Mid-July update, slow reading, 5 more game badges

My new meds for sleep were repeatedly making me sleep for 10-12 hours, so I stopped taking them. On Saturday I went to bed at 20h00 and set my alarm for Sunday 08h00, thinking surely I would wake up before that. Not only did I not wake up before then, but I felt like I could've hit the snooze and kept sleeping. It's a scary feeling, sleeping for 12 hours and feeling like your body could still use more sleep. I had some hypersomnia issues before my sleep apnea was treated, and I have no desire to go back to that.

I've been sleeping okay with nothing but melatonin. I've only had one more Kafka-adjacent dream, and it was about this blog. Someone was replying to one of my posts that contained images, and they included the images in their email as part of their response; however, I noticed that the images were subtly but noticeably off, and I realized that the person had used "a.i." to re-generate the images instead of including the original ones. I was poring over every little detail trying to fathom why anyone would do this, cataloging all the differences with a manic obsession. It was unpleasant, but it didn't last all night and I was able to get back to sleep and dream normally. I think this was my first anxious dream about AI. I wouldn't like any more of them, please. I would prefer my unconscious mind not be polluted with that shit.

I have two longer blog posts cooking, but they both involve making points that I'm going to need to present an argument for, and those are always harder than posts that are just "what I've been up to", and I barely have time and energy even for those. The ideas in draft aren't exactly "persuasive essays", I don't need to convince anyone I'm right, but they're both ideas that are a little out of left field, and I want people to at least see where I'm coming from. This could be a good opportunity to "trade blog posts",¹ since I have titles for both in mind already, but there's a chance whoever I trade with will have no idea what to do with them. But I guess that's part of the fun, never knowing what you'll get.

Books

I've given up on my Cryptonomicon re-read, and I'm now convinced that I never finished it the first time I tried to read it. I was approaching the halfway point, and I realized that the plot wasn't so much going off the rails, but was never actually on any kind of track to begin with. The first half of the book has some very cool ideas and scenes that I found as thrilling as anything I've ever read. It also had a few scenes that are basically "a bunch of characters stand around in a room and explain the plot to each other for a few hours". Those scenes weren't great, but I could endure them as long as I thought it was all going somewhere, that the elements would start coming together in a satisfying way, but it's turning more and more into a series of unconnected stuff that happens, followed by people stand around and explaining it. Now that I've reached this point, I realize that it's exactly the problem I had with Reamde. Lots of cool ideas, plenty of interesting characters, absolutely no narrative cohesion. Some people just aren't cut out to write 900-page novels. It's okay! Very few people are! You just gotta get someone to edit them. That doesn't seem to have happened.

Confederacy of Dunces is also somewhat lacking in the plot, but that's by design. It's meant as more of a character study than a plot-driven narrative. That doesn't mean I like it less, but it does mean it's not a "page-turner". I think I need to read some genre fiction after this. I crave stories about likable protagonists having adventures and triumphing over adversity in a 3-act plot paced out over, say, 250-300 pages. Something nice and digestible.

I'm still chipping away at it though, and still liking it a lot. My slow progress with that one isn't because it's hard to read or feels like a chore, I just haven't been in as much of a reading mood. Bad sleep makes my brain less interested reading. I've been playing new games though, so not all of July has been a waste.

Game Badges

• FRANKEN (4❤️/5)
• Freedoom (4❤️/5)
• Hot Air Balloon Game (1❤️/5)
• North & South (3❤️/5)
• Sylvie RPG: 7 Elf Apocalypse (2❤️/5)

My reviews for these games aren't nearly as brief as I would like, but it turns out I have more to say about games that I've finished recently and are fresh in my mind.

That's about all I've got for right now, sorry. I'm really only fully functional in spring and autumn, and I'm comprehensively overworked and burnt out by now. I may be getting a slight reprieve at work in a couple weeks, cuz one of my co-workers should be past a busy period and ready to help me with some of my backlog. I barely put any words to markdown this week because I was falling behind too much. I'll keep doing what I can.