Even I find myself to be worryingly weird sometimes.

Case in point, the events of this afternoon, which started something fairly innocuous and ended with my stressed out, shaking, and miserable.

It all started when my good buddy and feline head adornment Maelkoth pointed me to a particular game company called Rusty Lake and, in particular, their game Rusty Lake : Seasons, which is an escape puzzle type game in the horror genre.

The game is superb, and to think it was the company’s first. It has an amazingly spooky atmosphere, genuine scares, deeply disturbing imagery, puzzles that are extremely clever without being absurdly difficult (and that takes real skill), and a fascinating plot involving murder, insanity, time travel, and a cockatiel named Harvey.

So feel free to try it yourself. Be warned, though, it’s scary as heck. And it might well suck five hours of your life away like it did with me.

But nothing I am about to relate about my day should be taken as a reflection on Rusty Lake or their game. I am in awe of their skill and knowledge.

it should instead be read as a reflection of my fragile mental state that is the result of forty years of accumulated layers of neuroses piled on top of one another like some kind of mentally deranged baklava.

That said, let our tale begin.

I started playing it, and immediately got hooked^[1], which should have been my first warning sign. But I had frgotten the harsh lessons of my relationship to certain kinds of game from the past and so I plunged on enthusiastically.

And for most of the time. I was having fun, and so I didn’t notice my dangerously escalating mental stimulation level until the end, where things got real bad real fast.

I guess that’s the way it is with stimulus rushes, whether they are chemical or natural. You don’t notice how fast you are going until you are way out of control.

Oh, and speaking of chemicals, I had a fair bit of Diet Coke in me when all this went down, and I am sure that was a big factor in how far it went.

Anyhoew, I enjoyed myself for most of the afternoon, but eventually I ran out of gas. The unusually high level of agitation burned through all my blood sugar and sent that spiraling downward while at the same time, the high speed formance demands on my brain wore my nerves down to their raw little stubs.

And so I went into a pretty dark mental state where I was miserable and in multiple forms of pain but could not stop because I was going way too fast and had nowhere healthy to put all that energy should I try to slam on the brakes, and so the only way out was to finish the fucking thing.

My physical state wasn'[t much better. I was trembling, my heart was racing, my head hurt, and I was freaking out like someone who just woke up at the controls of a crashing 747 and has never even flown a Cessna.

And that’s the sort of thing that makes you wonder what the fuck is wrong with you. I mean, this was a video game, not the Indy 500. I was twitching like a speed freak and feeling like a coked up race car driver who just heard something go CLUNK.

And then seen their right rear tire roll past them, leaving a trail of fire behind it.

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And I’m back. Decided to lay down for a bit to give myself time to cool down from all the game induced insanity.

And it worked. I feel a lot better now. Still pretty raw, but better.

So what happened? Why is it that this partciular knd of game does such prfoundly messed up things to my head? I mean like… WTF, dude?

It definitelt has something to do with the mental stimulation of puzzle solving. Other sortgs of video games do not tax my mental CPU nearly as much as one of these puzzle based games.

That’s because the puzzle genre requires multifaceted multi-threaded problem solving that involves examining things from many different angles all at once and I think that really wears my poor overclocked brain out.

And the escape subgenre in particular packs these kinds of tricky puzzles together so densely that it is no wonder that I end up in a strange mental state if I don’t make sure that I take them in via small, managable chunks.

And even then, maybe I should just skip the whole thing. I am old, fat, and diabetic, with a lot of blood circulation issues, and I should probably avoid things that bring me to a high state of agitation while sitting down.

That’s how fat guys die.

To add to it all, this all happened in a period where my body is re-adjusting to my diabetes medications, and so who knows what the hell is going on with my blood sugar.

Plus, I had a light lunch today because part of that re-adjustment is low appetite, and no matter how much I tell myself that I ave to treat food like medicine during those times, that shit is still very hard to negotiate with when the chips are down.

So yeah. Typical personal clusterfudge. Somehow, event conspire in a way that seems downright choreographed to produce a huge emotional moment for me, and afterward I am left wondering just how brilliant I must be in order for my subconscious mind to be so goddamned clever.

I suppose it has to be if it is to fool my oh so clever conscious mind.

That train of thought does not go anyplace good.

So here I am, with full knowledge that I went through manic Hell today because I chose to play the wrong kind of video game.

God it sucks to be me.

But I guess someone’s got to do it.

Otherwise I wouldn’t exist!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.