In short, I’m experiencing the longest episode of depression in my life, starting around August 2025, intensifying from October to December and continuing to this day. In my internal dialogue, I still value every friend I’ve made on the internet, every mutual who’s laughed at a post, and all the otomos and grems who choose whimsy over cynicism. But behaviorally, I act as if I never want to talk to anyone ever again, and this has caused me a great deal of cognitive dissonance. I’ve done everything short of killing myself to become a ghost on the internet. This includes marking myself as invisible and never going online in Discord and Steam, privating all of my social media accounts, never tweeting, and never reaching out to anyone. When people do message me, I have to go through an insane mental ritual of planning out the contents of my response, passing the response through my mental filter, and imagining every way my message could be misinterpreted. This ritual repeats over and over again until I get a visceral feeling that I’m dying. If I respond to someone, I respond with a short message that doesn’t adequately contain the nuances of my thoughts or I’ll experience a demand threshold where I delay my response for hours or days. The weirdest thing about myself that I can’t forgive is that I don’t even have any obligations that would prevent me from responding to people in a timely manner. Every day I apply to four to five jobs and lay comatose in my bed (unless CC is streaming or there’s a new podcast episode).

Lucie is a washed up gamer who happens to want to play nothing but Kovaaks. Suppose she plays up to Voltaic Diamond Complete, watches EskayOW call things chungus, and drinks Monster Energy Ultra Fantasy Ruby Red. What will happen when she is released from her self-imposed prison? When she finally experiences the qualia of playing a video game, will she have learned anything?

The skillset contaned in “aiming” is important because people find video games important. Alas, I have no FPS game to call home. Team Fortress 2 isn’t hitting, as I’ve exhausted nearly all the dopamine I could from the market garden in 2400 hours of gameplay. Overwatch 2 never felt like home. The Finals wants my 3060-kun dead. Diabotical is dead, Warfork is dead, Quake Champions is dead, and Quake Live is gay. The only game I’m looking forward to are Deadlock (a MOBA FPS hybrid) and Open Fortress, a casual arena shooter based on TF2. The former requires I commit to 30 to 45 minutes to a single game, and the latter won’t be active until their official Steam release. So there’s the void in my gaming diet. I want an FPS to git good at, but I don’t always have the time to commit to Deadlock and everything else is gay and dead. How am I going to fill the void?