...

Sure feels like the world has gone coo-coo for coco-puffs, huh? I mean what the fuck are we even doing here?

It has become really fucking cold recently, too. I'm not a fan of the cold. Makes me slow down. Freezes my fingers. Makes me want to just huddle under something warm and just go to sleep and forget my problems. Unfortunately, my problem lie in wait.

To say that there is a lot going on right now would be an understatement. Feels like the whole world is collapsing, and all the powerful people who poke their fingers all over the place have all gone collectively insane over the past 10 years. All that money and power have gone to their heads and there is no good outcome for the rest of us regular people.

I try to think of other things to keep me preoccupied so that I don't spiral into madness, myself, but each day, there are fewer and fewer things to keep me in check. I feel I'm slowly going mad as well.

Lately, I've been distracting myself with games from my past. A time when things were simpler, slower, and easier to compartmentalize. I still have my old slim PS2 from 2004 and I've recently found a way to play my games through an external HDD instead of disc. The disc reader has been having issues, sometimes just refusing to read discs or freezing at random points. This way, I can still play the games without having to boot up an emulator (which, while it can often provide a higher-res version of these games, can also present unwanted graphical issues).

I've been trying out Timesplitters: Future Perfect and there's a charm to the simplicity of this old game. The main menu is clean and unintrusive. No live-service bullshit or battlepasses or ads to take up any space. It's all just pure menu to get you to the action. It's refreshing. For comparison, I booted up Lego 2K Racers on the pc and was inundated by flashing menus and buttons on the front page. Things to get you to buy DLC or whatever it's hawking. I'm not a fan.

But all this to say I've been trying, often unsuccessfully, to keep my head down and prevent myself from becoming overwhelmed by all the news that seems to force its way into my face each day. I'm so goddamned tired of things. I want it to end.