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Katie & Scott & Simon & Cecily.

Tag: time (Page 1 of 2)

Day 347: burden blogging

January 25, 2010 / / 0 Comments

As we near the end of my year of blogging, I will admit that there have been times when I’ve sat in front of my keyboard, looking at an empty text box, wondering what coherent and interesting thoughts I could type out that day.

While I wouldn’t go so far as to consider an entry a day a burden (or at least, a burden of any meaningful size), there have been days were I have gotten by with simply a single paragraph of text or a picture or video, instead of something longer.

And the times at which I’ve made my entry have also fluctuated.  If you go back to the days and weeks following my birthday, I would often write in the mornings, right after waking up, or in the early afternoon.  Nowadays, I almost always write my entry right before bed and – recently – often past midnight.

The fact that I consider it a part of my day is interesting; no matter how tired I may be, I know that I’m obligated to write an entry before I’m allowed to sleep.  But it’s not so much an obligation that feels like a chore.  Instead, it’s a bit like the obligation of making soup for your sick spouse; you know you have to do it, but you don’t mind it one bit.

How time flies, though.  I can’t believe that it’s almost February, almost my birthday, almost my baby’s birthday.  I’m excited for all these things, as well as the upcoming release of Mass Effect 2, season premiere of Lost, and the Colts-Saints Super Bowl.

Day 243: cheating

October 13, 2009 / / 0 Comments

It was bound to happen.  Today, I didn’t get to a computer before midnight.  I thought about turning back the clock on my blog post, pretending that it had been posted before the clock struck 12, but that’d be deceptive and unnecessary.  After all, this experiment, this writing project is really about writing one short entry each day.  And a day starts when I get out of bed and ends when I get back into it.

Midnight is just a scientific construct to demarcate what society considers a day.  So, it’s no big deal that I missed the midnight “deadline,” right?  Besides, setting the clock to a time other than the actual time I wrote the post would be cheating.  No one might ever know about it or find out, but it would reside in my heart as a shameful mark in this yearlong write-a-thon.

I don’t remember ever having cheated in school, although I don’t know if this is actually something extraordinary or not.  I always thought that there must be schoolmates of mine that did cheat (in ways both large and small), but I would be hard-pressed to come up with any actual percentage.

And what constitutes cheating?  Besides the obvious infractions of secretly getting test answers early or copying off of another student, where is the line drawn?

When I was younger, it wasn’t always be clear when working with other students was mere collaboration, and when it had turned into something more sinister.  Likewise with that naughty p-word: plagiarism.

Sure, copying direct passages from a library book into your paper was obviously wrong.  But what about rephrasing an idea that wasn’t originally yours?  What about letting a book do the critical thinking on a situation for you?

Of course, you don’t really think about this when you’re a kid.  Not that much, anyway.  As an adult, you realize that cheating surrounds you.  It’s not just restricted to those classroom questions of morality.  It’s about whether or not you eat that extra donut, whether or not you go to sleep when you told yourself you would, what you write in your self evaluation.

So, I’m not perfect.  I don’t always turn off my console after just one more level.  I don’t always wake up in time to do the chores I said I’d do the night before.  But you have to draw the line somewhere.  And forging blog post times to make it look like you wrote something before midnight?  That’s just fucked up.

Day 223: longplay

September 22, 2009 / / 0 Comments

There are video games that take me a long time to finish.

I’m reflecting on this tonight because I’m near the end of my first play-through of Mass Effect, a game which I started over a year ago.  It took me just as lengthy a time (if not longer) to finish Twilight Princess.  If I ever beat Fallout 3 or Eternal Sonata, it will be in a similar timeframe.

Compare these to those shorter action games that I devour quickly: Mirror’s Edge, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.  Sure, the genre of game has something to do with it.  With books, it can be easy to quickly finish a pulp mystery by Harlen Coben but a hefty John Irving can take quite a while.

Still, though, it’s also the attitude the game (or related media) gives off.  Certain games are heavy.  They present themselves as epic.  And when a game or book or movie sends out those signals, it makes it harder to consume quickly.  Movies are slightly different because they’re almost always consumed in one sitting, regardless of genre or length or heaviness.

But I find the same thing: a movie with a heavy moral message or an advertised epicness (like, say, a war/holocaust movie or The Lord of the Rings) tends to sit on the shelf or coffee table longer before it gets put into the player.  You really have to be in the mood to indulge your senses, to let yourself be weighed down by the media and experience it.

The end result also varies.  Finishing a longer game or book, watching a heavy movie, they all have their own rewards.  You feel like you really accomplished something.  After slowly making progress for a year, there’s a feeling of the overall journey.  Of getting somewhere.

There’s a different feeling I get when I consume something quickly, like with Batman or when I read The Prestige recently.  There’s a sense of mourning.  Of losing something you love so quickly, of a sadness that there’s no more game to play or no more book to read.  It’s harder to capture this in movies, but with some of the shorter Pixar films or certain of my favorite films (like Moulin Rouge! or Juno), there’s the sadness of knowing that I’ll never be able to watch the movie again for the first time, never again experience the surprise and awe of seeing certain scenes or hearing certain lines that I had never seen or heard before.

Anyway, I have to get back to Mass Effect.  I do actually want to beat it tonight and go to sleep at a reasonable hour.

Day 209: 8:44

September 8, 2009 / / 0 Comments

The clock in our family room stopped at about 8:44.  Whether that was 8:44 PM tonight, 8:44 AM this morning, or sometime yesterday, I’m not sure.

But it’s very disorienting.  Especially when you spend all night watching the final few episodes of season 3 of The Office only to find that somehow time has managed to stand still.

It’s odd, because watching episodes of The Office always feels so quick anyway.  An episode will breeze by before any time at all has passed, so I wasn’t too surprised to look up and see that it was not yet 9 PM.

Except that the new Woot item had been posted.  And my stomach was hungry.  And Brian, who has a young daughter, was on his Xbox playing Batman.  All of which would have been impossible had it only truly been 8:44, except for me being hungry.

So, I’ll need to put a new battery in our clock and get Katie some Coco Puffs.  The Coco Puffs aren’t really related except that they, too, are timeless.

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