Quiet-ish Sunday

T'is quiet. Not completely quiet, but quiet enough.

Somehow, I think I will look back upon this sabbatical year with fondness, and miss the relative calm that I have the fortune of experiencing while everything else around me is burning from all kinds of craziness.

In some sense, I do seem to be on sabbaticals ever so often in the past fifteen years. Of course, what I call a ``sabbatical'', people call ``going to study at a tertiary institution''.

But let us face the truth soberly: if one is good enough at something (in this case, studying), then doing the thing that one is good at is less effort consuming and can be considered relaxing in the same paradoxical way that intensive concentration on a singular topic can be considered a form of meditation.

I think that this year's worth of a sabbatical was timely, not because of crappy the COVID-19 situation and other... extenuating circumstances. It's more that I really did not take any ``circuit breaker''-esque breaks the way I used to do annually while I was in I²R where I would fly half way around the world to the United States to visit friends over a couple of weeks. That kind of break was extremely refreshing, not just because of the chance to breathe a different kind of air away from the concrete jungle that dominates SIN city's landscape, but also a shifting into a mindset that I was fond of in my days of graduate and post-graduate education, where for twice in my life, I felt truly at home among my people.

Here, in SIN city, there's always a barrier that is present, no matter what group I end up in. That barrier is less obvious among my still extant oldest friends, but among those of a newer vintage, it's painfully obvious that I do not think nor do I act like them. No, it's not because I am ``better''---there really isn't such an objective measure for the behavioural aspects that I am referring to. I'm just different.

Usually people just tolerate me, and I keep it to a courteous cordiality in turn. Most people are matured enough to learn how to be like adults, where it is completely normal to not like someone but not act diffidently to them the way an immature child might. Because if we were to act negatively towards people we don't like, there is just going to be so much friction that will be present within society, and there will be more problems in the making.

Another less PC way of saying it is that people here are so brow-beaten that they just cannot be bothered to stand for whatever they believe in with the kind of vehemence that might put the fabled SJW to shame, at least in face-to-face confrontations. Behind the pseudonymity of the screen/keyboard is a completely different animal, and that's where the usual meek-mannered SIN city denizen suddenly transmogrifies into some kind of deranged blood thirsty ape.

We're into the last twenty five/six days of the year. Let's make it a good one with fond memories for future-me to look back for comfort.

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I've started on Machinarium, a point-and-click adventure game that I had lying about in my GOG account. My usual point and click adventure is the first person shooter (you point, and uhh... click and the enemy goes boom), but after watching so many of Reine's point-and-click/visual novel series like her AI: The Somnium Files, Zero Escape: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward, and Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma playthrough series, I started to like them once again.

I mean, I have played The Room series by Fireproof Games (need to start on The Room 4: Old Sins) which are also point-and-click adventures with a strong puzzle slant (but less visual novel) like the ones that Reine plays, and love them. But a more story-centric adventure point-and-click adventure... not something I played much off. I did play the Deponia series (I think the first two/three?), but the puzzles there were too contrived for my liking.

Machinarium was alright so far, though I didn't like the forced Gomoku game that I had to play to advance the story.

The thing about point-and-click puzzle adventures though is that it is possible to be all ``puzzled out'', which means that some break time needs to be taken in between play sessions. Maybe I had more endurance as a kid, but I know for sure that I can't do that continuously nowadays---same as how I can lose concentration/effort when I play rogue-likes like Jupiter Hell for too long a session. And in this case, ``too long'' means more than an hour.

Yeah... I'm getting old. Whatever man.

I might continue on my Machinarium adventure after I post this entry out.

And so, till the next update.