A Number of Realizations
Concertina Wired Shorts
Power Levelled Players
It's the 19:00 count one night, and I'm in the cell with my cellie.
I'm reading an ancient eBook or listening to a podcast (or at least trying to ⬇️)
He's playing a video game called DYSMANTLE on a tablet; it's someone else's save file, who had reached level 34 or so. He keeps asking me how to play the game which I find a bit irritating as I would like some time during the day to collect my own thoughts, relax by reading something other than my assignment, work through some things, or to catch up on my podcasts.
A thought comes unbidden to me, and I cannot help but laugh at it:
In an MMO, you can frequently tell a person who paid for power leveling services apart from a real player. The real player generally knows their character or learns quickly if there is something new about their character. The power leveler asks questions that they should have learned the answer to twenty levels earlier (look, I was an Anarchy Online player; 200+20+30+70 levels if you paid for all the expansion packs).
He is that power leveled player.
Him: "How do I not fall in the holes?"
Me: "Stay off the dirt. Stay in the grass. Hug the cliff side and walk north from the sign. Don't chase monsters; you're going to fall in a hole."
20 seconds later:
Him: "I'm dead."
Me: "How?"
Him: "I fell in a hole following an arrow on the screen."
Me: ...
Me: "The arrow operates in a straight line. Look at where you are and walk or run accordingly. Dodge obstacles, beat up monsters, etc."
Him: "How do I get back there?"
Me: "Go northwest from your fire. There's a blue van, and a sign across from it."
10 seconds later:
Him: "Ain't no sign, and this thing puking on me! Arrow says go this way!"
/facepalm
He went east. I cannot give him cardinal directions despite a compass map being in the upper right corner of the screen.
I'm forgiving, but this game is clearly not his genre. He gripes a lot about the difficulty of play, not realizing the game is largely open to whatever he wants to do as long as he accepts that some content is gated behind specific items or tools to acquire.
I see Candy Crush as being more his speed (complemented by his remark of enjoying 'Sweet Shuffle'), but hey, we have no Candy Crush.
Ah, well.
The Prison HOA
Walking back from insulin call one afternoon, I could not help but laugh.
Being in prison is a lot like how I imagine having an HOA is in the free world.
Your house/cell must look a certain way. Your car/shoes may only be parked a certain way and in a certain place. And by all that is holy, your lawn care teams had >BETTER have your yard looking fantastic or else!
Yes, our bunks are made a specific way, with a folded bath towel strapped across the corner of the foot of the bed, and hygiene items stacked on it. Shoes must be placed about 18 inches away from the bunk. And our Inside Grounds team murder my allergies with their mowers, blowers, and weed eaters regularly.
Shipping Container Homes
There is a lot of work that goes into building a shipping container home.
If I'm going to go back to Oregon to live, assuming I'm barred from emigrating to countries I would like to be in (some countries deny residency to people with a felony record), I would need help with the whole process.
From compacting the earth to placement of foundation piers, offloading and anchoring of containers, building a frame to sit on another set of piers so I can attach walls there, too... Plumbing, electrical, welding, green roofing, the works.
This might be a $70,000 project in the grand scope of things, after paying for help doing things I know nothing about. That's a hard ask when you yourself do not have an income to calculate against.
Now, I could take my late father's approach as I think about it: building things over time while living in a trailer on site, but that begets the expense of a trailer. Yet, it's less an expense than trying to live in a motel, VRBO, Airbnb, or Couch surfing along.
Y'know, writing this helps me contemplate and work through my options.
Buy or rent a small trailer for temporary living quarters, start building in Spring (no snow, dry enough ground, decent temps in case I'm pouring concrete or similar), get help from friends, pay for services when necessary (electrical, plumbing).
I might go with a septic system, just toilet water goes there; sink/dishwasher/shower/laundry water should be grey water, send to tanks with filters, solar powered pump to then send it to my roof which is 18-24 inches of soil with grass and flowers, maybe a small garden?
I figure I can get inexpensive old hot water heaters from home renovations that need to haul old heaters off -- maybe it's not as energy efficient as they want, but I'm just using the tank as a tank, not anything else.
Stairway to head up to the rooftop garden, rails because I'm clumsy, but the place comes together slowly in my head. :)
Just have to avoid feature creep, which I'm guilty of at times.
But alas, I overthink it all like a plate of beans.