Empty spoon drawer, writing, and Frostpunk

[dreamerinsilico]

I'm two behind on the Sunshine Challenge and disastrously low on spoons; I think I need to decide I'm allowed to skip them, so I don't end up not checking DW because I'm stressing over the posts I haven't made.

I direly want to get the next chapter of my current Hannibal fic out the door, and that's fairly close to happening.  I think I'll call this weekend a win if I can finish the draft.  The good news is, it's writing itself in my head in at least half my mental downtime; the bad news is it's never the part I'm actually drafting.  But hot damn do I have plenty of material queued up!  

I was gifted the game Frostpunk on Steam recently as a belated birthday present, and it's a hell of a psychologically double-edged sword for me.  xD   It's a fairly difficult survival/city-builder sim that kinda reminds me of the movie Snowpiercer in concept/aesthetic, and it's the particular sort of OPTIMIZE ALL THE THINGS!  MAKE NUMBERS GO UP! that is catnip to my brain.  Particularly on an anxiety swell.  So I love it!  It's a game I find very fun and very immersive.  (And I'd rec it to anyone else who likes city-building and/or optimization porn.)

Buuuuut few things will make me hardcore lose track of time to such an extent.  When I finally finished the first scenario I didn't realize I'd been going all night until I looked out the window; if someone had asked I'd have guessed it was maybe three or four in the morning.  Seeing sunlight (it was 7:30) was fucking jarring as hell; normally I have an exceptionally good sense of time, and obviously OPTIMIZE ALL THE THINGS, while highly enjoyable, is not productive outside its own context when it's a video game.  (Rampantly devouring hundreds of thousands of words of fanfic and/or other books, which is the other main thing I do when the brain weasels are uppity, isn't technically productive either, but it does tend to add to the creative pressure that eventually motivates me to write.  Compulsively making numbers go up, not so much.)

Comments

[enemytosleep]

If it helps, there is absolutely no pressure to complete any/all of the sunshine_challenge posts! They’re simply there for people to enjoy and meet new folks on DW. Enjoy them in whatever capacity causes no stress ♥

[dreamerinsilico]

Yes, I know and I really like that about it! My brain is just a dumbass with its own ideas about what I "need" to get done when, heh. :) (The explicit lack of pressure is why this won't keep me from picking up later prompts, at least.)

[pauraque]

I think I would have fallen way behind on Sunshine too, except that I've been housesitting for the past week so I've had more time on my hands. It makes sense to skip if it's causing stress.

Ahh, accidental gaming all-nighters. Been there. (The sunrise is pretty over the Barrens, at least...) And that was just the first scenario? That one sounds like it could be dangerous for me too; I get really into city builders.

Happy late birthday!

[dreamerinsilico]

The "accidental" part has always been pretty rare for me, haha, though the all-nighter part, much less so. xD

And yeah, the first one is the "main" one, so it's not meant to be short, but a significant amount of the time I spent went into attempts I abandoned and started over; the game really demands that you have a pretty tight understanding of what your priorities need to be and when, with errors quickly, um, snowballing out of control. (Normally I'd find that frustrating, but in this case it felt good? Each failed attempt seemed to teach me something really important, so I'd go into the next one gung-ho and with a Plan.)

And thank you! :)

[walgesang]

This reminded me how bad it was of me to show our kid the game Paper Clips because for awhile he had it running in the background of everything he did. (He also plays Magic Arena while watching MtG videos as well as playing video games while watching a TED talk. We share the same neurology but I can barely keep up with how he "plays." I'm really bad with sim builders, I just try to find how many Godzillas and floods I can cause to completely ruin my town. :/ I did try to get into hardcore theorycrafting when I played my warrior tank but I could just not keep up.

I agree you're allowed to skip! I'm tempted to skip the prompting one because I feel like I won't be able to follow through but then I'm like maaaaaaaaaaaaybe.

[dreamerinsilico]

Oh gods, Magic. That was also a thing I did. It was mostly okay because I only played Sealed Deck tournaments (I'm very good at being pragmatic with what I've got at the time; I'm not inclined to spend money to get The Perfect Deck).

I can't pretend to know what it's like to have a teenager, but I can guess that it's probably really cool that you have a fundamental understanding for how his brain and internal reward system works. Might not be the most useful thing now, but as an adult he'll almost certainly appreciate it.

[walgesang]

I really like Magic Arena because I am horrible at math, like I can't even try to subtract 13 from 21 in my head, so I appreciate that the game does the math for me. Our kid used to be very into it, but then he said he was sick about the expectation to buy expensive cards for the Perfect Deck and now he's just casual. He's been teaching some friends at school how to play (I don't know if I mentioned that he DMs a regular D&D game for classmates during the school year. He's trying to get a one-shot going this summer but everyone's schedule is kind of crazy).

I think having a teenager is a little bit like remembering what it was like to be a teenager. It also helps that we're both on the spectrum, though I learned early on that it doesn't mean we think exactly the same way (even though the joke is that he's an exact copy of me).

(oh and d'oh, happy belated birthday!)

[finch]

I got to the same point I always do with the snowflake challenge, which is that as soon as it involves effort I go "ugh" and start ignoring the "homework" like I'm still fifteen. XD

[dreamerinsilico]

Ahaha, yes, that's definitely a thing for me too. Though I spent a fair amount of time on the early posts for Sunshine. xD I always feel awkward about blanket fic-rec posts? (I am happy to rec fanworks to specific people whose tastes I have some idea of, but my own are varied enough that I don't have a lot of stuff I'd be comfortable giving a general rec for.) So I was putting that off, and then the idea of digging through other people's journals and then probably writing more things, when I'm already having trouble pushing on my current writing commitments.... yeah, that wasn't going to happen, unfortunately.

[tiggymalvern]

Isn't that the annoying thing about fanfic? So often the part that's busily writing itself in your head is not the part (or even the same fic) you're supposed to be working on. It's still better than having to write the whole story the effortful way though.

[dreamerinsilico]

Hah, yeah, no kidding. In this case it's particularly helpful, at least, because getting excited about future parts is motivating to get through the current one!