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January 18th, 2008

January 18th, 2008
09:53 am [Link]	Power, Gaming Playing Rock Band with my friends - which has happened a lot lately - has turned into a mirror of my approach on life. See, when you play Rock Band as a group, each player can choose to play on one of four difficulty settings. If you're in over your head, you can miss too many notes and bomb out, but then the other players - if they've played well enough - can save you. In this way, a group of moderately talented players can team up to beat a difficult song. There's a debate before every setlist, because there are always two choices: What song(s) you will play next, and what difficulty you want to play on. And I've noticed that my fellow players tend to be timid; if they're taking on a song they've never heard, they'll drop back to a difficulty level they feel more comfortable with, and they tend to go back to old familiar songs more often. Whereas I am always, "Let's try it one level up! Let's play to the limit of our abilities! Oh, and here's a song we don't know, let's try that!" I am, in short, the guy who's always pushing the envelope. Oh, I might well bomb out playing "Number of the Beast" on Expert for the first time, but who cares? I get my kicks from riding the edge, knowing that this is the absolute best I can do at this moment and knowing that I'll be better the next time. Which in turn led to the realization that I don't actually relax a whole lot. Right now, in between my usual working for StarCityGames.com, I'm juggling two novels, a This American Life project, a side project of surprising depth, and my two columns for SCG and Magicthegathering.com (including video). That means I generally work a lot of hours trying to cram it all in, generally cruising through the weekends just as much as the weekdays. But when I sit down and take some time to kick back... I'm still working. Because I don't see the point of doing something where you're not pushing yourself. My games are invariably about seeing how good I can get. Certainly, my own limits of skill push up against that - I'm not an ace Magic player by any means, and my sense of boredom sets in after awhile (I haven't the patience to practice either "Raining Blood" or the Dredge matchup ad infinitum). But playing games for me isn't about relaxing, it's about moving the mental muscles in a different sense. Which isn't what games are for most people. They want to turn off for a bit. Me? I don't sit back. This isn't always a positive thing, because it means that I'm never really satisfied. At one point I said that if I got a book published, I'd have attained all my dreams... And I was thrilled. Then I did that, and suddenly the focus changed to "A novel, not a computer book." I know as sure as shooting that if I get a novel published I'll want a better-selling novel, then a best-selling novel, meaning that no matter what I attain it won't be enough to satisfy my endless need for finding other things to do.* Likewise, the video shorts I'm doing for SCG (and, hopefully, Magicthegathering.com). I could have easily just kept writing articles, but I've done that. I wanted to try my hand at some new form of communication. And my New Big Programming Project? Well, I don't know whether I can do it, since the back-end queries are eight-table-join nightmares, but I'm reading two books on Ruby on Rails. Sure, I know how to program in PHP, but that's all been done. Can I +1 my programming skill? I get bored by doing what I can do, no matter what. You'd think just dorking around on Medium on Guitar Hero would be awesome, and it is, but I want more. Which is kind of stupid because I feel the constant tug of low-level stress because even my downtime is uptime, but whatcha gonna do? * - Honestly, if I didn't have this drive to push myself, I'd have probably given up by now. Certainly, it doesn't look like I'm scheduled to be a world-beatin' novelist any time soon. Yet like "Green Grass and High Tides," I keep at it. Tags: rock band (25 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)
Time	Event
10:34 am [Link]	Oh, Fucking Fuck If it's true, another hundred bucks is leaping out the window at the McJuddMetz residence. (I am embarrassed to admit that some of my Magic-writing money went to purchasing another copy of Guitar Hero III so we could get the wireless guitar with better buttons. The Rock Band guitar is Teh Suxxor, yo.) (Link courtesy of tsumik.) Tags: rock band (30 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)