What if, instead of prodding poor Arthur Dent into another adventure, Douglas Adams’s third or fourth attempt at a Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy book had involved a totally different cast of characters doing their thing in another corner of a generally goofy sci-fi universe?

Like I could imagine a couple of books involving the daily lives of the planet builders of Magrathea that could have a similar vibe to Discworld books involving the Unseen Academy, maybe a try at some bumbling space cops who actually have reasons to throw themselves into the teeth of danger, maybe a book about the time Ford Prefect’s terrible research lead him to become the accidental ruler of an entire planet, maybe a story about Scoodlewiff Mazariblan’s attempt to rob the biggest casino on Damogran and the ways it goes horribly, comedically wrong, etc, etc, I am pretty stoned right now and just riffing here, damnit now I wanna live in the timeline where Adams didn’t have a heart attack in his late forties and said “Hey what if I rub the serial numbers off of Ocean’s Eleven, set it in space, made a couple tangential references to the Guide, and left Arthur Dent to live a quiet life well off-stage for once?”

(This comes out of discussing how Pratchett’s first Discworld books were promoted as “like the HHGTTG but for fantasy!”, and thinking about how every single Rincewind-focused story has the same essential problem as all of HHGTTG: a main character whose constant desire is to just find a nice quiet place to slack off instead of “saving the galaxy” or whatever.)

This morning dawned chill and grey and overcast and Seattle. I’m sure all the natives cheered it, as they cheered a similar day yesterday; July was record-settingly hot. But me? My body’s learnt that skies like that mean it’s time to shut down and hibernate for another three-quarters of a year.

I went out with a book for a sandwich for breakfast, and no urge to get anything done today. I was just gonna sit in the park with a hot drink and read for a while.

But on the way to the park, I found myself singing the chorus of the title track of Genesis’ album “A Trick Of The Tail”. It’s a little story about a person who leaves a “city of gold” to wander a world that sees his city as just a legend, ends up a freak in a cage for a while, and eventually makes it back home. And today I felt all too sympathetic to that plight: I come from a strange, colorful city that’s been on the edge of sinking into the swamps for my whole life, and could quite possibly vanish within my lifetime thanks to global warming. I’ve spent most of the past decade in a cold place full of people who recoil from the sun that gives me life; they wail in misery during the few weeks of the year I actually feel alive for. A mythical beast, lost in an alien land, telling tales of a place that sounds straight out of myth, beginning to question if the place they remember ever existed at all? Yeah. Yeah, I can sympathize with that. I can sympathize with that a lot today.

I used to visit my mother at least once a year. Two years ago, I went back during summer for her funeral, and I haven’t been back since. I sat there in the park watching homesickness well up and spill out through me, and cried.

Seattle’s seemingly inexorable flight towards being another city that only people working for “disruptive” software companies seeking ways to suck profit out of every corner of human effort can afford to live in has been making me think it’s time to leave more and more. I’ve been thinking about a few places but I think today just really made it clear that it’s time for me to go spend at least a few years in the city I grew up in, a place that’s so implausible that there was a Twitter thread going around for a few days in which an RPG designer pointed out all the things he’d ask for revisions on if someone handed in a world map with an accurate depiction of the place on it.

Maybe I’ll stay. Maybe I’ll find circumstance slinging me out to some other adventure, hopefully in a much more mild way than when I moved there three days before Katrina and ended up in Boston with Nick and Rik. I don’t know. Or care. I just know that I am getting perilously close to the maximum number of Seattle winters I can make it through and survive.

He grabbed a creature by the scruff of his neck, pointing out:
There, beyond the bounds of your weak imagination
Lie the noble towers of my city, bright and gold.
Let me take you there, show you a living story
Let me show you others such as me
Why did I ever leave?

They’ve got no horns and they’ve got no tail
They don’t even know of our existence
Am I wrong to believe in a city of gold
That lies in the deep distance, he cried
And wept.

And so we set out with the beast and his horns
And his crazy description of home.
After many days journey we came to a peak
Where the beast gazed abroad and cried out.
We followed his gaze and we thought that maybe we saw
A spire of gold – no, a trick of the eye that’s all,
But the beast was gone and a voice was heard:

They’ve got no horns and they’ve got no tail
They don’t even know of our existence
Am I wrong to believe in a city of gold
That lies in the deep distance

Hello friend, welcome home.

This morning I started batch deleting old Twitter and Facebook posts. Twitter’s relatively easy, if “deciding to trust one of several websites, or to get a script up and running” is easy. Facebook though? Boot up Chrome (not my main browser). Install an extension that can batch delete old Facebook statuses. Start using it. Watch Chrome wedge up so hard that it just shows blank windows when I restart it after force quitting it.

I did get as far as 2011 (my second year on that site, I held out a good while) which is when Ricky died. I got to watch some of those comments scroll by as they got deleted, one by one. That was basically the thing that got me to ever really use my Facebook account in the first place. Those conversations are gone now.

Possibly this is not something I should be doing when I’m mopey and haven’t had breakfast or my pills yet but I’ve been contemplating this for a few days. I’ve been in a place lately that can best be summed up as “for-profit social media considered harmful”. And having Facebook and Twitter’s attempts to fix their problems end up interfering with the ways I’ve set things up to copy my posts from my blog and Mastodon is just getting a big shrug from me; really the only thing that’s keeping my Facebook account alive at this point is the pile of people watching the Tarot deck’s page, waiting for me to get a Kickstarter for a second edition moving.

At any rate, I reinstalled Chrome and kept poking at the Facebook batch deleter. I’m up to 2015 now. It’s kinda slow and takes multiple passes but I sure have a much smaller trove of stuff to mine off of Facebook than I did this morning.

So.

In the course of setting up things for a potentially really cool collaboration, I have recently been reminded I have a dormant Dreamwidth account.

And today I got informed that Facebook is going to stop letting me automatically crosspost from my blog at the start of August.

I have never wanted to be on Facebook badly enough to manually crosspost my blog entries to it. So if you follow me on Facebook, be prepared for my new posts to pretty much stop next month. If you’re on Dreamwidth, let me know – maybe some of the people I knew in the LJ days will reactivate their dormant accounts too and we can, like, have conversations that aren’t being relentlessly monetized.

Out of the jillions of games available for iOS, I keep on coming back to Bejeweled. There’s a handful of games installed on my phone but that’s the only one that ever really gets any play; mostly in its “Butterflies” mode, which is turn-based, and requires no investment in remembering what you were doing from moment to moment – perfect for a game that has to be juggled with keeping an eye out for my bus stop, and could be paused for a week until the next time I’m on the bus and don’t feel like reading.

I used to mix it up with a Puzzle Bobble/Bust-A-Move clone (also from Popcap, I think) but quit when I started getting nothing but levels designed to make you cough up the in-app purchases on that. If iOS wasn’t such a walled garden I’d consider sticking MAME on there with the appropriate ROM, but that sure is work. Although writing this made me do some rudimentary duckgoing for “puzzle bobble ios” and discover Puzzle Bobble Journey. Which has IAP but sounds like it also has a decent amount of distraction before hitting that wall.

I should maybe try looking for more turn-based stuff for the phone but honestly I don’t really want to have a ton of that in my life.

Today was supposed to be D&D but I woke up just knowing it was time to leave the campaign; I just don’t have the energy or enthusiasm for getting it rolling again after multiple spring holidays disrupted it for a month or two. Especially with a new player coming in. So bowing out of that with some (hopeful) measure of grace was… fun.

I hope this isn’t the death knell for the entire campaign. I will feel bad if it is. But leaving feels better than continuing to be part of it and spending my Sundays failing to play a role that I just don’t have my heart in any more.

Anyway. Back to work, I guess. Comics ain’t gonna draw themselves.

(later: looks like two of the other three original players decided to bow out as well. Might be continuing with the one remaining original player, the new one, and another new one. Good luck to them and the GM.)

Called out as a highlight on a sidebarred MeFi post. Well that’s a weird little sort of achievement.

I will have been on Metafilter for ten years come this August and I feel impossibly old because of that.