anarchonurzox

I'm gonna be honest. I'm feeling kinda burnt out. Just too much between work and dealing with Jimmy and the house and cleaning and church and idk what else that just has to be done. The trip was nice because I just had to think about the next few weeks. Yes, travel and scheduling was a bit much, and I got sick a few times because I was so tired, but I didn't feel so almost depressed by everything. I just feel so unmotivated that I'm spending time playing video games and I know that's not good for me either but it's a thing to do that will take my mind off of all the other things I have to do.

I wish I could talk to Jimmy about this but he would just put it all on himself and be all "oh i'm a terrible husband" and that would honestly just make it worse - I don't have the emotional bandwidth to handle him doing another woe-is-me spiel. I'd talk to my friends about it but at this point I don't really have any because we moved away from everyone and they're not really interested in being friends anymore (who can blame them ig) and I don't have any here yet. I guess I could get a therapist (lol) but that's expensive just to be whiny and there's not really a "fix" for this - I just need some time off from "adulting" as the kids say but I'm not going to get it so I might as well just buck up and deal. But that's really getting overwhelming and I don't know what to do.

This is a bit more personal than usual but I've been really inconsistent on a lot of things and I feel myself dropping balls and this is one of them so why not use the journal site for a bit of actual journaling lol.

 There are three kid kids and two teens you can talk to. 

The three kids are actually pretty happy most of the time. 

John likes bugs. Mabel likes hitting things. Pyke likes drawing and grass. They mostly hang out together near the gardening area and your interactions with them are mostly petty kid drama. They will also tell you about all the bugs that live here and who they don't like. And they'll ask lots of questions about your truck. 

The teens are a bit more skeptical. I'll work on them later...

I think you can stay in the town in the fog for a while. Several days, a week or two, maybe longer. It'll be a little slice of life sim if you want it to be. 

One of the people there is the gardener. He is middleaged - maybe 45ish. He's initially a bit crusty and not really forthcoming about his life or what he thinks. 

He's pretty resigned to living in the bubble. Life isn't great - there's a lot of hardship and things are often difficult but he values his relationships with the other people and seems himself as sort of a father figure. 

day 1

you: hey
him: hello there. 
you: ... 
you: so, tell me about this place
him: well, these are the gardens. I grow food here. 
you: what about the other people here?
him: ... they're cool

anything other than that gets noncommittal responses or grunts 

I've been procrastinating a bit on writing stuff for road game because I don't really know how I want the ending to go. I'm struggling with the antagonist and what it's really supposed to be and do; what its powers are, what its goals are, etc. Is it something out of the cthulhu mythos? is it just sort of a generic "spoopy monster" from the cosmos that wants to eat people? Is it a dream monster, a demon, or something else? 

I don't want to be super obvious about this in the game itself, but I want to have some of this spelled out at a meta level. I think it is something that is "summoned" or "awakened" by the exercise of power for ostensibly "good" reasons. (I think that's one of the main themes that gets into this game: sort of a "road to hell paved by good intentions" motif.) So in the first episode, the "cult" are exercising "god's law" but they're ending up with something that is gonna summon $monster eventually. And the village in the fog is a group who already did. 

But the monster himself.. is he a will to power monster? is he the abyss? is he the ghost of hitler? He devours and always wants more (power / control / souls ownership). He is an antichrist - an? the? 

Here we are! Matcha in hand, and I've already gone to the town council meeting. 'Twas entertaining, as usual, to watch the folks go about trying to figure out how to do their towning. A grant from the county here! A plan for the tractor show there! I told them I'm interested in volunteering to help the weekend of the threshing show - hopefully that will be a way for me to get to know people. 

Really though it's not about belonging to this community. It's about how I get to belong to the community of believers and how we all together come to the house of God with a single purpose. 

But part of that is this local 土地 and the people who live here. Serving them, desiring their good, doing what I can where I can and being faithful. Bearing faithful witness. Hopefully. 

Am running into some organizational silliness. Boss has a project going on that includes a wide range of org issues. Other people have some ideas about how to do things. I don't have much insight into either their problems or proposed solutions, so I say, "sure why not."

Boss seems ok with it. Founder (who has decent insight into that area of stuff) reviews and says, hey there's not enough context here, y'all add some. Problem statements n stuff. (He's actually skeptical about the solution.) So Boss does a whole exercise that kinda goes nowhere. Founder comes in and pulls me and other minion and tells us to do problem identification stuff. 

But this kinda feels like it's gonna step on Boss's toes so I'm hesitant to take point on the whole project even though I'm probably decently qualified... I feel stuck. 

I said yesterday that I want the town in the misty woods to feel like the PNW. To emphasize: damp, verdant, forest green, full of flowers. Like Spokane when we visited in spring: the sort of place where you wonder how they don't have moss growing on every single surface. Tallll trees, not redwoods exactly but sort of a dream equivalent. 

And the people should also be a little bit like what you'd expect from a cult in the PNW. Carmina is enticing, warm, easy to trust but a bit woo at the same time. The people dress in very natural ways... not formally like in The Village or something, but the kids are wearing smocks, linen and wool, earthy and floral tones. The Village actually isn't a terrible reference; this is not a "lesbian commune" story but it's also kiiiiinda got that vibe of having some kind of secret knowledge going on even when you're in the sunshine. (The monster isn't one of the people in the village either, not really.) 

So there's Carmina. She remembers the before time. Talked about her before. 

The priest. Edmund. He knows how to conciliate the spirit. He feeds it stories. Dreams. He makes and burns a floral incense to placate it. 

There are some NPCs here. The purpose of the NPCs is to give the protagonist a sense of the depth of what is destroyed if he doesn't "win" against the spirit. They should have really deep conversation trees... you can really get to know them. That's going to be a lot for me to flesh out... maybe you can even stay here for a while and almost become part of the community, and over time you'll unlock more and more with them. But every day you will get a warning that you are trapped here. You're not progressing the actual plot. And eventually you'll run out of time and HAVE to defeat the monster. 

 I started playing pentiment yesterday. Obviously the text and font is pretty contextual to the game itself, but I also really liked how the game used the different fonts to indicate literacy levels (and sometimes changed fonts when you learned e.g. one of the peasants could read or a monk couldn't). 

And I mentioned in the last post the way adios used greyed out text to communicate internal thoughts, things you might want to say but couldn't. 

All of these are creative ways that the medium of the game is made to serve the narrative purposes of the author/ creator. Specifically the words. For road-game I'll probably use some kind of engine, at least at first, so I don't know how much freedom I'll have to customize everything. I don't know if I need clever stuff like in pentiment and adios. But I think it's going to be important for me to consider how everything in the medium: the text, the audio, etc all need to support the theme (s) of the game. 

 I didn't get the job here so back to North Dakota it is. I'm kinda relieved, honestly. It would have been a big change and I really do value having the ability to work remotely. Plus the house stuff and everything else.. 

I have a few goals once we get there.
- join the church with Jimmy 
- solidify some exercise/ healthy diet/ meal prep habits (maybe join a martial arts gym again? might be too much idk)
- try to join an in-person d&d group 
- do some volunteer work (maybe meals on wheels or something)
- join a fiber arts group 

All in addition to fixing up the doghouse to be my new office and painting the siding on the south side of the house. Plus whatever happens with the renovation/ foundation repair. Should be a busy season! 

 This has been bouncing around my mind for a while and I'm not sure where to go with it. I have some competing thoughts and emotions that I'm not sure how to process.

We recently returned to our church after having been away for nearly a year (with family / traveling). A few people came over and greeted us. One of them (T) suggested that we should all get together and hang out. He had this conversation mostly with Jimmy (but also a bit with me there). Since T has interacted with us in group settings he didn't have either of our numbers, so he asked for Jimmy's.

It is a fact that Jimmy hates a) scheduling things and b) talking on the phone. So when T called him, Jimmy predictably didn't respond. I ended up getting T's number from Jimmy's phone and doing the scheduling.

Then later they had a separate scheduling call and decided that maybe they should just do guys night. (We ended up having not just guys night, but it was three guys (Jimmy, T (unmarried), and D (wife indisposed)) and me.

I made the comment to Jimmy that it was dumb for T to only get Jimmy's number at church; he should have gotten mine too. Jimmy just brushed it off and said that the way it works in complementarian churches is that the man gets more attention for such things, and the wife gets the attention via the husband.

Now, I don't think Jimmy intended any particular insult by this, and I think he accurately described what is the case. But I do not like that this is the case. It does indeed seem to be true that people at church will automatically assume that Jimmy is more interesting / worthy of attention / worth talking to than me. But that is not necessarily right.

I think I remember Ta (the short-haired female molinist philosophy major at our... rather conservative calvinistic southern baptist church) once making a comment about how she sometimes had to remind our pastor that women have interests in things like politics and doctrine and the like.

For all the talk about "not less than" in the complementarian circles, it sure feels like we get treated that way.

I'm not trying to bash here. But I'm frustrated. I don't maintain friendships with people who aren't somewhat reciprocal. Why would I stay at a church where women are relegated to cooking and baby-raising? This is not a diss, it's a serious question...