Insomniac Nightmares

One of the biggest problems I deal with is procrastination. I know it. At times I am languid, allowing things to happen without doing anything about them, for good or ill. But there’s a very special kind of procrastination that I am particularly good at. I’m sure some of you are, too.

It’s the kind that says “I want to do a thing… but to do the thing, I have to do these other things, and I don’t really want to do all that.”

It’s the kind that, even when you set out to do the thing – and by extension, the things that you have to do so you can begin to do the thing – you will find a reason to throw your hands up and say “Fuck it.”

I’ve been having this problem for the last few days. I have a recurring nightmare about my elementary school. I want to harness it and put it to work. I don’t think it wants to be a short story or a novel. I think it wants to be a game.

“Great,” says I. “I can do that.”

I should be able to, after all. Once upon a time, I bought Clickteam Fusion (and all the extensions to make it run on OSX, Android, iOS, etc) as well as RPG Maker.

Problem one, as I booted up my computer to try doing something here. I’ve formatted the system since the last time Fusion was installed, and I can’t for the life of me find my product key. The website wasn’t helping much, either.

“Okay. Still have RPG Maker. Which is the better choice, anyway, since I suck with art and having the option to just do grid-based stuff will get it out of my system, at least.”

Problem two. RPG Maker (at least the version I have, VX Ace) doesn’t run on OSX, the PS4 port I was eagerly awaiting was delayed – again – and, as noted, I recently wiped my system, so I don’t have Windows installed.

“Okay. I have my Windows 7 disc. No problem.”

Problem three. Bootcamp no longer supports Windows 7. Not much of one, since I have a valid key and can go download the ISO. Annoying roadblock, but easy to remedy. Until we hit problem 4: all my flash drives are tiny affairs, suited for shifting some .PNGs from my computer to the girlfriend’s laptop that I use for streaming or for shifting video clips from the PS4 to my computer so I can edit them, but won’t fit the Win10 ISO and the Bootcamp drivers.

A search ensues. I finally find out that’ll handle it, and do that. Then run Bootcamp, make my startup “disk” and download all the drivers that mean all my devices talk to Windows and the bloody thing works.

Then we hit problem five. Bootcamp claims it can’t partition my hard drive. It just says “Run Disk Utility.” So I do. Which says there’s no problem. I try again. Same error. I try partitioning the drive in Disk Utility, it works fine… but Bootcamp won’t let me use that partition. Has to make it itself. (I’m assuming because it actually makes a handful of “phantom” partitions that it installs from, or it has to format it in a manner not standard to OSX’s options, or both.)

Commence hair pulling, and giving up, especially because I didn’t want to keep sitting there for 20-minute increments watching it try to do the job and then canceling at the last minute.

I refused to touch the computer the next day, a sullen and petulant gesture. “Well, fine. I don’t wanna play with you, anyway!”

This morning I sucked it up, trudged back to the computer and went back to trying.

Problem 1: Apparently while diddling it last time, OSX had been happily downloading patches and updates in the background, had finished the job, and neglected to tell me. So it took half an hour for the computer to boot, because it was busy updating everything it had just downloaded.

Then Problem 2: First, tried doing what I was doing before. Same result, but another half hour down.

Okay. To the forums I went, discovering that there is possibly an issue buried in my SRC or in the disk that I have to boot to the command line and force a repair on. Okay, fine. That takes another half hour while discount Linux sets itself up and then deep scans the hard drive. It doesn’t tell me anything was wrong, but, what the hell, I did as I was told.

Reboot – which again takes a while, because apparently, it did do something and the OS needs to think it over nice and slow. Back to Bootcamp. Partition again. Success!

…then you wait for an hour while Windows figures itself out, yells at you because it can’t find a network (since it has to install Windows before it installs the Bootcamp drivers, and the Bootcamp drivers are what tell it where the network adapter is), finally drops you on the desktop. Hooray! Another twenty minutes for Bootcamp to do its job. Another half hour for Windows to download all its updates, yell at me because I don’t want Cortana talking to me, downloading Chrome, using Chrome to download Steam, using Steam to download RPG Maker, and now I am theoretically finally ready to actually try to do what I wanted to do several days ago.

Of course, now I’m tired, cranky, out of sorts and due for my meds, so I probably won’t be doing it today. But at least I can.

That was just a long winded rant that basically boils down to: sometimes the only thing to be done is to do it. And I need that lesson drilled into my head far more often. Had I persevered more the other day, I could be working on Black Yard right now, instead of bitching about everything I had to do before I could start doing it. Maybe that’ll motivate someone else out there. I hope it does.