Monthly Archives: March 2017

Thoughts on Being Single for the Second Time

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About two years ago I went through a divorce. I had known my marriage was over years before I was able to finally pull the trigger on it. I had actually tried leaving once a year earlier, but I was forced to go back to my husband because I wasn’t able to sustain myself quite yet and he promised to change. He didn’t and we followed through on the second attempt.

My ex-husband had an OKCupid account set up months before we filed for divorce the second time. He had his first date less than a week after he moved out of our house. A year after he moved out he had already replaced me with another woman with long red hair, two small dogs, and mental health issues.

During the year or two after our divorce I was a complete wreck. I was in much worse shape than I thought I would be. I had wanted the divorce. Our marriage was over. I thought I would feel free to finally do all the things I wanted to do. Instead, I felt like a death had happened. I had never been responsible for balancing my own budget and I had no idea how much money I earned or how much my bills were.

I had multiple rooms in my house that I simply never went into. My house felt incomprehensibly large even though it’s actually quite small. I used to have dreams that I was walking through my house and it was a giant labyrinth of gardens and piano rooms that I never knew were there because I only stayed in one small corner of my house.

The idea of trying to date anyone during this time seemed absolutely incomprehensible. I consistently see men who have recently gotten out of relationships try to get back on the horse and date again immediately. I don’t understand how they can do that.

I haven’t been on a date since I was 16 years old. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was put on medication that made me gain sixty pounds in less than two years. My medication triggered panic attacks and caused a lot of mental health issues alongside the ones they were supposed to actually treat. I was a chubby, socially awkward woman with no social skills trying to navigate a social environment run on alcohol, which I couldn’t drink because of my medications.

I felt like having a boyfriend would give me some kind of validation that I was actually a person worthy of being liked. I used to develop crushes on other socially awkward guys who were less attractive than I was because I thought that they were low enough that I could get them. Most of them were either too socially awkward to return my advances or were appalled that a chubby socially awkward girl thought she was good enough for them while they drooled over anorexic teenagers with daddy issues.

Boys in college had been sold on the idea of the hook up. They had been told all through high school that when they got to college it would be a never ending stream of pussy. None of them wanted a relationship. They wanted to have sex with you and never speak to you again. I literally had guys come up to me and say to my face, “I hate you. I know you hate me. We should have sex. It will be fun.“

I was too priggish to give into any of these situations, but other girls I know did. They slept with guys to give themselves a sense of personal validation and were always disappointed when things never went any further.

I left college without having a boyfriend. I also left college without having any kind of stable career path. I was faced with a future alone with no meaning. Then I met my husband. We’d known one another since we were children. We were both tired of trying to find someone. I needed health insurance and to move out of my parent’s house. I thought I knew everything about him. I was terribly wrong and if you ever meet me IRL ask me about it and I’ll give more details than I am willing to give here!

After my misadventures in college, this seemed like as good as it was going to get. Sure, we weren’t really attracted to one another, but he would look me in the eye and talk to me. That was an improvement.

Things were fine for the first two years. Then he got weird. He started spending money we didn’t have on shit we didn’t need. I decided to go back to school for computer programming. I wanted an actual career and not just the menial white collar jobs I had held since we got married. I wanted a sense of self worth and to do interesting work I was proud of. I told him that if he would support me for two years that I could start bringing in four time more money than I had before. We could start a business. We could be partners. We could have our freedom and independence from The Man.

He wanted his freedom, but he didn’t want to work for it. It was the biggest disappointment in his life that he wasn’t born wealthy. This ate at his soul. He was bitter and resentful of having to go to work to earn a wage. He was always scheming about how to get rich quick without any effort. He would bully me about how I wasn’t developing the next Candy Crush. He would come to me in tears and tell me that he just needed me to earn a million dollars a year. He could find a way to be happy on just a million dollars a year.

He got incredibly paranoid. He was convinced I was cheating on him. He would follow me to networking events he previously had no interest in. He would skulk around behind me nursing a glass of scotch, watching me as I tried to network. He would go over and yell at me in front of people I was trying to connect with professionally. Once I came home from a business meeting to find him in the garage activating the GPS on my phone so he could track me down and physically bring me home. He would lay on the ground behind my car to prevent me from leaving the house.

He was jeopardizing everything I had worked so hard to accomplish and I simply could not tolerate his behavior anymore.

I feel I have been left in the lurch. I talk to other people who have built their careers on writing books and doing conference talks. I ask them for advice about how I can build this as a sustainable career while still paying my bills and I always get sheepish looks and the response, “Well, my wife has a really good job with benefits.“ I hear that and my heart sinks. I keep seeing and hearing that the career path I want to take can only be sustained by having a supportive partner who is willing to shore up the other person’s financial deficits.

I feel a great deal of anger at my ex-husband for destroying our marriage because he was unwilling to give up his $10,000 a year vacation habit. I have been borderline unemployed since September and I am just now reaching the end of my savings. We were $30,000 in debt with two incomes and bringing in over six figures while we were married because my ex couldn’t do without picking up an expensive hobby every couple of months. I had a plan that would have been mutually beneficial for both of us and now I am spinning plates frantically hoping that I can achieve what seems like the impossible all by myself.

I have no illusions about my book. I am writing about an incredibly niche topic that has almost no job prospects. I keep hoping if I develop skills around graphics programming that I can break into that area of expertise and have a long, stable career build on something most people don’t know that doesn’t fundamentally change, but I don’t know if I have enough time or runway to slog it out. I’m afraid of taking a dead end job and waking up seven years from now to find I didn’t keep up with the new changes in tech and that I am unemployable. Having the buffer of another person in case I made a terrible mistake and failed eased my mind. Having no safety net and throwing myself into a chasm right now is deeply worrying to me and I don’t have anyone I can even talk to about my anxiety because I am completely alone right now. Except for my parents. They have been fantastic, but I hate having to go to them with my hand out.

Being single at this point in my life is markedly different than it was when I was younger and I had no career. I am doing my best to not see getting remarried as an escape route for the path I have chosen to take. I would love to have a supportive partner around to help me out so I don’t have to do this alone, but having survived an unsupportive one, I know it’s better to be alone than live through that again.

I keep feeling like I am supposed to move on. Join OKCupid or Match.com. Go to speed dating. Relocate to San Francisco or Seattle to get access to a larger pool of eligible men. But I keep getting this nagging feeling that things have not fundamentally changed much since I was in college. Reading horror stories about how Tinder has basically supercharged the college hook up dynamic worries me. Seeing how many men are basically jumping into relationships to avoid being alone worries me too.

I like working. I see so many people doing frivolous crap all the time that I worry if I did move to a city and started trying to be social like everyone else that I would stop dedicating myself to my work. I would stop pushing and get left behind. It’s so hard to find another person who also likes working who is willing to just be in the same space I am while we’re both working.

I want to be with someone who wants to be with me. I would love to have someone to cook for besides just myself. I would like to have someone to build robots with me in my basement and then cuddle on the couch watching Star Trek. I don’t want that badly enough to grasp onto anything with a dick that comes along because I don’t want to be alone. I feel I have progressed from my college aged self who felt like having a boyfriend would be a validation to someone who is comfortable with themselves but would like to find another person to share things with.

I’m not willing to be with someone who did a visual assessment of me that I am just hot enough that they’re willing to have sex with me but they think I am unattractive enough to be approachable. I don’t want to be with someone who thinks that relationships are parking spaces and that you are supposed to always be parked somewhere or on the lookout for one.

As it looks increasingly like this will never happen, I am trying to accept being alone. I won’t settle for anything less than someone who likes me as a person and who I actively want to be with. There might be no one out there like that and I need to be okay with that.

Being alone sucks. But being with a destructive and unsupportive partner who doesn’t love you sucks more. It’s important to have a creative and fulfilling life rather than waiting for it to just happen to you. For better or worse, I am living a life I want to lead. I have no idea how sustainable it is in the long run, but for now I’m being true to myself. I am trying to have faith that if I do that then things will work out. Doesn’t mean I don’t indulge in feeling sorry for myself every once and a while.

Enough whinging. Back to work.

Persona 3 vs Persona 4

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I am doing a lot of travel at the beginning of this year. I just got back from GDC and I am flying to London for iOSCon in a few weeks. While I was at GDC I was staying with a friend who generously let me squat on her couch. Her couch was an hour away from San Francisco by train, so I knew between my flights and all the time spent on trains I needed to find something to keep me entertained and occupied.

I couldn’t work on the plane or the train because I am sensitive to motion sickness. That crossed out reading too. The best option I could think about was playing video games. I didn’t want to take the 3DS because it has terrible battery life, so that left the PS Vita.

I decided to replay Persona 3. I finished up Persona 3 a little over a year ago. It took me 75 hours to get through it the first time. I really wanted to replay it again, but I thought it was stupid to confine myself to one game, so I have spent the last year trying to find something I like as much as Persona 3. I haven’t found it yet. And yes, that includes the venerable Persona 4 Golden.

I know this is probably an unpopular opinion, but I like Persona 3 better than Persona 4. I was told by many people to play Persona 3 so I could appreciate how much better Persona 4 was. I held off on Persona 4 for a bit while looking for another game, but I couldn’t wait anymore and started playing it. I was disappointed.

I have been trying to figure out why I don’t like P4 as much as P3. Since I started replaying P3 I have a better understanding of what it is about P4 that I don’t like as well. Fair warning, I am only about 20 hours into P4, so it’s possible that some of my gripes might be rectified.

Dungeons

I like the main dungeon in P3, Tartarus, better than the mechanic in P4 where you enter the dungeon through the TV. I was a huge Buffy fan, so the idea that your school is the base of all evil is a perfect metaphor for being a teenager.

I liked that there was an explanation about why the Shadows show up at the school. The Shadows are a result of an accident at the Kurijo Group. Mitsuru’s father was responsible for the accident. Yukari’s father died in that accident. It felt like people were being drawn to this problem because of their pasts.

In P4, you enter the dungeon through the TV. There seems to be no explanation about why these people in this one town are able to enter the TV to go fight shadows. It’s a small town and people just sort of happen to be there. There was no grand plan to right the wrongs of the past. There was an epic component missing from the grand scheme of things. I get that it’s supposed to be a less heavy and more fun iteration of Persona, but if you’re delving into Jungian psychology and the collective unconscious, I did appreciate the epic scope provided by P3.

Getting flashbacks to college

I also really liked that the students in P3 live in the dorms and there don’t seem to be any grown ups around. It really scratched a mental itch to get to have an immersive Japanese high school experience with all its stereotypes. Playing a game about a bunch of kids in a small town who live with their parents reminded me too much of my own real life to be a fun escape.

Combat

Persona 3 Combat

I don’t really like the tweaks to the combat system in P4. I don’t know why, but it’s difficult to see what various Shadows are weak to. In P3 I can directly control all of my players and get a good overview of what each shadow is weak to. When I do combat in P4 I don’t control my players and things happen so chaotically that I don’t actually know what moves my players made against the Shadows.

I also miss having the portals on various levels to take you back to the entrance in P3. In P4 you need to hold onto a consumable item that you must use to get back to the entrance.

All in all, I just found the combat in P3 to be more intuitive than in P4.

Quests

Completing a quest for the Fox and leveling up social link

One component in both P3 and P4 is that you go on quests and receive rewards. The quests are a side component of the main gameplay.

In P3, you receive a list of quests from Elizabeth/Theo. They’re all neatly gathered in one place. You get a crazy response from Elizabeth. It’s fun to complete the quest just to hear what she is going to say. A lot of the quests can be completed just by doing dungeon crawling. They’re not that hard to figure out.

In P4, your quests are spread all over the place. Unless you have an online guide, it’s practically impossible to find and complete every single quest. One is from a teacher wearing Egyptian wear hiding behind a corner. It’s difficult to keep track of all the quests and how to complete them. I believe some of the quests advance a social link, which makes it vital that you complete some of them.

I wound up playing through bits of P4 on the plane when there was a glitch on my memory card. I bombed nearly everything I did in the game because nothing was intuitive. I couldn’t look up the answers online and I failed at everything. If this was a normal game where dying is a way of learning, that would be one thing. Playing this game is an 80 hour commitment and I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot by screwing up all of the quests when I want to play for a few hours when I don’t have access to the internet.

I get stressed out trying to keep track of the quests and so I usually wind up ignoring them. Sometimes I will look something up and find there are ten things I missed. I get that some people might really enjoy just how many side quests there are and how much there is to do, but I don’t like the idea that I have to sit down with an online guide to accomplish everything happening in the game.

Skills

Scooting to the next town over, just like high school

Going along with having too much chaos with the quests is expanding the skills requirements.

In P3, you have three skills you must max out: Academics, Charm, and Courage. The first time I played through I didn’t understand that you had to max out all three of these. I focused on Academics because I knew we had midterms to study for. This lack of understanding bit me towards the end of the game as there were several social links I never finished because I didn’t have the requisite skill level to begin the social link.

P4 doubles the number of skills to six. In addition to that, it adds gardening and fishing and scooter riding and… It’s difficult to grasp the advantages of leveling up one skill over another. In addition to these skills you have to kill Shadows and level up your social links.

I get that part of the appeal of P4 is that there is more of everything, but I find it personally overwhelming. I find it difficult to know what to do on any given day and I feel like I am playing the game wrong because I don’t know what my character is supposed to do. I have major FOMO no matter what I do.

Female Protagonist

Female Protagonist and team leader

The last bit I would like to bring up is my appreciation that the portable version of P3 has the option to play as a female.

It shouldn’t make that much of a difference, but playing as a female character completely changes the feel of the game. The first time I played through as a female character I found Junpei to be creepy because I thought he was hitting on me rather than being friendly. This time around, knowing that he is not an option for a love path, I am really enjoying my character’s friendship with him.

You get to have the option to use Elizabeth’s brother Theo as your liaison with the Velvet Room. It’s fun getting another character to interact with.

Right now I am playing another game, Rune Factory 2: A Fantasy Harvest Moon. That game consists of two generations, where most of the main gameplay happens in the second generation. In that generation, you have the option to play as either male or female, but you don’t get that option in the first generation. Your main goal in the first generation is to find a girl to marry so you can knock her up with what will be your character in the second generation.

Playing as a boy puts me in a position I don’t like being in. I know the only goal I have as my character is to find the mother of my child. The characters are paper thin because they’re not really the point of the game, so I find myself asking questions I don’t like. Do I marry the girl the game wants me to marry who will never marry anyone else if I don’t marry her? Do I steal the shy girl who talks through her doll from her boyfriend because he’s an asshole? Do I try to marry the rich girl because she’s the hardest one to marry and thus prove my status? It’s a really creepy and superficial way of looking at things and it worries me that this is how boys see relationships in real life. Like, we’re not people. We’re various status symbols or a means to an end. Playing like this really depresses and upsets me. I know logically that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to give deep and complex personalities to something with such shallow gameplay, but having to think that way really upsets me.

P4 was remade for the Vita as Persona 4 Golden. They made a fighting game with the Persona 4 cast, along with a dancing game. These characters have been in so many games and done so much fan service that it really bothers me that they figured it just wasn’t worth it to add a female protagonist. Being able to play as a female is much more comfortable and it’s an indication that the creators care about making a nice game for everyone and not just the boys.

Conclusion

I will admit that the story and characters in P4 are better than P3. I know that the characters are a vitally important part of the game, but it’s still a game. It’s not a visual novel. It’s nice to do well in the game and constantly being confused as to what to do. In my opinion, P4 is too much of a good thing. I have preordered P5, so we’ll see how that one stacks up. For now, P3 for the win!