I slept very poorly and have (un)surprisingly little enough brainpower to assemble thoughts for this blog. (Dear god, that sentence was perversely hard to write, that's how bad things are.)
I've also flipped into one of my lower-energy modes, which arrive periodically and lead me to want to do as little as possible for a short while. I'm generally, to say the least, a bit overfixated on work and work-adjacent things. It's got a lot worse over the years as the work I do has aligned more and more with the things that I enjoy doing. That alignment is, undoubtedly, a good thing. But it comes with flipsides.
There's also the sting in the tail that most of the things I enjoy as leisure (reading, playing games, watching films and TV) have overlapped more and more with things I do for work. And it's hard to get my brain out of that analytical mode, or to read or play things with reference to the things I'm working on or want to work on. In terms of being better at my craft, that's really useful! But in terms of being a more rounded human who enjoys his downtime, it generally sucks. This has also worsened during the pandemic, as my main escape hatches (fighting people in white pyjamas and moving heavy things around) have been largely closed off to me.
I'm also in a low-noise state at the moment (Going low noise), which is very welcome. I think one of the strongest recommendations I have for other people regarding the somewhat weird habits I sustain is this conscious dialling up and down of outside noise (Noisedialling). I'm not checking the news. I'm only occasionally on Twitter, and even then see almost exclusively original posts from people I actually know. It's nice.
Something from Orbital Operations a while back that stuck with me:
I needed to completely empty my head the other day, disconnect the front of my brain and let all the loops and intrusions out, so I spent some hours clicking around on the tv. Not something I usualyl [sic] do, but I need to to a force-reset. This is how I discovered Karate Combat, which is like MMA except you apparently get to do an attempted murder. Very odd.
I definitely hit these points from time. Where I just feel I need to do a memory dump. I haven't quite found my mechanism for that yet, but suspect it will come in the form of 'comfort games' that I have played to death and which offer me engaging but low-effort play with familiar patterns (Subnautica, Oxygen Not Included, XCOM 2, Doom (2016)).