I’ve been struggling to post because of how my life is so I’m hoping that posting about my life helps. It’s tricky because I’m not free to be totally open, other people are involved, but I’ll see what I can do.

I’m currently separated from my wife. We’ve drifted apart and something triggered our first fight. That led to us both doing therapy work on ourselves while things are figured out. I feel some confidence about what I need to change though and am working very hard to be worth it. It’s almost been a year. I hope she finds what she needs.

I’m living with my parents while I do my part. Sleeping on a couch with a TV on right next to me the rest of the time. I am seriously grateful to them for this. Especially since I’d been pressing them very hard to discuss some serious stuff they don’t want to. That’s all on hold while I’m in their house of course, this is their space. Our politics are opposed, I still love them though. I get to save money despite the difficulties. I’ve earned my place by catching 74 mice in their house. All caught live and released in a local park. Seriously.

I had to release them on weekends and this is what they do when they get more comfortable, stare at OUTSIDE. Or stare at one while it tries to jump out to learn. Smart. And cute. One even had babies and I raised them up to a releasing age. They still wanted OUT despite never having been OUT. I hope it’s worth it.

My best trap was a dog biscuit box with a cereal box inside and a plastic bag in that with dog food and peanut butter. I hear them, I cover the hole, I dump them into a tub. Easy.

Outside of therapy work and some games I’m having a hard time finding the energy to do much. I don’t have any meat space friends. I’m pretty isolated. I’m trying to get into situations where friends can be made, meetups and such, but it’s slow going. I have really severe social anxiety due to a lot of factors that I would rather do in a separate post. In short I didn’t get shown how to make friends, learned to distrust and fear people, and bullying in school with no friends in school (the tourette’s). I didn’t fully appreciate just how avoidant I was until after my attempt at graduate school, it never occurred to me to join professional groups for example. This is hard to change in my late 40s. But I’m working on it. A statistic in the loneliness epidemic.

I hear it gets harder for everyone to make friends as they get older. I wonder why that is. You’d think that because things get easier as you get age and experience it would happen here too. But no, many of us are separated in our way.

I may at least get off of the couch soon, my parents are emptying an extra room they were storing things in. That will help. And then maybe I can bring some stuff from the apartment, I’ve had an urge to play some Halo. My wife is nice about that part. If I want my stuff I can get my stuff.

I just wish I could do more of what I used to do politically. But I’m missing a balance in my life that prevents the rage and passion from consuming me. It’s ok to just work on myself when that’s what I need to do though.

This all came to mind while watching this video by Anton Petrov.

It’s a great video about the group of archaea that we seem to be descended from, in part. Look at those cellular appendages!

To summarize life, cellular life comes in 3 major groups: bacteria, archaea, and eukarya. The first 2 are single celled and the last one can be single or multicellular. We are eukaryotes.

What are eukaryotes?

The way we talk about this bugs me. An archaea engulfed a bacteria and the bacteria became modern mitochondria as the endosymbiotic theory goes. From there complex membrane systems evolved like the nuclear membrane and the endoplasmic reticulum. But when you look at the circular genome in the mitochondria it’s tiny, most of the genes for everything including mitochondrial ribosomes have moved to the nuclear genome.

We are bacterial-archaeal composites. The 2 earliest branches of the tree of life combined into the 3rd. We are just as evolved from an archaea as we are a bacteria. Identifying with the outside membrane and main genome is a kind of bias. We are both.

What was the nature of the evolution of 1 group of cells to 2?

Since there is evidence that the chemistry of alkaline hydrothermal vents is involved in the evolution of life, I wonder how that relates to the evolution of 2 major groups of cells before eukarya showed up? Archaea are extremophiles. They seem to like things like high temperature systems and other extreme conditions. Since the alkaline vents are like internal cellular chemistry cellular life likely evolved there first. But there are 2 kinds of hydrothermal vent systems, alkaline and magmatic.

I’m of the view that this life, maybe bacteria, then seeded the magmatic hydrothermal vents which resulted in archaea as the populations became separate. The 2 kinds of vents is what makes sense to me as a means of evolving bacteria and archaea and eventually the 2 met again allowing for eukarya.

Maybe I’m wrong but it’s an interesting thought.

Edited.

I live in Tucson and I’m in the process of looking for a board game meetup, but I play lots of games including video games. If anyone in Tucson who reads this blog or other FTB blogs wants another player for games I’d love to be considered.

After posting I realized I wasn’t sure if my email was available on my site so if anyone has room for another gamer my email is mudge80@gmail.com

Somehow this game hit a spot for me, and I want to dissect it. Not the spot since I’m still looking for the perfect something on Android (if it featured some match 3 play that would help). But it’s nice overall, something about helping other people fight monsters. But the formula breaks down a bit when I think about it, or overthink it as some might say. But I think it’s valid to look at games like this even while enjoying them.

Dungeon Village 2 is a town building game with a town space and an outside battle space.

As you improve your village more people are attracted to it and go outside to fight monsters. They all get the traditional RPG improvement mechanics where they get experience and gold, level up, and buy themselves equipment in the weapon, armor, and accessory shops in the village. You can gift them equipment which is much more efficient. Then they go back out and do it some more. They also get knocked out instead of dying and becoming coins for the monsters, and will rush one another to the inn to rest up. Bosses will also show up periodically.

You get to build the town, including houses for people who become citizens instead of visitors (and they pay taxes). Hire people for quests (dungeons or concentrations of monsters), meet requirements for upgrading towns, hold special events that increase stats or town popularity,  as well as meet requirements for contests and special town visitors (they spend more money mostly).

The monsters are sentient, they talk. This is where things get weird for me. There’s this unstated history of conflict where these creatures are constantly fighting towns and keep coming back. Why?

If you have a monster tamer in a group for a quest there’s a chance a monster will be impressed with you defeating them and ask to join you. You can assign them to a fighter who forms a “partnership” (suggesting a kind of equal status) with the monster and they then go out  together to fight the former allies of the monster. When the monster’s happiness is high enough it lets the fighter ride it into battle. Monsters without a partner live at the monster farm. I guess monster civilization isn’t good.

Speaking of monster civilization what’s with the gold you get? This suggests monster economics upon defeat, or some kind of evolution where flesh becomes metal on death. Strange stuff.

While this could be a bit overthinky to this point (I do wonder about what we feed into culturally though) the next bit definitely isn’t. Trigger warning for racism.

Sorry for the volume slider but this is the boss Afrokin. An apparent demonesque humanoid wearing animal skins with an afro. This is an insulting connection between people who have afros (people of African descent) and apparent barbarity and being a monster.

After the character says the above dialog they say “Let’s get down to business. I’m going to give you a painful lesson in fashion sense. My pants are stylish, comfortable, superior! There’s no way I’m going to lose while I’m wearing these!” When they lose they say “Not bad but the way I see it I only lost to myself, not you!”

This is all sorts of disturbing and doesn’t belong in any video game.

When I’m done with this game I’d like to find something similar on Android. Flawed but fun outside of the racism and apparent beating of monsters into joining you instead of finding a way to live together without conflict. If any of you have a suggestion for me about a similar game on Android I’d love to see it.