Today in mental health cat

Video Games

I'm actually playing a bunch of different games at the moment, which is progress. I often feel attracted to a new game, then find it impossible to overcome some mental block - like a lot of my motivation problems, a burst of interest is drowned in a tsunami of apathy. Or I barely make it through a tutorial before giving up.

I think the turning point might have been finally getting into rimworld a couple years ago. These last few days I've been fully engaged by the last caretaker, which is a story driven apocalypse survival game where you play as a robot booted into a world with no people in it, the earth, but after the waters have risen. You prep your trawler, fuel up, and craft resources to keep moving and uncover the fate of the planet, and eventually reboot humanity at a cloning facility.

The ocean is vast and compelling, and I find myself feeling actually nauseated when it gets rough and I have to be below deck.

It rewards patience and methodical exploration. You can only save at backup stations, so when you're exploring facilities or underwater ruins, it pays to get back to one whenever you discover something important or new, or overcome a new hurdle that's frustrated you. I've joyfully rushed onward several times only to lose progress - which often involves opening easier routes you can use on subsequent excursions, if you make it back and save!

This tendency I realize rhymes with one of my major work/study weaknesses. When that happens in game, I've taken to giving up and doing something else, maybe going to bed. This pays dividends, because I usually have a considered approach by the time I come back to the game. This happens when I'm writing code too, and often I end up spending several pointless hours into the evening before giving up and sleeping, only to solve whatever blockage I had within an hour or two of starting the following morning. Something something sunk cost fallacy.

News

Ari asked me how I consume news these days. I try not to, but I realized I check the Guardian front page a couple of times a day, just to get the traditional who bombed whom, and what's going on with the overton window in liberal/centrist UK today top lines. Other than that, I occasionally read an article if I think my Dad (a lifelong Guardian person) will read, if it's something we're likely to talk about, ask a kind of pre-brief on what his frame is going to look like.

But otherwise, I mostly listen to podcasts - mostly not news per se, though there are "current affairs" components. Mostly it's deep dives into particulars, with strong perspectives - not just my own I should say. For example, many of the Coolzone iHeart podcasts resonate with me. It could happen here, behind the bastards, weird little guys, etc., and I also spend a bunch of time with the Jacobin podcast family, with Doug Henwood as my most consistent listen with behind the news. But I also listen to some UK centrist stuff, like quiet riot and behind the lines. I like to hear how the non-dingbat non-fash pro-EU membership people are dealing with the rise of dingbat/fash/racist/xenophobia/etc. Similarly, the US lawfare podcast family is useful as a deep dive into US natsec and legal/political matters.

All in all I like to hear these because they force me to consider framings I don't naturally make. Kind of like reading the FT (which I don't any more) to get a sense of what capital is thinking. Or hearing material conditions analysis from military people, which tends to lack gloss and evasion.

Then there is fedi and a tiny bit of bsky, which is mostly nerds, leftists and anarchists, and scientists. Lots of important news type stuff flows through those channels, ranging from things I read about in papers to important software politics, like cognitive scientists writing about LLMs and projects to conserve and preserve software which is in danger of being ruined by LLMs. In fact, this is just the current iteration of anti-capitalist praxis, but it is focusing the minds of many people who have not been able previously to go there.

Vincent

My cat, Vincent, is 17 years old and has metabolized most of his muscle due to kidney failure. This is a chronic (and common) condition, and for the most part, we feed him a couple of pills, keep him fed and watered, and he is mostly comfortable and happy to snuggle. Occasionally he has bladder problems, and gets into a kind of doom loop where he goes to the litter box compulsively, and gets really upset when he can't pee. We've found that spending a day stoned on gabapentin usually breaks the cycle, and today was one of those days. I hope he feels better tomorrow, he got a lot of pampering today - including some homebrew chicken broth from a friend.

Other bits...

Someone posted this excellent gaming blog aggregator on the fedi today. I will scour this for feeds to follow.

Watched a great cartoon on prime video today - Kevin - an Aubrey Plaza co-creation with many excellent voices in it. Very funny, about an eponymous cat and his friends in NYC. Strong recommend.

Cancelled mullvad VPN and got a refund, due to finding out about the fash tendency of one of their co-founders, and his donation to a Swedish white nationalist party. Now considering my options - considering a self-hosted VPN at an Iceland data-centre, running on geothermal and hydro power. Most tech companies are awful.

Enjoying getting vim-classic configured to my tastes, so I can ditch neovim and vim9, which have chosen the road of betrayal (LLM code contributions). I think these times will cure me of my upgrade compulsion. We may end up with a somewhat frozen emacs too, if that project makes the wrong decision.

Spending a little time with Hare programming too, since it comes out of the same stable as vim-classic and is therefore unlikely to ever fall to the spicy autocomplete.

Gotta sleep.