The Diet Cycle

As some of you are probably well aware of by now, getting back on the running wagon is one of my goals for this year. At this point, almost 4 months in, I still haven’t gotten back into running regularly at all, but I am making strides towards getting the ball rolling again. On the exercise side of things, I mentioned in the 100 day update that I was considering doing Orangetheory again as a way to motivate myself, and I have since signed up and gone a couple times. I would’ve gone more, but I’ve been hampered with body problems and other things that ate up my time (excuses, excuses, I know). Of course, the other side of getting healthy is on the eating side of things, so this week’s post is about that.

To say that I have trouble sticking with diets is an understatement. It’s also universal among people in today’s world of food excess. I definitely fall into the camp of finding a diet that looks interesting, trying it out for a while, seeing results, and then slipping back into lazy mode once I’ve reached my goal.

To help give context for this monologue, I’ve provided a nice graph that shows my weekly average weight over the last 6+ years, starting in 2013 when I started taking daily measurements.

Average Weight Over Time.png

I really wish I had measurements all the way back to 2008, after I graduated from college, since it would show an equally impressive dip and climb back up to where the data starts. This post is going to cover essentially three different periods of time where I was able to make big gains, and then immediately fall off the wagon again, concluded with a look at what’s I’m going to be attempting this time around.

Before I start, it is important to note here that according to most estimates I’ve been able to find on the subject, the ideal weight for my size is around 195-200 lbs. That’s for a 6’4” guy, big frame, around 12% body fat.

First Cycle

As mentioned, I don’t have exact data from 2008-2012, but I mostly remember how it went. When I graduated college and moved back home (not having a job yet), I weighed around 215-220 lbs. The exact number isn’t that important, the significant part is that I gained around 30 lbs during those 4 years away from home, partly from time in the gym, but mostly because being a student means a poor lifestyle of ramen, potstickers, mac n’ cheese, chicken nuggets, pizza, and burger patties on toast.

Since I was living at home and had a bunch of time to fix this problem, I was able to undertake a pretty rigorous exercise plan. It’s not around anymore, but back then there was a website called I Want Six Pack Abs or something like that, and my best friend and I decided to give it a go. It consisted of six workouts per week, three days on strength training (for 30-60 min depending on number of exercises) and three days on cardio (30 min or less, focused on sprint intervals), plus some guidelines on what to be eating.

Food wise, the guide wasn’t too far off what many diets recommend these days. Meats and vegetables, some healthy grains, and allowed for desserts that consisted of applesauce or cottage cheese with berries. I also remember eating a lot of nuts between meals since the plan recommended smaller, more frequent meals that is common among athletes.

This strict routine lasted for almost 4 months, basically until I royally messed up my left elbow such that I couldn’t do half of the exercises anymore (and my elbow still has never fully recovered from this). But by the time this happened, I was able to get back under 200 lbs, so it was a success.

What happened after that? It took a while, but without the exercise I couldn’t maintain that weight, and my eating habits slowly got worse after I moved out on my own. I tried to get back into it a few times over the next few years, but it never stuck, so I ballooned back up to my post-college weight and beyond, as you can see from the graph.

Second Cycle

Now that I can use the graph, it is pretty obvious where the second cycle happened. There’s basically a peak around June 2013, then a consistent fall for almost a year into April 2014, holding steady for a few months, then another drastic drop from November 2014 to my ideal weight in the Spring of 2015.

The two main factors for the first drop are both exercise related. One, I started working at Amazon in September 2013, which meant that I started walking to work instead of driving. That alone had a huge impact on my mobility and how I felt. Two, I also started running in June, followed by joining Orangetheory shortly after starting at Amazon. I probably also made some diet adjustments to help fuel the new exercise, but I can’t remember exactly. It really was mostly just getting back into the habit of pushing my body.

The second drop was entirely diet related as I plateaued from exercise alone. November 2014 is when I heard about and immediately started trying the Bulletproof Diet. These days I have my doubts about the full efficacy of this diet since it seems to rely quite heavily on products that they conveniently sell, but at the time I was all in. And while I didn’t do the full Bulletproof Coffee since I generally dislike coffee, I stuck to the rest of it really well.

And the results definitely showed. My weight immediately started going down again and I cut off another 15 lbs in 4 months. However, maintaining the full diet is really difficult because of the limitations, so I didn’t stick with it much longer after I got down to that ideal weight. As I said before, I fall off the wagon quite easily.

Third Cycle

After falling off that diet for a few months, and seeing my weight creep back up again, I tried to find another diet that I felt would be easier to maintain with fewer restrictions. And I did find one that appealed because it was more about cycling through different modes of eating rather than limiting foods, so you would fast one day and then eat a bunch, followed by eating less again, cycling through different ratios of protein versus carbs versus fats, and so on. That also worked for a bit as long as I stuck with it, getting back down to 200 lbs again in early 2016. But again, it ultimately didn’t sync well with my normal life, so it lasted probably the shortest of any diet I’ve tried. I’m also not sure if the diet itself caused the weight loss or if it was just me focusing on healthy foods again.

And from there you can see the slow creep back up to where I’m at right now, hovering around 230 lbs. There are a few spikes along the way there and they are directly correlated with me quitting on my long-distance running due to foot injury, me moving away from downtown Seattle to a more suburb-like area (limiting good food options and walking), and me parting with Orangetheory because it got too inconvenient to attend. But even with all that I did seem to manage keeping the weight under control for a long while until I left Amazon in August 2018, at which point I became even more sedentary than before.

Fourth Cycle

That leads us to today where I’m aiming to start yet another cycle. I have no delusions that I will be able to lose the weight and keep it off forever, that’s just not how I operate. But if I’m going to fluctuate within a range, I’d rather it be around 200-210 instead of 225-235 like I am now.

So here’s what new. As I mentioned at the beginning, Orangetheory is back again, though I’m not planning to be as intense with it as I was before. Previously I would do 3-4 days a week, now I’m aiming for just 2, and try to get in a run on the weekends. Since my goal for the year is to run a half-marathon in under 2 hours, I need to be doing those longer runs at least once a week. Realistically the farthest distance I can get in at an Orangetheory class is about 2 miles, so that doesn’t cut it.

For my diet, I’m trying something pretty new. Not in the food I’m eating, I’m going to be attempting a close-to-keto diet, which is pretty similar to the Bulletproof stuff I did years ago that worked really well. No, what’s new is that I’m taking the super lazy route and having all my meals prepped by someone else. If I look back on my history of diets, the easiest time I had sticking to something was during those months after college when I lived at home. All I had to do was tell my parents what I was trying to do and they helped make it work. As soon as I was on my own, bad habits crept back in.

So this time I’m going to take myself out of the equation as much as possible, just eat pre-made meals with the right keto components and only involve myself when I feel like it. Yes, it is a little more wasteful and more expensive than doing it myself, but overall it’s still going to be a lot cheaper than what I’m doing now, which is going out 90% of the time because I’m lazy.

I don’t think this is something I can keep up long-term, but I’m going to do it for a few months, see how it goes, and then make adjustments if I find myself wanting to cook more. I’ve found over time that it’s easier to make good decisions when you’re already in a good place, hence why I eat so much bad stuff right now.

Hopefully things work out well this time around, and I’m sure I’ll have an update every month or two on how things are going.

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.

Goals Update: 100 Days

As I promised at the 50 day mark, it is time for the 100 day update on how the goals are progressing. I probably won’t take as long to go over them this time around, so this will be short and sweet. This is everything up to April 10.

Run a Half-Marathon in Under 2 Hours

Still the area where I’m behind the most at this point. I have managed to do three runs in the first 100 days, which is pretty bad. My eating habits also haven’t resulted in any significant body change, though it is definitely better than it was. Still eating too much and not cooking at home enough, but getting in more healthy and less bad foods.

The hard part right now isn’t that I don’t have the time, since I do have time. I just don’t think about it most days, so I need to start setting reminders and making sure that I don’t make other obligations for when I get home on the days I should do a run.

One option I’m considering is that there is an Orangetheory Fitness next to our train station, which I used for a several years in Seattle until it became too inconvenient. Positives with this option is that you have to go to the classes or forfeit money, which creates incentive. The workouts also balance cardio and strength training, and I do feel like I need both to make any real progress. Just need to figure out what time works best if I go this route. In any case, I need to do something soon or I won’t have enough time to train up.

Publish a Post Every Week

No real change here, I have managed to have a post for every week, even if they arrive a week or two late. This is week 15, and you can see that there are exactly 15 posts in the column to the right within 2019.

The biggest struggle has continued to be thinking of topics to write about. This is mostly due to not having as much time to work on things to review as I’d anticipated. I suppose this is also partially due to having ideas for posts I want to write about, but not willing to do so without having enough data/experience to give a worthwhile opinion. Like, I could talk about my time with VR, but I’ve only spent like 5 hours with it, which isn’t much. I really want to talk about some board games, but with only a couple plays I can’t say that I’ve really engaged with them (which is partially why last week’s post happened).

On the plus side, with my schedule more settled and fewer trips coming up, I have time locked down to do the writing, so I have been getting more consistent at being on time.

Listen to 200 New Albums

As of day 100, I have listened to 33 new albums. That means I’ve almost tripled the number since the last update, but still only 1/6 of the total I need. Considering that we’re only a little more than three months in, I’m positive about the trend.

What has been helping is that instead of forcing myself to follow a set list of albums, I’ve been jumping around between different artists and just going through their whole discography, making note of the new stuff. That was always the plan, but I’m okay with going with what I want to hear rather than doing a purely alphabetical journey. On the other hand, what hasn’t been helping is that I still have to try to keep caught up on podcasts, which eats into music time. My office is also not conducive to consistent listening since interruptions are constant.

Since the last update, a couple albums have stood out as worth repeat listening. Rubber Factory by The Black Keys, Favourite Worst Nightmare by The Arctic Monkeys, and Queen II by Queen (duh). I already liked all those bands beforehand, but these albums were new to me and I keep thinking about them.

Aside from those new ones, I’m also still giving Dreams in Space (my band’s album) a lot of listens, plus I’ve re-remembered how much I love the album Origami Eyes from my friends in American Island, so that’s also eating up some time. But, gotta do what you love.

Make a Focusing/Quitting Habit

In the last update I mentioned that I wasn’t sure where I was with this, and I’ve had to make some adjustments to make it work better. I’m still tracking books (should read every day) and audiobooks (should listen every work day) the way I was before. Incidentally, the percentages for focusing on those are currently 65% for books (better) and 65% for audiobooks (slightly worse).

The games have completely fallen off because I realized it wasn’t actually what I should be focusing on. I kept having other things I needed to do, so what I decided to go with instead was simply marking if I got my focus activity done or not. Each day I determine what that activity is going to be, and then do it (or not if I get distracted). Some of these activities are games, but some are writing these posts, learning new skills, and doing things with my wife. It has made it a lot easier to make sure that the activities I want to do get more equal time, as well as making it less frustrating to see myself not getting things done (because I am getting things done!).

Back on the quitting side of things, I still haven’t encountered anything that I’ve wanted to drop yet. The audiobook from last time (Gone Girl, which I ranted on a few weeks ago) was able to survive the axe. There are a couple more things on the block now though, so we’ll see again what happens. The thing is that right now I’m doing enough different things that I haven’t had a chance to get a full experience of anything.

Alright, that’s pretty much it. Obviously I need to keep going in the areas that are going well, and I really need to get the exercise kicked up a notch. Another update will come at the end of June.

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).

My Perpetual Games

Games are on my mind as my wife and I head to Boston for PAX East this week, and this post came out of thinking about how I try to prioritize game time in my life. Games have always been my first love when it comes to hobbies, I quickly became obsessed with them during my pre-school years and the desire to play everything I can has burned ever since. And recently I have been thinking about how much time I should continue to devote to what I like to call my perpetual games.

There are basically three kinds of games for me. One, the games I tend to play once and enjoy, but not enough to warrant a replay. A good recent example is Spider-Man, which I reviewed a couple months ago. I played the heck out of that game, and I eagerly await a potential sequel, but I've done everything there is to do, so I feel no need to revisit it. Two, the games I enjoy so much that I think about replaying them often. The Uncharted games are all like this for me. I just love the cinematic quality of them so much that I will gladly experience them over and over again. Other examples are old Mario and Zelda games, the gameplay is so good in them that it’s still satisfying just to get to the end. And three, the games that I play consistently for years, mostly because I'm trying to get better at them.

I think most people who play games have or have had at least one perpetual game. For many people my age, World of Warcraft was (or still is) that game. Competitive games with high skill caps also tend to become perpetual games for people, games like Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, Madden, League of Legends, Starcraft, and so on. Games that are so good that you never want to stop playing them, or games where you want to be the best you can be against other players. They also tend to be games that you can't actually finish because there's no specific end goal.

For me, I've really only had three games that I would consider to be perpetual games, and two of them are really series of games rather than just a single one.

The first, and by far the longest perpetual game for me, has been the Rock Band series. I could also include the Guitar Hero series in that since it started my rhythm game obsession. But even if you dismiss the GH games, I played Rock Band 1/2/3 for a full decade before I finally had to give it up moving to New York. Even then, I do still have the game and all the connectors needed to play it, I just don't have the instruments anymore.

The Rock Band games are super important to me for several reasons. The most obvious one is that I am literally a musician today because of it. I straight up learned to play drums because of Rock Band, and I used that skill to create two albums of original music with some of my best friends. That alone makes the Rock Band series one of the best things that's ever happened to me. And aside from the drums, it also helped with sparking my current interests in picking up guitar and piano as well.

The other great thing that Rock Band did for me was introduce me to a ton of music that I wouldn't have tried otherwise. My first exposure to one of my favorite bands, Coheed and Cambria, was through Rock Band. That's the one that stands out the most, but there have been a bunch of bands that I got into because of the games. Bands like Dragonforce, Dream Theater, The Fratellis, Kaiser Chiefs, and even Rush.

And when it comes right down to it, playing drums and seeing myself get better and better at it over the years, there is nothing like that. Being able to rock out to a bunch of my favorite music while doing so is just icing on the cake. It's only been a few months since I had to give up the drumming for the foreseeable future, but I think about it everyday.

The second perpetual game on my list is helping me through the withdrawals though. It's not really a surprise, given my history with Guitar Hero and Rock Band, that Rocksmith (mostly the 2014 version) is something I latched onto right away when it came out and I've been playing it regularly since. Rock Band 3 tried to do the learn-to-play-real-guitar thing, but it ultimately didn't work for me and I switched over to Rocksmith immediately. And just like how I learned to play drums from Rock Band, I can honestly say Rocksmith has done a ton to make me an okay guitar player. I will never be as good at guitar as I am at drums, but it's still a lot of fun and rewarding seeing the progress. At this point, I basically have to take what I can get, and I try to devote at least one day a week to playing this so I don't get rusty. I'm still waiting for the similar killer game for learning piano (there are game-like apps for piano available, but they just don't get the feel right).

The third perpetual game is the only actual multiplayer game I've ever tried to get good at. I've always been more of a single-player, narrative-focused gamer, so multiplayer games come and go quickly for me. I learned through high school and college that I'll never be a good FPS or RTS player, and I don't enjoy sports games. In the competitive gaming scene, that doesn't leave much else aside from fighting games, and I'm even worse at those than the above (though I do like them). But I did manage to find one game that I really like to play and want to get better at: Heroes of the Storm.

I've been playing HotS pretty consistently for over two years at this point, and I still think about it all the time. I spend a good amount of time watching other people play it and talk about it to try to get better at it. Like other MOBAs, the skill of playing different characters is only one part of the equation, you need to be good at reading the situation as well, which is where watching other people play helps a lot. That being said, I'm still not very good at the game. If my ranking is to be believed, I'm in the bottom 25% of the player base, but it doesn't bother me too much. The game is still fun whether my team is winning or losing, each game is a learning experience and I get better.

The only real problem with playing HotS is that it has been on the ropes in terms of whether it will be around much longer. The team working on it was cut quite a bit and all of the official tournament play around the game went away. This has caused a large part of the player base to move on. The way I look at it, I still like playing the game, and I will just keep doing that until it goes away or I find something better. If it does happen to die, then I guess my time with MOBAs will be done for a while and I will get some time back for other things.

There are a few other games in my sphere right now that could potentially be perpetual games, but don’t quite hit that sweet spot I’m looking for. I'm working through Destiny 2 when I can, but I feel that I'm going to be done with that as soon as the story content is done. Returning to a post from a while ago, Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms and Neverwinter are also still very much in my rotation. I don't think Idle Champions can ever be a perpetual game because it's not much of a game to begin with, there is no getting better at it. It will be a game I keep having in the background until there's nothing left to do in it, and then I will move on. Neverwinter is still early enough that it could become that MMO I play for a long time, but I doubt that as well for similar reasons as Destiny 2. Once the sense of progression ends, I will probably move on to something else (maybe actually play WoW?).

Anyway, there wasn't much of a real point to this post, just needed something to write about. I have a few things in the hopper that I hope I can write about in the coming weeks.