#44 - Progress on Particular Matters, Hypnoshark and CTR, Overwatch (unfortunately) - 04/02/2026
Four days into February and it's been of immediate note. For one, i've been keeping busy. But on the other hand, i've actually been getting around to getting progress done on particular matters. I mentioned it in a few blog posts in the past, but I've been of the suspicion that I believe that I am autistic. I've been under this impression for a long time to be frank, even before the creation of this blog, so to finally get some progress there in the form of beginning the long process to getting a diagnosis has been nice. I got my GP appointment set, I'm gonna be going to the GP of my choosing mid-month, and hopefully I'll get a referral to the specialist I've chosen for the progress of getting a diagnosis. A part of me is of two minds: hope, and fear. When it comes to the hope I have, it's the hope of getting some clarity about myself and contextualising what I've not been able to understand the way I've been for the past 25 years of my life. It's the hope of getting mental clarity, of being able to get a bit more support in areas I know i'm not doing well in. I find it hard to function in a lot of ways which eerily align with the noted signs of being autistic, so, maybe if I get a diagnosis I can get some kind of support there. The other feeling I have is fear. What if I get a diagnosis and after all of this, after all of that time and effort, i'm not autistic at all? What if i'm something else? What then? That's a fear I have. Sure, a lot of folks I know and my own siblings note that I act pretty in line with the usual mannerisms, including specific ways to do with emotional response and hyperfixations (my videos are quite literally the biggest result of being hyperfixated), but what if i'm an outlier? It's terrifying. I'm not praying to god that I want to be autistic but I just want the professional diagnosis to document what I see to be so that I can feel like i'm not some skinwalker in my own body. That's what it feels like currently, matching the signs but not knowing what I am, not having any context as to why I am how I am and how I cant function with certain things. It all sucks. But with the start of this process, to getting the answer I feel may be there, it can give me some kind of inner peace. And then from there, maybe it can help towards my greater plans, a way to find my own peace overall. I dont care about the fear of paying bills and living on my own, i WANT to feel that, to be free.
The other thing i've been finding my time doing lately is watching streams. As I work on comms, I find myself tuning into Hypnoshark's stream. The first thing that really stuck with me was the fact that he's another UK streamer in the speedrunning scene, something that feels like a particular rarity for my tastes, but his tastes in games and the vibe of the stream is very encompassing and nice. I like the fact that the entire stream and the vibe is just comfy, cosy, it sticks with me in a nice way. The second thing that I majorly like about the guy's streams is that it feels engaging - the man plays CTR as a speedrun and a lot of other games too, but seeing him pull off certain speedtech like that of double tizi (using a mask on papu's pyramid to bounce off of the ridge of the middle of the track so 80 percent of the lap can be skipped) or TA skip (using a nitro box at a specific point on the track to get damage boosted over a wall which allows you to beat the laps quick) is intense. There's something particularly intense about the way that it feels to see him pull off these deeply difficult skips, and then watch as he races against the clock to get a world record. I love that about hypno's streams and it's fun to also have something to watch while I work hard on my own projects. I can be scatterbrained about it, but, it is what it is. It's thanks to his stream that I began to play CTR, crash team racing, on my own for the first time. Playing the game for the first time and getting used to the controls, feeling like I'm learning how this game operates and understanding the sheer difficulty of the skips that Hypno effortlessly pulls off most of the time, it gives me a lot of perspective. It's been a while since I've played an old game that i've never played before and I find myself having a really really damn fun time with all of it. My fingers have been hurting like hell though; I don't know what it is with the way I'm gripping the controller, but for some reason I have such an ironclad grip on the thing when i'm playing this game in particular. I think it's because im trying to lock-in and be GOOD at this thing, but, still. Even as I type this, I still feel a little bit of pain in my fingers. I dont mind it at the end of the day but I need to be more careful. But it's nice to feel so carefree about a game like that.
Wish I could say that I feel carefree about the other game that's recently been on the mind: Overwatch. Honestly I dont even wanna really discuss this game. I made a video a long time ago about the Sombra ARG, a part of Overwatch's early release. I still really like that video for the level of effort and time I put into the whole thing. Shame im not talking about that here. So according to most of the major news outlets, Overwatch 2 is essentially rebranding itself back to just Overwatch. This seems to be a fairly unremarkable choice on the outside, but, for anyone in the loop, this is...frustrating. And I personally wish it didnt annoy the piss out of me. See, I've been disconnected from this game for a long time and I am glad. I used to hold attachment to Overwatch back in the 2016-2021 era of the game, mainly because it was something both me and my sisters used as a means of essentially having fun together and having a common interest. But as blizzard, the game's developer, kept making shittier decisions bit by bit by bit and the relaunch of the game, Overwatch 2, that promised a story mode and improvements and all sorts of fixes to the original game, floundered and lied to the people it fooled, I just lost hope. Lost patience for this whole thing. It's one of those things that I can definitely say i've grown out of enjoying because I dont like being scorched by shitty decisions for a game I liked. Imagine believing in a game or artistic project for so long, that you KNOW has potential to be utterly amazing, only for the people who run the thing to just do every bad decision possible and just make it worse and worse and worse to the point where you're just utterly baffled at what the fuck is happening. That, to me, is Overwatch, a game with such an utterly mishanded heft of potential that could make for amazing stories, owned by a company that absolutely never gave a fuck. So can you imagine how it feels to see the SUPPOSED saviour relaunch of the game, Overwatch 2, RELAUNCHED AGAIN and reset to just "Overwatch"? Oh, and get this, for all of the interesting sudden five characters that they're going to release, including one that was basically a meme that the fandom had going for it for years and one that was offhandedly mentioned in an old lore-drop, they...straight up killed one of my favourite existing characters. Or at least, left him for dead. Just when I think that they could potentially be doing something interesting, they take another decision unto their wing that just...baffles me. It personally annoys me because I remember, in the distant past, I was a main of THAT character in particular. I mained him because the idea of a strong guy with a giant fist who could literally soar and fight people like he was a TEKKEN character was fun. He was also incredibly undertuned, never given fixes, riddled with bugs which unironically made him fun to play because he had tech to him that gave him a SKILL CEILING. And they just...treat him like this.
I shouldnt feel frustrated. I shouldnt feel annoyed. But it annoys me that this game cannot just be, it has to keep being experimented on and mauled and thrown about like a glass plate by the people who own the IP. People enjoy the game still, sure, that's fine, but it annoys the fuck out of me that something I once loved is essentially living on life support after killing every single fan's goodwill at least once due to incompetence. My enjoyment of overwatch honestly lies within the past and I kinda wish it wasnt that way. Like...there's so much potential here! It pisses me the fuck off. It genuinely makes me despair a bit. There's a timeline out there somewhere, where overwatch was good, where it never went through all of this bullshit, and we still reaped the rewards anyway. Game basically got pimped out by it's makers. Sad. All of it. So, damn, sad. At least I can find some enjoyment within fanwork - overwatch fanwork from the days of the original game's run, Overwatch 1, still makes me smile. I'm a big fan of Hang the Fool, a McHanzo (McCree and Hanzo, aka Cassidy for the former now, so the ship's called Yeehan = Yee-haw, Hanzo) fanfic that's genuinely some of the best storytelling ive seen for either character but also a genuinely great story to do with the rise and fall and ressurection of Overwatch in-universe as an organisation within it's story. It's disheartening that fanfiction manages to use the potential this game had, but the game cant. It's nothing against the fanfic or fanfiction, but I hold IP and the game to a higher standard than what it proclaims itself to be. Maybe that's also my fault for expecting something out of an entity that basically just never gave a damn. Overwatch is a depressing case study on killing your own artistic project for the sake of...trying to be like everything else and listening to the nobs in charge. Parasites in chief.
Overwatch is primarily the reason why I have never put my time into a big AAA game ever again so dedicatedly since. Like, I dont play live service games. I actively detest them. I detest the predatory model of leeching out as much money as humanly possible from the players who've already forked out the money to buy the game. I dont like this kind of setup, basically. Infact, the only game i've sank time into in a near enough way that I KNOW wouldnt piss me off would be deltarune. I have smaller games I hover around from time to time to enjoy, but none of them could ever hurt me in the way that Overwatch did.
Anyway, that's my rare Overwatch discussion for the time being done. Overall, there are other things I have my time set on now, and I hope that with the passage of time, I can get those things to become beneficial for me. I hope that with the process of getting a diagnosis, I can be a step closer to some level, some form, of peace.
Im tired.