game no more
this morning i'm thinking about how the idea of being a Gamer feels kind of aspirational rn.. i think i'm missing a time when playing and discussing games was more a part of my daily life. i've been playing tears of the kingdom—it's fun, but it's not a game i have really any thoughts about, or play to think about. and other than that i haven't been playing anything. it's been a while since i sat down to properly play an itch game, or to try out a more popular game on a friend's recommendation. i think i could totally get into something like an old elder scrolls game or pentiment or whatever. i still regularly check the few discords of internet friends i care about who are still regularly playing and talking about games. a part of the wistful feeling is that not really playing games also makes participating in those spaces more difficult. another part is feeling like i don't have enough free time to do the other things i'm interested in AND play these games i want to play.
but on that note, i think i also like the idea of playing games more than i actually enjoy playing them. i think that's why i end up playing the first hour of a 60-hour long RPG, exploring the feel of it, and then not returning to it again. i like the texture of the experience, but i don't want to do all the work, not alone anyway. the loneliness of some of these games feels so tiring now. maybe the solitude used to be more alluring, or maybe i just didn't mind.
i saw people were participating in the o2a2 jam, and i was thinking about making an entry. it ends in 3 days, so we'll see.
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what have i been doing these days? i've been keeping up with language learning. mostly mandarin, but i've been studying korean more recently, along with some basic japanese and thai. i'm trying to watch more tv shows in these languages, if you have any recs!
a more recent development is i've been doing a lot of nonfiction reading. i'd been reading mostly fiction for the past year, but all of a sudden i'm on this big quest to learn about modern east & southeast asian history. i've always had an interest in studying this, in fact, i wish i could've taken more classes on it during undergrad... but i haven't really had an excuse to get back into it. now that i have this trip to taiwan/thailand/korea scheduled in the fall (my first time traveling overseas), i feel like, now is the time to learn...
right now, i'm reading a lot about korea in the first half of the 20th century, from japanese colonization up to the korean war. there's just so much. i thought this interview with bruce cumings, giving an overview of the korean war, was accessible and informative. he makes a remark about "the one or two paragraphs about korea" that americans get in their history textbooks, which was definitely true for me, and the more you learn, the more strongly you feel how grotesque and fucked up that is.
i'm tired of work. i want to lie down with a good manga and a good, cold peach.