Difficulties, Technical and Otherwise: May 12-18

Battery problems (well, remembering to charge said battery) got in the way of my getting this write-up done in time. Sorry about that. I'm struggling my way through life at the moment, grasping at straws and fumbling along, and I found some real escape in playing Blue Prince this week. It's a video game that is somewhat Myst-like, in that you need to figure out pretty much everything from the small puzzles you encounter to what you're supposed to be doing at a more meta-level. Unlike Myst though, I've actually solved a puzzle in this game...

Books

• Rage by Stephen King (finished): Discomforting in a whole different way than I expected. While it started out seeming to foretell the gun violence in schools epidemic, it turned into an us against them type rebellion of students pushing back against the cultural norms expected of them. I didn't fully buy the transition, but I must say it was effective in keeping me uncomfortable. By the time they turn on the Golden Boy amongst them, all of the lessons I thought I was being taught were thrown out the window. Overall, an interesting read but not one I'm going to rush to go through again.
• Sandstorm by James Rollins (finished): At times it was uncomfortably plot-driven, but that was exactly what I was looking for. Whenever it seemed the next step was obvious ninjas or some other hostile group would show up and chaos mostly ruled the day. By about half-way through the book, though, I had given myself over to the onrush of plot and I ended up quite enjoying the show. It's not going to win any awards for the quality of the writing, but I'll probably read the next one in the series.

Articles & Episodes

• "How a Deep Cover Spy Recruited His Own Son": A story about a real-life version of The Americans. Great read.
• Apparently, Wes Anderson has been warning us about fascism for quite some time.
• "My Presumably Scrotum" Taskmaster S19:E03: A great example of why this is my favorite show on tv. Unpredictable and always walking the most rewarding and treacherous of lines:

• The Greatest Breaking 80 in Bob Does Sports History: I'm a bit late to the game on these guys, but I could watch this for hours.

Games

• Blue Prince: A game full of puzzles that really engaged me in a way I wasn't expecting this week. The moment I started a notebook to track what I was seeing, my son was suddenly interested and I'm proud to say that he solved the first major puzzle that we encountered. I spent the next day engrossed, and while I still don't really know what I'm doing it's nice to have that feeling about a game rather than my day-to-day existence, you know?
  
  I have a theory that in uncertain times people gravitate towards conspiracy theories because it's psychologically safer to believe that there is an answer out there that's being kept from you for some reason that it is to admit that there are no answers other than the ugly truths right in front of your face. In moments like this one, I find myself wanting to play something like Blue Prince or reading Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (which predicted our current paranoid, dissociated existence) to get my fix of meaning. Puzzles have answers unlike the questions that swirl around us, and as I'm learning I am always willing to find an escape from an uncomfortable reality.