Category: non-gaming

goals and whatnot

My wife and I were hanging out the other day, and she asked me what I’d hope to accomplish for myself in 2020. I thought about it for a while, and it occurred to me that the mere act of having to think about what I’d like to accomplish next year meant that I didn’t have a clear goal already in mind. Which felt unusual.

I did come up with an answer, eventually, which was this: I would like to have some sort of reckoning with myself and figure out what exactly I’m doing, creatively speaking. Like I said above, having to think about what I’d like to accomplish is odd, because for the last several years the answer has been the same – I want to finish this album I’ve been working on. Even if it just means taking the 4-5 songs that are almost done and putting out an EP, rather than a full-length album, I still want to get this stuff off of my hard drive and into other people’s ears.

I’m not sure why I stopped, unless it’s just that I can’t trust myself to keep myself motivated. When I was in bands, I had my band mates there to kick me in the ass – indeed, we kicked each other’s asses all the time. Working with other people meant that we could each pick up each other’s slack. We could fix problems that the others couldn’t see/hear. We could support each other when we felt directionless. And if nothing else, we could just plug in and turn up and see what happened.

It’s harder to do music by myself, which I also understand is ironic if only because the downside of working with collaborators is the loss of total creative control. If I know how I want everything to sound, it’s easier and faster to do it myself. It’s just that, these days at least, I don’t know what I want to sound like. I could finish the 4-5 songs that are pretty much ready to go, but I couldn’t tell you if they accurately reflect what I sound like right now. I don’t even know what I sound like right now. I know what artists I listen to that sound like what I’d like to sound like (Tycho immediately comes to mind), but I also know that I listen to tons of different things and all that stuff is quite literally all over the map – my Spotify Discovery algorithm is still pretty good at guessing what’s going to hit my brain the right way, but how it gets from Japanese prog/punk to indie songwriter to Zappa circa 1973 is far beyond me.

I’d thought about doing NaNoWriMo this year, because writing prose is easier than writing lyrics and I’m less inclined to beat myself up during the process and I thought that maybe the simple act of throwing thousands of words out of my head into some sort of coherent order might help me figure out some lyrics; but the thing about NaNo (for me, at least) is that I need to get myself prepared, and I didn’t even really consider the idea of doing NaNo until November had already started. And the last time I tried doing NaNo, I nearly gave myself a nervous breakdown.

So, maybe I’ll try doing the RPM challenge again in February? I can give myself a head start and re-record the songs that are still works in progress in the interim? I can try to settle into some sort of evening routine?

I don’t know. But I need to do something. At the very least, I need to do just enough to be able to go get my taxes done next year and not feel like a fraud by declaring myself to still being a musician.

i should be telling you this in person

I had something of an epiphany this weekend, and I’m still trying to figure out how to process it.  Let me back up a second and explain.

So on Friday night, the wife and I actually left the kid with his grandparents and stayed out and about in Manhattan after work; one of my oldest and bestest friends was part of a gallery opening, and so we went over to check it out.  And a whole bunch of other people showed up, and then we went out for drinks afterwards, and I realized that it was the first time I’d seen some of these people – some of my best and closest friends – in years.

I’m an introverted person by nature, and my move to the suburbs has only made it easier to be a hermit.  But the truth is that I’d also been crippled by some serious anxiety issues for a number of years, which often times made it impossible for me to leave my apartment.

And yet, even though I’m an introvert, that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m shy.  I’ve been oversharing on the internet since my first LiveJournal blog back in 2000-2001.  The internet has made it far easier for me to compensate for my introversion and my social anxiety.   After all, there’s no real need for you to call me and see how I’m doing if I’m already telling you.

So my epiphany this weekend was about realizing just how much I tend to overshare, especially on places like Facebook, and how perhaps Facebook isn’t the best place for that kind of stuff.   There is no adequate substitute for a quality in-person conversation with a good friend.

And so maybe it’s time for me to get off my couch a little more.

a few words from the sad guy, plus some new (old) songs

So I’ve been kinda fucked up lately.  With the news.  Like, really kinda fucked up.  As in, I am really needing to go to therapy on Saturday.  I want to clarify:  I’m not in a dangerous place.  But over the last few weeks, with news shit really starting to get, like, absurd, I’ve been aware of my face having the sort of thousand-yard stare that can accompany the late stages of devastated, turn-out-the-lights-and-listen-to-Disintegration-over-headphones teenaged heartache.  There’s really no other word for it than sad.  But in a really deep, really fucked up, please get me offa this thing sort of way.

We all have different coping mechanisms.  I’ve been too frazzled to play video games lately, which is frustrating.  I’ve been reading very escapist fiction, but only a chapter or two at a time – and I’m also reading two collections of short stories, and alternating between all three or four at any given time.  I can’t focus, is what I’m saying.  I get home, I put Henry to bed, I kiss my wife, and then I get just sad and also perhaps a little or a lot very stoned in my basement while I listen to music or try to think about maybe one day writing lyrics to songs that I haven’t finished recording from three years ago.

SUDDEN TANGENT:  You know what, fuck it.  It’s killing me that I haven’t finished this album after all this time, and so I need to do something about it.  All these tracks have been slowly burning tiny holes in my iPhone since 2015.   So rather than release a B-side of a B-side, I’m gonna throw on one of the stuff that I actually really like and still intend to finish.

So this thing right here is a loop I recorded on a 4-track through my looping pedal in, like, 2001.

 

So that’s a thing I’ve always kinda liked.  I later reworked into a bridge section for a latter-day Good Evening song in 2006-7, and then I kinda just kept it in the back of my mind; when I signed up for the RPM challenge in 2015, and for lack of any better ideas, I decided to revisit it and see if I could fit it into something new.  I never did find a definitive beginning and/or end to it, but the section itself still sounds quite lovely to me:

 

And then this other thing, which is just a fun doodle of an idea that is perhaps too-obviously informed by The Forms, also happens to be the most recent substantial thing I’ve recorded here in Maplewood, (but again, that only means November 2015):

 

OK.  You are now the first people in the world (aside from 3-4 beta listeners from three years ago) to have heard that.  Thank you for indulging me.  I HAVE PLENTY MORE AND WILL PUT THEM UP, PERHAPS LATER IN THIS VERY POST THAT I AM PROCRASTINATING FROM FINISHING.

[END TANGENT]

So I’ve been sad, is the thing, and it’s frustrating as all hell, because it’s a sadness that exists beyond me; it’s not a sadness that I can control.  It is a sadness of the very reality that we are currently living in, more specifically the cruel feeling of hopelessness about it all, and that even with the amazing and surprising and good-heart-feeling election victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, it’s immediately driven back by the 1-2 punch of the SCOTUS mess and the mass shooting at a Maryland newspaper (which, I want to make clear, I’m writing this at 9:23 while very stoned and don’t yet know if a motive has been uncovered – the more important issue is that, in the words of @igorvolsky, “any motive + easy access to firearms = death & horror.”

And so anyway, about half an hour ago or so I went upstairs to pee and get some ice cream because I’m sad and binge-eating and munched out and I was looking at Facebook and saw this video.

Now, look.  I think Donald Trump is, perhaps, the most dangerous man in American history.  He is vile and repellant and morally unfit and profoundly unethical and we all know it.  There isn’t a day that goes by lately where I don’t spend my day within a deep and disturbing dread that something truly awful is about to happen.

But the thing I find most loathsome about him – despite his endless blustering and bravado and chest-bumping – is that he’s a fucking coward.  This shooting in Maryland is tragic and horrible and he is so scared about having to deal with a real crisis that he just keeps on walking.  He’s the President of the United States, don’t tell me he didn’t yet know.   He absolutely knew.  And he was too scared to speak to the press to offer any words of condolences.  He has no empathy for other human beings in pain, and so there is nothing for him to gain out of offering solace to the grieving.  So he just walks away.

I was going to get into a whole big rant about it.  I was gonna just vent and spew and vomit all over the internet.  This is a very small and insignificant part of the internet, the whole of which you’d never call pristine, but whatever – now I’ve just covered my little tiny part of it in venom.

Then I decided to not do that.  Maybe I’d write about not writing.  Because even though I’m hurting, I don’t know that throwing my hurt onto you is the right thing.  I’m not saying I should be keeping this to myself – like I said above, I’m really looking forward to Saturday morning’s therapy session.  And so I worry about having my only contribution to this shrieking nightmare to simply be another lonely howl at the moon.

I think what I really needed to do is just tell you guys that I love you.  Times are fucking terrible right now, man, and it fucking sucks.  But you’re not alone.  I’m not alone.  We’re not alone.  I love you guys.  I need to remember to love you guys more.  I need to remember to keep love in my heart.

(And then, after some cleansing breaths, I say:  if they go low, continue to kick them in the face.)

Spooky Validation: Disc Theory and the Akashic Records

(deep breath)

OK.  I’m going to re-write a thing I’ve talked about in various other, older blogs, about one of the most pivotal events of my life.  It is a weird thing, and if you were to read this and say “I think you’ve smoked too much pot”, I wouldn’t necessarily disagree.  But it’s still true.

However, to paraphrase the narrator of the Captain Underpants books:  before I tell you that thing, I have to tell you this thing.

I have always been fascinated by, for lack of a better term, “weird stuff”.  ESP, astral projection, UFOs, Freemasonry, the secret wisdom of the ancients.  This goes back to when I was a little kid, too – I remember having conversations with friends in my neighborhood about spooky psychic stuff and really, really believing it.  I was a devoted fan of In Search Of…, and when I was in junior high I begged my mom to get me the Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown books (which she then got rid of when I was in college, and I’ll always be ever-so-slightly bitter about that).   You may remember those books from the ridiculous commercials:

This was more than just catnip for my easily-distracted pubescent brain; this was the good stuff.  I didn’t necessarily know what to do with it, but I absorbed it anyway.  As I got older I started reading more advanced versions of these things; in retrospect it’s easy to understand why I gravitated towards conspiracy-minded books like Foucault’s Pendulum and The Illuminatus! Trilogy, both of which are explicitly fictional – which is to say, the fictional characters in these books of fiction are creating these fictions within the books themselves – and yet resonate with the weight of ancient truths.

The irony in all this is that I have not a single psychic bone in my body.  In fact, I have, like, negative psychic ability. And not for lack of trying.  If I flip a coin, I will pick the wrong side nearly every time, even if I change my mind mid-flip.  I remember playing with Zener cards in my bedroom for hours and I always and consistently struck out every time.

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There is psychic ability around me, for sure.  My wife claims to have a bit of it, and she says it runs in her family.   My uncle, who is… um… troubled, used to tell me about his experiences in the astral plane.  I dated girls in college who read my tarot, and while they didn’t know each other at all, they were all fairly consistent in their readings; one girl in particular gave me one of the most detailed and accurate palm readings I’ll ever get in my life.

More recently, as you know if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, a few months ago our basement flooded, and on the day that we received the repair estimates (which were in the thousands of dollars), I went to get the mail and saw that I’d received a rather sizable check from my aunt, completely out of the blue.  And when I called her to thank her, she just said “Jeremy, I just had a flash and I knew you needed this, and I wanted you to have it.”  The thing is, the check was sent via regular mail, which means she sent it before the flood had even happened.

I am, by nature, a skeptical person.  I am agnostic, at best, in terms of religion; I do not have to believe in science, because science is not something you believe in.  But when it comes to this kind of stuff, well…

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I went to my one and only Grateful Dead show when I was in college; me and my bandmates went to MSG and ate a whole bunch of mushrooms and had a really good time for about an hour.  (I should also mention that this was my first time eating mushrooms.)  During the break between the first and second sets, though, I started feeling very weird.  The hallucinations were coming on pretty furiously, and for the most part I could handle them; but things started to go south when I realized that I’d been having the same conversation over and over in a loop for about 15 minutes.  Suddenly, time was not linear, and that freaked me the fuck out.  My friend saw I was having a bad time, and he walked me back to my dorm room – which was a good hour-long walk.  I felt like nothing was real; I had no way of discerning whether I was actually walking downtown or if I was a disembodied brain in a jar imagining that I was walking downtown.  With the benefit of hindsight, I suppose it doesn’t really matter, but at the time it meant everything.  I felt like I was going insane.

This feeling of anxiety ebbed on and off for about 2-3 weeks.  And when I felt like I’d finally come through the other side, I realized that I would never be able to return to the mindset I had before that night.  I had been changed, utterly and profoundly, and it took quite a bit longer for me to accept that.

Around this time, I had a motley group of friends – filmmakers, actors, musicians, writers, directors – that would go to a diner near our dorm late at night, and order coffee and smoke cigarettes and write poetry and song lyrics and such in our journals, and we’d talk for hours about stuff.  We’d talk about theater, we’d talk about Capital-A Art, we’d talk about life.

One night my friend and I came up with something called Disc Theory.  Disc Theory was a way of reconciling Fate and Freewill.  The idea went something like this:

Imagine your life is a compact disc.  (The metaphor immediately breaks here, because (a) some of you grew up without CDs, and (b) if Blu-Rays existed at the time I might’ve used that instead.  But this was the mid-90s, and so you’re going to imagine your life is a CD.)  You are born:  the universe has pressed “play” on your CD in the cosmic jukebox.  You die:  the CD is finished.  Your life, as you experience it, is the music.  When you meet someone you’ve never met before and you immediately hit it off, it’s because your music is in harmony with each other; likewise, if you immediately get a bad vibe from a stranger and you can’t explain why, it’s because your music is dissonant.

The Fate and Freewill parts go something like this:  the music on the CD was already recorded (fate), but you’re hearing it for the first time, so you don’t know what to expect (freewill).  You are allowed to make choices in your life; even if the choice was already made, it doesn’t affect your ability to make the choice in the first place.  Even if you choose to not choose.

It’s clumsy, in retrospect, but at the time it made an astounding amount of sense.  And even if it’s silly, I do like the idea of the cosmic jukebox.

Which is why I feel like I just got punched in my third eye.

I am currently reading Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government’s Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis, and holy shit is it messed up.  This book purports to be the true story behind the US Military’s dalliances with ESP, astral projection, remote viewing, etc., and even if only half of what’s in this book is true, it’s mindblowing.

Anyway, Chapter 19 in Phenomena mentions something called the Akashic Records – which is a way of viewing what one participant called The Matrix. (One presumes this name was devised well before the movie.)  What are the Akashic Records?  Well, according to this site:

The Akashic Records are the energetic records of all souls about their past lives, the present lives, and possible future lives. Each soul has its Akashic Records, like a series of books with each book representing one lifetime. The Hall (or Library) of the Akashic Records is where all souls’ Akashic Records are stored energetically. In other words, the information is stored in the Akashic field (also called zero point field). The Akashic Records, however, are not a dry compilation of events. They also contain our collective wisdom.

Holy shit, is what I’m saying.

bloggin’

So this New Yorker article popped up in my Twitter feed and got me thinking about “the end of blogs”, although my perspective is much different than the essay’s author.  Her piece is about the failure of the blog (specifically The Hairpin and The Awl) to generate self-sustaining revenue, and as such, it is becoming more and more difficult for the most interesting writing on the internet to find a place to live.

Whereas I’ve never blogged for money, or exposure, or really for any other reason than I enjoyed keeping a diary, and was amused by the idea of making it public.  And LiveJournal was just getting underway right when I started feeling this way, and so since 2001 I’ve been blogging in one form or another.   I left LJ in 2009, moved to blogger for a little bit, and I’ve had 2 or 3 blogs here at WordPress, each with a different focus.  This one has become my default, though, and so it’s here where I’ve decided to post this.

I’ve never been under any illusions that my writing was worth anything.  I’ve said this before in other places but it bears repeating here:  I have something of a Salieri complex – I imagine myself a better writer than I know myself to be.  This used to bother me a great deal, but now I just accept it as fact, and in the meantime I try to get better when I can.  The beauty of blogging, though, was that it was never about how good you were as a writer; I was naturally drawn to good writers but I was more inclined to read about people with similar interests, similar senses of humor, similar points of reference, and who could write honestly about what they thought about.  I made friends through LJ, real friends, and it wasn’t bullshit; I still love those people, and even if our LJ community is gone, we’re still in each other’s social media bubbles, such as they are.

I guess the point is that the word “blog” means something much different to me than it does to other professional writers, and our purposes were never aligned, and yet the feel of a blog is still something necessary and vital.  For me, I find that the writing on the internet that I most enjoy has a personal feel to it, where it might be rough around the edges but it feels authentic because it’s not bullshit.  Its driving force is honesty, not cleverness.  I’ve always been envious of people who can be clever while also being honest, and lord knows I’ve tried to do that, too, though I’ve never been particularly successful at it.

In any event, this is going to be a more traditional blog entry for me, rather than what I usually post here.  Feel free to skip; or, alternately, feel free to keep reading.

I also felt compelled to write about blogging because the tweet directly following the New Yorker link was one of these personal list-type things – in fact, these were the sorts of things that I used to call “memes”, rather than whatever they are today.  I ‘m gonna do this one, here, because why not.  It’s been a while since I took any personal inventory out here in public, and the afternoon is a bit slow.

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1.  I have two Twitter handles, as it happens, but the primary one is @couchshouts, which I’d started in an attempt to boost this blog’s visibility (and also to keep my personal twitter feed and my videogame feed separate).  I’m sure the name explains itself.

2. Who inspires me?  Hmm.  This is a tricky one.  I guess the context matters; I have musical inspirations, writing inspirations, general “being a better person” inspirations.  I don’t honestly know if I can answer this one at this particular moment in time.  I could’ve answered it in college in about 10 seconds, but my life and my perspective have changed so radically since then that I can barely recognize my college-age self.  If I’m honest with myself, though, and ask myself who inspires me to be a better person?  Well, that’s my wife and my son.

3.  Do I care what others think about me?  Not nearly as much as I used to, because I’m not trying to impress anybody.

4.  What am I most looking forward to?  This one’s actually pretty easy – I can’t wait to see who my son turns into as he gets older.  He’s a super-sweet almost-5-year-old boy, but who he’s going to be at 8, 11, 14, 18… I can’t wait.  Even though I never want him to grow up.

5.  One life rule that I follow:  I alluded to this in the intro, and it’s something I’ve said a lot here and elsewhere, and it’s something that my high school English teacher said somewhat off-handedly, perhaps not realizing that he was about to drop a seismic charge on me:  it is better to be honest than clever.

6.  My dream job:  I would’ve loved to have been able to pay my bills through music.  And if I were me, now, but 25 years younger, I would’ve wanted to at least try to break into game journalism (especially since I could live on a shit salary back then).  I don’t have a dream job now; I just need something stable and secure and something I don’t need to take home with me when I leave.

7.  Which fictional character do I wish I could meet?  Hmm.  When I was younger I had developed a fierce crush on Becky Thatcher from the Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer books, but it’s not like I would’ve known what to say or do with her.  Nowadays I suppose I’d be very interested in having an elegant luncheon with the titular character of “A Gentleman in Moscow.”

8. As a child, I wanted to be an actor.  I got lucky in that regard; I knew I wanted to act, and I was good enough at the time to get good enough parts to make me think that I could actually do it as a real job, and I got into college to study it, and then, of course, I gave up on it.

9.  If I were a cartoon character… I never watched enough cartoons to have a good answer.

10.  What skill would I like to master?  I wish I could draw.  Like, at all.  The best late-night stoned doodling I ever did was still just stick figures.

11.  In what situation would I feel most out of place?  Well, you’re talking to someone who still struggles mightily with social anxiety – who still takes half an Ativan just to leave the house in the morning – so you might say that I feel out of place every time I leave my house.

12.  An artist that I really like but rarely admit to liking?  Well, if you look at my answer to #3, I don’t really care what other people think.  My first answer would be Genesis, but I think I’ve talked about them a lot.  Can I say that there are a few songs on Pete Yorn’s first album that I still, to this day, adore tremendously?

13.  What gets me fired up?  There are several ways to interpret the context of this question.  Politically, my #1 hot-button issue is gun control.  But if I need to get super-excited about something in a hurry – like if I’m about to perform on stage – I’ll take a shot of ice-cold Jagermeister (don’t judge me).

14.  I am not a part of any fandoms that I’m aware of.  I am a 42 year old man.  I like what I like and I don’t need to commune with other people over that stuff the way that I used to.  If I really need to talk about something, chances are pretty good I’ll talk about it here.

15.  What do I do to get rid of stress?  Well… I play video games and listen to music and read books and also I smoke pot, often.

16.  The idea of this question is what caused me to have a very, very bad mushroom experience in college, and it’s why I have a hard time watching “Groundhog Day”.  But if I were to get stuck in a loop and relive one day over and over again, and I was able to not be freaked out, I’d pick a day early in my relationship with my wife, back when we were carefree and could sleep in and would spend whole days at a movie theater sneaking into other screenings and then having a lovely dinner.  Or, alternately, I’d pick a day from one of my childhood summers at a music camp in Maine, which were some of the best days I ever had.

17.  How quickly do I jump to conclusions about people?  Almost immediately.

18.  If I were a doll, what accessories would I be sold with?  A Kindle, a game controller, and a guitar.

19.  What have I done in my life that’s given me the most satisfaction?  The easy answer would be that I’ve married my best friend and we’ve had a wonderful kid together, but the more truthful answer is that I’ve done a ton of work to make myself a better person to better appreciate my relationships with my wife and kid, because for the longest time I was trapped by anxiety and bad stomachs and insecurity and everything else, and I’m not like that (that much) anymore.

20.  The worst thing to put in a pinata would have to be soiled diapers.

21.  The biggest waste of money I’ve ever seen is literally everything that Donald Trump has ever been a part of.

22.  A common misconception that I hate hearing repeated as fact is that Donald Trump cares about anything beyond himself.

23.  The best place to go to meet awesome people?  You’re asking the wrong person, dude.

24.  What food do I crave the most?  Well, let me tell you – I had to go on a gluten-free diet a few years ago and so even though the GF industry has taken great strides in recent years, I am sad that I will never get to experience a real NYC bagel ever again.

25.  I don’t care enough about TV to re-watch anything with any interest, although my wife and I do occasionally call up certain episodes of “Arrested Development” just because they’re so goddamned funny.

26.  Among my friends, what am I best known for?  I have literally no idea what my friends think of me, if they think of me at all.  I don’t mean that in a self-pitying way; I just mean that I have absolutely no idea what they think of me.

27.  Who of my friends is most like me?  Hmm.  Well, my wife is nothing like me but I’m positive that we can communicate telepathically; we finish each other’s sentences all the goddamned time – hell, we start each other’s sentences because we think the same way.

28.  The most traumatizing moment of my life?  Toss-up between my parents getting divorced, my aforementioned bad trip experience, and the breakup I had in early 2000 before I started dating my wife.

29.  The best lesson I’ve learned from a work of fiction?  Don’t eat mold.

30.  Something I’ll never do again?  Any drug harder than pot, that’s for sure.

I don’t watch Twitch streams and I don’t really listen to podcasts, but I had an idea for a Twitch stream wherein I’d play some sort of game that didn’t require sound, and then I’d put on my favorite songs from that week’s Spotify Discovery playlist and talk about why each song feels necessary.  But apparently this is an awful idea, already done to death by a billion obnoxious bros, and so I’m not gonna.

At some point I’ve gotta talk about the Aziz Ansari stuff, because of all the horror stories that have emerged since Harvey Weinstein, the Aziz story is the one that I recognize.  I don’t know that I was ever that forward with girls that I used to be with, but I know I was more forward than I should’ve been, most certainly ignoring signals that couldn’t have been more obvious, and I still feel disgusted with myself all these years later for not acknowledging them and backing off.  I owe a lot of people apologies for that.  (I have apologized to some of them over the years, and some of them have forgiven me, and some of them have used my apology as the basis for a stand-up routine literally a year after I originally emailed it, and it is what it is.)  My son and I will talk about this stuff as he gets older, and I will do my absolute best to make sure he doesn’t act the same way.  I’d like to think that he sees my relationship with his mom as a good place to start from; that’s all I can hope for, at any rate.

sighs and goodbyes

Here we are, the biggest day of the nerd year.  Stranger Things 2, Super Mario Odyssey, Wolfenstein 2, Assassin’s Creed Origins.

But my head and my heart are elsewhere.

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I think we’re going to be saying goodbye tomorrow to our sweet Lily, Lilybug, Lilymonster, Lily von Pooten, Lil’ Flooferbutt.   It’s the right decision, even though it’s agonizing and heartbreaking.  It sucks.  She’s 13 years old, and she’s been in pain for a while, and dragging this out seems heartless rather than letting her go, peacefully, quietly.

I will be happy to discuss all of the goodies described in the first paragraph at some point.  (I should also mention that in my sadness/hysteria I may have ordered a Nintendo Switch and Zelda and Mario, so I will actually be able to speak to all of those aforementioned goodies.)  But I can’t right now.  Right now I just want to give her more gentle pets and bellyrubs and snuggles.  And instead I’m stuck at work.

Lilybug, you’re my super sweet little dog, and I’ll love you forever and ever and ever.

on Arrival

My wife and I are home, sick, again, as we’ve been all week.  It’s been a shitty week.

We just finished watching Arrival.  A few quick thoughts:

1. One of the problems of being parents who are afraid of hiring babysitters is that we don’t get to go to the movies as often as we’d like.  Which is why, of the 9 nominees for Best Picture, we’ve only seen Hell or High Water, and now Arrival.  I can’t properly assess how it will fare at the Oscars, but I can say this:  it’s one of the best science fiction movies I’ve ever seen.  Even having read the source material beforehand, I was moved and astonished and amazed.  I will watch anything that Denis Villenueve directs from here on out, but I should also mention the cinematography, the sound design, the performances – I have nothing but praise for every aspect of the work that went into making this film.

2. It is impossible to overstate how being a parent can profoundly affect the way one absorbs popular culture.  And if you’ve seen Arrival, you can probably guess where I’m coming from; I’ll leave it at that.

3. It is also similarly impossible to see this movie being made in the same way, now that Donald Trump is the President of the United States.  Indeed, it is impossible to see a lot of alien encounter movies being made in the same way with Trump running the show.  One can only hope that we, as a planet, remain untouched for the duration of his term.

here / not here

1. [cross-posting from my secret blog, but bear with me]

So every once in a while I get overwhelmed by whatever it is that overwhelms me about people, and so I publicly announce that I’m taking a Facebook hiatus, and each time I do the hiatus never lasts, and I feel like a hypocrite.  I’ll hit the “post” button announcing my farewell, and then I’ll be lurking on FB within 20 minutes of my initial post.  I acknowledge that this is ridiculous.

However: as I may or may not have mentioned, my day job has instituted these new draconian internet firewalls, and so not only can I not use my work PC to access my personal email, but I’m also completely shut out of Facebook.

And this means that, if I do want to use Facebook during normal business hours, I have to use my iPhone.  And the iPhone FB experience is a fucking dumpster fire.  It doesn’t matter how many times I ask it to stay in chronological order; it straight-up refuses to work in the way that I want it to.  Which means I invariably always miss something.  And since a lot of the reason why I used to spend so much time on FB is that weird “fear of missing out”, I kinda have no choice but to confront that particular fear head-on.

And so the oft-threatened hiatus is actually starting to stick.  I don’t really check it all that frequently any more, because I know the experience will suck when I do, and there’s nothing I can do to fix something that refuses to stay fixed.

Instead, I’m now on Twitter like a motherfucker.  (@couchshouts, if you didn’t already know.  If you knew me as @jervonyc, that account is long dormant.)  My twitter account is mostly political retweets and announcements of blog posts, so, you know, keep your expectations in check.

At least WordPress still works – for the time being, at least.  I don’t expect this to last forever, either, but there’s nothing I can do about that now.

2. We are all agreed that Portal 2 is one of the best games ever made, yes?  Yes, of course.  It was recently made backward-compatible on the ol’ Xbox One, which is great news, because I very much like that game and would like to continue to play it.  Especially the online co-op mode, because that mode is SUPER AWESOME and it’s been a long time since the last time I played it and I’ve forgotten all the solutions.  HOWEVAH, the online co-op doesn’t seem to work anymore?  Possibly?  I’d like some external confirmation about this, actually, because me and my buddy tried to do a bit of the co-op campaign over the weekend and we couldn’t keep a session together for more than 10 minutes.  ALSO, Portal 2’s online interface, as designed and intended for the 360, does not work at all with respect to the XB1, which is a bit of a problem.

tl,dr version: remaster Portal 1 and 2 for next-gen consoles and, hey, why not include Portal 3 while you’re at it.

3. I was feeling pretty good about No Man’s sky again, especially in light of yesterday’s post.  So last night I fired up the game, struggled to find the one element I was looking for in order to complete my super-mega warp drive for about 90 minutes, and then the game crashed. Again.  So, yeah.  Maybe I’ll keep that one on the shelf until the next patch.

 

Prep To Move

If all goes according to plan, we close on our house this coming Friday, and we move the following Saturday, August 1.

I left for work this morning and as I walked down the street I started becoming hyper-aware of my surroundings – the view of the Hudson from the top of my hill, the sketchy hourly-rate hotels that are inexplicably littered along my street, the greasy-bacon-and-eggs smell from the diner on the corner, the stifling heat of my subway stop – and couldn’t help but observe to myself that I’m only making this specific walk 3 more times after today.

I’ve been doing this same thing for the last few days – I can count on one hand the number of my remaining trips to the laundromat, the grocery store, the coffee shop.  We can only eat at our favorite Mexican restaurant a few more times before the trip becomes impractical (it’s a great place, but we’re not driving 45 minutes through Staten Island traffic for it).

I’ve also been feeling a lot less melancholic than I’d anticipated, regarding this move.  An old work colleague had posted something – “17 Quotes Every New Yorker Should Live By” – and after reading it I found myself inexplicably feeling somewhat hostile.  Quite a few of them required a response:

4. “The city is uncomfortable and inconvenient; but New Yorkers temperamentally do not crave comfort and convenience—if they did they would live elsewhere.” —E. B. White

That’s true, and that’s partially why I’m moving.  I’m ready for a different tempo.

8. “Every true New Yorker believes with all his heart that when a New Yorker is tired of New York, he is tired of life.” —Robert Moses

Oh fuck you.  I’m still working here; I’m just sleeping in a town where motorcycle gangs and 16-wheelers aren’t drag-racing outside my 2-year-old’s window every night.

9. “If you want to become a real New Yorker, there’s only one rule: You have to believe New York is, has been, and always will be the greatest city on earth. The center of the universe.” —Ellen R. Shapiro

I still do believe this with all my heart.  I just don’t have to live here to know it.

16. “When you leave New York, you ain’t going anywhere.” —Jimmy Breslin

Again – fuck you.  I’m gonna be a 30-minute train ride to Penn Station.

All that aside, I can’t help but wonder – am I losing part of my identity if I’m no longer a full-time New Yorker?  I was born here, I went to college here and I’ve been a full-time resident since 1996; does all that go away once I become… *gulp*… a resident of… *gasp*… NEW JERSEY?

I am suddenly aware that my long-standing email address – not to mention my gamertag across each and every gaming service – JervoNYC – will no longer be 100% accurate.  There’s a part of me that wonders if I should change it.

*     *     *

Posting’s going to be light for the next few weeks.  For starters, I’m not really playing that much right now besides replaying Tomb Raider on Xbox One, for some reason*; I’d also rented the new EA Golf Game but it hasn’t yet shown up, and given its poor reviews, I’m not really all that committed to playing it even if I happen to receive it.

After the closing, I won’t be back at work until August 10.  I’ll have internet access pretty much the whole way through (minus one brief hiccup immediately following the move), and I’m sure I’ll need to decompress at some point after the unpacking, but I’m probably not going to be doing any posting here beyond a simple “I am here and my internet works”.

* That reason is simply that the definitive edition is currently on sale for < $10.  I’ve already beaten it twice, on both PC and PS4, and I’m not really sure what prompted me to buy it again beyond that it’s a fun game and it was cheap and I hadn’t used my Xbox in a while, and maybe I’m more addicted to Achievements than I care to admit.

Further Adventures in Real Estate

1.  In last week’s entry, I wrote that I was incredibly distracted and overwhelmed by the very real possibility that the house we’d fallen love with was going to be ours within a matter of weeks, and that the speed with which this whole thing happened was dizzying and disorienting.  In my excitement and confidence and naivete, I’d told a work colleague that the only two things that could happen to derail this process was that (1) the bank would do their own appraisal and give us far less of a loan than what we’d bid, or (2) the inspector would say “this house is actually just a hologram and doesn’t exist in any sort of physical reality.”

As it turned out, (2) was closer to the truth than (1); the inspection went so terribly that we agreed to abandon it about halfway through, because there was nothing we could see that could possibly make up for what we’d already seen.  Words like “deathtrap” and “shitshow” were thrown around.  The inspector – who was hired by our realtor, and thus was professionally biased on her behalf – said to us, “Look – no problem is unsolvable.  But if you were my own flesh and blood, I’d urge you to walk away.”  I asked our realtor, who’s been doing this for a long time, how this flip ranked in terms of what she’d seen, and she said that it was, in fact, the worst she’d ever seen, and by the time we’d signed the inspection checks, she was already looking at other properties for us to visit.

So there’s that.

At this point, we’ve learned quite a lot in a very short amount of time, the most important of which are:

  • There will never be a situation in which an inspector looks at a house and says, “I can’t find anything wrong, this is a perfect house.”  But there’s a difference between a solvable problem and a waking nightmare.
  • The Venn diagram comprising available houses in this neighborhood in our price range that also meet our specific needs and that aren’t going to collapse in a stiff breeze is going to be very small, and we have to be realistic about what we can expect to find.
  • A good support team is everything.

We’re not giving up; indeed, we went back out there this past weekend and saw something that’s actually quite lovely, and we also learned that the very first house that we ended up being the runner-up bid for might be coming back on the market, and the chance to get a second crack at that one is certainly very intriguing.  But until we finally get out of the nightmare contract and get our money back, we’re still on the outside looking in.

2.  I need to get back to the album at some point, but as you can imagine, it’s just impossible to feel creative and focused when so much big stuff is happening.  Looking at houses is exhausting, especially with a two year old who loves climbing stairs and saying “No.  Stop.”  and hitting you when it’s time to stop climbing steps and leave the house.  I’d hate to think that I’m not going to get back to it until we’re moved in to a new place, because who knows how long this process is going to take; in the meantime, though, it’s rough going.  I’m trying to not beat myself up about it; these are extenuating circumstances, to be sure, and I’m sure that soon enough I’ll be able to carve out some time and mental energy to get back to it in earnest.

3.  I am kinda playing games again, though, if only because that’s easier for me to deal with when I’m collapsed on the couch.  There wasn’t a lot of time this weekend, but there was enough time for me to be able to see a few things.

  • Invisible, Inc. is a really interesting turn-based stealth game – it’s by the team that made the fantastic Mark of the Ninja, and it looks an awful lot like XCOM – and I can’t wait to really settle down and play it for real.  The simple truth is that for me right now, even on the easiest difficulty setting, it’s very stressful, and I’m already too stressed out as it is.  Supposedly it’s coming to PS4 later this year; if it also came to the Vita, I’d gladly buy it twice, as I think it’d be perfect as a handheld title.
  • Project CARS is really beautiful and really obtuse; I played it for about 5 minutes and then put it back in the Gamefly envelope.
  • For some reason, I felt bad that I’d not turned my Xbox One on in a while, and so I decided to rent Dead Rising 3, even though I’ve never really cared for the first 2.  And after 10-15 minutes, I remembered that I’d still not finished Sunset Overdrive, which is one of the games I bought the XBO for in the first place, and that if I had to choose between two zombie apocalypse games, I’d much rather play Sunset Overdrive.
  • Did I end up playing Sunset Overdrive, though?  No, I did not.  Instead, I tried to cram through as much of Wolfenstein: The Old Blood as I could.  I’m about 3/4 of the way through, and even though it’s not nearly as engrossing as last year’s New Order, it’s certainly fun enough in its mindless action, and shooting Nazi zombies is always a gas.  (Even though they also shoot back, which, I mean, come on.)  I’d like to finish it tonight, so that my plate is clear before The Witcher 3 unlocks.

Yeah, The Witcher 3.  I’m trying to keep my expectations in check.  I played bits and pieces of the first two and couldn’t really get into either of them.  The hyperbole surrounding this newest one is ridiculous, which is impossible to ignore; but given that I’m also feeling rather sour about games at the moment, it must be said that I’m kinda putting a lot of pressure on it to really be as good as everyone else seems to say it is.  If The Witcher 3 can’t get me excited about gaming as a medium, then maybe I should start thinking about switching off for good.