Ori And My Deep Disappointment

As part of my 52 goals for 2025 one of the goals I set myself was to clear the backlog of games in my Steam account. There were 153 games unplayed at the start of the year and it now stands at 122 so 31 have been played in the last 8 days, some for a lot longer than others. I thought about writing reviews for each of the games but many of them are not remarkable, if I find anything of particular note I will make a post about them.

Ori And The Blind Forest is a game that I played many moons ago, where exactly I can't recall because according to Steam it was unplayed in my library - some posts on Reddit mentioned that it was available on the Epic Games Store but was removed so that's probably where I first played it. Regardless, for the sake of certainty I decided to play again from scratch and I was disappointed.

52 Weeks : 52 Goals

I've decided for 2025 to do a different take on New Year's Resolutions. In years gone by I used to make a few realistic goals for myself, things which I thought I could actually achieve in a year, and inevitably I failed to achieve those resolutions - I'm not even sure how many I have kept over the years. Then for a while I became vehemently opposed to the entire concept deciding that it was a tradition that set people up for failure, and only amplified misery and feelings of worthlessness.

73 Questions inspired by Vogue

I've always enjoyed those videos on Youtube where Vogue takes a random celebrity or someone of influence and asks them 73 questions in an effort to get to know them better. It's interesting to see how a person sees the world and even when they don't give simple answers, the response they give tells you a lot about the person and their priorities.

The actual questions asked varies in each video it's not the same 73 questions every time I believe, so I had a look around various blogs where people made their own posts and used those as the basis for this list. So here are my 73 Questions and their answers.

Procrastination

Procrastination gets quite a bad rap and I've been thinking about why that's the case. In a previous post I mentioned the fact that our society dominated by capitalism is obsessed with productivity and uses it to define our self-worth and I've come to the conclusion the derision for procrastination is just an extension of that obsession.

When you really stop and think about it, procrastination is the only true choice a human can make, because you're actively choosing to do something you want to do as opposed to something you're expected to do. When you're supposed to do something, or there's an expectation placed upon you, it's because it is a choice someone else has already made for you, the only thing you get to "choose" is whether to go along with it or not.

The Other Great Depression

Are you happy with your life? That should be a simple question to answer but for far too many, myself included, the answer is not so simple - not least of all being that the answer is often a dynamic variable rather than a constant. Whether I am happy with my life varies depending on when you ask me, morning, noon, or night, and a whole host of influences in my life that fluctuate with much less rhythm and routine.

I've felt like I am not alone in this view, when I look at my circle of friends there are few that are thriving, most are simply surviving, and at the age of 36 it pains me to admit that I have lost some people who didn't survive. I've written about my own complex relationship with suicide and my past attempts, and of the concept of survivor's guilt that leads me to question why I am still here and others aren't - others I thought stronger than me in almost every regard.

The repetition of life to the point of monotony with the absence of emotion to me is the hallmark of depression - there are many other ways to define it, which I think are also valid depending on the context, but this as much I can say is a sign of depression, when people are still alive but they aren't really living.

Dickotomy - The Dichotomy of Dick

As a gay man I have observed a strange phenomenon when it comes to the pursuit of dick both in my own behaviour and in the behaviour of other gay men. I am going to refer to this a the dichotomy of dick - or dickotomy.

The shortest explanation I can give, is that the more emotional potential a connection has, the more resistant we seem to be when it comes to sexual advances and their timings.

One thing I love about Bluesky is the communal acceptance that Horny-on-main is the default, this is enabled by the fact that you can tag posts as adult or nudity using labels and anyone who hasn't opted in to seeing posts of that nature won't see it. You have to enable adult content when you join, it's off by default.

Preserving Positivity

I spend a lot of time online, some of that time is spent by choice in my free time, the rest is by necessity as most of my disposable income comes from the internet. When you spend a lot of time online you get to see unsolicited opinions almost constantly, knowing these are opinions and not facts makes them easy to ignore but I do recognise that the ability to differentiate between opinion and fact is a point of critical thinking that people seem to be increasingly lacking.

When you can't tell the difference between an opinion and a fact it leaves you open to influence, some people make entire careers out of exploiting that point of ignorance, people we aptly refer to as influencers.