Comfy Questions and Answers, Part 1

Nothing new to report about the eye, except the new normal seems more normal every day. I stopped using the antibiotic eye drops as instructed, and now only use the prednisone (steroid) eye drops 4 times a day for another week. (Those drops drive me crazy because I swear they have chalk in them, as if they simply crushed up some pills and mixed it with water.)

I don’t see much of anything interesting happening in gaming. I feel really bad for news sites right now. There’s maybe 1 or 2 actual news stories a week, usually about games that aren’t even out yet, but they have to keep making up stuff that sounds like important news twenty times a day.

As an exercise to see how my eye is doing with writing on a computer for a long time, several days ago I took a crack at those Comfy Questions going around the blogosphere and ended up with well over 3,000 words. Probably closer to 5,000 by the time I finish. I tend to take whimsical quizzes entirely too seriously as you’ll soon see. (I’m not sure what is “comfy” about these questions, they sound deeply personal and invasive to me.)

(My eye did well, by the way, though my back is a different story… I really need to work out a better chair, or a different posture, or something, because no matter how I adjust my monitor, keyboards, and chairs, I just can’t seem to sit in a computer chair for more than an hour anymore without neck and shoulder pain.)



1. “How do you drink your tea?” I don’t drink tea, cold or hot. I tried a little bit of non-caffeinated hot tea this past winter, because I thought it might help my vocal cords. I was recording a bunch of game videos, and also trying to sing again, and I have perpetual problems with weak vocal muscles, a dry cough, clearing my throat, nasal congestion, things like that, and it irritates me greatly whenever I hear that come through on a microphone track. So I thought the tea might help, but I never felt like it did. Cough drops work better, and don’t require boiling any water. I avoid iced tea because the caffeine leaves me too nervous. Mostly I drink water, orange juice, various flavors of cranberry juice (cranberry mango and cranberry/blackberry are my favorites), and a couple of cups of fairly weak, mostly black coffee in the morning. Coffee does nothing to wake me up, but if I don’t drink at least one cup in the morning, I get a headache by the end of the day. That’s the only reason I drink it.

2. “Favourite dessert?” I try to avoid too many desserts. I always feel like I’m two steps away from diabetes due to family history and I sometimes have a hard time stopping myself from binging on anything sweet in the house, so I just don’t buy it. Most of the time the sweetest thing available to me on any given day is fruit like raisins or grapes. I still occasionally get a bag of Reese’s peanut butter cups, though, and usually feel awful about it afterward, both mentally and physically. Sometimes a gallon of ice cream in warm months. At one time I thought cheese cake was the greatest thing in the world, but I almost never actually have any.

3. “Favourite season and why?” Spring is definitely my favorite season, because I hate winter. Followed closely by summer, because the days are longest. I don’t like it when the sun is down anymore. I used to be a night owl but now I don’t even like to be awake when it’s dark. It feels like such an alien, frightening, claustrophobic world at night. Partly it’s because I’ve never been able to see very well at night-I try very hard to avoid driving at night, and I’m sure I haven’t done so more than a handful of times in decades. Partly it’s because I realized one day that every night when you fall asleep you’re basically practicing the moment of your own death. Losing consciousness for sleep probably feels the same as losing consciousness forever. So in a way night time represents “the end” for me. The end of the day, the last chance to get anything done, time running out, it’s late, it’s late, it’s all too late, etc. That realization takes all the joy out of night time. So I guess I’ve just ruined it for everyone reading this, too. Sorry. I’ve had trouble with insomnia (gee I wonder why) so I need a strategy every night to get a decent amount of sleep, because I don’t function very well without proper sleep.

4. “What cheers you up?” Music cheers me up almost instantly, and is one of my main strategies for dealing with anxiety actually. Sadly I often forget to play music. (Both purchased music and picking-up-that-old-guitar-and-playing music.) Sometimes it’s because I’m doing something that music would interfere with (recording or editing videos, for example), but mostly it feels like it’s a lot more difficult to casually listen to music in 2018 than it used to be, especially discovering new music. I used to be able to pop CDs or cassettes into a boom box, or just turn on the radio, at any time, in any room, or the car. I haven’t quite worked out how to replicate that to my audiophile standards in 2018. Today I have to find a “streaming music site” and it has to be on my PC or my phone, and it never works as well or sounds as good as olden times (aka. 10-20 years ago). I try to avoid playing compressed music through good-quality audio systems. All the CDs I’ve ripped are in FLAC format, but I can only listen to them on my PC through Mackie CR3 reference monitors. I don’t think I even own a CD player anymore. I’m one of those unlucky people who can clearly hear the difference in sound quality between compressed and uncompressed music. (I think about scattering Bluetooth speakers around the house but God forbid I should hear an MP3 played over Bluetooth… compressed, uncompressed, compressed again, uncompressed again! shudders It might as well be white noise at that point.)

5. “Dogs or cats?” I have a dog and a cat. I like them both, and they like me. I usually have a better rapport with them than people. They are two radically different kinds of animals though. Dogs are companions and friends, cats are more like roommates, almost like ornaments sometimes. Dogs are like small children-vulnerable, dependent, loyal, eager to please. (Mine can get moody and stubborn sometimes though-beagle mix.) Cats are like teenagers-unpredictable, distracted, demanding, suspicious. Cats are funnier to mess with though. My current cat (a stray who just showed up one day and hasn’t left) doesn’t have much of a sense of humor though.

I’m going to try to keep each part less than a thousand words so there’s at least a microscopic chance somebody might actually read these posts. I’ll post the rest later.