than fade away

[jazzfish]

I appear to be, if not Burnt Out, then Burning Out.

I am judging this based on the fact that I very badly want to set up the TV, hook up the Wii which plays Gamecube games, and replay a couple of games that I beat ages ago (Zelda on a boat, the Metroid Prime games, maybe Eternal Darkness).

Note that I don't want to play any of the small backlog of unplayed games I've got hanging around. I explicitly want to Do A Thing which is a thing that I have done before. At a guess, what I get out of this is something along the lines of: comfort; consistency; sense of accomplishment without corresponding fear of failure; mental-sense of being in another, safer(?) time.

Bah. Work is being terrible: I've been doing the work of at least two people since the beginning of March, and for the two months before that it was 1.5 people. I lack the energy to apply for other jobs, if indeed there are any that are hiring at the moment, and if indeed I would be able to function well enough to take on a different position. I miss humans-that-are-not-Erin but I do not think I would be capable of interacting with them at present (I certainly do not have the ability to reach out, and do not appear to even be able to respond reasonably). I badly miss role-playing, which I've done zero of since ... November 2016? and I miss boardgaming, and at this point I'm not even able to indulge in gaming-adjacent activities like "playing online" or "reading rpg books". (Honourable exception for Through the Ages, whose asynchronous play keeps me going. I can generally brain well enough for five minutes at a time of taking my turn.)

... and there's a hell of a lot of other stuff just under the surface of this that needs digging through, but I certainly do not have the time and may or not have the energy.

So. Noted: today I admitted that I was burning out, yet again.

Comments

[reedrover]

Yeah. I hear you on the lack of impetus to do/read/play anything new. I'm doing a lot of re-reading and almost nothing new. Of the three new things lately, one was a comic book and the others were known authors.

[jazzfish]

I seem to be swinging wildly on what I can handle. Caroline Stevermer's brand-new The Glass Magician seems to be okay, for instance, and I've only read one and a half of her books, and those were well over a decade ago.

But... yeah. I want to reread Sandman because it's been years if not decades (I definitely have not reread them since I loaned them to Good Chris, and that would have been before 2006) but... even that seems like such a heavy lift.

Time War is definitely comfort-reading, and I'm going to reread Murderbot before the novel comes out, because Murderbot. Beyond that, I have no idea at all.

[reedrover]

Sandman is a very heavy lift. I am not sure I could do that right now either.

Achaosofkittens is rereading the Imager Portfolio, which is vaguely appealing to me too.

I got the ARC of Network Effect in December, but I will probably reread the novellas anyway in celebration.

[carbonel]

I have been doing a lot of comfort reading, but it has to be the right comfort reading. I just read a long Harry Potter fanfic novel (The Green Girl) in which Hermione is sorted into Slytherin instead of Gryffindor, and it was just the right thing. Rereads are good if they haven't been read too recently. Otherwise I would go for Connie Willis's WWII duology, but those are a bit too fresh.

I just started rereading The Deed of Paksennarion (the omnibus version of the trilogy) by Elizabeth Moon. This is definitely comfort reading for me, and will keep me happy for a week or so, because it's been at least five years since I've read them. I may read the connected ones that come after, but again, those are fresher in my mind.