Sunday night.

I tried and tried, but I just couldn’t get into that Vicious book (by V.E.Schwab) I mentioned a week or two ago. I stopped at the 53% mark. The first chapter was excellent, but the rest felt like a by-the-numbers drawing exercise to get from there to the end point, whatever it might be. As a connoisseur of supervillain fiction, I demand better villains, not an emotionally stunted guy obsessed with revenge or a mildly religious guy who becomes a mass-murdering zealot overnight. Meh. There are better ways to write bad guys.

In other procrastination news, after giving Stardew Valley about 101 hours of my life, I feel like I’ve achieved almost everything that game has to offer. My little farmer guy has a prosperous farm that’s routinely harvested by weird magic creatures. A family with a robot-tinkering wife and two creepy kiddos. A magic staff to teleport back and forth as needed… There just doesn’t seem to be much of a point to continue with that.

New distraction: my giant archive of Steam video games that I’ve downloaded over the years but never quite played. (I’m really tapping into the reserves here, eh.) The original Tropico game came out 20 years ago, and the graphics look quite dated by now, but the humour is still there, as is the challenging gameplay. It’s a construction/management simulator where you play as a third-world dictator with your own little island. It’s set in the 1950s and bears more than a passing resemblance to Cuba. Heh. It was a fine way to fast-forward through the evening, and that game alone has at least two weeks’ worth of missions to play through. I believe I got it for $5 or so. Talk about great bang for your buck!

In covid news, I’m about to take a huge risk. The local search&rescue group I mentioned earlier, OVERT, requires all applicants to have a valid First Aid/CPR certificate. Mine expired over a year ago. Six days from now, on Saturday, I’ll take a day-long course on that topic. The course itself isn’t challenging, but I’ll be surrounded by dozens of living, breathing people. The sign-up form has the standard “code of honour” disclaimer asking people to avoid coming in if they have symptoms, or might have been exposed to someone with symptoms, etc. I hope everyone that applies to will do so. And yet the risk remains… Aside from xgf’s socially distanced outdoor birthday party in August, where only five people attended, this will be my first social event of any kind in about six months. It’s a calculated risk: if I get through the class without getting sick (and it’s unclear how many people will be there: could be five, could be 50), I’ll be able to join the local rescue group. That’ll make this doomed year a whole lot more enjoyable.

One risky day in exchange for a chance to be a good guy once again and do something objectively good after almost a year of hiding out. (Which is all the good a regular person can do when a highly contagious virus is making its rounds.)

Should be fun.