As a cool happening sort of guy I spent last Friday evening drinking scotch and playing Command & Conquer: Red Alert with some friends online. My old buddies have fond memories of that now 30 year old game – two of them from a campaign of LAN games against each other on PC and the other from the PlayStation version. I was a Nintendo kid and my family didn’t get a PC till after the millennium, so I’d previously only played it on the PlayStation my cousin would occasionally lend me. So I don’t have such strong memories of it. Nor do I have any skills of any clue how anything works so I spent the night watching what I thought was an impressive stronghold fall under the least amount of pressure, followed by a lenthy game of cat and mouse between everyone else.

Fun night though, ignominious defeat aside.

I’ve played a few C&C games over the years, and even more Real Time Strategy games that stole it’s mechanics wholesale. It’s never been a genre I’m good at. My brain absorbs about 60% of the knowledge necessary to play well and decides that’s quite enough thank-you-very-much and we’ll somehow brute force our way to victory from there. I have a terrible habit of overloading the build queue with buildings, infantry and vehicles and then to hear the voice-over chap say the, “insufficient resources” line so much it plays in my dreams. I forget the order I asked things to be built and run things in a deeply inefficient manner. I get excited by new, expensive toys and set them slowly constructing when I should be focussing on resource gathering. My army ends up a mishmash of elements usually swarming round in one big mob, and when it inevitably falls at the first sign of combat I’m very easy to eliminate.

It’s a mess. But while sipping a nice glass Port Charlotte and watching a small group of mammoth tanks casually take apart my empire it struck me I run my own affairs much like I run my build queue, adding shiny new things to my to do list with no real consideration for what’s already on my plate. I often find myself lying in bed, angry with myself for my inability to chop down the list, hearing the angry, depression ridden version of, “insufficient resources” running in my mind.

I’m one of the ever growing number of people who has sort of diagnosed themselves as ADHD based on Instagram and vibes. I had a, “not diagnosed but something ain’t right” t-shirt advertised to me on there the other day and thought, “damn it, algorithm, you got me this time.” It’s a symptom of the age but also, I think, something my mum passed down to me. My dad had to hide the medical dictionary from her when we were kids as she kept diagnosing us with obscure diseases and getting into a panic. I don’t have kids and have somehow avoided descending into full blown hypochondria but I have been trying to work out why my brain hates me and refuses to function for the majority of my adult life. Some might call that narcissism – I call it a mystery I can’t live without solving. ‘There’s a bastard living up there that I either need to kill or make peace with’ is the best I’ve got for a diagnosis. But I’m willing to concede that ADHD is an actual recognisable condition that might have a bit more weight to it. The trouble is that getting a diagnosis is a lengthy and potentially expensive process, so I’m settling for my wife watching, “how to live with an ADHD partner” videos, subtly manipulating me and then excitedly telling me how well it’s working.

Close enough.

The chaotic and unco-ordinated approach to my build queue/to do list fits the criteria at least. And in the absence of proper mental health care in this country we have to make do with what we can. Would the NHS support using emulations of classic RTS games as a diagnosis tool? Probably not. But they do support frowning at you, and listing all the anti-depressants you’ve “failed” on*, so like some kind of medical vigilante we have to take the diagnosis into our own hands.

This whole brain-wrong thingg has caused me all sorts of trouble. It makes most things difficult, up to and including the artistic pursuits I use to try and escape myself. This is what my musical project build queue currently looks like:

• dronejournals august-february (40-45 minutes of music each + liner notes, blog posts, launch videos etc)
• The Being Afraid – hardware only live streams leading to releases on my..
• tape label, involving 2 of my own projects and a wishlist of 4-5 other artists (for starters) releasing tapes every couple of months with the production and the artwork and the promo
• Feather Paths, the other project for the tape label, a pure drift drone project using a number of pieces from the dronejournals as seeds to make a number of albums with
• VFOS – Find a Home in the Ache, an album I worked on throughout 2025 until I needed to step away due to mental health shenanigans. It needs one track developing and some nips and tucks on the rest. And then pitching to labels.
• VFOS – Walking Wound – a real ship of Theseus/trigger’s broom of a project I’ve been tinkering with for nearly 5 years. It’s evolved into a pair of 20-23 minute, 3 movement pieces that are reasonably close to finishing. But I need to fix the drum mixing and I hate drum mixing so it’s sat dormant for long periods of time
• VFOS – You’ve Been Here Before – a haunted dub-ish techno-ish project, like GAS or Basic Channel possessed by evil spirits. It’s sketched out but needs a lot of work but I’ve not been in the mood for drums for a long time so it’s sat unloved for quite some time
• Walrus Teeth – Existential Drone Awareness Week – a series of oddball beat driven ps made from tracks I made during the pandemic. About 16 tracks in demo form, just need me to go back to drums and learn more about making them sit happily in a mix
• VFOS – Various Elsewheres – an ep earmarked for release by the Welsh Electronic Producers Network (WEPN) despite me being English. A few surprisingly upbeat and reasonably conventional tracks that I’m really pleased with but need to sit down and develop
• Live sets. I had a VFOS set laid out but I’ve been working on The Being Afraid hardware set up – initially Model: Samples + Microfreak + Pedals, currently Model: Samples + 4-track + pedals. And also a slimmed down Model: Samples + Walkman + pedals version for short sets as it all fits nicely in my pedal case

The first bullet point is enough to the fill the whole lf my time with. The rest, bar The Being Afraid live set, aren’t getting any time at all, and that’s only because I’ve managed to work it into the dronejournal.

I also have a full time job – in which I’m behind on the work for an NVQ qualification – a hot sauce business that has withered on the vine while I’ve been busy with family stuff and will require a lot of time and money to get back on its feet, a home that needs a lot of TLC, a studio that I’m trying to reconstruct in another room (a room that’s currently a dumping ground of stuff that needs sorting through) and a calender choc full of social obligations.

Insufficient. Resources.

If I’m going to succeed in any of my goals, or win in a skirmish in Red Alert, I’m going to have to prioritise, refocus, and be brutal with what it is feasible to achieve. And that’s my focus for the immediate future: restructure the way I think about my activities and then a fully reconstructed list of priorities. I don’t know what that will look like. But if you catch me on here or on social media announcing any exciting new projects please send me a link to this substack page and tell me to think about my build queue.

*an actual GPS words, listed before each medication. “You failed on sertraline, you failed on fluoxetine…”