20241109

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A casino is an ATM, if you're playing both and . At that point, it's Monopoly money. But then, so is your character. If everything has to balance, what experience do you want to have?

But if you're only operating as a player character, pointedly keeping yourself out of the DM seat*, then, ... how do you proceed?

Love and joy are constructive, additive, multiplicative modes. After you conceive of an Other, go to them, and love them. Love them fully and freely. Save your game on a high note. Doesn't have to mean leave; can simply mean "normalize". When your experience sings, let that moment hang glittering in the air. Make a home with it. Don't push it. Pause your game. Let that state resound, until it becomes your baseline. Once you've normalized, once you reach a place where you sleep and wake and find yourself at the same baseline of experience, then begin again. I would say "resume play", but that's not it at all. Your original game remains paused. You begin a new one, built atop the state from where you began.

It's the only way to build something that lasts.

* "Why wouldn't you want to run the game?" Ask a forever-DM. :) It's not that it's difficult. There are things you can only feel when you're on the ground. ... Having said that, there are things you can only feel from the DM's seat too, so, you know. There's a reason why we keep creating games for each other to play. There's a reason a mind forgets. And competitive gambling (i.e. not slots, and you may mourn for the lost pun**) can be kind of like sex.

** The fact that there's a nearby sex pun in the term "slots", and the fact that that particular pun doesn't quite work (because slots are not thought of as a player-versus-player sport), hints at how the experience of fragmented language creates experiences that can't be accessed from a place of original language (i.e. the state of language we experience ourselves to be coalescing towards; see 20241108). In original language, there is no other to play against, which means that we can joke about slots and sex. But you can't have competitive gambling without an other, so, you know. Choose your own adventure.