As I’ve been looking to both improve my mental health and build my Twitch channel, one of the video games I’ve had my eyes on is Unpacking, a puzzle-style game where you unpack items from boxes to organize various living spaces. I’ve enjoyed puzzle games all my life, and the low-key nature of Unpacking definitely places it in the “cozy game” genre that I’ve been trying to play more of, to help me maximize the benefits of using video games to help me unwind from…
It’s been a month since I made affiliate status on my Twitch channel, i.e. got enough people watching that I can now make money on there through commercials and subscriptions and donations and such. I know that I’ll never make much money on there, and I’m okay with that because I want streaming to remain a hobby for me. My daily video game time is primarily for self-care, to give my mind a break from all the other things I’m working on, so for my…
[The following blog contains mentions of bullying.] My gullibility in my earliest years knew no bounds. I don’t even want to think about how often I fell for the old trick of someone holding out something nice to me (like a piece of candy), cajoling me to grab it, and then taking it away at the last second. (My lack of physical coordination probably made me a prime target for that sort of thing.) No matter how often I got tricked, I couldn’t stop myself…
I normally try to get usernames on Internet services based on my real name: @seanshannon on Twitter, sshannon on Facebook, and so on. Part of that is just me being used to having usernames assigned on that basis by colleges and so on, back before people started creating “handles” for themselves with their Hotmail accounts and MySpace pages and so on, and part of it is also me being aware of my need to market my name as a way to extend the reach of…
I was worried enough about the pandemic in the days leading up to our campus closing that I could feel my mind going to a very worrying place. For all the challenges I’ve faced after Mom’s passing, I could at least formulate some vague notion of the advice she’d give me if she were here in the flesh, even if they were challenges she never faced herself. A global pandemic that shuts so much of daily life down is something that neither she, nor even…