games and words and places to be
Feb. 20th, 2011 04:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
threeplusfireI have almost too many things to write about for this space and so I don't end up writing anything. Paralyzed by indecision. It's how I feel looking at menus sometimes. A habit of a perfectionist streak I've tried to break myself of but keeps sneaking back in under the radar.
Most of the past few days I've played Dragon Age Awakenings. It's about twenty hours of play time, so long enough to be interesting but not long enough to eat up everything else. I play pretty intensely because I get so wrapped up in the story, in the emotional arc I attribute to my character that stopping feels like delaying a good book. I hate stopping in the middle.
I play on the PS3, and the more I play the more I think World of Warcraft was a strange deviation in my gaming habits. I prefer the relative simplicity of console controls, with their attendant limitations. For the most part I like the DA interface for items and spells and what not. I like playing on my television even more now that we have a nice television. I spend a lot of time on the computer because I work there and write there, so it feels good to do my game playing somewhere else.
Tomorrow I'm going to pre-order my copy of Dragon Age II as my reward for completing thirty days of writing. Last month I discovered a website called 750 Words through an article in the NY Times about motivation and the internet. Feeling aimless, restless, and all out of shape in the written word, I decided to sign up. I have written at least 750 words every day for the past thirty days. My total as of this moment is 25,200 words. This doesn't even count the LJ entries I've made in the past thirty days, which would surely add up to an enormous total. I won't lie - the motivation of unlocking badges is a powerful thing. It feels similar to my desire to unlock every possible outcome of circumstances for my characters when playing Dragon Age.
So I write, motivated by badges and the idea that for every month or so of writing I will treat myself to something I want that is not a necessary thing. It helps. Some of it has been private sort of journal that has helped me work out connections and reasons for things brought up in therapy and in general day to day life. I have also used it to write some fiction, to sketch out a story idea that came from a bad dream and a newspaper article, as well as my Fuzzy Five fanfiction piece. (Which I still need to post somewhere.)
Why do I write so much there? Because I need to. Even writing here, even when we try not to be, we're always writing for an audience. More and more lately I see how much LJ is one of those dinosaurs of the digital world in some ways. The culture of LJ has profoundly shifted in different places, from the ownership to the interaction of people here. I cut nearly a quarter of my friends list recently and still I only see twenty posts a day or so. Some of those are only pushes of twitter streams or communities. I think a lot about what writing here gives and takes from me. But that is an entirely other post. One where I talk about web spaces, why I have relented and even like Twitter now while I think Facebook is ruining everything I love about being online.
When I uploaded this icon, I realized I have space for more than two hundred now. I remember when we complained bitterly about only having thirty or so. Hah. Oh internet of 2000.
In other news, I ate some cupcakes this weekend that were pretty good. I've decided though that I don't like constant fillings in my cupcakes. Fillings are a sometimes joy for me, not an always. The weather is really nice right now. I have lots of windows open to take advantage of these rare days when it is actually temperate enough to do so. I should do some chores but I really don't feel like it.
Most of the past few days I've played Dragon Age Awakenings. It's about twenty hours of play time, so long enough to be interesting but not long enough to eat up everything else. I play pretty intensely because I get so wrapped up in the story, in the emotional arc I attribute to my character that stopping feels like delaying a good book. I hate stopping in the middle.
I play on the PS3, and the more I play the more I think World of Warcraft was a strange deviation in my gaming habits. I prefer the relative simplicity of console controls, with their attendant limitations. For the most part I like the DA interface for items and spells and what not. I like playing on my television even more now that we have a nice television. I spend a lot of time on the computer because I work there and write there, so it feels good to do my game playing somewhere else.
Tomorrow I'm going to pre-order my copy of Dragon Age II as my reward for completing thirty days of writing. Last month I discovered a website called 750 Words through an article in the NY Times about motivation and the internet. Feeling aimless, restless, and all out of shape in the written word, I decided to sign up. I have written at least 750 words every day for the past thirty days. My total as of this moment is 25,200 words. This doesn't even count the LJ entries I've made in the past thirty days, which would surely add up to an enormous total. I won't lie - the motivation of unlocking badges is a powerful thing. It feels similar to my desire to unlock every possible outcome of circumstances for my characters when playing Dragon Age.
So I write, motivated by badges and the idea that for every month or so of writing I will treat myself to something I want that is not a necessary thing. It helps. Some of it has been private sort of journal that has helped me work out connections and reasons for things brought up in therapy and in general day to day life. I have also used it to write some fiction, to sketch out a story idea that came from a bad dream and a newspaper article, as well as my Fuzzy Five fanfiction piece. (Which I still need to post somewhere.)
Why do I write so much there? Because I need to. Even writing here, even when we try not to be, we're always writing for an audience. More and more lately I see how much LJ is one of those dinosaurs of the digital world in some ways. The culture of LJ has profoundly shifted in different places, from the ownership to the interaction of people here. I cut nearly a quarter of my friends list recently and still I only see twenty posts a day or so. Some of those are only pushes of twitter streams or communities. I think a lot about what writing here gives and takes from me. But that is an entirely other post. One where I talk about web spaces, why I have relented and even like Twitter now while I think Facebook is ruining everything I love about being online.
When I uploaded this icon, I realized I have space for more than two hundred now. I remember when we complained bitterly about only having thirty or so. Hah. Oh internet of 2000.
In other news, I ate some cupcakes this weekend that were pretty good. I've decided though that I don't like constant fillings in my cupcakes. Fillings are a sometimes joy for me, not an always. The weather is really nice right now. I have lots of windows open to take advantage of these rare days when it is actually temperate enough to do so. I should do some chores but I really don't feel like it.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-02-20 11:55 pm (UTC)the degree to which lj feels abandoned to me now (I think I have 2 or 3 active friends) feels a bit like a dystopian eventuality, but it's romantic in a way that the ghost-town of myspace has no capacity to be. It reminds me a bit of the first days of the www - when you wrote something and had no idea if anybody ever would run across your page or read what you said. Back in 1995 I had a "homepage" and the things I wrote on it felt like letters to the unknown, like letters sent out into an empty universe.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 07:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 02:20 am (UTC)Maybe I should add the 750 words that that as well....
no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 07:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 09:00 pm (UTC)I told Dave I was preordering DA 2 just in case I got put on bedrest, which I still hope to avoid, but if I can't at least I get to be entertained!
no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 02:28 am (UTC)Now, whenever I write something meaningful, someone inevitably leaves a comment that makes me think, "Who the fuck gave you permission to have an opinion about my life?" Then I remember that I did, so I just stop writing. Not writing is easier than getting all worked up over jackassery.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 07:33 pm (UTC)I've noticed a definite shift in attitude over ten years here. Comments have gone from being more supportive/commiserating to more "let me tell you how to do what I think you should do" in a lot of ways. I think it echoes some of the rise of the LJ social justice police group. It's weird.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 07:47 pm (UTC)I also think my own attitude has changed a lot over the years. It's just less appealing to open my veins here the way I used to. Reading over past entries proves that the comments people used to offer aren't much different than the ones they offer now. I just care less about their opinions than I used to.
But there are still people here who I love and for whom this is my primary method of communication. I don't want to lose that connection and I often feel sad that you and Simon actually know less about what's going on in my life than you used to. Maybe we should all just have epic email chains every day. :)
no subject
Date: 2011-02-22 04:58 am (UTC)I feel the exact same way (both about LJ and menus). The weeks where I barely post are often my most active times, but my desire to summarize everything adequately keeps me from finishing the entries I start. I'm even worse when it comes to comments. I read my friends list often, but rarely comment since I'm terribly shy. One of the few things I like about facebook is that I can send specific things to specific people. So, for example, if I find a youtube video I know someone will like I can pass it on to them easily without feeling weird wasting all that blank space in an email. Other than that, I miss the LJ back when it was a couple of people who seriously cared about improving the experience (I have a rant about just trying to compile the source code somewhere in my archives).
Anyway. Maybe I'll finally give Dragon Age a try, now :)
no subject
Date: 2011-02-23 03:54 am (UTC)I have found it often helps to break my posts into single topics for summaries, or find some other division. Otherwise they would become unwieldy beasts.