I don’t know if it’s just an unpleasant byproduct of being raised in the Nintendo Generation, or if it falls into the category of full on ADD (my aversion to mind altering medication combined with my admittedly anecdotal perception that it’s over-diagnosed has kept me from asking a doctor about it), but the fact remains that it takes considerable effort for me to concentrate on any one task at a given time. The really strange thing is that it seems born less out of a general lack of focus, but out of an uncannily misplaced sense of guilt. I learned a phrase in Economics class — possibly the only thing I learned there — that describes it fairly well: “opportunity cost”. If you’re not familiar with the term, it essentially boils down to the idea that every time you make a decision, it’s at the expense of an alternative one you could have made instead. Thus, the cost of seeing a movie is the $10, or whatever they’re charging these days, but the opportunity cost is all the other stuff that same money could have bought you or the things you could have done in the 2 hours you’re glued to a seat. By this same measure, even hanging onto your hard earned cash bears an opportunity cost in that you’re missing out on all the neat goods or services you could trade it for.

In my personal life, this same principle leads to frequent bouts of paralyzing indecision. Simple acts like watching a movie, playing a video game, hanging out with friends and, yes, reading a book are hamstrung in advance by my consternation over the chunk of time it’s likely to steal from me, a million other tasks left undone. Paradoxically enough this often leads to me trying to do 2, 3 or even half a dozen things at once, and in the process not really doing any of them at all. I’ll end up watching the same shows, playing the same games, and listening to the same music over and over because if I half do them while doing something else, I won’t really have missed anything.

It’s insane, I know! I’m so worried about not being able to do everything that I end up doing nothing. I understand that this self-defeating compulsion is not uncommon, and over time I like to think I’ve gotten better at combating it, if only by being aware of it. I go out with friends and co-workers more. I watch more movies, finish more video games, and listen to more albums. I’m reading more too, but that’s easily been the most uphill battle of them all. Part of it is the simple fact that I read at a downright glacial pace. Another part is that I have a hard time reading in motion. I don’t get carsick or anything, I just have an even harder time than normal concentrating in a moving vehicle, or when there’s an abundance of ambient noise. That rules out reading on my commute, during a flight, or even while sitting in a waiting room. Finally, and this may be the biggie, reading is the one activity that really cuts you off from all five of your senses; words are highly abstract representations of ideas, after all, so you can’t even really count “sight”. It’s just you and the images you create in your head, and I think more than anything it makes me fear I don’t have much of an imagination.

Like I said, I’ve made progress, but still find myself frustrated when I just can’t seem to get into a reading groove on a regular basis. My mind will wander and I’ll find that I’ve read a dozen pages without actually comprehending a word. At that point I’ll close the book (or more recently, turn off my Nook) in frustration and move on to something else. Every time this happened, I would halfheartedly turn my thoughts to audiobooks, and then quickly reject the idea.

There’s no real rational reason for my ambivalence. I guess it always felt like cheating. The snooty, high-brow, wannabe-intellectual in me would turn his nose up as soon as the thought entered my head. He’d think to himself, “that’s how the illiterate masses consume their Dean Koontz or Stephanie Meyer drivel when they’re too lazy to actually READ about shimmering emo vampires.” I’ve never even read either author’s books, they’re just what I imagine a good snob is supposed to judge someone for reading. And so it went.

Still, as my frustration grew, so did my resolve fade. It didn’t help that every podcast on the goddamn planet seems to be sponsored by audible.com, and my commute tends to be filled with offers for free books followed by “Tell ‘em [INSERT PODCAST HERE] sent you.” I guess advertising works, because the idea sounded more and more tempting every time I heard them. Besides, no self-respecting snob worth their salt is going to let anyone that enjoys Kevin Smith movies as much as I do into their club anyway. I finally capitulated.

I didn’t do it unconditionally, though. If I was going to dip my toe into the water, there were going to be some ground rules, by gum. I decided that whatever I tried out first was going to have to meet some criteria:

1. Anything I had actively put in my mental to-read list is out of bounds. I didn’t know how I felt about this “listening to books” business, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to risk ruining anything I’ve been looking forward to.
2. Anything I’ve previously read is out of bounds. It seemed like a waste. If I was going to do this, I should at least be experiencing something new.
3. Anything abridged is out of bounds. I’m already compromising my (silly) principles here, and I’ll be damned if they’re gonna steal words from me too.

With that I set about the task of selecting my first book. After about an hour, I found what I was looking for: Philip K Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. It was perfect! I enjoy Dick’s work, and I remembered watching the movie a couple of years ago, so I had a passing familiarity with what I was in for without outright breaking rule #2. Plus, it’s read by Paul Giamatti, which certainly sounded interesting.

The audio file that made its way to my phone shortly thereafter was just over 9 hours long and I tore through it inside of four days. I think it’s fair to say it held my interest. The following weekend I related the above to a friend of mine, and before I could get halfway through my list of rules and regulations he said to me, “There are two books you should pick up: A Scanner Darkly, and World War Z.” As soon as I finished geeking out over the fact that I’d already picked out one of his recommendations on my own, I shared my concerns. I own World War Z, and had read it a couple of times already. Plus, the version online was clearly listed as “abridged”. Two out of three rules were broken right there. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “it’s worth your time. You should give it a listen anyway.”

When I got home and gave it a closer look, my doubts quickly disappeared. The cast list was absolutely mind-blowing. Carl Reiner, Rob Reiner, Mark Hamill, Henry Rollins, Alan Alda, and Max Brooks narrating. It looked more like a radio play than anything, and that seemed more than fitting for the books interview format. I caved. And once again, I ate it up.

Finally, I broke my final rule last week. I’ve been curious about John Dies at the End for a while, as I’d read a lot of its author’s work on Cracked.com (yet another thing to contribute to my lifetime ban from snob city). On top of that, Bryce Wilson, an online friend of mine, and prolific online fiction blogger, had been singing its praises for quite some time. Once again I caved, and once again, I was glued to the story from beginning to end. There was no celebrity reader this time, but I’ll be damned if Stephen R. Thorne’s horrendous Jack Nicholson impression didn’t turn out to be an oddly fitting match for John the charming slacker.

So there you have it. I can’t say I’ve completely shed the mental stigma I’d built up around audiobooks, and I’ll frequently self-consciously refer to the book I’m “readi… well, listening to”, but the ratio of “guilty” to “pleasure” is shrinking with every book. I don’t know that it’ll ever completely replace the allure of words on the page, but it’s nice to know that if nothing else, I have a decent way to take in a book on the way to work.

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NOTES

You can check out Bryce’s blog here. While you’re at it, buy his book! (also available for us nook folks)

Yesterday, when word came down that 1up was picked back up by ZD, and that it, and a handful of other long-running sites, would be closing their doors, once again I felt nothing. I still keep up with the site from time to time, and still feel that a lot of their feature articles represent the best of what games journalism has to offer, but the connection still wasn’t there. It was a world I’d stopped caring about for quite some time.

Then I hit twitter.

I might not have noticed it at all if a friend hadn’t dropped my name in a tweet. When I popped online I saw tons of folks eulogizing the site, and revisiting old memories. Some folks I haven’t talked to in ages had started following me, and still others recounted stories I remembered experiencing firsthand, if from a distance. Suddenly it all came flooding back.

I was back in Japan, studying abroad for my junior year in college and feeling like a fish out of water. I had started a blog on 1up, and for a while it provided me with a comfort zone while I acclimated to life in the chilly north of Sapporo. I didn’t shut myself in and spend all my time online or anything — quite the opposite, in fact. Having that lifeline to the States allowed me to come out of my shell and start living life in a new place. I guess knowing I had a place to fall back on made it all less scary.

I started flipping through my old blog posts, their images long gone, since I had them stored on my now defunct college account. I remembered cheering for Jenn Frank in her mission to go to E3 (she had a nose for news). I remembered a bunch of my dumb friends and I all changing our avatars and online identities to a nebbishy looking accountant type they dubbed “Link Goldstein” — what we thought we were accomplishing, I still don’t know. I remembered the elation I felt at seeing my face on 1up’s frontpage, “blog of the day” written above a picture of me eating my dead iPod’s power cable. I remembered sneaking into Hokkaido University’s engineering faculty building late at night to mooch internet and talk to friends on skype. I remembered spending way to much on phone cards to talk with a girl I’d met through our blogs, a girl I’d go on to marry, then divorce, but a girl who remains one of my closest friends. I remembered joining up with my 1up clique to re-launch a friend’s website, and I remembered all the terrible game reviews I’d written for it.

There were a lot of memories there, is what I’m saying. That just scratches the surface. More importantly, I finally felt something. The weight of all those memories came crashing down on me and all at once it finally dawned on me how much I was going to miss it. How much I already did miss it. It was comforting, in a way. Even though it made me sad, I was glad, if surprised, to learn I wasn’t the hollowed out husk my initial non-reaction led me to suspect. I just needed a friendly reminder from those that meant something to me. Then the introspection started.

As I read through my old blog posts, I came across “the” one. It was the one that got me noticed by the newly budding community, and which I can probably thank for all that fond reminiscing. I don’t think I stopped cringing the whole time I was reading. It’s short, and not very good to be sure. It’s full of the same kind of context-free hyperlinks to other sites that I’ve grown to hate so much, and it was essentially a grossly superficial look at Japan’s relationship with western religion. Why, I thought to myself, was THIS the thing that got me noticed? Who could have read this and thought, “hey, there’s a guy I’ve got to talk to”? The answer came before long, and I actually smacked my forehead when I realized just how simple it was.

I cared.

When I was younger, I decided I wanted to be involved in the video game industry in some shape or form. At first, I wanted to be a programmer, but quit when it was too hard. Then, I wanted to be a translator or localizer, but quit when I never had the patience to see a project through. Finally, I decided I wanted to be a journalist. It made sense. The whole reason I came to 1up in the first place was because I used to follow Jeremy Parish’s blog religiously in my senior year of high school. When he came aboard the newly christened 1up ship, so did I. I’d started following a lot of other writers since then. Chris Kohler, Nich Maragos, Ray Barnholt, Phil Kollar… the list goes on and on. When I was younger, I idolized them. As I grew older, I like to think I appreciated them. All throughout, I wanted to be like them.

In that little time bubble, where I was sitting in a tiny dorm room writing blog posts on 1up, knowing that there were a handful of people who actually seemed interested in what I had to say was euphoric. There couldn’t have been more than a dozen people who actually read anything I wrote, and I came to know most of them, but in my 20-year-old brain, I was the next internet rockstar. It’s more than a little embarrassing when I think about it now. As I continued to look through my posts, they became fewer and farther between, and I seemed to have less and less to say. Half of them looked like a hackneyed version of some of the stuff that I’d read in Nintendo Power or EGM in my youth (both of which had plenty of hackney to go around at the time). I’d spend altogether too much time coming up with what I thought were witty titles for what amounted to “here’s what I’m playing right now” bits of fluff. I remember being dismayed when I no longer seemed to have the “it” I though I’d stumbled upon. Heck, I remember being beyond jealous when most of my little clique were tapped to contribute to a volume of Pocket Games, and I hadn’t. I didn’t understand why they were so special and I wasn’t. It’s clear as day as I retrace my steps, though. I didn’t care anymore.

Oh, I cared about people seeing what I wrote, and I sure as hell loved (and if I’m being honest, continue to love) the sound of my own voice, whether it’s spoken or written. I just didn’t care about any of the things I was writing about, and it showed. As I continued to read, I realized that what drew me to all those writers I was trying to imitate wasn’t the first look at Atlus’s new game, the tale of Miyamoto turning Radar Scope into Donkey Kong or historical sitings of Lucky Dan throughout the world. It was that each and every one of those writers were passionate about their hobby, and it came across in their writing.

When I was writing about the Genpei Wars and crucifixions in Nagasaki, the delivery may have been beyond clumsy, but I was writing about something I was genuinely interested in and that, I now realize, is what caught peoples’ interest. A lot of the time I spent trying to think up gimmicky angles for a game review, or desperately searching for some retro niche to claim for myself and become “the” authority on, it never once occurred to me that it was so grueling because I wasn’t looking for something that I cared about, I was looking for something to make others care about what I had to say. Talk about putting the cart before the horse!

I came to the conclusion a while back that for me my hobby is just that: a hobby. While I might enjoy reading about Atari’s corporate espionage at the patent office or the front companies used to circumvent Nintendo’s anti-crash publication restrictions, at the end of the day I’m more interested in reading about them than I am in researching them. I knew I liked writing, and tried to force myself into the mold of the people I looked up to rather than spend any time really thinking about what mattered to me personally. Hell, I’m still trying to figure that out, and have left a trail of half-maintained blogs in my wake while I sort it all out.

When I step back and look at all the thoughts that have gone through my head in the past 24 hours, it’s kind of amazing. Being able to reminisce about my time gallivanting about 1up’s playground was one thing, but I couldn’t have guessed that there was still a thing or two hiding in the cracks for me to learn about myself. It really was a hell of a time. Here’s to ya, 1up, and here’s to all the folks that spent the better part of a decade living their dream. You really did create a magical place.

As I asked these questions, my curiosity growing with each, I realized that it’s been forever since I played a sports game of any variety. Well, not any variety, I suppose; I get in plenty of NBA Hangtime on the MAME cabinet at work (what can I say, my job has perks), but nothing that doesn’t involve somersaulting dunks from the 3 point line. I was always a football guy, really. I enjoyed a lot of the games on the Super NES and N64, and loved NFL Fever on my venerable Xbox. I never much cared for any of the modern incarnations of the Madden series, though, so when EA locked up an exclusive deal with the NFL, my interest sort of petered off.

So, as it happened, I decided to pick up 2K Sports’s latest entry on Steam when I got home that night. NBA2K13′s career mode is pretty neat, as it turns out. You make a character, and rather than shifting control to whomever has the ball during games, you control your player and only your player. You start out getting drafted, and end up spending a lot of your early games primarily on the bench (mercifully, you can simulate past the parts of the game you’re not in). My first crack at NBA Superstar Nick Rycar resulted in a tall, powerful center and before long, I had learned one thing very clearly: I know precisely fuck-all about basketball.

I ended up firing up the player creator a few more times, changing positions or stats, and every time shut the game off in frustration after two or three crushing losses full of penalties I didn’t understand and an in-game grade point average of D+. In the span of an afternoon, I think I resolved to quit playing forever, and booted up a new character at least half a dozen times. I’m not sure what kept pulling me back — maybe just being presented with something so foreign sparked some sense of curiosity. “There’s got to be something I’m missing”, I’d think. And sure enough, I was right.

After rushing through the game’s tutorials and studying up online about what different positions roles and strengths are, I decided to make a fresh go of it. Nick Rycar is now a point guard on the Houston Rockets, 6’4 and with enough bulk not to be a pushover, but not so much to weigh him down overmuch. He’s focused on assists and steals, but can make a layup or two in a pinch. Like so many games before, I realized that the key to improving was to slow down and take a long look at what was going on.

Once I started paying closer attention, I realized that the bar in the top right-hand corner of my screen, which displays my overall teammate score on a scale from F- to A+, is giving constant feedback on each little thing I do. For example, I have a tendency to mash the “pass to me” button constantly, and learned quickly that every time I did so when I wasn’t open, whether or not the CPU actually deigned to send the ball my way, the game would drop me down a notch. Conversely, I found that my habit of fouling a player as they drove in for a layup was being consistently rewarded — I’m sure most ball fans know that you’d rather make a guy work for his two points at the free throw line than grab an easy bucket, but it was a revelation for me.

Now, a week later, Steam tells me I’ve clocked over 20 hours in the game. Funny how those evening hours add up, eh? I’m not fantastic by any means, but I’m learning. I still have trouble driving to the hoop once I’m in the paint, but on the other hand, I now know what “in the paint” means, which must count for something. In the end, I guess I just find it interesting how a little bit of curiosity and an ingenious, if simple, carrot-and-stick mechanic have taken me from being a disinterested neophyte to someone who could probably follow what’s going on if I were to sit down and watch an actual game. The REALLY scary part is that I think I might just be inclined to watch a game or two somewhere down the road.

The scenario’s pretty common: I come home after work, and look for something to put on while I eat dinner. Typically I’ll pull up Netflix or Amazon Prime and find a movie that I’ve either seen to death or one that looks interesting enough to hold my attention without demanding any real attention. Half the time I’ll end up doing something else while I watch, or just shut it off after I’m done eating, so it’s not really the time to discover Ingmar Bergman or dissect a Fellini picture; it’s popcorn flick time, plain and simple.

For some reason the Sci-Fi selection is pretty abysmal on all the services, save the odd MST3K, so that usually leaves comedies or action flicks. When I pulled up Hulu and started thumbing through the genres, I knew I was in trouble right away. In the “action” tab, my first batch of recommendations contained the second installments in both the Hoodrats and Spy Kids franchises. Some more perusing revealed at least half a dozen movies with top billing for Dolph Lundgren. Certainly seemed to fit the bill for “non-engaging”, but not really anything I had much interest in sinking any time into. When I flipped over to “comedy”, things weren’t much better. There was a Scary Movie entry on nearly every page, and half the box art on display featured tits or weed fairly prominently. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but none of it looked to be quite up to the quality of your average Porky’s or Half Baked.

Don’t get me wrong, there were certainly some gems to be found. I’ve been interested in Ip Man ever since my buddies over at the Action Cast focused their attention on it, and the likes of Heathers is an ever-embarrassing omission in the catalog of any self-respecting child of the 80′s. Still, this is all stuff I actually want to watch and enjoy, so it’s out the window as far as foodtime fodder is concerned.

If Hulu’s got a treasure trove, though, it’s the Criterion Collection and I couldn’t help but cycle through what they have available. I tell ya, what Hulu lacks in the Hollywood schlock department it more than makes up for in classy cinema and cult classics. Suddenly I had the likes of Eraserhead and House at my fingertips. There was Charlie Chaplain and Akira Kurosawa as far as the eye could see. Even though there was nothing there to whet my appetite for the comfortable and familiar, I was already envisioning the evenings I’m bound to lose exploring that particular treasure trove. Hell, I even half considered launching some kind of “film a week” project for documentation right here, but I figure I’ll have to wait more than a day after bringing this bad lad back online before I commit myself to any grand plans I’m unlikely to follow through on. Baby steps, Nick.

Anyway, by that point my food had gotten cold, and I pulled up Hudson Hawk on Amazon. Fuck you, that movie’s goddamn charming.

I’d been fiddling with the idea of trying to write regularly again, and though it may be (and likely is) just as doomed as so many previous incarnations, I decided take the Scorched Earth path and start from scratch. There’s no real reason behind it, to be honest. Well, I did want to upgrade my ancient (read: about 4 years old) server to a more up-to-date OS, but there’s no reason I couldn’t have just transferred over what I had into a new WordPress install. Heck, it doesn’t even mean I’m necessarily giving up on all the half-finished projects I have over there (I STILL haven’t read all of those New 52 books I bought). I guess the same part of me that re-starts the same RPG over and over again without getting anywhere near the finish line, or the part of me that will nuke and pave my computer to run a fresh OS install likes the idea of a clean slate.

This blog is fresh. It’s new. I can fall in love with it or learn to hate it without any of the baggage that comes with whatever nonsense I might have written a year or two ago. This is new nonsense, goddamn it!

Still, we’ll see if I end up having the patience to keep up with things, or if the tongue in cheek blurb at the bottom of the page is as depressingly true as it has been historically. I’ll likely wait a while before I start telling friends I’m doin’ this again, or god forbid inflicting my posts on people via twitter. Who knows, maybe some folks still have some ancient RSS feeds this is aggregated on. Really, it’s not about self aggrandizing or promotion at the moment. For now, it’s just about my deep love for the sound of my own voice, be it spoken or written.

So ends the internet’s billionth “I’m totally going to keep writing this time” post. Will I keep up with it? Time will tell, I suppose. I know one thing for sure, though. Today, if no other day, I’m hitting “publish”. One step at a time.