Today is technically a “holiday”, though when you don’t have a regular job normal days and holidays tend to all blend together somewhat. Still, at least it being a holiday means that I can technically not work and not feel guilty about it, so there’s that.
It’s been one of those days that has just sort of passed by without any particular incident or noteworthiness, and as such there’s not a whole lot for me to talk about today, really. Andie and I both got up late — we were both really tired, so a lie-in until midday was thoroughly needed — and then we’ve both spent most of the day playing Final Fantasy XIV. I’m almost at level 48 on Bard, which will be my fifth battle class levelled to 50 when it’s done — I should hopefully get that finished tomorrow. After that, I have Arcanist and Pugilist to get out of the mid-teens, and Lancer and Rogue to level from scratch. And then all the bloody crafters, though to be honest those aren’t very difficult to level, just a bit time-consuming.
I’ve also been playing some more Hyperdevotion Noire over the last few days, and I’m thoroughly smitten with it. I was initially a little put off by the chibi characters — I prefer more coventionally proportioned characters for the most part — but they actually work well in the battle scenes, making it clear who is where, which way they are facing and so on. Outside of battle, you still get the full-size portraits in story sequences — plus the beautifully drawn event scenes, too — so I’m happy with that. (Also, Chibi Female Solid Snake is adorable. As is the personification of Dragon Quest. As indeed are most of the characters.)
Nothing special planned for tomorrow, it’s looking like a lazy Easter weekend. Andie and her mother are going out to town tomorrow, but I will probably stay in. With money a bit tight at the moment, it’s probably best I stay away from places that sell things I might want to buy. Like, say, PlayStation 4s. That ain’t going to happen until I have some more money coming in, but I’m working on that.
And after that, Sunday is raid night, of course. We will probably be taking our first serious look at the Final Coil of Bahamut, though one of our number still wants to get their own clear of Turn 9, since his unlocking of Final Coil was actually achieved by someone else playing his character. I’m all for that; Turn 9 is a fun, if intense, fight, and the last time we tackled it we cleared it within 3 attempts, making the weeks of practice look somewhat trivial!
Anyway. I’ve spun this post out for long enough without really saying anything, so it’s time to head to bed and maybe play with my beloved Noire a bit. Here’s to boring but peaceful days.
I’ll level with you, dear reader, I’m not entirely sure what to write today. The Black Dog has been creeping in somewhat over the course of the day, leaving me somewhat morose and not particularly in the mood for a great deal of communication. This feeling sucks, but I am taking some small solace from the fact that there are a few irons in the fire right now. Whether or not any of them will come to anything remains to be seen, but at least they’re there.
In the meantime, it’s largely been business as usual. I rediscovered the fun of Japanese doujin title Croixleur earlier through its new Sigma edition and would encourage anyone who enjoys a bit of hack-and-slash goodness to check it out. Then I spent some time moving towards cleaning up the rest of The Witch and the Hundred Knight. I’m torn on which ending to try for, since both the Normal and True endings are very straightforward to get, while the “Bad” ending actually takes significantly more effort to attain.
This isn’t the first time a Japanese game has locked its worst ending behind a particularly complicated series of hoops to jump through, and it probably won’t be the last. The last time I encountered such a practice was with Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2, where the “Conquest” ending — an incredibly dark affair that, despite featuring a huge tonal shift from the rest of the game managed to fit in quite well with the overall narrative — required a huge amount of faffing around to accomplish. And your reward? Feeling awful at what you had done to the characters. I am, frankly, glad I did it first, and it’s for this reason I’m contemplating getting The Witch and the Hundred Knight’s “bad” ending out of the way first.
Meanwhile, I continue to be enraptured by Demon Gaze. I adore the characters whom you get to hang out with while back at the inn between expeditions into the game’s sprawling dungeons, but I was surprised to discover that it’s the dungeon-crawling aspect I’ve been having the most fun with. Demon Gaze’s dungeons are relatively simple in terms of tech, being designed on a flat 2D grid, but their design is superb. The current dungeon I’m running through — Endless Road, a dungeon towards the end of the game — is a multi-floor monstrosity that demands you pay careful attention to the relationship between the different levels and areas, and search carefully for secret doors.
Secret doors! When was the last time you searched for a secret door in a video game? Demon Gaze is full of them. Granted, much of the old-school frustration of hunting for secret doors is mitigated by two things — the demon Comet, who, if equipped, marks them with a big flashing mark, and the fact that players tend to leave helpful Gazer Memos in front of them — but it’s still enjoyable to kick down a wall and discover a door behind it.
At the other end of the spectrum, I’ve been enjoying the aforementioned Gazer Memo feature a great deal, too. Somewhat similar to the messaging system in Dark Souls (in that you can’t type freely but instead pick from predefined words and phrases)but with a few more suggestive terms included along the way, the Gazer Memo system allows you to scrawl messages on the dungeon floor which are subsequently uploaded to the Internet and downloaded into the game of anyone else who happens to be playing. During the time I was reviewing the game, the messages were fairly sparse and mostly helpful; now, they’re still fairly helpful, but there’s been a clear explosion in players: the sheer number of messages making rather suggestive implications about spears and butts is testament to that, I feel.
It’s fun to leave these messages, too. At several points during the game, after overcoming a particularly challenging maze of one-way doors, I found myself deliberately going back and leaving memos to future adventurers helping them out. (I also left them a few sarcastic “Nope”s if they went the wrong way.) I also couldn’t resist a “Caution! Gigantic Butt Ahead” at the entrance to one particular dungeon — a message that I now see every time I happen to wander back to that area.
But anyway. I’m rambling on about nothing much in particular and it’s getting late. As such, I’m going to leave that there. Here’s hoping that tomorrow is a more positive day.
Can’t believe no-one told me that I’d done three posts with the same number (1554, if you were wondering) — it’s an irrational and largely not-terribly-important fear I have that one day I will completely bollocks up the numbering system on this blog and celebrate, say, my 2,000th post when I’ve actually written 2,003 or something.
Not that it really matters, obviously; the original people who were following this blog as part of the #oneaday movement have almost certainly long since moved on as I’ve continued to babble on for somewhere in the region of 500-1,000 words per day for the last 1,557 (that’s 1,557, not 1,554… I think… I hope) days and I remain here largely talking to myself and the few people who stop in regularly or semi-regularly. (Thanks!)
After yesterday’s rant, I saw a few things today that kind of made me want to go off on one again, but I’m going to resist for now since it’s one of those subjects which will almost certainly be wilfully misinterpreted by certain people on the Internet and shared with the inevitable “THIS IS NOT OKAY” in an attempt to attract the usual crowd of shamers. (And I’m not talking about members of the Squadron of Shame.) It’s kind of disappointing to sometimes feel like I can’t truly speak my mind on certain subjects for fear of inciting the wrath of the Moral Outrage Committee, but having seen a number of friends fall victim to said Committee on a couple of occasions, I’m in no hurry to join them in being publicly shamed for saying something that, frankly, was absolutely fine in the first place. (I guess I’m kind of ranting here again after saying I wouldn’t. Apologies.)
Anyway, the upshot of feeling like I’ve had my lips zipped like this is that I feel… I don’t know, “backed up” for want of a better word, like I need some sort of release. It’s a stressful feeling, and it’s not a pleasant one, but at the same time I don’t want to really let rip because I know it will be ultimately unproductive.
So when I felt myself getting stressed out earlier, I booted up Final Fantasy XIV and escaped for a little while. It worked. I wasn’t alone; I got to hang out with the friends I’ve made in that game and even play some stuff together. (I’m getting quite good at Garuda Hard Mode and slightly better at Titan Hard Mode, but I’m still not great.) It was a nice means of getting away from it all for a little while, and when I was done I was able to log out feeling a little bit calmer about the world. Which was nice.
Anyway, I’m aware this has been a largely aimless post but I didn’t have a lot of things worth talking about happen today, frankly, since my mind has largely been occupied by being stressed and trying not to explode. Which it hasn’t, so that’s good. But anyway. Tomorrow is another day, and, more to the point, the end of another week, and I’m looking forward to a nice relaxing weekend. Apart from the part where I need to go and shout at Novatech because my laptop’s battery has died again for the third time in a not-very-long period of time. Sigh.
Anyway. That’s that. It’s 1:20 and I need to sleep, so that’s precisely what I’m going to go and do.
The weekend is coming to a close, and another week of work beckons. After that, there will be another weekend, and the whole cycle will repeat over and over and over again.
This weekend has been quite nice despite the fact we haven’t really done all that much. Andie and I paid not one but two visits to a nice local restaurant/bar/lounge type place called Trago Lounge that we were first introduced to for a friend’s birthday a while back. We went there on Saturday for one of their excellent burgers — the “Hero Burger”, which also features chorizo, some unidentifiable green goo that tastes nice, chipotle mayo and a pickled chilli in a toasted, crispy brioche bun is delicious — and enjoyed it so much we decided we’d drop in for breakfast today.
Trago Lounge has a substantial breakfast menu, largely inspired by the sort of stuff you’d typically get in an American breakfast-specialist place such as the Half-Day Cafe in Marin County, CA that my parents always insist on going to every time we go and visit my brother. (To be fair, they do do amazing breakfasts.) Today, I tried a stack of eggy bread with crispy bacon and syrup — predictably yummy, though the bacon was a little overdone — while Andie had what was called “dirty beans”, which was essentially a bowl full of home-made baked beans (three different types) with a healthy dollop of barbecue pulled pork and some lumps of toasted ciabatta to dip. It’s not what I would have called “breakfast” per se, but Andie enjoyed it. (It was a little too oniony for me, however.)
After that, we wandered into town for an idle look around and I ended up buying a new television. I recently came into a bit of money, you see, and while I’m intending on saving most of it, Andie quite rightly suggested that it was probably worth spending some of it on something nice that I’d enjoy. After a considerable amount of umming and ahhing — there really wasn’t all that much I want to spent a considerable amount of money on right now, aside from, you know, the house we’re buying — Andie suggested replacing my current TV, which is now a good few years old. It still works perfectly well, I might add, but the new one is significantly bigger, has an almost bezel-free edge, is an LED screen (as opposed to my current TV’s LCD), has optical sound output instead of analogue and has a lot more options to tweak for optimising performance when watching TV, watching movies or playing games. Oh, and it’s 3D, too, because it’s apparently impossible not to buy a 3D TV any more, despite 3D TV not really being anywhere near as much of a thing that everyone tried to convince us a year or two back.
Anyway, that’s turning up on Wednesday because John Lewis apparently don’t stock anything above 50 inches in store (it’s 55) so we’re both looking forward to that. And that, really, was my weekend. Oh, I found two Atmas in Final Fantasy XIV earlier on, but I’m sure you don’t want to hear about that. And people got angry on Twitter earlier on (not at me!), but people always get angry on Twitter and I’m frankly beyond giving a shit about any of it any more.
Whew. Made it. Nearly went to sleep without writing something. Doing so wouldn’t really matter, of course, but it’s a matter of personal pride by this point. It has been 1,363 days of daily posts (of wildly varying quality) after all.
So now here I am at 1am trying to think of something to write and, in my tired-out state, struggling. So I’ll just do some sort of babbling on about what’s going on this weekend and hope that’s vaguely interesting to at least one person out there somewhere.
Actually, pretty much nothing’s going on this weekend. We went out to town earlier, mainly for me to go and look for a course book for my Japanese evening class, but Waterstones failed me so I’m going to have to turn to the Internet, as ever. I don’t know why I’m surprised.
Then tomorrow we are taking Lucy the rat to the vet. You may recall a while back that Lara the rat wasn’t very well and I was worried about her — thankfully she seems to have made a full recovery thanks to some medicine we were given for her, so that’s good. Lucy, on the other hand, has suffered with a snuffly nose for quite some time and it seems to have gotten a little worse recently, so we’re going to go get her checked out just to see if there’s anything we can do. Said snuffly nose doesn’t actually seem to bother her all that much, since she’s still as energetic and mischievous as ever — she’s very much “the childish one” compared to the older, lazier Lara — and so I’m not too worried; I just hope it’s not been causing her too much discomfort.
That’s about it, really. Andie and I played both Flash Point and Guildhall earlier, both of which are board/card game acquisitions from our trip to Canada a while back. I contemplated teaching Andie the full rules for Agricola, but by the time that was a possibility it was already getting late and my brain wasn’t up to the task of medieval German farming, so that’s something to save for another day.
Played a bit more Beyond earlier, too. Still very impressed with the whole thing and intrigued to see where it goes. I have a lot more patience for David Cage letting loose than most other people, it seems, but it’s been nice to talk to a few people who have also been enjoying it and don’t feel the need to ridicule and mock Cage at every opportunity.
That’s definitely it now. I’m going to bed because I should have been asleep half an hour ago, so now I’m going to go and do that. Yeah.
It’s still massively warm, but at least our Internet is back. (It came back briefly shortly after I wrote last night’s post, actually, but by then it was too late.)
Our flat is like a fricking oven at the moment. All the hot air in the whole building rises, making our place on the top floor unbearably warm, even with all the windows open and fans running. You can feel it as you come up the stairs; pass by our first floor neighbours and ascend the stairs to the second floor (third if you’re American) and you can feel yourself pass through a wall of heat. It’s really quite unpleasant.
It’s times like this that I wish air conditioning — or indeed any form of cooling — was more commonplace here in the UK. Heating is fine — the heaters in our flat are great when it’s cold — but when it gets too warm? There’s really very little that you can do save for sit around in your pants and drink lots of cold drinks. We have been plying the poor rats with bowls of iced water, which they seem to appreciate; Lara, our slightly older rat, particularly seems to be suffering somewhat in the heat. Poor girl.
I’m heading down to Brighton tomorrow to work in the Eurogamer office for a change. It’s nice to have the option to work in an actual office with other people — this is something I’ve not had the luxury of doing in previous games writing gigs, so I intend to take advantage of it every so often, if only to break the monotony of working from home. (Also, hopefully the EG offices have air conditioning, which will save me gasping for breath in this oven of a flat. Also, I owe Chris Donlan a sandwich.)
One thing I’m actually quite looking forward to about the trip to Brighton is having a commute where I don’t have to drive. Finally — finally — I have a commute long enough to play some handheld games on. There will be some Animal Crossing, Velocity Ultra and possibly some Persona 4.
For now, though, there will be a large glass of something cold and wet in an attempt to cool off a bit, then sleep. Or, alternatively and more likely, very little sleep and instead a lot of sweaty tossing and turning as I attempt to get comfortable in an environment which is not in the slightest bit comfortable.
Moan moan moan, I know. At least Andy Murray won the tennis earlier. Supposedly that’s important or something.
It is 1:20am and I haven’t written anything here, nor do I have any particular idea as to what to write about. So I’m just going to write any old crap that comes into my head right now. I hope you’ll forgive me for that. This isn’t going to be a “freewriting” exercise as my brain is not awake enough for the mental agility required for that (though doing freewriting when absolutely exhausted is probably an interesting exercise in itself) — instead, it’s just going to be… stuff. All right? Good.
As I was logging in to write this post, I happened to see what my “top searches” are. I find these interesting to look at every so often as they provide a curious insight into how people are finding me here. And it’s not always in the manner you might expect. (Those bloody stickman GIFs I made a while back attracted a lot of people, but that seems to have died down somewhat now.)
My top searches at present are “My Girlfriend is the President Irina Route”, “Candy Crush Features on PC that Aren’t on Mobile”, “You Have Earned a Trophy” and “Cis Male Guilt”. I think that about sums things up nicely, doesn’t it? If any of those things have brought you here, allow me to address them in order: Irina’s route in My Girlfriend is the President was my third favourite route after Ell-chan and Yukino but ahead of Ran-neechan; Candy Crush Saga is a mug’s game whatever platform you play it on, so go and buy a copy of Bejeweled instead; well done, you have earned a trophy; and cis male guilt is one of the most irritating blights on the Interwebs of 2013. Happy? Good.
I’ve had a fairly dull day today, which is why I don’t have a lot to talk about, really. I’ve done a fair amount of work on my game, though nothing significantly more interesting than the stuff I talked about yesterday. In terms of how far through the “plot” I am, though, I’ve officially finished the first “day” in the story and got the structure in place for the next five in-game days to branch off in several different directions and lead the player towards one of the endings. So progress is being made — noticeable progress — which is exciting.
In other news? I had a little play on the piano earlier, but given that the B key above middle C is sticking and making it very difficult to play at times, doing so is an infuriating experience. It is doubly infuriating because I have just come into possession of the piano scores for the Nier and Final Fantasy X-2 soundtracks along with a bunch of fan-arranged sheet music for a selection of tracks covering everything from Ar Tonelico 2 to School Days HQ. I would very much like to play all these and record them to share with you, but without a working B key I can’t do that to the standard I’d like to. So next week I have to take my keyboard to a scary man in Ringwood who will hopefully fix it without too much difficulty.
That’s about it, really. I think I’m going to go to bed now. Andie’s having a night out with her friends and isn’t back yet. I have no idea when she will be back, but I will almost definitely be awake when it happens. Or perhaps not. I have no idea. I’m quite tired. To such a degree that I’m babbling nonsense out through my fingers, so I think it’s probably best for everyone involved if I just cut my losses, click that Publish button and go to bed now. Good night!
I have written a veritable bucketload of words today (including this 5,000+ word epic for the Squadron of Shame) so you’ll forgive me for taking “the easy option” and indulging in some freewriting again this evening. (Technically I guess it’s not truly freewriting if I go back and add a link to that sentence I just wrote after the fact, but eh. I’m going to call it freewriting and there’s nothing you can do about it, really.
Today has been a fairly quiet and unremarkable day, as most days tend to be. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course; having remarkable days all the time would quickly make them unremarkable and thus boring, and you’d get yourself into a cycle of increasing awesomeness, whereby it would take more and more remarkable things happening on a daily basis to make you determine that you had indeed had a “remarkable” day. So yes. Today was fairly unremarkable, which is fine. Though it did see the arrival of our new, massive, comfy sofa, so that was nice. And I guess that qualifies as something vaguely out of the ordinary, though whether I’d actually call it “remarkable” or not is up for debate somewhat.
Today I reviewed Zynga’s new game Ruby Blast on Facebook. As per usual for Zynga, the game lifts game mechanics from other titles wholesale, though in the case of Ruby Blast the game isn’t a straight clone of Wooga’s Diamond Dash (its primary inspiration) but instead combines it with the “Diamond Mine” mode from Bejeweled 3. It works pretty well, though it does all the things about social games that probably annoy you if you’re not already engaged with that particular part of the market. It has an “energy” system to throttle how much you can play, it continually asks you to share things and invite friends, and there’s something just “off” about the aesthetic that makes you want to strangle the personality-free main character. Objectively, however, it’s not a bad example of a social game — it’s fun, quick to play, likely to earn a fair amount of money and actually encourages people to play together with a weekly leaderboard a la Bejeweled Blitz, which still rules the roost for social puzzle titles as far as I’m concerned.
What else did I do? I wrote up that epic Squadron of Shame article I posted earlier. That was the result of an extended conversation between me and my good friend Mr Alex Connolly, who makes his home all the way over in Japan. It’s pretty awesome that we can have such an in-depth conversation across thousands of miles and then publish the (lengthy) results for all to see. The piece even got a shout-out from the developers of the game we were discussing, which was nice.
I also put my foot down on Facebook and determined that I am not going to put up with the facile social marketing crap that most “brands” tend to indulge in on Facebook. My new policy is that the second a game/company/other brand posts something inane, like “what are you having for dinner tonight” or “I like ________” then I will immediately unlike them. This will have little impact on their user figures, but I’ll feel better about it. This kind of social marketing is apparently A Thing, and me saying it is stupid (it is) is not going to make it go away, sadly, because it’s proven to be effective. Just look at any brand page asking an asinine question about what colour sauce you prefer on your kebabs and you’ll see several thousand “Likes” and at least a few hundred comments, possibly more. Meanwhile we struggle to get people out of the house to vote for things that actually matter. Oh well.
I’m not sure where this rambling is going but I haven’t stopped typing yet so I may as well continue for now. It’s been quite warm today, but the night has become a bit chilly. I have the window open as I type this and the cold breeze is actually quite pleasant. I popped into the bedroom to see Andie before I started typing this and it is incredibly hot in there — way hotter than the rest of the house. I’m not sure why, nor do you, my readership, care. So I will stop talking about this nonsense forthwith.
I have had the song “Winter Wrap-Up” from My Little Pony stuck in my head all day. This is partly due to the fact that the other day I had to review a Facebook “virtual world” where it was possible to choose YouTube videos to put on the walls, and naturally (naturally?) the first thing that sprang to mind was PONIES PONIES PONIES. As such, I haven’t been able to get that earworm of a song out of my head ever since. It’s not a bad song. It’s catchy. It has silly lyrics, but let’s not forget it was part of an episode of My Little Pony, so we can forgive it a bit of silliness I’m sure.
I am closing in on a thousand words so I will be stopping soon. I am going to end this post with an embedded video of Winter Wrap-Up so you can all suffer like I’ve been suffering. It’s just a shame I can’t make it auto-play. Oh God, do you remember Web pages that auto-played MIDI files and other stuff? Thank heavens we moved beyond that. Now, we just have superfluous Flash animations and other crap. But it’s been a very long time since I visited a website that had a background MIDI. I sort of miss it. But at the same time, any website that did do that would doubtless get mercilessly mocked. It would probably be a viral sensation these days, to be honest, but for all the wrong reasons.
Anyway. That’s really nearly a thousand words now so it’s time to stop, and the only thing that remains for me to do is this, as promised:
I have no idea what to write about today. So I’ve decided to just start typing and see what comes out. Doubtless it will be a ridiculous flow of consciousness nonsense post, but eh. What can you do.
I’ve used this technique before, of course. It’s called “freewriting” and it’s a good technique if you’re planning on perfecting your creative writing craft. Well, maybe not perfecting, but it’s a good means of practicing the art of getting ideas out of your head and onto the page as quickly as possible. This is an important thing to do, as ideas, if left unchecked, float around your head for a day or two and then dissipate without warning, often before you’ve had a chance to do anything with them. I find that I can generally hold A Good Idea in my head for up to a week at a time, but if I don’t do anything about it (even if that “anything” is simply “make a note of it to come back to later”) then it is gone forever. Usually. (Sometimes if it’s a particularly powerful Good Idea, then it will be back with greater force. This is usually a sign that I should Do Something About It.)
Talking of creative writing, I downloaded an app for the Mac called Scrivener yesterday, and spent a little bit of time going through its tutorial and fiddling with it. It’s a “writer’s toolbox” sort of application, taking the approach that programming environments do for application development, only for creative projects. You have a “binder” in which you can organise the various bits that make up your work, and when it’s all finished you “compile” it into its finished product, whether that’s a short document or a full-length novel. There are all manner of different handy tools in there, including a corkboard where you can rearrange virtual notecards, the facility to store all your research within the single Scrivener project file and the ability to split your work up however you see fit for later recompilation. It looks pretty good, and I’m going to make use of it. I’m thinking that if I actually organise myself to start writing something, I might be able to finish it. Whether or not that will be sooner rather than later will depend on my own enthusiasm for the project and whether or not I’m able to maintain momentum. I made a start today with a couple of character sketches, so we’ll see where I go from there. No, you’re not getting a sneak peek yet.
And now I’m running out of things to say again. I have broken my freewriting streak by replying to someone on Twitter, which was an error on my part. I shouldn’t leave Twitter open while writing. It is distracting. Everyone knows this. Perhaps I was thinking that it would provide me with inspiration for something to write. I guess it sort of has, now. You’re probably wondering what I tweeted about. Well, it’s all in the context, but I told Aubrey “Chupacaubrey” Norris that she is the “secret boss of PR”. She was lamenting the fact that she wanted to be the Final Boss of something (Penny Arcade Report’s Ben Kuchera had been referred to as the “Final Boss of Games Journalism” a few moments earlier) so I said that to be nice. Also she is awesome, and a fine example to the rest of the industry.
Anyway. I think that’s enough for now. Sorry for the lame post (I’m not sorry at all) but it’s very late, I’m tired, I just finished Quest for Glory II at last and now I want to go to bed. Maybe after I’ve sent all my Pocket Planes flights on their merry way.
(Aside: “Sleep tight”? What the hell does that mean? For one, it implies you can somehow “sleep loose”, which sounds suspiciously like bollocks to me. But I digress.)
Sleeping’s a strange thing, really, isn’t it? It’s something natural and instinctive — so much so that it’s pretty much impossible to explain to someone how to do it. I know I can’t. I know that I can’t even explain it to myself, and the more you think about trying to get to sleep, the less able you are to actually do it. “Trying to sleep” becomes “lying in a dark room with your eyes shut trying not to think about anything and failing”.
Because that’s impossible. You can’t think about nothing. It’s actually impossible. There is no way you can completely clear your mind of absolutely everything, because even if you’re picturing darkness or a black wall or something, you’re still picturing something, not nothing. And your consciousness of the fact that you’re not clearing your mind, the fact that you’re thinking of something, not nothing, that makes things worse.
It gets even worse when it’s late and you know that you actually need to get to sleep otherwise the following day is going to be hellish, especially if you have to get up early. Not only do you have the pressure of trying to clear your mind and get to sleep (and inevitably failing) but you also end up opening your eyes every so often just to check how much time you’re wasting when you could spend it sleeping.
Then you realise your phone’s by your bed, so you figure a quick round of Bejeweled Blitz/couple of levels of Angry Birds/few weeks on Game Dev Story/couple of attempts at Tiny Wings/an episode of Cause of Death is just what you need to make you drop off. And so you play for a bit, and your eyes get heavy, but then you figure “what if someone’s said something interesting or exciting on Twitter?” so you check that, then look at your emails, then possibly send an email or two to people you’ve been meaning to email for ages but never remember to in the daytime. By now, your brain is full of words and jumping birds and Special Agent Natara Williams and so there’s no hope of you getting to sleep any time soon, so you go and get yourself a drink and/or a sandwich and/or a jammy dodger and then repeat the whole process over and over again.
I envy those people who can just keel over in pretty much any context and start happily snoring away. Clearly I need to sleep in a sensory deprivation chamber approximately three miles away from my phone and any other electronic equipment.
