Good start to the day. Woke up and started my laundry. Then I went for a walk. 20 laps, yoga, and 10 pushups. Pushups are easier now. I can do 7 in one go, without breaks. I remember when that number was 1 or 2. Pretty cool.

My mom was out walking as well, and I got to see her and talk for a minute. I was sad to see her go. I was feeling happy to see here, but I didn’t communicate that. Maybe she thought she was bothering me. I was just happy to see her.

The neighbor who walks their dogs using his 4 wheeler parked and was staring off into the distance. Maybe he was doing some meditation or something. I wanted to say hi but he’s a stranger and all I was doing was freaking out and building up a panic. I pretended to be lost in thought and not notice him on the other side of the fence, and I just kept walking.

I would like to be confident enough to say hi to strangers. Maybe I could wave. Maybe that’s a good start. Actually, I think a good start is probably to acknowledge him with my eyes. I don’t even do that right now. I avoid looking at people.

I recently asked my therapist about the fear of connection. She said it comes back to shame in that if I’m so afraid of connecting with other people, it means I’m afraid of trying to connect with them and they reject the connection. Shame is the fear of disconnection.

Strange how that works. Hmm. Well, I’m not afraid of disconnection, I’m afraid of having to talk to the person and exchange thoughts and ideas. I’m afraid of wanting to be doing something else, but feeling trapped and feeling obligated to stand there and have a conversation.

So maybe there is some increased awareness that I can work on in this area. Do I want to stop and have a conversation with someone? If I truly do not, don’t try to connect! If however, I’m feeling lonely and I think it would be nice to see how someone’s doing, or ask them about their life and satisfy my curiosities about them, do try to connect!

I think in most cases, I don’t want to connect. I might be able to work on that, and come up with reasons of why I do want to connect. Is it simply curiosity that makes people want to get to know someone, or is there more? I don’t even know, this is a new area for me.

I’m cooking some brown rice. I have some vegetable curry leftovers in the fridge that I’ll be heating up in a few minutes, and that’ll make a nice supper.

The past few days I’ve been eating one or two big meals a day. The first one is probably the only meal I really need, and the second one ends up being a binge eating of snack food that I probably don’t need.

Last night I did pretty good. I stayed up till 5AM, but I didn’t impulsively binge eat food, and I didn’t impulsively watch porn and jerk off! Instead, I came up with a super sick startup script for turning a plain Ubuntu VPS into a BitTorrent seedbox! Very cool indeed.

My internet just dropped out. I wonder if my dad is doing something with the new modem/router. He just got a replacement from CenturyLink and he was asking me questions the other day about it. He’s going to simplify the home network and get rid of the RV042 router which I’m super stoked about. Our free Ptera connection has been down for weeks so there’s no good reason to have a dual WAN router at this point.

I was about to switch to my phone hotspot but then I realized that having no internet is very desirable for when I want to focus on writing.

I was trying to find another word for “cool” on wordhippo, but the internet dropped out. I just went with, “super sick” which is an adjective I have on lock.

So it’s 4:00PM. at 7:30 I’ll be hosting a family conference call and we’ll be playing some games on Tabletopia. I learned how to play Go Nuts For Donuts last night which seems like it should be a fun game. I still need to figure out Sub Terra which is one of the three games I promoted as an option for playing. I can see myself subscribing to Tabletopia in the future, because they have a lot of fun premium games that I think would be a blast to play.

I hope Tabletopia adds 7Wonders. That’s a game my family seems to enjoy, and it’s one that would be great to play via the internet during this ongoing covid-19 pandemic.

It’s funny how a lot of gamers change their nickname to, “COVID-19”. It means that in game, you see notifications such as, “COVID-19 shot Crispy with a sniper rifle.” LOL. Dark humor. I gotta release my fears somehow!

The third game that I suggested we play is Santorini. I have a basic grasp of this game, but there are a lot of rules I’m not familiar with yet. I think there’s a low chance that we will actually play this game, because the max amount of players is 4. I think there’s a good chance that we will have more than 4.

3 people said they were coming, which means we’re at 4 already. A bunch of people haven’t replied, which means they might show up. Go Nuts for Donuts and Subterra both have a 6 player limit.

I think I need an 8 player game up my sleeve, just in case the whole gang shows up. I’m a little worried about the call quality. I think the background noise is going to go to shit with that many people. Discord might be a better alternative because it’s got noise cancelling, but then it might exclude people without a PC headset from joining.

I guess I’ll have to figure it out once the call starts. I might have to have everyone mute their microphone until they are ready to speak. We might have to take turns talking, and that’s okay.

I’m learning an 8 player game called Dragon Racer. Internet just went down again. This is quite annoying! I wonder if my dad got the new modem installed, or if we’re still on the old one. I was in there about an hour ago when I was cycling my laundry, and there was a laptop connected to the router. I wonder if he hasn’t switched to the new modem because he’s stuck on something? I should really offer to help. I guess I can find out when I go inside in a few minutes to cycle my laundry again.

Oh, it looks like it might have been a youtube hiccup, rather than an internet outage.

Ok, I learned Dragon Racer. It seems like a good game to play. It’s not too difficult and I’ll be able to teach it now.

So I’m confident in teaching two games now. Dragon Racer and Go Nuts for Donuts. Dragon Racer can play up to 8, and Go Nuts for Donuts can play up to 6.

I want to get a handle on Sub Terra now, because that’s one of the games I suggested. My internet has been complete shit today. This fact is causing me worry…

I’m worried about my internet, I mean. I’m choosing to worry, the game is not the cause.

I want to get the journalling done before I jump into internet board games today. Thus, I will hold off on learning Sub Terra until I finish out this post.

There’s something I wanted to bring up today, which is the strange fact that I have a recurring dream where I go into a restroom and all the toilets are taken, out of order, or to foreign looking to use. It’s an incredibly common dream I have, and all the bathrooms are incredibly complex. It’s like a fractal restroom where there are clusters of toilets or urinals together, followed by a small passageway, followed by another cluster of toilets or urinals.

Sometimes it’s a locker room with steamy baths or showers mixed in with the toilets. It’s usually crowded with people in some areas, followed by areas which seem to be for leisure rather than pooping or peeing or cleaning. Just people chillin’ out talking, and I’m always too afraid to go to those groups. Usually, I have to pee so I’m just looking for a toilet or urinal in a quiet corner.

There are never quiet corners where I feel at ease. There are never toilets or urinals which meet my needs. I am forever condemned to wander the vast restroom, searching for a perfect toilet which doesn’t exist.

I usually wake up after this having to pee. This morning, I woke up horny. I think in the dream, I was looking for somewhere private to rub one off, but couldn’t find a suitably private location. There were long lines for each stall. There was a green felt gaming table with four well dressed men sitting at it passing time with a book or their phones. That was the full service bank inside the restroom, reserved for only the most elite members. Walk up to the gaming table, and take out a loan, deposit a check, or withdraw cash.

Each of the men at the table had a job. One was a teller. One was an underwriter, etc. I didn’t have membership at this high-class bank, so I just took note of it and kept looking for a spot to jerk off. As usual, there was no suitable place, and I woke up, still unfilfilled.

It’s interesting where this dream came from. It came from JRE #1137 with Duncan Trussell. Duncan is incredible when it comes to seemingly any topic under the sun. He’s got a vast knowledge of buddhism, metaphysics theories, mindfulness, yoga. The list goes on.

Anyway, he was talking about the NoFap movement. He was asking the question, when a man is aroused, its like a buildup of energy. Is there only one way to dissipate that energy, such as rubbing of the penis until it shoots out a creme sort of material? Or is there another way to dissipate that energy?

I’m thinking that there is more than one way to dissipate that energy. I could have jerked off last night while watching Iwara TV, and I probably wouldn’t have had the dream where I was looking for a place to masturbate. Masturbation would have dissipated the energy that caused that dream.

I went outside and exercised this morning. I have zero desire to masturbate because of that, because I expended the energy that was causing the desire to fap.

In think in most cases, that is the case; Sexual energy can become workout energy.

Now, I’m sure there are cases where the sexual energy is so high, that converting it to some other kind of energy would be incredibly difficult. How difficult? I’m not really sure, but I would think that it approaches impossibility at some point.

I think experimentation on that subject might be fun. I could commit to NoFap for a certain amount of time, then see if I can watch porn and not masturbate. I’ve done that a few times, but most times I can’t resist the urge.

I think this experiment would be a lot more fun with a partner. I’ll have to keep this in mind for when I find a girlfriend who is interesting enough to have sex with me.

I’m going to wrap this up now. I gotta finish my preparations for my game night which starts in 55 minutes!

18. I am strong.
19. My confidence is beautiful.
20. I am imperfect but I’m still perfectly me.

I’m grateful for video tutorials on youtube which teach just about every game on the planet. Not just board games, but video games as well. Video tutorials are especially good at breaking the ice so to speak. A game which seems incredibly complex and difficult to learn quickly becomes approachable when introduced by a charming personality seen in video.

I’m grateful for Ludum Dare game jam. It’s a game jam which happens every 6 months and I like to participate as often as possible. The goal is to make a game in 48 hours, and share it with the world. There is always an interesting theme to base your game on, and there are no prizes other than the game you create! I like Ludum Dare because it challenges me to create something new, and it puts my software development skills to the test!

I’m grateful for https://www.timer-tab.com/. This is my go-to timer when I do laundry. I keep it open in a brower tab, and I never have to worry about accidentally closing my browser because timer tab is smart enought to remember the timer when I re-open the tab. Timer tab fits into my digital lifestyle really well!