In the 2005 sfmagic Player of the Year race, I stayed in contention until the second-last week, and then only dropped out of contention because I had to miss the final draft. In this year’s race, I have very little hope of even making it into the top five.
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What separates the two? The question has some hidden depths—especially after reading Play Money last weekend, which details the world of trading virtual assets in MMORPGs. Also, I spent my weekend happily fascinated by JavaScript challenges that a lot of people would have difficulty distinguishing from the “normal work” of a web developer.
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I seem to find it difficult to remain calm when losing at games. Not always, more casual games rarely disturb me. But games I feel competitive about, well, there I have trouble. I become emotionally involved, and when things go against me, I turn surly.
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A few years ago I read a book called Undoing Yourself. I probably need to re-read it, and remember that it had a bunch of suggestions for “reprogramming” the self (or structuring your consciousness, if you want to put it another way) that I felt were probably useful (but didn’t get around to actually applying). It also had an intro by Robert Anton Wilson in which he stressed that if you wanted to be good at something, you should do it every day.
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Happiness is a topic I consider relatively often. Most of my musings about flow, structured consciousness, focus, and so on have the implicit goal of increasing happiness. Over the last few months I’ve come across a few articles on the subject that interested me.
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I believe in free will, and the ability of the individual to make free choices. However, I do think that there are obvious limitations on this ability, and do not believe in what I term “trivial” free will.
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Several months ago, I posted about unplugging the cable feed from my television to see if that would help me watch less of it. It did, to the extent that I stopped watching television entirely. I just didn’t have enough of a desire to do so, and the few minutes of effort required to plug the cable feed back in was enough to put me off.

Soon afterwards I decided that I really didn’t need to pay my cable company $50/month for a service I wasn’t using at all, and I cancelled the service. So I haven’t watched any television at home since April, and almost none elsewhere, either. It’s around in bars and so on, and when it is there it’s hard for me to ignore it, but I don’t have much of a desire to resume the service.

Sporting events have been the hardest. Anything else on that I want to watch I know I’ll probably enjoy more on DVD (e.g. Lost). Sports, on the other hand, makes most sense live. Baseball season has started again, and the NBA Finals were apparently excellent this year (I really thought that Miami would lose that series, showing what little I know). Then there were the two Nadal–Federer Grand Slam finals, both of which I really would have liked to watch. Especially the French Open. And then there’s the World Cup. I didn’t watch a single match. Which I do regret a little, because I’m sure there was a lot of good football there.

I think it’s better that I don’t have cable. (Which means I don’t have any television at all, since my place doesn’t get an aerial signal.) I clearly don’t miss the sports that much—or I would have made the effort to go watch them elsewhere—and in return I get a lot of time I would otherwise waste. When I do watch things, they’re things (usually on DVD) that I want to watch, as opposed to things I’m watching through inertia.

It’s probably not unconnected to the amount of reading I’m doing, either. Between escapist television and escapist reading, I think I prefer the reading.

“Morning pages” are a practice from The Artist’s Way. The idea is that you write every day, preferably in the morning. You don’t show the writing to anyone, and what it is doesn’t matter at all, as long as you write enough.
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Not quite a desert, perhaps, but I somehow felt a nod to Baudrillard was appropriate. Whenever I’m about to leave a place I’m established in, I feel as if the departure were unreal, illusory. This happens more strongly when my destination is another place that I am also somewhat established in (trips between Dublin and San Francisco fit this category perfectly). The feeling that the place I am about to go is somehow not real clings to me for a few days before I leave, getting stronger as departure nears. There is a corresponding other feeling, which is that the place I am in feels “more real”, in contrast to where I’m going. I start to feel as if I am more grounded where I am, more connected to where I am, as if I “should be” where I am, and not elsewhere.
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I randomly found these two categories on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Logical_fallacies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cognitive_biases

There’s a lot of really great reading in there, and in fact I feel like *everyone* should read all of them. Especially the logical fallacies. I mean, wow, how much better would the world be if people were less swayed by emotional manipulation? And if everyone were more aware of their own biases?

I also came across a good explanation of the Monty Hall problem while skimming the Gambler’s fallacy.

I decided on Saturday to unplug the cable feed from my TV. I haven’t been watching a lot of television, but I have been drifting into it, especially when I’m tired.

I don’t want to get rid of the TV entirely, since I use it for DVDs and DDR (and, in theory, other PlayStation games). I don’t necessarily want to get rid of my cable feed either, since I do occasionally want to watch stuff on it. But unplugging it is an attempt to make sure that I only watch television when I want to watch television… seems to be working so far.

So what’s wrong with watching television? Nothing, really. Except that when I’m not really enjoying it, then what’s the point? Why do something that isn’t enjoyable, acts as a soporific, isn’t productive, and is apparently really bad for you? That doesn’t seem to be a good idea.

Whenever I mentioned the ill effects of television to Juliana, she would always ask if, therefore, watching movies/series on DVD was also bad for you, by implication. I usually said no, but clearly didn’t have a convincing reason for this (else she wouldn’t have kept asking, presumably). Having thought about it a little more, I think the answer is engagement and enjoyment. After a good movie, or an episode of some excellent series, I feel engaged with it, I feel like I want to watch another one (if it’s an episode, less so with movies), and I feel like I’m really thinking about it. None of which is really true when just watching cable television. There are exceptions, but those seem to be rather rare. And the advertising really takes away a huge amount of the potential for engagement. So the difference is really between active engagement and passive viewing. Even though they’re both passive (it’s a passive medium), one is clearly different from the other, and that’s most evident in how I feel after doing one, versus how I feel after doing the other.

Anyway, it seems to make a lot of sense that I should only watch television when I actively want to, hence the unplugging of the cable. I’ll see how it works out.

I came up with this the other day. I don’t agree with it 100%, but I like the sound of it:

There is no talent. There is only struggle and focus.

I’m reading The Evolving Self, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, at the moment, and it’s definitely helping my mental state. Flow did that also—both are excellent for reminding me not merely that great achievements are possible but that the pursuit of happiness and fulfillment are based on organizing the self, and that such organization is clearly within the grasp of just about everyone. This particular passage stood out to me today:

The normal condition of the mind is chaos. Only when involved in a goal-directed activity does it acquire order and positive moods. It is not surprising that one of the worst forms of punishment is to place a person in solitary confinement, where only those survive who can discipline their attention without depending on external props. The rest of us need either an involving activity or a ready-made package of stimuli, such as as book or a TV program, to keep the mind from unraveling.

—190. Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi. The Evolving Self. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. ISBN: 9780060921927.

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