Hi, friends! Can you believe it’s almost 2021? I can’t! This year has both been extremely long (things that happened in February feel like ten years ago) and too short (ah! It’s the end of the year already?).
The holidays have snuck up on me. I’d like to pretend that’s caused by 2020, but, to be fair, they do every year. For some reason I can’t seem to ever do any Christmas stuff before Thanksgiving. My brain can’t process it or something. But then what happens is that I only have a few weeks to do everything, and I get overwhelmed and shut down, which makes it harder to get everything done, repeat ad naseum.
This is why I can never carry my Nanowrimo momentum through December. Very frustrating.
A side effect of being overwhelmed is that I am an expert procrastinator. December is perhaps the worst month for it, too, because I’ll tell myself things like “It’s the holidays, you should make sure you’re enjoying them” and then spend two hours on YouTube.
(In case you’re curious, I am almost completely done with my shopping now. I have to do my brother and his new wife–I’m thinking gift certificate somewhere–and some little things for stockings. Also my husband has informed me that he’s gotten me four presents and expects an equal amount of things to open. I got him one expensive present, so I may go buy some Reese’s Cups and wrap them or something.)
(I am only about 30% done with Christmas cards, however.)
My current procrastination of choice is Among Us. Have you guys heard about this game? It came out in 2018 but has hit its peak in the quarantines of 2020. Basically it’s like Werewolf, or Mafia, if you’ve played those. You are one of ten little astronauts of differing colors, and there is one (or two or three) imposter among you. The crew’s job is to do tasks and try and catch the imposters; the imposters kill the crew and try not to get caught.
I bought it for $5 on Steam but apparently you can get it for free on your phone.
I bought the game at the beginning of November and kind of played it around Nano (which, as Siri mentioned last week, I managed a full 50K on), but not too much. No one else I knew had the game, so I had to play in the public lobbies, which are really hit or miss as to whether you get good people to play with. A lot of the people playing are literal children.
There’s a game variation I like called Hide and Seek. It’s less stressful than the normal version, because you don’t have to suspect everyone around you, and the imposter is known, so you don’t have to try and sneak around. You can find the games in the public lobbies because people would set their usernames to HideNSeek or some such. But it got really frustrating because we’d get, oh, 7 out of 10 people wanting to play hide and seek, and then the other three would try to play normal, even after the rules were explained, or some people would come in specifically to troll, and invariably the imposter would be one of those 3, which made it no fun for anyone.
So I wasn’t playing very much, because FRUSTRATION. However, at the beginning of December, I had a thought. I use Discord for writing groups, but a lot of people use it for video games. Surely there must be Among Us channels out there, where I could make friends to play with and not have to worry about public lobbies.
I found a smaller adult-only one, and it’s great. Great people, fun games. A few days ago they taught me a new variation called Vent Freeze that works a little like hide and seek.
The issue is, of course, now the game is super fun, so I’m playing it more. Which does not help on the whole procrastination front.
But, hey, at least this year is almost over. Fingers crossed for 2021.