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Super Bowl Ads

23:44 04 Feb 2007. Updated: 00:45 05 Feb 2007

I’ll probably write about the game itself at some point, but wow, I thought the ads were terrible.
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Permalink 2 Comments [advertising, economics, politics, television]

Distractivities

06:35 02 Jan 2007. Updated: 20:31 27 Jun 2013

I thought of that somewhat obvious term last night, while replying to Seth’s post for December. It seems useful.

The meaning is fairly clear: things that you do less because you really want to do them and more because they distract you—either from specific things, or from life in general.

Television is a fairly obvious one. I’ve managed to eliminate that, and it’s been good. I don’t really count films and books as distractions in the same way, although they can be sometimes. But generally they seem like focused activities that have something to them (there are many caveats here, naturally).

Gaming can be a distractivity. I’ve certainly used it as such many times in my life, especially when in college, around exam time. But it doesn’t have to be that. It can be a relaxed/relaxing, fun activity. It can also be a focused, challenging flow experience, which is what I tend to strive for when playing. However, the possibility for it to be different things can be dangerous, because it becomes really easy to convince yourself you’re doing it for the focused challenge while in fact you’ve fallen deep into the distraction valley.

It’s hard to tell the difference, though. And it’s certainly hard to define a difference. I suspect, though, that you usually know the difference. When it’s a distraction activity for me, I generally know it at some level, and part of what I’m trying to distract myself from is that knowledge…

However, I’m not too worried about gaming as distractivity right now. In fact, I don’t think I’m gaming enough—I need to get more MTG practice in, and work on my focus on that game. And increasing my daily dose of DDR wouldn’t hurt either.

The main distraction activity for me right now, and one that seems like a canonical example of the category, is web surfing. I just do it too much. There’s so much interesting stuff out there… and there’s so much useful and educational material out there, too. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from surfing, and that includes a lot that I use professionally.

But. But, much of the time it’s clearly something I’m doing to distract myself. It eats up time, and more than that, it eats focus. The habit of surfing to get away from something, as a soothing balm for some unpleasant occurrence, obviously leads (like any addictive thing) to turning to it more often, and most importantly turning to it whenever difficulty is encountered. And so I find myself increasingly likely to web surf when I run into some problem that’s hard to solve (this doesn’t include cases where I am trying to find the answer to the problem online)… twenty minutes later, the problem is still hard to solve, and I’m completely unfocused, and in fact I’ve pushed my mind into a mode where it expects to skip around, dealing only with pleasing and interesting tidbits.

It’s similar to channel surfing on television, except that you are more or less guaranteed to come across something interesting and appealing and even worthwhile. There’s just too much content out there not to. And that makes it even more dangerous, because it’s like a reward for the mind: do something unfocused and distractive for a while, then you get this goodie! So you’re reinforcing behavior you want to reduce.

I’ve cut down on a lot of the distraction activity. No television, and I spend a lot more time engaged in projects like writing and coding. These are good trends, ones I intend to continue. But sooner or later, I suspect that it’ll be necessary to proscriptively alter my web surfing habits.

Permalink Comment [consciousness, distraction, flow, games, personal, psychology, tech, television, web-surfing]

Embarrassment Comedy

17:13 27 Dec 2006. Updated: 23:19 16 Jan 2007

I’ve always had a tough time with it. I can see that it’s funny, but it’s also just painful. I can only take so much of it before having to stop.
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Permalink 1 Comment [comedy, personal, television]

Interrogation Scenes

21:43 03 Dec 2006. Updated: 13:27 08 Apr 2009

I re-read Powers today (and it’s still simply fantastic), and then read the interview that Oeming and Bendis did for the fiftieth issue. In it, Bendis mentions that he loves interrogation scenes, that they’re a lot of fun because you get to lock two characters in a room and see what happens.
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Permalink Comment [comics, film, law, television, writing]

AFBH Wrapup

13:45 05 Nov 2006

I’ve finished the run of Annotated Fantasy Bedtime Hour posts, having done one every day for thirty-five days. Julie, Heatherly and Jenn plan five more episodes, and I intend to cover those when they show up online.
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Permalink 3 Comments [annotated-fantasy-bedtime-hour, criticism, e-prime, fantasy-bedtime-hour, television, writing]