the unbearable lightness of sleeping

I wrote this on my Facebook thing yesterday:

I’ve been trying to get myself on a sleep schedule that is consistent with the rest of humanity in my timezone. This isn’t easy, because my brain naturally wants to sleep between 2am and 10am, and has been that way pretty much my whole life. But in summer, especially, I like to get up early before it’s close to 100°, walk the dogs, and feel like I’ve actually accomplished stuff before noon.

So I’ve been getting myself into bed around 10 or 11, as I attempt to slowly move the clock back. I read until I’m ready to close my eyes, and I set my sleep thing on my phone to wake me up 8.5 hours later.

By the way: if you like science fiction, you probably want to subscribe to Lightspeed Magazine. It’s what I’ve been reading every night, and it’s always spectacular. It’s delivered to my Kindle once a month, and it’s one of my favorite subscriptions that I have. Also, keep your eye on the Humble Book Bundles, and Vodo.net.

They *always* have great, inexpensive, amazing books on sale.Okay, back to … whatever this thing is.

So last night I got into bed a little later than I wanted — around 11:30 — and picked up my Kindle. Which had a dead battery. Shit. No worries! I picked up the actual book I’ve been reading (Imbibe! is a book about cocktail history, culture, and recipes), and read for awhile. I turned off the light when my body signaled that it was ready to go to sleep, and put my head on my pillow.

You know what’s coming, right? Just like the comics, my brain went from being sleepy to being WIDE AWAKE WITH LOTS OF STUFF TO THINK ABOUT in under a minute. It’s okay, I thought, I can power — err, the opposite of power, I guess, since I’m trying to go to sleep — through this. I began doing this relaxation/breathing/self-hypnosis thing that has always worked for me… but it didn’t work for me.

A side effect of one of my brain meds is that, occasionally, my left leg will twitch like crazy, and my whole body won’t let me get comfortable. Last night, it set itself to eleven and went bananas.

I think it was finally 3am when I just gave up, and sat up in bed. I grabbed my phone, and looked at Twitter for a few minutes. I hoped that occupying my mind would somehow work some voodoo or whatever on my legs.

It didn’t.

So I fired up Bejweled, and played a game … that lasted to level 11. I don’t know if that’s as good as I think it was, but it felt pretty great to play that long (until I realized that it was nearly 4am) and I got a badge that I can turn in for nothing at a redemption counter that doesn’t exist.

So at 4am, whatever the hell was going on with my leg finally stopped, and I turned off the lights again. This is when Luna, my cat, jumped up on me, snuggled into my chest, and began to purr. It turns out that the warm weight and soft purring of my cat on my chest really helped me fall and stay asleep.

Until the goddamn jackhammer started four hours later.

I got up at 9:30, because I am committed to going to sleep earlier and getting up earlier, even if it means that I didn’t get as much sleep last night as I wanted or needed.

I’m fairly sure that I won’t have much of a problem with that in about 10 hours.

—

So last night, I watched a pair of movies that I really liked: It Follows, and Ex Machina. I think it was about 12:30 when I got into bed. I read almost a full page of my book before I felt sleep coming on, so I powered off for the night … and didn’t fall asleep for two hours. Sigh.

Today’s Conversations with Creators is Dedicated to Satoru Iwata

Today’s Conversations with Creators features a conversation with Naughty Dog, who you assuredly know brought us legendary games like Uncharted and The Last of Us (which as it turns out is in my top five games of all time).

I’m particularly fond of this episode, because I just loved talking with these guys about a couple of my favorite games, which it turns out were developed by their studio … but I don’t want to talk about that today. Today, I want to talk about Satoru Iwata, who died far too young at 55, this past weekend.

Satoru Iwata’s contributions to the gaming industry have touched every developer, every programmer, every designer, and every publisher. I wanted to take a moment and acknowledge how profoundly he touched my life, without ever knowing that I even existed.

I’ve been playing console video games since the Atari 2600. I’ve been playing handheld video games since Merlin. I grew up in arcades during their golden age, and video games have been part of the fabric of my life for almost as long as I can remember. But it was my NES and my Gameboy that tipped me from a kid who loved games into a kid who lived games.

For those of you who are maybe a little younger than me (probably a lot of you), let me give you a little context. Early consoles had limited graphics capabilities, and while most programmers used that to their advantage, the thing we always wanted was something that would truly let us recreate the arcade experience in our homes. Colecovision did that to some extent, but the NES was flawless. Games like Excitebike, Mario Bros, Donkey Kong, Duck Hunt, and Super Mario Bros. were actually in my house, on my television, exactly like they were in arcades. This was a huge leap for my generation, but then Nintendo and their partners began releasing original NES games that fundamentally changed what console gaming was. Games like Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, Blades of Steel, and R.C. Pro-Am kept me up all night long during many weekends and summer nights, sitting in the CRT glow of my 27” television, fueled by caffeine and the kind of salty snacks that I can’t even think about eating late at night — or at all — now that I’m almost 43.

So … that was a lot more context than I intended, but now that you have it, I hope that you’ll understand why I want to dedicate this episode of Conversations with Creators to Satoru Iwata. It isn’t unreasonable to consider that this episode — and, indeed, the entire series — wouldn’t even exist (at least with me in it) without the contributions Mr. Iwata gave to the industry. I wanted to include a graphic in the episode itself, but we were already locked and that wasn’t possible, so here we are.

I hope you enjoy today’s new episode. Next week, I have a conversation with Trey Arch, where I find out that I like FPS games more than I thought I did, even though I am terrible at them.

Take Care of Yourself

“Take care of yourselves, watch the people around you carefully, and cordon off the ones who are toxic, so that the universe can decontaminate them for you through exposure and death.”

-Warren Ellis

This is always very good advice (I’ve written some version of it myself at various times), but it’s especially poignant for me to read it from Warren, now, because I’ve just had to remove a profoundly toxic, dishonest, manipulative, bad, bad, bad person from my life, who was in my life for years. You’d think it would be easy, but it wasn’t.

So, speaking from experience: it’s not your fault that a toxic person fooled you, even if they fooled you for years. It’s not your fault, and while it is entirely expected that you go through the normal grieving process that is associated with any loss, try not to spend any time blaming yourself for not seeing all the things that you can see now in hindsight much sooner than you did.

Take care of yourself, as Warren says.

in my head

Today, I got to do something that is so amazing and unexpected, I can’t believe it was real … and I have to keep all the details of it a total secret for a very long time.

That seems to be the story of my life these days. I’m not complaining, but everything I work on has this huge list of NDAs and terrifying agreements that make me responsible for millions of dollars in damages if I give up the secrets. Seriously. I had to sign an NDA recently where I affirmed my understanding of the value of the information I would be holding in my head, and that I further understood that if I leaked this information out of my head before a certain period of time, I agreed to be responsible for a minimum of a million dollars per bit of information, up to several millions of dollars. I was so afraid of something happening when the materials were out of my hands, I destroyed them — first in a shredder and then in a fire — to ensure that nobody could somehow dig through my trash for some reason and go through the improbable and difficult series of events necessary to put me on the hook for the millions of dollars that I do not have. It was a little weird, in retrospect. And don’t ask me what it was, because I won’t say.

This is pretty awesome, because it means that I get to work on projects that a lot of people are really excited about, including me! This is also a bummer, because one of my first loves, narrative nonfiction writing, doesn’t have as deep a well to pull from as it has for the last decade that I’ve been writing it almost every day.

Over a decade. Wow. That’s …. a thing.

I’ve been telling Anne that I need to take some time away from my on-camera work, so I can focus on storytelling and creative writing. I have lots of ideas that can be turned into things, and there’s a very good chance I’ll get to pitch at least one of those things to a comic publisher this week. Fingers crossed. I’m also working on narrative fiction pitches for Geek & Sundry, Nerdist, and Legendary Digital, so I can do that sort of thing in addition to the games and the hosting and stuff that’s been most of my professional life for the last couple of years. These are all first world problems, I know, and they are good problems to have, on balance.

I have stories to tell. I just need to find a way, and find the time, to tell them.