Five Things About Yesterday Make a Post

[pedanther]

I had a good day on my birthday. I went on my first Parkrun (although the way I'm doing it, it's more of a Parkbriskwalk), did the washing up, played a lot of Invisible, Inc., and watched the 2009 Star Trek reboot movie with the Mark Watches commentary running in another window.

Parkrun is an organisation that does free weekly community running/walking events in picturesque surroundings -- the course for the local event goes along the nature walk trails in a rehabilitated woodland. Despite the name, everyone is allowed to do the course at their own pace, whether running or walking. Several of my friends do the local event regularly, and I've been meaning to give it a try for a while. I opted for a brisk walk, and of course came in well behind the runners, but ended with a fair number of people behind me. (Beating other people is very much not the point, of course, but if I had been the last one in I would have felt like I was holding everybody up, so I was glad I wasn't.)

The washing up has been plaguing me for years, ever since I moved into a house on my own with enough bench space around the sink that I could get away with not doing it. It's actually not the washing up part that's the problem, so much as the drying after: I have issues about towel-drying kitchenware, so the only way I can reliably proceed is by leaving the clean kitchenware on a rack to air-dry, which means that once I've filled up the rack I'm done for the day, which in turn means that once I accumulated more than one rack-load of unwashed dishes by the sink it became a continual presence only changing in its composition. Having a lurking pile of unwashed dishes tended to set off the avoidance and procrastination problem, which in turn let the pile grow larger... (Usually, I could rouse myself to make a dent in the pile when I ran out of breakfast things, but when the brain weather was bad even that didn't work. I've been known to say that when I'm running low on spoons, it's not just a metaphor.) However, a while ago I managed to achieve the blessed state of Nothing Left to Wash Up, and since then I've got into the swing of doing the washing up regularly when there's still less than a rack-load, so I may have actually got on top of the problem. Huzzah!

Invisible, Inc. is a turn-based strategy game where the player controls a small group of agents running stealthy heists on sinister megacorporations. It's been eating a lot of my free time lately. There's a basic storyline -- a cinematic at the beginning and the end, and bits of narrative pasting the missions together -- but it's the kind of game where the storytelling emerges from the gameplay, so the bits you remember aren't the scripted scenes but That Time I Thought I Was Totally Cooked But Then I Got All The Agents Out Safely. (Or then there was That Time One Of My Agents Got Knocked Out Right At The Beginning Of The Mission, So We Tucked Her Sleeping Body In the Escape Pod And Did The Mission Without Her.) The mission maps are all procedurally generated, so the game is different every time you play it, even before you start unlocking new starting agents and tools, and in addition to the campaign mode that builds up to a big heist and the aforementioned cinematic, there's a survival mode where you just keep running missions indefinitely and see how far you can get and how much loot you can acquire before the megacorps get the better of you. I haven't got around to trying survival mode yet; I want to beat the game on Expert difficulty first, and it's significantly more difficult than the intermediate difficulty. I finished the intermediate difficulty campaign first try, but I keep getting wiped out in Expert difficulty. On reflection, it might be not just that the missions themselves have more threats and fewer safety nets, but I've unlocked all the starting agents and gear now, so I keep trying out new combinations that I don't know how to use properly yet and tripping up that way.

At Mark Watches, Mark Oshiro has spent the last three years watching all of Star Trek for the first time, but now it's coming to a close as he reaches the reboot movies. (He's leaving Star Trek: Discovery until some point after all the episodes are out, and moving on to Alias as his next new thing. Which appropriately means he'll be transitioning from one JJ Abrams project to another, although I don't know if that was why he picked it.) Rewatching the first reboot movie with him wasn't a hardship; it may not be very good Star Trek, and it may not have very good plot logic, but it's a fun movie. I'm not looking forward to Star Trek Into Darkness, though.

Comments

[justice_turtle]

I've been known to say that when I'm running low on spoons, it's not just a metaphor.

Ugh, I feel you. For a long time there I had only one or two eating-spoons and very little tableware in general (having bagged it all from my biofamily and more recently from my aunt), so when I was low on metaphorical spoons, my eating would depend on what usable cutlery I could scrounge up. I tried disposable dishes, but the only thing that really works for me is having a dishwasher. I'm glad you've managed to conquer your dishes problem, at least for now; long may this continue! :-)

I'm not looking forward to Star Trek Into Darkness, though.

You may already know this, but all Star Trek movies go on a good-bad-good-bad pattern; it's a rule. XD I think you have to include GalaxyQuest in the count to get the pattern to maintain between original and reboot Trek, though. (Have you seen GalaxyQuest? It seems like the sort of thing you would have seen, but I don't like to assume, given how many things I haven't seen. It's a brilliant movie, anyway, and a damn good Trek movie for not technically being Star Trek. ^_^)

[pedanther]

I tried disposable dishes once, after I read a post on Tumblr about somebody else using them. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anybody selling paper plates, only the plastic ones, and the brain gremlin insisted that since the plastic ones were washable I would have to wash them, even if I was only going to throw them out after. (I rinse bottles and fast food containers too, if they can stand the water, which was another contributor to the growing pile. Allowing myself to cut that back to only things that are going to be recycled and actually do need to be rinsed first was an important step in getting on top of the problem.)

I do know about the even-numbered Trek movie rule, yes, and about the fact that it seems to be inverted with the reboot movies. Adding GalaxyQuest to the list is an interesting solution. :)

I have seen GalaxyQuest, but not until some time after it first came out, and unfortunately during the intervening period I heard a lot about it from people who had seen it and loved it, so that by the time I did see it I already knew the plot, the best jokes, and all the quotable dialogue, which rather muted the appeal. (Also, characters being stuck in a life-or-death situation while thinking it's just a game is one of my narrative allergies, so it takes a while before the story settles down to something I can enjoy.) But I see why people like it.

[justice_turtle]

by the time I did see it I already knew the plot, the best jokes, and all the quotable dialogue, which rather muted the appeal.

Yeah, that happened to me with the book of Hitchhiker's Guide. It kinda sucks. :S

Edit: Oh, also, belated happy birthday! Sorry, I appear to be kind of spacey right now. How old are you now, if I may ask? :-)

[pedanther]

If you break the current year into two two-digit numbers and add them together, you get my age, which is very convenient and saves me a lot of mental effort that I would otherwise have to spend keeping track.

And don't worry, I go by the rule that birthday wishes are still timely for anything up to a week after the official event.

[justice_turtle]

Nifty! So you would be... about six years older than I am? Or seven? (After my birthday in a couple weeks, my age will add up to four.)

[pedanther]

Yes, that sounds right. (My age adds up to ten, which is six more than four.)

[sqbr]

Happy birthday!

[pedanther]

Thank you!

[thisbluespirit]

\0/ Hurrah for at getting to the top of the washing up pile! (I tend to not bother with drying, either - at one point I was so ill I did my washing up about once every 2-3 days, let alone doing the drying - but that just being ME/CFS, it doesn't bother me in the same way. I hope you continue to conquer it! Better to have clean dishes lying about than unwashed. *nods*)

The game sounds fun. :-)