you say that's exactly how this grace thing works

[matociquala]

The post-novel ennui is ebbing. And given that Dragon Age has developed an unfortunate habit of crashing during bossfights, that seems like a good set of signs that it's time to start exerting a little more personal discipline. I'm still giving myself the rest of the month off from writing--March 1, I need to get seriously busy on the next Shadow

Comments

[aliskye]

Could I "friend" you on Sparkpeople? Or is that being presumputious. :)

I'm looking for motivation!

[matociquala]

You certainly may. I'm matociquala over there, too--but I don't have a blog or anything.

[swan_tower]

One thing I enjoy about the Discipline: it turns eating into a kind of resource-management game ala Sim City.

A friend of mine is a professor studying game design, and she's been talking a lot about exactly this kind of thing. There are lots of nifty new ideas in the air about "gaming" things like food, exercise, breaking of habits/addictions, etc, as a means of leveraging the entertainment instinct for productive ends.

As for Dragon Age . . . yeah, I've been hitting DA2 again, because it's February and it always brings a serious case of the DON' WANNAS. Life got better when we realized the reason it was being hella crashy was nothing to do with the game, and everything to do with the wad of dust and lint stuck in the computer fan. But DA often crashed on me during boss fights, because I hit "pause" so often to micromanage the party.

[matociquala]

Yeah. And boss fights are freaking boring. So I don't want to have to keep starting them over!

[swan_tower]

They really are, aren't they? The high point of DA:O isn't the fight against the archdemon and the waves of minions; it's the choices that lead up to it. The actual fight is a coda.

(You can tell I play for the story, not the strategizing of "how can I beat this on Nightmare, with no companions, in starting gear, with one hand tied behind my back?" Which makes me rather different from the assholes that populate the Bioware message boards . . .)

Gaming the brain

[freyaw]

Heh. Yeah, I do the Fitocracy thing, and when I log my workouts, I find myself thinking that I only need x number of points to get past the next hundred for that workout, and then I go do more exercise (a favourite is side bridges, because I can watch TV at the same time) purely to get past that next point break.

[thewol]

It's good when you miss doing stuff that's good for you like climbing. Trail running sounds fun. At least you have landscape there. Here we've got flat, flat and more flat, and maybe a tree or two. I'm about halfway into "All the Wind-Wracked Stars." Been reading it in big gulps. I've been reading so much on my Kindle Fire lately that reading this dead tree edition of ATWWS seems kinda strange. Soooooo addicted to listening to Rhapsody playlists while I'm reading on the Kindle Fire. I need to get into Yoga.

[also_huey]

I think I was in the seventh grade, we were given an assignment to read and write a report on some book of 'classic literature', which was defined as "choose one from this list of 100 books". No idea where that list came from, but there were only a handful of books on it that I didn't recognize, so of course I had to pick one of those

[matociquala]

I need new shoes.

I get Manfred Mann's Earth Band's "Runner" a lot. But today it was, indeed, "Running up that Hill."

And yeah, I get a lot of thinking done.

[resolute]

I find your posts about The Discipline to be extremely heartening.