Hopscotch

 When I was younger, one of the characteristics by which I defined my identity was that I was a genius. I understood maths much, much easier than anyone else I knew, and I could intuit things that other people couldn't comprehend.

When I grew up, I discovered that the very idea of a maths genius was a narrative that people constructed to describe characters like Ramanujan, Gauss, Euler, etc. It was an idea that a person might accept or reject about themself, not some implicit inextricable quality of that person, and there was certainly no moral imperative for a person skilled in maths to study it.

With that narrative disestablished in my mind, it became impossible for me not to question; is there any true narrative? Is there anything on which I can build my fragile identity on that won't crumble beneath me if analysed closely?

Sometimes I think that I'm cursed with great intelligence, to be forced to examine myself in detail until there's nothing left, but I'm honestly stupid to be so full of myself. The realisation I had is one that I think everyone experiences, and really, I'm just late to the party. The belief that you're the most important person in the world is sometimes called "main character syndrome", and almost everyone has to grapple at some  point with the realisation that they aren't the person they thought they would be.

A lot of people go through this as a teenagers, as they realise they don't have natural talents in anything, and from a particular perspective, they might think this means there's nothing special about them.

These people find their way though. I know I will too.

Sometimes I worry that I'll deconstruct every positive belief I have until all I have left is despair, but I think deconstructing my main character syndrome is a good thing. It can help me to turn my eyes to Jesus, and to people in the world around me.

Free Writing 3

 25/9/23

There was a sound, a low rumbling kind of thing. It weighed upwards through the bones, made you feel all heavy. Dripping, tinkling tings scattered over the top, making a cacophony of unerring unpleasantness. It seemed uncaring of the minds it carried, so delicate and easily snuffed out, in spite of its purpose; the salvation of intelligent life. A roaring, screaming void rushed by outside, shielded by gumption and hard work, mankind's last big "fuck you" to the encroaching unreality poised to destroy it. Their destination: anywhere that could harbour a stable enough reality to reestablish earth. And that was their cargo: the entire planet. Shrunk down with an ingenious usage of unreality held together with paper clips and gaffer tape. Anyone would have thought them insane, but anyone who was sane would have probably died with their dignity intact. This plan was a real embarrassing balls-to-the-wall kind of affair, an I-don't-care-if-I-look-stupid-as-long-as-I-live-long-enough-to-be-able-to-look-stupid kind of affair.

2/10/23

"Never mind that," he said, affecting an air of benevolence, and somehow managing to maintain his insufferableness. "Now, tell me about yourself."

I went to do exactly that, but I'd barely gotten half a sentence out when my new 'friend' managed to turn the conversation back to his favourite topic: himself.

"You know, I once went canoeing in Burma. Now I know what you're thinking," he said.

That I don't care.

"How's that possible? Burma's dry as a bone, there's nowhere to canoe. Well, the story starts with a toothpick, three thespian wastrels and a Burmese mountain lion..."

Burma's coastal, you tosser, I thought, maintaining an agreeable smile. Do you think we don't have schools out in the country?

"I'm sorry to cut you off and miss such an interesting story, but I was on my way somewhere when I bumped into you."

"Oh, not at all, let me escort you there!"

"No, no, I'm sure a man of your calibre has no shortage of things to be doing right now."

"Why, yes, yes, of course I do," he said, suddenly flustered. It seemed that flattery would get me everywhere with this man. "Very considerate of you. By the way, what's your name?"

"Trevor Siatskis."

"William Longfellow, at your service. And now I must bid you adieu."

Little did I know the role this strange man would play in my life over the next six months, how hard it would be to get rid of him now that I had imprinted on him, and how he would change me for the better.

4/10/23

Take it from me, you don't want to go down that road. Nothing good comes out of that place, and that includes people, too. Every good thing you bring in there will be taken from you, and when you leave, it will be as a husk of yourself. There is no relief, no recourse, and no recompense once you cross over into that world. I went into it thinking I would make it better, but you can see what happened to me... But I can see it in your eyes. You're not going to listen to me. You've gotten a taste of it, the freedom, the power, and you won't turn back until you realise it was the metallic taste of chains all along. Well, so be it. Just make me one promise. When you come back - if you come back - don't bring your woes to me.

Note:

Not really my best offering, as far as free writing is concerned. I kinda liked the insanity of the first one, the willingness to mess around with grammar. The third came out as some kind of miserable video game dialogue.

Free Writing 2

 Some more free writing from my masters. These are from my other computer, so the dates are spread out weirdly.

No date:

In those times, it was common for the first born child of every family to be given to the state, to become public servants. The child was taken away from its parents almost immediately after birth, and was raised with the notion that the king was their father. Those familiar with the government of Kadukano will understand just how strange this is; The King of Kadukano is not an individual, but a collective. "The King" is a "person" made up of the entire governing body of the nation. Hence, these firstborns are dubbed "The Prince", and they grow up to be members of "The King"

25/8/23:

There was nothing to be said or done. Each soul watched in disbelief as the immense mass slid down the hill, sweeping trees, houses, and cars with unrelenting, unstoppable force. They watched it slide directly towards them. Many ran. Some knelt down in prayer. The rest just watched in awe. Some were frozen to the spot even as the mud and snow enveloped them.

30/8/23:

There was ever an air of uncertainty around that place. A yawning, unyielding whorl of mystery hanging over every rocky precipice and tangy pine. A place where fruits grew out of season and deer would watch passersby, unblinking and unfazed. It was like a place that had forgotten it was supposed to be part of the rest of the world, and relished in its differences. It was a place where men would go to die, and be given breakfast instead.

Note:

The one which I didn't note the date of is based on an idea I had a while ago, about a kingdom for a fantasy story where they overthrew their King or something in the past, but still liked having a monarchy, so they created a government, called the "King", and each branch of government was named for a different part of the king's body.

As for the one dated for the 30th, I have no idea what that word vomit is. Don't ask me what a tangy pine is; I don't know.

Free Writing

 To try and overcome the mental block preventing me from writing my thesis, I've been trying to start my days by doing some free writing. I think it's helped a little, and I've been surprised by the direction these have gone. Here are some from the last few days:

20-8-23

There is something to be said about a place with no end. It captures your eye, even when you know you should be focussing on something else. Others insist that it’s disturbing, that it serves as an uncomfortable reminder of mortality, or eternity, or what-have-you, but I’ve always found it comforting to work within sight of the singularity. Perhaps it’s the fact that our city’s continued existence is predicated on it; anchoring reality by echoing its memory in the endless fractalline depths. Perhaps it’s because it’s like a dazzling light show, always reflecting the city spires and roads in a seemingly impossible lattice.

Perhaps it comforts me because people look at it the same way they look at me. Discomfort, confusion, maybe even fear. And if the anchor holding our city together gets some disdainful looks now and then, maybe I can help people too, even if they don’t accept me.

22-8-23

The glossy film over the surface of his skin. It never occurred to me that he would look different to us in death, but of course he did. He wasn’t human. I never truly believed it, even knowing him all these years, being his closest friend, but at that moment I felt it for the first time in truth. When I saw the glossy film over the surface of his skin. Excreted like some kind of developing cocoon, shining multicoloured like oil on the road after rain. That was the cruellest thing about it, that it stole away some part of his humanity, in my mind. But maybe that’s true about everyone; before, that was a person. Now, it’s just a thing.

23-8-23

High above the ground, neverwhere presided. They said the really was ground down there, If you went far enough down. Tallis didn’t know why you would though; neverwhere was everything he’d ever known or wanted to know, and the same went for his parents and their parents before them. But now and then, he’d catch a glimpse of void peeking through the clouds below, and for some reason—he didn’t know why—he’d feel a kind of sad longing. But, knowing that these sourceless emotions were unproductive, he would set them aside and continue with his business. He had no time for such nonsense, none at all.

Depression

 I've been coming to grips the last couple of days that I've been experiencing depression since about halfway through last year. I'm not sure why I didn't realise it until now, but I can see all the signs looking back. I've been unable to motivate myself to do anything, I've lost my ability to care about the things that matter to me, I've stopped taking care of myself (hygiene, exercise). I stopped seeing problems as something to be fixed and started seeing them as something to be ashamed of.

That being said, today I made a commitment to try and do things, and it went relatively well.

I really struggled to get myself to go to my new life group this evening, but I'm glad I did. I was finally able to convince myself to go when I thought about the possibility of good fellowship and opportunities to build others up. It troubled me that I didn't at all feel a desire to read the Bible with others.

In it, we discussed what we wanted to get out of the life group, and it was a good opportunity to think about how my previous life group was failing in that regard. I could see that the previous life groups were functioning on a technicality. We were reading the Bible and studying it, but we weren't really living out our faith or discussing how to do that. What I want is to feel excited to go and encourage and comfort and be encouraged and comforted towards works of the faith, and as it stood previously, I didn't feel that that was happening, and I didn't feel excited at the prospect.

I also started to see a little bit how that depression expressed itself in my spiritual life. Old doubts and worries from last year haven't been considered and addressed, they've mostly been covered over, and when I start to uncover them, the pain and confusion starts to show itself. While my earlier coping mechanism was to cover them up and distract myself, uncovering them now encouraged me. It made me see that the hazy peace that I've been living in is false; there is pain hiding beneath the surface, and the depression was there to protect me from it. Now I feel encouraged to sort through it and work it out, difficult though it may be, because I know that the depressive calm I feel is a lie I tell myself.

This has affected me in other ways too. When I'm in a mental health crisis, I use distractions as a coping mechanism (usually copious amounts of Youtube videos), but often I allow those distractions to become habits and outlive their usefulness.

For a little levity, I played Return of the Obra Dinn, a game in which you have to determine the name and cause of grisly death for sixty (give or take a few) passengers of an old sailing boat.

It's a great game. I shouldn't be surprised, given it's made by the Papers, Please guy, Lucas Pope. His use of unconventional game mechanics and goals is amazing. He's not dethroning Daniel Mullins as my favourite indie dev, but he's definitely getting a high spot in the rankings.

Importantly, It's finally a mystery game that has a challenging and satisfying process of inference that you are actually game-mechanically required to go through. Of course, I'd still like to play some of the games from my previous post.

Murder Mystery Games

 Why is it that immediately after writing my previous blog post, I discover that a bunch of games have come out recently based on exactly the premises I laid out there? The games in question are:

• Pentiment: You have to solve a string of murders and scandals that occur in medieval Bavaria.
  
• The Case of  the Golden Idol: A murder mystery game in which you have to investigate for yourself, find your own clues, and determine your own suspect.
• Loretta: You're a 1940s housewife who committed murder, and in a series of flashbacks, you have to decide how you did it and how you're going to cover it up. (coming out this February)
• Paradise Killer: A murder mystery game where you can accuse anyone, but you'll have to prove your case in a trial. Reminds me of Danganronpa.

Before I saw all these games, I was thinking about how I would make a game on the same premise. The big challenge, in my eyes, is giving the player the freedom to make robust accusations without limiting them to a very small set of options (like Danganronpa) or swamping out the correct options in a sea of useless ones (Portopia). I'm interested to see if or how these games solve these issues, although I don't really have enough time or money to try them all at the moment.

Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Danganronpa

 I quite liked Danganronpa, and so I was eager to try something else similar. 'Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors' (referred to hereafter as '999') was an earlier game from the same studio, Spike Chunsoft, which I'd heard I should try next.

Both of these games feel like they hold the promise of a masterpiece, and both of them fall short. 999 feels like it has the more promising premise, but I think that Danganronpa is the better game.

At the core of my disappointment is the vast gap between the fantasy of each game and the gameplay.

999

In 999, you are trapped on a sinking boat, and you must solve puzzles to get through a sequence of numbered doors in order to escape. When I see this premise, I want to personally engage with the questions in the story:

-Who is doing this? Why?

-Who is responsible for the murder of a certain character?

-Why have each of these characters been kidnapped?

I want to address these questions in gameplay. In a way, you can, but it's so indirect that you don't really have any agency to do so.

At a number of points in the game, you are given the choice to go through one of a set of doors. Which choices you make determines what ending you get, and the endings contain the answers to these questions. The issue with this system is that there's really no way of knowing how your choice will change the ending. There are only 6 endings (really only 5), and so 90% of the paths you can take lead to a bad ending where the main character dies and you get basically no new information. There's really no way of logicking out the path to the best ending, you're best off looking it up.

I've heard that the remake makes some changes that makes it much easier to enjoy the story (and allows you to skip playing through the same rooms over and over and over...), but the original is painfully lacking these. The ability to make these choices and have them affect the outcome feels like it promises the ability to engage with the story and 'solve' it, but at the end of the day, the story is just something the game delivers to you, much as a film or book would, and attempts at interactivity simply make it a frustrating experience.

The gameplay in 999 is fun, but not complicated. It's basically like a series of simple escape rooms. They involve simple maths, pattern matching, sokoban, and 'figure out where this thing you found goes'. None of them ask you to consider the wider story of the game. Each room is completely self-contained. A lot of the puzzles make really good use of the DS, although some of them have needlessly clunky design.

The gameplay is pretty much air-gapped from the interesting puzzles of the story, which is what was so disappointing to me.

Danganronpa

In Danganronpa, you are trapped in a High School with a number of other students. Everyone is told that in order to leave the school, all you need to do is commit murder and get away with it. The questions that I'm interested in here are:

-Who committed this murder? Why? How?

-Who is controlling Monokuma?

-Who is responsible for this whole situation? Why are they doing it?

The interesting thing about Danganronpa is that while it doesn't actually address these questions in the gameplay, the structure of the game causes you to think about these questions and encourages you to put together all the evidence you've found. While the courtroom gameplay does spoonfeed you the solution, you'll already have spent plenty of time coming up with ideas before you get there. For me, most of my engagement with these questions took place outside of the game. I remember going for a walk one afternoon and simply turning over all the evidence for the case in my head, hoping that I could figure everything out before the game told me anything.

In this way, the game is leaps and bounds ahead of 999 as far as fulfilling the fantasy is concerned.

That said, the gameplay is still extremely minimal. Where 999 is a visual novel puzzle game, Danganronpa is pretty much just a visual novel. Strictly speaking, you don't have to think about anything. The game will prompt you with the right thing to do at the right time. I don't think that there's anything about the courtroom gameplay which is fun or interesting in itself. It seems as though it's there simply to maintain the façade that it's a game. The gameplay outside of that is very simple and unchallenging, but I quite enjoy it. The process of exploring the spaces of the school and finding clues is actually very rewarding, basic as it may be.

I would have liked it if the player had some degree of agency in the process of solving mysteries.

Imagine if the player actually had to synthesize, somehow, the solution to each of the murders. Imagine if failure to do so would result in the wrong person being accused. Imagine if befriending different characters could result in different sequences of events, e.g. befriending a character could make them reconsider committing murder. Imagine if you could plan out and execute a murder of your own.

For the non-murder mysteries, I would have liked some more thought and action to be required to piece things together. The game already has a good setting for adventure-style gameplay. I would have enjoyed finding secrets around the school in my free time to gradually put together what's going on. Perhaps even some puzzles in similar style to 999, but spread out over the course of the game.

Many of the previous suggestions would have been implausible to implement without overhauling the entire game's structure, but some of them, I think, would be relatively reasonable additions which would elevate the experience.

Story

The broad structure of the story of 999 is excellent. It's a great concept, and provided you actually get through all the endings without trouble, it's well presented. Most importantly, the premise of the game arises naturally from the core concept, and the questions that arise from the premise point back to this core concept.

The broad structure of the story of Danganronpa just exists to support its premise. There isn't a glimmering idea at the heart of the story from which everything else arises. The story is really about the murders, and trying to guess at what's going on in the world is pretty much pointless.

It should also be mentioned that while 999 has good characters, Danganronpa's are much better, and the fact that Danganronpa could make me feel for characters like Ogami more than 999 could make me feel about Akane or Clover and Snake speaks volumes.

Conclusion

It's odd for me to say this, but even though 999 is far more substantial both in gameplay and story, Danganronpa is a better game. Despite the minimal interaction, Danganronpa got me more involved in everything that happened. I was barely able to put it down.

I'm very eager to try more games like these, but I'm also craving something that has a more robust branching story, and more dynamic interaction with the world.

Feeling terrible.

I'm feeling terrible today. 

I don't feel like doing anything. It feels like everything's pointless.

I sit at my computer and gradually waste the day away. Scrolling through twitter, watching Youtube.

Now and again, I catch a glimmer of desire to do something, to achieve something, but that fairly quickly dims, as though my mind is covered by a fog that not only obscures, but extinguishes any desires.

I did manage to cook some pasta today, and there's enough leftover for a couple more meals. It wasn't very good, but I can at least recognise that objectively, today wasn't a complete waste.

I know I'll feel better, and soon. I just wish I didn't have to slog through this marsh first.

I've never wanted to die. I doubt I ever will. But sometimes I feel so apathetic toward my life that I wish I could just go to sleep, and wake up a long time later, when I feel better.

I can remember the first time I felt this way. I was eleven years old. When I told my mum, her advice was that I should do something that makes me feel happy. Back then, that was simple enough. What I wanted to do was make games with Scratch. Nowadays, when I feel like this, every idea to cheer me up feels flat, as though I can see through it, and immediately judge it as meaningless.

I know I'll feel better, and soon. And when I do, all the things that I love to do will be exciting again. I'll want to read books and program games and build worlds again. But until then, I don't really know what to do with myself.

2022

 It's been a bit since I looked at this blog, but I wanted to go over some of the things I've done this year. As I write this, I have a list of things that I want to talk about: my reading goal for 2022, progress on my games backlog, my game development ideas.

Thinking over these things, I wonder; are these really the things I want to remember this year for? By deciding to write about these things, I'm implicitly organizing my life around them, using them as my measurement of progress. At the very least, I'm thinking about them, and in doing so, dismissing the other things that happened as less relevant. In light of that, perhaps I'll try and look at all the other things that happened this year.

The year started, more or less, with a holiday in Cowes, Phillip Island. As is sometimes the way of these things, I mostly want to stay inside, while my family wants to go out and do things every day, usually swimming at the beach. Hazel, turning three around the beginning of January, was so much more grown-up than on the last holiday. I remember our 2021 holiday fondly, in part because I was able to entertain Hazel so effortlessly. She wanted to do the same things over and over again: walk up and down the stairs, throw things down the stairs and watch them tumble, "Tom sit here", etc. It was delightful to show her the simple things we take for granted and see the fun and excitement of those things reflected in her reaction. 

Another thing that was perhaps so special about the holiday in 2021 was that it coincided with an awakening of my own. I'd watched the Pixar movie "Soul", which was honestly life changing. It showed me how to appreciate the beauty that constantly surrounds me, and it felt like waking up from a 22-year-long stupor. It felt like I'd spent my whole life walking around looking at my feet, and I'd suddenly learned how to look up. In this way, I felt like I was having the same kind of experience that she was; the sudden and uplifting ability to comprehend the world around you and how it works.

This year was different. I didn't feel able to make fun for her as much. The games she wants to play are more complex than the year previous, and still so much simpler than anything an adult would be entertained by. Perhaps she's in a gap, one where I'm not sure what to do with her. Luckily, she's pretty good at entertaining herself nowadays.

Zeke was not quite ready to talk yet, but was doing plenty of walking and running. I'm sad to realize I can't remember much of him from the holiday, except for one instance of playing a game with him, and when I tried to escape to my room for some reason (probably to read or watch netflix), he started calling my name to get me back. A little later in the year, I would become firmly established as his favourite, but I'll get to that.

Eden was of an age to do nothing but lie around, drink milk, and cry. Luckily, she did very little of the latter. She spent a lot of time in her bouncer, and she would smile at anyone who made funny noises at her. Not a lot has changed, now she just smiles at you while she toddles around. 

I did a fair bit of reading while we were there. I was reading "Mother of Learning" for most of January and a bit of February. It's a really good "Groundhog Day" style story set in a D&D inspired world. The genre has been described as "Progression Fantasy" which I think captures what's so compelling about it: seeing the main character progressing and becoming an incredibly powerful magician. I've seen some people criticize it for being pure power fantasy, but I don't really see that as an issue. It's really a lot of fun, and I recommend it to anyone who is at least as nerdy as me and is willing to read a book that doesn't really have any literary pretensions. 

The first book I finished this year was Howl's moving castle. I'd watched the movie in 2021 with Beck and Daniel, and I thought the film was so beautiful that I had to know what it had been adapted from. I bought the trilogy of books on my kindle the very same night (or perhaps it was shortly afterwards, but that doesn't sound as good). There's something so thrilling and terrifying about the unresolved symbolism in the film: what is the meaning of Howl's transformation into a bird? Why does Sophie gradually grow younger when she gets closer to Howl? Why does the main theme make me feel so sad? I actually found the movie a bit upsetting; it was so moving and yet I couldn't grasp the source of its beauty, which stands in contrast to my own philosophy of storytelling. The half-baked thought that enters my mind when I contemplate these things is this: Am I fundamentally wrong about how stories should be told? Have I misunderstood the foundational purpose of storytelling?

If I stop and take the time to really pin down these thoughts and inspect the ideas founding them, I realize that they depend on a belief that there is one correct purpose of storytelling and many wrong ways, and that a story can only be considered great if it matches up to that one correct standard.

But stories are not just things that people have made up. The concept of a story is something that people have made up. Stories, like most other concepts, are tools. They are created in order to serve a purpose. Howl's Moving Castle (the film) is excellent for the purpose of filling me with an ethereal sense of mixed dread and beauty, but not great as an anti-war metaphor.

And importantly, if I want to tell a story, I get to choose what purpose it serves. Because it's all made up anyway, right? This is a slightly scary realization, but one I've been coming to peace with this year. As Solomon said, "Everything is Vanity!" I don't actually believe the broadest interpretation of this adage. I've been gradually delineating the things that are made up, and the things that are "ground truth" so to speak. Most things in our society (government, TV shows, road rules, contracts) are made up, which sounds obvious, but it's easy to act like these are atomic (read "indivisible") units of meaning.

And the reason we think like that is plain to see, if you only observe a one-year-old child learning to speak. "Tom", and "Mum" and "Harry" and "dog" and "car" are all equally atomic units of meaning to a child, even though the first and third are proper nouns, the first three denote specific things in the world, while the latter two denote classes of things, and "Harry" denotes a particular instance of a dog.

It shouldn't be surprising, then, that when we learn words like "Government" and "Police" before we are even able to understand the dynamics of interpersonal interaction in a small group of people that we continue into adulthood believing that the Government decides what people are allowed to do, and we don't even realize how remarkable it is that we almost instinctively believe that if someone does something wrong, then The Police will come and stop them and The Law will determine punitive action.

In summary, Howl's Moving Castle is a good movie. The book was also good, but didn't really move me in the same way.

The next book I read was The Little Prince. I won't summarize the story for you, but suffice to say, it probably would have hit me harder if I'd read it early 2021. It has a little bit of that feeling of "unresolved symbolism" that I mentioned above, but not in a way that upset me at all. It did make me think about some friends who told me about the book. People who had "tamed" me. And I missed them. A lot. One of them I managed to catch up with this month, but I'll get to that. The other is in a different world, and I still miss her, sometimes. (In case it's unclear, I'm not saying she's dead or anything)

The other thing I did on the holiday was watch "Archive 81" on Netflix. I really liked the premise, presentation, and the start of the show. It ended up going in a little bit of a demonic direction that I didn't appreciate, and I guess I didn't like how the backstory ended up panning out, but it had enough great moments that I was pretty happy with the show overall. Shame it's not likely to get a sequel, what with Netflix cutting shows like an axe murderer. It can go in my pile of Netflix shows which were undeservedly discontinued, along with "Great Pretender". It's a very short pile. A pile of two shows.

I didn't realise this at the time, but it's no wonder I had the idea to make "haunted cartridges" and other physical/tactile game experiences around this time. An instance of this idea was to produce an NES cartridge that you could play, but at some point in the game, it would imply that you need to open the cartridge and do something in order to progress. When you actually opened the cartridge, you would find that it's filled up with some kind of fleshy organism with tendrils going everywhere (probably made from molded silicone or something). In order to get on with the game, you would need to perform "surgery" on the creature and rearrange some kind of plugs inside it or something. Perhaps that idea is a little too gross, but it does capture the essence of the sort of experience I want to create; something that kicks players out of the rut of modern gaming and gets them to interact with the game in different and interesting ways.

I can't really think of anything else to say about the holiday, so I think it's time to move on. I managed to make it through the rest of the uni break without getting a job, which was probably not ideal.

A good memory I have from the early part of the year was Heidi's 25th birthday. It was at her new share house over in some far-flung corner of metropolitan Melbourne. I can remember a few good conversations I had there.

It's striking me now that I'm scared of forgetting those conversations. I want to preserve them all here, even though that would take way too long, and would not be interesting to read at all (not that anyone will read this). But the conversations were meaningful to me. One of them was one of the first really good discussions I'd had with Calum. I told him about my idea for a game where you ride bikes around, and after showing him some photos I'd taken while riding around my area, he just got it. It was really nice to just click with someone talking about gamedev. He and I are currently discussing plans to do a game jam together some time in the next couple of months.

And it scares me that this memory might be lost. Why don't the memories I've already lost scare me? Should they? It feels like death. Like a little piece of me dies when I lose that memory.

Rationally, I know it shouldn't. I should be happy that something joyful happened to me, and be happy that I can live to experience more joyful things. It would be nice to believe that one could be happy without any long-term memory. Just going about living in a good way being sufficient. I'm not sure I believe this; it scares me. Perhaps I should get down to business and write that story about card-playing immortals that I've been talking about for ages. It tells the story of some immortal people who gradually forget all of their memories, and yet some element of their personalities remains with them throughout billions of years, and they are able to find the same happinesses and sorrows throughout time.

The conversation I wanted to bring up in particular was about the book I was reading. Someone was trying to guess what the book was about based on the title, "Mother of Learning". Soon, a couple more pitched in, with their own guesses. I can remember one person was particularly insistent on guessing that the story had something to do with a sheep. Was it Josh Griffin? I can't remember. Eventually, I gave them the clue that the title came from an old latin phrase which translated to "Repetition is the Mother of Learning". Later on in the evening, after everyone else had been given the answer, Daniel Grimes gave it a go, with the clue. He immediately guessed the Groundhog Day setting, and guessed it involved a magician trying to end the time loop. It was pretty funny.

It was a beautiful night. Heidi had set up chairs and couches out in the backyard, and we could just sit there and look up at the stars.

I think this ends the part of the year that I look back on fondly. Soon after I was back at university, and barely a couple of weeks in, I had a mental episode. It's hard to explain, but it ends up being a string of panic attacks, generalized anxiety, and debilitating depression. I was barely able to do anything but sit and stare at the wall for a day or two. I wasn't able to go to uni for a week and a half. This one was triggered by me realizing how the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics works, and realizing that it is, indeed, the most elegant solution to the measurement problem. I've since come to decide that I don't actually believe it (for largely metaphysical reasons, if you're curious), but that period of time when I thought it was true was some of the worst I've ever experienced. It was what really kicked off the chain reaction of me questioning whether anything has meaning. As above, I did eventually conclude that there are meaningful things in life: life itself, love, and many other things that I won't or can't express.

I do still wonder though; What should I do with my life? Most of the things that exist in society, professions and the like, are made up. One poetic way I put this question was "Is there anything that I can do which is worthy of the gift of life?" What's worth doing? The answer "Soul" would give is that the best thing to do with your life is live it, which is true, but actually doesn't help me with planning things out. These thoughts make the idea of being a vagrant preacher appealing. Just being in a position where you can let life happen to you, and doing what you can to help the people you find around you. 

I'll probably add an interstice talking about books here, just to break up the heavy stuff a little.

The next book I read was Stephen King's "The Gunslinger", first book in the Dark Tower series. There wasn't really much substance to it; it honestly felt like a long prologue, which, I suppose, it was. That being said, I could see and liked the direction it was headed. I'm not sure if I'll go back and read the rest of the series, although that could be my fatalistic of inadequate reading speed complex speaking.

Next was "A Wizard of Earthsea". It was cool, I guess. I don't think I really have anything to say about it, which is, by some standards, the worst thing a book can do. I'm interested enough that I might try the rest of the series.

I quite enjoyed Diana Wynne Jones' "Castle in the Air", sequel to "Howl's Moving Castle". It was a bit silly and rather fun. I'm sure there's something to be said about its cliched depiction of middle eastern culture, but I don't know what exactly should be said and I don't care enough to figure out what it is.

The next book was Jim Butcher's "Storm Front", the first book in "The Dresden Files". It was quite good, and I find my tolerance for low fantasy growing as I experience more of it. When I was a teenager, I thought that the tendency authors had to set all of their stories in our world was arbitrary and boring. Nowadays, I would only say that the tendency authors have to set their stories in naturalistic real-world settings is arbitrary and boring. If that's not character growth, then I don't know what is.

At this point I hit a dry spell of reading for a bit, but managed to pick it back up with Brandon Sanderson's "Skyward Flight" novellas and "Cytonic". Nothing really needs to be said here, I just enjoy everything Sanderson writes. I can see the flaws in the writing and I know why some people don't enjoy the books, but I don't really care. I just love the worlds he makes and the way he puts the story together. I could keep reading his books for the rest of my life (although he's bound to die halfway through some series, and we'll all be left hanging).

"Artemis" by Andy Weir was as almost as excellent as I've come to expect from Andy Weir. I'm not quite sure why it wasn't as good as The Martian and Project Hail Mary. Perhaps it was about the cast of characters, who were a little one-note. Maybe that's why he returned to the bottle format for PHM. 

Fun fact: Andy Weir has written a number of pieces of fan fiction, including one for Ready Player One which has since been declared canon by Ernest Cline, and was referenced in Ready Player Two. 

The next book I tried to read is what really killed my reading streak. "The Magicians", by Lev Grossman. It was just so miserable. It doesn't even feel like the fantasy setting matters to the story he's trying to tell. It's really about the disenchantment that you experience as you enter adulthood. In a sense, some of the themes of the story match up pretty well with the ideas I was brooding on this year, but the book really tries to plumb the depths of depravity that this mindset can lead to. I tried really hard to push through it, but I eventually decided I couldn't bring myself to finish it. A really dreadful book, in my opinion. George R R Martin said "The Magicians is to Harry Potter as a shot of Irish whiskey is to a glass of weak tea." Perhaps it's telling that I don't like whiskey, although while I know people like whiskey, it's hard for me to say what anyone would enjoy about this book.

Stepping backwards a bit, in July, I jumped on a plane to Adelaide to stay with my sister and her family. In the lead-up to them moving over, I had, for some reason, become Zeke's favourite uncle. This was only compounded by my trip to Adelaide. Ostensibly, the reason we went over was so Sam could buy his new car (a Hilux Surf), but I was just happy to have my siblings together again. Playing with Zeke almost constantly was really tiring, but it's hard not to be pretty chuffed when a one-year-old starts calling your name whenever you leave the room.

There was a moment, just a few minutes, on the last day Sam and Jord were there (they drove back to Melbourne, while I flew), where James (my brother-in-law) was off in another room with Zeke, and it was Just me, Sam, Jord, and Belle sitting at the table together. Jord told a joke, and we all laughed, and it felt just like when we were growing up. I suddenly felt a little sad, because I realised that we might never have a time like this again; just the four of us, enjoying knowing each other and being known by each other. We were all grown up now, heading different directions in life. I'm crying now as I type this. I know we're never going to stop being in each other's lives, but I'm going to miss that closeness. Belle, Jord, Sam; I love you guys so much.

I should again interstice with some fun things. After playing The Legend of Zelda last year (see: The Legend of Hitchhiker's Rock), my desire to understand the development of the game quickly ballooned into a plan to play every single game in the series and create a monstrous video essay about it to upload to YouTube. This plan met a brick wall pretty quickly when I tried to play Zelda II and found that it was pretty hard, and I got stuck and gave it up for a bit. Over the course of the next year, I gradually chipped away at it until I finally managed to complete it in October 2022. It took me more than a year to beat a single game. The video essay plan was consequently put on the back burner. That being said, I quite enjoyed Zelda II. Once I really got into it (after the second palace) I really started to have fun. It's one of those games where you have to pull yourself out of your gaming rut and draw some maps of the dungeons in order to win, and I think it's really admirable when games do that (although this was back in the day when games hadn't established the convention that you never force the player to leave the game, so less admirable in this case than just 'cool').

The thing that finally gave me the time to finish it was house sitting for an aunt. I was on my own for whole days at a time, so I would spend my evenings playing Zelda and watching Yugioh (which I was surprised to find is a better anime than Pokémon). Next, I turned my attention to Metroid, and managed to beat that in a couple of days, although it should be noted that I was playing the "Metroid + Saving" patch created by Snarfblam, which, perhaps most importantly, includes a map, so my experience of the game was probably a lot less frustrating than most people. I definitely recommend anyone interested in exploration-based games plays it, but if you want the comforting amenities most modern games afford, I would suggest you play it in the form of Metroid Planets, an excellent fan creation. I started Metroid 2, but didn't have time to finish it until after my exams were complete. I think Metroid 2 is very playable by modern standards, but is almost completely lacking in the open exploration and sense of lost-ness that the first Metroid thrives on (although some would argue that these are the major pitfalls of the first game). AM2R is to Metroid 2 as Metroid: Zero Mission is to Metroid 2. It's an absolutely incredible fan creation, and it's hard to believe that fans created a game of such high quality without any prospect of financial recompense. Nintendo C&D'ed it, which is kind of like a really sucky "Nintendo Seal of Quality". Like, Nintendo clearly thought the game was of high enough quality to pose a threat to the sales of their upcoming Metroid: Samus Returns, so them hand-picking that game to take down really is an assurance of quality.

After exams, I almost immediately beat Metroid 2, and got started on The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past". I can tell that it really sets the direction for the rest of the series, which I actually find a little disappointing. It's hard for me to really explicate why without going really deep on what I loved about the original game, which is what the video essay was for. Perhaps I'll reformat what I have of the script into a series of blog posts. All that said, I did enjoy ALttP, and with maybe two exceptions, I think it's very approachable and a great place to enter the series for a modern gamer.

Since then, I've played through "Yoku's Island Express", "Kirby's Dream Land", and "Ori and the Blind Forest". Yoku is a delightful little metroidvania/pinball game. I was concerned that I would find the game a bit of a slog, but it was very well paced, and I easily got through it pretty much in one go. Kirby's dream land is a very short, very easy, and very polished platformer. I managed to finish the game while my parents were out on a walk. The thing that's impressive about it, and probably the reason the game is so well remembered is just how adorable everything is, and how much love has been put into every detail of the game. Finally, Ori. I don't know if there has ever been another game of such cinematic excellence. It's like playing a Pixar movie. The chase sequence at the end of the game is so tense and exciting, and really rivals the best chase sequences in cinema (with the caveat that it might not be as exciting to watch as it is to play). The gameplay leaves something to be desired. I think it feels more like a Zelda-inspired platformer than a metroidvania, what with the very Zelda-esque dungeons.

For the first time in a while, I feel like I'm making a little progress on my gaming backlog, but I get the feeling that I'll never actually finish all the games I want to play. I should allow myself to be okay with that, but I really do worry. When I wanted to play Ocarina of Time, I decided to play all of the Zelda games leading up to it, because I felt like I needed to do things in "the right order". I own Final Fantasy 7 on the Nintendo Switch, but I feel like I'm not allowed to play it until I've played Final Fantasy 1-6 through. And then when I decided to play FF1, I started to worry about having an authentic experience of it, and so I decided I had to play the original version on NES. But then I worried that it might be one of those games with a terrible english translation, so I decided to play one of the fan retranslations. You can probably see where this is going. I have a broader problem than just a big backlog. I have some kind of compulsive need to play through every part of it, and ensure I get and "authentic" experience. This is one of those "made-up" things that I could do to deconstruct. Why do I have this desire to play through my backlog? If I find an underlying and more reasonable impetus, then the next question would be "Is there a better way to sate this impetus?"

Anyway, here is my backloggd account, and here is a spreadsheet I made with hour counts from howlongtobeat. It paints a pretty dismal picture of how long it would take to play these games through. Included in the spreadsheet is a shortlist of games I might try to play over the course of the next year.

Time for a final hard hitter. I have a friend from high school who, around 2019, withdrew from our high school friend group. I don't know all the reasons why, but I know it was following some hard experiences she went through. Over the next couple of years, I sent her messages on her birthday, but really didn't put enough effort into reaching out to her. After a couple of years of this, I decided enough was enough, and we needed to organise a catch-up.

The day of the catch-up was shortly after the worst of the flooding we had in our area, some time in early November. I know because I rode my bike to Eltham, and on my way there, almost every footbridge was destroyed, and I had to find detours. I arrived at the meeting spot, a cafe on Main Rd. We hugged, sat down, and had a few moments of awkward silence. I worried for a moment that this was what had happened to our friendship. We'd left it stagnating for too long, and now it had turned into an "old friendship". As it turned out, that wasn't the case. When we realised neither of us were hungry, we made our way outside for a stroll in Alistair Knox Park, and found a spot to sit. And we just talked. About friends, about her partner, about video games, and plenty of other things. At some point, she directed discussion to serious things. I think she felt the need to explain, in some capacity, her absence. I still don't know all the details, but I got the impression that one of the big things was this: She wasn't a Christian anymore, and the prospect of existing within our group of friends was (rightly or wrongly) very stressful for her (e.g. she didn't want to be "that friend" who everyone else was trying to convert back). I don't remember saying anything in response about this, but I hope she felt reassured and welcomed by whatever I did. I'm not really hurt by this; she had to work through some things and needed some time to do it. I just wish she didn't feel she needed to leave altogether. Later, she said that she honestly thought that everyone would be better off without her. This was the thing that really hurt me. I know for certain that I'm not better off without her. She's such a wonderful person, and she's really important to me. I wish I had been able to tell her that. Instead, I tried to speak, and all that came out was a series of pathetic squeaks and tears. We hugged for a minute, and the words of Christ ran through my mind: "this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found." I'd found her. I'm happy she's back in my life. I hope she stays in it for a long time. 

While I was house sitting, I finally managed to rekindle the enjoyment of reading that Lev Grossman so thoroughly extinguished with a book called "Rivers of London", by Ben Aaronovitch. It's actually rather a lot like the Dresden Files, except thoroughly British. The low-fantasy world didn't really catch my imagination, but the voice of the main character was excellent. Its depiction of London and British culture was captivating, though I suppose I can't speak for its accuracy.

The most recent book I finished was "Empty World" by John Christopher, who also wrote the Tripods trilogy. It was a pretty miserable tale about a boy who is one of the only survivors of a horrific pandemic that sweeps across the world. I actually enjoyed it, not for any of the characters or the plot that makes murphy's law look optimistic, but for the Wyndhamesque presentation of events and exploration of the consequences of said events. While I don't know how his contemporaries responded to his works, I hope John Christopher wasn't too bothered by the fact that his books' best qualities are all stated in comparison to John Wyndham. 

Currently I'm reading "The Lost Metal" by Brandon Sanderson. I've been waiting for this book for many years, so I'm very happy it's here.

At the beginning of the year, I set myself a reading goal of 24 books. If you've been keeping count, I've read 14 so far (assuming you count the skyward flight novellas separately. Throw me a bone here!). I'm not going to hit my reading goal, but I'll probably finish another 2-3, so I'm pretty happy with that result. If I keep up this rate of reading and don't buy any more books, then I'd finish my reading backlog within 5 years or so, which is actually very reasonable. That being said, I'm accumulating books at a much higher rate than I'm reading them, and it's hard to think of a reason that will slow down any time soon. I expect that the pool of books that I would like to read is far too big for me to exhaust; I'll have to be a bit pickier.

The last thing that I'd like to cover of this year is creative projects. Pretty much as always, I had a number of interesting ideas, but haven't done much towards actualising any of them. This used to bother me a lot, but it doesn't bother me as much anymore. I used to think as though my purpose was to be a creative being that made brilliant works of art that would be universally recognised as masterpieces. Nowadays, I'm much more at peace with the fact that creating things is an activity I do because I enjoy it, and it doesn't really matter if I have something marketable at the end of the day. Often, thinking and talking about making things is more fun than actually making them. That being said, it would be super duper cool if I could share some of these ideas with people, and actually have something tangible to show for all my hours of dreaming. Towards that end, I've asked for a Gameboy cart flasher for Christmas, and I'm hoping to use it to make some cool physical Gameboy games. If I do end up doing that, I'll post about them on here.

I had two ideas brewing in my head this year. One is about a world that is set entirely underwater, where people find refuge in settlements formed around creatures called airshells, which have a sort of reverse gravitational field and maintain a bubble of air around themselves. It's one of the first times I've had an idea that gradually developed from a rough thought I wasn't all that excited about to one that I think is excellent, and could make a great setting for a story. Normally my ideas start from one image which is really captivating, and immediately implies all the things that arise out of it. This idea took hard work to polish it and extrapolate from it, and I'm very proud of it.

The other idea was to create a hack of a Pokémon game that was haunted, and to flash the game to a cart and donate copies to some op shops. The eventual goal would be to turn it into an ARG of sorts.

If you've read this, even a small part of it, thanks. It's a ridiculous, self-indulgent wall of text, but it's filled with some of the most meaningful experiences I've had this year, so I hope you'll find some meaning in them too.

Oh, and if you are reading this... How in the world did you find it? I doubt there's anywhere on the web that links to it. Please comment and let me know.

Clophe

 clophe (kləʊf) n. A long, narrow pathway, walled on both sides but with light intruding, the end of which is obscured by the subtle curve of the path, along with the feelings of intrigue, beckoning, or portent which accompanies it.

The Legend of Hitchhiker's Rock

 Or alternatively, Zelda's Guide to Picnicking, The Legend of the Hanging Galaxy, etc.

I've been starting to appreciate uses of theme and symbolism a lot more in stories. Recently, I finished reading 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' and 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'.

Picnic at Hanging Rock is, I gather, a respected classic in Australian literature. It really didn't resonate with me though. While the prose was beautiful, and the characters were nice, the plot was some kind of pessimistic rubbish, and the themes, at least those I picked up on, didn't impact me at all. (I've heard that there's some obsession in the story with the idea of time, but it mustn't have been very pervasive, as I didn't notice it at all, except for her mentioning stopped clocks a number of times) I don't really feel like talking about this one any more though; I've already written a goodreads review, so it's off my chest. I'm just logging here that it's one more off my to-read list.

Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy was a lot of fun. I'll reflect my friend Taha's sentiment; it's one of the few times I've laughed out loud reading a book. It's a lot of fun to see someone fill a book with nonsense and treat it in a serious manner, exemplified perhaps best by the passage detailing the invention of the infinite improbability drive. Thematically speaking, it wasn't the complete nonsense I thought it would be. In fact, it very coherently weaves the central theme throughout the story. The idea is this: that eventually, the pursuit of truth is replaced by petty desires. For instance, when a computer is on the path to finding the answer to life, the universe, and everything, a pair of philosophers show up intending to stop it, because if the truth is found, then they will be out of a job. A couple of similar incidents occur in the story, but perhaps the clearest example is in the difference between the Encyclopaedia Galactica and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The Encyclopaedia Galactica tells you anything a respectable spacefarer could need to know. The Hitchhiker's Guide tells you where to get the best drinks, how to catch a ride on a Vogon spacecraft, and why the marketing department of the Sirius robotics corporation sucks. The Hitchhiker's Guide sells a lot better. It's through this lens that I can understand why a book ostensibly about the destruction of Earth, a stolen prototype spaceship, and a journey to a long-lost planet would be named after an in-world travel guide. Also, I bought this book in 2017, and finally got around to reading it. I'm glad to finally make even an inch of progress on backlog.

As for what I'm reading now:

• The Shadow Rising, Book Four of The Wheel of Time
• The French Revolution by Christopher Hibbert
• Something else which is suuuuper seeeeecret

The last couple of days I've been playing through The Legend of Zelda. I'll start by explaining why.

A few days ago, while listening to some of the music from Ocarina of Time, I became suddenly aware that I felt there were some mysterious underlying depths to the stories of these games. This is the sort of feeling I often get when I read a book or watch a movie and am growing an awareness of a theme. I feel like something is moving beneath the water, and it hints that there really is more to the iceberg. Some examples of things that made me feel this way:

• The 'Trinity' of Link, Zelda, and Ganon, of Courage, Wisdom, and Power, of Farore, Nayru, and Din
• The cycle of the world, wherein the same characters show up again and again in different ages. (and some thematic links to the wheel of time which I may explicate at some point)
• The constant reusing and remixing of music and ideas from previous games, hinting at underlying meanings. (Why is "Ballad of the Goddess" "Zelda's Lullaby" backwards?)

Somehow, the games repeatedly uses ideas that seem trite (The legendary hero must rise up to beat the dark lord and save the princess) and make them seem epic.

Part of the connection I see with The Wheel of Time is the way that many things seem to be preordained. A snippet I wrote in my notebook which seemed salient: "In the worlds of Brandon Sanderson and Andy Weir, the truth is something to be figured out, discovered, and sometimes, constructed. In the worlds of The Wheel of Time and The Legend of Zelda, the truth was determined a long time ago, and the hero's job is to rise to it."

In summary, the games do something in their storytelling which I don't completely understand, but I'm very intrigued by, so I'm going to do some research into the games.

That all being said, there isn't much storytelling to report on in the first game. The "Triforce with wisdom" was split into eight pieces. Get them all, go beat "Gannon", who weilds the "Triforce with power".

What I do have to report is on the game design philosophy, which is fascinating. You're really dropped in the deep end with this game, but the game is small enough that you will eventually stumble your way into understanding things a bit. There's almost no text, there are no tutorials, and you have to figure out a lot of the game by guesswork and trial and error. These things would be unacceptable in a modern game, but I actually think they work really well here. You die a lot at the start, but you eventually find your way into the first dungeon, and with enough trial and error, get your first heart container and triforce piece. And bit by bit, you gain confidence in the world, finding more and more secrets, and learning how to find things. Soon you're burning every suspicious looking bush and blowing up every suspicious stretch of wall. In a modern game, every single one of these things would have to be signposted, but in this game, keeping it unclear works perfectly.

After playing the original game, I can see why people say that Breath of the Wild has so much in common with it. But I daresay that this game has something to it that Breath of the Wild doesn't. Perhaps something that Breath of the Wild shouldn't. Maybe there's a Bennett Foddy principle hiding in here somewhere. That BotW wants you to beat it, while LoZ doesn't. As you gain mastery over LoZ, it feels like you have tamed the game. When I played through BotW, there was this mild anxiety that I was doing things the wrong way by, say, climbing around enemies rather than facing them head-on, or something like that. I never feel this way in LoZ. If I find an easier way to do something, then I take it, and it makes me feel clever for getting around it, rather than like a cheater.

I'm sure there's some discussion to be had around challenge vs. accessibility with this game, but from what I've played, I actually feel that the challenges I described above do not implicitly alienate anyone. Perhaps they make the game harder to get into. Back in the day, if you got a game, you milked it for all it was worth (even if it sucked), which perhaps gave the Nintendo something of a captive audience, but regardless, these challenges require very little in the way of physical or mental faculties to overcome, and reward patience and curiosity.

That being said, some of the combat is a little bit frustrating. (although some of that may be due to me playing on an emulator on a psp), and I struggle to tell whether I'm being impatient or if perhaps some of the enemy design leaves something to be desired. It's difficult for me to say whether adjusting the difficulty of the dungeons, or at least some of the enemies, would be a significant breach in the design philosophy of the game. Perhaps we'll see if I ever manage to finish the game.

Overall, the game is very good, and I'd be interested to try comparing it to similar games that came before and after to see what the gamedev climate was like and how this release affected it. I'm also excited to try some more Zelda games and see how these ideas evolve, and perhaps also start getting some answers to the questions that prompted this investigation. 

As for my life in general, we've moved back into our house, and life is fairly good, lockdown notwithstanding. I do find myself lonely, and I often don't want to do things on my own. Playing games on my own, or reading on my own, or especially watching movies on my own, feel like failures of some sort, like my brain is saying, "You're not hanging out with people? That's not good, you should be hanging out with people, therefore, you must be failing in some way." Often, the only thing I feel like doing when this happens is watching Youtube, as though I can go, "See, I'm just watching a 20 minute video, just filling in the gap between some other important things I'm doing." But the youtube sessions go on for hours, sometimes eclipsing all other activities in the day. I said life is fairly good, but perhaps I was wrong. I'm making myself a little sad just looking back on what my days have been like. Or maybe it's just that sad song I've had in my head all afternoon.

Anyway, I can tell that wallowing in my misery isn't going to help right now. I'd like to come up with some plan of action to snap out of it and get myself doing something useful, but everything feels a little pointless at the moment. I think what I'll do is pray about it and go to bed, and try to get a decent sleep. These three things are known to work miracles in improving my mood.

Itta and Other Hard Games

 I finally have some progress to report. I've completed a game from my backlog. (although I did purchase more games in the time it took to complete... oh well) The game is called Itta, by Glass Revolver. Itta is a bullet hell twin stick shooter about a little girl named Itta stuck in a hollow, haunting afterlife created by a self-serving deity.

To preface this post, it is important to know that I am bad at games. This is not merely a matter of lack of experience. I am very game literate. This is a matter of my reaction time. When I did an IQ test a number of years back, I scored a full 20 points lower (more than one standard deviation) in processing speed than in any other category of intelligence on the test, and almost 40 points lower than my total IQ.

All that being said, the conundrum is that I love playing hard games. I've played through super meat boy, celeste, hollow knight, the secret ending of cave story (twice), Dogworld, and now Itta. The main difference for me completing these games is how long I take. I sometimes like to check howlongtobeat before I buy a game to see whether it will be too much of a time commitment or too short to be worth the effort, but I've also used it to compare my speed at completing these games relative to others. For instance, it took me about 45 hours to complete the main story of hollow knight, where the expected time is 26 hours (although I swear I spent 20 hours on the watcher knights alone 😠). It took me 22 hours to beat Dogworld, where most people finished it in 6 or so. Itta took me more than 10 hours to beat every boss, compared to the expected 5.

I'm a little slower than everyone else, so maybe I shouldn't be too hard on myself for not working through my backlog. I think it's understandable to be loathe to start on a game when I might play hours without making progress. It's a strange twisted logic that makes me feel like I'm there to serve the games, and not the other way around. I should just be happy when I do enjoy playing them.

Speaking of which, I did enjoy Itta. It took a while before I could figure out strategies to aim and move at the same time. I know that might sound stupid, but it's actually very non-trivial. Not being able to aim and move at the same time in first person games is a common problem that first time gamers have. The reality is, it's not really possible at that point to think about doing both at the same time, they're both new experiences. Even now, having played lots of first person games, trying to do both at once tends to decrease my accuracy at both activities. What I found when I was playing Itta is that I developed little micro strategies to avoid having to focus on two things at once. For instance, I would aim my weapon roughly in the direction of the enemy, and hold it in that direction, I would then adjust my player position so that the weapon's ray lined up with the enemy, before firing. To this end, the cannon weapon was very useful. Apart from learning how the bullet patterns of each boss worked, it was also helpful to learn not to panic just cause there are bullets nearby. The hitboxes are very generously small.

My other greatest enemy was the controller. For the first bit of the game, I was playing on my Joy Cons. This was okay for the first bit, but after an hour or so my hands would start to hurt. When I was finally able to retrieve my Pro controller from my house (which is still being renovated), the hand pain wasn't an issue, and it was also slightly easier not to make slip-ups.

Anyway, I can cross one more game off the list (out of like three hundred).

Changes

 There have been a few changes in my living situation. It'll resolve itself in a couple of weeks, but until then, I'm not getting much done out of all those things I listed in my first post.

Some of the things I have been doing include:

• Playing Chess matches with my Pop.
• Reading
• Organising an Analytic Number Theory reading group
• Talking with a friend about the game he's making

So certainly not a waste of time.

Apart from that, I have a seemingly interminable list of ideas. Here's a list of some from just the last couple of weeks:

• An underwater exploration game for Haunted PS1's summer game jam
• A fantasy Action-Adventure game for GBA about the stories told by the sister of a boy with cancer
• A podcast about the most interesting people in history

I always work on these ideas for about a day before forgetting about them and moving on, which is a shame, because I'd like to complete a project at one point. Is the problem that I can't commit to an idea? Is it that I'm having ideas for big projects when I should be focussing on small? Or should I be trying to think of ideas until I have one that really sticks?

To round out the article, here's a picture taken from a nearby overpass. 

I must admit, I'm a little scared of never actually making something. Like I'll never work on a project for more than a couple of days, and end up never completing anything because of my fickleness. It just feels like every day, I want to make something else, and every time I return to an old project, the frustrations that made me give it up are still there, and just as insurmountable.

Maybe I need to go back to an old project with a new mindset, and poke and prod the ideas until they yield, just to show myself that it can be done.

Home

 I went for a bike ride today. I wanted to go somewhere I hadn't before, so I continued all the way across towards the next suburb over. I saw a water tower way up on a hill nearby. I tried to take a photo of it, but I couldn't really capture how big and powerful it looked. If I got the right angle and a good lens, maybe I could give it a go. 

I might try and ride there next. I might've gone there today if I was on my other bike, which is better for off-road stuff. As I went further into this town, it seemed to become more and more industrial. There weren't many restaurants, and the shops were mainly for more specialty products; Electrical, cars, hardware. There was even a shop seemingly exclusively for GPS systems. How that stays afloat, I have no idea. I thought perhaps they must be laundering money. I actually came in this direction to visit an electronics store and enquire about temperature controlled soldering irons. I'm relatively new to electronics, but I'd heard they were essential to any projects involving very fine soldering, and I have one such project in mind, which you might see in subsequent posts.

There weren't any places to lock up my bike, so I went into a nearby street to find a fence to lock it against. I found myself in a little cul-de-sac nestled between several factories, and locked it one one of the metal fences. Just above my bike on the fence, hanging between the fenceposts, was a little spiderweb. When I looked at it, one word came to my mind: "Home."

It's funny that I was so focussed on how industrial the area was, but it was as good a home as any for the spider.

Anyway, I'll put some more of the photos I've taken while cycling recently below.

A footbridge over a gully, dusk silhouetting a tree, an alley, and sunset from the highway overpass.

Purpose of this blog

Hi, I'm Tom. I've been thinking lately I want to have somewhere to post about miscellaneous topics and pretend that someone is listening to me. I figure that if I have in mind an imaginary crowd of people hanging on to my every word, then I might perhaps be able to get something done for once. Here's a list of things I want to get done / topics I might talk about here.

• Work on game development
• Work on electronics projects
• Keep record of my attempts to get through my book backlog
• Work through my games backlog
• Do some story writing
• Logic puzzles
• Maths and physics
• Photography

If any of these things interest you, then you're a grown adult and can decide for yourself whether you want to read my blog and don't need me to tell you what to do.