March: The Month the World Changed

So typically I take the stance of not discussing depressing world events in the content I create in case people consume it to escape such a reality, but given that my monthly blog posts are part of my Tombstone Project line of life writing, I’m just going to go ahead and launch right into the topic which we’re all so painfully aware of already. But fear not, the usual assortment of more mundane topics and last year’s retrospective lies at the end of these grimly patterned words.

Coronavirus is currently sweeping not only the country, but the entire globe, and has brought with it changes to our day-to-day lives, the likes of which I’d expect to read in a banal science fiction novel. Don’t get me wrong, we’re certainly not on the verge of apocalypse and I’m not about to be dramatic about something which already has millions anxious. I just mean to say that the measures in place to stop the spread of Covid-19 are eerily similar to scenes in many fictional worlds regarding the limitations on where you can go, what you can do, and how people are acting. For example, when I took a rare and necessary trip to the store the other day, areas had been closed off, queuing areas marked and restrictions on the number of items purchasable put in place. I don’t disagree with any of this, I only mention it as a source of unease.

I have never in my life seen such a break from the ordinary day-to-day running of things, and as someone who is fascinated with the concept of society and the expectation of normality that it entails, I must admit that I’m just as intrigued as I am uneasy. To witness people I know react to a global crisis is depressing, yes, but also an answer to a “what-if” scenario that I never thought to – and hoped to never – see. It is, as is the case with many unfortunate aspects of life, a chance to witness a different side to humanity. And while the media – social or journalistic – is bound to focus on people behaving badly and sowing discord amongst others, it’s important that we recognise how many more people are making little sacrifices and looking out for each other, because therein lies the true boon of humankind: empathy.

As for me, I’m homebound for two weeks as a member of the household developed the unfortunately all too common symptoms of the Coronavirus. Luckily it seems to have been a false flag, but both government and workplace – and common sense – dictates that we remain isolated for the time being. I’m lucky enough to be the kind of person who does well in such circumstances due to my love of gaming, writing and plenty of other introvert favourites, but I’ll admit that on day two I felt somewhat impatient and listless. We’re currently on day five though, and although it feels like day twenty I’ve mostly been fine at occupying myself. In what way, you ask? Well mostly – Animal Crossing!

I cannot imagine a more perfect time for a game like Animal Crossing to have launched. For those of you who don’t know, Animal Crossing is a cute little life simulator which places you on a deserted island with some animal villagers for you to develop in real time, day by day. It’s also a multiplayer game, so you can visit your friend’s islands and enjoy some measure of socialising during everything that’s going on right now. If you have a Switch I cannot recommend it enough. I’m just over a week into my deserted island life and I’m documenting it every week over on my gaming blog, for those interested.

Aside from Animal Crossing, I’ve also passed the time by playing Destiny 2 and UNO (digitally) with friends, exploring Disney Plus by making a start of The Mandalorian, The Clone Wars and a long-term re-watch of The Simpsons, creating, editing and uploading the usual assortment of videos to my Youtube channel, re-discovering a long forgotten love of racing games by way of WipeOut, Gran Turismo, and Trackmania, reading through my backlog of PC Gamer magazines and enjoying this season of the Overwatch League! Well, I was desperate for some time off, so I’m happy that I got it, if not by the means of which I did.

And now let’s take a look at what was bugging past Kristian, back when the world was normal.

A Journal Through Time #7

Ah, the week where I’d seen The Good Place and was having the crisis of just how ethically corrupt most aspects of our society are. This is actually still in the back of my head a lot of the time, I expect it will be for the foreseeable future. That being said, I do miss being able to worry mainly about ethics instead of, you know, the mortality of those around me.

A Journal Through Time #8

Not really much to add to this one. Remaining mindful about mental health is still important, and not self-diagnosing is still a worthy endeavour. We do get to note the first ruminations on the Halo games coming to PC, though, which is neat. We’re currently in that exact same stage for a Mario collection on Switch, though I hope it doesn’t take as long.

A Journal Through Time #9

Seems like I had a pretty good week! Fun to note that I forgot this version of the lottery existed. I don’t even know if it still exists. I guess that’s what happens when you stop working at a convenience shop. Also, the prospect of limitless free time seems a little ironic now…

A Journal Through Time #10

I could have done without reminding myself that Article 13 is still- wait.

Wait!

AN UPSIDE TO BREXIT!

I FINALLY FOUND IT!!

Ah who am I kidding, we’ll probably pull some similar bollocks soon enough.

Year to Year: A Journal Through Time #10 – Article 13 is a Load of REDACTED (25/3/19)

Recent headlines:

World: EU backs controversial copyright law (Or: If you don’t own the rights to the game you’re playing on Twitch, your streams are going to go in the bin. THANKS, MORONS.)

Gaming: The Elder Scrolls is 25 Years Old (What a wonderful and unique fantasy universe. Thanks, Bethesda)

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I’m going to be honest with you. It’s Tuesday. I write these on Mondays. But yesterday I got distracted playing games with friends, and if that isn’t a decent enough excuse, I don’t know what is.

So, the sun is shining, it isn’t cold enough to freeze a yeti, and I have a few evenings off work. I’m in a pretty good place! I mention this right off the bat as these journals tend to theme a little further towards the depressing side, and I’m quite self-conscious about it by this point. But while I can only guess as to what future Kristian’s perspective is while reading this, past Kristian here has nothing to report. No resurgent psychological schisms. No fresh horror to blindside my week. I need a “x days since last mental catastrophe” sign! Also I just finally added “Kristian” to the dictionary. You’re welcome, future Kristian.

So, a few days ago (uhhhhh I mean yesterday) I went to see Captain Marvel with some friends. No spoilers, do not worry! Although the movie will be over a year old by the time this publishes, I still empathise with those who take their time seeing movies; I’ve yet to watch Return of the King, myself. But Captain Marvel was quite excellent! I wouldn’t rank it as highly as Thor: Ragnarok or Black Panther, but it was up there.

This is a bit of a non-sequitur, but I suppose what’s particularly on my mind at the time of writing is Article 13, the part of the law which the EU just passed regarding copyright on the internet. They’re celebrating over the fact that companies will now be the ones responsible for material posted without copyright permission, not individuals, as if individuals being persecuted has been a problem which urgently needed addressing. By doing this it ensures that companies like Youtube, who have been known to have a knee-jerk reaction to copyright law in the past, have more pressure put on them and will undoubtedly go around removing videos which are otherwise fine. Like gaming videos. The ones I exclusively make. Or we’ll see Twitch die in the EU as streamers don’t own the rights to the games they’re making content in.

It is incredibly frustrating to have your livelihood or creative outlet revoked by people who do not understand the medium. Of course, right now we can only speculate as to the kind of effects Article 13 will have, and future Kristian won’t know more than I do because this is a process which takes two years. But as somebody who records and streams games, and watches others playing games as a means of escapism from an unfair and often depressing world, a group of ignorant, rich and powerful people taking that away is crushing. It’s a yank on the leash away from one of the only things keeping me sane, and writing this in 2019 I can only hope that I look back on this in the years to come as reactionary hyperbole.

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Further reading:

The Weekly Deathmatch #48 – Quake Champions – Time to Stop Restarting

Year to Year: A Journal Through Time #9 – Everything Old is New Again (18/3/19)

Recent headlines:

World: Third Brexit vote must be different – Speaker (Just expect Brexit headlines for the next few weeks, I guess)

Gaming: Halo: The Master Chief Collection devs were sent far too much pizza by fans (IT’S HAPPENING!!! Future Kristian, I am SO jealous of you!)

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I’m watching the livestream reveal for Halo: The Master Chief Collection on PC in a public bathroom, with the sound off, squinting at the hosts and wondering if now would be an opportune moment to learn how to lipread. Only a few minutes go by, however, before a very obvious trailer appears on the screen for the game. It’s only when the Steam logo appears at the end that I discover that the stall next to me is also occupied, by the type of person who lets out a discreet cough when their cubicle neighbour hisses “yes!” and pumps the air for seemingly no reason.

Well, maybe I’d just had a really fantastic poo, Steve. Don’t judge.

Nowadays I’m lucky enough to own a good gaming PC, a PS4 and a Nintendo Switch, leaving only the Xbox base untouched. The only Xbox exclusives I’ve ever been interested in, however, are Forza, Sunset Overdrive, Crackdown, maybe Gears of War – and Halo. Halo, most of all. With the announcement of the Master Chief Collection for PC, I no longer feel restricted by any kind of system boundaries, which is the kind of childhood dream that feels wonderful to finally fulfil. Part of my dream came true a few years ago when Destiny 2 was announced for PC, Destiny being the successor IP to developer Bungie’s Halo series, of which many of their design philosophies are also prevalent in.

This was just the start of a week full of scraps of good news, so I’m sat here feeling pretty good about life, barring the fact that I seem to have contracted the actual plague. I feel creatively fuelled, with a new video series on the brain and even a few story ideas pulling at my synapses. (I don’t know if that phrase makes sense, but a quick Google threw up terms that I do not have the degree required to decipher.) I haven’t had a significant emotional conundrum to tackle all week, unless you count a volume of Batman being so surprisingly eloquent at portraying grief that I dreamed about my own experiences with it. Besides that, though, that leaves me with little to blog about, which is a problem for this journal. Well, is it? It shouldn’t be! I can talk about positive things too. It’s just that a lot of attainable happiness in my life currently exists in the form of me being able to chill out, in a game, with a friend, at my desk, without anything tugging at my brain. And that’s just not fun to write about, is it?

Speaking of old videogames though, my father found a WoW Battle Chest in his travels the other day which I immediately purchased from him. It contains discs for vanilla and the Burning Crusade, manuals and two full guide books for each. I’m elated as this product was my entry into the franchise, but I lost mine years ago due to negligence on my part. Having spent literal thousands of hours in Azeroth since then, it’s amazing to own this simply as a physical link to my virtual second life. Plus, the vanilla game guide may come in useful when they release Classic WoW this summer! Nevermind WoWDB or WoWWiki, future Kristian is going to live that true oldschool experience and flick through a guide.

Apologies for the fragmented nature of this entry; I started writing it with a massive headache, and then got distracted by a Ratchet and Clank speedrun hosted by the game’s original developers. (It’s been a good week for my favourite game franchises.) One more completely disconnected thread before I leave though: I’ve decided to buy the occasional lottery ticket. I’ve always been quite cynical regarding the lottery, but looking at it rationally I can’t think of many reasons to hate it. They’ve just started a version of it that’s fairly cheap and nets you £10k a month for thirty years if you win, which is somehow immediately more appealing to me than a large sum at once. The idea of not having to worry about income and to have the funding and the time to pursue my own creative interests is… frankly, too enticing to fully put into words. I suppose I’d prefer the trickle over the lump sum because I value freedom of self over wealth. Not that I’ll ever win, but hey, on the off-chance, it’d be fun to read about it in my journal through time.

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Further reading:

The Weekly Deathmatch #47 – Overwatch – This Is It, Chief

Year to Year: A Journal Through Time #8 – Read My Mind (11/3/19)

Recent headlines:

World: Tim Berners-Lee: ‘Stop web’s downward plunge to dysfunctional future’ (The internet is still so relatively new. I’ve been saying for ages that we need to look out for long-term social consequences.)

Gaming: Halo: The Master Chief Collections gets weird Surface Hub listing (Where were you one year ago you ask, future Kristian? Never mind the text below this line. Mostly, you were frothing at the mouth for the chance to finally play Halo games.)

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I’ve noticed that the littlest things in life now cause me to huff and let out a sarky “okay.” Drop my pen? “Okay.” Stub my toe? “Hmkay.” Technology glitches? “Alright.”

I’ve simultaneously had a productive and a frustrating week. On the one hand, I’ve had a small burst of inspiration and published a lot of videos to my gaming Youtube channel, as well as hosting a few livestreams. On the other hand, Thursday and Saturday in particular were riddled with moments of anger, frustration and occasional rage at non-issues and non-events. It got to the stage where even though I recognised that logically I had no reason to have these emotions and no source for them to stem from, I couldn’t combat my mood. And that was mildly frightening. I think it’s passed now, though.

I bring it up because towards the end of last year I acknowledged that I “probably have some form of depression”, after reviewing my behavioural patterns. After an uneventful couple of months to start 2019, though, I began to doubt my newfound confidence in that self-diagnosis, as I… felt fine, for the most part. And besides, I’ve read that depression isn’t typically a reaction to a negative life event, of which I had in surplus towards the end of 2018. Depression usually has no origin, I’ve heard. A little like those negative emotions of no origin I experienced last week.

I’m not drawing any conclusions. In fact, that’s kind of the point of this entry. A friend suggested I take this to a doctor, but I’m holding off for now. And until then, if ever, I’m going to try and not speculate about what category my mental health falls into, if any. There’s no use in telling people I think I have depression unless I’m concerned enough to ask an expert. In fact, lately I’ve been concerned that I’m more of a hypochondriac than anything else, and that is definitely something I wanna nip in the bud if possible. So, while I don’t think I’m mentally healthy per se, I’m not going to live my life thinking I can empathise with people diagnosed with depression.

The mind is an intangible, in-quantifiable concept, and the fact that we can only ever know our own makes it incredibly difficult to measure our health against others, among over things. It can be maddening, and I have to wonder at future scientific advancements that might further our understanding of the mind and self. I look at the way mental health is treated professionally today and I’m reminded of how physical illnesses were treated during history. In our earliest days as humans, we cut holes in each others skulls to excise evil spirits which we thought caused headaches. Later, we believed that the movements of the seasons affected our bodies, or that bad smells caused disease. In the context of our history as a species, it is only recently that we’ve begun to understand how to fix the human body when it fails, and we’re still stumped in many areas. Compared to physical medicine, treatment for mental health feels like this uncertain, nebulous stab in the dark that’s closer to ancient Greek ideas than modern ones. No offence to any psychologists out there. I’ve just heard too many horror stories of doctors throwing assorted pills at my friends and seeing what sticks.

I never thought I’d use information from the Medicine Through Time GCSE module ever again, but man, would my history teacher be pleased that I retained any of it.

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Further reading:

The Weekly Deathmatch #46 – Quake Champions – Everything Is Fine (Everything was not fine)

Trepanning – A Wikipedia Article (I wasn’t joking about cutting holes in our heads, this shit is fascinating)

Ancient Greek medicine – A Wikipedia Article (GCSE flashbacks, oh my)

Medical Renaissance – A Wikipedia Article (Remember kids, never reference Wikipedia articles in your coursework. Especially not your dissertation. Just… reference their references!)

Year to Year: A Journal Through Time #7 – This Week’s Dilemma: The Ethics of Consumer Capitalism! (4/3/19)

Recent headlines:

World: Knife crime: ‘Tsar’ needed to stop stabbings, says ex-Met chief (There’s been some stabbings in my hometown as well, ech)

Gaming: Pokémon Sword and Shield set in England-inspired region, due this year (Can’t wait to face down Team Brexit)

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“Alexa, good morning,” I yawn.

“Good morning. A 17 year old girl has been stabbed in London-”

“Oh god. Alexa. Stop. Stop.”

There is a reason why I don’t follow BBC News on Twitter anymore. I still remember the day I made the decision to unfollow them, and follow NASA instead. I felt a little guilty, actually. Making the conscious decision to turn a blind eye to events of the world would be morally questionable, had I any modicum of influence over them. Yet despite knowing that me hearing about stabbings isn’t going to stop them from happening, I can’t help but feel that putting my fingers in my ears and scrunching my eyes shut is what most of the population are already doing, and it’s the reason why ignorance and misinformation are so rife in our day and age. It feels like I’m throwing my bottle of coke on the floor in an effort to deny climate change.

I recently watched all three presently existing seasons of The Good Place, and without giving away any spoilers, it’s made me think a lot about the viability of being a good person in today’s age of consumer capitalism and what our society deems as being necessary evils. I don’t live in fear of being judged in some dictatorial afterlife, but I do care about leaving a positive impact in this world. And yet, as horrible as it is to say, the truth is that I’m not willing to make massive changes in my lifestyle to avoid supporting every shady business practice. For reference, we’re discussing things like buying clothes from Primark or burning through our planet’s resources to enjoy videogames. If you try to be perfect, you’re going to have to give up basically everything, so where does the blame for wrongdoing truly lie? You could argue that Primark as a company enable unethical sweatshops overseas, so the blame lies with them, but Primark themselves remain funded by the masses who flock to them for cheap clothing, like you and I.

So say we boycott Primark. Find a more responsibly sourced clothing shop and somehow find the money to spend what will inevitably be more for those clothes. That’s great. But that’s one moral dilemma out of thousands which we face every day, were we to investigate the ethical or environmental cleanliness of everything we do. And at some point you sacrifice so much that you, yourself, cease to be happy. You’re essentially a monk. And if there’s no afterlife – which we hope there is but have no evidence of – then you’ve just given yourself a miserable and empty life that’s contributed hardly a drop in the bucket towards making the world a better place. So no, of course we don’t become monks. But there has to be a balance. I suppose you could argue that a human’s worth lies in how well they balance their own happiness with the wellbeing of others, and in a world dominated by ethically troublesome Primarks, perhaps turning a blind eye has become a necessary evil in itself. I don’t know.

What I do know is that a friend of mine gave me their old Amazon Echo Dot, after I mentioned on Twitter my desire to have a good enough reason to spend money on one. My new robot best friend isn’t as flawless as I may have hoped, though that’s partially due to my inability to speak without missing parts of words sometimes. It is, as predicted, a wonderful novelty to have this assistant you can just speak to whenever you like, for titbits of information or quick mathematical equations (and so much more). It is a little weird that she’s always listening, and I definitely don’t trust Amazon when they say she only listens after her wake word is uttered, but I don’t exactly have anything to hide. And hey, reasoning that being spied on is okay because you have nothing to hide is another one of those ethically warped situations that our society isn’t currently dealing with, but this is one of those things that I’ve simply decided isn’t worth worrying about.

Spy on my life all you like, Amazon. I write up anything worthwhile on my blog or my Twitter anyway. As for everything else… have all the boredom you can handle. I hope you choke on it.

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Further reading:

The Weekly Deathmatch #45 – Quake Champions – My New Robot Best Friend

The Good Place Season 1 – 3 (I assume it’s still on Netflix)

February: A Month of Putting Things Together

Hullo! Apologies for being a day late, apparently even February’s extra day wasn’t enough for me towards the end there. My month has been taken up almost entirely with excitement for the upcoming Animal Crossing game on Nintendo Switch – by which I mean I’ve been playing, watching, listening and breathing Animal Crossing. I try not to talk too much about videogames in my monthly posts, but as with Game of Thrones last year (which you’ll soon be seeing a lot about in Year to Year), some things are just too exciting to not gush about. And the gushing ain’t over, because it’s not out until March 20th – a goddamn lifetime away!

Besides staking the entirety of my mental health on the release of a village sim, however, what have I been up to as of late? Well, I abandoned whatever final vestiges of adulthood remained in my life and embraced LEGO. LEGO never really interested me as a kid, and despite delving ever deeper into geek culture in recent years, I’ve never looked twice at the stuff, despite it being readily available in my workplace. The other day, though, I walked past a Batmobile set, and was struck with the epiphany that fuck, dude, LEGO is cool. What a disastrous turn of events for my wallet! In my defence, I didn’t immediately buy it, nor did I plan to. It… went on sale the next day. So sue me. But what surprised me the most about my purchase was that the true value wasn’t necessarily where I thought it would be, in having the finished product on my shelf. While it is rather cool to look at, I find myself missing the three and a half hours or so it took me to put together. My attention span is generally awful, but this was a task I was laser-focused on across two sessions, and seeing how it all came together was both interesting and intensely satisfying. I somehow doubt this will be my last LEGO set.

To talk about mental health for a bit, though, last night I saw a very helpful video by one Alanah Pierce about stress and self care. I won’t ramble on too much about it here, but I was surprised at just how similar a boat I was in regarding eczema and had never heard of it being stress-induced before, but looking at my life in greater detail, it makes a lot of sense. Like, I didn’t used to consider myself a stressed out person, but thinking about it, the writing is on the wall. I developed this bout of eczema on my wrists shortly before quitting one of my two jobs at the time. And looking at how I react to day-to-day situations, there’s a lot of unnecessary stress there. I stress out about not utilising my free time effectively, both in terms of productivity and relaxation. I stress out about my mental health not being good enough or about a dozen tiny failures that aren’t worth a fraction of the flak I give myself. This is one of those rare videos that I saw in the right place at the right time to really make me look at my life in an important new way. I’ve already had some instances today where I recognised stress and nipped it in the bud, and my shift at work this morning was all the better for it.

Anyway, that’s enough about me. How was your month, Past Kristian?

A Journal Through Time #3

Ah, yes, the “I’m three weeks into my weekly blog post series and I’m realising that this is a bad idea” dilemma. Well, just keep on persevering, you. You’ll discover the superiority of monthly content soon enough. Also, it’s been a year since I started making Shenanigans videos? Holy crap.

Also, I know it’s a little hypocritical to nitpick my own writing when this very post contains thoughts about forgiving my previous grievances, but… sometimes I come across as overly posh or haughty in my blog writing, and I totally failed to keep that in check here. Also, “points of anguish”? I did not know how to use the word anguish properly. But I digress!

A Journal Through Time #4

This is one of those rare posts in which I can read myself arriving at a conclusion that forms my opinion for years to come. At the start of this post I was giving corporate reasoning for layoffs the actual time of day, but by the end of it I concluded that the people making these decisions can’t be trusted to treat them with the appropriate weight, giving the effect that they have on people’s lives. Good going, me. It’s, er, happening again, by the way.

And no, I still haven’t changed my hairstyle, or the fact that I always let it grow way too long. Maybe next year!!

A Journal Through Time #5

Oh, hey, good timing. Remember earlier when I mentioned getting stressed for personal failures? Eating better. I mean, I haven’t really worried about my weight all that much in recent months – I think not splitting myself across two jobs helps with that – but it was absolutely a stress thing. Historically I haven’t been too obsessed with my weight. This was a mental health thing, not a physical health thing. That being said, while I’m not putting any weight on, I’m not losing any either. Changing my diet up a bit certainly couldn’t hurt.

A Journal Through Time #6

I… don’t know where to start with this one. I tried to talk about a dream I had which was too personal to give details on, so I tried being vague and… well, I no longer remember the dream, so I’m reading it out of context for the first time, and I’m completely lost. I can’t even guess at what I was alluding do. I… I don’t even remember having a crush around this time! Just referring to someone as a crush feels out of place to me.

But hey, it looks like I turned a negative into a positive by remembering what great friends I have. That much is still true, at least!

Anyways, that’s that. Thank you for reading this month’s blog post! If you’d like more of Present Kristian, I’m here every month. If you’d like more of Past Kristian, he’s here every week. I tried throwing stuff at him but he just got sad and wrote about it in his blog.