Things have settled down here and I think I’ve reached an agreeable balance between ‘using the Internet’ and ‘not wasting too much of my time’. The time tracker I’m using now is still on its ‘shakedown tour’ so it is currently grabbing stats for a pile of stuff that I don’t want tracked. But even with that, August’s ‘idle Internet usage’ was 18 minutes:

Miro is a collaboration tool I use at work – at the moment to help students shape their research questions for the Introduction to Game Research course I run. That should be excluded entirely (and will be in the future). I spent 8 minutes on Dominoes trying to wrestle an online order into place and in the end they let me do everything before saying ‘Ah, sorry – we don’t deliver to your area’. So I don’t think that should count. I mean, it probably is a fair entry but I resent it a lot.

Taming Gaming is part of a collaboration I’m doing with the guy that runs it, so it’s ‘work’, as is the expert.antagning.se site which is what we use at Chalmers / GU to handle application data to programs. Doodle.com is a scheduling tool, so again – work. And I have never tracked tabs.ultimate-guitar.com before because it’s just a side effect of a different activity, which is badly playing the guitar. So if I remove all the stuff that I wouldn’t have wanted tracked, we carve almost an hour off of the figures.

I said last month that I thought 30 minutes would be a fine level of time to waste clicking around online, and 18 minutes is even better. But when you dig down into the stats excluding the stuff I mentioned above, it’s a little better still coming in at just under sixteen and a half minutes. That’s a little more than in March, and June (13 minutes each) and a lot more than in May (5 minutes) but it also represents a more ‘enjoyable’ way to deal with the Internet. I’d be more than happy with this as a permanent level of activity.

Again though I have to stress that some of this is ‘re-routing’. For example I spent virtually no time on Polygon because I send anything that looks interesting to Pocket. It’s not that I’m depriving myself of anything but rather making sure everything is more ‘mindful’. I don’t want to read an article online just to click on to the next one out of habit. This approach makes me ask ‘Am I interested in that?’ and then once again when I sit down to Pocket ‘Am I still interested in this?’

As a side effect of that, Mrs Meeple is now very interested in working her way through my Pocket lists because it represents a kind of curated ‘best of the Internet’. Much like I hope the monthly roundups accomplish. There’s a lot of value in curation.

I was actually thinking about that earlier this month. Do we consider curation art in the same way that the elements that make up curation may be art? Is a well chosen collection of book recommendations, say, art in and of itself? Are librarians artists? I don’t know, but I think we undervalue curation as an activity. A good art exhibit, made up of artistic objects, can certainly make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. I’m not saying I’m an artist because my Pocket is full of rich treasures. But I’m also not saying I’m not.

Anyway…

The queen recently died and I’ve never been happier to be off the news sites. A certain amount of national mourning is to be expected, but the British media take it to ridiculous extremes every single time there’s an opportunity to wave the flag. I’m a pretty ardent republican, in the sense that I would like to abolish the monarchy. I didn’t hate the queen or anything – if she’d stood for President of the United Kingdom I probably would have voted for her. She did a good job for a long, long time and that deserves respect. What it doesn’t deserve is saturation media coverage for the ten days of mourning. The world goes on, with multiple important catastrophes that need attention. I would be extremely put-out if I was still actively reading the news to find six out of every ten articles was a variation on the theme of ‘Royal X interacted with royal Y at Sad Event Z’.

But also in that, I had a discussion with someone recently about the inflation crisis, the energy crisis, and the apocalyptical glee the media have had in reporting both. I still slip up and check the news – when I’m on a device that doesn’t have my usual protective sigils installed – and when I do I always come away anxious and stressed in a way I wasn’t before. And I honestly think if I was on a complete news blackout I’d probably be surprised at the electricity bills I receive but I certainly wouldn’t be alarmed in the way the news tells me I should be. Anxiety is not activism and all that.

It just makes me ever more convinced that the modern nature of news reporting just makes crises worse. It creates the circumstances under which they intensify. It’s irresponsible, packaging up fear as entertainment – and yet it’s the business model at the heart of the whole thing.

I have long felt, for example, that it’s the media that are more responsible for the rise in school shootings and spree killings than, say, the NRA. There are numerous extremely responsible things that the media can do in the face of violent extremism and they generally don’t do any. But for decades, experts have been pointing out that the attention directed to these events energises others. Mass shootings are contagious. If one happens, another is more likely to happen with the next couple of weeks. And a lot of that is down to the coverage.

If media really wanted to report responsibly on an event, there’s a lot they can do. Don’t name the killer. Give them some anonymous code name like ‘John Doe’ that means their ’accomplishments’ blur into the background noise of other killers. Don’t report on their motivations or agendas. No photos. No life history. No imagery of them pointing guns menacingly at a camera. Essentially no reward for behaviour that we don’t want to encourage. No glory for those that have never demonstrated it. It’s not difficult. But it’s also not profitable, and the media profits on misery like a parasite.

People tell you that it’s important to be an ‘informed citizen’ in a democracy. The media, of course, perpetuates this view. But everything from the spike in inflation to petrol shortages to the lack of toilet-rolls in supermarkets during Covid – the media makes everything worse.

Sometimes you really need the absence of something to get a clearer view of how much it’s been infecting your thinking.

Anyway! Let’s see how next month works and if this pleasing balance of time spent versus time valued holds true.

Depth Year 2022

I think roughly at this point in the last Depth Year I felt that I had achieved a sense of ‘anti-consumerism flow’ in that it was no longer effortful to avoid buying things. That’s happening this year too – buying things is an active choice rather than an unconscious habit. I don’t feel the loss of deferring my gratification.

But there is an interesting shift here.

I changed the way I was handling Project Unplug 2022, and it’s certainly more enjoyable than the hardcore isolation I tried in the first half of the year. But it also comes with an infinitely increased degree of exposure to ‘new shit’. I know ‘what’s coming out’ so much better now, and so I’m facing temptation more often than I have had to for a while. But also, the nature of media itself makes resisting it easier.

For example, the Game of Thrones prequel has started to make its way onto screens and by all accounts it’s great. But also, I kinda feel like I’m done with Westeros. I don’t really care about the backstory of what led to the Game of Thrones. I don’t care about new characters. There was a great, epic story told in an interesting, detailed world and I’m happy with what I got. Similarly with the Rings of Power. Lord of the Rings (the movies) were absolutely enough for me. Even The Hobbit was way too much more. If it was a faithful adaptation of the Silmarillion and other sources I might be a little more interested, but really it seems it’s basically Tolkien fanfiction with an unusually large budget. If I’m not interested in the ‘authentic back lore’ of Game of Thrones I’m certainly not interested in someone’s counterfeit re-interpretation of the Lord of the Rings mythology. I didn’t even care enough to read the Silmarillion itself.

But it’s more than just these two specific things. It’s also predictive of a coming crash in the industry.

There’s a book I read years ago (I forget what it was called unfortunately) that made a very compelling argument of the role of ‘exploration’ versus ‘exploitation’. When you’re at the start of something, you focus more on exploration. You look to find new, exciting opportunities. Like – when you first move to an area you try out a whole range of restaurants to find candidates for being your regular. As you grow accustomed to your options, you switch focus. You try new places occasionally but tend to spend most of your time and money in the ones you know you like. And when you’re getting ready to move somewhere else you focus entirely on exploiting the things you already know about. There’s no point trying ‘That new Indian restaurant’ if you’re just leaving the country next week. You might love it, sure – but the opportunity cost of taking the risk of that might is too high, and the lifetime benefit too low.

You see a similar pattern in all kinds of endeavours and industry, and what we’re seeing now is a media landscape that is almost entirely in exploit mode. I kinda feel like I’ve said that several times when specifically talking about boardgames but I think it’s true in TV and movies too.

Anyway, this is all a long-winded way of saying ‘I’m not tempted because I just don’t care to dig deeper into these franchises with wom I have already said my goodbyes’. I’ll probably watch them at some point, I guess, but I can’t say I’m more interested in the House of the Dragon than I am Season 4 of Stranger Things.

As usual though, let’s talk about my wishlist! As of the end of June, it looked like this:

Red Seas under Red Skies (Gentleman Bastard book 2)
The Republic of Thieves (Gentleman Bastard book 3)
Don’t Look Up (a movie)
Before Your Eyes (a game)
Dalton Trumbo (a book)
Spartacus (a movie)
The Blackwell Epiphany (a game)
Hard West 2 (a game)
A year in the Country (a book)
Documental and Busted (Japanese game shows)
Infernal Affairs (a movie)
Library of Ruina (a game)

Quite a lot, actually. I don’t think I did the update last month though, so let’s look at the cull.

Before Your Eyes (a game)
Dalton Trumbo (a book)
Spartacus (a movie)
Hard West 2 (a game)
Library of Ruina (a game)

Those are the things I’m no longer fussed about. I don’t even remember what Before Your Eyes was. I’ve lost my temporary interest in Dalton Trumbo. In previous years I would have gotten the spark, bought the book, and then lost the interest before I got to it. Not this time though, bucko.

I was only somewhat enthused by Hard West 2 anyway because while I liked the original I didn’t love it. And I’m no longer regularly cajoled by a friend of mine to play it, so without that constant reinforcement it just slipped off the list. And Library of Ruina looks weird as hell and I like that, but also I suspect it’s the kind of game that will come my way through a Humble bundle at some point and I don’t need to seek it out.

Coming onto the list is:

Jade City (a book recommended by a friend with judgement I trust)
Memory called Empire (ditto)
Cochrane the Dauntless (a book I owned and apparently abandoned before we moved to Sweden. Good going Past Michael, I am finally in the position where I am ready to read it)
The Pillars of the Earth (a book about the construction of cathedrals in the 11th century)

That Cochrane the Dauntless entry though is quite telling – we’ve been in Sweden for almost three years now and this is the first time I’ve actually regretted getting rid of a book during our aggressive downsizing. And even then, I don’t know if I’ll still regret it by the time January 2023 rolls around. I’m only enthused to read it now because I read the first Master and Commander book and Jack Aubrey is heavily based on Thomas Cochrane.

But I like that I don’t have the book because it really does highlight how unlikely it is for any book purchased as part of a temprary interest that I will genuinely get around to it. We got rid of seven full bookcases (with extenders) worth of books when we moved here – I’d estimate we abandoned maybe 1500 books in total. Assuming a ‘one regret every three years’ as an average, it would be 4500 years before I actually missed them all.

Or if you think of it in economic terms…

Cochrane the Dauntless has a replacement cost of 140kr, which over three years puts the actual cost of regret at 0.12kr a day. Or approximately one tenth of a pence per day. Or about 0.9kr a week, which is about seven pence a week. That’s what it costs me to abandon most of my books and replace the one(s) I legitimately miss at the time I actually want to read them.

The figures get considerably darker when you take the same frame I did with our boardgames, which I discussed in our reasons to cull a game from your collection article.

A lot of games in the cull had never been opened. For some, I hadn’t even removed the shrink wrap. Of the eighty-four games I brought to the TTS Bring and Buy, I hadn’t played 28 of them. At their lowest current retail price, that’s a total of about £700 to buy. Not all sold – some were donated to the convention for them to do with what they will. I got around £270 back. I basically paid £430 for games to come into my house, sit on my shelf, and leave. I could have given that money to a food bank and I would have been no worse off at all. In fact, I’d have been better off because I wouldn’t have damaged my back carting them off into the Dewar Centre. What a waste of time, money and effort. I could have fed some hungry families rather than essentially paying for games to take up space in my house. I genuinely feel bad about that. My shelf of shame is literally a shelf of shame.

I don’t know how many of those 1500 books I hadn’t read. Let’s say half, because a lot of the books I had read and loved came with us to Sweden. That’s 750 unread books. Let’s say the average cost was £5, even though it would have actually been higher given how many were hardbacks and occasional rare and irreplicable items. £3750 of books, of which three years in I only miss £11 worth, and even then perhaps only temporarily. It’s still a few months before 2023 rolls around. 0.29% of the value I abandoned then has value now. That’s a genuine sense of loss at a level so low that it is basically a rounding error.

Yeesh.

Anyway, I think that’s enough for now! See you all next month I hope!