I guess this isn’t so much an official grab bag as it is a post with a common thread running through several different areas of interest.

As I have mentioned on occasion, my involvement in Whatever Interests Me is cyclical, but also seemingly without pattern. I’ve got my 3D modeling interests, my development interests, my (for lack of a better term, but as it applies to TTRPGs, mainly) creative writing interest, and the occasional “wild card” slot, like when I thought I was going to get into painting minis or, more recently, 3D printing itself. The when of when I get the urge jump into these interests changes, so although I once thought the timings were governed by the turn of the seasons, now I’m not so sure. Throughout all of it is gaming, which I still have an interest in, although I will admit that it’s not consistent. Sometimes there are games which really interest me and keep me occupied for weeks on end, like Dune: Awakening has, and other times there are games which sound good when I read their descriptions, but fail to inspire beyond the initial introduction, like so many titles that are clogging up my various online libraries.

Right now I seem to be in the dreaded “famine cycle” where I have a lot of potential activities in mind but none of them inspire. I am still logging into Dune, but now its only once or twice a week, mainly to ensure that my generators are topped off. I’m not at the “end game” yet, but I have reached the point where the paint has started to flake off the ornithopter and I see the bare metal beneath: collect resources, build, and kill Bad Guys. That’s about it. It bears repeating on the off chance someone new reads this post: I really only like things when there’s something new about them that I can learn about; once I start to put those lessons into practice, my interest seems to wane rather quickly. I suspect I’ll mainly be visiting Arrakis when I get to play with someone else from now on, but not often otherwise.

I have tried to tackle the new event in Star Citizen, but this project now makes me angry as a matter of course. Initially the event was plagued by issues with the freight elevators not working properly — shocker, I know! — which, considering so much of the event centers on those elevators, pretty much nullified the entirety of the situation. As CIG raced to find solutions to this and other ongoing issues, other plainly boneheaded decisions reveal themselves, like how out of all of the potential places in the game right now for players to be able to pick up and drop off cargo, why was/is everyone forced into only a handful of locations? When the event started, there were dozens upon dozens of players cramming themselves into outpost airspace in the hopes of accessing one freight elevator. Why were the goddamn distribution centers not being used? That’s literally what they are supposed to do. Making matters worse, the community is just terrible. Chat is a cesspool of edgelords, and there are always going to be those who log in just to ruin things for others, like ramming people who are trying to load their ships from the elevators, or stealing their cargo during loading Just Because. I can do without the familiar excuses for this game, I’ve heard them all and have levied some of them myself in the past, but no more. If CIG folded tomorrow, I wouldn’t even lament the loss of money I gave them over the years. I’d consider it a payment Chris Roberts can use to get fucked.

Of course, I also spoke strongly about Funcom in the past, and look where I ended up. Consider this venting and not a manifesto, but JFC can they put someone in charge at CIG who knows what they’re doing, please?

I still have Ideas in the back of my mind, though, for other things that aren’t strictly gaming related. I really want to work on this application I have started, but then again, I really don’t because while I enjoy making applications work, I absolutely hate making them look nice because I am really not good at that. What I have in my mind is rarely what makes an appearance on screen, and that applies a hard stop to my interest for a while. So I work on things like this in fits and starts. Meanwhile, I’ve started collecting images for inspiration in creating something for Delta Green-slash-maybe-The Secret World, because the whole SCP Universe seems to be my jam right now. I’ve got several pictures which evoke the kinds of feelings that I am looking for, but when it comes to figuring out how to use them to evoke similar feelings in others, my mind goes off chasing bubbles or something. My thoughts are slippery and even when I bear down and try to s l o w l y weave a thread, something else T-bones my efforts. Making matters worse for the voices in my head, I still have a tentative interest in doing video things, since I’m getting a fairly steady stream of video-things related videos in my YT feed. I really enjoyed working on my Let’s Play videos back when I was playing Bloomtown, but that statement applies mainly to the intro work and not necessarily the recording and editing. Some days I wonder if there are local filmmaker groups out there I could join, because otherwise all of my learning is academic when I might like it to be practical, but then I decide that finding out sounds like work and would also involve interacting with other people, so I put the idea aside.

One benefit of this malaise, I suppose, is that I’ve finally found my footing in Brandon Sanderson’s The Stormlight Archive series. My nephew is all in on Sanderson’s Cosmere meta-universe and has been trying to sell me on it for years. I had tried to get through The Way of Kings on several occasions, but the intro, with it’s hot-drop into all of the fantasy-name-generator output, was incredibly off-putting to me. Even when I managed to get past the intro and reached the traveling portion of the story, I felt it was just OK, but eventually I ended up achieving momentum. What I initially felt was just OK started to become interest, and then transitioned to investment. I am now into the second book in the series, so when I find myself at a crossroads in the real world and looking for Something To Do, I’ll just go to the couch and read. I suppose my loss of interest in almost everything I want to do is literature’s gain, but I don’t feel like it balances the scales, at least not for me.