One hour of writing, by the end of it, feels insufficient, but I swear the first ten to fifteen minutes feel like early morning Mass. I do have to make better plans so I can do 2-hour sprints again (or more). I just haven’t been able to wake up wake up these days. I mean, I feel a little clarity today and I know it has something to do with being forced to walk at least 5 thousand steps back from the doctor (because I spent more than I would have wanted on a car ride just to make it on time), but this isn’t the sort of thing that I remember well enough to repeat. (Maybe this time it’ll take.) ((But I’ve already said that countless times before.)) (Maybe this time it’ll be different!) ((No, it won’t.)) I’ll just have to accept that I forget, but I’ll then just have to keep remembering. The work, I’ve come to understand, is not to eliminate the funk, but to just come back from the funk a little faster. There will always be funks. Nature demands it.

Speaking of funks, where did that suddenly stalwart streamer go? Off to the city, Baldur’s Gate 3, to be exact. I’m after my golden dice, which I definitely won’t deserve should I make it, because if I do it’s because I have the mod that removes the party limit. But no one’s watching and it’s not like I could slide into fifteenth place for a 10K run when really I was the laggard from the 5K run which started earlier, the way I almost did at a fun run in UP, the knockoff effects of which is not lost on me (I’ve forgotten if I’ve corrected the oversight but I didn’t get anything out of it except shame and eternal sorry for the 21st placer who was never identified). It’ll just be my own little undeserved win which I hope will make me feel I have completed Baldur’s Gate 3 to the extent that I can so that I can stop playing for a little while and start playing other games.

I did start streaming games in 2022 I think, but felt intimidated that I needed at least a minimum of 3 hours to get a modicum of engagement. If I get on with that I have to make sure that’s time not better spent writing (that is, energy-wise and disposition-wise).

For the social media update: as expected, I have found loopholes to my system because I couldn’t remove YouTube from my Samsung phone so now I watch shorts there too, thank you very much. My screen time on other apps has definitely significantly decreased though, so I’m still going to count this as a semi-win. I could set up a specific block for YouTube on the phone, you know what, I just might do that after blogging this. I fully expect to then be finding any excuse to use my desktop so I can low-key scroll, but it’s okay, I’ll deal with that when that happens. In the meantime, back to the books, and here’s the stream from this morning (nothing happens except during the break I try to read an essay by Ursula Le Guin and I had to look up words by sentence one):