I have delicate lungs, so time to kill 1000 goblins

[dorchadas]

With that title I really should have a Goblin Slayer icon to go with this post. Heavy metal intensifies.

I realized yesterday that, since I had pneumonia as a high school student that left me with damaged lungs to the point where for a decade-and-a-half, I'd get a horrible wracking cough every winter for five to seven weeks, I might be at higher risk from serious complications from coronavirus than I thought. I haven't gotten that cough for several years now, but I don't know what, if anything, that says about my lungs and how much I've actually healed. It's possible that I'd be one of the asymptomatic carriers since I'm otherwise in excellent health, and it's possible that I'd have to be put on a ventilator. I have no idea, so it's pretty good that I can work from home and only have to go out for food like some kind of burrowing animal. Yesterday I went to the grocery store and it was the first time I had left the house since Saturday.

Today we're switching over from the old new database to the new new database. I thought this would impact my work, but since we're working from the old database since the old new database is a trash fire, it doesn't. I just need to avoid the old new database so its info can be migrated to the new new database, and if this sounds ridiculous and stupid, let me tell you about how actually dealing with them is! The new new database has a terrible UX--in the old database I can work entirely with key commands, in the new new database I have to click through five pages to change one record--but the old new database wouldn't even start a search if you hit Enter, you had to manually click the Search button until I wrote a script to click the button when you pressed Enter.

So what I'm saying is that the bar for "better" is pretty low here.

I've gone to sleep early the past two nights and woken up early in the morning both of those days. I don't think this means anything other than this is an extremely stressful time. There was a tweet I saw that went:

"You are not working from home; you are at your home during a crisis trying to work."

I've heard this twice today. I think it's an important distinction worth emphasising.

— Neil Webb (@neilmwebb) March 31, 2020

...and that's really the heart of it, isn't it? Trying to pretend like this is a nice jaunt, or a chance to do that thing you've been putting off for a while, or learn a new skill, ignore the societal level of fear. We built our whole society around the idea that pandemics were a solved problem, and we were wrong.

At least the people learning a new skill aren't spending all their time online belittling and mocking people for daring to briefly step outside on a nice day, though.

A long while ago I wrote a blog post about the idea of fun boredom, about doing dull repetitive tasks deliberately because the monotony is part of the appeal. One obvious example would be people watching a TV series or movie they've already seen a dozen times and know every single line of, and another would be playing old JRPGs that require a lot of grinding, which is my own version of it. I recently went back to my iOS game of the original Final Fantasy that I've been playing on and off for years only to find that an update had erased my save and iCloud backup somehow hadn't worked. That let me implement something I was already considering for a while, but hadn't yet done because I was almost at the end of the iOS game--switching to the original NES version. And since I'm playing in Japanese, switching to the Famicom version.

There are a lot of differences between the modern iOS version and the Famicom version, but I can summarize them all as "Famicom requires way more grinding." So that's what I've been doing, just walking back and forth in a forest and killing goblins, then killing gigas worms (Eng: creeps), then killing ogres, and occasionally hitting the game milestones. It's soothing, to see the numbers go up on my little chibi characters, to watch the burst of pixels when the black mage casts a spell, to listen to the chiptune themes. While the graphics of the iOS version are great, much better than the mobile abominations of Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI, the first version of the game I ever played was in my basement as a kid, in front of the TV on an NES, so the 8-bit version of Final Fantasy will always be my favorite. And in this time of uncertainty, with plague all around, playing a game where I know the plot, I know all the tricks, I know exactly what I need to do and I can turn off my brain and click through the fight command and buy up those potions to delve into the dungeons...that's comforting. It's a bit of normality that I can control, assuming your definition of normality involves goblins in the forest.

I have thought about resubscribing to WoW, or starting FFXIV, but I think the MMO part of my life is over. MMOs are about friends who also play them, and I can't rebuild the old Pig and Whistle community from nothing.

And now, back to work. Shabbat is tonight, which is the one part of the week that still feels different because I don't check social media then. It's actually still restful, and right now, I'll take all of that feeling I can get.

Comments

[corvi]

Your thoughts on "fun boredom" reminds me a little of this article, where the author goes out into a forest, makes a circle ten meters in diameter, and stays in it for 24 hours without anything whatsoever to do: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/jan/24/wilderness-solo-splendid-isolation-stopped-time-sitting-in-a-forest-24-hours . He is, of course, tremendously bored, and that was sort of the point of the exercise. He writes "boredom is the raw and unmediated experience of time" and eventually achieves a sort of meditative state.

For me, that article was the first time I'd considered boredom in a positive light. "Fun boredom" in video games seems like it might be similar.

[dorchadas]

Thank you for sharing that article! I'd never seen it before, and it reminded me of two things.

1) There's a Jewish practice called התבודדות hitbodedut ("Self-seclusion"), that involves going off alone, preferably into a wilderness, and talking directly to G-d without the formalized language of prayer. It's more structured than the seclusion in that article since it has a goal, but it has a similar point in that it's about leaving the world behind for a bit.

I suppose Shabbat is, in its own way, similar as well, though that doesn't involve isolation.

2) The video game metaphors, about always going right as the clock ticked down, reminded me of a game called Passage that played out an entirely lifetime in five minutes and that I first played over a decade ago. It was very affecting for something that only took a few minutes to play through and whose main mechanic was "go right."

[earthspirits]

Glad you can work from home. Stay safe!!!

[dorchadas]

Thank you!

So far, so good, though of course every time I have a headache or a feel a bit off I think, "Oh...is this it?"