Slow Starts, Updates, Distractions, and "Hard" Difficulty (Here We Go Again)

Sorry for not doing anything here for a while.

Updates necessary for context:

1. It was not a great school year
2. I gained some weight
3. I stopped running, which contributed to the above
4. I'm back in Guelph right now, working full time

Hey everybody.

So it's 2/3 of the way through May, and I can officially say that it has been a Slow Start. I have an incomplete, which I talked to the prof about, but it was supposed to be dealt with by now. It is not. Hopefully this weekend?

I wanted to get back into fitness, but I've pretty much only gone on one run (at least I haven't been smoking - which I did far too much last semester).

This is my first real bit of writing, which makes me late for that too, and I haven't finished any books.

It's an unfortunate kind of thing - after I fuck up for a while, I always really want to "fix things". It's a bit of an all or nothing kind of strategy, which I think contributes.

My goal is to be more rigorous with CBT and DBT stuff this year, hopefully in a way that allows me to maintain the benefits that I usually show over the summer. The Winter really crushes me, but I also let myself get too disheartened by failures and allow myself to stop maintenance things (like running). I also am super prone to distraction.

My most recent distraction- other than my ongoing weird obsession with a certain corner of leftist twitter - is the game Bravely Default, which I feel like dedicating a few words to.

Bravely Default is a prototypical kind of JRPG, with a few twists (Farmville-esque village building, turn saving system). It's fun and goofy, one of the characters is essentially just there to be horny, and I have a weird ability to get absolutely sucked into these things - in the last 2 weeks I've banked a solid 46 hours (some might not be legit but some time might be lost due to deaths etc.) And for whatever reason - I'm playing the game on "Hard", which was what this post was going to be about in my head before I started writing.

See - in other games, say Halo or Gears of War, hard mode changes the structure of the game in a meaningful way and forces you to play it differently. It's easier to die, the A.I. tactics are better, etc. etc. The goal when I play things on hard is to make it a challenge, because usually games on normal are almost trivially easy.

In JRPGs, that's not so much the case. Basically, putting the game into hard mode just means I need to grind for more levels before going to boss fights. You could argue that this is similar to other things, but I feel like there's a measurable difference when after grinding enough, a big boss fight can be completely brainless. Occasionally, I do actually need to think to beat bosses, and use the game's mechanics, but mostly I just need to grind and to make sure that I have special attacks ready when I go into the battles.

So why do it? Why make my life harder in such a trivial way that mostly just means more time spent? Why play ANY game on hard mode? Sometimes I feel like it's me transferring my desire to prove myself as intelligent to something which has a clearly defined beginning, middle and end. In JRPGs, there's always a goal to reach, a 100% to collect, and a nice resolution. If only...

 

 

 

Of course, there's nothing particularly novel about saying that entertainment provides catharsis/escapism. I'll probably investigate things further, to be honest. For now, hope your start to the summer has been quicker than mine, and I'll try to keep posting these on a regular basis.