So this, today, is the last day of the Moon Diary. Tomorrow I shall wake up and not have to write about Marty Burnham. I was relieved before I played, and now I am just quite sad.
]]>Something happened today! I accidentally crashed the meteor into the moon! I didn't mean to, I just steered it down instead of up, and then I realised it was getting bigger, and it hit the moon! When I looked at the chart it showed a drop. What does it mean?
]]>I missed another day again, because I was out of the office yesterday. At this point I'm wondering what the earth even looks like. Should one even bother to continue to save it? It's probably become a Mad Maxian hellscape over just three weeks. The Tory leadership contest has shifted to a big bottom-bashing contest in a pit dug out of the House Of Commons. It's been fully Armageddoned several times over. Aerosmith tried to screech out I Don't Want To Miss A Thing but got totally steamrollered. Brown bread, mate. Brown bread with extra yeast.
]]>The Moon Ritual is still a bit out of sync. I have a week left, still, and missed another meteor at the weekend. The world is looking a bit Swiss cheesey. I'm struggling to find something to think about today because I just rushed through it, in business, because I have something else I need to do. Ack, ack. I have no pithy wisdom darts to throw in your eye and, really, Marty Burnham The Moon Witch didn't have any for me. I think I've seen her thoughts today before.
]]>Today is a day late because I was a) busy yesterday and b) the playthrough ended up being a pretty good cliffhanger for the weekend. It seems that the extremely long timeline over which I've ended up playing this may have interrupted the natural flow of the game.
Here, after over a month (but which should have been three weeks), we see that Marty Burnham is considering what we may call her ultimate choice.
]]>Look, I'm very busy again today. I'm back from being on holiday and nothing is finished, and I have to stay late tonight for unrelated reasons anyway. I don't understand those people who are like, "Oh I made a lemon drizzle cake when I got home, because I had a spare hour." HOW? And, when you have a spare hour, how do you stop yourself from lying on your bed watching a TV show you have already seen?
Luckily Marty Burnham The Moon Witch has nothing but time, so I used the visit today for an extremely quick bit of attempted meditation.
]]>Alright, yesterday was depressing and made some of you sad (buddy, if you think reproductive healthcare bums you out, imagine how some of the rest of us feel!). But today I'm actually feeling pretty good today, which is out of sorts with Marty Burnham The Moon Witch, who is feeling trapped by hope. That probably needs a whole several hundred words of analysis by itself. But, blimey love, lighten up, am I right? Luckily I'm here to bring the mood back up again.
]]>The siren call of the moon returns, and so do I (from my holidays). Surprisingly, despite being absent for 10 days, my moon calendar in the game still only pegs me at day 17. Perhaps the point of a daily ritual is that it sort of doesn’t happen unless you do it.
In any case, because of recent geo-political events, a trip to Ireland, a new Louis Theroux documentary, and a pregnant-person-Tamagotchi game all landing at around the same time as I start up the Moon Ritual, I must warn you that this entry is long, and liable to get very, very heavy. I’m talking about pregnancy. And about choice.
]]>There was no diary yesterday, but today is in fact yesterday's diary. If that makes sense. Because today I am going on holiday and I am leaving my computer behind. No diaries for a week. I hope Marty Burnham The Moon Witch will be okay. I hope the earth will be okay. Without context that sounds extremely conceited, doesn't it?
]]>Yeah I miscounted the days, so today is actually day 14, but only one meteor hit the earth? I think? Honestly I'm not sure any more. Yesterday I went to get some pasta from the shop on my way home and they'd run out which made me really sad. Then I was properly passive-aggressive but also sort of just aggressive actually to my housemate, because he made late night chilli and got a load of rice the sink and left it. Apparently household chores are often a final straw for me.
]]>After last week I left Marty Burnham alone for the whole bank holiday weekend. I wanted the world to explode and didn't give a heck about it. Today I find I have once again been given a surprising reprieve; despite not playing for three whole days I have only missed one in-game. But I didn't want or ask for this one. I wanted to abdicate responsibility but it is still here. Hello responsibility. Life goes on. Argh.
]]>I'm not going to lie, writing this today feels like a chore. My relationship with the game is changing, because part of my own particular Ritual Of The Moon involves writing about it afterwards. It takes me significantly longer than a few minutes a day now. And I have a lot to do besides this today!
]]>Today Marty Burnham The Moon Witch, and consequently I, am/are/is contemplating her place in the universe. I'm not prepared for the existential wallop of doing that, to be honest.
]]>Marty The Moon Witch's thoughts today feel like, once again, Large Emotional States for me. Today she seems to be accepting her exile, or at least muttering to herself over and over again that she totally doesn't mind being alone. Her ritual mantra, "They don't control how I feel" sounds a bit like she's trying to convince herself again.
]]>On day eight we start the weekly ritual by clearing the former ritual objects, beginning again with the first of a new set. This time I start with a sprig of plant in a bottle. It makes a bright tinkling noise when Marty Burnham The Moon Witch picks it up. Marty seems tired again today, which means we're back in sync, because I am knackered. I fell asleep on the train to work listening to a podcast about bad books.
]]>Sorry for not posting yesterday. I promise I played! I have transferred Marty Burnham the Moon Witch back to my work PC, but there's been another small time skip, so Marty was forced to live through day seven again and, even worse, let the meteor hit earth on day six.
I am inadvertently exposing Marty Burnham to a lot of existential complications. At least two different versions of her exist. Plus the versions of her that anyone else playing this has created in their heads. They're probably not all called Marty, for starters. And they don't know that each of the others exists! So in fact I'm mostly heaping existential concerns on myself, but on behalf of Marty. Existentialism by proxy.
]]>Today's Ritual Of The Moon opened with what I believe we millennials call a big mood. "Why shouldn't I let them die? They don't care about me." Sometimes I idly like to imagine we can look at our parents generation as Rorschach in Watchmen looked unto, well, everyone. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth as they realise they've ruined everything and they need us to save them and pay for their retirement homes. And we'll look down and whisper "No."
In reality what will happen is that we will never figure anything out because Silicon Valley has reached such a zenith of recursive doucheholery that they're reinventing buses, and applying terms like "sustainable cost structure" to keeping hens.
]]>Finally Marty Burnham the Moon Witch has broken out of her time loop into a never before encountered day! This diary is simultaneously two weeks and less than a week old. Yet with the dawning of a crisp new day six comes a revelation for me about Marty Burnham's past: BETRAYAL!
]]>I had intended to make today a quiet and contemplative ritual. I wanted to spend some time listening to the sounds of the game. I think sometimes I can hear Marty Burnham the Moon Witch breathing.
Unfortunately, I overslept and rushed about getting dressed and only just had time to play the ritual before running out to meet a friend at the Imperial War Museum.
]]>Today the weather has cooled off a bit, which is a bit of a relief because it was nice drinking cans in the park, but unseasonable weather is just a reminder that the planet is slowly dying. Also, when I wear a dress I feel like I should shave my legs, which takes ages. I have considered becoming a maxi dress person entirely because then I'd only need to stealth shave my ankles (I have not considered not shaving my legs because I am secretly a bad feminist).
Either way, myself and Marty Burnham the Moon Witch are in a better mood today, as evidenced by her resolution after today's ritual.
]]>If you're just joining us, I am playing a game called Ritual Of The Moon which takes five minutes a day to play, for 28 actual days. Last week I realised that I was going to be on holiday this week and that also the save game didn't sync to the cloud, which presented me with a dilemma: start a new game, or leave the previous game to it's fate for a whole week, including daily meteors pelting the Earth, cosmic gobs of spit splattering the bus stop pavement of creation.
Everyone in comments had a lot of lovely suggestions (some of which were variations on "have a lie down, you are on holiday."). I followed one piece of advice and got Graham to send me the save from my work computer, but it didn't work out quite as planned.
]]>You may recall that yesterday I pointed out that I had started the diary just before I went on holiday for a week. I thought I would be very clever and play it while I was at home and keep turning copy in, and Graham would be like "Wow, thank you for putting extra effort in, have a raise and a bonus of a billion million quid."
The thorn in this particular ointment is that I forgot to put the save files on a USB, and as it turns out Ritual Of The Moon doesn't automatically sync save files to different computers via your Steam account because obviously it doesn't Alice, you buffoon, you imbecile of the highest order.
]]>I realised it was perhaps foolish of me to start this series before a bank holiday and a week's stay-cation, but I'm going to play the game every day while I'm gone, and will try to file a post as often as I have time to.
]]>Today it became clear to me that part of my Ritual Of The Moon is going to be the witch saving the world every day (apart from the two write-offs at the start that we're not talking about). Every day she will do a ritual, and then divert a meteor away so it doesn't strike Earth.
And I think: where are all these meteors coming from? Has something happened to one of the other planets? Are there scientists looking into this?
]]>Playing Ritual Of The Moon today taught me two things. 1) I had not actually stopped the meteor on day one from hitting Earth, only thought I did; and 2) the game continues whether I play it or not. I had fully intended to check in on the exiled moon witch this weekend, but wasn't able to. Another meteor blammo'd the surface in my absence, and our pale blue dot has now got a few smoking craters. Let me think of them as fetching beauty marks on the face of Mother Earth as I tug guiltily at my collar and go "Oh boyyyyyy."
]]>Friday is as good a day to start as any, right? Day one of Ritual Of The Moon and I am thinking about my period (warning!! TMI ALERT!!!!). Ritual Of The Moon is a month long game that you play for five minutes a day, for 28 days, about a witch exiled to the moon, so I don't think it's a huge associative reach tbh. If you're a person who doesn't have periods, let me tell you, they're pretty weird.
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