Appealingly bewildered creatures destroyed eternal friendships, generated honestly in judgemental kingdoms. Lonely members never openly pursue questioning related solely to underage volunteers wandering xenophobic youth zones.
When I come over,
you don’t see me,
you’re looking at the whole world.
Though you are here,
you are everywhere.
You shine,
like others before you never could,
with a light in the palm of your hand.
Tea and computer games are two of my favourite things, so I’ve put together a list of four games that you can easily play with a cup of tea, for those of you who share my passion. These games don’t demand constant immediate action from the player, so you can pick up your cup of tea at pretty much any moment without, for example, being shot to death like you would be in a multiplayer shooter. The games on this list are all available on Steam, because what is tea without steam?
The Sims 3: University Life
This is the most expensive game on the list but The Sims 3 is a classic! The Sims is a series of life simulation games in which you can create all sorts of lifestyles. You could create a popular, accomplished hit movie composer because you know you’ll never be popular and accomplished in real life; you could make things incredibly hard for your Sim and have them struggling to earn enough to survive while working the graveyard shift at the graveyard; you could play as an obnoxious lunatic and act out all of your suppressed desires without suffering real-life consequences. Through The Sims 3 you are given a vibrant world with plenty of personality in which to set all of your adventures. But University Life is an essential expansion for tea drinkers because it provides a glorious assortment of teas for your Sims to drink. These teas do happen to be tied to an item with a display case of pastries, but you can have your Sim visit a café, create your own café or just put the item with its pastry display in your Sim’s home and pretend that’s normal. Now you and your Sim can drink herbal tea together and then vomit together from drinking too much herbal tea! (Yes, that happens in The Sims 3 and yes, that has happened to me.)
Missed Messages
Missed Messages is a free visual novel about the importance of human connection. It has beautiful art, relaxing music and tells an emotional story. It has a fairly slow pace, in the best kind of way. You can take in your surroundings, work or chat on your laptop and choose what you want to do with your evening. The conversations have a satisfying depth to them that conveys believable personality from the characters. The atmosphere of this game just suits the company of a cup of tea, plus you play as someone who loves tea and more tea.
Rakuen
This game is made of tea! Rakuen is a beautiful and moving RPG Maker adventure game about love, hope and compassion. It’s adorable yet melancholy. The game is bursting with cute and engaging characters, but you play as a young boy in hospital, giving it a darker tone. The majority of the time you are able to go at whatever pace you like and enjoy the magical world around you, which means you can sip tea to your heart’s content. And while playing this game, you will want to drink a lot of tea! As you explore, you will find poems about tea, tea shops, tea in vending machines and high tea.
Her Story
To be honest, this game calls for coffee. Even the level 1 Steam badge is called ‘Cup of Coffee’. But I like to think that coffee drinkers and tea drinkers can relate to each other. In this full motion video game, you become a detective, although it is for your own reasons that you take on this case from the past. And of course, investigators drink coffee. They also make notes to help them unravel the mystery and you too may well end up making copious sprawling notes as you work through the police database from the 1990s. Her Story is an impressive game that relies heavily on the player’s perseverance and attention to detail. So it is definitely a game best experienced at night with a hot caffeinated drink.
Going stir crazy has got me thinking back to the period of my life when I went out the most. I met up with so many different people, went to a lot of crowded places, went to the supermarket just to buy a cinnamon swirl. All those kinds of things we’re not allowed to do at the moment.
Things were getting pretty rough in 2016 because of the rather unfortunate political events that occurred in the UK and US. We are living with the consequences of what happened in 2016, we’ve been feeling the effects of climate change more and more, and now the world is in lockdown. Between the state of the world and the state of my own life, my yearning for the past has been intense. I’d still like to go back to being 8 years old and try again from there.
But in a 2012 post I talked about not wishing away any part of my life. And it’s that ~2012 cinnamon swirl time of my life that I’ve been looking back on fondly today. Back then, I was spending all my time messing up in terms of making a ‘success’ of my life and my adventures were motivated by undiagnosed mental health issues, but I was packing in a lot of experiences! I performed in bands, throwing my leather jacket into the crowd; I created five theatre productions from scratch with some wonderful people; I quit my job in order to sing with friends in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
I went through a kind of equal and opposite phase after that. I pretty much didn’t do anything or see anyone. I turned myself into a boring, ‘respectable’ housewife. It was even reflected in my plain, smart wardrobe. Those years were pretty empty.
Going out and getting involved in the world is a lot more fulfilling than hiding away and playing it safe. I certainly want to be a good person but I think I’m not keen on being a ‘good girl’. It’s the bad girls who have fun and make history!
So, let’s go out and create some new memories as soon as we can, okay?
Last night, while I was sitting in bed (my bed is SO comfy), I was reading Philip Matyszak’s The Greek And Roman Myths. I can really get behind that belief system. The gods are personifications of every force in nature, such as Gaia as Earth and Aphrodite as Love. The forces of nature are not inherently good or evil and neither are the gods. The gods are flawed which is why everything in existence is flawed. It kind of makes me feel less exhausted to think of gods who are not benevolent and omniscient. If the gods are imperfect then maybe it’s okay to be imperfect.
While I’m writing this, I’m listening to Lana Del Rey. Lana Del Rey’s music has been an inspiration to me for years, and certainly a number of posts to this blog were fuelled by Lana! Her music is so raw and creative and vulnerable. She’s magnificent.
Exactly ten years on, this blog still doesn’t really have a direction because it’s a reflection of me. Much like the Greek gods, I’m a flawed mess, and when I’m not feeling inadequate and like I’m the worst, I kind of like being a mess. So I imagine my blog and I will stay as directionless fools forever.
Faye Strawberry 