Corona all over the place…

It’s been a while since I last wrote anything on this blog – the kid is older and my life is significantly different than it was. But I just felt the need to take some time by myself and maybe just write a little bit about being at home and trying to adhere to all the advice from the government, for the sixth day in a row.

 

What have I learned so far?

First of all that we do not pay our childcarers enough. Trying to entertain a 4 year old, gets more and more straining for each day, and I am the lucky one, because of my health situation, we incorporate breaks for me away from her, my significant other does not get those.

Also I am trying to figure out how serious the situation is. Is it serious as in we should stay at home and only see ourselves at all times, or serious as we can let our child play with the neighbours children once in a while? I am not sure, and ends up doing a little bit of both depending on the day and my mood. And it is such a bliss if she can play with other kids for just a few hours, where it is not me and my partner that needs to entertain her. So far, that bliss wins out every once in a while, to the more serious, let’s all stay alone at all times thinking.   

 

I also spend quite a lot of time worrying. Both about the entire world and this coronavirus thing, but also worrying about my small world. What if my partner gets really sick from the virus and has to go to the hospital. I cannot handle our kid alone, my mental health condition will not allow that to go well. What if I get sick, what if my grandmothers get sick, they’re not young anymore. What if, what if, what if… It is turning into its own daily mental exercise to stop the spiraling thoughts from continuing on and on and on. My anxiety and schizophrenia really feeds off this situation, in a not great way. But so far I have everything under control, and I try to keep it that way.   

 

On a positive note, I do not mind the staying at home part, I was already doing that, and doing that well, and I really like our home, and like being home. I know that’s not the popular opinion but I really like it and find it quite relaxing to be around my own stuff. 

 

I also really like playing games with my kid. She loves her games, and the only wish I could have, is that we had even more games for her to play. I especially like playing Co-Op games (Cooperative games where either you all win together or you all lose to the game), both in general, and with her. It is so much fun to see her take pride in the shared victories we have in the games, and see her getting better and better at planning what we need to do, to get to the win. And she does get better. From the first time we played “My First Castle Panic” til now, she has really evolved in her thinking and her strategizing. Yes it is strategizing on a 4 year old level, but still, it is amazing and fun to watch.

 

Today we went for a walk to a playground, to get the little one outside, and so the rest of us could get some fresh air. And it was so quiet. There were people and cars, but not nearly as many as there used to be. It was really weird, almost feeling like we were the only people outside for a little while. But there was another child and their mother at the playground. It was really difficult to get the little one to understand that she has to practice distance from the other kid, and not run to him to play. She does not understand this distance policy at all. And why should she? She has always been able to be near other kids and play with them if they wanted to, and now she can’t?

But we got her to keep her distance, so everything went alright.

 

I think that’s all I got right now, but maybe I’ll return some other day, to tell more about my experience with the coronavirus….

 

– Gro, the hipster

A Hipster’s Guide to…: The Stanley Parable

For Christmas this year, I got a Steam gift certificate. I got it because the present my brother-in-law and his girlfriend had gotten me, turned out to have a bunch of problems that ended with them in the last minute, having to find me another present.

I still cannot thank them enough for this. Not that the other idea they had for at present was not very appreciated, but it turned out that this steam gift certificate, more than I had anticipated, was just what I needed. I had not actually bought any games for a long long time (years) because I somehow had gotten into my head that it was mostly my boyfriend that played games anyway (this is actually baffling that I would think that when you consider the fact that I met my boyfriend through an online game over 10 years ago).

Given this certificate, I all of a sudden had to think about what games I would want to play, and spend money on buying to play them, without factoring anything or anyone in, except me. It turned out that I had absolutely no problem with spending the money, and I quite readily knew what games I wanted, I had actually made a list in my head of games I wanted to try out. Therefore, I ended up with buying a nice short list of games and have already had my fun with some of them (and still have many playable hours left in many of them), and this is the story behind why this blog post ended up being about The Stanley Parable.

Because one of the games on the list that I bought was The Stanley Parable, and now I finally got around to actually playing it.

I had reasonably high hopes for it, since both Gametest (a very small-scale program with a bunch of people testing games) and Smagsdommerne (A danish program that invites the cultural elite of the Danish society to review different cultural products, from art exhibits to movie blockbusters) both liked it a lot, and recommended it. The fact that the trailer also looked interesting and this text “about the game” from their website captured my attention:

“The Stanley Parable is a first person exploration game. You will play as Stanley, and you will not play as Stanley. You will follow a story, you will not follow a story. You will have a choice, you will have no choice. The game will end, the game will never end. Contradiction follows contradiction, the rules of how games should work are broken, then broken again. This world was not made for you to understand.

But as you explore, slowly, meaning begins to arise, the paradoxes might start to make sense, perhaps you are powerful after all. The game is not here to fight you; it is inviting you to dance.”