I’ve been playing Elden Ring on PS5. This isn’t my favourite genre of video game, but I’m playing it since it was free-ninety-nine courtesy of my sister-in-law’s excellent Xmas present. It’s undeniably a quality game, a little more story telling would have been welcome though. It’s a pretty great time regardless. I just gained a new spell that apparently conjures the moon and launches it at a target. Very excited to try it later. I WILL DESTROY YOU WITH MY MAGIC MOON!!!!!!!!

On the other hand, I paid forty bucks for Dragon Age: Veilguard a couple weeks ago. It’s a sequel to a video game I absolutely loved, Dragon Age: Inquisition. Unfortunately, Veilguard is an incredibly disappointing experience. Bioware has really ruined some great games lately. The character designs have been uncanny valley lumpy and the dialogue and writing is bland and monotonous.

It seems this game was ground zero for the culture war too. On the character creation tool, they allowed a slider to make crotch bulges big, and an option of adding surgery scars (from removing breasts) on your character. A nice inclusive move, more representation in video games is great. The weird thing is that they also completely shrunk the chest and ass sliders for women. It’s restrictive in a way that even a slightly curvy woman wouldn’t be able to recreate her likeness in the game. I understand they must have done it to try and avoid perpetuating stereotypes and creating harmful beauty standards. Doesn’t it feel weirdly punitive though? It’s a mature rated game where there are romance relationships, yet the game refuses to allow creating traditionally attractive female characters? Sexuality for me, but not thee. How about we just let everyone have fun? I wish video games weren’t ground zero for this bullshit, but I can see why the gamer-bro’s were frustrated by this.

Ehh whatever. I wish I could get my money back on that game. It’s the writing that’s the real problem, not the weird character creation tool restrictions. Dragon Age Inquisition was so much fun, I’m so disappointed they screwed this up so bad.

Hysteria by Def Leppard is pretty great.

My weight has crept up into the 170-180 pound range. Not bad, but that’s a bit heavy at 5’10. I feel better in the 160-170 range. I know that at 44 years old I’m healthy. Just want to get a bit more fit and control garbage eating.

Last night after my wife went to bed, I stayed up playing Elden Ring. After a particularly frustrating death, I got up and grabbed a handful of candy leftover from Halloween and binged probably 18 of those little single serving sour gummies and Swedish fish bags. Full blown Brendan Frasier whale behaviour. I don’t think I’ll ever grow out of this. Sometimes I’m a human racoon.

I’m pretty sure society is in decline.

I’m planning a 2025 mid-year move to Canada. The house has been bought, working on the sponsorship documents for my wife. We’re making it happen. The home is a 40 acre wooded property, just inside the city limits of my hometown. It’s on a large hill or small granite mountain. There are no sight lines to any neighbours, only forest and mountain views. The well has incredible pressure from what may be a pristine source. Microplastic free.

Is my capacity to feel joy reduced? Is it because of the accumulated wounds of life? Or is it more that I’m affected by society boiling? I think Russia has won the cold war. They did it with social media propaganda and lit the fires that are crumbling the nation from within. So many people have seemingly lost the ability to tell truth from lie. Malibu is dried out and burning. Anger and discontent. Trusted institutions are being compromised or destroyed. Wealth is so concentrated in the hands of a few.

Can I turn this noise off? Reduce my exposure? Hide in my forest house and wait for robots to solve all the problems.

I hope so… because I’m going to try.

The last post I wrote felt cringe (as the kids probably no longer say). Not the sentiment, just the one phrase, “if you can’t tell”.

Ugh gross. Who am I writing to? This is for me. Be honest. No need to be a ham.

I’ll leave it though. It’s a record of who I was and what I was feeling that day.

I wrote it a little hurried from the little barrel sauna we have in our sunroom. As I am now. Fingers dripping sweat, autocorrect on every word. I’m doing it again and it’s happening again. guess I’ll just watch YouTube instead.

This is so absurd. 2025. It’s so ridiculously far in the future. Maybe you have the same feeling? That the real year is about twenty-five years in the past, and that this reality is some sort of broken, out of control spiral of misery?

Maybe the Y2K glitch wasn’t a data storage bug. Maybe it was our inflection point of doom. DOOM. DOOooOoom!! If you can’t tell, I’ve been doing a descending slow burn into apathy ever since an Inconvenient Truth came out. Ever since Gore lost that election.

I still can’t embrace full nihilism yet though. There’s a stubborn piece of optimism that won’t die, despite the unrelenting progression of global temperatures and ecosystem decline.

It Jan 1st and it’s raining outside.

So, here I am, sitting in the sauna, post New Year’s resolution workout, once again mourning the seemingly inevitable demise of our species…. and I’m so tired of it.

Last night we watched two episodes of Star Trek The Next Generation followed by the animated movie Flow. We should have reversed the order. The futuristic show with earnest idealism should come after the beautiful crushing Dystopian story, not vice versa. (I can’t recommend Flow enough. Incredible animated film)

Happy New Year.

Yesterday I drove to Quebec and back. I needed to wire my Canadian house deposit to the real estate lawyer in person. The bank refused to do it remotely. So I woke up at 4am, drove to Coaticook 4.5 hours away (the nearest branch from Boston), did my business then drove right back. It was a small town. Quebec provincial flags flying in the absence of Canadian flags. That gave me pause, the people there might be begrudgingly Canadian, and my French skill is poor. The town also smelled like manure, not disparaging, just an observation. They were good people at the bank. They helped me send my wire and I was grateful. On the way back the US border guard was an asshole. I told him I was buying a house in Canada and he gave me a sarcastic “Why?”. Fuck you is why. Then he checked my back seat to see if I was smuggling someone into the country.

Today I drove to Cleveland. Part one of the Chicago then T-Bay Xmas road trip. Fuck that was a lot of driving. My neck is a rock. Driving is like a video game. Except it feels boring and mundane despite the fact that you could die at any moment. I don’t like how I speed so much. I was cruising down 90 west at mostly 84 mph. The only lunatic on the road doing this. When I drive why can’t I chill the fuck out?

In the hotel now, on the 29th floor. Bladerunner 2049 is on the TV. It was the least shitty option on the menu. I forgot how mesmerizing the visuals were in this movie. It suffers from volume issues though. I hate how dynamic range is maximized in movies so that you have to turn the volume way up to hear the dialogue, then in an action scene it blows your eardrums out. I need a hot shower and sleep. Go to bed Complain-o.

I successfully found and downloaded all the music from my Spotify like playlist. It took fucking forever. Curating and expanding the list, adding in forgotten bands and tracks. It’s my music now. Mine! I take it with me now. No corporate gatekeeping.

My wife flew to her hometown in the Chicago suburbs today leaving me alone in the house with the cats. I’ll join her in a few days. I did some chores, then holed myself up in the guest bedroom where my PC is and decided to continue my personal music renaissance. I had written down a bunch of bands to add to the master liked playlist of downloaded songs. This was stuff from mostly from the 1994-2000 era. The teenage high school stuff. The CDs I bought with scrounged money from gifts and those first (sometimes shitty) jobs. Dollar store cashier. Hockey linesman and referee. Utility man in the chemical recovery plant. The NIN era. Smashing Pumpkins. Alanis Morrissette, Garbage, Oasis, STP and Soundgarden. AC/DC and Metallica. White Zombie and Green Day. Weezer, Nirvana, Pearl Jam. The Soundtracks – The Crow, Dumb and Dumber (surprisingly awesome), Natural Born Killers, The Saint, Last Action Hero. Etc etc.

Tonight I moved on to my Pandora liked songs. For the last ten years or so, I’ve been mainly using Spotify, so opening my old Pandora main station was like a nostalgia dagger to the heart. I loved who I was when I was listening to this music. This was mainly the 2003-2010 era. Fuck the music was so good.

Belle and Sebastain, Tegan and Sara, The Stokes, The Hive, The Kooks. Talib Kweli and good Kanye. The New Pornographers, Broken Social Scene and Alexisonfire. Cadence Weapon, Immortal Technique and Buck 65. Camera Obscura and The Arcade Fire. The Weakerthans, Constantines, Sharon Jones, Magnolia Electric Co. Phoenix, Passion Pit, MGMT, The Unicorns.

2005 might be my favourite year of music ever. There are so many adorable catchy indie one-offs around this time. This is when I started listening to college radio religiously at Western. I have so much gratitude to those young DJs that exposed me to so much new music. It helped me bop and jam through such a chaotic time. I love that I am reintroducing these songs back into my life. It feels like reaching into the past and pulling my younger self into now. Help infuse this old hardened husk with joy, kid.

So the UHC CEO killer doesn’t appear to be a wounded crypto bro like I hypothesized. Instead, he shares some uncomfortable similarities with myself at that age. A bright computer science grad with some anti-capitalist ideology. But unlike myself, he had something different inside that propelled him to take bold action on those ideals. Its hard not to sympathize, especially knowing the misery that UHCs fuckery causes.

My music reclamation project is done, at least the first phase. I went through 361 albums, picking out 589 songs to build my “liked” list. Normalized the volume across all of them and put them on my phone. Feels good. It’s my music. Fuck you Spotify. Fuck your ads and subscriptions. I can play these on my phone or computer, skip as much as I want, no unwanted track insertions. I’m so happy with this. And as I was doing it, I was writing down long forgotten albums, bands and artists that I’m going to also add in the future. This project was so restorative. Music is important, personal and joyful. Make sure to keep it in your life.