Something rather strange happened last week, or I found it amusing at least: I completely forgot to write the blogpost. Well, not completely, but Monday evening in bed I had the sudden realisation I hadn’t written it yet, and did so, and only after submitting the post did I realize that it was indeed already Monday evening and not Sunday evening as I had thought, and that I had missed my self-imposed deadline. The strange part was, I didn’t end up being mad or frustrated with myself, as I might have come to expect, but simply amused at being so completely, oblivious I suppose to the passing of time or the weekday.

I could probably try to attribute this to some sort of growth that has been going on lately with me trying to deal with things like failure and making mistakes better, and in this instance I think it was the only appropriate reaction since there was nothing I could do to change what had happened and the corrective action as it were—writing the post—was already done so the only thing remaining was being amused at my mistake.

Being bored is something I feel like happens relatively rarely in modern times, at least being properly bored. It’s so very easy to find a distraction that being bored is rather rare. I’ve noticed this in myself at least, where the moment there is even the slightest hint of not having something occupying my mind, I turn to some easily digestable task like scrolling through memes or watching videos.

Both of these activities aren’t bad in and of themselves, and sometimes that distraction is exactly what one needs, and the videos I watch tend to even be mostly educational in nature, at least slightly. Despite this, I’ve noticed a certain need in myself for allowing myself to actually get bored and not fall into the trap of these easy distractions; both because I need to actually take time to process what I am doing or feeling or wanting to do, and because being actually bored and not doing anything seems to be the best motivation to actually do the things I want to do instead of filling my time with the distractions from my boredom.

So that’s been what I have tried to do as well as I can lately, and I have to say, while the switch has been partially quite fruitful in getting me to do more things and appreciating those things more as well, other things it certainly doesn’t make any easier to achieve and it is quite hard to pull of in one fell swoop. It almost seems like in order to still avoid being bored, I’ve merely changed the category of tasks I do to distract myself, but still don’t necessarily the things I actually want to get done. The reflection part is also still missing for me, where I merely give myself time to think, though to be fair that’s usually at least partially covered by me thinking during my daily walks, this isn’t the always the case and I do often end up escaping into fantasy worlds during those in order to avoid confronting the things bothering me or to avoid boredom. Consequently I also haven’t been as succesful as I’d like in exploring more and simply taking in my surroundings better, since I tend to just walk the same route and be lost in thought while doing so.

Still, the steps I’ve taken so far feel like a good start, and I think I’m expecting a bit too much from myself by expecting me to be able to make such a drastic change at the drop of a hat, this is something I’ll need to work on for the forseeable future I think. But it feels like I’m working on the right thing at least, trying to make myself more capable of achieveing the things I want to achieve and doing the things I want to do, so that feels like a positive. I’m not sure what the next step after this will be, but I think I need to take this one first before I start worrying about that.

As feels like is becoming a yearly tradition at this point, I changed the design of the blog again. I’m currently resisting rather well also changing the software running it as well, since even though that seems like it would be an interesting project it feels like the alternatives would all land me in a worse place than I am in at the moment—to be fair, that hasn’t stopped me before, but still.

Contrary to my considerations at the end of the year, I decided against also changing the name, since I’m really not sure what the new name would be, and silly and out of place it might be at the moment, I think it serves its purpose well—for now, at least. This might all change once more in the future as I learn to know myself better and what I want and expect from this here experiment in doing just that changes with time, but some stability in these turbulent times might be rather welcome.

As for the design itself, it’s gone back to being a bit more understated, clean and modern I guess one could call it, though with some light inspiration from synthwave I guess one could say, though that’s mostly just the background gradient talking. It feels a bit strange going back to something so understated after having the previous design which was something of a nostalgia trip, but I think the problem with that design was that it wasn’t actually all that good in many ways. The post pages themselves were a strange mix of a more modern style with old trappings, the contrast between the text and the background was somewhat poor making reading harder than necessary, and while the name remains inspired by World of Warcraft and my journies there to a great extent—that’s the only capacity in which I am anything resembling a priest—the heavy callout to that in the design didn’t really reflect the current reality of the content all that well. How much those two things need to be related is debatable I suppose, but I still felt there was a certain level of disconnect there.

Another thing the old design didn’t really leave room for implementing properly was “hero images” for the posts, something that I’ve considered doing on and off for a longer time but just didn’t really have a place in the design. The necessity of such images might be debatable, and it is completely validly arguable that the content should speak for itself and not be carried by the work of others in the form of images, but I think the addition of an image to a certain degree set the tone of the post might be a valuable tool. To many of the more recent posts I have already been selecting these images, they have merely had no place to be shown, but for most of the backlog they will be missing and even for future posts I might choose not to make use of them, but still they are now there for your enjoyment; well, assuming you go to the page for a single post at least, felt a bit too much like breaking the flow to display them on the index pages, and I also still have the habit of trying to optimize for connection speeds that are unlikely to be seen these days, so I didn’t want to include a bunch of not-strictly-necessary images on those pages.

The final thing to note then, and a change from earlier times of carefully curating a list of standard fonts applicable to the major operating systems or making use of web fonts, is that the new design intentionally merely states that a sans-serif font is preferred, and the users preference should be respected. Now, I’m sure most users aren’t even aware that they do in fact have the option of specifying such a preference in their browser, much as they might not be aware that they may specify a preference for language and the like, so it might end up meaning that most users will end up seeing some of the rather less pleasing default fonts rather than something nice looking when reading here, but I still felt like respecting that choice was more important for this design than trying to force something else on people even if they are unaware that they are making that choice. To be fair, the default font selection has probably also become quite a lot better since the olden times, so even the defaults might not be that bad, though I wouldn’t know since I’ve intentionally chosen Fira Sans for myself. I suppose that means if you want to see the pages as the author sees them, that would also be an appropriate choice for you, but if not then choose whatever you feel makes for the best reading experience.

The last time I wrote about reading, I was worried I might not be able to engross myself in a book the same way I have before. Dear reader, to my delight, that worry was unfounded—as I also speculated at the time. On Saturday I finished the Red Queen tetralogy (yes, I had to look up that word too, four books), a journey I had only began two weeks prior. Now that I think about it, I think all of the four books actually took pretty exactly two weeks, I think I began reading on a Saturday evening as well.

I ended up enjoying the books quite thoroughly, even if it felt that they were part of a rather familiar pattern at this point and I still have mixed feelings about the decision to include several perspectives in the later books. Yes, there is undoubtedly merit to it, and there were certainly characters it gave me a greater appreciation for, but it still felt like a diversion a lot of the time. As for the familiar pattern, the book felt very reminiscent of others like Hunger Games or Divergent (basing that somewhat on the movies, haven’t actually ended up reading those books, but still). This isn’t a bad thing, just something to be aware of if you end up considering reading these books. They also felt very young adult, which I think is exactly what I need at the moment, but also something to be aware of.

The only problem I have now, which I ended up feeling after finishing Pillars of Eternity II as well, is that odd void that appears after having spent such a long time in another world I can no longer enter. It of course opens the way for new and interesting experiences in the future, especially since I know again that this is something I can still do if I find the right book for it, but there is still a certain sadness to every end that makes it somewhat difficult to begin something new in order to avoid that feeling.

Thinking back, that might have been the reason I have had such difficulty reading before this, simply the fear I suppose of loss that comes when leaving these worlds that end up feeling almost more like home than the real one for a short while. It probably also doesn’t help that I still have several books that I started reading but never finished, partially because they are a part of unfinished series that I decided to wait for to be finished so that I could devour them more efficiently at my own pace instead of waiting for the author, but also partially because for whatever reason those books didn’t end up resonating with me on a sufficient level for me to just read through them, simultaneously making every new book I began a betrayal to the unfinished ones, making it ever more difficult to enjoy new books. I will probably have to take another look at my backlog of started books and reconsider if I truly do want to read them, and if not actually mentally check them of my todo list so that they don’t end up haunting me in the future, learning to let go as it were.

It feels like, I might have made one of those classic blunders of spring: underestimating how cold it still is. The last probably week or more, I have felt more or less a bit down as far as energy goes, and a bit of a stuffy or runny nose. Now I know what one might suspect, that it might be the great spectre of our times, COVID-19, but I think the likelyhood for that is extremely low, considering the measures I take to be safe. Even if it were the case, it would seem I am one of the lucky ones, considering how long I have been in this state and no worse symptoms appearing so far.

It does have the unfortunate side-effect of making it a bit more difficult for me to actually enjoy spring, since I’m less likely than before to go out and enjoy the rather good weather we have been having here for the most part, but to be fair that is something I’m generally not all that likely to do—even if I do still want to get into the habit of doing some more exploring.

There is another somewhat strange thing accompanying all of this, namely I have been noticing lately a certain difficulty in falling asleep lately, and wasn’t initially quite sure what to attribute it to: mental health state, stress, or what? But it is slowly dawning on me, that the most obvious change has been a increase in evening mental activity on my part, in this case in the form of reading more again, a couple of hours before going to sleep. Now it has been very nice to be reading this much again and I have certainly missed it just like I had missed playing a good RPG, but I think I need to come to terms with the fact that it is actually a highly stimulating activity for me when it is as interesting as it is at the moment, which means I need to take some time to recover afterwards before going to sleep. It’s funny in a sense, having reading which seems so passive be something I need to recover from, but I guess adventures in other worlds are anything but relaxing.

There is another rather fortuitous link between these two things, namely taking a day and just hanging out in bed reading seems like a rather splendid idea in order to try to recover from whatever ailment I might be suffering from at the moment, maybe even several days. I shall try this, then, and hopefully by this time next week I am feeling somewhat better, hopefully once more in more of a mood to do other things than just reading. It is the most excellent of distractions though, whisking me away from life as it is to the troubles of someone else, the worries of my own fading away for a moment, replaced by the adventures of others, comforting in their distance.