A Literal Dream Come True, But Nobody Cares

I'm still alive somehow, even though I'm not a big fan of the idea. Funny story, actually. Our cat was put down the other day, because she had a nasty infection, needed an incredibly expensive operation to save her life, but the chances of survival were so slim, the vet told us that putting her to sleep was "the humane thing to do". You know, you get that whole thing about how it's not right to let the animal suffer, she wouldn't enjoy her final days and so on and so forth. Poor kitty didn't want to die. Didn't even understand what was going on. We were cuddling in front of the heater just an hour before they told us to have her killed. Because it's so humane.

Meanwhile, here am I, unable to find sleep during most nights, because my brain never shuts up. ADHD, Asperger's, randomly going through every failed social interaction since I've been three years old. I rarely manage to pass out before sunrise, then I'm usually haunted by nightmares. They won't let me have any pills, which I'm sure has absolutely nothing to do with the fact I once deliberately overdosed on them to end it all. I'd very much like to be dead. The thought of not existing, peace and quiet, no more existential dread, no nightmares, no insomnia, no self-loathing, I'm not exactly enjoying my existence, so can somebody please put me down? It's the humane thing to do, isn't it?

Turns out I'm not a cat, so they're not allowing me to just die. Instead, I get a lady calling me on the phone every now and then to check if I'm still alive, before she proceeds to remind me of all my progress and achievements. I understand that sort of thing helps a lot of people, who desperately need someone to talk to, someone to listen. Thing is, if I ultimately decided to go ahead and end it all, my telephone lady would be the last person to know. It's my life, I didn't ask to be born, I should be allowed to end it whenever I want to, without anyone telling me what to do. Yes, I know, what about your friends and loved ones and all that. Turns out if you're already feeling inadequate for not being able to provide properly, going on about everyone who depends on you isn't the great deterrent some people seem to think it is.

Don't worry, I'm not planning anything drastic right now. Since it sucks all the ass to sit alone in an empty, cat-less house all day, I've started a friendship with trusty Patches. This guy:

Patches is a leopard gecko, and geckos are stupid. I figure, a good way to measure at least some form of basic intelligence can be detected in how a creature goes about taking a shit. Our cats knew when they had to shit and would do so in a box. Our monitor lizard would only do it in his tank, and only ever had a single accident in all his life, which is more than I can say for the family dog I grew up with. A gecko just shits. It's like blinking or breathing, they don't even think about it, they'll just do it right in the middle of their food bowl, because there isn't enough brain capacity to tell them what a terrible idea this is. 

I find this to be the most undesirable trait in any pet. An animal that may take a shit at any given moment, without warning or any signs of it happening before it is too late isn't really something I want to hold in my hand or spend time with. Not just because it's icky, but if that's how unaware they are of basic bodily functions, the odds of them ever learning any cool tricks, seriously bonding with you in any meaningful way, showing any signs of personality outside of bog-standard gecko behaviour are basically zero. I like intelligent animals. Especially exotic ones, which are hard to read, which are still unknown compared to cats and dogs. Our monitor lizard was utterly fascinating when he wanted to play or when he sought to socialise. Things you wouldn't necessarily expect from a reptile. The gecko just wants food and to shit on things.

Still. He does this thing where he comes to the front of his vivarium every night, puts his front paws (hands? Feet?) against the glass and watches us. So I'll slide his door open and he'll climb up onto my hand. Then he usually just sits there, taste-tests my fingers, chills for a few moments, turns around and hops back in his tank. Last night he decided to crawl up my sleeve and went all the way up on my shoulder. Which is kinda cool. Would have been even better had he not attempted to throw himself off my back and into the darkness of our night time living room, so my significant bear had to get up and intervene. Stupid gecko. "I don't know where to go from here, so I'm just gonna jump into the void and hope for the best." Still, it's a little something to keep me sane, I guess. Wonder if I can get him to actually stay still on my shoulder or to go to sleep in my pocket or something. We used to walk around with our bearded dragon that way, but stopped bothering for pretty much the same reasons. Stupidity, random surprise shits, suicide leaps, lizards are idiots.

Earlier this week I have done something so wild, so awesome, to me it felt like actual magic. You could throw a fireball right in front of me or pull a live dragon out of your ass, and I wouldn't have been any more impressed than I already was by what I was doing there and then: I sat on a park bench, fired up an MMO and completed an endgame dungeon.

I'm a rat paladin.

I've been messing around with a handheld PC for a few months now, a little something like the Steam Deck, but significantly more powerful. It runs Windows and just about every AAA game you throw at it. My favourite game to play on there is Everquest 2, because it just looks so cool on a 1600p handheld screen with all the details and eye candy cranked up. Besides, it's an actual, proper MMORPG just running in my pocket! It also runs Guild Wars 2, and I could put World of Warcraft on there, but right now, EQ2 is my MMO of choice. I've set up a controller profile for it, which lets me play the entire thing without depending on a mouse and keyboard, so I can just sit and play it just about anywhere I want. 

Of course you may have noticed I said I've been playing it at the park, which isn't exactly a location known for its great, reliable WiFi. I'm using a USB thingie called a wingle. You slam a data SIM-card in there, which turns your computer into a portable WiFi hotspot for up to ten devices. So now I'm playing online games whilst sitting around at the park. To me, this is quite a massive step up from, say, playing something like Mario on the go on Nintendo Switch. Having something as massive and complex as an entire MMO at your fingertips, being able to just fire it up no matter where you are, feels unbelievable to me. I can connect with thousands of other players, communicate with them, explore dungeons, upgrade my character, all whilst sitting on a bus to town.

Paladins fight alongside their mounts. My mount is a dragon.

This is something I've been fantasizing about since the very first Game Boy in the 90s. My brother and I were crazy about videogames and used to talk about "what if". What if you had a Game Boy, but it came with a massive screen that lit up and showed all the colours, and what if it ran every game ever, from any console, computer, anything you could think of? Now I've got exactly that. I've got just about every 8 and 16 bit videogame that ever existed on there, sometimes I run the PS2 version of Gauntlet Legacy on there just for the fun of it, I play my VR games on there when I'm at home and have my external RTX 3080 to plug in. And now I'm playing literal MMOs sitting outside Tesco with a meal deal. I'm about to go there right now, right after finishing this post, have a sandwich and play some WvW on Guild Wars 2, just because it's a surprisingly sunny, pleasant afternoon and I've got nowhere else to be.

The thing that completely freaks me out about all of this, though, is how nobody apart from myself seems to give a shit. This is another one of those things that'll always make me feel like a weirdo, an outsider, somebody who will never understand how other people think, feel, function. I've got this crazy little device, which completely blows my mind and feels like actual magic to me. I have found a way to play an incredibly complicated MMO with dozens of abilities and skills, using only a built-in controller, with the same efficiency and precision as any mouse and keyboard user, and I'm doing so whilst sitting around outside. Nobody cares. I wrote an article about it, and people told me that's not what you should do when you go to the park.

"Back in my day we'd feed the ducks and enjoy nature, we didn't go to the park to play videogames!" Right. Because I can't appreciate animals and fresh air, whilst also playing a videogame. "YoU'rE doInG iT wRoNG!" I don't understand people. They're so upset by the fact I'm taking a videogame outside, they completely ignore how the insanity of this even being possible to tell me I'm going to the park wrong. What in the ass? Do you people interrupt folks, who take a book to the park? Are you telling people they're doing it wrong if they listen to their mp3s in a park? People go there to sit, chill, sunbathe, nap, snack, read, do all sorts of things, but apparently playing a videogame is taking it too far. That's so far out, the wrongness of it completely overpowers how incredible it is that it can even be done in the first place.

People don't like the stuff I like. At the same time, I don't care for most of the stuff people like. I experience this every day. I write lots of jokes for my articles and columns. Most of my favourite jokes are just ignored, fly under the radar, people rarely understand or like them. But they all point out and repeat the dumb, cheap laughs in the comments section, the low-hanging fruit, the lame puns, the painfully obvious shit. They laugh at the stuff I find mildly amusing at best, but nobody finds my favourite bits funny. But I also stopped caring about Stranger Things after two seasons, I stopped giving a fuck about Star Wars halfway through the prequel trilogy, we never needed anything related to Ghostbusters after the very first movie, superhero movies are dumb shit for dumb people. I hate nostalgia bait and popcorn entertainment, but all of my friends are completely crazy about it. None of them give two shits about the stuff I like. So there must be something wrong with me. I'm not losing any sleep over it or anything. I'm just completely unable to understand why everyone loves so much incredibly stupid shit, or why none of the stuff that fascinates me and keeps my mind busy is even remotely relevant to anyone I know.

Well, there is one person. Bear has decided we should spend our savings on a GPD Win 4. It's yet another handheld pc, which is even more ridiculously overpowered than the Onexplayer. It comes with 32 gigs of quad-channel DDR5-RAM, a Ryzen 7 6800u and a Radeon 680m. If you want to play AAA games on the go on high detail settings and in full HD, this device has got you covered. You can go a little crazy, if you're willing to go below 60 frames per second. Right now she's playing Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice on high settings with fucking Raytracing enabled, and running it at 35-40 FPS, which is perfectly smooth and playable on a portable device. 

Raytracing. On a handheld PC the size of a PS Vita. Was hoping to write an article about it, but got turned down, because apparently that's just not interesting enough. I don't understand people. Everyone seems crazy about the Steam Deck, which can play a selection of Steam titles at low settings and 20 FPS, unless it's some pixellated 2D indie game. AAA games at high settings, in full HD and with raytracing? Eeeh, hard pass. Well, alright then.