The icon is an anti-icon because I actually haven't had insomnia in a long while, and I even got enough sleep last night! I managed to finish all my nightly chores--prepping for breakfast tomorrow (cook fish, set rice in the rice cooker to cook overnight), make lunch, exercise, clean up a bit, take a shower, check on Laila and make sure she's sleeping--by 10:45 p.m., and then I read for a bit and lights went out by 11 p.m. My watch tells me I got three hours of deep sleep and six and a half hours of quality sleep, all of which ended when Laila took a flying leap onto mama and abba while we were both sleeping. I was in the middle of a dream about...something. I don't remember it anymore. That's pretty standard for me now.

"When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key to the gate of dreams."
-H.P. Lovecraft, The Silver Key

I used to have dreams that stuck with me for hours, at least long enough to write them down, and some that remained no matter what. I still remember recurring dreams from my childhood, like the one where I was in a cabin on a peninsular cliff over a raging ocean under a clear blue sky, or the one where my friends and I were hunting vampires through a weird dream version of my hometown. Now I basically can't remember any dreams at all. I had already forgotten most of the details of my dream within a few minutes of waking up and now I can't remember anything. sashagee tells me that sometimes I'll be thrashing around and muttering and she'll wake me up and I'll thank her and fall back asleep and I have no memory of any of this ever happening.

I used to have real trouble falling asleep in any reasonable amount of time but waking up to take care of Laila fixed that. Now I can fall asleep usually in fifteen minutes or so--not as much as my father or my sister, who are "head hits the pillow and lights out" people, but still way better than the thirty-minutes to an hour of previous. My worst night ever I lay in bed for seven hours until eventually giving up, but nothing like that happens anymore. On the other hand, I don't remember my dreams anymore either, and I wonder if the two are connected? Looking it up it should be the other way around--poor sleep quality is connected to fewer dreams--so maybe I just need to put a journal next to my bed or grab my phone and jot down notes if I have any dream memories on waking up. That's hard when nowadays we're usually woken up by a very enthusiastic Laila though, but it should at least be worth trying.

Yesterday, sashagee took Laila to a speech evaluation. I've mentioned that she's been behind for a while, but only in expressive speech--she'll understand multi-stage instructions and I just talk to her using grown-up sentence structures at this point. Still, she has a hard time putting sentences together and it's especially obvious when she's in a group of her peers, hence the evaluation. I heard from sashagee that she came away very reassured, but it wasn't until later that I got the details.

To wit: they seemed to think it was more of an occupational therapy issue rather than a speech therapy issue. sashagee has mentioned she feels like Laila is just thinking much too quickly and the words don't have any time to get out, so she needs some help slowing down and reconnecting her mind and body (coupled with a bit of speech therapy to smooth the process out). Now if you've been following the story of Laila for a while, you may remember that Laila was in both speech and occupational therapy years ago, but graduated out of them. The person doing the assessment this time was pretty dismissive of Laila's previous therapists--sashagee told me that she said this was definitely something they should have noticed and they must "not have been very good" (direct quote)--but had some recommendations for therapists in the city for us to look in to, so that's the next step. At least from what sashagee said, this should hopefully be something that doesn't take that much time and then Laila will unlock her language. Hopefully that's the case.

After nearly 200 hours, I'm finally at the point in Vintage Story where I'm in a position to to the (vintage) story. I have some teleportation stones (from the Ruststones mod) charged up so I can make the dozens-of-miles-long trek north to the Resonance Archive to figure out what's going on with it. I'm glad I discovered there's an overland route, so I don't have to make a canal to the northern ocean. In a couple weeks, I should have a review and I can move on to Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia.

But that's not why I'm writing this post. The real reason is that I'm hitting the same wall I usually hit in these long games. It happened when I played my heavily modded games of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas (each of which took about 200 hours), it happened in Stardew Valley, it happened in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and it's when I start off very excited, and I make big plans, and I stretch out the gameplay as long as I can, and then there comes a time when my motivation just...peters out, and I start rushing headlong toward the end so I can finish. There's no specific point where the switch is thrown, and I can predict when it will happen. In Vintage Story, I had a bunch of plans for what I was going to do when spring finally came again, all the crops I would plant and the upgrades I did to my greenhouse to prepare for it, and now it's looking like it'll be pointless because I'll beat the game before it's warm enough to put any seeds in the ground.

Some of this is just that I'm doing too much of the same thing and want a change. For example, it didn't happen in Baldur's Gate II. Maybe because I played it in bits in between the other things I'm doing. On the other hand, even though there's a whole route and revamped content in Night in the Woods that I haven't done yet, I haven't gone back to it yet after eight years. And this is in contrast with literature--there I often don't want a book to end, and I know some of that is because I write reviews of all the books I read so finishing a book means I have homework, but I also write reviews of all the games I play so there's no difference there. And of course, books obviously don't take 200 hours to read unless you're reading the Talmud or something, and Daf Yomi means you stretch that out like I stretched out my Baldur's Gate II playthrough. So what is it?

Okay, between this paragraph and the previous one I stared out the window for a while and you know, I actually thought of a possible explanation--action. Video games are an active medium, they require you to do things to complete them. Even the most text-heavy visual novel requires you to make a plot-relevant choice occasionally. Books (and TV shows etc) don't require any action, they just require absorption of information. So maybe what I'm actually getting sick of is the repetitive actions, and what's more, the constrained possible range of actions. In Vintage Story I can move blocks around, explore, craft, fight monsters, farm crops, and so on...but there are very few NPCs to talk to, no character sheet to level, no job classes to pick, etc. The mechanics have been basically the same for those entire 200 hours and what I really want is a set of new mechanics. Order of Ecclesia has platforming challenges, gimmick boss fights, and killing monsters for their glyphs. Vintage Story has...well, I've heard it does have a gimmick boss fight but it doesn't have any of the rest of those. It'll be a big change.

You know, I didn't actually expect to come up with a real answer when I sat down to write this, but it also explains why I tend to pick very different games. Just look at the list of games I played in 2024 and you'll notice I never played the same type of game twice in a row. The closest were River City Girls and Kirby and the Amazing Mirror, but the former was a co-op beat-'em-up and the latter was almost a metroidvania, so they were still very different. What I'm looking for is mechanical variety.