December 2024
I don’t know that I love storytelling. I may have said this before. There are plenty of writers who profess a love for storytelling and yet spend decades writing nothing of note (at least to the wider world). I’m not saying this to deride the efforts of any writer. It’s an observation that the critical and/or financial success of a writer doesn’t depend on how much passion they claim for storytelling.
Education Update
I passed this semester’s computer science courses. I did a class in data structures and an independent project where I built a website for hypertext fiction. I’m almost fifty years old, and the last time I studied with any seriousness was December of ’19, five years ago, when I earned a D in data structures, an F in assembly language, and straight up withdrew (tail between legs, yapping, the whole nine yards) from discrete mathematics. To say that returning and succeeding was a challenge would be a gross understatement.
My brain is nowhere near as plastic as it once was. I now have to stretch, strain, groan and moan to wrap it around complex ideas where once I could retain and synthesize while only paying half attention and hungover. I don’t know when the drop off in cognition began, though I suspect it was in my early twenties. Has a lifetime of video gaming slowed the loss? What about my privilege of being able to sleep at least eight hours every night? Or the strict diet and physical exercise of the last twenty-five years? It’s impossible to say, but the next semester will be a true test: classes in object-oriented software development, database systems, and systems analysis stand between me and a minor in computer science. I’m not looking forward to it. I haven’t taken more than six credits a semester in five years.
I’m reapplying to the University of British Columbia’s distance education M.F.A. in creative writing. You may recall that I was rejected last year, which led to this pursuit of the minor degree add-on to my bachelor’s in creative writing. If I don’t get in for the 2025 intake I’ll have to seek actual employment, something I haven’t had since October of 2008 when I left a decade-long career as an English instructor at Berlitz, Japan. I’m hoping for a position in artificial intelligence. I think the combination of writing and computer science studies is enough to at least train large language models, if not research and develop them. Part of me thinks I’m a decade too late, much like I was with the independent video game career. But despite my overwhelming cynicism for most things, I maintain a semblance of hope.
Another Year of Content Consumption
In 2024 I managed to finish playing thirty-seven video games. It’ll be thirty-eight if I can clean up the last bit of this silly replay of BioWare’s Dragon Age: Origins. Here’s a top three list in order of completion:
- Rundisc’s Chants of Sennaar
- Remedy’s Control
- MachineGames’s Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
I read forty-five books this year, quite a drop from 2023’s hundred and one. I can attribute this to how much time I spent playing games: Last year I only finished five. Although I’ve expressed a strong desire to read more and play less over the past months, I’ve had real difficulty adopting that practice. It’s not that one activity is any easier than the other, but gaming absolutely provides more dopamine than reading. While I still believe that the overall neurological and cultural benefits are higher with books, the lizard-brained goblin in me that craves stimulation is caught up in the addictive properties of twiddling my thumbs and making virtual numbers get bigger. It’s silly.
Here’s the top three books:
- Marcus Aurelius’s Mediations
- The Berean Study Bible: Old Testament
- The Berean Study Bible: The New Testament
Another contributor to the lack of reading is the amount of shows I watched in 2024: a staggering ninety-five films and television series. Again, compared to 2023’s thirteen, this represents a huge investment of time. Would that time have been better spent on other tasks? This is always a question that’s so easy to ask in retrospect, and I imagine that few people record their habits like I do in order to measure the true cost of idle entertainment.
- Will Smith’s Slow Horses
- Lokesh Kanagraj’s Master, Kaithi, Leo, and Vikram.
- Atlee Kumar’s Jawan
2024 was the year I fell in love with the Bollywood action spectacle, hence four of Kanagraj’s films occupying a slot and Kumar’s Jawan rounding it out. Check out my thoughts on Jawan for more details.
I know I’ve been lax on writing reviews for most of the content I’ve consumed. Though I have a strong, internal desire to document everything and express at least my surface impressions, I’m always at war with the thought that such recordings don’t matter. And they don’t, at least not to most people. But they should matter to me: the present me who needs to justify his actions and the future me who will demand an accounting of the things I’ve spent my time on. I would love to write, narrate, and draw unique images for each and every piece of media I consume. I’m just too lazy to pull that off, no matter how many resolutions and promises I make. And in periods like the one I’m going through now, I simply don’t have the capacity for such work.
Next?
I’m avoiding making public promises and predictions. Every one I’ve made has either gone unfulfilled or come in far later than I said it would. But I do have a clear vision for my future. I always have; it’s what’s gotten me this far. I just need to keep my deeper plans private, something I’ve always thought best. It’s far better to do than to say; deeds, not words. But I always take time to reflect, and it’s so much easier to reflect with an accurate record. At least I’ve managed to pull that off almost every month for the past two years.
See you in 2025.
2024.12.26