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i'm an adventurous type. always looking for the new and the exciting. used to be i bought the new phones the day they came out, preordered the new games, got excited about all the new tech.
these days things have changed, slowed down as it were. i still get excited, but in my experience the new new new is 90% just the old wrapped in new plastic at this point. either i'm getting old or the world is getting dull.
with that in mind, i want to talk about something i've noticed about myself. i don't have much exposure to the internal workings of other folks, so i can't comment on how common it may be to others. sometimes, i feel a need to adventure! i set out on crazy paths. i read books i wouldn't normally enjoy and find them fun and exciting. i watch shows i haven't thought about before. i install operating systems that do weird things and use them to play weird games no one cares about but me.
then. one day. things get stressful. it's not fun anymore. it's frustrating, it's scary in a way, it's too far out into the deep waters. and i swap back to comforting things. things that make me feel at home, quiet inside. that warm coffee feeling on the porch of reality.
my comfort os is arch linux, for example. i know where i am and how to do things. i love alpine linux for it's clean simplicity, and i love guix for it's fun build processes, and i love void for it's lack of systemd, but arch is where i can just use the system and know if i break it i can fix it.
my comfort games are things like factorio and minecraft. just sit and play the same things. over and over. dig a hole, build a factory. pleasant and easy. i'll play jedi fallen order, and enjoy the story and the difficulty, but the factory and mines is where i feel safe.
sometimes my comfort stuff gets tainted because people involved are not who they seemed. my comfort youtube series was always the yogscast's jaffa factory. it was silly, and i've seen it so many times i can tune out and it just plays, and i laugh and have fun.
then it turned out one of my favorite members of the yogscast was a horrible sex offender. it makes it less fun to watch. now every time he shows up in the series it's like. oh. yeah. he was doing awful things as he joked about doors.
my comfort books have always been david eddings belgariad and mallorean. again, tainted a bit because he tortured his kid. the difference there is he's not making money off me at this point because he's gone. so that feels less concerning.
on the other hand, another series i loved and read for comfort was harry potter. now that one feels miserable in many ways, knowing what we do of it's author. she's still alive, so i would prefer not to line her pockets.
when things that i love and use to get through life get broken, it feels worse than it would if it were just something i enjoyed in general. luckily it doesn't happen too often. i can just sit back and enjoy my things comfortably in my little chair in my little corner of my living room.
