I try and try

I try to write blog posts, but I never seem to finish them.

A common thread on this blog is me whinging about being too busy.  It turns out that can get never endingly worse.

Some of it is good.  Our daughter has been the goalie for 8 hockey teams this year and is constantly training or playing.

Here she is, fearsome and fearless, playing for our state.

Our Son managed to get his Karate Black Belt, and while he still attends two classes a week, he is now working towards almost daily coaching for solo and pair roller skating competitions.  He has been skating for a decade and is very good at it. 

Some of the busyness is not so good.

Off the field our daughter still causes havoc.  She was diagnosed with clinical anxiety at a young age.  Her coping mechanism is to be very controlling and exploding violently when overwhelmed.  With an extraordinary amount of effort and the guidance of a behavioural Paediatrician, multiple Psychologists and Therapists, we have a structure and consistency around our daughter’s life which helps.  That has left us however in a Juxtapose where she has no problem throwing herself in front of a hockey ball but threatens never to play hockey again if we try to force her out of the car at a venue until she has seen at least one of her teammates arrive.

Off the rink our son has oscillated between brilliance and being a complete fuckwit.  After quite a journey a recent diagnosis of ADHD has gone some way to explain his behaviour, but we don’t seem to be able to stop the worst of it.

Both our kids have the world at their feet, and the propensity to throw it all away.  Makes for very busy and stressed parents.

The sibling I remarked on back in March as being very unwell has now passed away with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.  It was an unnecessarily exhausting journey that was heading towards being an unnecessarily horrific death.  Thankfully at the last moment she finally accepted palliative care and had a peaceful passing.  She left two orphaned children, and an unprepared, dysfunctional, and messy estate.  Trying to get that in order is taking up a lot of my time. 

The stress of this hastened the deterioration in my parents and pushed to the forefront signs of dementia.  That journey, given the personalities involved, will be utterly awful.

Work continues and I continue to dislike it.  I dream about a career change and doing some relatively mindless job for a while, but the reality of doing 3 times as many hours for the same pay traps me.

What else is there in my blog notes.

I passed 350M Skill points on my main.

I started on a post about how important it was for the developers of an online game to focus on having their players habitually logging in.

I mentioned how EVE, like most online games I have played, have daily logon bonuses, frequent and time limited events, and game mechanics that require you to connect often to update queues and processes.

I then pointed out how little of this existed when I first started playing EVE.  I suspected that aside from people with addictive personalities or OCD tendencies, that the artificial attempts to get people to log in daily do not work long term.  The developers really need to focus on immersive and fun game play and goals.

Oh – there was a note about how everyone in the family has had COVID now, except (as far as I know) me.  That remains the case.  I did just have my 4^th vaccine dose earlier this week.  I am not a fan of the side effects.

I had some notes on how I tried to get back into World of Warships.  It had new content and updates, so I thought after a long break I would give that a go.  On a whim I made use of a sale and purchased another year subscription, but then soon ran into a brick wall.  There was enough change that I had to re-learn parts of the game via YouTube.  There I found all my old content creators deep in bitter vet status, complaining about the game instead of playing.  I felt too far behind the current meta and never logged back in after the first week. I think the same thing happened the previous year.

I had some notes on how I went through a process of buying a whole heap of old PC games.  Games I had loved and spent many hours playing.  They had been updated to run in later versions of Windows on Steam.  Various releases of Command and Conquer, Blitzkrieg, Star Wars, Total Annihilation and so on.  None really worked, often crashing.  Much of the problem I expect relating to trying to run them on 4K monitors. I reattempted to play these again on a FHD gaming laptop. They keep crashing.

I had some notes on how I went through a process of buying a whole heap of somewhat newer PC games.  Games I thought I might get into, like Terraria, Sins of Solar, Rain of Reflections, Northgard, Planet Coaster, Halcyon 6, Galactic Civilizations, Cyberpunk, Cities Skylines, Banished, Ashes of the Singularity, Elite Dangerous.  Mostly I could not get past the tutorials.  I just couldn’t get into them.  I get some value out of Minecraft and Factorio at times, but they do not hold my attention for long.

I also remarked – that from all the entertainment available to me – a PS5, XBOX X, 4K Blu-ray players and a library of movies and shows and books, multiple streaming services, multiple PC’s and laptops, an iPad, and an Android Phone, that my most played game by far is Solitaire on my phone.

And back to life. I need to put tea into a thermos for my son, then go pick up him up from Band practise, then drop him off at Karate, then try to organise tea for the rest of us before going back to pick him up.