A Place for Some Stuff
This is going to be a short one, but I think one some of you will relate too.
It has been a busy few months where I’ve had to chop the heads off of several frantic chickens all at the same time and in no particular order.
I’ve been trying to work in the dark a little bit more lately. I was starting to feel this obligatory pull to talk about every aspect of the creative things I was doing. Not only that but several more personal initiatives I have been tackling felt like they would be better served by talking about them not at all, and others, less personal, but really not much to say that concerns this particular space.
That said one thing I have been doing that probably is pretty pertinent is down in this dank unfinished basement, where I’ve been trying to transform it from a dumping ground of stuff into a more usable space.
This was a challenge and illuminated how truly burdensome stuff can be. Because stuff also sometimes has value. And yet, it’s value is only truly equal to what someone is willing to take it off your hands for, and while selling things on Marketplace used to be rather fruitful and quick, and becomes less and less so as the things you have accumulated have fewer and fewer reasons to be appealing to other people.
In English, I flat out threw away some variant of Stratego among other things because they were hardly the kind of thing I could give away, and five or six boxes more, I simply gave to a guy because there was so much crap in the way that the only way to start dealing with it at all was to get it the fuck out of my face.
There are some pet projects here for the aftermath of quiet anxiety that follows a long and bloody campaign because eventually you get so used to being consumed by something that once it is finally over, it can feel very lonely on the mountain. And I’m not there yet anyways as evidenced by piles of CD’s and DVD’s that need reorganizing.
As far as RPG’s are concerned at this point I feel as though even the one shelf, which is sharing space with other things, is probably more than I will ever need for the rest of my life. Traveller5 sort of ended my search for a particular kind of thing, in the same way that TempleOS is probably the best operating system I’ll ever see in my life, both for similar reasons. That being that both were made by someone who was obsessed with what they were doing, and made these things with the expectation that those who would use them would love them as much as they did.
They also have one other thing in common in that very few people, if any, are actually doing anything of real value with them. I guess that’s the real trick, isn’t it? A C interpreter is only as useful as the maniac drawing circles on their 640x480 resolution workspace in the same way that Traveller5 is only as useful a game master running games with it, or using its tools to do something more reasonable.
Anyways I’ve been burning the candle on both ends but I’m still looking over the shelf and thinking of trying to get a game of something in over the next couple of days. I’m also consumed with an obsession to repair my Commodore 128 or at least determine if it’s the reason one of the expansion cards I have for it isn’t working. So finishing this today really started with me looking for my multimeter, which I did, and which I need to start probing serial ports with. Owning old microcomputers is a curse because it always gives you something to do, but that almost becomes the function of owning one moreso than actually doing anything interesting with it.
That said, I also found my Arduino, and I have a couple of fun projects in mind for that including building a tape deck emulator with a breadboard and an SD card reader. Turns out if you just want to develop on a Commodore 128 and your serial port is broken, which may be a possibility, it’s your only other option for actually saving data. Either way, when it comes to things like this, I’m not always a path of least resistance kind of guy, because breaking and fixing things in perpetuity is how I developed a passion for this garbage in the first place. A 30 dollar chip vs. a frankenstein of wires and 40 dollars worth of parts in a true example of a lot of effort for pretty poor results is a no brainer if you actually want to use the thing behind the problem you are trying to solve. At that point you have to ask yourself, “am I doing this because I actually want this machine to run, or is all this dicking around actually the fun part?”
The line gets real blurry, and anyone else who plays with old machines will understand.
D&D is probably that way a little bit too. They don’t actually play is thrown around as an insult, and it might be, but it also might just describe a perpetual state of being for some grump-ass DM’s who have more fun making up nonsense than they do actually using any of it.
At any rate, it’s nice to have organized a lot of these things and reduce the analysis of paralysis of “what do I play?” There is really no benefit to hanging onto a bunch of shit you don’t touch. And as my new hobby has been investing, every dollar I make from some thing I wasn’t using is another dollar that can go into an outrageously risky exploration investment, because I’m absolutely convinced, for sure this time, that uranium is a sure thing and that nothing bad will ever happen at a power plant to deter this ever, ever again. And even if that isn’t true, the AI hivemind will become so demanding that ten trillion fans on every astral body in the solar system wouldn’t generate enough power to keep the lights on in the Data Center Megastructure Arcologies that will no doubt come in the future.
This is what an Arcology still looks like whenever I think of one in my ridiculous head-cannon of DOS game brainrot.
All I know is this place for all the stuff I live in is gradually becoming more livable, and it feels good to have the breathing room.