So, I just started playing this video game, Star Wars The Force Unleashed. You play as Darth Vader's secret apprentice, so really the whole goal is to give in to your anger an break things. The goal of a good video game is the same as the goal of a food book. It should draw you into it's world and make you feel something of what the characters feel. I tend to overproduce adrenalin. On a scale of 1 - 10 where a "normal" person might produce a 3, I'd produce something like a 7. This has a wide and often disquieting range of effects in my life. The one I'm going to focus on right now is joysticks.
The PSP is a modern marvel. It's a pocket (jacket pocket) sized full game system. The graphics and sound are great, and I can even listen to music on it. I'm on my third analogue joystick. You see the problem is that I've found some good games, ones that do the immersion thing well. One of the whole points of games is the excitement and "Pulse Pounding Action!" I bet you're well ahead of me here. Pulse pounding action + a tendency to overproduce adrenalin = too much force while playing. I try to be good, but really a zen-like detachment about how I use the controlls is kind of counter to the whole immersion thing. I like the immersion thing. So, joysticks are something I'm pretty good at replacing.
Right now mine is broken in such a way that it keeps pulling down, or toward me (the player.) This gives me a cowardly Sith who keeps turning his back on the fight. It damages the immersion and is really fucking frustrating.
When I'd had too much earlier today i took the PSP apart, tried to see if I could get the joystick to play nice to no avail, and decided to do some dishes that I've been putting off.
Step one of doing dishes is to empty the dish drainer. As my Mom always said, you put wet o dry and the dry get wet. Step two is to put away what's in the dish-washer. Often this entails putting some still wet dishes in the dryer. We have a mug on the stove that holds some knives. There are slightly more knives than will fit in it gracefully. Now, I still have far too much adrenalin coursing through my system, and I try to make them fit. >CLINK< two pieces pop off the side of the mug. I go outside and work off some aggression and frustration, and come back in to fix it. First I finish the dishes so I have room to work. Once I've gotten the mug off the stove I notice that the stove's a mess again, so I set out to on a scrubbing mission. I took apart the stove and vacuumed under the burners. I used a wire brush where it might help, and I even scrubbed down the crumb-catchers.
The stove's clean. The mug is mending. The adrenaline's down, but I still have a cowardly Sith.
I'm kind of hyper vigilant about problems with electronics these days. Aside from the PSP problems, all My ipods are dead, I rebuilt or helped to rebuild several of the computers in the house this year. My computer has officially been declared obsolete, and it's doing it's crotchety oldster best to remind me of it. I freezes and crashes very regularly, and I keep expecting the crash it doesn't come back from. I got a possibility of a getting a new system, but that not something I'm going to push, as it seems too good to be true. So, I'm it a long term just try to keep things running mode, and I get really frustrated and feel kind of helpless sometimes when another thing breaks. Modern electronics breal a lot. I used to make a living from this. Now it's just a free-range source of frustration.
At least the stove's clean. It's older that all the electronics in the house put together, and it still does what we need it to. Yay Stove!
