![]() I couldn’t spare the time to do anything else - last weekend, my parents even visited, and I barely saw them (though I hear they enjoyed their grandkids). My consoles have only been used for Netflix, and not by me, just by my family. ![]() During finals, I haven’t had time to play a “real” game. But every time I fretted over a terrible paragraph, or lost my way, or failed to connect something that had made sense five minutes before, there it was, the little kitty face icon on my phone, offering a momentary escape into an overly elaborate garden. I probably spent more time talking about Neko Atsume than I did actually playing it it’s a simple experience by design, never meant to be anything more than do stuff, get cats, repeat. On any given day, I think I spend about ten minutes total in the interface, less time than I spent trying to figure out the best way to cite some of my weirder sources. After all, all there is to the game is a bit of management. Maybe we needed that very passive distraction. The thoughts are complete (for now), the papers are submitted, and along the way, we fooled around with a lot of virtual cats. And since I do not hear any wailing in the streets tonight, I assume we all made it. A couple of our professors told us to get the hell back to work we got the hell back to our cats. In between paragraphs and re-reads, we talked cats. Slowly, the department fell, one by one every time I checked Facebook, that excellent procrastination tool, a new member of the NA posse was there, proudly displaying their admission into the club, and each time, there was a new gasp: “What’s that? I need it.” And another node popped up in the network. Each time, someone would gasp (I assume it was text): “What’s that?” and I’d explain. I started my game, and as my peers were posting pictures valiantly displaying the stacks of books they were re-reading, I started posting pictures of my (virtual) cats. ![]() I didn’t know anything about it, except that there were cats and it was adorable, and that seemed like plenty of reason to forge ahead, late to the hype party (as usual). I’d been seeing Neko Atsume screenshots for some time, and as we were prepping for finals, I decided–as one does-that what I really needed was a new game experience on my phone. At the very least, I get to study and explore such a vast array of wonder, and my colleagues are brilliant reading their work this semester has been a revelation, and I can’t wait to see what comes out of this hell week.īut enough of that let’s talk cats. ![]() I’m learning, and enjoying what I’m learning, but it never stops being hard. With no rhet/comp background, I still often feel like I’m operating in a foreign language, both when I’m reading and when I’m writing. This is not to say that any one form of writing is harder than any other (writing is always hard, even when it’s joyous we are breaking off bits of ourselves to create that text, and that’s always difficult), it’s just that this was very different for me. Coming as I do from a creative writing background, where the stakes are different, as well as the projects, this frenzy to produce 45-50 pages of work in this way was very new, and let me tell y’all now: there was nothing about that struggle that wasn’t damned real. We’re wrapping up finals week here at the university, and many of the grad students had papers due over the last few days, long, weighty papers meant to prove our worth as general human beings and to demonstrate our fitness to survive (at least, that’s how it felt). On any given day, a good 1-2% of my Facebook feed is cats, but lately, it’s been a very specific sort of cats: virtual cats, the fuzzy furballs of Neko Atsume.
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