Returning from Scotland, after a couple of weeks of ‘free Internet’, was kind of a test case for this project. I wondered if being able to check the Internet whenever I liked would undermine the rest of the time I was disconnected. The answer is… no, actually.
I noticed something last weekend – I had switched off the Internet blocking on Friday so I could access a service I needed but hadn’t whitelisted. And I just forgot to switch it back on. I didn’t even notice until late Sunday because I hadn’t even tried to look at any forbidden websites. So that’s a pretty good sign – as are my stats. I’m now down to under five minutes of non-work Internet access and most of that is Facebook still. Of the 2 hours and (nearly) fourteen minutes I have spent online at the time of writing (the 29th of May), just a touch under half of it is Facebook.
But there are a few sites nudging their way into the list that need blocking.
One thing I’ve found is that my urge for news hasn’t gone away, and so instead of going to the BBC and being satisfied that it’s blocked… well, I look for a site that isn’t. So I’ve been spending a fair bit of my ‘Internet spend’ (in the context of this project, it’s still less than about two minutes in the month) on The Times website. I don’t even like the Times.
So I think what’s needed there is a full detox. Every news site, on the blocked list. If I need to know about it, someone will tell me. And if they don’t tell me, I didn’t need to know about it. Increasingly the news resembles not so much ‘a record of the day’s events’ and a tawdry gossip mag about politics. Who’s Putin shagging? What did Johnson know about Partygate? Is Crypto really dying or is it just slimming down for the summer? I don’t want any of this bullshit in my life. It’s not news. Even the stuff that might class as news is filtered through such a pervasive, self-serving ideological lens that it loses all its genuine power to inform. Again, I trot out the old Mark Twain quote – if you don’t read the news you’re uninformed. If you do read the news, you’re misinformed.
Mark Twain was a really smart guy.
Aside from that, a good portion of the time I have been spending online has been on game shops – almost 10% of the time, which is a substantial percentage of a not very significant total number. But it’s that time of year again when we need to minimise our tax liability – sure, that liability might only be in tens of pounds these days and I’m not even sure if it passes whatever ‘minimal threshold’ is needed for sending out a bill. But even so, it’s important that the money you send MLU is spent on what matters for the work, and not on taxes incurred because of a Depth Year obligation.
But also, my accessible dexterity game project still has a chunk of money that needs to be spent before the end of the year, and as part of my Game Design and Technology Master program admin role I also have a budget to spend supporting student social activities. For the latter, our regular game nights fall into that bracket so I’ll be spending a bit on picking up some new titles to freshen up the library as well as some games I think will be great for induction. So I’ve been doing a little bit of research there without ever actually arriving at anything so useful as a shopping list. I’ve run out of dexterity games that I think are genuinely worth evaluating for my research work, and short of picking up a Carrom board I suspect that money will end up being spent on the technical architecture rather than the evaluation. And since we’re heading into the Summer break, there’s no need to pick up anything there immediately. So it’s time spent browsing rather than anything more productive. Technically speaking most of it is ‘for work’ but I don’t feel like it’s in the spirit of the project to add those sites to the whitelist.
Although if any of you have recommendations for games that would work good for a student induction, let me know. A few copies of Telestrations will definitely be part of the plan but if you have other suggestions…
I keep saying this every month, but I’m happy with the ‘per diem’ amount of time I’m spending on the Internet and I don’t see how it realistically could go lower. The fact it has every month is just proof of how bad I am at forecasting. But under five minutes a day of time-wasting on the Internet? That’s not enough of a drain to be worth optimising further.
I sort of feel like I should continue on in this way for one more month just so it is a six-month project, but I’m not sure that does anything more than tickle a few appreciative synapses in my brain. Nonetheless, I think what’s needed here is a transition to Project Unplug 2.0, which will follow the tracks I outlined last month. Essentially it’s an inversion, from a whitelist approach to a blacklist approach. Any site that I feel is draining more time than I like goes on a blacklist. Everything else comes off. There’s no need to have Cold Turkey running with this approach, and my Time Tracker plugin becomes diagnostic rather than evaluative – I will check it occasionally for sites that make me think ‘That’s a waste of time’. For example, the site I check second most often is The RPG Site and that’s only to keep an eye on an ongoing trainwreck of a discussion thread regarding ‘woke and anti-woke’ publishers. It’s not a lot of time when looked at in isolation, but that impulse to gawk at the reactionary wing of the hobby isn’t productive. So that’s probably blocklist fodder.
I think what I’m really looking to build now is the second pillar of healthy Internet use. I’ve addressed quantity – that’s fine now, and realistically I’d probably be okay with that number trending a bit upwards. We started at 300 minutes a day (!). We’re down to five. I’d be fine with, say… 30 minutes a day. That’s a fine amount of quantity now I know that I can get it down to as low as it currently is.
What matters then is quality, and that’s where sites like the RPG Site are corrosive. It’s mean-spirited of me to treat it like a buffet-bar of comedy. If I was going to grade the quality of minutes I spend online, sites like that would get a negative score. They made the Internet a little bit worse (for me) so I shouldn’t be spending that time there. There are a couple of equivalent Facebook groups I keep up with (for the same reason) and man – that’s also a net loss in the quality of the experience of being online.
Some of the time I spend online is ‘quality neutral’ – Foodora and SMHI – that sort of thing. They provide information and services, but they don’t actually make my life any better other than the convenience they offer. But they don’t do any harm. So they’re fine. The real question is – what side of the coin do other sites fall?
Facebook, surprisingly, is still in the ‘positive’ category… but only once you butcher it with plugins that keep the shit from the doorstep. I removed Facebook from my phone because I found the constant stream of ads, recommended videos and other social morbidities made it stressful to check. With my regiment of protective plug-ins, Facebook on the desktop is downright pleasant – just a place I can read stuff from my friends, and nothing else. But also, as I said last month, I don’t want it on my desktop. I want the sigils and pentagrams that a browser lets me put around it, but I also don’t want it so close it becomes reflexive to check. So it’s a bit of a problem to solve. I’d like to ward it off in a tablet that’s kept away from my desk, acknowledging its role as a seductive demon that should be treated warily. But the runic magic of plugins doesn’t work there and thus the beast I chain up in the corner is a wilder, less worthwhile thing.
I’ll work out the incantations that keep the beast available while also being compliant, but I don’t have them yet.
So, I think what June is going to be is an audit of my audit, culminating in Project Unplug 2.0 in July. I feel like I’m on the threshold of fixing the Internet, at least as far as I experience it, and Unplug 1.0 has been a useful exercise in building my understanding of what I want from being online.
Depth Year 2022
Man, this is so easy. So easy. The first depth year was a challenge but this one is a breeze. I don’t even think about it except when a new season of a show I like is released. There’s a new series of Taskmaster (which you know I love), the final season of Derry Girls (ironically a show I couldn’t watch to begin with because of the last Depth Year), and a new Stranger Things. I could probably justify watching them on the basis of ‘This is something I was invested in already’… I did that with the Expanse novel that came out in 2019. But I don’t think I will. There’s no urgency – there’s plenty to keep me occupied – such as really digging into the depths of my video game collection.
‘Gaming to One Hundred’ also continues apace. In fact, more than apace. Again ‘at the time of writing’ we’re 21 weeks into the year and I have 59 games completed. If I was doing a ‘complete a game a year’ challenge, I’d already be done by now with almost 60% of the year left to go. I’ve also been doing wonders with my other stats… a couple of months ago, for every 100 games I completed I probably abandoned another 60. A 60% abandon rate. Now that abandon stat is down to 52.5% and even that is artificially inflated from the previous years. This year I have abandoned 18 games – by which I mean I played a couple of hours and decided the game didn’t have enough to warrant my full attention. That’s an abandon rate of 30.5% in 2022 and even that is trending downwards.
But the problem I’m having at the moment is that there’s very little left in my ‘to play’ list that genuinely excites me. My curation of the backlog into a triage means that I abandon fewer games because I can just mark some off as ‘Won’t play’ or ‘Not Currently Interested’. But the last time I did a challenge like this my backlog was full of stuff I genuinely wanted to play. I found a lot of really great games, and a lot of AAA stuff that was perfectly enjoyable in a predictable way. But I’m 59 games in now and haven’t found a single five star game that I hadn’t previously completed before. I haven’t even found enough four and a half star games to fill out a top ten. Currently my list of ‘newly discovered gems’ is:
- Not for Broadcast
- Timelie
- Saints Row 4
- The Swapper
- Mark of the Ninja
- Deltarune
Just a touch over 10% of the games I have played this year fall into that category. To be fair, in 2022 when I completed 76 games the percentage was only 15%, but that also included five star titles. I guess what I’m saying here is that I think I’m starting to get nothing but splinters as I claw the bottom of the barrel. The average quality of play in any month struggles to reach ‘good’.
As I say though, I think this is the last time I’ll need to do a year of intensive gaming to tame a backlog. My ‘three out one in rule’ will hopefully keep things manageable from now on, although this year will probably put me thirty games ‘in credit’ as far as that goes. By the time I complete those I’ll get another 10 credits. Maybe it should be four out and one in. Of course, having the credits doesn’t mean I need to spend them and my gaming wishlist is pretty small at the moment.
So, let’s round out this update with the wider wishlist of things I would have bought in 2022 had I not been on my depth year. Last month 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 (movie)
- Some Numenara books
- Spartacus – the movie
- Bruce Cook’s Dalton Trumbo book
- Before your eyes (video game)
- The Blackwell Epiphany (Video Game)
- Hard West 2 (Video Game)
Well, we’re having a purge! I don’t care about Numenara any more. I’m indifferent to the Spartacus movie. The Dalton Trumbo biography is no longer a thing I want to check out, and I don’t even remember what Before your Eyes was. So, this is where we are:
- Red Seas Under Red Skies (Gentleman Bastard book 2)
- The Republic of Thieves (Gentleman Bastard book 3)
- Don’t Look Up (movie)
- The Blackwell Epiphany (Video Game)
- Hard West 2 (Video Game)
But we’re also adding in a couple of things. The death of Vangelis (RIP, one of the greats) had the side-effect of introducing me to the concept of Hauntology which sounds fascinating, and so I want the book ‘A Year in the Country’ by Stephen Price. And exploring some game design tropes in television led me to two game shows I want to check out. One is Documental – a bunch of comedians put up large cash sums of their own money. They’re disqualified if they laugh at any point during the show – so it’s about making people laugh without laughing themselves. Yeah, that’s some Squid Game nonsense that I want to check out. The other is Busted, which seems to be a cross between an Alternate Reality Game and the Crystal Maze.
So the list is now:
- Red Seas Under Red Skies (Gentleman Bastard book 2)
- The Republic of Thieves (Gentleman Bastard book 3)
- Don’t Look Up (movie)
- The Blackwell Epiphany (Video Game)
- Hard West 2 (Video Game)
- A Year in the Country (book)
- Documental (game show)
- Busted (game show)
Not a lot for five months, but that shouldn’t be a surprise at this point.
That’s it for this May! Talk to you again next month I hope!