God morgon allihopa!
Oh my word, is it December already? This is it then – the final stretch. The last mile of the marathon. Bottom of the ninth. Injury time in the cup final.
Uh.
Last innings of the wicket?
I’m not really a sporty person so perhaps this was a bad set of metaphors with which to begin. I’m sorry.
Anyway, November feels like it’s been a bit of a cheat because not only did I not break the Depth Year rules, I also didn’t have time to even think about breaking them. It’s been an astoundingly busy month that got busier and busier the closer we got to the 29th since that was the day we were permanently leaving Scotland. Really though, the 27th was the real deadline for getting everything done because that was the day we were vacating our house. Except if you think about it the real deadline was the 18th of November because that’s when all our furniture got taken away But you know, now I think about it…
It’s been a busy month, is what I’m saying.
The way I tend to prep for these diaries (yes, I do prep, believe it or not) is by keeping a Google document that notes themes, particular media I wanted to talk about, and my general feelings with how the month is going. The first entries in that document for November look weird and alien because the second half of the month was so hectic The first bullet point I have is about ‘the artificiality of hype’ and how over the year I don’t really feel like there’s anything I have genuinely missed out on. Looking at it from his side of a move though it seems like a concern of a halcyon and oddly self-absorbed time. Yeah, mate – I don’t feel like I’ve missed out on anything either but that’s because all conscious thought has been replaced with a permanent dull hum of exhaustion.
It is odd though how little this year of enforced non-consumption has mattered in terms of ‘stuff to watch’ or ‘stuff to read’. I’ve remarked a few times in this diary series that I’ve occasionally felt a little left out of online discourse but once you get over that it’s largely plain sailing. This isn’t an original observation or anything but I realize more and more that what I was driven by was a hype-cycle rather than genuine excitement for the thing being hyped. When you’re not part of that cycle everything just seems so… temporary. The list of things about which I’m still excited has been curated on a monthly basis and you’ve all seen it happening. It’s… surprisingly succinct after eleven months. It’s shocking really – a year of not being able to start anything new and I can blast through a big chunk of this wish-list over a long weekend. Is that all a year has to offer, really?
I honestly believe this year has been a psychic detox for me. Not only have I not bought anything new (remember, format shifting was allowed) I think I’ve even lost the thrill of buying, Once upon a time I would just get things on a whim. Now it takes a conscious effort to really want to pick up something that I don’t need. Part of that has been linked to the move itself. So much went into the bin rather than into a box because in the end every kilogram of weight had to be accounted for. Every square inch had to come from a budget. It’s a bit like being a payload specialist at NASA, except not in any way that actually matters other than the frantic obsession over the minutiae of physicality. As such, every time we managed to give away a book, a DVD or a piece of furniture it was like a weight being removed from our inventory and my mind.
Everything we own now is something that was consciously chosen. Everything I buy over the next month is something that is actively needed. The balancing act of ‘weight to necessity’ means that sometimes you need to consider ‘Is it worth bringing this or should I rebuy it at the other side’. I have a list of things there that includes everything from pasta dishes to bookcases. The mindfulness of it all is refreshing and it feels centered. We probably could have just waved a hand at the house and said ‘Pack it all!’ – we came in well under our allowance of space for the movers. We were at less than 80% of the total 25 cubic metres we were allocated. I’m happier we did this though, and not only because our new Gothenburg apartment is half the size of our old house in Brechin. We likely need to cut even further with regards to the stuff we brought.
Oh by the way – anyone want to buy a house in Brechin? It’s a pretty good house and I’ll miss it a bit.
A lot of what we chucked though was just… stuff. Cables for electrical equipment we didn’t have any more. Electrical equipment for which we no longer had any of the cables. Stupid junky toys from Loot Crates gone by. A computer that I was ‘totally going to set up as a server at some point’. Lots of rubbish that I had accumulated when I was a member of Amazon Vine. Clothes we never wore. Bedding we never used. Bean bag chairs. Nerf guns. Hot nonsense in various forms.
We have given away an awful lot of things this month, and it’s been really great. To begin with our friends would say ‘Are you sure? Are you really sure?’, and we’d need to reassure them that anything that didn’t go to them was going to a skip somewhere. By the end of the process we’d beaten them down. They’d just nod mutely and accept the unending list of randomness that got sent their way. ‘Hey, do you want this kettle? How about these cups? HOW ABOUT A HUGE BOOKCASE? A mini fridge? Another mini fridge? AN ARMCHAIR??’
I think in the end they realized that every thing they took was a thing we didn’t need to drag away off 20 miles to our nearest recycling centre. Honestly this move would have been so much more difficult were it not for their indulgence.
I said at the start of this depth year that I was going to make a big dent in my various media piles, through one means or another. At that point I hadn’t realized that the way I was going to do it was with an international move. By my estimate we gave away, or donated to charity, about 1500 books, 400 DVDs, about £2500 in various electrical devices, furniture and miscellaneous bric-a-brac. It sounds like it should feel like a massive loss but it really doesn’t. It feels like a spiritual spring clean. For the week leading up to our move Pauline kept asking ‘Do we need this \?’ and I’d keep replying ‘If you haven’t needed it up until now, get rid of it’. Before the move I might have thought of our house as Aladdin’s Cave of Wonders. Now I kind of think of it like an airBnB run by the trash lady in Labyrinth.
At the time of writing we’ve been in Gothenburg, at the Hotel Comfort, for a couple of days now, Normally I write these diaries about a week in advance of the publication date, but I just haven’t had the time this month. I’m very proud of the fact that despite this massively stressful and difficult move there has been no interruption of service for the blog. Behind the scenes things aren’t quite so rosy – my buffer of posts is in tatters and I’ve had precious little time to play games to get momentum going for new posts. Hopefully that’s going to change, especially since my new Friendly Local Game Store has a game night every week. I have enough articles written to last through the next month but I really need to get back and settled into a routine to build up a safe buffer once more. Running a site like this, with a schedule like this, is enormously draining at times but it’s never more apparent than when there’s a second Big Project that needs time and attention.
This is Gothenburg as we approached it on the flight.
Interestingly, or perhaps alarmingly, I noticed something odd about my wishlist this month. There are no board games on it. What’s that about?
Well, I guess it’s partially because board games have an exemption in the depth year rules – since I run a review site, there needs to be flexibility there so I can review the games that actually matter. I have bought a number of games for MLU as a result, especially because there are occasionally tax implications for not spending money in the MLU account. But the honest truth is – if I hadn’t bought them I don’t think any of them would have ended up on my list anyway.
I thought 2018 was a pretty slow year for board games. There was nothing that hugely gripped my attention although there were a few titles that did at least command some interest. 2019 seems to have been largely the same. I think board games are definitely becoming better – there’s more professionalism in the production of fun. It’s been a while though since I’ve seen a board game that actually made me excited and that’s a shame. It seems designers and publishers are getting better and better at more tightly hitting the zone of ‘This game is safe, reliable fun’ but fewer are willing to throw the dart at riskier, more experimental territory. Maybe though that’s just a flawed perception because, as with most things, I’ve been paying a lot less attention to the media landscape than I have in previous years.
It’s still a somewhat concerning notion for me, given how much the site has thrown its weight behind the hobby.
At this point in these diary entries I return to the wishlist and talk about how it is or isn’t changing. This is how it stood at the end of October:
- The Joker
- Avengers Endgame
- Return of the Obra Dinn
- Good Omens
- Captain Marvel
- Into the Spiderverse
- The Outer Worlds
- Midsommar
- El Camino
- Disco Elysium
Well, El Camino slipped on and off within the course of a month. I honestly didn’t even remember it was a thing until I copied and pasted the list here. Same with Midsommar. I’m sure I’ll watch it but there’s no urgency. Brief flashes in the pan, both. My appetite for both the Outer Worlds and Disco Elysium has increased though, with everything else remaining stable.
This month though we watched John Wick 2, and yeah – John Wick 3 is definitely going on the list. As is the new Netflix movie The Irishman which stars Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino. Directed by Martin Scorcese. Yeah, that’s so totally my jam that it couldn’t possibly stay off of the list at all.
And I also saw an article about this amazing documentary about Marion Stokes, a woman who recorded thirty years of broadcast television. I’m low-key fascinated by the idea of what it would take to make my media centre work like a television channel – with period appropriate scheduling and adverts – and it’s pretty interesting to know someone basically built up a massive archive, available on the Internet, of that very thing. So yeah, that’s going on the list.
That gives us what is pretty much the final wishlist for the series, because any wishlist I have at the end of December will have things I can just leap on right away if I want. I’ll probably do one anyway, just for the sake of getting the thing Done.
Here’s what things look like then for the penultimate month:
- The Joker
- Avengers Endgame
- Return of the Obra Dinn
- Good Omens
- Captain Marvel
- Into the Spiderverse
- The Outer Worlds
- Disco Elysium
- John Wick 3
- The Irishman
- Recorder
It’s honestly still not much – one thing for every month that has passed. I’ve written before about the idea of living life a year behind the mainstream, but honestly if all I have are eleven things to focus on from 2019 I’m not sure that’s going to be all that different from what I’m doing now.
See you next month for the final entry in this series!