Rosemary for Remembrance

I turned sixty this year. I won't say I'm the same person as at (say) thirty-five; I'm bitterer, less hopeful, and of course disabled. But the fun-having part of me is pretty much the same. I get seriously involved in fun things, until the fun wears off or I get anxious about not doing them right. (Ask me about knitting.) Sometimes, when I'm lucky, I do them forever.

The strangest thing about being old is the way some younger people react to my very existence in fandom and gaming spaces. Some are creeped out. Some applaud me for my ... daring originality? If you play Don't Starve Together, yesterday I was called "Our very own Wickerbottom!" (Yes, I am a Wickerbottom main. She's a librarian. Duh.)

I've heard the first gen fanzine writers complain about the very same thing. When a hobby has been active for forty-plus years, dating slash to Leslie Fish, then you're going to have people who are fifty-plus (at least) years old doing it. Home videogaming is also forty-plus years old, and the same applies.

Does anybody remember an SF story called something like "Grandma Won't Rock", about somebody assuming their grandmother ought to be doing grandmotherly things? I feel like that.

I bought Crusader Kings II Friday afternoon.  It's a game that simulates both the inter-court negotiations and the battles among most of the kingdoms of what is now Europe during the medieval period.   Including Crusades, of course, because you can't have love and rhetoric without blood.

I never did figure out how to work the battle mechanic on a Mac.  So I spent the better part of 48 hours -- including staying up to 2AM, which gave me a migraine -- obsessively marrying off my little dolls to gain money and influence so I could marry my little dolls' children and on and on.

Mercifully, it crashed at 5:30 PM Sunday.   I do not think that I shall click that game again.   I have Mary Beard's Pompeii plus a new sashiko challenge in which I was sent the fabric and some threads and told to "go".  I think the abstract grey, black, and orange color-washed fabric -- pictures later -- looks very much like an autumn tree dropping leaves into a pond of koi, so that's what I'm going with.

No more Crusader Kings, because it is painfully more-ish.