### Using useless things to break out of spirals. ### Preamble Often when at work or at home, or even in the grocery store line, I have a sense of dread and begin to feel overwhelmed. This can quickly spiral into a state of panic about the state of the world, my life, or if I remembered to close that door at home. This leads to me reflexively opening something to break out of the bad feelings. Often it is social media, which is something I wish didn't happen. ### The goal Create a simple, yet effective time waster game, that helps get me back to the current moment, and out of the spiral. ### Strategy: I know p5.js pretty well and have a game called [Kill the Bokoblin](https://matchabarnes.itch.io/kill-the-bokoblin) I made while waiting for Tears of the Kingdom. I can repurpose much of that code and integrate a simpler graphic to ease speed and implementation. This was the initial plan, in the end I just asked a LLM (Llama) to make it based on p5.js. Was it the lazy way out? Yes. Was it the fastest way to get me to where I wanted to be? Also yes. I also hadn't played with the newer versions of Llama on my machine so that was interesting. ### Is it effective? For me, yes. It has helped me break out of a cycle and play a round or two until I fail a few times. After losing and by giving my brain a reset the tactile feedback and simple visual tracking is a sort of grounding exercise. The speed increase of the interactions redirect my brain to external stimuli. The 60-second duration prevents me getting trapped playing forever. ### [Play The Game](https://matchamakes.net/projects/ballpressing/index.html)