itself and everything to do with the game I played before it, Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous.

In case you’d forgotten.

The two games are just too much alike. Turn based isometric-ish RPGs with open worlds and deep plots with plenty of side quests.

And that’s my jam, dawg. I love those kinds of games.

But I plated Pathfinder for months and was honestly starting to get pretty sick of it when BG3 came along, and was similar enough to Pathfinder that it really feels like the same old thing sometimes.

Boy, does the universe work hard to come up with inventive ways to screw me over.

I am honestly beginning to regret blowing $80 on the latest hotness now. I mean, the game is good, but it’s not $80 good, and I miss having that nest egg of $60 sitting on my Steam account enabling me to look over the offerings on Steam with the confidence that comes from knowing you CAN has that if you want it.

But it’s far too late for me to return it. So I will keep on playin’.

More after the break.

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The inevitable sequel

Well, I tried the DirectX 11 thing and it ran even worse.

So much for that idea. Under DirectX 11, it ran so slow that I repeatedly had to use the Windows key to pop out of the game long enough to verify that my computer was indeed still running and it was just the game that was frozen.

Eventually I gave up and exited the game impolitely (via Task Manager) and then tried to load it again under Vulkan but it crashed.

I’m hoping that’s not a permanent thing.

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This makes me so happy.

It’s so #relatable!

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Now on to the bummer stuff.

This is your wakeup call.

That song is definitely the unofficial theme song of all us “failure to launch” types.

The thing is, there is no starting gun. Once you’re an adult and out of school, everything is up to you. If you want something in life, it’s up to you to do what it takes to get it. If you have dreams and plans and ambitions, you’re the only one that can make them come true. You are now the one in charge.

All that borrowed structure and momentum from school is gone. And despite the bullshit they spew at you in Guidance class, school didn’t do jack shit to prepare you for life because it made all or almost all of your choices for you.

All you had to do was show up and do what you’re told.

Life ain’t like that.

At minimum, you will have to get a job, a place to live, and something to fill the time between getting home from work and going to sleep.

And those are all up to you. At best, your college education gave you the ability to qualify for the low end of the career you studied for but it is still up to you to find those jobs and apply for them.

And I think all kids should be told this. High school seems like the right time to do it. Tell them the truth : that once they graduate it will all be up to them and them alone.

That doesn’t mean you have to do it alone. You can recruit whatever kind of help you need. But that part is up to you, too. You see?

And I think us failure to launch (FTL?) victims owe our condition in part to not knowing this vitally important truth.

Or we know it but refuse to accept it, and just keep backing away from the reality of growing up because. deep down, we don’t think we can take it.

We’re the baby birdies most likely to plummet to our doom when kicked out of the nest and we know it. To us, growing up seems like dying. We are terrified of it.

Perhaps we are trapped by a fixed sense of self. Turning into a butterfly must look like death to an intelligence caterpillar, after all.

But why do we have this lack of faith in our own survival potential? Why does a certain percentage of the population reach the threshold of adulthood and instead of crossing it and continuing life’s journey, we shrink back and hide?

Is intelligence a factor? Does it take a certain level of IQ to see that you have a choice in these matters and you can choose not to participate? Are there failure to launch types of average IQ out there?

Mental illness is definitely the most salient factor to me. I have never known any other FTL types who do not qualify for a mental health diagnosis, most likely something on the depression/anxiety axis.

Is it a spiritual malaise? Could faith and/or inspiration help? A feeling that something or someone is guiding you to a better life? That you are not alone in this world?

Certainly something is eating away at us and taking away our fundamental self-confidence and making it nearly impossible for us to transition into adulthood.

There is no force that will ever come to live your life for you. And if your response to that is, “Well then I’m screwed because I can’t do it myself”, you’re right.

You are definitely screwed. You are doomed to live your current life until the day you die because you are literally incapable of doing anything to help yourself.

So yup. You’re fucked. Get used to it.

Now if you somehow, by some miracle, suddenly gained the ability to take charge of yur own life and make changes to improve it, that would be different.

But as long as you are literally unable to help yourself, you’re fucked.

Hope your parents have a very nice basement.,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Let’s talking about scab picking.

No really… let’s.

The thing is, people pick off their scabs because it feels good and it feels good because scabs are itchy and that’s stupid.

It’s stupid because the same body that put the scab there to close a wound and protect it from germs is the one giving you the urge to remove the damned thing because it gets itchy when it dries up.

Make up your fricking mind!

It doesn’t make sense. We have the urge to destroy our body’s own defenses.

And it comes from a sane place. By far, the most common reason we itch is that some skin cells failed to slough off when they died and now need some help from us to finish the job via scratching.

Thus, we maintain our skin’s health.

But our bodies can’t tell the difference between dead skin that has to go and its own scabs, which really ought to stay.

We even get a “clean” feeling when we are done, like we washed up, when in reality we made things much, much dirtier!

Now imagine what it must have been before we knew about germs et al. People had no reason to hold back in those days, and must have been picking away freely and making their wounds much worse while also opening them up to infection.

Boggles the mind, dunnit? Just think about all the lives Louis Pasteur has saved by now by launching the hygienic revolution.

Scabs still get picked, but at least we know better now.

As those close to me know all too well, I have had a serious problem with the scab removal compulsion in the past. To the point where I made wounds from infections on my legs far worse and far bigger by getting rid of those itchy scabs all the time.

And all the while, the poor wound care nurses had to deal with the consequences.

They were also the ones who gave me what I needed to break myself of that very very bad habit. By covering up the affected areas with bandages, they both put a physical barrier in the way of my wandering hands so that they could not pick at things when my mind was elsewhere, they kept the scabs from drying up and itching in the first place.

Thus, the tide was turned and all those awful leg wounds healed up and now I only need bandage changes on my feet.

Hell, one of my wounds was like two inches from my butthole. Don’t know how I survived having an open wound on the filthiest part of my anatomy.

The scab removal issue has been on my mind lately because I have developed some new wounds on my legs and so I am struggling with the whole thing again.

There is one on each leg, plus a few minor ones hither and yon.

And once more, it is not hard for me to keep myself from picking at them consciously, the trick is to keep myself from messing with them in those rare moments when my mind is busy but my hands are free.

Last time I was at Wound Care, the nurse gave me some spare bandages for my feet in case I have to change those bandages myself some time.

I am thinking they might go on my legs instead.

More after the break.

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Pay attention to me!

I have always wanted and/or needed attention.

That’s one of the main reasons I have, mostly unconsciously, worked so hard at being entertaining. I want to grab and hold on to people’s attention and make them happy and then, through them, I can be happy too.

It’s a beautiful thing, really. A fabulous fuzzy feedback loop where my happiness and skills make them happy, and their happiness makes me happy, and I radiate that happiness back to them which makes them even happier, until we either reach some sort of entertainment nirvana or explode from the sheer bliss of it all.

It would totally be worth it. Dude.

Ergo, I am a natural entertainer. I tend to ignore that part of myself because there is no way I have the energy, youth, focus, or vigor to try to be an actor or a musician or even a comedian at my decrepit age and in my run down shabby condition.

I might be able to do comedy if I had someone to drive me everywhere, door to door.

Working my walker into the act would be an interesting challenge. But it would have to be that or bring a frigging chair.

It’s possible to be a sit down standup comic, but it’s very, very hard.

I suppose I could do my act from a wheelchair. I don’t technically need one yet but I feel like it ain’t that far off.

And boy does getting around without having to stand up suit me.

I get the feeling that if I had to stand up to do comedy, the pain I would be in would make my material very, very edgy.

“Hey, have you ever noticed that LIFE FUCKING SUCKS and I HATE EVERYTHING and EVERYTHING EVERWHERE SHOULD DIE FOREVER?!?!?!.”

Life sure is funny that way.

But no, I figure if I ever become any sort of entertainer, it will be via the internet. I will put together a podcast with Felicity, or start making TikToks again, or whatever.

That means kicking my false introversion to the curb permanently. I will always be a basic introvert – small group of RL friends, prefer quiet places, dislike really loud people – but I also crave attention and praise and money, and those needs are not introverted at all, and it’s time I faced that.

And that is just as much a real part of me as all that sad sack bullshit I am working so hard to put behind me.

I don’t need to be that broken down depressed version of myself any more.

I can be more.

I can be better.

I can be stronger.

And I can be… me.

And I’m fucking amazing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s been a very sleepy day.

Guess it’s time for one of those sleep debt payments. I think perhaps it’s REM sleep in particular that I need because my sleep has been very, very deep.

Like, the kind of deep that leaves me feeling like a coma zombie.

It being the middle of August doesn’t help either as the afternoon heat can turn any dream into a fever dream in nothing flat.

So I am feeling pretty deep fried right about now. I will doubtlessly feel better once I get some food and hydration into me, but for the moment, I feel like boiled crap.

As usual, I am doing my best to remain mellow about the whole thing. It’s not like I had hot plans for the day anyhow, so sleeping through the day is no big deal. My video games will still be here when I need them.

Therefore the eagerness to play that tends to lead me to become aggravated and frustrated when I have one of these sleepy periods doesn’t make a lot of sense. It might feel like what I know and love is being pulled away from me like a separated twin, but it’s not actually going anywhere.

I’ll be back for it and to it after my much needed trip to the Land of Nod is done.

It’s a rough place, that Land of Nod. I can see why I don’t go there much.

Speaking of video games, had a scare this morning with Baldur’s Gate 3. A couple of times, the game crashed while I was trying to level up my main character for the first time, and I was faced with the prospect of not being able to level up at all.

Which would make the game unplayable. obviously. If you can’t level your characters up in an RPG, the game is going to get real hard real fast.

Luckily, the third time around, I thought to just make my choices really fast and thus evaded the crash.

I am, on occasion, quite clever, as befits my adoptive species.

As I wander through whatever strange land I find myself in, I have picked up traveling companions, as I knew I would.

In this type of RPG, you never travel solo. And if you try, you get your ass kicked.

And I am more or less fine with that. There are times when my cranky Taurus loner side rears its ugly horn’d head and grumps about having all these people following us around and slowing us down, but for the most part, I like having others around.

After all, they’re interesting and useful characters with their own colorful personalities and points of view who really enrich the experience and who have to do exactly what I tell them to do most of the time.

And those are the kinds of companions I really treasure.

Right now, I am trying to figure out how to get someone down from a wooden cage suspended from a tree by a rope.

And she is not making it easier by being all haughty and rude and entitled about it.

But I am sure I will get her down…. eventually.

More after the break.

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Is wealth bad for people?

I think a compelling argument could be made that it is.

First exhibit : Elon Musk, for fuck’s sake.

In this case, I mean “bad” as in being spiritually and morally bad for people. I think becoming and/or being rich has a cancerous effect on the human soul and it thrusts people into the jaws of decadence like nothing else can except power.

And power and money are basically the same thing anyhow.

I think the rot sets in once you start living surrounded by people who work for you. That might be employees, subordinates, live-in house staff, or even your own family if you are the person who decides who gets what when you die.

And the greater the power disparity between you and the people you deal with, the more toxic the effect. Also, the longer you can go without ever having to deal with anyone who doesn’t work for you, the worse it is for you.

Wealth infantilizes people. It makes them regress emotionally to a toddler level of consciousness, where everything in their world revolves around their needs, wants, sensitivities, and desires.

No wonder it makes people sociopathic. It eliminates all need to negotiate relationships with your fellow humans and without that need people lose their minds.

We are a social species. We need the company of peers in order to be healthy.

I think that one of the reasons you see a great deal of socially aberrant behaviour in the wealthy is because their societal expectation is that if they are a thousand times richer than the average person, they should be a thousand times happier than them too.

And that is simply not possible. But our societal programming is so strong that even the wealthy can’t escape it and so they will continue to try to be that happy and become very angry that they keep failing to get there.

So they lash out at convenient scapegoats, like the poor and the taxes they have to pay and so forth and so on. That way, they can continue to believe that there is some amount of money or level of personal freedom that will fulfill that promise of happiness in proportion to their wealth.

Dang it, if it wasn’t for those welfare bums, I’d be rich enough to be happy!!!

The truth is, there is an upper limit on happiness and it isn’t even that expensive. It starts at roughly $80K/year and past that point more money simply leads to more extravagant and ludicrous spending as people try to find that promised proportional happiness that society insists exists.

The truth is, those people in the house on the hill aren’t any happier than you, any more than you are happier than people poorer than you. No matter what the wealth level, it’s your normal, and expecting to be proportionately happier than those on a lower socioeconomic rung than you is a fool’s bet and merely yet another delusion created by our social status instincts, which were never meant to handle this level of power imbalance and social breadth.

In fact, those people on the hill might well be absolutely miserable because not only are they no happier than you are, their repeated attempts to get that happiness they were “promised” have left them jaded, callous, selfish, and unable to maintain any kind of real relationship with anyone, even their spouses and children, because their wealth has so infantalized them that they have lost all ability to give and take in a relationship and you can’t connect with people if you, like the brat you are, insist in having everything be your way, all the time, and anyone suggesting anything else makes you throw a tantrum.

Except your tantrums come with lawyers.

Once you realize what a nightmarish trap wealth can be, you are well armed to see past the social illusion and the compassion surpressing effects of envy and see that the rich can be just as much of a victim of a fucked up system as anyone else.

Oh, except that unlike you or I, nobody has any sympathy for their pain.

Is it any wonder they behave badly?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m a-gettin’ there.

By closing my browser and Steam, and running it without its stupid launcher, I was able to play Baldur’s Gate Three for a good 30 to 45 minutes today before the screen went black, the monitor beeped, and it was “reboot or try to play blind” time.

I chose to reboot.

So that’s where it stands now. I can play for a while before the game decides I am done. It’s an incomplete solution but it at least makes it so I can play a while, and that is enough to keep me from returning the game.

Hopefully, like when Pathfinder was doing the same thing, eventually there will be a patch pushed that gets rid of the problem entirely.

I might still file a bug report because that is still a pretty damned big bug. Having the game shit the bed at a random time is definitely nontrivial.

It’s the randomness that mystifies me the most. Does not matter what I am doing in the game. It could happen at any second.

And in addition to adding highly unwelcome stress to my fragile life, it also suggests that it involves some element of the system has to reach a certain state to trigger the problem, or it happens whenever the system happens to access one tiny bit of memory.

Although that would not explain how reducing resource usage buys me more time. So it is probably the first thing, probably related to temperature.

I may still turn down the graphics settings. Or I may not. If it buys me enough time for a full and satisfying gaming session, then I guess it’s worth it.

It’s just a bummer, is all. I have a monster GPU! I shouldn’t have to turn things down ever, god damn it!

Another partial victory : I have gotten around my Instacart issue by ordering some things from Amazon.ca instead.

They took my credit card just fine.

Obviously, I am not going to be able to get things like potato salad or ice cream sandwiches that way.

And they have Voortman’s sugar free cookies. They even have some varieties they don’t stock around here, like peanut butter wafer cookies.

But they want fifteen fricking dollars per package! I’m used to paying $6 at most, $4.50 when they are on sale.

And they usually are.

So as tempting as those peanut butter wafers sound, I am never going to pay that much for them. It goes against every frugal bone in my body.

And that’s most of them.

Luckily, they had the Peak Freans shortbread cookies, which are not the most thrilling of treats but they are okay and priced much more reasonably.

They do not, sadly, have the Peak Freans sugar free fruit cremes I used to get at Sav-On Ironwood and that I loved so much.

In fact, I Googled them and the only place that still has them is, weirdly enough, Wal-Mart. And as much as I hardcore miss them, I can’t give money to Wal-Mart.

Those people are scum.

More after the break.

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Yet another increment

Managed to play Baldur’s Gate Three for around 20 minutes without it crashing.

Woohoo on that! But I had played for that long before. The only difference was that this time I had the rare and delicate privilege of getting to quit the game as opposed to the game deciding for itself when I was done playing by crashing my computer.

Still, I am cautiously hopeful that by turning the graphical settings down to “Medium”, I have forestalled future crashes.

Doing that really hurt, though. If I tell the game to auto-detect what my settings should be, it goes to Ultra every time.

But apparently this black box of mine can’t handle that.

I think I have played for long enough to have formed an informed first impression of the game, which I will now share.

Well, the first surprise was that unlike the previous game, which used a “real time with pause” style of play where you pause, give your characters orders, then unpause and see how that works out, this one is good ol’ turn-based, just like Pathfinder.

And I have mixed feelings about that. Part of me, the larger part, is relieved that I don’t have to mentally gear up to handle RTWP.

But the smaller part was kind of looking forward to making the switch. Recently I have realized that as a shapeshifter, I am always looking for new things to adapt to.

That’s my form of seeking challenge, I suppose. Unfortunately, it does not come with the gumption needed to go find a new set of circumstances to adapt to and then force myself to leave my cozy comfort zone to go there.

Not yet, anyhow. I am working on it.

Other impressions of the game : it has a richly detail 3D environment which is quite beautiful and superbly well made and I don’t like it.

I don’t like it because it makes getting around with what amounts to 2D controls (click and the character moves to where you clicked) much more complicated and confusing.

I got so lost on the Mind Flayer ship you start on that I was tempted to start over.

I might start over anyway, because I accidentally made my character female. And I am NOT female so I want my character to be male, god dammit!

Plus, I am somewhat regretting my choice to be a Sorcerer. Don’t get me wrong, I love being a spell slinging magic user, but it’s a lot more complicated than being a sword swinging Barbarian and thus maybe not the best choice for a starting character.

Oh well. I will likely muddy through anyhow, like always.

Overall, I am enjoying the game. Which is good because I am well past the point where I can return it by now.

I am sure I will adapt to the more complex terrain and controls.

Would you believe there is even a Jump button?

And I am glad I have found a new thing to obsess over.

Even if it’s a lot more like the previous thing (Pathfinder) than I expected.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

…as do the problems. Dammit.

This morning I went to Wound Care. Update : They switched me back to once a week.

And I don’t like that. I was quite enjoying going there twice a week. It gave me another reason to get out of the apartment once a week and to be honest, it’s pleasant to have a nice woman touch me and take care of me for a little while.

Unmet nurturing needs and so on. It ain’t pretty but it’s me.

But I could hardly tell THEM that, so I will be only going there on Fridays for the foreseeable future. Oh well.

Maybe I need to invest in a once a week trip to the beauty parlor.

Or massage parlor…. I could get a lot of use from a good masseur. Someone who can help drain alllll my tension away…. *ahem*.

When I got back, I went ahead and made that phone call to Pay Power about the fact that my card didn’t work certain places.

Sadly, the fellow on the phone could not see any problem on their end of things. Or at least, I think that’s what he said.

He had a strangely brisk, clipped Indian accent with an odd galloping cadence and that plus the loss of sound quality inherent in the sorts of phone systems gigantic call centers tend to use made what he said land in my ear as just one long incomprehensibly staccato word.

I felt bad for him. I could tell he was struggling mightily with his accent. I imagine that accent makes his life as a phone center worker very stressful.

Interviewer : “Do you speak English?”
Phone person : “Yes…. technically…. ”

I then contacted Instacart via text chat to see if they could help me. The helpful person there suggested I log out, wait an hour, then log back in.

Just tried that. It did not work. Fuck.

And the same goes for the other problem dogging me right now, Baldur’s Gate 3 crashing. I tried doing a full reinstall of my video card drivers to make sure they were up to date and all that accomplished was to get rid of the little nag screen that popped up when I played the game to remind me that my drivers were out of date.

But it still shits the bed and crashes like a bitch not long after starting up.

Eventually I will have no choice but to return it, which will break my heart. But if I can’t get it to work, getting my moolah back is going to have to do, otherwise the thing becomes an $85 white elephant.

I am sure I can find another thing on Steam that I want. Not as much as I want to be playing what appears to be the Best Game Ever, but something new nevertheless.

So far, I have “played” it for 86 minutes, which leaves me 34 more minutes before I hit the return deadline of two hours.

I will keep plugging away at whatever I can think of until then.

More after the break.

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Then there’s Beyond Thunderdome, which is about plant based Thunderdome.

(Did I do this joke before?)

---

A crack in the dyke

$obvious lesbian joke$

Well I manafed to get Baldur’s Gate 3 to work…. for a while.

This time, I managed to get all the way through character creation and into the actual plot of the game before it forced me to reboot.

I did it by going to the loader for the game and choosing to run it using the Vulkan renderer instead of DirectX 11.

What’s the difference? I dunno. But it was one of Larian’s (the people who make the game) official suggestions and it worked. Kind of.

It got me further, which is good. Performance was pretty choppy during the cutscenes.

Speaking of which (slight spoiler ahead), having the opening cutscenes feature an Illithid (aka a Mind Flayer) was pure genius because we all spent a lot of time fighting those evil horrible motherfuckers at the end of Baldur’s Gate 2, so when the camera pans up to reveal the face of our villain, I was instantly seized with frothing a genocidal hate like the hate The Doctor has for Daleks.

They look like this :

And that brought me right back to where I was at the end of the previous game in a way no recap or references could ever do.

They are so detestable because they are completely ruthless and cruel and think nothing of performing unspeakable experiments that would make a vivisectionist puke on live sentient beings and they do it all with the air of implacable calm that just underscores what cold blooded fiends they are.

Possibly literally. Squid are cold blooded, right?

The next step is to a) run the game with as few other programs running as possible so that it has as much RAM and CPU bandwidth as possivke at its disposal, and b) bypass the loader and run it directly from my HD.

Those are both on the “Before you file a bug report….” section of the Support section of the Larian website so I figure I will give them a try.

I may also (sigh) turn down the graphic settings to make the game use less resources. Right now everything is set to ULTRA, max quality, because of my awesome GPU, but my CPU and RAM are still subpar for modern gaming, and that might be the problem.

Would be depressing to have to do that, but… better to have a low res game I can play than to have a high res game that crashes all the damned time.

I resent having to do so, though. But this seems to be a season of fuckery, and I am only going to survive it if I stretch my ability to adapt to its fullest and resist the urge to cry foul and try to fight the tide.

It doesn’t matter what is fair or right for the world to demand of me.

All that matters is making the best of the shitty cards I have been dealt.

And more I make peace with that fact, the healthier I will be.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.