Back Spasms, Lies of P, and Laptops

I woke up yesterday in the kind of pain that could be considered exquisite, the kind of pain in my back that could only be spasms or a good old fashioned muscle pull. Apparently I chose violent gymnastics in my sleep. For all you youngin’s, back pain is an absolute killer of energy and patience. A trip to the urgent care later and I had me some meds and a warning of “it might get worse before it gets better.” While I appreciated the honesty, it wasn’t quite the words I wanted to hear after the awesome, 10 minute struggle of climbing inside my car without the feeling of my insides tearing to shreds. As such my plans of comfortably sitting at my desk digging into the new Mac release of Cyberpunk 2077 were placed on hold while I hung out with my temporary best friends - my bed, mattress, and sheets. Today, in an attempt to not re-aggravate the injury after a shockingly restful night that involved my wife and I plotting out a plan for me getting out of bed without screaming like a banshee, I’m cooped up on the couch with my laptop, a PS5 Dual Sense controller, and thanks to Steam’s weekend deals, a discounted copy of Lies of P.

I like the concept of the “Soulslike” games and got pretty deep into both the original Demon’s Souls and Bloodborne, but in general they are not games I enjoy playing much due to their more methodical difficulty. I can play them and if I dedicated myself I could finish them, but I just don’t want to do it. Lies of P is a Soulslike that, in an obvious attempt to appeal to people just like me, patched in two difficulty levels beneath the original to draw in those who want to play the game and see the story but not get constantly murdered by puppets that had their switches turned to evil. I picked the “medium” difficulty, or Awakened Puppet in their nonclemature. There’s an “easy” mode that can be switched to anytime as well, but that seemed too easy. The first boss still gave me a decent challenge on this medium difficulty anyway, so… so far so good.

I’ll probably do an “Adventures in Mac Gaming” on Lies of P eventually, as I only spent a little bit of time on it before my laptop heated up to levels that could either cook steak or imprint itself on my legs, but I’m already really into the very creepy atmosphere, enemies, and the whole concept of Pinocchio being a ruthless swordsman sending puppets to their maker. Well not literally, but just wrecking their shit. It’s a pretty wild take on a story best known as sanitized Disney Family Entertainment. Really interested in seeing where the story goes from where I left it.

However, playing the game on my Macbook Air has brought up an issue that constantly annoys me and I wish it could be addressed. I may, or may not have already wrote about this! Anyway, I use an Xbox Series X/S controller for my Mac gaming on my standard rig, the M4 Mac mini. This controller is assigned via bluetooth and the only way to use it on my laptop is to pair it, which kills the pairing to the other Mac, so I have to re-pair it when I want to go back to the main gaming system. To avoid that I just use one of my PS5 Dual Sense controllers. It seems like a simple thing that I shouldn’t get worked up about, but if, you know, Apple designed their own controller and have go from device to device like AirPods, they could be heroes. For more than one day too!

This is a wild segue but in general I hate laptop computers. I came of age during the era of beige towers, CRT monitors, and floppy disks, so I’ve always been more of a traditional desktop computer kind of guy. In I think 2019 or maybe early 2020 I bought a 15 inch Lenovo laptop for about $300 that was really fast and useful with Windows 10, but it had abysmal battery life and that really drained my enjoyment of using it. Why bother with a laptop when I would have to sit by an outlet to plug it in since the battery lasts 3-4 hours tops? After reading the reviews of the M1 MacBook Air and it touting its blazing fast processor and really long battery life, I wound up buying one in early 2021.

It’s been four and a half years and this thing has been discontinued and far surpassed by M2, M3, and M4 chips here in 2025, but the thought of upgrading is the farthest thing from my mind. Sure it’s an M1 processor with 8GB of memory, but you know what? It’s still blazing fast opening apps, surfing the ‘net, and the great majority of Apple Silicon-enabled games run great on this thing that I’m typing this on, as a fresh dose of ibuprofen enters my bloodstream. Sure, it doesn’t even play Cyberpunk 2077 since it requires 16GB of RAM to boot, and Lies of P chugs above 900p even on “low” quality settings, but I don’t care, I can play them in their glory on my newer, faster desktop computer, and play something not quite as demanding instead.

The lesson I learned with this computer vs. other laptops that I have used in the past is that while, sure, you’ll pay more for this thing compared to a Dell, HP, or Lenovo, but you’ll get so much more usage out of one over the years that you may not even want to upgrade until Apple decides to stop offering updates to the newest OS, or when programs stop being supported. In the case of this MacBook Air, that time might be a couple of years away, but given how zippy and useful it still is 5 years later, they might keep it going for longer than that. Anyway, the moral of the story is that a bad back has rekindled my affection for this computer today, and while it’s not a gaming device much anymore, it’s still a screamer for everything else.