Perusing My Old Bookmarks
I have a lot of bookmarks. Like a lot. With the exception of the ones in my toolbar I never ever look at them after I save them. I always intend to. Everytime I make a bookmark, I figure I will get back to it at some point in the future. It’s usually something I don’t have time for right at that moment or something I enjoyed so much that I want to be able to find it again. But, like I said, I never come back.
Well maybe I can change that. I’m going to go through my bookmarks and pick a few here and do a quick write up for them. After I’m done, I’ll tag them as reviewed. So let’s get started!
Arcade Legacy
Ok, so the actual link I found bookmarked was the Twitch channel, but I want to include the arcade’s main website as well. Arcade Legacy is where I spent all of my free time when I was living in Cincinnati. I haven’t been back in a long time because I fell out of the fighting game community. I was never very good and I had a lot of trouble with the competitive atmosphere. But Arcade Legacy itself was a place where I always felt welcome and had a lot of fun. I learned a lot there and it gave me a place to belong when I was having a lot of trouble being anywhere at all.
Burnout by Victor Widell
At the time I bookmarked this I was in the middle of a very very long burnout recovery. I’m not really sure I will ever be able to work like I did in high school, and I certainly hope I never try to push myself through something the way I did in college. This article and others like it helped my realize that I had a real problem. While my issues were a lot different from the ones that Victor experienced, they had the same flavor and many of the same symptoms. My situation has improved considerably through a combination of very good counseling, internal drive, and support from my friends and family. I think perhaps that I will always be recovering. I have a tendency to push too hard and crash in a repeated cycle, but I’m better at recognizing the signs than I was before.
I found at least one article that I wanted to return to which is no longer online, but also is excluded from the Internet Archive, which sucks, but that type of bitrot is to be expected I guess.
This article was not where I initially checked for it. Looks like Victor changed his url scheme somewhere along the way. Use 301’s people!
Do schools kill creativity? by Sir Ken Robinson
This is one of a collection of videos and articles I bookmarked one after another about creativity clashing with our educational system. It’s a TED Talk from before TED really started diluting their brand significantly. I think that a lot of what Sir Robinson talks about in this video contributed to a lot of my adult issues. I can never finish things. I’m afraid of failure, afraid of being done, and having it be over, and so many other things.
My education didn’t prepare me for being wrong. Moreso it didn’t prepare me to think for myself and pick my own goals. I didn’t learn that in preschool, kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, or the one month training seminar I attended at the beginning of my first career track job. In fact I still don’t think I’ve learned it. Not really.
I’m certainly better than I was. But if I was to give myself a grade, like the literacy scores they gave me in school, I would probably be still be in elementary school. 3rd grade goal setter, 7th grade in getting shit done.
I can finish anything that anyone else tells me to well and ontime. My education prepared me for that. Give me an external source for accomplishment and I power through, even at the expense of my quality of life (as discussed above). But ask me what I want in life, what I want to do next, and I’ll have trouble answering.
I’ve done a lot of work in this area recently and I have some goals now. I even had some significant goals that I accomplished fairly recently. But I’m still having trouble sticking with things. for every project I’ve finished, I’ve started and abandoned 12 others.
Watching this video and reading many articles like it have contributed to my ongoing work of undoing the worst parts of my education. I hope to continue in the future.
Hot Chip (music)
Wow MySpace’s interface is confusing these days. At some point I found this band somehow. They’re a bit far away from the kinds of electronic music I usually listen to these days, but, after listening to one song in order to write this, I think I’ll have to go back through and listen to some more of their stuff. This is a very odd mix of genres.
Why Go Out by Sheila Heti
This speech transcript is fascinating. I disagree with so much of its premise on the surface, but I still found it worth reading again 11 years after it was written.
I think the main thing I disagree with is how pessimistic it is about the whole thing. I mean life in general. Like you seemingly get very little from interacting with others. And that the only reason you would ever do so in the first place is precisely because you wanted something.
But the author’s conclusions are even more interesting than their world view. I have a thought running through my head these days that this article bounces off but doesn’t state outright: satisfaction is more important than happiness. More on this later maybe…
Incidentally, just like with the Burnout article above, the link I had bookmarked was not this link because Brick Mag changed their url scheme. Booooo
Wrapup
I promised myself that I would hit at least 5 bookmarks today and I think I pulled out some pretty juicy ones. They highlight a pretty dark time in my life. I was surprised to find that I’m still pretty interested in these things, most of which I think I bookmarked about 6 years ago or more. I wanted to write more about each of them, but I’m running out of time, brainpower, and concentration. So I’m just going to leave this here. Crap work that’s finished and delivered is worth infinitely more than perfect work that is never done.