I already addressed volume three of The Mahabharata in another post, so I'll skip it here. I had a re-read this month, Erling Kagge's Walking: One Step at a Time. Kagge is a renowned explorer and avid walker. He's Norwegian, and Norway (along with many European countries) has enviable pedestrian infrastructure. Don't worry, I'm going to save my ranting about car dependency for another time. This little volume is a meditation on the act of walking, which is probably one of the best things people can do for themselves, assuming the ability to do so. Wow that sentence was awkward, sorry 'bout that.

If you find you do some of your best thinking, relaxing, or imagining while on a walk, it's not just you. Kagge's other works are worth seeking out as well - I also enjoyed Silence and Philosophy for Polar Explorers.

Italo Calvino came to my attention recently and I acquired a few of his novels. But first up I read The Complete Cosmicomics, a broad collection of short stories based on scientific ideas and discoveries. Calvino was watching the Space Race of the 1960s with great attention, and loved reading about theories and discoveries relating to outer space, so many of these stories feature an apparently immortal being named Qwfwq, who narrates tales about gravity, black holes, moons, and even the Big Bang. These are not LOL-funny comic stories, but are more wry. Enjoyable but I am passing this book on because I doubt I'll read it again.

Related to The Mahabharata, I also read The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma by Gurcharan Das. I have been much more familiar with the term "dharma" from a Buddhist perspective, where it means truth or teaching. Here, it means something a bit different, and the best explanation I came across was "the dharma of fire is to burn." Your dharma is your path in life, the choices you make, the attitudes you have. A kshatriya fulfills their dharma by leading the people and fighting to protect them. A bramanha does so by conducting sacrifices. Etc. The Mahabharata can be looked at as chiefly a tale about dharma and goodness, or how one should conduct one's life. A handful of characters are exmined one at a time, specifically from the point of view of their dharma and behavior. Even Krishna is looked at this way - in this human incarnation, he is an advisor to the Pandhavas, but also sort of a trickster, in that he keeps finding loopholes in dharma and advising people to "fudge" their actions.

The problem is that dharma is often "subtle." The answers are rarely clear cut, and often there are many considerations at play. The Bhagavad Gita, which is coming up pretty shortly in volume five, opens with Arjuna entangled in exactly one of these dharmic messes - on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, realizing he will either have to kill his own kin or put down his arms and dishonor his role as a warrior. Neither option is a good one.

So that was four books completed, for a total of 28 this year.

This month's gaming has been dominated by Silksong. Before diving into that though, I also received a gift copy of Gato Roboto, and it's very much a "you should play this" thing.

You are a kitty in a mech suit, with a gun. And a rocket launcher. The game is fairly simple and what you'd expect in the way of platforming, movement ability gates, and weapons upgrades. Simple in this case doesn't mean boring - it's an engaging and fun game that doesn't run super-long. I consider it highly replayable, or I would if I weren't stuck on a boss fight, LOL.

I've also played Cato: Buttered Cat off and on to take a breather, and it's still a good game as well. I'm almost at the end of the world 3 map, so I suspect a boss fight is coming up. The difficulty has ramped up in this world and I've been using the game's hint system much more. The hints can help but sometimes they're a little cryptic - it just shows you icons of where the toast and cat ought to be to solve the puzzle, and occasionally this is something I already know, but don't know how to do. In the end, I can just fart around until I figure it out.

Silksong is ... wow. Yes, it is more difficult than Hollow Knight. But it doesn't quite seem unfairly difficult. Perhaps I just haven't gotten far enough to run into something of controller-cracking difficulty yet, but I just hit the Cogwork Core, which very much resembles the White Palace as far as challenging platforming goes. Annoying. Hard. But if I do it enough times, I figure out the moves I need to make and build the muscle memory to execute them.

My main complaint with it is the godawful runbacks. They got so aggravating that I finally installed a mod allowing me to respawn almost anywhere, usually at the beginning of the room I died in. I can also manually set a respawn point. That has been a real sanity saver.

I've made it to act two and have acquired some nifty movement upgrades. Exploring optional areas and optional bosses has also gotten me some good tools and accessories for my Crests. Learning which Crests do what and swapping them out based on what you're doing has helped me out immensely. Some of them change basic movements like how your downstrike works, and others alter the speed and/or damage of attacks. And these can be expanded both by in-game pickups and by an NPC you'll have to go out of your way to find.

So in that game, for now I'm using my new movement abilities to go after other upgrades before moving too much further into the Citadel. I have double jump, and getting to that was a pretty intense set of platforming challenges, but I found there were several flat "stopping points" and a bench midway, so thank God for small mercies. Time to start polishing off some side quests!

I have never done a lot of modding before, but I've never been opposed to people doing it. Honestly, if it increases your ability to play and enjoy a game, why not do it? Games are supposed to be fun, which seems like a shocking and controversial opinion to some. I've left a lot of Silksong's difficulties in place because I like a challenge, but I needed to bring a few elements down to my level.

I've noticed I have several half-finished or almost-finished games at the top of my library so I may start trying to finish them up. A few of them have been there so long I may actually need to just start a new save so I can re-learn the moves.

After the 10k on Saturday I'm taking time off from running for a while. I'm so burnt out, y'all. I don't intend to give it up entirely but I need some other outdoor cardio as a change of literal pace. I still have my plate carrier I bought earlier this year, and this week I splurged and bought myself a fancy GoRuck pack and some weight plates. There are a lot of rucking events that range from rucking around urban areas with a group to tough endurance events in the middle of nowhere. Of course, you know I've got my eye on a something dirty and difficult.

I like having something to train for in my future, and when I started running I thought that one day I'd like to try running a marathon. That helped inform my training from month to month. For rucking, I'm looking at stuff like GoRuck Heavy, or this overnight event in Ocala where you need to go 65 miles, mostly unsupported, in 24 hours. No drop bags or aid stations, but there are five checkpoints where you can refill water, or tap out. I've been interested in military-style physical training for a long time, despite having no actual military ambitions. I've apparently been named a domestic terrorist so there's that. (Not me specifically, just everyone who dislikes the current administration.) My overall fitness philosophy has always been "I'm making myself hard to kill," not that anyone's actually trying to kill me, but you get the idea.

No one's trying to kill me, right?

This will still allow me to get time on my feet, outdoors, and see stuff. I love the little dopamine hit when someone says, "You went HOW far??" I can still do the endurance sports I love without having to grind through another run training cycle. I'm actually really glad I don't have any more races on my calendar right now, especially long ones, because stick a fork in me, I'm done.

Plus I get to buy quasi-military gear. With patches. I love patches. And MOLLE. Lotsa straps. I would say I need attachment points for an admin pouch, first aid kit, etc, but I've got plenty of room IN my pack. I can carry water, a rain slicker, a little blister/first aid kit, snacks, and a towel.

Anyway, this has also caused something of an existential crisis, because I've built so much of my identity around running and road racing. If I'm not running anymore, who am I? Will I get fat again? Will that make me a quitter? Etc. Reasonably I know it's a more or less lateral move, but for some reason it feels like a huge step. I'm probably grossly overthinking it.

I dropped dead yesterday after spending all day doing various food prep tasks. I have about fifteen pounds of pie pumpkins so far and more coming in. I made my first roselle harvest and processed the calyxes and seed pods to make jam, though it didn't quite set so I'll need to reprocess and try adding more pectin. Soy sauce chicken for lunches, a loaf of bread, holy crap I'm tired. AND I made dinner. And cleaned up.

So over the weekend I'll get my gaming and reading posts written up but for now I need to eat a bit and go for a short shakeout run.