Well, they can be.
Just got finished playing an epic session of Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey.
I’ve almost finished the Elysium part of the post-main-plot expansion (which is turning out to be so…. frigging…. long… ) and that means I have to fight Ros.
I knew Ros for most of this section as a sweet brown doggie who looks kind of like a greyhound (a brownhound?) and seemed to show up wherever I went and whom I would always stop to say hello to.
Sadly, that’s all I could do.
In this game, you cannot pet the dog.
And I knew the game was probably up to something with him, but I didn’t expect that at the end of this part of the game, he’d turn into a giant three headed dog.
Oh. Ros. As in Cerberos. Very cute, game.
So that’s the boss fight I am currently stuck on. Makes sense, I already fought the Medusa, the Minotaur, the Cyclops, and the Sphinx, so what famous Greek monster was left for me to fight?
Makes me wonder who the boss of the NEXT section will be.
I bring this up not just to wank on about the game I am playing but because it brought up an issue I have always had when it comes to things like boss fights in video games.
And that issue is focus.
It’s extremely hard for me to remain completely focused on and engaged with the here and now, in realtime, without daydreaming or other secondary mentation.
And that’s fine for most of modern life. Very little in the modern world requires your completely undivided attention. A guy like me who is never quite all in one place can get along fine most of the time.
But boss fights, like sports, require completely focusing on what you are doing and that’s what trips me up every time because it is extremely difficult for me to remain focused on what I’m doing and what is happening in the game.
In fact. I just realized as I was fighting Ros that when I am doing something like that, I am continuously fighting my own mental wanderlust in order to stay in the zone and beat that dang boss.
And it’s not an easy thing to fight. It’s like trying to stuff an octopus into a box. As you are stuffing one tentacle in, two more slip out, and so to keep the dang thing in there requires a constant struggle.
Plus, it really pisses off the octopus.
And I think this might explain my whole clumsy fumbling dyspraxia life. Doing things like sewing or writing longhand or whatnot requires a continuously engaged consciousness in order to keep your hand steady and get it to do what you want it to do.
My, at best, only periodically engaged mind just ain’t gonna cut it.
And I really want to change that. If I was to join some sort of monastery or ashram or whatever where they teach things like meditation, my main immediately goal would be to acquire the ability to focus my mind whenever I need to.
I find my current inability to do so incredibly frustrating. I like to imagine that I am in control of my mind and I can make it do what I want it to do, and I certainly can do a lot of amazing things with it, but focusing it is not one of them.
And I get the feeling that if I could just get my mind together and flowing as one, I would find it a hell of a lot easier to get my life together, too.
More after the break.
The format is to not have a format
Every once in a while, I pondering trying to create something more…. commercial.
Ya know, the sort of thing that might appeal to people who are not my dear friends. Strangers, even, who haven’t even met me in RL and found out just how cute I am.
And the thing is, I know I could do it. I have the skills to write all sorts of more generally accessible things. I could write short stories, or start another webcomic (AI art plus text balloons?), or try to do a novel again, or do a humour column or a political one.
And so forth and so on, anon.
I could do all sorts of more commercially works, and make all kinds of things.
But it won’t be THIS thing. This thing you’re reading right now.
And now. Aaaaaand…. now.
Spooky, isn’t it?
THIS thing is my big pile marked “miscellaneous”. Whatever I need to output, it can take as input, because there’s no format to get in the way.
Everything I write comes from deep inside me. Therefore, it is dictated by whatever it is I have going on in there. That precludes any sort of preconceived formula for what can and cannot go into this thing because what comes out might not fit the format and well, fuck that, I’m going to write what I need to write regardless.
I could do the “suite of pseudonyms” thing, where I have different pen names for different sorts of writing.
One for my political screeds, one for my humorous takes on things, one for my science fiction, and so forth.
But even that feels too restrictive. I deeply mistrust categorization because no matter how many categories I make, something is going to fall between categories, or worse, belong equally in more that one category, and so I will chuck it in the “misc” bin, and then more and more things will end up in “misc” as my high powered analytical brain produces more fine distinctions between categories, and before you know it, you have a dozen categories with exactly one thing in them and a “misc” folder with everything else and the kitchen sink.
So fuck that. I will write whatever I need to write at the time I write it and somebody else can figure out where to file it.
Like an agent, for example. Oh, what a lovely fantasy it is to imagine having a wonderful, magical agent to whom I can send anything and they will know exactly who will buy it.
Of course, I’d have to do something to attract their interest first…
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.