03/15/22: Insomnia sucks but you get a newsletter
TLDR
Update: Insomnia
Listening: The Trojan Horse Affair
Playing: Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
End Notes: You can contact me at jadettman@gmail.com
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THE UPDATE
I’ve been up since 1am and I spent about an hour reading my current book which usually gets my mind off whatever it is churning on and let me get back to sleep. Not this time. Of course.
I’m supposed to be visiting friends in Madison today, who I haven’t seen in person in two years, but I’m pretty sure I should cancel. It’s that or anticipate the inevitable crash an hour from home. Suck.
It’s spring break for the college this week, so I took vacation. Currently, vacation is a lot like my regular week except that, instead of going to work, I’m playing more video games.
I was really looking forward to seeing friends in person again.
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LISTENING
Yesterday I finished listening to The Trojan Horse Affair, a podcast from Serial Productions. It’s about an unusual situation in Birmingham,UK in which someone purportedly sent a partial letter to the local government about a plot by Muslims to take over local schools.
Serial knows how to make a compelling podcast. The Trojan Horse Affair is extremely listenable and I very much wanted to know what the hosts were going to discover. But also, a lot of my fascination with the podcast was the journey of Hamza Syed over the course of the investigation.
The podcast, for me, is a window into the unexamined biases of so many people, the way that an unidentified person used those biases to create a threat in the mind of local and national government, and the repercussions. I think it’s well worth listening to.
The Trojan Horse Affair - This American Life
A mysterious letter shocked Britain. But who wrote it?
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PLAYING
A week ago, Kevin loaned me his Nintendo Switch. I have been dissatisfied with the prevalence of violence in the majority of games I see offered to me on Playstation and wanted to see if there were other options on the Switch. What I learned, really, is that I am much more comfortable with game violence when game images are more cartoony and less realistic. The less realistic the presentation, the more comfortable I am. Which bears examining but I’m not there just yet.
Anyway, I’ve mostly been playing Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild with a short dip into Paper Mario: Origami King.
I’m enjoying Breath of the Wild, primarily the same way that I enjoy No Man’s Sky: I have set myself a goal (in this case, activating all the towers and finding all the shrines) and I’m running around the landscape trying to do that. For the most part, I’m trying to avoid combat because the graphics are just realistic enough to make me feel like a murder-hobo and, also, combat is hard and running away is often a good option. The designers have done a specifically clever thing to avoid the murder-hobo feeling and that is that monsters, when they die, disappear in a puff of clearly magical purple smoke (also, there is an annoying mechanic where they magically respawn every three hours of play) and that is starting to slowly warm me up to fighting the monsters.
The Legend of Zeldaâ¢: Breath of the Wild for the Nintendo Switch⢠home gaming system and Wii U⢠console â Official Site
Step into a world of discovery, exploration, and adventure in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a boundary-breaking new game in the acclaimed series. Discover what has become of the kingdom of Hyrule in this stunning open-air adventure for Nintendo Switch and Wii U.
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END NOTES
If you'd like to send me some feedback or discuss one of the topics I've talked about here (or even a different topic), email me at jadettman@gmail.com
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