Continuing the theme of ‘things coming to an end’ that I discussed last month, early on in July I resigned from the job I’ve had the longest – as a principal examiner of the National Computer Centre. That position, under various other names and guises, is one that I have had since 2011. They were planning to issue new contracts that halved the pay and ‘made up the difference’ by having a whole load of extra responsibilities attached to the role. You’d get the same pay by doing approximately three times as much work. As you might imagine that wasn’t a great change in terms and conditions and I decided it was no longer for me.
It’s a little bit sad, but these things are almost always for the best in the long run.
The NCC was once a great company offering valuable educational qualifications around the world, but I don’t think that’s the case any more. I’ve tried to do what I can from the inside to change things but it’s clear that economic pressures are such that the whole thing is in a downwards spiral. It’s important to know when it’s time to quit. Things come to an end and that’s either at a healthy time or when it’s already too late. I think here it’s the former but any delay would make it the latter.
I’m looking on it in a positive way. It means I will have a bit more free time than I had before, but I’d like to actually use it productively. I was thinking about trying to get into actual paid freelance writing, but I have no idea how to even start with that. There’s so much competition for jobs in that space that I wonder if it’s even worth exploring. I mean, any time I have a topic on which I want to write I can just do it for Meeple Like Us.
Sure, that gets a fraction of the reads that something like Kotaku or Rock Paper Shotgun would get but on the other hand I don’t have to clear it with anyone. I certainly wouldn’t be looking to change careers – I’m pretty much trapped in academia now even if I actually wanted to leave. It just seems like it would be nice to branch out a bit. Does anyone do anything like this? Any advice on how to even get started?
One of the things I wanted to do early on in my Depth Year was address my relationship with social media, because I think that it is unhealthy. It was never the core deliverable of the process, and that’s a good thing because I can only describe progress in that area to date as abysmal. But!
This month there was a plagiarism scandal in board game media, and as is always the case I Took A Stand. That stand was costly, as it often is. I ended up on a lot of block lists, and my own became a good deal bigger.
Patreon supporters often have to cancel their pledges, and I am extremely grateful for every penny they sent our way while they could. It’s rare though that canceled pledges are ideological in nature, but that’s certainly been the case this month. A good half dozen of our long-standing supporters withdrew their pledges. Patreon exit surveys are an imprecise instrument for data gathering but silence is its own subtext in some cases. Timing too is a factor. The proximal cause is obvious.
It was inevitable this would happen at some point. And equally inevitable it will happen again in the future. Yet again I’ve been declared apostate on the grounds of my insufficient piety in the Church of Social Justice by refusing to accept or even entertain the argument that expectations on ethical behaviour are a branch of identity politics. There are real, genuine problems with regards to victimisation, double-standards and harassment online. Of course there are. However, there is a faction of board-gaming twitter that responds to any criticism of board game media with allegations of misogyny or racism. That’s corrosive. It’s the Social Media Collective That Cried Wolf and it genuinely, demonstrably damages the social justice agenda for which I am an (imperfect) advocate. The simple fact is – we clean our own house or we’ll need to deal with those that will come in and pretend to clean it for us.
Anyway, that’s a long-winded way of saying ‘Twitter was toxic and tiresome’ and it compelled me to finally do something about my time there. And really I think I probably should have done something drastic of this nature way back in January when I spoke about social media in my first diary entry.
So – I blocked Twitter on my computer. I can’t access it at all now from there. I have it on a phone instead, and my new policy is that I only respond to notifications and post content updates. I haven’t yet 100% internalised this rule and haven’t got into the habit of following it diligently. Change is a process . I’m getting better at it, but slips along the way will happen until I manage to correct my own little Internet tics . My intention from this point on is to withdraw entirely except for announcements of posts and initiatives. It will eventually result in my Twitter account being one of those tedious advertising bots that do nothing but spam posts and reply to comments about that spam. Really I think that’s for the best.
Twitter has never been a great platform for me and it’s such a facilitator of frictionless zealotry that I don’t think any real good comes of engaging with it any more. As to Facebook, at some point I lapsed into not really checking it very often all – to the point that even direct messages and notifications often go unanswered for hours, if not days. By sheer dint of neglect my relationship with that platform has become much less problematic.
Having Twitter on a phone is important because I still occasionally need to check it. Society is fractured across too many social media platforms for it to be possible to go completely cold turkey. It’s an old phone though and I haven’t installed any convenience software such as Swype so it’s a pain the hole to tweet. That’s turning out to be a fair disincentive. If I need to do something more substantive (like announce a new post) I have to go get the laptop and when I’m done I put the laptop back in its bag.
It’s all for the best. Fundamentally I’m a misanthrope anyway. I like a lot of people individually, but I don’t like people as a collective . That means I’m just not really compatible with social media because it’s full of people acting collectively. This isn’t me being self-pitying or anything – I don’t really like social media so it’s no surprise I don’t get much positive out of it. You get what you put in and what I put in is resentment. That’s completely on me.
It’s telling though that one of my fondest fantasies in an idle moment of daydreaming is that I live on an island somewhere with an overstuffed Kindle. Hard-drives crammed full of games, movies, TV shows and albums. Shelves full of board games. And absolutely no Internet connection. I once thought if I won the lottery I’d become a jovial philanthropist at the hub of a not-for-profit initiative to transform my local town into a glittering hub of gaming and socially responsible advocacy. Not so much these days. I’d use that wealth to retreat from the world. Barring a glowing blue penis and phenomenal cosmic power, I’m basically Dr Manhattan.
And yet completely counter to that…
One of the things I was really hoping to get lined up this month was a games weekend. I wanted to gather together a dozen friends for the weekend, put on some catering, and just Play Some Damn Games. And it seemed to be going pretty well too – got enough people, booked a venue, and providing games was never going to be a problem given my shelves. People filled in a Doodle poll to indicate when they were around, we set a date based on maximum availability…
… and then life happened as it always does.
It’s So Damn Difficult just to get people together in a room at a given time when you’re an adult. Real stuff gets in the way. Childcare responsibilities, unexpected work obligations, family issues, uncertain timing for other events… one by one pretty much everyone backed out of attending the weekend to the point that we had to cancel the thing and arranged a single, smaller ‘games day’ instead. I’ll talk about that next month.
Really the game weekend was an attempt to answer the question ‘Is it better to just arrange a weekend and play games versus go to a convention?’. We had bypassed UKGE this year on that basis and it was pretty disappointing that we never got our own local weekend up and running. So on one level the answer is ‘lol, no, because you’ll never manage to arrange a weekend’. Mate, everyone you know is a grown-up. Of course you’ll never manage to arrange a weekend.
Mrs Meeple and I made the decision to not have children for many reasons, but one was so that we had time and money to do things that we wanted to do. Most of our peers made different decisions and so there is a massive mismatch in calendrical flexibility. A couple of days ago we decided, on a whim, to drive to Edinburgh to go to the zoo. We spent the day there and then dinner in the evening. We can do that because the only people that need lined up there are us – we don’t need to arrange babysitters or worry about spending four or so hours in a car with children. Similarly for a weekend playing games – we just need to make a note to not organise anything else on those dates. Sometimes an inaccessibility of social capital on our end is the consequence of the inaccessibility of time for others.
Partially it’s my fault – my main hobby, at least at the moment, is one that is fundamentally tied up in the availability of other people. That’s not a wise path to take when you’re over forty. Maybe we just need to make friends with some children but I suspect that’s probably also not the wisest course of action we could take.
I had actually budgeted some cash to host the gaming weekend. It was going to be an MLU expense because I was essentially planning to use it as an opportunity to play some of the games that I find it difficult to get to the table. It seemed a friendlier way to do it than say ‘I will literally pay people some money if they come play games with me’ and also one that didn’t leave quite such a large bruise on my self-esteem.
I have numerous boxes on my shelves that need to be played a few more times before I can get a review out. They either require larger numbers of players than I can easily mobilise during the semester, or require too much time to play, or they thrive at player counts that are awkward to meet. Hiring the hall for two days was going to cost £120. Lunches and dinner would be about £210. We were able to put up a couple of people but otherwise travel and accommodation was up to people attending. When we last went to the UKGE the total cost was about £600 so this seemed like a much better deal for a much more convenient and refined gaming opportunity. At UKGE we spent a lot of time wandering around and waiting, and that’s not something you need to do when the venue is in your control.
So we didn’t need to spend that money, but that was a problem in and of itself…
The end of the financial year is July and as such that £400 needed to be spent before The Government ended up taking a £80 slice out of our scant operating capital. As I said last time (when I got mixed up about the date of the end of the financial year) I intended at the end of the Depth Year to buy new review material in January 2020 and to focus on only those games I already owned. However, I resent the government profiting from my self-growth project when they’re just going to put it towards pro-Brexit propaganda. As such, I ‘broke’ the ‘no new purchases’ rule again to get stockpile review material.
As with the last time this happened, they stay in shrink wrap on the shelf and won’t be opened until next year. I will make occasional exceptions in line with my original depth year promise – that I would be selective in balancing site responsibilities with my buying patterns. So, new games are coming in but mostly kept away from the table. They exist on my shelves only because the money has to be spent before the Tories get it. They may as well not be there for all the attention I’m paying them.
Except… not quite.
Every one of the games that enter my shelves has to displace another. I’m on a ‘one in and one out’ rule and have been for quite some time. So I’m actually shrinking my playable collection with every game that comes in. Those abandoned games will be going to the Bring and Buy at Tabletop Scotland, and currently I already have three dozen registered to go there. Some good stuff too. There might be a special feature on the one-in-one-out policy and the games that didn’t make the cut. That is – if people would be interested. I don’t know though – it might be a touch too negative to focus only on reasons why games weren’t good enough for me to keep.
But what’s actually pretty telling is the reason for some of them not making the cut is ‘Bought it cheap and was never interested enough to actually play it’. There are games that entered my house, took up residence on the shelves, and will end up in the bring and buy without me doing more than removing their shrink-wrap.
I’m now eight months into my Depth Year and I think that I’ve been successful in changing my relationship with random buying to the point that I’ll be looking to adopt something like a ‘one-in-two-out’ policy in the future for anything physical. Maybe even a one to three ratio. That’s something to investigate I think when the minimum description I’d ascribe to a game on my shelves is ‘great’. At that point, I need to start looking to aim for excellence as the minimum quality level to merit admittance.
Speaking of Tabletop Scotland – If any of you are going give me a nudge – I don’t think I’m doing anything ‘pressy’ there so Mrs Meeple and I are almost certainly going to be available at some point or another to play games and chat. Come say ‘hi’ if you see us!
I’ve given myself permission to buy some stuff there if I fancy them because it’s important to support local events like this. I want Tabletop Scotland to continue for a long time. It was a great event last year and I have no reason to assume it’ll be anything less this time. One of the reasons it didn’t sting to miss UKGE was that I have this to look forwards to.
At this point in the diaries I like to have a think about by what I was tempted during the month and see what I’m still interested in from the previous month. Here’s the wishlist as it was at the end of last month:
- Chernobyl
- Observation, from No Code
- The Terror
- The Wandering Earth
- Avengers Endgame
- Return of the Obra Dinn
- Good Omens
- Captain Marvel
- Into the Spiderverse
- Sex Education
Of those, I’m no longer particularly interested in Observation since I’ve seen some online commentary that suggests it doesn’t quite live up to the promise of Stories Untold. So that’s off the list. Everything else is going to stay, although Sex Education might not make it to the end of the year. It’s had a good run, but at the moment i just don’t really care about it at all other than ‘wow, it’s been on this list for a while’. If it doesn’t make it to the end of next month it’ll mean nothing from January survived a bout of patience. The half life of enthusiasm is not long.
During this month I was tempted by The Outer Wilds but it didn’t even last a week on the wishlist. I quite like the look of the movie Yesterday but that’s because I’m a massive fan of the Beatles rather than anything else. I doubt that’ll be anything other than an idle memory in a few months time so it’s also not going on the list. Interestingly, a game that was on my wishlist from last year, Warhammer Adepticus, is no longer on my wishlist. Not because I’m not interested but because I got it as part of the Humble Monthly subscription I still have running.
My rule is I can’t play it until next year but there’s a very real chance that simply waiting would bring a substantive portion of the games for which I am enthused into my possession without me even making an effort. Patience is sometimes more than just its own reward. Sure, the Humble Monthly is basically a subscription service for pointless consumerism but it has the benefit of being cheap and giving me games I can send to other people. I often like doing that more than I like playing a lot of them.
I think this is the first month then that nothing is getting added to the list. Maybe it’s just a quiet time of year, although Gen Con is coming up and honestly there isn’t much there that I’m overly excited about. Megacity Oceania is probably the only one and that’s just because I really like Hub Games. I hope though that this marks something of a turning point – that running these lists for seven months now has made me realise how transient my desire for things often is. How, when they’re no longer being talked about, I don’t think about them at all.
Along with an eventual two-in-one-out policy I think ‘enforced patience’ might be a mindful ‘life hack’ I adopt on a permanent basis. If I only ever buy things three or six months after they first tickle my fancy I’ll know, at the time of buying, that it’s not just hype that’s compelling me to purchase. My wishlists can go into a ‘first in, first out’ rule rather than the ‘last in, first out’ that so often dominated my purchasing,
The 2019 list then looks like this:
- Chernobyl
- The Terror
- The Wandering Earth
- Avengers Endgame
- Return of the Obra Dinn
- Good Omens
- Captain Marvel
- Into the Spiderverse
- Sex Education
The persistence or otherwise of this list’s contents is something for me to reflect upon. I’m more than half way through this Depth Year now and it’s not a bad idea to contemplate what it means for me when it all comes to an end.
Thanks for reading! Hopefully see you all next month!