this is only a glimpse of my chaos
Mar. 2nd, 2026 02:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
f0rrestReports of my death have not been exaggerated at all, because who actually cares?
I know I haven’t been posting much here lately, and I also know that maybe two people, at most, are wondering why. I’d love to say this is because I’ve been hyper-productive in writing elsewhere, but that would be a great big lie. Between November and now, the hyperactive gray matter of my brain has come up with ideas for two different fantasy novels, loosely inspired by two works of fiction: one, Earthsea, and two, Inuyasha mixed with Arthurian legend for some reason, titled Where Does the Wind Go? and The King of Arcadia respectively. I wrote about a chapter of each before getting distracted and drifting off to some other fleeting idea. Oh, and I also wrote a couple of paragraphs for a short story titled I Am a Cat II, cheaply inspired by Natsume Sōseki’s 1906 novel, I Am a Cat, except mine is set in modern-day United States. So, that’s three projects that will likely go forever unfinished. This is only a glimpse of my chaos. I’m quickly realizing that, without amphetamines, my talents, if you can even call them that, are much better suited to short-form than long-form.
Alas, it’s a constant struggle trying to balance my focus, which is basically nonexistent, and my ideas, which sometimes overflow like a small pond during a great rainstorm. This, as you might imagine, can result in some heavy cognitive dissonance when I have big ideas but little focus, as I’m always beating myself up with shoulder-angel, shoulder-devil shit like, “Shouldn’t you be writing right now?” and “But writing is hard, why not just play video games instead?” And this can be quite paralyzing, but it’s not the real reason I haven’t been posting much.
The truth is, I’m an adult with two kids and a full-time job, and as such, I’ve been busy. But that’s just an excuse really, because I’ve always been busy, yet despite that, in the past, I’ve always made time to write. So what’s different now? Could it be that I’ve lost the will to write? Has the fire gone out? Maybe I’m just getting too old to juggle all of life’s bullshit along with my numerous hobbies? Perhaps it’s just writer’s block? No, I don’t actually believe writer’s block is a thing, writer’s block is just another excuse, covering for a willpower issue more than anything. The truth is that my desire to write, like many things in life, waxes and wanes, and these moon phases are usually correlated with computer games, specifically how much I enjoy the computer game I’m playing at the time.
So, if you’re interested in the two Z’s, Zen and Zelda, bookmark oncomputer.games, because that’s where I’m going to upload the essay, which will be called Breath of the Now Now. It should be up in a few weeks, hopefully, if my focus holds.
That’s another thing I’ve been doing: rebuilding oncomputer.games. A good friend and I built this site back in April 2023. The original idea was to release nostalgia-focused essays on video games, which we resolved to exclusively call “computer games,” because that’s what grandma used to call video games back in the day when it was a bright summer day and you were holed up in your room playing Chrono Cross or whatever: “STOP PLAYING THOSE DAMN COMPUTER GAMES AND GO OUTSIDE.” The first essay was a review I wrote on Final Fantasy XII, which you can still read but is about 5,000 words too long and so dry that I wouldn’t recommend it. But after that essay, oncomputer.games veered into more bizarre territory, merging philosophy, history, personal stories, and even tanuki lore with computer games. Between my friend and me, we wrote about 23 long-form essays before it all got too competitive, and we basically ended up wanting to rip each other’s heads off; and by the end of 2023, some nasty words were exchanged via text message, at which point my friend deleted all his stuff from the site and didn’t speak to me for over a year. And I wrote about this exact situation in some detail in the essay/short story titled I, SEPHIROTH, which can be read on the site, so I won’t get into all that here.
In December 2024, my friend and I got back in touch and mended the grievous psychic wound, but for about a year there, I imagine we were both stewing in envy and denial and angst, at least I was. I let the oncomputer.games domain name lapse, and the site fell into obscurity, but I kept writing oncomputer.games-style essays for a while, posting them on a different site, howdoyouspell.cool, and then eventually on Substack, and then eventually on Dreamwidth.
About a month ago, however, I realized that my desire to write was waning a bit, and I started thinking back to those oncomputer.games days, about how much I was writing back then, even though most of my writing was pretty bad, and I realized something: the competition between my friend and me motivated me, drove me to write when I otherwise would not have written, and I started to miss those days. I thought to myself, if I could temper that competitive spirit with some self-awareness, and use it all in a friendly way, perhaps that will drive me to write more, and frankly oncomputer.games was just cool as fuck, if I do say so myself. So I texted my friend out of the blue and said, “Hey, let’s do oncomputer.games again,” and surprisingly he had been thinking the same thing, and so immediately he said YES.
They say never to lease an apartment or start a business with your best friend, or at least I think they do, and I know this to be true from firsthand experience, but I hvae awlays had a hrad tmie wtih teh wohle leanring tihng. I guess we’ll see how long this lasts before we're both dead or dying.
But so and anyway, about a week ago, I renewed the oncomputer.games domain name, spent several hours on the Wayback Machine copying my friend’s old deleted essays, reposting those deleted essays and backdating them to their original post dates, and then I uploaded all my own OCG-style stuff that wasn’t originally posted on OCG to OCG, and now I’m working on an essay titled Breath of the Now Now. And I have ideas for other stuff too, like an essay about The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time titled “Pulling the Master Sword,” recounting carefree events from my childhood, pre-“pulling the Master Sword,” and comparing them to my responsibility-ridden adulthood, post-“pulling the Master Sword,” and another one using Chrono Cross to argue for and against determinism and free will. Knowing me, both of these essays will probably end up not happening at all now, now that I’ve loosely committed to them here, but we’ll see.
So yeah. That’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve also been reading I Am a Cat, which is a classic Japanese novel told from the perspective of a cat with no name that satirizes human behavior, and I’ve been listening to the band Ivy a lot, particularly their album Apartment Life, and I’ve just recently been listening to Gorillaz’s new album The Mountain, which has this one song, “Orange County,” that’s one of the catchiest songs in the universe, so maybe you shouldn’t give that one a listen unless you want the little whistle melody stuck in your head for days.
Anyway. I think, going forward, with my focus for the time being on writing long-form essays for oncomputer.games, I’ll use this space to write more general “what’s going on in my life” journal entries, like an old LiveJournal from the early 2000s or something, and occasionally I may post essays or short stories that wouldn’t fit on oncomputer.games here.
But actually who knows. My mind could change tomorrow. I have recently given up trying to wrangle the old gray matter, instead just going where it wants to take me, with the flow, as they say. When it comes to hobbies and other activities meant to be fun, I’ve found that forcing myself to do something contrary to my immediate whimsy makes those things not very fun at all, and after a long day of adulting or whatever, what I really want is simply to relax and enjoy myself, within reason.
It may be a little hedonistic, but right now, with where my head’s at, and with all the crazy shit that’s going on in the world, I think a little bit of hedonism won’t hurt.
I know I haven’t been posting much here lately, and I also know that maybe two people, at most, are wondering why. I’d love to say this is because I’ve been hyper-productive in writing elsewhere, but that would be a great big lie. Between November and now, the hyperactive gray matter of my brain has come up with ideas for two different fantasy novels, loosely inspired by two works of fiction: one, Earthsea, and two, Inuyasha mixed with Arthurian legend for some reason, titled Where Does the Wind Go? and The King of Arcadia respectively. I wrote about a chapter of each before getting distracted and drifting off to some other fleeting idea. Oh, and I also wrote a couple of paragraphs for a short story titled I Am a Cat II, cheaply inspired by Natsume Sōseki’s 1906 novel, I Am a Cat, except mine is set in modern-day United States. So, that’s three projects that will likely go forever unfinished. This is only a glimpse of my chaos. I’m quickly realizing that, without amphetamines, my talents, if you can even call them that, are much better suited to short-form than long-form.
Alas, it’s a constant struggle trying to balance my focus, which is basically nonexistent, and my ideas, which sometimes overflow like a small pond during a great rainstorm. This, as you might imagine, can result in some heavy cognitive dissonance when I have big ideas but little focus, as I’m always beating myself up with shoulder-angel, shoulder-devil shit like, “Shouldn’t you be writing right now?” and “But writing is hard, why not just play video games instead?” And this can be quite paralyzing, but it’s not the real reason I haven’t been posting much.
The truth is, I’m an adult with two kids and a full-time job, and as such, I’ve been busy. But that’s just an excuse really, because I’ve always been busy, yet despite that, in the past, I’ve always made time to write. So what’s different now? Could it be that I’ve lost the will to write? Has the fire gone out? Maybe I’m just getting too old to juggle all of life’s bullshit along with my numerous hobbies? Perhaps it’s just writer’s block? No, I don’t actually believe writer’s block is a thing, writer’s block is just another excuse, covering for a willpower issue more than anything. The truth is that my desire to write, like many things in life, waxes and wanes, and these moon phases are usually correlated with computer games, specifically how much I enjoy the computer game I’m playing at the time.
And it’s been particularly bad lately because, for the last two months, I’ve been playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and I fucking love that game. My two-year-old son loves the game too. “I wanna play Zelda,” he says, “Let’s go find some Koroks in Zelda,” he says, “I wanna climb the towers in Zelda,” he says, with all the cherub-like syllabic mispronunciations that come with toddlerhood. He just sits on my lap, with his own battery-less controller in hand, watching Link climb mountains and fight Moblins and dash through the meadows of Hyrule. He’ll watch me play for hours if I let him, which is crazy considering he’s more hyperactive, mentally, than I am, hardly able to keep focus on anything at all. He just loves Breath of the Wild, and so do I. It’s quite possibly the best computer game ever made, a Ghiblian masterpiece, which is a word I just made up, but you're free to use it, as long as you use it correctly.
Ghiblian (adj.)
Etymology: From Studio Ghibli, noted for its distinctive animation style and thematic depth.
Definition:
Etymology: From Studio Ghibli, noted for its distinctive animation style and thematic depth.
Definition:
1. Of or relating to the visual, narrative, or emotional qualities characteristic of Studio Ghibli films; marked by a hand-drawn anime aesthetic, a focus on nature, and a sense of childlike wonder and magical realism.
2. Denoting an atmosphere or tone that evokes serenity, nostalgia, ecological harmony, and gentle wonderment; often blending the fantastical with the mundane in a manner that emphasizes empathy and the sanctity of nature
2. Denoting an atmosphere or tone that evokes serenity, nostalgia, ecological harmony, and gentle wonderment; often blending the fantastical with the mundane in a manner that emphasizes empathy and the sanctity of nature
Example: Kakariko Village, nestled between the misty hills of the Necluda, dotted with cherry blossom trees and traces of ancient magic, has a distinctly Ghiblian charm.
I’d tell you all about it, about why I love The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but I’m currently in the process of writing an essay about that very topic right now at this very moment. The essay functions not only as a love letter to the game, but also as a beginner’s primer on Zen ideology, with references to Thich Nhat Hanh’s Peace Is Every Step. The essay attempts to use Zen ideology to analyze the game’s flaws, such as the weapon-breaking thing and the general aimlessness of both the narrative and gameplay, to argue that these supposed flaws, and others, are actually not flaws at all, but instead some of the game’s greatest strengths.So, if you’re interested in the two Z’s, Zen and Zelda, bookmark oncomputer.games, because that’s where I’m going to upload the essay, which will be called Breath of the Now Now. It should be up in a few weeks, hopefully, if my focus holds.
That’s another thing I’ve been doing: rebuilding oncomputer.games. A good friend and I built this site back in April 2023. The original idea was to release nostalgia-focused essays on video games, which we resolved to exclusively call “computer games,” because that’s what grandma used to call video games back in the day when it was a bright summer day and you were holed up in your room playing Chrono Cross or whatever: “STOP PLAYING THOSE DAMN COMPUTER GAMES AND GO OUTSIDE.” The first essay was a review I wrote on Final Fantasy XII, which you can still read but is about 5,000 words too long and so dry that I wouldn’t recommend it. But after that essay, oncomputer.games veered into more bizarre territory, merging philosophy, history, personal stories, and even tanuki lore with computer games. Between my friend and me, we wrote about 23 long-form essays before it all got too competitive, and we basically ended up wanting to rip each other’s heads off; and by the end of 2023, some nasty words were exchanged via text message, at which point my friend deleted all his stuff from the site and didn’t speak to me for over a year. And I wrote about this exact situation in some detail in the essay/short story titled I, SEPHIROTH, which can be read on the site, so I won’t get into all that here.
In December 2024, my friend and I got back in touch and mended the grievous psychic wound, but for about a year there, I imagine we were both stewing in envy and denial and angst, at least I was. I let the oncomputer.games domain name lapse, and the site fell into obscurity, but I kept writing oncomputer.games-style essays for a while, posting them on a different site, howdoyouspell.cool, and then eventually on Substack, and then eventually on Dreamwidth.
About a month ago, however, I realized that my desire to write was waning a bit, and I started thinking back to those oncomputer.games days, about how much I was writing back then, even though most of my writing was pretty bad, and I realized something: the competition between my friend and me motivated me, drove me to write when I otherwise would not have written, and I started to miss those days. I thought to myself, if I could temper that competitive spirit with some self-awareness, and use it all in a friendly way, perhaps that will drive me to write more, and frankly oncomputer.games was just cool as fuck, if I do say so myself. So I texted my friend out of the blue and said, “Hey, let’s do oncomputer.games again,” and surprisingly he had been thinking the same thing, and so immediately he said YES.
They say never to lease an apartment or start a business with your best friend, or at least I think they do, and I know this to be true from firsthand experience, but I hvae awlays had a hrad tmie wtih teh wohle leanring tihng. I guess we’ll see how long this lasts before we're both dead or dying.
But so and anyway, about a week ago, I renewed the oncomputer.games domain name, spent several hours on the Wayback Machine copying my friend’s old deleted essays, reposting those deleted essays and backdating them to their original post dates, and then I uploaded all my own OCG-style stuff that wasn’t originally posted on OCG to OCG, and now I’m working on an essay titled Breath of the Now Now. And I have ideas for other stuff too, like an essay about The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time titled “Pulling the Master Sword,” recounting carefree events from my childhood, pre-“pulling the Master Sword,” and comparing them to my responsibility-ridden adulthood, post-“pulling the Master Sword,” and another one using Chrono Cross to argue for and against determinism and free will. Knowing me, both of these essays will probably end up not happening at all now, now that I’ve loosely committed to them here, but we’ll see.
So yeah. That’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve also been reading I Am a Cat, which is a classic Japanese novel told from the perspective of a cat with no name that satirizes human behavior, and I’ve been listening to the band Ivy a lot, particularly their album Apartment Life, and I’ve just recently been listening to Gorillaz’s new album The Mountain, which has this one song, “Orange County,” that’s one of the catchiest songs in the universe, so maybe you shouldn’t give that one a listen unless you want the little whistle melody stuck in your head for days.
Anyway. I think, going forward, with my focus for the time being on writing long-form essays for oncomputer.games, I’ll use this space to write more general “what’s going on in my life” journal entries, like an old LiveJournal from the early 2000s or something, and occasionally I may post essays or short stories that wouldn’t fit on oncomputer.games here.
But actually who knows. My mind could change tomorrow. I have recently given up trying to wrangle the old gray matter, instead just going where it wants to take me, with the flow, as they say. When it comes to hobbies and other activities meant to be fun, I’ve found that forcing myself to do something contrary to my immediate whimsy makes those things not very fun at all, and after a long day of adulting or whatever, what I really want is simply to relax and enjoy myself, within reason.
It may be a little hedonistic, but right now, with where my head’s at, and with all the crazy shit that’s going on in the world, I think a little bit of hedonism won’t hurt.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-03 03:08 am (UTC)