How time flies. More than half-way through the year, and by extension, more than half way through my new-ish life.
Many things have remained the same, but some things have changed quite drastically.
That ``middle age'' is really catching up with me. I have the zeal of being twenty-five, but with the weariness of being forty-five (despite having an age that is somewhere between these two). ``Can do'' spirit becomes ``is it really an `ought to do' '' one, and me-time overrides many other things.
I don't activate brain cells unless I absolutely have to, preferring to just keep quiet for the most part. Because at the end of the day, all I am looking for is a peace of mind to catch up on sleep, as opposed to being absolutely right.
Heard of the phrase ``energy vampire''? Neither have I till recently. And something about reading 'net-based definitions of it bothers me to a certain degree.
The word ``intense''. Or the fact that talking with me can be draining, because I am ``intense''.
That is not a word I used to describe myself. That is a word used by others.
As far as I know, that is not exactly a good word. It means I'm an asshole.
And now I'm an asshole armed with the righteousness of Christ since I have publicly declared myself to be a follower of Christ. How much bigger of a sanctimonious bastard can I get?
The answer, surprisingly enough, is no. As in, I don't even want to talk any more.
No talking implies no need for conversations. No need for conversations means no more chances of ``intense'' ones.
I'm just realising that there is really little to no need to talk to anyone anymore, unless absolutely necessary. This is not because I'm holier than thou art, but more like everyone talks past everyone else these days anyway.
Attention spans are short, everyone wants to catch up with the latest and most fashionable---and many people live in pretend worlds [that they didn't create] anyway.
I don't live much in pretend worlds, or rather, I live in different pretend worlds. As a middle aged man, there is a decreasing compulsion within to conform.
I am no longer bound by the rules of the school, and society's rules are generally quite permissive, as long as one isn't out to ``stir trouble''. For authorities, this usually equates to taking steps to organise people along some cause; it matters little if it is for or against the status quo---any form of organisation is a cause for alarm as it threatens the primacy of the ruling elite. Which explains why there has always been attempts to pit different [under] classes of people against each other to divert their attentions away from the real problems of the world.
Anyway, living in different pretend worlds. Flying solo has its own strange set of consequences. My time and effort is no longer revolving around working out good consensus and compromises with another thinking person, and more importantly, I do not have to think about working around the third party people around that other person that is deemed important. Some days I do wish that I were more conventional so as to blend in, but I quickly disabuse myself of that on realisation just how absolutely boring I would be, and more importantly, how bound I would be to the invisible shackles that prevent each of us from living our best lives.
It also helps(?) that my skin is having a flare up during this period once more, due to I-really-don't-know situations. The easiest is to blame the weather conditions, but somehow I don't think that it is the full story. There are certain compulsions involved that need to be tackled that aren't fully explainable through the use of the hot weather---it's one thing to have a flare up of inflamed skin, it's another to be picking at said skin's vesicles to break them and make it all worse.
Oh... too graphic? Too bad... this is the reality. Finger tips are affected by it, making typing full of nuisances, and playing on my dizi downright hazardous, which explains my no show for nearly a month.
Corporeal issues aside, a thought came to mind [again]---I remember some quotation about how someone was mumbling at why is the night sky full of darkness if the entire universe is full of stars in every direction.
Much to my embarrassment, the simple answer to that only reached me recently: the entire universe is full of stars in every direction (see Hubble Deep Field), but they are separated by space and time, i.e. they don't all appear and go away at once.
So obvious, yet I didn't get it till now. How embarrassing.
In other observations, knowledge, Zen, and ko'an---simply put, we often create a strong equivalence between reality and knowledge through the use of words. It's a powerful concept, don't get me wrong, but it isn't necessarily sufficient---there are certain parts of reality that holds that cannot be expressed as words. The paradox is that if I can describe it in words, then it is not a part of reality that cannot be described by words.
More importantly, we have no guarantees that it can be described by countably infinite number of words either. Because no matter how big the [observable] universe is, it is still represented as a finitely over-large number [representing the state], not a countably infinite one, mostly because our laws of physics have a clear starting point, and a clear ``as at''-type rolling ending point.
That's probably the best working definition of the unknowable that I can come up with. And ko'an are meant to force Zen practitioners to break away from that strong equivalence of knowledge of truth/reality with the expressing of them using human defined concepts of words.
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In Minecraft, I've built yet another sandstone pyramid covered with smooth quartz stairs to remove mob spawns. The base of this pyramid is a square of more than 120 blocks per side (it extends 60 blocks from the base of the four-deep iron-block pyramid used to host 4 beacons). The terracing works at three blocks rise per one block run, which leads to a height of nearly 200 blocks above sea-level.
No pictures of it this time though... lazy. It used up quite a bit (but not all!) of the material that I obtained clearing out the desert that the pyramid is now sitting on. I exhausted all the smooth quartz blocks I had, and resorted to quasi-creative mode shenanigans to give myself the rest needed to finish it all up.
In non-Minecraft games, I've been slowly playing WHAT THE GOLF?, and started on Zero Escape: The Nonary Games (Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (999)) of the Team Zero Escape Bundle, which has all three Zero Escape games and the AI: The Somnium Files on sale at the time of writing.
Why the sudden interest in these Spike Chunsoft games?
Okay, backtrack a little. I like puzzle games, though once they start to get too taxing I have a tendency to drop them. Puzzle games have a kind of fun that tickles the right spots when applied at the right times. These games in the bundle, while being ``Visual Novels'' as a major genre, have strong puzzle elements within them that are similar to the escape room genre of games. Those are fun---a digital version of real world puzzle manipulation.
I learnt of these series of games from Pavolia Reine's channel:
- Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (999)
- Virtue's Last Reward (VLR)
- Zero Time Dilemma (ZTD)
- AI: The Somnium Files
Which makes now the perfect time to pick them up (at a discount!) to play them for myself to relive the experience.
And that's happening because a new game has just been recently released: AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES---nirvanA Initiative, that Reine is also playing.
A happy confluence of incidents.
A new fan-made off-shoot of Vampire Survivors and Magic Survival featuring Hololive Productions characters is also made available: HoloCure. I've not played it yet, but have seen many of the Hololive Production VTubers playing them. It looks fun, has its own mechanics that differ from either Vampire Survivors and Magic Survival (both of which I play quite often to kill time when I just want something more brain dead than reading), but I don't think I will play it. Not because I think that it is bad, but that I uh... have enough of such games in the genre to keep me occupied.
And so there. July begins, and I have lots of stuff to report, not all good, and not all bad. Till the next update then.
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