With Christmas barely every week away, it is time to begin celebrating my very own RPS Christmas traditions. Video games to play, songs to time, surprises to spring. Let’s begin with a wee shock. Pull in your mittens, fill your flask with cocoa, and clip-click-skkrachk these ski boots, for it’s time to play the free downhill slalom sport Skeal.
Hie thee to Itch.io to play Skeal anon. The downloadable model has been gone for a couple of years but when you have not been lovingly transferring a replica from laborious drive to laborious drive, PC to PC, like your childhood macaroni Christmas ornaments by some means preserved by your mum, you possibly can nonetheless play that WebGL model in your browser. It is free and it will take you 4 minutes. See you in a bit!
You are performed?
That is enjoyable, is not it.
A pun blown up right into a musical spectacular with a collection of escalations, figuring out precisely when to finish. Good joke. It isn’t a joke I would revisit on my own however hey, nor are Christmas cracker jokes (together with our personal horrors, which I am sorry to inform you’ll return this yr). I am right here for custom, for creating your individual traditions and becoming a member of these which give you the results you want (whereas putting off these which do not).
Each time we participate in custom, we’re constructing and strengthening reminiscences and investing power. That is amplified by figuring out different persons are doing the identical. Repeated over time, it is an emotional suggestions loop. The subsequent yr rolls round and here is a basis of mirth and merriment to lift your degree of enjoyment of a joke you have heard earlier than. The joke’s nonetheless good, and also you’re glad we’re right here doing this collectively once more. This emotional financial institution helps withdrawals too.
This yr I am late to begin my wee spherical of RPS Christmas traditions (hell, I as soon as began in November) as a result of truthfully, I would forgotten. It has been a tough outdated yr on about each entrance and my mind has turned to mush. Then once I did bear in mind, I virtually skipped it. Was not feeling it. I am totally spent. However I feel it is beneficial to proceed traditions particularly at these instances you are not feeling it. Enjoying Skeal right this moment, I really feel a few of these banked feelings flowing into me. Just a little pep speak from the previous. Greater than that, it locations this second on a continuum. I do not know that is subsequent however I’ve left one other footstep within the sand alongside you all. And if nothing else, I’ve now performed Skeal. It’s a good joke.
I’m reminded of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s opening to The Mushroom At The Finish Of The World: “What do you do when your world begins to collapse? I’m going for a stroll, and if I am actually fortunate, I discover mushrooms.”
When my world is falling aside at Christmas, I play Skeal, and if I am actually fortunate, we discover our energy, our pleasure, our ache.
