Most peculiar, mama.
Well, I found my New Game at last.
It’s called Doom Eternal and it kicks a truly royal amount of ass.
It’s fast paced, intense, hardcore, dark, brutal, and drips blood and testosterone.
It’s basically heavy metal in video game form. Including an entirely appropriate heavy metal/industrial soundtrack.
Also, it’s from Bethesda and it’s been out for less than a month, so clearly they are not completely incapable of putting out a decent product yet, Fallout 76 notwithstanding.
My only quibble – and it’s a great quibble to have – is that the game is so intense that I can’t play it for more than half an hour without getting completely worn out by it.
Because I am old.
I had high hopes for the game because I enjoyed the previous game, creatively titled Doom (2016), and the game has not just exceeded those expectations, it’s blown them into tiny twitching chunks of devastated demon flesh..
My first session of playing it, I found myself saying “Fuck yeah!” over and over again.
That’s a very good sign.
The whole game feels like it was made by people who got it. People who understood what made a game like Doom good and turned those things up to eleven, then set them on fire with a 20 foot electric guitar shaped like Satan’s cock.
In other words, I kind of like it.
In other local news, I finished my re-play of Dishonored. God damn, that’s a good game. I had forgotten just how good it is.
I had also forgotten what a delightful little treat the game has for you when it comes down to what looks like it will be the end of the game(long story) : taking out the Lord Regent, aka the former Royal Spymaster who framed you for the death of the Empress you loved and were sworn to protect.
There’s two ways to take him out: you could be boring and just kill him, OR you can broadcast a recording of him confessing to his crimes over the public PA system.
Obviously I chose the latter, but not out of mercy. Quite the opposite. I know it will hurt him far more to be publicly revealed to be a horrible bastard, arrested, and thrown in jail to rot than it would if I simply killed him.
Death takes but a moment. Shame lasts a lifetime.
I have now re-downloaded the sequel, Dishonored 2, and have started a new playthrough of that. And I am very excited to be doing so.
Because Dishonored 2 is one of those rare sequels that is actually even better than the original. It keeps everything that was good about the first game but adds so much more.
My only snag is that, having just saved the kingdom by killing the fuck out of a lot of people in order to put the Empress’ daughter Emily on the throne in the first game, it kind of sucks to have everything go to shit again at the beginning of the second.
Granted, in-game, 15 years have passed, but still.
And I am trying to be less murderous this time. But it’s not going well.
Killing people is just plain easier than taking them down nonlethally.
Plus these fuckers conspired against me (you get to play as Empress Emily this time).
So if it’s just one on one, or two against one, I will just knock them unconscious.
But if they swarm me, motherfuckers gonna die.
More after the break.
Misadventures in therapy
Had therapy today and it was terrible.
My fault. I was incredibly sleepy throughout the whole thing. As in, I was so sleepy I would forget what I was talking about in mid-sentence.
And I tried so hard to prevent this exact happenstance. I got up at around noon, and had my lunch immediately so I would also be fortified by my usual Diet Coke ration, and I stayed out of bed and tried to keep my mind activate with video games.
But nope. Caffeine once again failed me, and my therapy session was atrocious. I sure as hell didn’t make any progress psychologically.
How could I? I was barely conscious.
So that was pretty depressing.
My fatal mistake was taking my sleeping pill at around 7:30 am. One would think that it would have relaxed its grip on me five and a quarter hours later. I certainly did.
But nope! Zonk city.
Oh well. I did get some pretty good sleep afterwards, and my mind feels more relaxed than it has in weeks, so some good came of it.
I’ll be taking the pill again tomorrow morning. Clearly, I need it.
Weird how the need doesn’t manifest consciously though.
I get the feeling that there are a lot of things I screen out of my consciousness without even knowing I am doing it.
Recovery will therefore mean making myself conscious of a lot of unpleasant realities of which I was heretofore blissfully unaware.
Dirty work – but it has to be done.
I have done a lot of damage to myself via my ability to hyperfocus on what I wish and ignore everything else.
It’s a heck of an ability to have, but it occurs to me that I use it as a crutch. By filling my mind with a video game or a book or whatever, I shut out the rest of reality and thus create this tiny little safety zone that none of the things which make me anxious or depressed can touch me.
It’s a great trick for survival, but deadly as hell if you want anything more than just making it through the day.
And I do. I want so much more than survival. I want to thrive. I want to succeed. I want to live a full, healthy, meaningful life instead of being this absurdly gifted person tucked away in society’s deep background because he is too scared to deal with anything.
The fear is so damned strong.
But I will become stronger.
This, I swear.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.