I woke up feeling terrible in the middle of the night. Difficulty breathing like usual, fiending, uncomfortable in my own skin. I decided to play Bloodborne, and I think I'd like to make it into a regular end-of-the-week ritual. I feel drawn to the fast-paced games that keep me hooked with time-limited events and microtransactions, and it's hard to pull away from, but I think it's a really good piece of art to return to regularly. It makes me feel so different and much more peaceful than usual.

It's like a sort of end-of-world worst case scenario with plague and hellish beasts and suffering. People weeping from their homes as monsters lurk outside. I find it comforting, to have a beautiful world with all these awful things. Like it's possible for things to be so bad and survive through it, and make peace with death, and to have the end not be around the corner, but everywhere. Burning the monsters feels merciful.

It's a good thing to return to and I'd like it on disc or on a hard drive without copyright protection, so I know it will always be there, at least as long as I'm here. I would like to see the visuals updated with higher framerates, smoother edges, and more detailed horizons, and I don't think I would miss the older version, but just on principle, I think every version should be accessible for archival purposes without abolishing past versions. I think From Software is a Japanese studio, whose work lends itself to an almost universal appeal because it isn't contorting to fit into transient and destructive political trends. In spite of this, I hear the remaster of Demon Souls abolished sex differences during character creation. They never had to do that. The gender weirdoes love Bloodborne and I love it because it never detracts from itself. The characters are kind of ambiguous but it doesn't seem to be with the aim of bouncing ideas off of and asking approval from Twitter. So From should just keep doing their Japanese thing. Instead of conceding SHIT. But everything Sony turns to shit. So I'd rather no updated visuals if an update means making any concessions to ideology. Bloodborne is timeless and placeless to me, and that makes it special.

My yearning for timelessness and freedom from this waking world is one of the reasons I have always recoiled from learning too many technical things. If it's referencing a specific point in history, I don't want to know it, if Marilyn Manson's music references any political events, I didn't want to know which ones, if I was good at photography, I didn't want to know why. I just wanted big emotional outbursts and mysteries and an escape hatch from the world of tangible and fluorescent things. In some ways, this is still true, but last night, I tried to pay attention and grasp the RPG elements I previously never acknowledged or paid attention to, without necessarily descending into the Reddit hellmouth and seeking tips n tricks from a world I detest. I think this kind of focus will serve me well and may help me understand other subjects.