As I mentioned last month, I forgot to track my stats at the start of October, and by the time I actually remembered that it needed to be done (I like to time it to the start of a day as well as the start of the month) it just didn’t seem to be worth doing it. So I’ve used this month again as a calibration opportunity to see how it feels to be online without the defensive armament of a time tracker.
That’s not as risky as it might seem though because all the other tools were still in place – specifically, Cold Turkey with its hard limit on how long I can spend on batches of websites. I did though notice the absence of the time tracker, because one of the things I find useful is periodically checking in to see which sites appear at the top of the list. You know that I find that useful, because I do it here too. What I have missed in October then is any sense of what sites might have creeped in when I didn’t want them.
My own personal feeling though is that I spent a lot more time on Amazon than I would have liked (related to something I’ll talk about in a little bit), but I think my own intuition there is enough to say that Amazon, and e-commerce sites in general, need a quota in Cold Turkey. But it’s a little bit more awkward there because of the pattern of use. It’s not like I’m buying stuff every day (any more – you may remember from my first post about taking a Depth Year that I once got an intervention from Amazon telling me it looks like I’m buying in bulk for business). So what tends to happen is long, relatively intense browsing for specific purposes and then longer still periods of lying fallow. Cold Turkey doesn’t let me carry over an allowance from day to day, and it doesn’t seem to let me schedule on a longer basis than a 24 hour block.
So say I want to give myself 70 mins of access to e-commerce sites per week – I either need to give myself 10 mins per day (which isn’t compatible with patterns of use) or 70 minutes per day and track my allowance manually (which isn’t compatible with the whole ethos of this project).
What I’ve gone for instead is a password based approach – I can switch the block off and on as I like but I need to put in a password each time. That’s probably fine because it’ll fit the purpose of making me think if I’m actively looking for something or just reflexively browsing. But it also means I’ll need to remember to relock it every time, which seems prone to failure. I guess we’ll see as we go on.
I’m still mulling over the question ‘what did I achieve during this year’, and that’s something I’ve decided to formalize. A friend of mine at work has been exploring ‘auto-ethnography’ as a form of scientific publication. I’m skeptical of the philosophy behind it, to be honest. I’m not convinced self-reflection can offer much that has sufficient rigor to the academic literature. It reminds me of the old joke, ‘No this isn’t an anecdote – it’s artisanally crafted data’. But also, the plural of anecdote is not data. But nonetheless I’m going to experiment with a couple of auto-enthnographical papers in the coming year. One will be on Project Unplug, the other on my ongoing quest to clear my gaming backlog. We’ll see if a) I like the papers, and b) if anyone else likes the papers.
Since I have been journaling both of these projects through these posts, that’s another reason why you’re all awesome. If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t have tracked any data at all or made it available in a form suitable for external use.
Part of the Project Unplug paper though is that I’m going to need a conclusion, which is what I’m currently lacking as we head into the final stages of the year. Mostly what I’m feeling at the moment is a sense of relief that I won’t be auditing my behaviour quite so much on a daily basis. But also a sense of satisfaction that those tools I will keep on using will be useful in meaningfully keeping me from backsliding into the worst of what it means to be online.
And that’s where October comes in, really. It’s been a mini-version of what happens after this project is done. And my main realisation from the month has been that there’s less about my Internet usage that bothers me than I might have feared. Occasionally I find that there’s a news site that I haven’t blocked and there’s a brief period where I find myself drawn to it before I notice and add it to the blacklist. That does show the insidious draw that ‘news’ has on me – even though I have consciously chosen to ignore the artificiality of news as entertainment, as soon as I see a crack in the wall I start sticking my eye right up to it. October shows me that I can’t abandon my protective sigils and expect that my own intentionality will replace them. That’s just not how I’m wired.
So, where is my thinking heading as regards to the success of Project Unplug?
I think in the end it’s going to have to be a little bit wooly. Project Unplug is a success because it confirmed, through a rigorous self-enforced process of digital abstinence, that it is not necessary to be celibate to recalibrate your relationship to the Internet. The preparatory work took me perhaps 80% of the way to a pragmatically optimal relationship to being online. Cold Turkey and my time trackers working together in conjunction took me another 10%. The remaining 10% of achieving a state of ‘Zenternet’ almost certainly requires complete disconnection with all the attendant inconveniences.
My final post on this topic in December will essentially be my tutorial for 90% Zenternet, with the note that diminishing returns kick in at this point and complete disconnection is probably neither something to be desired or attempted. It’s not that the Internet itself is bad – it is a wonder of our modern world – but it is expertly wielded by manipulative actors to our detriment. We can filter out much of the mendacity of online discourse, and much of the self-serving aggrandisement of people at ‘Internet Scale’ and still gain most of the benefits of a digital toolbox. It does involve sacrifice and losing some things, but Project Unplug has shown me that you don’t just learn to live with it, you learn to prefer it.
I can imagine a version of myself ten years from now with no Internet except at work, surrounded by physical media such as CDs, DVDs and boxed video games. I envy that person, but I don’t want to be that person. Yet.
Depth Year 2022
There have been developments here! The main development is that many of the books that I have down for me to buy at the start of 2023 are no longer on the list because of what I’ve decided on for my next Grand Personal Project. But we’ll get to that. Let’s first talk about the subgoal of Depth Year 2022.
So, unsurprisingly I did hit 100 games in October. In fact, I hit 107 games this month. One of them, Grim Fandango, got an asterisk because I had to use a walkthrough to complete it. Man, that game has not aged well. But that brought me to 106 games, which is comfortably beyond the target I set. But as I mentioned last month, I don’t feel great about some of the completions.
- Three games are re-completes, rather than games I completed for the first time.
- Three have asterisks because I’m not happy with how I ‘completed’ them.
- Six games are board game adaptations, rather than strictly ‘video games’
The three main asterisks need to be resolved because I’m unhappy with them. I know nobody is going to come in and audit my performance here (although actually, if I’m writing a paper about the project maybe they will) but I couldn’t defend their inclusion with a straight face. So that means 103 unasterisked games takes me to the point I have cleared the official record. And yes, I have done that. So the project, as I set out to do it, is complete.
But…
My intention for this was to make a meaningful attempt to clear my backlog of games, and it doesn’t really feel like re-completes authentically match to that implied goal. The way I put it was ‘Complete 100 games in a year’. Nowhere does that say ‘new games’, but that feels like a semantic loophole. If I re-completed 100 games would I still have considered this challenge to have been met? Probably not. But they are within the letter of the challenge, if perhaps arguably not within the spirit.
That’s not good enough. I need to play to 106, at which point those ‘soft asterisks’ are dealt with. And, as I say, I’ve done that. So the hard asterisks are dealt with and the re-completes also are not needed to hit my goal.
But the question of board game adaptations is a little more philosophical. I consider a game complete when I have reached the end credits of a traditional single player campaign, or when I have seen everything a game has to offer. Those though are explicitly video game framings with video game sensibilities. How do you ‘complete’ a game in a form where completion is not even a consideration? How do you ‘complete’ Poker, or Chess, or Monopoly, or Chinatown, or Scrabble? You don’t. You can’t. It’s a question that makes no sense. You can see everything they have to offer (at least, to the standard of an amateur), and that’s the criteria I used for including them. For each board game adaptation on the list, I played it at multiple player counts, multiple difficulties, and encountered each game scenario several times.
But then you (or I) hit a deeper philosophical problem. Are digital board game adaptations actually video games?
Now again, my challenge didn’t explicitly say ‘video games’ but that was the spirit implied in the thing. And if someone came to me and said ‘I’m a video game developer’ on the basis of them having created a digital adaptation of Monopoly I’d probably say ‘No, you’re a software engineer’. And perhaps this is a bias on my part, but I just don’t see a digital adaptation of a physical board game as being a ‘video game’. I think they are their own, genuine and valuable thing but my conception of their categorization would niggle at me if I listed ‘Xbox Chess’ under a list of video games I owned.
It works the other way too, for what it’s worth. I don’t see the digital adaptation of Terraforming Mars as a board game and I certainly wouldn’t list it in my board game collection. And yet I have, at times, used digital versions of board games to explore certain gameplay nuances for Meeple Like Us. There’s overlap, sure, but they exist in an intersection of two sets on a Venn diagram and don’t happily exist in either parent set itself.
So basically there are six further games that get soft asterisks not because of any rigorous definitional issue or because I think they’d raise objections in an audit – rather, they don’t feel good in my own head when I contemplate them being there. So that brings me up to 112 games that I need to complete before I am happy with saying the project is done.
That’ll happen next month for sure though.
My abandon stats continue to improve. I’ve gone from a 46% abandon rate (as in, for every 100 games I complete I will have abandoned 46) to a 43% abandon rate, or a ratio of 2.35 completions for every abandoned game. My playing time now sits at 1550 hours, with an average game length of 14.30 hours and a median length of 10.
So, on to the wishlist. This is what it was at the end of the last update:
- Red Seas under Red Skies (Gentleman Bastard book 2)
- The Republic of Thieves (Gentleman Bastard book 3)
- Don’t Look Up (a movie)
- The Blackwell Epiphany (a game)
- A year in the Country (a book)
- Documental and Busted (Japanese game shows)
- Infernal Affairs (a movie)
- Jade City (book)
- Memory of Empire (book)
- Cochrane the Dauntless (book)
- The Pillars of the Earth (book)
And here’s where it is at the end of October:
- Don’t Look Up (a movie)
- The Blackwell Epiphany (a game)
- Documental and Busted (Japanese game shows)
- Infernal Affairs (a movie)
- Jade City (book)
- Memory of Empire (book)
This isn’t because I’m less interested in reading any of these books than I was when I put them on, but rather because I’ve decided on my big project for next year. I had contemplated ‘complete my board game collection’ but honestly I think that’s too big a project for one year. I need to nibble at it a bit more before I can make the push. It’s too dependant on the time and mood and availability of other people.
So my big project is ‘Read a book a week’, which was my project back in 2017 and 2018. Only in 2018 did I actually achieve it. But I’m reading the book Invisible Women at the moment. What it really inspired me to do was look at my shelves, look at my records of books I’ve read, and realise I read way too few books by women. So in 2023 I will be reading fifty-two books (at least) by women authors. That means the Gentleman Bastard will probably have to wait until 2024, as will Pillars of the Earth and Cochrane the Dauntless. They’ll still be there. If they’re not, it’ll be because the world ended at which point it won’t have mattered that I never got around to them.
I asked for recommendations on Facebook and ended up with about 80 books that I’ve added to an Amazon wishlist. I might talk more about them next month, but for now they aren’t books for which I actively wish so they don’t go here. Not yet. But if you have recommendations yourself, I’d love to hear them!
That’s it for this month! Thanks everyone for your support!