In other words, video games.

They must be my real life because I spend more time in those virtual worlds than I do with my mind in good ol’ objective reality.

So if I am not there when I am feeding my video game addiction, where am I?

First, have I talked about Inscryption yet?

A quick site search say no. So here goes. Warning, I am about to gush.

It’s an incredible fucking game. Not just a good game or even a very good game, it’s something else entirely, something that takes video games themselves to an entirely new level as an art form.

This game levels up video games, is what I am saying.

In it, you play a hapless nameless person who has been abducted by a mysterious and twisted figure whom you only see as a pair of eyes in the dark and who forces you to play a CCG^[1]-style game against him with you life as the prize.

You can also get up from the table and explore the cramped cabin he is holding you in, and find various puzzles you can solve for bonus cards or abilities.

Some of which are quite potent. I always have a lot of respect for games designed well enough that they can give you truly powerful abilities without it screwing up the game balance by making things too easy.

And the thing is, everything I have said so far is just the first third of the game! Once you beat your captor three times, you escape his clutches and the game turns into something quite a bit different.

The whole thing is done with such imagination and originality and the creepy spooky atmosphere is so intense that it totally sucked me in.

The fact that it’s one of my favorite types of video games didn’t hurt either.

It’s definitely one of the best games I have play this year. When I am done with it, I am going to check out the developer’s other two games to see if they are just as mindblowingly original and imaginative.

There’s even a mod scene for the game. I haven’t gotten mods working for it yet, though I did try. But who needs mods when the original game is so amazing?

I will make a more dedicated attempt to mod it once I have beaten it.

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Been kinda sleepy lately. Not, thank goodness, to the extent I was after the stents went in. I never want to experience that level of being crushed by sleep again.

Made that one of the worst days of my entire life.

But I think have cracked the code to getting better (in the long run) sleep : going right back to sleep after I get up to pee.

It’s not what I want to do. For many years I have tended to stay up for a couple hours. Thus my day has been broken up into alternating periods of sleep and activity.

Not a healthy way to live. Brains need longer sleep periods in order to get all those juicy REM cycles they need to transfer medium-term memories to long term storage.

I wonder if this is why my biographical memory is so poor? Facts and trivia and knowledge I can remember for decades.

What I did yesterday? Total mystery.

More after the break.

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Alone and adrift

So what else is new? For me, that’s Dog Bites Man.

The Man Bites Dog would be if I felt connected and rooted.

And I try to remember that this vast gulf between me and others isn’t real. It’s just the product of my mental illness numbing me to my own empathy and humanity.

So it’s not how it feels : that nobody cares about me, and everyone has abandoned me, and I am forever lost and abandoned to that midnight tundra that is my personal hell.

Forget being tormented by one’s personal demons. By this point I would appreciate the company. My hell is endless total loneliness and abandonment.

But on my good days. like I said, I remember that the pain is real but the abandonment is not. There is all the love and acceptance and comfort and love I want out there in the world from people who truly care about me.

I just can’t feel it.

And that’s…. pretty fucking depressing, to be honest. No wonder I prefer to forget the truth and go back to thinking it isn’t there at all.

That might be objectively worse – after all, it means that the love can’t be mine ever because it just plain does not exist, whereas if it does, it’s just a thin wall of madness away. I could break through any minute now.

But the truth is, despair is a lot easier to take.

Despair is final. It’s done. You give up and lay down and are free from the cycle of hope and disappointment that is far more crushing than despair ever could be.

Hope can come back when health comes back, and I am therefore strong enough to take it should it falter again.

I wish I could feel the love people have for me. It makes me feel very guilty that I can’t. Not that I blame myself for my emotional disabilities. It just seems so sad that people sending love my way get so little feedback from it.

It does make it to my sad little planet, people. And I love you all back.

But I labour under a terrible curse, and it makes it so hard for me to feel anything at all, let alone love from afar.

So I apologize if sometimes it seems like I barely know you are there.

Sometimes my inner vision grows to take up my entire mind.

And sometimes….I am just too damned cold to receive you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.