I feel like too much of my idle time is spent being annoyed with social media. It’s impossible to quit, even if the recent Facebook privacy bullshit makes my blood boil. And I’m getting bored of myself telling everyone I’m taking a break. There’s nothing more annoying than logging into Facebook with the sole express purpose of telling everyone that I’m taking a Facebook break, especially since my “breaks” tend to last about 45 minutes.
So, then, I think I’ve finally started to get a handle on how I want to deal with social media. Which is to say: I’m gonna start posting here more often (or, at least, as often as I can), and probably only here; this blog gets pushed to my FB and Twitter and Tumblr (which I think I still have?), and so I won’t necessarily vanish, but that’s gonna be about it.
So it’s gonna get a bit more LiveJournal-y around here, is what I’m trying to say. Be warned.
So the boy turned 5 on March 31st, and then he promptly had the flu for the next 5 days, and so last week kinda just fell apart. Both my wife and I had been teetering on the edge of coming down with it, too, though I think it’s over now. His fifth trip around the Sun can only get better from here, right? Let’s hope.
Now that the basement is back – and better than ever – I’ve been rearranging my music area. The big news is that I’m getting a brand-new iMac delivered next week, while I’m home on a mini-staycation. This means that, at long last, I can finally start getting back to work in earnest.
I’ve been re-listening to the stuff I recorded back in 2015, when this album was really getting started (gasp – has it really been three years already?), and while some of it has gone a bit stale, I’m still really happy with quite a lot of it. And so to be able to return to it with working equipment and a fresh attitude in a really pleasant environment is basically a dream come true. This is all I’ve wanted since we moved out to the ‘burbs in the first place. Believe me, I will be Instagramming the shit out of my work space once the computer is set up and ready to go.
I can’t begin to tell you guys how often I’ve considered giving up and just throwing the demos up on Soundcloud or whatever. I’m really happy with this stuff but I’ve been so frustrated in my inability to finish it, whether it’s making the formal transition from demo to actual recording, in a real studio with real musicians and a real engineer, or even just finishing one (1) goddamned set of lyrics that don’t make me gag. I don’t think I can afford to bring a full band into the picture, but ideally I’d like to send my finished tracks to a producer I know for a proper mix – I may have to raise some funds for that, but we’ll get there when we get there. The point is – it’s been three years since I started this thing, and I still like it. So I’m gonna get it out there.
In the course of getting my workspace set up, I stumbled across some hilarious photos/headshots that must’ve been taken in the late 90s, and MAN. I have some thoughts.
So there’s a couple things to point out here.
- As I’ve probably mentioned here, this album that I’m working on is inspired by a somewhat traumatic re-read of my college and post-college diaries. And those photos that you see here are, in fact, from that very same time period. All the neurotic insanity that I was scribbling down on a super-shitty word processor was coming out of the dude in the photos above. This is hilarious.
- I keep joking that it’s only taken me 42 years to finally figure out my look, but it’s absolutely goddamned true. The doofus in the pictures above had absolutely no idea how to look good. I never truly felt comfortable in my own skin and clothes and outward presentation until very, very recently, and it’s weird to see these photos and barely recognize myself in them.
- I’ve spent most of my last few years of therapy sessions talking about this period of my life (1993-1999), because it’s where, for lack of a better term, the most stuff happened to me. The best stuff, the worst stuff, the most inane stuff, the weirdest stuff, the scariest stuff, the most heartbreaking stuff. (My life before college was tumultuous, as is everyone’s, but it wasn’t particularly noteworthy, and it’s been relatively drama-free since 2000, when I met the woman who would become my wife.) And it just kills me to think that during this era, I looked like that.
*sigh*
Not much to report on the book front. I’ve been re-reading the first two books of Brandon Sanderson’s “Stormlight Archive” series because I haven’t yet read the third, and even though I like them they get a bit long. You’d think that I’d be able to re-read these books a bit faster, since I’ve already read them, but instead I’m kinda just putting it off altogether. It is what it is.
Finally, a few words about Far Cry 5.
I’m around 22 hours into the campaign; I’ve beaten 1 of the 3 sub-bosses, but I’m mostly just screwing around with the world itself and doing everything I can to avoid actually dealing with the story. This is one of the few times where I’m actually quite grateful that this open world is so stuffed with things to do, because it makes the avoidance of the narrative that much easier to handle. So while I’m only a third of the way into the campaign, I’ve found dozens of underground bunkers and collectible items and weird side missions, and that shit is great! So much fun.
But my god, I’m not sure I’ve ever been so compelled to keep playing a game that is so unrelenting in its narrative awfulness. There’s so many other directions this game could have gone, and it annoys me to no end that they went in this particular direction instead. To be fair, it definitely has that “over-the-top” Far Cry vibe, but it’s not rooted in anything that is relevant to this moment in time, which is frustrating if only because it has so many relevant things in it. (There is a side mission that involves you recovering what could only be “the pee tape”, though why it’s in a cult outpost in rural Montana instead of a Russian hard drive in a well-protected safehouse is… well, who knows.)
Whatever; this is the game we’ve got. Being angry at it because it’s not telling the story I’d like it to tell isn’t fair. And yet to take it on its own terms is madness. Nothing about the story makes any sense. Nothing about this fictionalized Montana, where literally everyone who isn’t a cult member has a stash of heavy weaponry and an underground bunker and yet are wildly impotent in the face of danger, makes any sense. Any activity that requires talking to a non-player character is frustrating and awful and ridiculous.
AND YET IT’S SO PRETTY AND THE NON-LINEAR STUFF IS SO GOOD.
There are two somewhat spoiler-heavy articles that I’ve read recently that articulate my problems with the game better than I ever could. And honestly, now that I’ve had the ending spoiled for me, I feel a little better in how I approach the game in the first place. Anyway, if you’d like to know what I’m dealing with, and you don’t mind INCREDIBLY MAJOR SPOILERS, I heartily encourage you to read the following:
- Kotaku: A Spoiler-Filled Chat about Far Cry 5’s Ending
- Polygon: Let’s Talk About the Ending of Far Cry 5
- RPS: Far Cry 5’s Interrupting Story Ruins Everything
- RPS: Far Cry 5 blossoms into something wonderful once you kill the plot-baddies
Shouts From The Couch 