Grab bag of disappointingly boring contents

©2022 Michael Raven

I’ve been a little less productive here lately, as I have a couple of things on my plate that I’m working on. There is the aforementioned collaborative multimedia piece I am working on, which has three of the five episodic storytelling pieces completed (it takes me anywhere from 10-20 hours per 5-minute episode to engineer the sound and write music, depending on how creative I am feeling and how much tweaking the audio needs). That’s finally start progressing into video format, so I suspect it might actually appear sooner or later.

As previously mentioned, I’ve been trying to add some woodcarving into my week have something to do with my hands. I’m still trying to find inspiration as to what will be my next attempt.

And, I’ll be honest, I have felt guilty about having a PlayStation subscription and not playing any of the games I have paid access to, so I have been trying out a few to see if any of them pull me out of this sensation most games feel samey the past 5 or more years. For the record: Spiderman is samey, but it at least allows me to get my power fantasy groove on; I felt weary before FarCry 4 started in earnest and deleted the game in spite of the lovely scenery — it’s essentially every other UbiSoft open-world game filled with fetch quests, chases and collectables; Ashen is cool AF, but I got my ass handed to me with the first boss by taking it on too soon and I lost my gear, and then, motivation; Final Fantasy XV is getting another go (I didn’t make it far the first time) and, as long as I don’t do more than basically ignore the missions and just explore, it is mostly fun; The Stick of Truth has evolved into a cringy mess — while I always preferred the bathroom humor of South Park over the racial satire, all of it has lost what appeal it might have had, especially in light of events since the game’s release and poor game mechanics that make TSoT feel more like a slog than a game; and, Uncharted: Lost Legacy feels like it might have been better as a DLC, but it still maintains the franchise’s higher quality elements.

And work has gotten crazy as hell. Don’t get me started.

To boot, I’ve also been toying around with a new personal writing project and exploring how I think I want to approach the matter.

While galdr was a bit of recently written and collected works, it came with only a loose theme with some size constraints. I have a concept book in mind, with a narrower theme and expanded length. I had described it earlier in the year (in a private discussion) as:

…a deep exploration into the concept of wildness: a feral, primal, and savage approach towards the written word. Something that explores the animistic, the spirit world; the earthy underbelly of thought that eschews the intellectual, heady interpretations of the cosmos and cuts to the quick. Something where there is no describing the wolf howling at the moon, but words of becoming the wolf howling at the moon[…]

Anyway, some regular visitors might notice that I’ve been exploring this conceptualization since before the cusp of 2021 and 2022 and that my experimentation has increased in recent months. But, I’m starting to actually get around to framing the untamed by putting some gossamer-thin tethers on some of the key ideas to guide the larger elements. I envision (subject to change) a progression as I write the pieces for it — not so much a novel in combined verse and prose, but a loose journey of sorts (in fact, that will be reflected in the working title I have for the concept if it sticks).

As August starts, I will find myself without parenting duties for a week (aside from the cats) and I may take advantage of that fact to really explore the carving and writing without (in theory) interruptions. I may go out and load up on a bunch of health-nut foods at the local co-op and eat it all like it is going out of style when I won’t hear complaints about deviating from the standard boring fare we have at home all the time. I have a strong urge to eat differently, but hesitate to make food that will wind up in me creating two meals for dinner every night — one for me and one for everyone else. Not to eat “healthy”, just to eat something different (look out, curry and middle eastern aisles).