The Blog In Yellow

After sitting down for three hours I was able to speed through my second run of Outlast. It...lived up to my low expectations I suppose. The biggest issue I have is the numerous jump scares, the crutch which the game uses to beat you over the head. The fear of someone staring at you or chasing you down loses it's effect after the fifth or so time. It feels like the developers didn't know what scary was and instead of letting things build up and let the tension go up and down like a wave (like Soma or Amnesia) the game keeps you on constant edge. The story follows a reporter who gets info that an insane assylum is doing "bad things." I'm paraphrasing, there's a bigger story dealing with nazi technology and nanomachines that haunts the assylum and subjects driven mad by the experimentations. There used to be a game jam, a get together for devs, called Assylum Jam with the intent of posing the story away from the cliche mad patients attacking the player. I'm ...

I've dived back into the dark world of the Outlast series. I recently bought Outlast 2 and Outlast Trials. The two games were missing from my Steam list. I must be careful, I've spent forty dollars on games. I need to save money, not spend it. Let me say that I won't be spending any more this month on games or fast food. That should boost my bank account.  Going back to the Outlast games is a little hard because the games are so gory. In one instance, if you get caught by this giant of a man, he'll rip your head off. The game is set in a first person angle meaning that you'll see your body on the floor as your head dies from decapitation. Both the first and second games have lots of other disturbing moments including implied necrophilia, cannibalism, and insane religious devotion. The first game has the player infultrate an insane assylum thanks to a whistleblower email sent anonymously. Armed with only your camera's night vision as a form of light, you descend ...

A lot of good happened yesterday. At work I saw that the schedule had changes which caused me some concern. I sent the updated dates to my folks who were as concerned as I was. There was clearly a communication error when I was working more than two days in a row. I get stressed if I work more than two days in a row. It's due to my medicine. I've been adjusting to the new dose which is keeping me sane but interrupting my sleep. But the issue isn't my sleep but how much work I can handle at a time. Two days on, one day off was our agreement but yesterday the schedule had me working on a day when I was getting a tooth implant.Technically I could come in that day with a busted mouth but I thought it would be better if I let myself heal for a day. I told my boss this and she agreed but seemed to be a little upset. I hate it when she's upset, it makes it hard to talk to her. I'm in mortal fear of upsetting people or letting them down. I went back to my job having the too...

I've been reading more about Lovecraft's life and how he dabbled in amatuer astronomy. His letters show an interest in science and he's published a few books and magazines about the stars. All this is to say that he sounds melacholy when he's writing about the unknown. "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown" as quoted by the man himself. There is this frustration in his words, a desire to understand and yet being unable to put the piece together. To quote Lovecraft again "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind ot correlate alll its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowlege will open up such terrifying ...

There's a place of disatisfaction in my soul. A place where stories are left incomplete. I remember in college I got into the world of fanfiction. I thought it was facinating that there were others like me who liked a story and decided to make their own version. I had often thought about "what if the story went this way or that way" and here was a bunch of people doing just that. But this opened me to a paler side of my life. Not darker as if it was blackened by some kind of evil, just a world of incomplete stories. You see, fanfiction authors are not paid by anyone. They write for the sake of writing, for fun. And they are under no obligation to finish their story. This was when I would wake up and check my computer to see if someone's story had updated. I would sometimes send them messages to check up on them and offer encouragement in hopes of getting another chapter. Many promised the moon but delivered a rock. They wanted to be the next epic tale. Hundreds of cha...

My mom and I practiced this technique of listening to the Spirit. It's demonstrated by these people who make this series called Perfected by Blood. They're a couple from Iran who were converted to Christianity and share what they've learned on a streaming service. Today's example was to use an image we had made in out minds of a tree. My tree, for some reason, was 2D. It was a cardboard cutout of a tree that you would see on a stage for a play. In other words, it was an effigy. A false tree standing in the wind. I imagined that a few weeks ago but we restarted our meetings so I had to be reminded about the image I conjured. The instructions were to basically go with the image and see what else was revealed to us. I thought it sounded like new age nonsens but I went with it just for laughs. And it was funny, to me at least. Mom said that she imagined a fire and someone singing Cumbaya my Lord. The song just popped into her head she said. As for me, my tree was soon surro...