Saturday, October 5, 2019

 I'm going to keep this short. Sort of checked out all day.



 The Sleep is still whipping me, so I let it it do so today & just ignored the rest of the world. Some days you just need to do that & let it ride. Maybe it's just me, I don't know how people who have too much energy to not have seven or eight things on the fire. This is wiping me out, to be quite frank; how someone does a vlog, develops games, has a real job & still does stuff for fun is beyond me.

 And that's really all I got right now. Yesterday, until I was interrupted, I had a fine line of talk going. Today I'll probably leave this page open until I squeeze out 500 words. Didn't get many readers, though. I'm sort of curious how that works & how many of them are actual humans rather than bots & webcrawlers.

 Still working on The Wandering Earth: Classic Science Fiction Collection by Liu Cixin. Any earlier recommendations I've made for the book are doubled. This is pretty good stuff, more of the "what if this happened or if life was this way" type science fiction rather than a reliance on any scifi tropes. There is a place for that sort of fiction; indeed, whatever fiction I find myself able to pound out will be highly troperiffic I imagine. Anyhow, it's pretty good. I wonder if it's indicative of Chinese science fiction, if there is indeed such a thing & I doubt there is.

 I played a good bit of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag the other night. I've found myself with a number of the Assassin's Creed games but IV is the only one I keep going back to. The basic gameplay doesn't seem to change so much from game to game, as fun as it is. Climbing on buildings, leaping on people, the punch-punch-block-parry fighting style I'm sure the Batman Arkham games wish they would have put a patent on, that whole bit. However, IV has the whole "pirate on the high seas" added onto the Assassins-versus-Templars story which, frankly, is a bit too pat for me.

 I do like me some pirates, though, particularly the famous Golden Age Of Piracy that brought us Blackbeard, Treasure Island, Sid Meier's Pirates variations. Tim Powers' excellent On Stranger Tides..., &, eventually, The Pirates of The Caribbean movies. I have no romantic illusions about the life or character of the famous pirates or any sort of joy concerning the pirate life. I just enjoy the stories. Sort of like with Western stories; I enjoy stories about cowboys but I have no desire to ever live that life.

 Maybe I should work on a pirate story, but I don't know if there's one better than On Stranger Tides. Perhaps once I get my cowboy universe squared maybe can I can do something in there. Of course, I need to actually get my cowboy universe squared away. I really wish I could figure out how to make the jump. I'm half tempted to take part in "Write A Novel In November" or whatever it's called. I mean, 500 words a day for 30 days is 15,000 words, which is probably a good start. I do have the tendency to ramble on if inspired.

 I think that's good. The weather's let up on us & the weather is noticeably cooler. This morning actually felt like Fall. We're supposed to get some rain, too. Sort of looking forward to that. I've broken into the Mendocino & that'll be the last of the stuff from the Trip. I don't know what I'll do, then. A middle-age man buying smoke in this part of the world, eh... it's rarely recommended.

 This actually started rolling decently once I popped the initial pimple. Maybe I will do the "novel in November" thing. In any event, let's call it a night.

UPDATE: It's 4:30 a.m. & I haven't been able to sleep. That's happening a lot lately. I can't sleep, all I do is pass out. It's not like I have anything to do & prefer the wee, wee hours as opposed to being out in the daylight. That being said, the later I stay up the more I dwell on the black parts of my existence.