TPA 32

If I keep at this pace, I'll have written for 365 days by the start of November. I let my friend stay over a little more today. He looked like he could use the rest. Part of me regrets letting him stay over a little longer. I want to play games and be by myself. There's nothing better than being alone. I've heard pastors like Bill Johnson who say how were supposed to be in a community. He doesn't understand the wonder of being in your own mind. It's great because you don't have to put on a mask. Even when I'm with my friends and family, no matter how close they are, I put on a mask. Whether it's a fool's mask or one of seriousness, it's still a mask and it chaffs my skin. It's a blessing to be able to be yourself and lounge on your couch. To not worry about tomorrow but know that your day is has purpose and direction. It's a wonderful thing.

I've been wishlisting a lot of books on procrastination and rewiring your brain. I've noticed that I've been losing focus. I'm missing a lot of keys and I'm losing focus. I need to practice to get better. I hate these condemnation videos I've been seeing that talk about how awful the education system is and how I may or may not be broken. People like to make fear into a product. They want to make you think there is something wrong with your brain and try to sell a solution. The problem is that I don't see a lot of videos where they offer solutions. It's like those exercise/diet channels that tell you you're worthless if you don't look this way or act a certain way. They don't say it upfront but it is implied. 

Last night, my friend and I watched the first three episodes of Chernobyl. It's a fantastic HBO mini series that dramatizes the events that happened on April in 1986. It was two years before I was born. I can only imagine what my folks felt. They were in Ohio, but the actions taken at Chernobyl had the possibility of devistating consequences. There's these horrific scenes of people being exposed to ungodly amount of radiation and returning with horrific radiation burns. You know immediately by the look on their face that they're dead. Hoe do you act that? How do you show a viewer that look of despair and quiet submission? This acceptance of inevitable death is cold and quiet. It's an amazing performance. I should also give props to the music team because there's this tone of despair mixed with melacholy that is distrubing. 

My friend was interested in the series because of a game we both played when we were younger: "Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare." One of the most memorable levels is you and a partner exploring an excavated Chernobyl with only a sniper, a ghilli suit, and a handful of claymores. Eric quoted the line from the game to me and I laughed. The line comes from the level All Ghillied Up, "Fifty thousand people used to live in this city. Now it's a ghost town. I should probably talk about the influence the game had on me. I was determined to get better at FPS games back then since all my friends were playing Halo. I was terrible at multiplayer so I thought it would be good to invest in a game that tought me the basics. The Call of Duty series was always focused on historical settings in World War 2 so for this game to focus on a fictional modern war was shocking. I had the PS3 version which meant I had access to free multiplayer. If you had an Xbox, you had to pay a monthly fee for Xbox Live. I must have played through the campaign five or six times before I went to the multiplayer. And once I went there, I never came back. I think every gamer, at least in my time, has a moment when a game really clicks with them. For my friend it was the Halo 2 multiplayer. He made friends with whom he still speaks with fifteen years later. For me, it was CoD's multiplayer. Unlike most shooting games, you died very quickly. Most games made it hard for players to get hit or gave your armor the player had to whittle down. In CoD,  you were human and you died like a soldier. Quick deaths made it easy to kill multiple enemies, for which you were rewarded. Three kills got you an UAV recon that let you see the position of other enemies. Five kills got you an airstrike where a jet would bomb a place of your choice on the map. That usually led it to seven which got you the helecopter. It would float around the map picking off anyone who stepped out of cover. The next game, Call of Duty: World at War, followed the same pattern execpt it gave you a pack of dogs to sick out on the enemy instead of a helecopter. This reward system gave you elation when you got the final kill and despair when you failed. If you died without getting that seventh kill, it was back to the beginning. You wouldn't be left high and dry though, the game offered tools and perks to keep you going. My favorite was the silencer which would keep you invisible on the mini map. If you shot without a silencer, you'd be picked up by radar. There was also a smoke bomb that was really useful to confusing the enemy as well as flash bangs, grenades, and a bazooka that could take out the helecopter that no one ever carried. I remember it was too much of a waste to carry it since it was only useful against the helecopters. 

During this time, tournaments were held, game events where you received extra points were given out, and cheaters were exposed. I remember reading about a supposed cheater in GameInformer magazine. I wonder what happend to that guy. This was also around when people started filming their gameplay and uploading it to youtube or other sites. 

This was the days of when shooters weren't quite balanced yet which led to many a rage quit and matches with only one player on the enemy side. This is true for most shooters back in the mid 2000s. I still have the game but only for posterity. The memories will hopefully never fade and the game's success led to, for better or worse (probably worse) a series of CoD games released each year. I haven't touched a CoD game since Modern Warfare 3. By that time the interest had faded and I moved on. I also could only afford maybe six games in a year and repeating the same game over and over wasn't enduring me to the series. The campaigns became dumber and the story was almost non-existent. I still remember going after these terrorists and Russians in the campaign (because who else was going to be the villain?) 

I think I wrote more about the game than the show. I didnt' even mention how one of my favorite family of actors, the Skarsgards, is in the film as a grumpy general or how the series made up this composite character to represent all the effort that the other scientists put into making sure that Chernobyl wasn't a complete disaster. It's a fascinating writing technique. 

Moving on, today I plan to play Dungeons and Dragons with my friend's friends. They aren't all my friends, just my friend's friends who I don't know from work. I envy his ability to meet other people. This friend, different from the one I'm watching Chernobyl with, is a relaxed man of God. He's a better influence on me than the other friend. This friend, whom we'll call "M" for clarity, invited me to play DnD and asks me to play online all the time. I've been playing Heretic x Hexen with him and it's been fun. I think that's all I'll write for now. If I feel up to it, I'll do another breakdown of Gleipnir but I have the energy now and I want to write about my Cain story. 

Well, that didn't work out. Right now I'm playing DnD with my friend's friends and his son. Maybe I should study my pysche first. Figure out what keeps me from writing. I have to make this story while it's still fresh in my mind. But I have done good today. I wrote a lot. I'm hanging out with friends. I'm doing good socially. I shouldn't write right now, I'm not up for it. I should read. 

I did some reading. But more importantly, I got to play DnD. It took a bit to get into it but the game my friend had laid out for us was a lot of fun. We played a game of Blitzball, a game based off of a game in the game Final Fantasy 10. It's an underwater version of soccer. I always thought it was boring, at least in the Final Fantasy game. This time, I had fun. I don't know if I was just able to lock in today but my focus was keen and I played well. Mike had us play back and forth for the first hour. Passing the ball and trying to score a point. We lost by one roll in which my friend, the dungeon master, rolled a die with the one point he needed to win. I, on the other hand, had the misfortune of the wrath of the dice gods. I rolled less than a ten in most cases. In one event, I rolled a one and had a negative one aspect added to it. I never knew it could be such fun to lose. It was us laughing at our own misfortunes but it really helped me a lot to play with others. I'm still depressed but I think I'll get better soon.

After that I went to McDonalds and got myself some food. I should have saved my money but I thought it would be better to get a quick meal. Right now my other friend and I are watching John Wolfe play Mouthwashing. I think I've written before about what I thought about this game. It's an amazing psychological horror experience. The last game I played that had this kind of atmosphere was Soma. Both games left me stunned. I think my friend is too tough or plays too tough to be emotionally affected. I wonder what happened to him to make him like this. I guess he has to hide his emotions. My friend also went out to get cereal. I would have gotten him some if he asked but he likes to take care of things himself. Sheesh, this game is dark. You have to take care of a captain who is incapacitated by injuries. You and the crew are stranded in space while making a delivery of mouthwash across space. Since you're stranded, all you can do is drink and disolve into madness. Madness that you've caused. There's even a hint of rape in the game which got the game in hot water. It's not that you can do the rape but it's implied. Leave it to a bunch of feminist idiots in Australia to try and destroy another person's work. 

Anyway, back to watching more John Wolfe. I didn't get up to two thousand but I'll get there little by little.