Recommended Doings

Hey guess what I'm back from my vacation! It was okay. I did a lot more thinking and basically decided that after said vacation, I would start on the path to good mental health. I'm gonna take it slow, but getting out in nature more, being social more, and bombarding myself with media distractions less will all be happening to some extent. I'm trying to spend more time doing just one thing. I can play video games without watching TV at the same time, and I can watch TV without playing video games at the same time, and they're both more enjoyable for the full focus I can give the stories I consume.

Speaking of video games with good stories, I'm already putting effort into playing more of those, because stories are what I really love. And I have two recommendations.

Oxenfree is an amazing and mildly spooky supernatural mystery thing where you play a teen going to spend the night on a beach on an island with other teens when some weird shit happens. It's super intriguing and also involves themes about death, grief, relationships, and coping. Also, time travel.

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is an incredible and weird supernatural adventure game in which you walk across the U.S. as a skeleton gathering and growing stories in a nation that seems to shift in time depending on the region but deals with many of the various cultural issues of the 20th century such as racism, union busting, unemployment, the dust bowl depression, and the general tragedy of cultural practices and traditions dying out due to culture change and technology. But mostly, it's about stories, so I'm currently lapping that up like it's the Elixir of Life.

Also, I read this piece from an incredibly bizarre website yesterday and I really liked it. It's by a guy who works at an Amazon fulfillment center and how the company has designed these facilities to make worker organizing nearly impossible and how the job has made him want to kill everyone from his supervisors to the programmers who created the computer program that serves as overlord to the whole system.

Trigger warnings for the article: Suicidal ideation, description of self-harm/suicide attempt, ableist language.

We are, all of us, Machines

I’d like to imagine a world in which everyone has on their minds: morepay, less work. No, more than that: refuse to work. Kill your supervisor to reclaim your humanity. Refuse the system, the stratification, and the machinification. Destroy this whole cybernetic organism that weighs us down like a fucking tumor hanging off our sides, and deal with all the fucking programmers who coded that shit. It’s no use trying to swat it out of their hands and take it for ourselves. This is a war of annihilation.

If the above resonates with you, I recommend the whole thing.