February has been another success for the depth year, although not quite to the same degree as January was. Teaching has started again and so I have less energy at the end of the day to actually accomplish much. I had started watching a movie before bed, and that was really great when there was no desperate rush to be in for nine o’clock in the morning. I live in Brechin, work in Aberdeen, and that means two hours of commuting a day to get to and from the university. When I need to be in for nine it’s because I have a lecture that needs to start on the dot and that means leaving at seven in the morning to make it there on time. I’m a chronic insomniac and as such ‘being up and out at seven o’clock’ requires carefully managing sleep time for the entire week leading up to the date. It often doesn’t work anyway. More often it means ‘Just go and hope you and everyone else survives your drive’. Unfortunately ‘I’m a bit sleepy’ isn’t really considered a reason for non-attendance at work.
Anyway, movies aside I’ve been doing well in meeting my depth year goals.
I have successfully not bought any new media – I’ve not even really been particularly tempted. I’ve found myself idly window shopping in the Switch eShop but mainly in the hope something I already own in another format ends up on sale. As I said in my depth year post, format shifting is an exception to the buying moratorium. If I can bring a game to a more convenient platform that’ll just make it more likely I play it. That’s not something to do be done indiscriminately though. I didn’t really like Undertale when I tried it out (yeah, I’m the one) so I’m not keen to get it on Switch just so I can not play it there too. I don’t want format shifting to be an excuse to buy things. It has to be directed. It’s for that same reason that I don’t buy Civ VI for the Switch. The thought of having it on the go is appealing, but I usually play my Switch at home anyway so what’s really stopping me?
The diplomacy spam. That’s what’s stopping me. A different platform won’t help in that.
Social media continues to be an issue – I haven’t been nearly as successful as reducing its power on my life as I’d like. That doesn’t undermine the depth year but it does feel like a failure of will. It turns out hiding all the apps and bookmarks didn’t short-circuit muscle memory. It just led me to develop new muscle memory pathways. I’m using it less, that’s true, but it still feels I’m using it too much. It didn’t help that, on a whim, I started a new campaign on XCOM 2 and decided to live-tweet portions of it to people that had signed up to be named as soldiers in my squad. I guess that’s being done as I play but it still feels like a bad tactical decision in a war against social media habits. Anyone following along with that playthrough though will know that ‘bad tactical decisions’ is pretty much the backbone of my commanding style.
I think though that social media is making the depth year feel a little more uncomfortable than it otherwise would be. If I were on a desert island, with the things I already possess but no internet, I think I’d be perfectly happy. The problem is that social media is always abuzz with discussion about new media and if you’re not taking part in that conversation it feels a little isolating. I’m still being given lots of suggestions for things I should check out and ‘Sorry, I’m on a depth year’ seems like a brush-off to people. ‘I’ll check it out after my depth year’, likewise feels like I’m just dismissing a suggestion and that makes me feel uncomfortable. I never want people to feel like their enthusiasms are an inconvenience to me but that’s sort of what happens when you bash social media and a depth year together. It makes me feel disconnected from wider culture in a way that is entirely self-inflicted and based on external criteria of attention. I don’t feel the need to actually find new things but it makes me feel a little excluded when I see other discussing things I can’t watch or read. I’ve spoken in the past about the importance of accessibility to culture – I’m getting a little taste of the countervailing inaccessibility myself now. It helps to know I can reintegrate myself at any moment, just on a whim. Others are not so fortunate.
That said, that feeling of disconnection is not necessarily a bad thing – it gives a bit of critical distance and it provides an opportunity to observe rather than participate. It’s something of an inoculation against the Cult of the New. It makes me think about what follows the depth year – I’m hoping over the next ten months I can develop something of a permanent detachment from instantly leaping on new things. I talked about that a bit in the previous depth year diary but it has stuck with me. I’d like to build a kind of ‘lag time’ into my consumption of culture. I want to become a patient consumer – that way I’ll only ever sample the things that survive beyond the initial acceleration of popular enthusiasm. I already kind of do that for television series – I’m wary of starting a new show when it has only one season. I’ve been burned too many times before. Firefly still really hurts. If it’s on its second season without having a confirmed third I always worry about a repeat of Carnivale – a show I loved beyond the telling of it but was left permanently unsettled because it was canceled just as it was getting really good.
One other thing I mentioned last month was my intention to donate a portion of my ‘savings’ to charity. That hasn’t happened yet because it turns out charity on an ad-hoc basis is really inconvenient. When someone comes to my door collecting for a charity I usually say ‘Look, I’ll make a donation but I’m not signing up to a monthly pledge’ only to be told ‘We can’t take individual donations’. I understand all the reasons for that, but it’s just not how I like to function. I looked at how I could make an individual donation to our local food-bank but essentially what it comes down to is ‘You can’t unless you come in and talk to us’, and since that’s prominently mentioned along with the details for direct debits and the like I know how that conversation is going to go.
Luckily we know one of the people on the board of the charity so we can just pass money directly her way. I guess I just really resent being made to feel bad for saying ‘no’ to regular donations when I just want to make a (hopefully repeating) one-off. It’s such a weird model of funding – weaponized guilt that disincentivises people from donating in the first place. I want to give people money, I just don’t want to feel like an asshole for not giving money in the precise form that is most likely to lead to my over-committing. I also don’t want it to be a ‘thing’ where I go in and announce my attention to make a donation like I’m some Tesco Value Philanthropist. I want to give some money, without fuss, without coming away feeling like it was a disappointment to the charity in question.
I don’t know, maybe that’s just me. I read a book called Influence by Robert Cialdini when I was younger and it made me intensely hostile to techniques for social manipulation. It was like being taught the counter-moves to the Jedi mind-trick. You should read it.
I mentioned too in the last diary that I wanted these entries to be a record of what took my fancy during the course of the month so I could see what I still wanted once the depth year was over. So, here’s what I likely would have done this month were I not making more of an effort to focus on what I already have:
- While the first Purge movie was very dumb, it did make me want to watch the rest of them. I don’t know, there’s something very British at the moment about watching the fallout from a society that voted to inflict massive violence on itself. The weak and helpless being preyed upon by the impossibly privileged is a very 2019 British Zeitgeist,
- Not an issue for this month but looking forward a bit – the next Expanse novel (Tiamat’s Wrath) is released soon and I’ve been a little conflicted on how to deal with it. I have read every Expanse book so far and since this is a continuation of something in which I’m already invested I think I’ll read it when it comes out. It’s not starting something new as such even if it does count as ‘new media’. It’s a bit of a fudge but it’s not like I’m going to hold out on watching the new Game of Thrones season either
- I’ve had a lot of people recommending I watch Russian Doll on Netflix. I’m certainly intrigued by the idea but it’s going on the ‘leave it until 2020’ pile. However, this is one of the things I’m talking about when I say it’s hard to say ‘Thanks but I can’t watch it now’ when people make recommendations. So many people have said I should check it out but I can’t. I’m sorry, I just can’t!
- There’s a new expansion for Civilization VI and normally I buy new Civ games and expansions as a matter of course. Even if I don’t really like the game. Civ V is still my least favourite Civ game but I bought everything that was released for it because this is one of my all-time favourite game series. I really like the design of Civ VI but unfortunately the diplomacy spam makes the game virtually unplayable. Every fifteen turns or so my peaceful warmongering is interrupted by someone offering me the same terrible deal I rejected last time in the hope I’ve somehow changed my mind. It’s like Theresa May presenting Brexit plans to parliament. No Open Borders means No Open Borders, Montezuma.
- I finished reading The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross – one of the many books I had bought in a Kindle deal and never gotten around to. It wasn’t the greatest book I’ve ever read but it was a strong enough introduction to the series (The Laundry Files) that I’m pretty keen to read more. The book is about a bureaucratic civil service department that just so happens to have a remit that covers advanced mathematical theories and occult technomancy, and it’s a little bit like Neil Gaiman meets John Le Carre. With a few lovely Terry Pratchett references thrown in – that’s always going to meet with my approval. I do actually have the followup already – the Jennifer Morgue. That just goes to show that occasionally the hoarding instict of Past Michael does have its merits.
Instead, I did a reboot of watching Californication. I caught up finally with Black Mirror.
The theme of this month has been ‘returning’, and I returned to the graphical adventure Oxenfree on my Switch. As I mentioned above I also started up a new campaign of XCOM 2. I’d love to see a Switch port of this and I figured that the best way to make that happen would be to start a new playthrough on PC. I fully expect to hear about the new XCOM + XCOM2 Switch bundle in a few days as a result. You’re welcome.
Returning to old games wasn’t really part of my Depth Year plans but XCOM 2 (and XCOM itself) are games that are strong enough to merit a lot of return visits. I might even start another playthrough after this one – I have a lot of volunteers who haven’t yet made it onto the team because fatalities have been lower than I expected.
I’ve spoken a lot more about these games in the regular Patreon newsletter, so if you’re interested in my thoughts you can check there. Suffice to say though that I’ve knocked a couple of things of my todo list in terms of games and television shows but progress has been slow. It’ll get better as the semester starts to lighten up. Probably…
Last month I spoke about things I wanted that I’d see if I still wanted at the end of the year. Well, it turns out it only takes a month for interest to wane. Already I don’t care about Shipwreck Arcana, the Humble Bundle photography book set, or Marie Kondo. What will actually survive a year on the ‘to get’ list? Maybe nothing – that would actually be quite appealing. It would be nice to think that patience is all you need to inoculate yourself against the faddish excesses of Capitalism.
That’s it for February, see you all next month!