spiritual self-obliteration quest part 2

i read how to keep house while drowning this week, while procrastinating on the dishes again. it was very good. a lot of it was about the sheer constancy and pressure of most self-help and self-care advice. it felt quite like lifting a weight off my chest. i feel like there is a subcategory of self-help that is actually good because it is built on the principles of liberation psychology and anticapitalism. i always recommend laziness does not exist by devon price as a good example of this. maybe i am due a reread. i have been doing fuck all but the bare minimum but i am existing and my hope is that that's enough.

fun stuff:

i am playing a LOT of slay the spire, which is really replaying because i already got pretty far into ascension on the switch. but now im playing on my phone which feels infinitely easier and lower friction. it feels like something i can just chip away at. hundreds of hours into this game, many cards are finally clicking for me that i just never selected at the start because they felt too low impact. right now i am really appreciating the need for card draw, far higher than energy and raw damage or defence. probably later into ascension i will have a different revelation. i have purposely locked myself away from strategy guides for this game (other than checking technicalities of certain cards) because i want the pleasure of figuring it out myself, even though i would say that games requiring any kind of strategy are... often ones i struggle with the most, because i'm naturally impatient and impulsive. i also finally got the true ending, without ascension, with an extremely cheesy body slam/barricade deck.

i'm also playing a lot of riichi mahjong, which i think i mentioned in a previous journal. i'm getting a lot better! it's super fun. i will probably get my ass kicked more as i go up the ranks. i feel like these two games complement each other quite well as my forever-games for now. there is just enough strategy, opportunism, and randomness to keep me infinitely interested in them.

we're watching the latest simpsons season right now. simpsons is good again? it's pretty wild. a lot of these episodes have the vibe of sort of like... season 9, just transferred to our cursed modern age. it's not 'classic simpsons', but it does have a much clearer sense that the writers are nerds and do care about the characters they're writing about for more than just brand recognition and keeping the shambling corpse alive. having grown up with the show (it was one of my first hyperfixations like. ever.), it feels VERY weird that i am now closer to homer and marge's ages than lisa and bart's, though. and that homer and marge are now millennials.

unfun stuff:

( suicidal ideation/self harm under the cut )

( skip it by clicking this one instead. like we're still talking mental health but it's less intense. )