The Bog

Thinking about "depression games"...like, the game you play obsessively when you're too depressed to do anything else.

Specifically, I'm going to humblebrag here: I think I might an extremely highly ranked Crypt of the Necrodancer player. I never thought about it because, well, I have never claimed the super hard achievements. I don't think I'm ever going to clear the game with Aria, a character who dies if you drop the beat, can't upgrade her weapon, and starts on the final floor. I'm not a speed runner. I'm not very consistent and I frequently choke on the first few floors of a run.

However, I play the daily dungeon every day basically (even a full clear is only like half an hour of play so it's a nice diversion), and if I don't fuck up I reliably end up in the top 10 of the daily leaderboard, which lists everybody who played the dungeon that day on all of Steam (usually in the range of 200ish people). That's gotta count for something, right?

I got this good at Necrodancer because, well. Depression game.

Not really sure how to feel about this. Is this an achievement? God, I dunno. Technically? I kinda wish I had gotten good at something else, though. Or, that I'd set out to get really good at Crypt of the Necrodancer on purpose and it was actually a goal I'd accomplished.

Will probably start crossposting my fic from AO3 to here at some point. Waffling about the idea of having a separate fic journal/community but I kind of like the idea of being able to post whatever even if its not "archive quality" and I feel like a separate thing would just become Archive: A Realm Reborn.

I've also been around a very long time and writing fic for a very long time and it's just like. Really hard to look at my writing from more than a few years ago, let alone close to a decade or more. Like I literally have trouble even looking at it directly; one time I wanted to lift a few lines from something I wrote in like 2011 and it took me like a week to work up the mental fortitude to work through a few thousand words to find the stuff I wanted. It's like staring directly at the sun, if the sun were cringe.

There are also fandoms I just don't want to engage with anymore, to varying degrees of seriousness. World of Warcraft, for example, was a thing I just grew to actively dislike but I might still like a couple of things I wrote for it if I went back and read them now, and while the company that makes the game is shit my main objections to engaging with the fandom itself is that I just don't like the story (although I used to get really, REALLY mad about the way the narrative went with the Forsaken, like "whoa I need to step back" kind of mad, because IDK I over-identify with zombies this is just a thing I do).

On the other hand, back in the 200X era I wrote a handful of Roman literature RPF fics and quite frankly that stuff is literally painful for me to read, an awkward relic of a time before I crashed and burned academically and had all these hopes and aspirations that belonged to functionally a different person. Ironically those are my fics that get the most interaction, so OTHER people clearly like them and I'm glad, but I would rather just forget they exist.

I feel like my interests used to be just way classier in general, and I guess another advantage of a personal fic archive is that somebody won't be crawling the tag for some Capital L Literature fandom, see one of my old stories, and then be extremely disappointed all of my work in that area is old enough to be in middle school and most of my recent output is video game characters doing things to each other that are varying degrees of objectionable. Like I used to live atop an ivory tower and while the tower is still there I currently live in the bottom of a swamp. I personally like it here but I could understand if someone came to see what the tower-dweller was up to and found themselves knee deep in mud.

Part of me worries that all this shuffling around is a way of avoiding actually WORKING on anything creative, but. Eh it's not like I don't find those anyway.