In Which I Explain That Updates Will Be…Reduced In Quantity For A Bit
In case it wasn’t already somewhat obvious, there will be fewer site updates per day than usual for at least the remainder of the week, and possibly next week as well. What time I would normally devote to drafting posts has been diverted to a rather important project report that I need to finish drafting by Friday, and finish revising (if needed) by November 10th.
Which…yeah.
I had actually taken this week off, intending to give my family some recoup time after the last five weeks I spent on the road. But, alas, I couldn’t get the report submission deadline I had hoped for, and so will be — have been, really — spending every spare hour this week chewing away on the report.
Which doesn’t leave much time for Aiera articles, sadly.
Ah, well, it’s only a temporary thing; a week or two (at most) and the regular tempo and pace of things should resume. OR I’ll be sent somewhere else, a different project with a different client. In which case: all bets be off.
Anyhow, consider yourselves informed!
I have to say I’m pretty awed by your time management skills.
For many people, it’s about choosing two out of the following three: Married life, work, gaming.
Yet you not only do all three, but also blog about gaming. What’s your secret? I have a friend who might be interested.
Well, it’s not easy!
I wouldn’t say I’m the best at time management, but I seem to have some skill for capitalizing on even the tiniest amount of spare time. I have a few tricks I use, and I’ve caught a few lucky breaks.
First — and I cannot stress the importance of this point — it is absolutely key to the whole thing that I have a wife who is basically nothing like the “spoiled American princesses” that Heartiste/Roissy decries, or the “choice-addicted” “future spinsters” that Dalrock mocks. It helps that she’s the Trekkie daughter of a Trekkie mother; she at least gets what it is to be a huge — perhaps obsessive — fan of a series of popular fiction titles from a while ago. Ultima may not be here thing, and she might wonder what I see in it at times…but she at least groks the general sentiment.
Second, capitalize! It’s like that motto from Glengarry Glen Ross: “Always Be Closing”. If I’ve got a spare moment any time during the day, I fire up Google Reader and look through a few articles for relevant content, or I fire up TweetDeck and look through my timelines and searches for anything related to Ultima, Lord British, or what have you. Or I tap out a few more sentences on one of the draft articles I have queued up. Waste no spare moment; capitalize on all of them.
My iPhone is the key here; from that little device, I can manage the site (comments, posts, etc.), manage my social presence, and correspond with Ultima fans and other site-runners…and I can even do it one-handed, if I need to. If you or anyone you know wants to have a fighting chance of pulling this sort of effort off, some sort of mobile device which supports rich text editing is basically a must. It doesn’t matter as much whether it’s a smartphone, tablet, or laptop PC — go with the best option you can afford. Having always-on Internet connectivity is very handy, so a 3G-enabled tablet or smartphone would probably be the better choice. But in the end, you can work “on the go” offline if you’re clever…so just give yourself the ability to work on the go.
In a typical day, I tend to spend most of my time on work and family, at least until the kids go to bed. Once that happens, either my wife and I will spend time together, or I’ll work on my stuff and she on hers. To be honest, I don’t game all that much at home, or at least I don’t play much in the way of AAA PC games. Most of the gaming I do at home is on my iPhone. My wife didn’t get the appeal for the first year or so I had the device, but since I picked her up an iPhone for her birthday a few months back (and since I put a few games on it that were right within the realm of her interest — Bejeweled and Pizza Boy, most notably) she has come ’round to getting what I’m on about when I putz away in whatever iOS game has my interest at the moment.
(If I do any AAA gaming, it’ll happen in the evenings when I’m on work trips. Dragon Age: Origins is a long game, to be sure, but it only took me three months to finish because two of those months didn’t involve any work-related travel.)
To be fair, it hasn’t always been perfect; I’ve had to learn valuable — and hard — lessons about balancing between interests and obligations. And being human, I don’t always get that balance right, although I’m better at it now. My wife has, in the past, had legitimate complaints about how much time I devote to gaming or blogging vs. how much time I devote to her. I’ve had to make adjustments. Which I suppose is the final point to make here: be a bit flexible to the needs and obligations imposed upon you by the other things in your life.
But equally: compromise, but do not concede. Your interests and passions are your own, and are a part of your being and your identity as a person. Don’t give up entirely the pursuit of these interests, even for your wife (unless your interests involve strippers, prostitutes, porn stars, and suchlike). You married her; be mindful of her needs and desires. She also married you, however, and you can — must, really — expect the same mindfulness from her at times.
Thanks for the sincere reply. Even if it’s not for me. 😉
Don’t forget that marriage is a legal and “moral” tool which is employed for a variety of reasons, least among them the ideal of Love.
I’m married and know what the deal is. I stopped believing in the traditional sense of love long before. Emotions are simple Newtonian physics, wrapped in arbitrary culture. They are generally predictable and shallow. If Einstein had theorized emotion we’d probably all be better off.
While I don’t dispute that emotions do indeed have a physical component and that they can be strongly influenced by electro-chemical and hormonal factors…every time someone makes an argument like this I find myself thinking “that’s some swell pillow-talk right there!”
Funny. Everyone wants the chivalric Disney fantasy I suppose, whether or not it’s real. I think of marriage as a formality with multiple practical applications, and that love is nothing more than consistently treating someone well. There’s no such thing as “I love you, even though I beat you sometimes” in my world. It’s an action, not a feeling. Of course people like to make things complicated and talk about ten million different types of love, but I think that just makes things unhelpfully complex.
I prefer the three Greek categories of love, myself. I am, after all, a bit of an Aristotelean in my philosophy.
And to be fair, I’m no Disney fan. I just don’t accept the reduction of love to the purely mechanical. I don’t deny the mechanical element; I reject the conclusion that the mechanical element is the only element.
“I love you, even though I beat you sometimes” – I would hope that any of us here, despite our differences on what is love – would agree that this kind of thing is definitely *not* love.
Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more…
Oh, for sure.
Though interestingly, it’s not always as cut and dried as that. A man who abuses a woman, or a woman who abuses a man (some research suggests that women initiate domestic violence slightly more often than men), can’t reasonably claim to love the target of the abuse under most circumstances.
And in fact, the abusee may actually feel increased attraction to the abuser, especially if the abuser is male and the abusee female. “Chicks dig jerks” isn’t just a saying; it’s a (somewhat trite) not-that-inaccurate comment on one of the prime factors underlying the mechanisms responsible for attraction.
I said it was physics and culture. Mechanical only sums those up partially. Love is action, not some supernatural force. Even the brain is governed by mechanics. Maybe love is the sole province of a soul? If you don’t have one, you may not love.
It’s a question of terms. Physics and culture, you say; I abstract these as being simply mechanisms, and take your statement to mean you view love as being wholly a product thereof rather than a transcendental quality. (If I err in this characterization of your view, do set me right.)
Human love is typically realized through action, though it need not always take the form, unless we abstract certain thoughts, longings, and feelings as being actions. Which is…tenuous. Love is an act of will. Can you love without a soul? I don’t know…but I know that you can’t love if you lack what we could (somewhat simplistically) call free will.
Love is also more, and then beyond the merely physical, culminating in that which is Love in the fullest sense. But now we are in to Aquinas, and it is far too late in the evening for Aquinas.
If thoughts weren’t actions then many things wouldn’t work. They are actions, even if only philosophically. Chemically they exhibit symptoms of electro-mechanical interaction similar to modern computer systems.
If love does transcend mechanical principles, humans definitely haven’t refined the notion. We still react predictably under most circumstances. History shows the possibility that we can be boiled down to algorithms with infinitely dense databases of individual humans to process.
I just remembered that Jesus or the New Testament in general equated thoughts with actions at least once. I think it said that a lustful glance was the same as adultery (paraphrased). Don’t sin in the heart or something. That always haunted me, in my religious days. I still have respect for it.
I like the idea of some epic, eternal kind of love, but what we know of the universe shows that real love is illusory. To love is to die, to submit, like a dog showing submission to its master or alpha. Self-sacrifice, for an ideal that you know will yield no immediate results. Being a martyr. Often when real love is experienced, someone dies. Not good. That’s why I like my “treating someone well” strategy/ethos.
Does it? Or does it show that the we are imperfect, and so can only love imperfectly? Is real love illusory, in the sense that it does not exist? Or is it just an unknown quantity to us who are imperfect, because in our imperfection we can only aspire to it, and never achieve it?
That is certainly one form that love can take, which the Greeks termed agape. It is not the only form, though it is generally regarded as the highest form to which man can aspire. “Greater love hath no man,” and all that.
Love in any sense does involve a measure of loss by the lover, I will agree. The degree of loss is variable.
But again, love proceeds from the will; absent our will, we cannot love. And the will is not (strictly speaking) an action; it is not simply or only the result of chemical reactions and physics (a deterministic will is not a will at all), though when these err the will can be affected too. That’s mostly what I’m getting at when I don’t accept that love is always an action. It may almost always be realized with action, but it doesn’t necessarily begin as one.