My appetite has been somewhat elusive for the past day or so.
At first, it was just nice to be free of that demonic hunger for a while. Said hunger came back when i stopped my all nut snack diet and went back to my previous wicked ways.
So clearly I need to work out a low carb diet that works and does not cause me to get so blocked up I get super sick six times a day.
But now that my appetite continues to keep disappearing on me, I am starting to worry a bit about my health.
I hope I am not coming down with something.
I mean, I feel pretty crappy right now, but in the usual post sleep way. I feel like I was squished flat by a giant hand in my sleep. I am dizzy, disorianted, queasy, cranky, and I really wish I could just to back to bed.
But I gotta eat, and I gotta blog, so here I am, making the words happen.
And they are not coming easy right now.
Probably doing the comedy open mike thing tonight with Felicity. Don’t feel much like doing it right now, but there’s no need to decide right now.
Odds are I will feel a million times better by then.
I keep gently prodding myself in the general direction of getting up there myself. I know I have all the skills. I am a very funmy dude, I have stage presence and charisma, I’m a total ham, I have serious mental health issues.
You gotta be crazy to do standup, man.
So there’s really nothing keeping me from giving standup comedy a try except blind naked mindless fear.
You know…. the usual.
I know that, for some reason, my mind and my talent balk at the idea of writing jokes. And I don’t know why.
It could be entirely psychological – a way for my depression to sabotage me.
Or it could be that the joke format is too small and restrictive for my expansive talent. Somehow the idea of sitting down and writing jokes or a routine bores me to tears.
Plus, I have this feeling that what I really want to do is just chat with the audience. Get them involved, make the whole thing informal and friendly.
Seems like a very strange approach to comedy, and yet, the idea persists. Just me, a microphone, and the audience, hanging out and having a good time.
Sure, there would be comedy, but it would arise from the moment.
I mean, the connection with the audience is what I want most out of doing standup. Makes the usual joke delivery style comedy seem tense and unnatural to me.
And who knows, I might even be able to pull it off. I might be able to develop my sense oh the crowd to such a degree that I can use it to enhance the interaction and make it something truly positive for people.
That would make me very, very happy.
More after the break.
Played the other two games. This, then, is the final installment of this chapter of Fru Tries Video Games He Paid Very Little For.
Or should that be For Which He Paid Very Little? Yeah, that’s better.
The first of the pair was Hue. You play as a boy who wakes from a monochrome dream into a monochrome world, and it’s up to you bring the colors back, one by one.
In other words, it’s an art game. Everything about it screams art game. The music, the spare asthetic, the art style, the fact that it is fundamentally just a simple platformer but feels like more because of its artiness…. art game.
Unlike many of them, however, this one is fun. It’s a decently well made game and attractive in a minimalist way to boot.
What can I say, I have always been more minimalist than baroque.
And while I am admitting things, I should add that I am a sucker for the whole “slowly improve the world” type of game. When I found the color blue in Hue, and suddenly the sky was blue, I felt an enormous thrill.
Reminded me of a game called Okami, where you start off in a polluted, barren, disgusting world, and when you beat the bad guys in an area, that area is restored to being all clean and natural and beautiful.
God damn that was addictive. It’s all the pleasure of cleaning but with way less work.
The other game was the intriguingly title Iron Fisticle.
Sadly, not about fisting.
Well, not so far, anyhow.
For the younger folk, it’s a high speed arcade shooter where you have to battle your way through hordes of monsters to save the kingdom’s food supply.
For people my age, I can sum it up in one word : ROBOTRON.
Yup, this game is a lot like an updated version of Robotron, the classic arcade game, including my fave thing about it, the two joystick setup.
I mean, I play it with the keyboard, but the idea is the game.
The left joystick controls your movement and the right one controls what direction you are shooting. This way, you can have a game with both eight degrees of motion and eight degrees of firing without it getting confusing.
It’s a setup I find quite intuitive and satisfying.
Sadly, my slow old guy brain has trouble keeping up with all those moving objects. I might just have to play on an easier difficulty level.
Ow. My pride.
It’s either that, or try to recapture the Zen state I used to get into when I played Robotron. A state where there is no thought, no conscious control, no aiming, only the pure experience of the game. A state where time has no meaning and the world is suspended like it is on pause and the difference between object and subject disappears, and there is no “I” any more.
Wow, that sounds like a lot of work.
I’ll probably just play something else.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.