5Q5A: Small Online Indulgences

It’s a Friday evening. I’m expecting it to either rain or storm later. I've been put in a spot medically where I’m exercising caution and teetotaling tonight, so I’m trying to rediscover some simple long forgotten bliss of just sitting and snacking on tea and cookies in the refreshing open air. Hence, I’m not confined inside just passively watching TV just by simple spatial logistics. Reading here outside to combat boredom was a thought, but the subject material I borrowed from the library* was about global economics: a topic that, I confess, I'm woefully ignorant about in general. I'm trying to make myself take a more vested interest in it, but it still comes across to me like too much bullshit and gobble-de-gook, and I can't seem to trouble myself to do it tonight. I'd be better off reading the Big Blue Book of Fairy Tales and find something with more sense and logic in it. Another topic, for another time. The urge to do something more interactive (yet without the annoyance of other people) became stronger. I chose to write up a snapshot of what these activities look like on an evening such as this. More to clear and decompress my bothered mind than anything, and to be appreciative of these little things for what they are.

Q1. Latest New Wits-Tester?

A1. A video game downloaded from Steam, The Long Dark, by Hinterland Studios, supported by the Canada Media Fund – It’s rare that I ever get so captivated by a video game, but this one is special. Firstly, it is 100% Canadian in both production and (virtual) game environment, with the setting being somewhere in the boreal wilderness of Canada. The mission: to survive the elements alone after a plane crash. The conditions are post-apocalyptic, but there’s no terrorists or zombies to battle. Just you in the first person. No other humans around, just the elements of the cold of winter, the scarcity of food, the struggle to find shelter, and facing the prospects of starvation, hypothermia, succumbing to accidents, or being ravaged by carnivorous predators. Nothing more complicated than that, but so real-life in terms of the weighed consequences of the hazards in dealing with such an environment. I’m a fan of shows like Les Stroud’s Survivorman on OLN, so this game is particularly intriguing to me. You use whatever resources you can scavenge, salvage, and exploit from nature. The community online is graced by a smaller set of international players with same-such personalities akin to mine; of whom I never thought I’d ever find. It’s a very respectful group, and we can even interact with the developers for idea input and feedback. Really cool stuff, not only to be a player, but to be a voice in its future development. This is the game that puts my wits to the test and fascinates me because it is reflective of what I wrote sometime earlier of what I claimed I would do in the hypothetical scenario of spending a winter in cabin alone (Cabin Pleasures vs. Cabin Fever) and getting a prize for it. Games like this are the more comprehensible primers and interactive courses for economics: for making decisions about what to do with finite resources in an environment of scarcity with a finite amount of time before you could possibly meet up face to face with the Long Dark. Now, if I download another similar type game with zombies or bananas in it, it might make the material in the book I'm trying to focus on now a bit more understandable.

Q2. Online Window Shopping?

A2. Scouting and hunting through eBay and Amazon targeting for my vintage Russian Submariner Watch, an authentic (yet cheap) Moroccan Tagine cooking vessel, concert T-shirts from Rockabilia, and checking out cheap flight prices for a non-tropical** holiday perhaps for next year.

Q3. Music Streams?

A3. Mostly in a retro/vintage Alternative and folk/nostalgia/shoegaze Indie mood tonight. Memories from my mid-20’s onward, to more modern stuff. My sample set of favourite songs played thus far, I list them as they come:

·         Love Will Tear Us Apart – Joy Division

·         Make You Better – The Decemberists

·         I Wanna be Adored – The Stone Roses

·         Hot on the Heels of Love – Throbbing Gristle

·         You Trip Me Up – The Jesus and Mary Chain

·         Airscape – Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians

·         A Forest – The Cure

·         This Must Be the Place (Naïve Mix)- The Talking Heads

·         Girlfriend – Matthew Sweet

·         Backsliding – Radiohead

·         South Central Rain – R.E.M.

·         The Only One I Know – The Charlatans

·         Fake Empire – The National

·         Seether – Veruca Salt

·         Picture You – The Amazing

·         Shovels and Dirt – The Strumbellas

·         Skinny Love – Bon Iver

·         Love Is All – The Tallest Man on Earth

·         The Night We Met – Lord Huron

·         Time - Tom Waits

·         Red Hands – Walk Off the Earth

·         World Spins Madly On – The Weepies

·         Gigantic – The Pixies

·         Serpents (Basement Version) – Sharon Van Etten

·         Summertime – The Sundays

·         I Know It’s Over – The Smiths

·         Suedehead - Morrissey

Q4. Adult Stuff? (the responsible stuff; not pornography)

A4. Testing the waters again with FOREX trading, and more serious study into the technical analysis involved with trend watching for the rise and fall of currency pairs. It seems sensible to research, as nowadays, money itself has been making more money than labour or other resources has. Also, looking for online classes for SQL, advanced Excel script programming, and other database management courses. All stuff I started to study, but have long since forgotten.

Q5. Language Lessons?

A5. Je continue à apprendre plus de français avec Duolingo, mais j’ai sauté quelques leçons. Ma motivation devient faible maintenant.

*- The book is Zombies, Bananas and Why There Are No Economists in Heaven by Jessica Irvine. I thought with a delightfully oddball title like that, it might actually find some chords to strike within me that I could relate to, but I still see that it has its work cut out for itself. I will say that finding an economist with a sense of humour in itself is like finding a diamond.
**- My lungs still won’t let me breathe well in elevated heat and humidity, as proven throughout this past week. It’s been like breathing through a wet paper bag. So, why would I opt to go to some tropical place with that extra extreme, plus 60% less quality in medical service if I should ever succumb to it? It’s either Eastern Canada (in fall), or Northern Europe, that I have left as options.