Passions and Priorities

There’s still a month before I do my official goals update at the mid-year mark, but I can’t get this idea out my head this week, so here’s a brief post that will act as a precursor to that update. I’ve been doing this focus tracker thing for five months now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it isn’t helping in any meaningful way. I’ve also come to the conclusion that it’s wrong to say that I have a focus problem to begin with, it’s really a problem of passions and priorities. Let me try to explain.

First, let’s talk about the problems I’ve been having with the focus tracker I started. Like many other things I’ve tried to do, it was really useful and enlightening for the first couple months. But by March it became obvious that it wasn’t really providing any useful insights into what I was actually doing, aside from seeing if I was reading every day. So I tried to switch it up to assign different projects to different days of the week. That lasted for another couple months until May when I discovered that also wasn’t helping, so I switched it up again to try to do more daily, consistent tasks.

Of course that hasn’t really worked either. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself over the last decade or so is that I’m not programmed for consistent practice of anything. I keep flipping back and forth between consistent practice (shorter periods of time every day) and batch practice (longer periods of time once a week or so), but I can’t do either one well. Yet I continue to try because every single person who’s ever been successful at anything will tell you that you have to do either one to succeed. And I want to be a successful person as much as anyone else, so I keep pushing myself into failure because neither method seems to work.

That’s why I come up with things like the focus tracker. I convince myself that if I track everything and see trends, it will give me more information on what works and the motivation to keep doing it. But it’s an inherently flawed system because it was never a problem with focusing on things in the first place. I am actually very good at focusing on tasks, and can pound away at something for many hours at a time.

The real problem is that focus only comes from passion. And I’m not passionate about very many things. And those passions very rarely match up with my priorities. Therefore, trying to force myself to focus on priorities that are not passions is doomed to fail.

A couple months ago I wrote a post about my perpetual games, those games that I play for years and keep coming back to whenever I can. Those are perfect examples of activities that I am super passionate about, but are super low priorities. For example, I probably put in 20 or so hours into Heroes of the Storm this week, both in playing it and watching videos about it. I think about that game all the time and I want to play it all the time. But I know in my logical mind that spending all my time on that game doesn’t improve me, as a person, in any meaningful way, it just feels good. The same goes with the thousands of hours I put into playing drums in Rock Band or guitar in Rocksmith. Learning to play music is a worthwhile endeavor, but in the grand scheme of things, the time put in hasn’t really justified the outcome.

The thing that really gets me about this is that I should be okay with it. It’s my free time and I should be happy with whatever I do during that time. And while I’m doing those activities, I am happy. It’s only later, when I see how much of the day has gone by, that I get down on myself for not doing other things that have a more tangible reward. Most days I get to the end of the night and the line from Hamilton plays in my head, “He will never be satisfied.” The big difference between me and Mr. Hamilton is that he had the passion to fulfill his ego, I just have the stupid ego.

So after five months, I have to concede that the focus tracker idea was never going to be the tool that gets me motivated to complete more things. It ended up being yet another tool for me to look at and realize how bad I am at doing things I’m not super passionate about. It was definitely the right tool for determining what my priorities should be, but that doesn’t mean much when missing those priorities has no consequence.

The quest to find the right tool for getting those priorities taken care of continues. What I really need is to get those priorities at the same motivation level as these weekly posts. Outside of using my existing tools to remind myself that it needs to be done, I haven’t had any trouble being motivated to write, as long as I have something to write about. But doing other things like reading, playing non-perpetual games, watching new TV shows or movies, cooking, exercising, each one feels like a hassle. And I like doing all those things, I just don’t love them.

The motivation for writing these posts largely comes from the public nature of them. There are enough people reading them that I feel bad when I miss a week. I also get more motivated to clean the house or cook when people are coming over. But I don’t know if I can rely on that same external pressure to read or play games. I guess I could set myself a review schedule so that I had to finish things in order to write about them, but then it becomes like an actual job. Is that what I really want? Of course not. Is there any other way to motivate myself? Probably not.

Ultimately I don’t want to treat leisure time like homework, but my completionist self tends to make it necessary to be satisfied, if only temporarily. It sucks, but that’s just who I am.

Four-ish Months in NYC (Spring)

For lack of other things to write about this week, time for some more observations on our transition to New York City. There are still a few gaps in the coverage I’ve written about so far, but expect this to be another fairly short one. Maybe next week I’ll have a better topic.

We have reached the middle of Spring at this point, and the weather has gotten nice and warm, which has been very welcome after one of the harsher winters I’ve ever had to live through. If you talk to people who have lived here a while, you find a lot of them will joke that every winter they are so miserable that they want to move, but the rest of the year is so nice that they forget just how miserable it was, so it’s a constant cycle of peaks and valleys. I really only experienced half of the winter here, but I can definitely see how people get that way.

In terms of how the weather here compares to Seattle, there are two things that surprised me. One thing I knew before getting here is that the weather reaches more extremes, but that’s not unusual given that Seattle is known for being temperate. Everywhere is more extreme than Seattle. But the first thing I didn’t expect is that the weather here swings more wildly day to day. The temperature and precipitation in Seattle have a smoothness to them that makes it easy to predict what today will be like based on the last couple days. NYC is not like that at all, I really have to look at the forecast to get an idea of what to expect since it could be sunny and 75, or cloudy and 50, and who the heck knows when rain will come pouring through. But that leads to the second surprise. The weather forecasts here are way more accurate than what I’m used to from the west coast. When the forecast says it will rain for a couple hours, it actually rains for those couple hours and then it’s gone. People who have lived here a while will tell me that the weather forecast is always wrong, but coming from Seattle, I can’t believe how accurate it is.

Also with the coming of nicer weather, that inevitably leads people to want to go outside and hang out more. Biking is a common way of getting around, and it’s likely I will be doing that again for the first time in almost two decades. I’m sure I’ll have a separate post about that. But otherwise, I am realizing just how big a difference it makes when you live in a city with great public transit. I’ve mentioned already in the last couple NYC posts about how much I like it, but it’s worth a little more time since it’s fundamentally the biggest difference for me in my daily life.

It is easy to say that without the subway, NYC would basically cease to function. It is hard to conceptualize just how many people use it at all hours of every day, even when you see how crowded every train and every platform is during rush hour, but it is a lot of people. Without the trains, you are left with cars and buses, and there is simply no way the roads could accommodate the volume. And that is just the subway we’re talking about, that doesn’t include the amount of people who come into the city from the nearby region using the LIRR, Metro-North, New Jersey Transit, PATH, and Amtrak trains.

I heavily rely on the subway, it’s how I get to work every day. We also use it pretty frequently when we want to meet up with friends. It’s so liberating to be in a situation where you and some friends can get brunch together at a place two miles away, and it’s no big deal. It’s something we haven’t really been able to do since we lived on Capitol Hill with all our Seattle friends in the same area, and it worked there because we could walk. It’s the same thing here, but the distances are greater, yet still just as easy. I love that our friend group in Queens can randomly decide to get together during the week and we can just make it happen. This is not to say that never happened in Seattle, getting a drink after work with co-workers happened once in a while. The frequency is just a lot higher now.

I don’t really have anything else to add at this point. As I said, it’s a short one. But I will end by saying that nearly four months in, NYC is finally feeling like home rather than just a long work trip or vacation. For better or worse, we’ve fallen into a consistent routine and we’ve established our favorite food spots in the area. There is certainly a lot more exploring and experiencing to do, and there’s a whole 4-5 months of nice weather coming up in which to do that. So there will definitely be more observations in the future.

Finding Zen in Puzzle Games

As I’ve mentioned multiple times in the past, finding topics is hard, but I’ve had some ideas on the burner for a while. One of them was to talk about Baba Is You, a push puzzle game that came out about two months ago. The reason I thought it would be interesting to talk about in a post is that it is a very interesting and clever game. But, I haven’t put any real time into it, it’s one of those games where it hasn’t clicked, so I have kind of given up on it. I may return to it in the future if I feel the itch, but for now it’s sitting tight on the backlog.

What made me decide to switch gears and do a general topic on puzzle games as a whole is that this week a new picross game, Picross S3, came out on Switch, which I instantly bought and I’ve already finished. As suggested by the name, this is the third game in a series of picross games on the Switch, and each one has more content than the previous one. Though it has gotten easier for me to do the puzzles with each installment, each of these games takes 40-50 hours to 100%, so it’s a hefty time investment.

So… why am I obsessed with these games when Baba Is You, an objectively better game in all respects, didn’t grab me?

I thought about it for a bit, and I came to a conclusion that was kind of surprising to me. As a genre of games, I’ve always loved puzzle games, it’s a staple of mine along with RPGs, platformers, rhythm games, and (some) shooters. But I didn’t fully realize until this week that I play puzzle games to zone out, to enter a zen of sorts. I get into a state of flow and if the puzzles maintain that state, I just keep going and going. If I get frustrated at all with puzzles that I’m trying to solve, I bounce off it right away because that’s just not what I’m looking for.

So games like picross and sudoku, which are puzzles of numbers and simple logic rules, fall into that camp of zen. There are definitely some that get frustrating because there are no obvious moves at a certain point, but filling in the grids is mostly relaxing and allows me to engage part of my brain while the rest engages in something else. Listening to a podcast or audiobook while doing picross or sudoku is perfect.

Baba Is You, on the other hand, gets really tough, really quick. It requires too much brain power and focus for me to enjoy for long stretches of time. I can appreciate it for what it is, but it relies too heavily on the shotgun approach and the cost of messing up can be high. I know that it’s a staple of a lot of puzzle games, but if my only path forward is to just guess and see what happens, that’s not something I’m going to enjoy.

There’s probably another reason why I don’t enjoy puzzle games that require a lot of thought, and that’s because I already put a lot of brain power into solving problems with my job. When I get home, my brain power is already drained, so it just wants to do something easy. There is an exception to this, namely the games made by Zachtronics. Their games, such as Space Chem, TIS-100, Opus Magnum, and Shenzhen I/O, appeal to me because they require the same kind of machine-building logic that I use in my normal work. It’s the same skills, but applied in a very different way. It’s the same reason why I also program in my spare time, but I focus on problems completely different from what I do at work. I do what I do because I enjoy doing it, but I want to use those skills in settings that don’t feel like work, so these puzzle games let me do that. Of course, I never play these after work, they are strictly a weekend sort of thing.

Another thing I find is that I really like puzzle elements in other games, whether it is an integral part of the gameplay itself or as a break in the normal gameplay to do something else. The latter tends to happen in action games, like God of War or Uncharted, where the player needs a breather between fights, so they put in a couple easy puzzles to break up the set pieces. The former usually comes in the form of strategy or tactics games.

I’m traditionally not much of a strategy game player, but I have enjoyed the small bites I’ve taken over the years, and it’s an area I want to get into more. Other friends I know love strategy games like Advance Wars, Valkyria Chronicles, Civilization, XCOM, etc., but I haven’t really played any of them. I’ve done a little Civilization V and I really liked playing Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle last year, which is XCOM-like. My history tends to favor games that are not strategy at their core, but have some strategic elements within it, like Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, which I talked about at length earlier this year. It’s not much of a traditional game since you don’t do a whole lot in it, but strategy is a big element when it comes to creating the most optimal formation for the situation at hand. Finding those optimal moves is inherently pleasing to me, which is found in a lot of games, whether they are heavier on strategy or tactics.

I think at the end of the day, the thing that will turn me off of a puzzle game most is when I have to guess to advance. I like games where the puzzles are tough, but can be figured out through small, logical steps. Having a quick way to recover from mistakes is also a big plus, since starting an entire puzzle over after spending 15 minutes or more on it is super frustrating, but that is true of pretty much any game. I’m not the type of player who enjoys banging my head against a wall for hours to get over a challenge. I will leave that for others to enjoy and keep my zen experiences.

Remakes

This seems like an appropriate time to bring up a topic like remakes. It is becoming more prevalent lately and more people have been taking notice of how many things are being remade in the last few years. One area in particular is with Disney remaking a bunch of their animated classics to be live-action instead, the forthcoming Lion King being the latest in the line. Of course remaking movies and TV shows is nothing new, it’s been happening for decades, and before that it was books, music, and other theatrical works. There aren’t any forms of media that are safe from the desire to remake or retell stories in order to bring it to a modern audience (with maybe the exception of podcasts, but that might change with time).

The quick version of my opinion on this practice is that I think it’s fine and people have the right to do it, but it also sucks because 99% of the time the remake is worse than the original. Sure you can say that I just think that because nostalgia makes me think the original is better, but it appears to be true for most people, so it begs the question of why it’s being done. Classics are classics for a reason, and remaking them is just going to be difficult to win people over because of that nostalgia. It is usually a lot easier to take something that was originally bad, but had enough good parts that you can turn it into something worthwhile.

There is one example in particular that I want to bring up because I experienced it this week and I just can’t fathom what the purpose of it was. But I think it’s also worth talking about instances where remaking things should be encouraged.

So when I was in high school, like many other nerds and geeks my age, I got really into anime. I was allured by the idea that animation could be for adults as much as for kids, so I went all in and consumed as much as I could. Like most mediums, most of it wasn’t actually good, but I still got a lot of good out of that period of my life. In particular, there are several Japanese bands and musicians that I still follow and listen to because of the credits music for many of those shows.

As I’ve mentioned many times this year, one of my goals is to listen to 200 new albums this year. During my travels through the artists I’m trying to catch up on, I listened to the whole catalog of Asian Kung-Fu Generation, who originally rose to fame based on their openers for Naruto and Fullmetal Alchemist in the early 2000s. What I love about AKG is that they are good at blending pop and trance rock, with a few hard rock pieces thrown in here and there. Really catchy and easy to listen to.

Well I found out this week that there were two albums I hadn’t heard yet, their latest that came out last year and… a remake of their second album.

What?

I could’ve understood if it was a remixing or remastering of the original recordings, but no, they re-recorded the entire album, more than a decade after it came out. It sounds significantly different from the original and, frankly, it sounds a lot worse.

I will use my favorite song from the album, Loop & Loop, to demonstrate what is different between the two. The video is kinda lame, but we’re focusing on the song here.

Pretty catchy right? That was the original one, the next one is the new one.

Structurally the songs are the same, they didn’t add in an intro or extra bridge parts like they did with some other songs on the remake. But you can probably tell where I have issues with it. First thing, it just isn’t as catchy as the original, despite being the same beat and chords. I think this is because it’s over-processed, you can tell the original is more raw and that lends to the pop-iness of it. Second thing, the new one feels like they didn’t actually want to perform it. It’s restrained and lacks energy. When you watch the chorus in the original music video, you can see the band having a good time. I just don’t see that in my mind while listening to the remake.

And the entire album feels like that, it doesn’t have the same enthusiasm and energy as the original. Which leads me to wonder exactly why it was made in the first place. It’s not like the original version had production issues, it sounds just as good as any album made today would. I find it hard to believe that it was a passion project because it simply doesn’t sound like it is, though that is likely the real reason. It could’ve been a corporate decision to have something released between normal albums, but the timing doesn’t work out for that either, it was only a 3 year gap between albums, which is pretty normal. I’m sure they have explained the reason somewhere, but it’s probably only in Japanese, which I can’t read.

In any case, I have no idea why this album exists. As a musician, I totally get the appeal of redoing something that you were not happy with. Before my band went in to record our second album, we debated if we should devote some time to re-record one or two of our songs from the first album because that album had a lot of issues and we had grown a lot as musicians since then. But we decided that our new stuff was more important and the first album should be treated like the time capsule it is. Besides, as a band you are able to “re-record” your music all the time through live performances, which is great and many fans will prefer those recordings anyway.

So, if you are in a band where you feel it is justified to redo an album that you love because the original production was bad, I’m all for that. I think that is a good reason to remake something. Similarly, remaking books is also totally fine when the original has a bad printing or is full of errors. That’s why second, third, fourth, and so on editions of books are somewhat common (especially in the field of technical/learning books).

But I am generally not a fan of other forms of remakes. Doing it just to be different from the original and try to appeal to a different audience (hi Disney) is sad and I don’t personally support it. I also don’t care for so-called homages, where someone will remake something out of love for the original. It always has that feeling that the artist(s) think they know better than the original creator(s). Borrowing ideas and applying them to original works is a better way to go. This is exactly why I also don’t support fanfiction or covers. Regardless of how good it might be, that effort could’ve been put towards something new instead. You could argue that it’s hypocritical of me to think that since I’ve spent countless hours playing guitar and drum parts of other people’s songs, but I’m not pretending to replace that original. I’m just playing along with it and trying to get better so that I can make better original stuff.

Anyway, I don’t have anything else to say about that. I just wanted to rant about that album a little. It’s disappointing and I just don’t get it.

PAX and Board Games

This post will be short and to the point because I’m late on writing it again and I again don’t have anything particular to write about. So I’m going to talk a little bit about PAX and how it’s basically morphed into a board game convention for me.

As I mentioned in my last post, PAX East was last weekend, and it was a fantastic four days in Boston, one of the better PAXes in recent memory for me. While it was my first time going to PAX East, in total it was my 17th PAX (this seems pretty impressive but it’s about par for the friend group we usually go with these days). And things have changed a lot in the time since I started going.

For example, when I first started going to PAX in 2007, there was only one show. Now there are five shows every year. The first couple PAXes in Seattle were small enough to be entirely contained in the convention center. Now it is spread out among the convention center, the Paramount, Benaroya, and four hotels. It used to be easy to get passes up to the day of the convention, now passes sell out in less than an hour (though the trend is starting to turn the other way as more people lose interest in going). And on personal level, how I interact with the show has changed a lot too.

For the first few years, when the original PAX was still pretty small, I would go with my local friends and we would basically do whatever we felt like at the time. Back then, that would usually mean going to the expo hall and checking out random games, jumping into PC freeplay to get in a few rounds of Counter-Strike, signing up for console tournaments (getting to the finals of the Guitar Hero 2 co-op tournament is still one of my best memories), rocking out at the concerts, and getting into giant games of Werewolf. I would also branch off from my friends to do panels, mostly to see live recordings of podcasts I liked.

After a few years, around 2012/2013 when getting badges to go started to get difficult, the local friend group started losing interest and we would split our time between going to the actual convention and just playing games at a friend’s house. It was also around this time that we started shifting from video games to more board games and party games as the group got bigger. While the times we had were still fun, it started to become more of a hassle trying to keep everyone together between multiple locations.

Knowing that the local friend group was slowly drifting away from the convention, I started to put more time into hanging out with another group of friends who I met through an online forum via a podcast I found back in college. It honestly felt weird at first because it seemed like I was kind of forcing my presence into their group, but they were cool with it and it became normal after a while. And now, several years later, we are good friends, and several of them live near us in NYC so we see each other even more often than before.

There were two big changes to how I do PAX because of this switch in friend groups. One, the new group goes to PAX because they want to go to PAX, so I was glad to be in the convention for the whole time again. Two, they are serious board game players, so I have gotten much more into playing board games as well. I like this change because the board gaming at PAX is generally more laid back than doing the video game content that is a lot more popular. I also know that when I go to PAX now, I’m going to get to play a bunch of new games, which helps me decide which ones are good to purchase for myself. I used to do that with video games as well, but it’s just too difficult these days to make that worthwhile.

Once we got more established with this new group, and I started making more money, we also started going to more PAXes than just the Seattle one. At this point we’ve been to all of them aside from PAX Australia at least once. And now that we live on the east coast, it’ll be easier to go to all four of the US ones each year. On top of that, in the last couple years my wife and I have both started enforcing (which is just a fancy way of saying we help run the convention as temp workers), which has been a lot more fun and rewarding than I thought it would be. Even when the job itself isn’t that fun, helping other attendees maximize their fun feels great. Enforcing also makes attending the more popular shows a lot easier since we don’t have to buy badges and we get first dibs on hotels.

The full arc, essentially, has been going from playing random video games with my local friends to a full blown board game convention, multiple times a year, with friends from around the country, and I give back to the convention by volunteering my time to make it more enjoyable for others.

I’ve also learned a lot about what kinds of board games I like thanks to playing them so much. While I like a bunch of different kinds, my favorites tend to fall into two broad categories. The first is card games where you’re building up some kind of engine that accelerates as you go. Deck-builders like Dominion definitely fall into this, but I feel like other card games like 7 Wonders, Splendor, and, most recently, Everdell also fit here, since you are still gaining cards in order to make it easier to get more cards. The second category is games where you have multiple options for getting victory points, to the point where figuring out the optimal play is difficult. That’s really just another way of saying: games where there are no obvious directional heuristics. These tend to be the big, meaty games with lots of bits and it takes up a bunch of table space. The best ones are the ones where your actual turn is pretty simple, you just need to figure out how to best use it. The two games at PAX East that best fit this category were Crown of Emara and Forum Trajanum.

I don’t have a lot more to say about this, so I’ll cut it off there. Maybe at some point I’ll do more of a deep dive review on a board game I really like (I have one in mind but I need to play it more to give a real opinion).