zen moments
Specifically, I like the moments in instructive zen stories that go, "And then, the pupil was enlightened."
Those moments of big enlightenment are a bit few and far between, but even the little ones are a cause for celebration.
I had tried to stop reading SA cold turkey a few times. This time I decided to just log out from the site on my laptop, so I absolutely couldn't read it at work or when not at home. It's a little thing but it does make a difference. It actually provided a moment of enlightenment that had been too long in coming.
That realization was this:
- I have always been hungry for facts - about dinosaurs, insects, mummies, whatever
- When I got into video games, the full force of my desire to know things was focused on them for a while
- I got into the habit of knowing a lot about video games, even for systems I didn't own; at one point I talked my parents into subscribing to 5-6 magazines and I did read all of them.
- After print journalism died down, this sort of magpie-information tendency translated very well to the internet
- Pretty obviously, I had more recently mapped this to SA and RPGs
It partly clicked for me after listening to a podcast (another indulgence of this tendency) and knowing more about some of the obscure recent games than the hosts. But these were games I had no inclination of running ever, and I realized I'd been internalizing a lot more than I needed to in the last few years - and that it had been distracting me from the ability to run my own games most effectively.
I also realized that SA was acting as junk food for my curiosity and desire to read; technically keeping me from feeling quite as bored while the same people rehash the same arguments over and over again. That's the real reason I want to cut back on it or cut it out entirely; I'm not really getting anything out of it and the community there isn't especially interested in the same sort of games as me. I don't mean that I'll never go outside my comfort zone of games - I am too easily bored for that - but you can only try and tell people that one-roll engine or Hillfolk does exactly what they want and be ignored so many times before you no longer feel like doing so.
Anyways, I think this year I have a much better handle on what makes me happy and what motivates me*. Watching Twin Peaks and Barton Fink is great; I love this mix of uncomfortable and strange. Trying to watch anime last year was just kind of a mess. Shifting gears constantly doesn't work well for me and means that I am just floundering, trying to figure out how to have fun, when I have chances to relax.
* which does make it more mystifying about just how bad I've been at working out so far.
Those moments of big enlightenment are a bit few and far between, but even the little ones are a cause for celebration.
I had tried to stop reading SA cold turkey a few times. This time I decided to just log out from the site on my laptop, so I absolutely couldn't read it at work or when not at home. It's a little thing but it does make a difference. It actually provided a moment of enlightenment that had been too long in coming.
That realization was this:
- I have always been hungry for facts - about dinosaurs, insects, mummies, whatever
- When I got into video games, the full force of my desire to know things was focused on them for a while
- I got into the habit of knowing a lot about video games, even for systems I didn't own; at one point I talked my parents into subscribing to 5-6 magazines and I did read all of them.
- After print journalism died down, this sort of magpie-information tendency translated very well to the internet
- Pretty obviously, I had more recently mapped this to SA and RPGs
It partly clicked for me after listening to a podcast (another indulgence of this tendency) and knowing more about some of the obscure recent games than the hosts. But these were games I had no inclination of running ever, and I realized I'd been internalizing a lot more than I needed to in the last few years - and that it had been distracting me from the ability to run my own games most effectively.
I also realized that SA was acting as junk food for my curiosity and desire to read; technically keeping me from feeling quite as bored while the same people rehash the same arguments over and over again. That's the real reason I want to cut back on it or cut it out entirely; I'm not really getting anything out of it and the community there isn't especially interested in the same sort of games as me. I don't mean that I'll never go outside my comfort zone of games - I am too easily bored for that - but you can only try and tell people that one-roll engine or Hillfolk does exactly what they want and be ignored so many times before you no longer feel like doing so.
Anyways, I think this year I have a much better handle on what makes me happy and what motivates me*. Watching Twin Peaks and Barton Fink is great; I love this mix of uncomfortable and strange. Trying to watch anime last year was just kind of a mess. Shifting gears constantly doesn't work well for me and means that I am just floundering, trying to figure out how to have fun, when I have chances to relax.
* which does make it more mystifying about just how bad I've been at working out so far.