Happy Federal Excuse to Binge Drink and Eat a Lot of Beef and Chips Day to celebrate a country that is growing increasingly hostile to me and many of my loved ones!
So, it finally happened. I didn’t finish a book in the given week. I annoyingly finished two books right away the following week, so prepare for a long report later.
Anyways, I’ve been stressed out about whether to send a newsletter or not given that I hadn’t read anything and also that I am late. I know that sending out an email irregularly dooms its potential for growth. But then I thought: Who cares when and how often I send my newsletter, who cares if it grows? I don’t want to feel like I’m working when I’m not at work, because all I do is work and think about work. I think about the actual work, yes, which I enjoy on an intellectual level but not an existential level. But then I also think about what my work means: About my ability to survive and my ability to enjoy life on top of that. About how the work I do and who I work for makes me appear to others. About capitalism and my complicity in corrupted systems that cause harm.
I’ve playing a lot of mobile games for “market research” outside office hours. A few weeks ago I set out to play games in a couple of categories: tower defense (like Plants vs. Zombies), sort (HexaSort currently has me in a chokehold), match 3 (Candy Crush) and merge games. And then the latter took over my life.
A merge game is simple: merge two or three items together to make another item. That earns the player rewards. There are two such games I’m currently obsessed with. In Merge Dragons, I am creating an army of cute dragons to revive lands killed by zombie goblins. I merge eggs to make dragons, and merge dragons to make bigger dragons, and seeds to make saplings and saplings to make trees that I can harvest for fruit. You get the gist. I once spent 25 minutes reorganizing my island camp of dragons, creating zones of treasure chests to merge, flowers to harvest for hearts to heal a dead land.
Then my colleague told me about Love & Pies. Love & Pies is a “Merge Mystery” about Amelia, a single mom who returns to her hometown after her divorce only to find the family’s coffee shop burned down and her mother gone without a trace. Amelia must rebuild her mother’s cafe and unravel the mysteries surrounding the fire. How does the solver help do this? You merge items to make other items to serve to customers in your cafe, and with the money earned, you rebuild the shop, and most crucially to the story, complete tasks to repair the cafe, during which you have critical conversations with people in the town that unravel the mystery of Amelia’s mother.
And I, an incorrigible gossip, am obsessed with the story, even though it’s very boring and for 117 coins worth of merging I might only learn that Amelia still has a crush on her high school boyfriend, Joe. Just as I think to myself - why am I fucking doing this - I realize something is going on. I’m pretty sure Joe has been replaced by an evil twin. I need to know if I’m right. To do that, I must merge cupcakes into cake slices until I make two level six cakes to earn 822 coins, which in turn, will allow me to unlock large pieces of the story at once.
I listened to The Goldfinch, as if listening to a Pulitzer prize winning work of literature cancels out the irreparable harm I am doing to myself. I wonder if a drug habit would be more dignified than this.
But, after about 35 more minutes (and $8 for gems to skip some of the merging!) I’ve validated my hunch. Joe’s twin brother Sam is impersonating him! But now, I must merge more baked goods to sell, so I can find out why.
I don’t know if I have it in me.
More of these please 💛💛💛