Pigment & Patience

Sick today. Starting early in the morning. Stayed in bed until afternoon, and most of the time in lights out mode, though it was difficult to sleep with everyone around. Felt better in the afternoon but still not great. It kept me from doing any work and would have kept me from robots if there was a meeting.

I did go out with Shanda and pals in the evening, though. We went out to supper, where I sort of ate, and then sat around for a couple of hours waiting for a laser show. Eventually I ditched and went home so I could sit someplace quiet and be tired on more comfortable furniture. But it was okay. Once we got settled Shanda finally relaxed a little, and the improved mood was nice even if I was a bit uncomfortable.

I wasn’t able to help much in keeping Shanda present today, since I spent most of it in bed. You did great in terms of schedule but only okay in terms of isolation and tension. Better than yesterday to be sure but still pretty high on the twitch scale. It was good of you to take a minute for eyes before we left, even though you were in a hurry. It helped me feel like this wasn’t yet another thing I had to interact with via schedule and role instead of as a human. And mine went well [fig 1].

I figured out what I wanted to discuss with @BPS ¹and did so: https://youtu.be/Fvc4ZwsWI84, about ruining things – it’s about the origin of that feeling. I’m wondering if they can help me peel off a layer from the gobstopper of trauma I’ve built around my beliefs on the topic. Sometimes just having another PoV that I can relate to a hard feeling lets me pull that feeling into smaller chunks. Or maybe it’s unrelated. But I’ve been liking the interaction either way. There are some unwatched ADs with titles about the feeling of home and remembering ones self through friends, and I’m interested to see their take. We definitely aren’t coming from the same place on those topics but I wonder if we ended up on parallel paths.

Played some Eastshade today [fig 2]. It’s very pretty, as you might expect in a game about painting ²https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Eastshade&t=fpas&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images. It’s the usual sort of open world RPG where people give you quests and you get rewarded for reading lore, except instead of murder you do paiting as a primary mechanic. It’s a video game so it’s more photography than painting, but the idea is similar. It asks you to think about light and time of day and angles and framing but it doesn’t grade you in a technical way like Pokémon Snap – it asks you to be happy with the work you produce, and to be made happy by sharing it with NPCs who enjoy it. You can’t die and most of the dynamic things are non-reactive and on a short loop so you can spend lots of time setting up a shot. The adventure is thin but there’s plenty of cute and heart and decent voice acting. And the enforced structure is either about the actual game play (day night cycles for light) or open to multiple solutions (make any 3 NPCs like you), so it rarely feels intrusive or tedious. And if you run low on inspiration you can always drink to find some.

Still quiet on the M front. I’m hoping this weekend includes a few hours away from the day job, to keep your supply of humanity stocked. I know it can be stressful even to imagine taking a break – or anxiety-inducing to try it – but it can really improve your work quality, not to mention your resilience against unexpected disassembly. Or at least that’s my worried brain’s best guess at what to shout blindly against the sound of silent stress, I hopes of making it easier to control.

Got the exhaust fan down and the light blockers up for the bedroom update. That’s only 12 minutes of work, but it’s just about right for a day I spent mostly in bed, and it makes the room more usable, which is probably important for the people currently using it. We still need to finalize some details about colors and tables – maybe we can find a minute for that tomorrow – but it feels like we’re chugging along in frequent steps.

H*.com and r*.com are both up for renewal in the near future. Do I want them for anything? Do you?

Robots tomorrow. At least assuming I feel better than I did today. And I think Shanda has 2 activities planned before 2 PM. I’m pretty sure some of the 3 extra people here are leaving tomorrow but I’m not sure who or how many. So maybe there’s some down time together in the afternoon. Maybe we can get our characters re-classed and take an hour for feels absent other pressures.

Therapy last week poked the idea of dynamic responses to my physical wellbeing. Which is a goal I’ve talked about here, and tried things to explore, but haven’t been able to get much information about. My therapist suggest that a structured evaluation might be more useful, which is obvious in some ways but difficult for me to implement – it’s not like I haven’t asked this question, I just haven’t ever gotten an answer I can make use of. But they think its possible to provide me with something, and even a bad framework that I understood would likely be better than the nothing I have now. So I’m anticipating that, and presumably a reaction like I had to the Human Needs list. Parts I can see and parts I cannot and maybe a set of feelings that holds the two groups distinct. We’ll see what they come up with.

I’m almost back to writing normally. It still feels like a challenge to make it as impactful and connected as I hope ³more of a challenge than usual – I’m rarely totally satisfied but it no longer feels hard just to do. I’ve made a couple of changes to the process both in construction and publishing that give me good feels. I don’t know if they’re important or lasting changes, but making them feels like improvement. I also think there’s a feeling to press on about imagining anxious situations and what I’m doing to make it less bad for me. And hopefully better for you too. But it still isn’t a shape so I still can’t write.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.