Well, my friend came to visit. We had a great time and did a lot of stuff. It was a lot of fun but also quite tiring. So I went with him to the airport in the morning on Thursday then I spent the rest of the day just browsing and journaling. Watched some gaming related videos. I also treated Friday as a rest day. I don't have to work Fridays right now and everyone was away from home. So, I just spent the day mostly browsing and kind of journaling a bit. Resting and decompressing. I watched some video gaming related videos. I was a bit more conflicted though in a way. On Thursday it was really clear that I was very tired so I had no problem giving myself permission to do nothing basically except my chores. On Friday, I felt better but still had very low motivation. So most of the time I was in the mindset that one good night of sleep wasn't enough to get back on track and it was good to take another rest day. But part of me was getting a bit angry at myself and thinking I was wasting the day. I just felt like somehow this is a common problem and I was just going to waste the whole weekend. But I mostly focused on just trusting myself and giving myself permission to be lazy. Basically it does seem a lot of times if I am rested then I will naturally feel motivated to do stuff and a lot of times the lack of motivation is tied to sleep problems. So I am intending to maintain the day schedule that I established the week before he arrived. I am hoping that will be conducive to feeling rested more often than not.
And lo and behold today I have felt much more motivated. I got up and pretty early made a to do list. Then I jumped into some chess work. Did a couple of tactics to restart a streak on chess tempo. (I had let it lapse while he was here.) Started a couple of new games to get back to 5 active daily chess games. Then I made some moves. Then I jumped in the Nunn "Understanding Chess Endgames" that I had let go of for a good while and did a whole 2 page section. Then I reviewed one of my finished daily games and made Wetzell cards for it. Then I ate lunch and watched a video gaming video. Now I am writing a blog post.
So, I think basically this is kind of fruits of the gentle path I was talking about in the previous post. By being gentle with myself, and trusting myself, and giving myself permission to rest I feel a lot of better. And then I am naturally just more motivated. I feel like part of it though also was just that his visit kind of kicked me out of the rut I was in and kind of made me remember how good it feels to do stuff instead instead of just sort of languishing. But I also rededicated myself to the solution of doing gaming stuff more and journaling less. I also made two new resolutions. One was to start tracking my time usage in the hopes it will enable me to be more conscious about how I use my time. Have been doing this for six days now. I also want to cut my spending and save money. Particularly cutting my spending on gaming stuff. I want to focus on playing games I already own, reading books I already own etc. The problem with the spending resolution is that it may lead to me isolating in an effort to not spend money. So I am a bit kind of unsure exactly how these resolutions will play out.
Some of the videos I have watched recently, mostly on video gaming. This is not all of them but the ones I liked more.
*This is a news about the industry video that talks about how Steam is going to be legally required to tell people that they are only purchasing a license to play the game and that this license can be revoked. It points out that GOG has very different terms of service that mean a person has total ownership of the installer program and that there is no DRM (copy protection basically) on the games so your ownership can't be revoked. This was particularly interesting because my friend and I had just been discussing these same issues on a trip to the electronics mall. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZW79weyGsg
*This is a video by a youtube content creator that I watched that might have helped me give myself permission to rest. It is basically about how he is having to cut back for his own mental health. As opposed to some videos on this topic this one is pretty positive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1te5Kthvac8
*This is one about how to get back into games that you have put down for a bit. Basically, it is very much a first world problem, the problem of having too many games to play and not finishing them. But this problem of putting down games and then not wanting to pick them up is also one I struggle with. His main recommendations are to 1) take some kind of brief notes about games so you can review them to remind yourself of what was going on when you put it down. I don't do exactly this but I do have notebooks in One Note about the games I play so I do find that is helpful. Might have to be a bit more targeted with them. 2) He recommends engaging with positive content about the game. This could be positive reviews, or like positive fan content. Etc. Stuff that will make you feel excited about playing. 3) He recommends trying to pick up the game with a commitment of only playing (actually playing, not loading screens etc) for two minutes. If after two minutes you just really don't want to do it then fine you can put it away again. But more often than not just that little bit will get you over the hump and you will want to play more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2HrRSWHYJc&t=2s
*This one is about the problem of difficulty settings in games. I liked it because he talked about various options regarding difficulty settings and talked about pros and cons with each. Some people are very polarized on this topic because some of them see it as an accessibility issue that games should be more accessible to all kinds of people so they should have difficulty settings that allow less skilled players to play. On the other hand some people look at the games of the developer Fromsoft that don't have any difficulty settings (and are very challenging games) and they see this as a really good thing because you are forced to overcome the same challenge as everybody else to experience the game. They argue that the games are more pure this way and resent the demand that every game should be made more accessible. I thought this video was nice because it didn't really fall into any camp. It was really a look at positive and negatives and didn't try to come to any easy conclusions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nJtd8AJghM
*This one was by the same guy as the last one and covers the topic of rewards in video games. Pretty much the same deal. He looks at some different models and kind of considers positives and negatives of each one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI_XEPoN3MA
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