Ok, so I have a lot of stupid little hobbies that I spend money on. TV shows, writing, video games, P&P RPGs, reading, 40k, etc. That's six, but each of them is so massively large scale that the whole lot of them is rather unwieldy. On top of this there are several hobbies I want to begin: beer brewing and firearm shooting. If I was an idiot I'd add fencing and/or martial arts and learning German onto the pile of things I someday want to do.
The point is that I have too much stupid shit on my plate and I need to analyze and trim the fat if I can. We'll start with TV shows.
Currently I "watch" 30 Rock, The Big Bang Theory, Bones, Californication, Cougartown, Criminal Minds, Desperate Housewives, Dexter, Doctor Who, Flight of the Conchords, Grey's Anatomy, House M.D., How I Met Your Mother, Metalocalypse, Modern Family, The Office, Star Trek: TNG (with the intent to go back to TOS and then to Deep Space Nine and Voyager), and Supernatural. If I watch one episode of each of those in a week, that's like fourteen hours of television. Last year I quit watching CSI: Las Vegas because of a lack of Grissom. Before that I cut CSI: Miami because no show based on a lab/science should have that many explosions and expert marksmen. I think it might be time to cut a bit more. There are other things I can be doing with my time and looking at this list there are only six shows that I feel like I love enough to absolutely under no circumstances give up (30 Rock, Californication, Dexter, Doctor Who, How I Met Your Mother, and The Office). Another seven I watch because Heather watches them (The Big Bang Theory, Cougartown, Criminal Minds, Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy, Modern Family [which I think I could grow to like enough to add to the previous list], and Supernatural. So there are Bones, Flight of the Conchords, House M.D., Metalocalypse, and Star Trek that I watch because they're there to watch, but to be fair I am really starting to like Star Trek: TNG and it will probably move to my must watch list. Anyway, its not a good enough reason to watch a show just because its there. House was great, as was Bones, but I just don't feel it anymore. I haven't even thought about them since they took the Christmas break or whatever, so why continue watching them? There's no good reason for it, so I guess I'll stop. Metalocalypse is stupid funny and you barely have to pay attention to it, but why waste my time in the first place if its not riveting television? As far as tv and movies are concerned, I can pretty much enjoy anything if the acting is halfway decent and the story is ok, but why keep wasting my time and subjecting myself to sub-par stuff on such a willing and regular basis?
Edit: Add Burn Notice and Eureka to the must watch list, those two shows are great.
Hobby Resolution Part 2, #1: Watch less stupid/uninteresting television. By that I mean, if something isn't riveting enough that I can watch it without doing a bunch of other stuff at the same time, turn it off and focus completely on something that is worth my time.
Next hobby on the list, 40k. Look, I'll be honest, this was a dumb idea. I enjoy the game and I enjoy painting, but the enjoyment I get out of the game isn't worth the time and expense required to get good at it and field a respectable army. On top of this Eric and Tony seem to have no inclination whatsoever to work on their armies and Shawn doesn't have enough time. I haven't been fired up about 40k in a LONG time as well. I do find painting to be fun, but I get frustrated and daunted by the prospect of six gazillion models to put together and paint. Lately I've found myself wondering if my time and money might be better spent buying a model or two (not necessarily 40k models) that I find striking and painting them or perhaps buying a twenty dollar multi-part plastic car model from a hobby store or something and decking the thing out with plasticard armor and weaponry ala Mad Max and giving it a custom paint job. I wonder if they make kits for 89' Dodge caravans...
Hobby Resolution Part 2, #2: Give up the 40k army dream for the moment, but not the fun and relaxing painting dream. Pack away the 40k shit but not the paints and files and such. Buy a twenty dollar model car kit and see if I still enjoy it like I did as a kid, and also a regular pewter miniature and paint it up. After all, miniatures will always be of use to DnD. Also, stop frequenting 40k sites every day, I don't need to and there's rarely much going on.
Next, video games. Video games are a hard thing to value and discuss because its so very hard to know what you're purchasing. I've bought some amazing games (Planescape: Torment) and some damn stupid ones (Qix++, Prototype, etc). Too often, I find myself buying on a whim because Tony or a podcast I listen to was talking up the game in question and I just don't do my own research. At the very least, I need to stop buying so many damn video games. I have plenty of stuff to do, and plenty of games already on my 360 and PC that need playing.
Hobby Resolution Part 2, #3: Be more discerning in my video game purchases and stop buying them on whims like I have been lately. Think hard about my money and the games I have at home before laying down money, whether its virtual (i.e. Microsoft points) or otherwise. If I do decide I need to have a game, give it a day or two and play something else and see if I still "need" the game. Also, borrow shit from Tony and Mark once in a while.
Writing. I love writing, its swell and I like bringing characters and worlds to life, even if no one will read about them. This one is staying around in its entirety.
Hobby Resolution Part 2, #4: Write more stuff, keep varying it up and don't sink completely into writing fantasy so much that I can never get free of it, try different point of views and styles as well. Finish writing the story of Keroen Skathos for the second time and get my friends to finally read it like they all have said they would. If they don't like reading stuff on monitors, they shouldn't have offered to read or agreed to do so, no one twisted their arms. Kudos to Eric for being the only motherfucker around here that said he'd do something and did.
Reading. I don't read as much as I should. I love reading and have a stack of a dozen or so books backlogged on my shelf and I can never seem to catch up because I only read a couple times a week. I'm ok with reading slower nowadays because it means I'm doing more than reading with myself and if I string a book out over the course of two weeks I seem to retain more information from it. I can still burn through something awesome like Sanderson's stuff in a weekend though, heh.
Hobby Resolution Part 2, #4: Stay the course, or perhaps read a little bit more regularly. Maybe even just set aside five or ten minutes before bedtime every night. I like to read and exposing myself to more books can only broaden my knowledge of writing and plots in general, so reading more often than I have been lately seems like a pretty good idea.
Finally, the beast, P&P RPGs. A lot of my life is taken up by this stuff recently. Heather can attest to the fact that I focus a lot of my free time on this stuff. I'm always posting and yammering on in real life about this stuff and I'm sure everyone has just about had it with my intensity. Sorry. I've got a lot of things going on in DnD that I'm really really excited about and I really really like GURPS and am itching to use it. There's no real resolutions here because I've posted them before, they're part one of my hobby related resolutions. I guess as an update I'll take another look at my resolutions.
The post is from December eighth and it is titled Of Impressive Length. My first gaming resolution was to find and use an audio mixer program. I've got it and I've played with it a bit and it seems to be working. We'll see what everyone thinks when we game on this sixteenth though. The second one is about learning to let go of my frustration and not be so irritable about shit: FAIL, but there is progress. The third is about really sticking it to the guys in combat and letting the dice have their way with the group in a fair and balanced combat, haven't gamed since the resolution so we have yet to make progress on this one. Number four is about plots and finishing campaigns, I've got this campaign planned out to fifteen scenarios and this includes the final conclusion of the campaign and how it effects the world at large. First time that has every happened, so definitely making some progress. Number five is about input from the guys and after an email last week, I've definitely been getting some productive feedback and it is swell. Six, seven, and eight are about a larger mini collection, recording our sessions, and shorter more frequent gaming. No progress on any of those fronts.
So there's an update on my gaming resolutions and a few new ones as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment