undo

Because of my unrealistically rare disease, I spend a lot of days in bed. I look at the ceiling a lot. I read a lot. I watch a lot of things on Netflix. I find many, many YouTube videos of people dancing and of Sesame Street covers of songs.

But lately I've also been wasting many hours playing Thimbleweed Park, which is a new point-and-click adventure puzzle game pretending to be an early 90s point-and-click adventure puzzle game, set in 1987. My brother gave it to me for my birthday. I recommend it. It is full of many ridiculous jokes and tasks and references to other video games and pop culture in general.

Whenever I spend a lot of time doing something on a computer, I start expecting real life to be similar. Like, writing a lot of papers and spreadsheets, I kept thinking "control F" when I lost my keys and "control Z" when I spilled coffee.

The adventure game effect is weirder. For one, in Thimbleweed Park one of the ongoing  jokes is picking up specks of dust wherever you see them. Then if you "look at" them, the character says "It's my specks of dust." They're randomly distributed all over, on the floors and streets, little tiny white squares (they're "pixels", from the olden days when you could see pixels.")

Recently I noticed that I've been subconsciously keeping an eye out for specks of dust to pick up, as I go about my daily life. (So far I haven't found any.)

And when I'm about to do something irrevocable with an uncertain outcome (resetting the stereo on my car was a recent example) I have a deep internal urge to save the game, so I can come back and do this part over if everything goes to shit.

I really wish we had saved the game last summer.