This winter is doing what winter is supposed to, I guess. Snow in many parts of the UK and apparently the wind will be up tomorrow as I’m driving to Wales.
I’ve been nesting, and thank God I can afford to keep the heating on for now. Talking to the wardrobe department for my next job and trying to plan ahead with the unsustainable situation of this flat vs my income. One show in Wales this weekend. One day of filming in early February. If these things were more frequent, more predictable, I would have less cause for concern. But I’ve got expensive tastes and not the means to indulge them. I don’t want to end up old and broke wondering why I didn’t make better use of what I had. So I’m trying to do that growing up thing at long last.
It’s hard though, especially when the habit isn’t there and the distractions are mighty. Very easy to do what I did the other night with Tristan and open five bottles of wine between three, see the dawn, lose much of the next day either to sleep or chemical mood. But that’s not new and it certainly isn’t sexy. It’s an old mode. It hasn’t served either of us with structure. An old trick of the mind to style the helpful things as dull. Life is bright and strange and colourful. The numbing is an interesting journey when new, but once it is old it is just old patterns again, the thing it pretends not to be, the same as a well worn thoughtless track in the sand.
It likely doesn’t help my mood that it is dark and cold. It likely doesn’t help my prose that I’m now playing an incredibly densely written and wildly mad RPG on my Steam Deck which is taking the place of books for the moment. It is more or less entirely a talking game. No twitch skills. No fighting. You just have conversations and skill checks but the themes go all over the place. My character’s most developed skills range from more familiar and predictable things like Empathy and Pain Threshold into “Inland Empire” which is about gut feelings and “Electro Chemistry” which seems to want my character to be constantly high on something. It’s beautifully written and largely well voiced, with the usual context related mistakes and mispronounciations you always get in low budget games. You play a cop who wakes up one morning with no clue who he is or what he’s doing or why. You can invent the answers, largely. It’s a well written world and a bold game. They did very well out of it too. It has been PC Gamer magazines top game two years running so I bet they’ve sold well. On paper it never appealed to me. But with the Steam Deck I can read it like a book.
Still this means I’m having to set strict times for my work. Got to be a good boy. Reward myself with games, but I’ve never been one to sit and wait for the phone to ring, even if recently it has rung a few times.
Not much more winter to weather, and since the winter has done the thing it is supposed to, maybe we can count on the same for summer…
AlBarclay 