Finished up the bike touring - time to plan out the Nepal trip. Right now we are torn between doing the Manaslu trek and the 3 passes trek. Both have positives/negatives but in the end I know whichever one we pick will be good. I’m a little worried about being cold and altitude sick and tired from the heavy backpack and getting food poisoning and being dirty with limited laundry available. But the past month has given me confidence in my resilience so I welcome the challenge and know it’s going to be a worthwhile experience in the end. I’m slowly making moves to set myself up for success at my return back home. Feeling motivated to focus on my career (something I have never done in my life ever) and invest into my health by exercising more. It’s finally dawning on me that by making plans and setting goals I stand a chance of getting something done. I think in the past I just never cared to, or didn’t know what I wanted well enough to try. I was happy to hop from one fun opportunity to the next, amassing experiences in the process. But now I’m wanting to leverage these experiences into something more than another funky gig. Ive always had an entrepreneurial mindset and have had moderate success in all the little projects I have attempted. But in my youthful naivety secretly hoped to luck upon some untapped goldmine in my attempts. I’ve uncovered some good plans, but they were all short lived as others start to clue in eventually. Excited for what’s to come and what the future holds for me now that I’ve chosen to make it my focus.
DUDE! This happened to me at LaGuardia like 4-5 years ago. It was pretty horrifying.
I finished the video game Disco Elysium in the last half of 2022. I haven't gone back to replay it, but it's been stuck in my head ever since. The music, the art, the story, the voices. I love my video games, I see them as an artform. I adore a game that alters me in some way, making me view things differently. In 2020 I was lucky enough to play Outer Wilds, went in blind and unaware of what I was about to experience. I was treated to an audible, visual and narrative feast I didn't think I'd experience again, till Disco Elysium knocked on my door. Outer Wilds was initially a nihilistic gut punch that ended with hope and optimism, beauty and splendor. The inevitable heat death of the universe has nothing on this little melody I uncovered, piece by piece. Come, sit around the final campfire. Disco Elysium waged emotional warfare on my psyche, asking me some deep fucking questions and demanding I face the unpleasant answers that arose. I'm not happy with how I handle some things. I'm not happy with how I cope. At times I've been a shit, arrogant, dismissive, selfish and cold. At the end of a week of playing, unravelling the story in the evenings, I simply wanted to be a better person. I saw how the creators of this game teased hope for the future out of a miserable existence. Not that I'm miserable, but I saw myself reflected in many, many of the events that unfolded. In the regrets the main character expressed. In the ways he chose to hide from those regrets. When I'm feeling stressed, or down, my mind invariably casts out to something I read/heard in that game, puts it into my current context, and helps me deal with it. Some of the songs from the OST are in my Spotify 'On Repeat' playlist. I'm quietly, subtly being nudged and inspired by artwork, to try and do better each time. Gotta love it.
I really liked Cyberpunk. I was excited for it, enough so that I played it day one. Then after a few hours I'd hop on Discord with the homies and we'd talk about the experience so far. All of us being on PC? Minimal performance issues. The odd person t-posing in poignant scenes, but the game itself was interesting enough that I could laugh about it and move on. I played the shit out of it, easily cruising past my very rudimentary metric of "$1 per hour of gametime = okay". --The method falls apart when you look at it too closely, as I have about 300 hours in Battlefield 2042 but I've not enjoyed much of it (just a game a certain group of friends play and I want to play with them), Outer Wilds took me about 20 hours, and cost me $40. So it failed that metric but obliterated everything else. It's not a great metric and I should find a better one.-- Anyway yeah I thoroughly enjoyed Cyberpunk for what it was. I went with the female V because I thought her voice actor sounded more natural, and I got to have the incredibly wholesome romance option with Judy as a result. Horizon Zero Dawn came with my PS4 when I bought it in 2017, I didn't know much about it but popped it in. The first or second datapoint I found in game, was labelled "Haere Mai". Detailing the NZ attempt to bring Kiwis back to a rejuvinated NZ following the collapse, and the PM at the time of the datapoint was Maori. That tiny little bit of info kept me intrigued about the wider lore, and I had a blast playing through the whole game even though NZ was never mentioned again. Which reminds me I need to play the second Horizon game. I'm allowing myself to buy a PS5 when my student loan goes bye-bye, so that'll be on the... horizon. Heh. Heh heh.
I played Cyberpunk 2077 on a basic-bitch Gen1 PS4 with no issues. It dropped fewer frames and froze less than Borderlands 3. It's my opinion that Cyberpunk was just the punching bag the gaming press needed in the moment and there was no possible way that game wasn't going to get pilloried. Plus, the gaming press sucks balls. I enjoyed Outer Wilds. Couldn't quite care enough to get through the expansion. I really wanted that game to be bigger. I love that it was created by Hiro from Heroes. Horizon Forbidden West is fucking great. The gaming press hates it because they pushed hard into representation, which got sand in the Gamergate Posse's collective vagina. I should revisit it at some point; there's still some housekeeping I need to finish. HZD was better, though. HZD was the game that made me go "I'm gonna go look at that turtle farm out on the edge of the map even though it's 15 minutes of walking" and then I just stared at 'em as the sun went down.
We bought a new home and plan to do some renovations before moving in. I have my guitars and recording gear in there. Drum set and keyboard too. Today I visited and noticed a sliding glass door was completely shattered. Called the cops and they determined in was likely vandalism. Nothing was stolen. Either it was just meant to be mean/destructive or they were going to break in but got spooked. Either way, it sucks. Should I be worried to go there at night? Should I get a shotgun? We put up plywood where the door was, installed motion lights and will install cameras too. Just sucks. Fuck people. My heart hurts. Too much negativity in my world right now.
still in the weeds. today is my second to last shift before leaving my job. problems are the same as the last couple pubskis but i guess there isn't a hurry been working on a writing collaboration with a friend which has been fun. i want to crank out the ending to another thing I've been writing just so i can have something with a structure to hold up to the light scarumbo