hey brother

Other days the writing hammers out you…

The always sensible Alan Kohler on debt levels in Australia – but not credit card debt, housing debt:

The combination of rising population, a lack of arable land and artificial restrictions on residential development in cities has led to a six-fold rise in the median house price since 1986, from $93,000 to $550,000 now. Over the same period, average household incomes have risen 3.5 times.

…

One sentence is like a rowboat, it can turn on a dime.

Two sentences is like a sailboat, it has to tack and work with something other than itself.

At about 8,000 words the number of sentences might be roughly 400. That feels like trying to turn a super-tanker, but in reality it’s probably much more like trying to steer a medium sized ferry.

At least now I seem to have a sense of the right direction, even if it is vague, and to stretch the nautical metaphor a bit further, I think I’m standing on the bridge now.

You know how sometimes you just get into a mindset where nothing seems to be going right? Where no matter what you do you can’t stop being in a deep, fuzzy funk? I’ve got that right now. So what’s pissing me off at the moment: let’s try and list the crappy things at the moment and maybe they’ll seem more manageable.

First: This book chapter paper-expansion job is crushing me. I hit a point where I realised that the initial idea I had in the paper was actually shit and rubbish and the so expansion turned into something like an attempt to salvage anything from the flaming wreckage of what I thought was a plausible original idea. Ha! So much for that one. Hey, guess what, actual originality is even harder than I thought it was (and I already thought it was pretty damn hard). I guess either I’m doing shitty research (hello!) or not doing enough (hello!) or my standards are too high (hello!) or I’m not playing the bullshit publishing game right (hello!).

Second: My actual PhD research – it’s basically the same deal as the chapter above. I mean, it was meant to be something preliminary from the body of my PhD. Which means, hey, my PhD research must not be doing too great I suppose yeah maybe. I need to get back on those interviews and stuff but I feel like at the moment all my time needs to go to this stupid chapter (see first issue) because it’s due soon. But all the time I’m supposed to be spending on it I’m really just wiling the fuck away anyway so maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe I’ve got heaps of time for it.

How much do I actually still have left to write? I need to write: an introduction, a literature review-type chapter (reviewing what’s been said about internet communities I guess; my methodology as well?), a chapter on my own take on internet community (how to talk about internet community), a theoretical chapter on the nature of the internet or digital environment (although every time I think about this one I kind of cringe and go “really? wasn’t that also just another bad idea I had?”), a chapter I had planned to write attempting something like a mashing together of object-oriented philosophy/ontology and J Gibson’s “affordances” but I think that’s probably not going to be a successful endeavor now, a chapter of ANT-style case studies of certain bloggers who did a lot of linking, i.e. community building (Maggie Green, Michael Walbridge, N’Gai Croal), that last chapter could almost be two or maybe three chapters with the amount Maggie and N’Gai wrote. And finally a chapter on some events that elucidate some aspect or other of whatever the hell is interesting about the community formation aspects of the critical videogame blogosphere. Perhaps at the end of it all I go “Well actually, it’s important not to overemphasize the importance of this stuff”, particularly if I’m not particularly convinced myself by my fanciful claims at the end of it all.

Third: I fucked up pomodoro. Guess that’s not working out for me at the moment either. No idea when I’m going to get back into that, but this more free-style blogging I’ve been doing is at least keeping up my sheer writing quota.

Fourth: If I get another bout of tonsillitis I’m going to murder someone, possibly myself.

Fifth: If I don’t stop coughing soon I’m going to murder somebody.

Sixth: I am frustrated by constantly being reminded of an ex.

Seventh: I haven’t gotten out enough lately. I probably should have gone to the gym today at some point to de-stress and work off some energy.

Eighth:  I had a rather crappy SC2 game that got to me. Some unnecessary ‘advice’ from my 2v2 partner got on my nerves. We were outplayed, massively.

Ninth: I’ve run out of really good TV shows that I want to watch. I’m up to what’s been screened in the US now with The Walking Dead, Misfits Season 3 is on-balance disappointing. I finished Deadwood. Game of Thrones isn’t till April and I can’t drag up the enthusiasm to watch any of the great shows that everyone else seems to love (I’m looking at you Breaking Bad, you horribly depressing mess).

Tenth: I still have really itchy hands as a reaction to the penicillin.

Is that all? I think that’s all. it’s pretty clear that the research and the book chapter are two big-ticket items really bringing me down at the moment.

After a shocking list like that, I think it’s probably time to think of some positives.

I am looking forward to GDC a lot. It’s coming up really soon, but it still seems pretty far away somehow. GDC is literally my favourite week of the year. It’s better than Christmas. It’s better than all those other activities you enjoy. It’s like having all your best, longest lost friends all in the once city all at the same time. Who cares if the talks you go to are good or not? That’s not what GDC is about for me anyway.

Even though I had a really shitty last game, I’m also really enjoying the challenge and the learning process involved with Starcraft 2. I missed the GSL Code S matches tonight because I was actually playing SC2 but I can always go back and watch them later. My 2v2 bro and I played an amazingly tenacious game  earlier in the evening in which we won by the skin of our teeth against slightly favored opponents. Ghost play is essential. And with ghosts, my late-game has slightly improved – just by asking myself the question: “do I have everything I want?” which is what Day[9] suggested as a good thought process for that mid-late game where money is no longer an issue.

This pastebin contains a discussion thread between the owner of the Australian gaming site PALGN, and it’s volunteer staff, admin, writers, etc.

There’s so much to say about it really, but the most obvious is that it’s a really incredible example of The Sunk Cost Fallacy:

…having inherited the editorial position when PALGN was in the shit over three years ago, and having worked my arse off to maintain it, rebuild many damaged relations while building the best staff team ever, I’ll be damned if Iím going to walk away and let you reap the benefits that I’ve tried so hard to provide for this team.

All of these people other than Roland should clearly have cut their losses months, even years before the situation reached the downright abusive and destructive point it’s at now. I know one (perhaps two? maybe more that I don’t know about) people who did just that. I bet it now seems like the best things they could have done, in light of this.

Where your brain is in a fog that stubbornly refuses to lift until after midday no matter how much coffee you drink or what you try and do. I have a chapter to write, dammit, and I can’t do it without you brain! Maybe you’re hungry. Well we’ll fix that soon.

Sometimes there really is no way to avoid being a bit of an asshole about certain things. I don’t really mind that, it’s just part of life, but I sometimes worry a tiny bit about how easily I accept the part.

I have a book chapter due in about two weeks time, it’s an expanded version of a paper I presented in Oxford in July last year. I’ve reached the point where I have stopped being convinced of my own thesis – which is pretty damning. The thrust of the original paper went something like this:

- The videogame blogging community is pretty rad

- The community seems to know stuff (it makes interesting blog posts and discussions)

- Therefore the community as an aggregate entity knows stuff (and for some epistemological reasons that’s interesting)

Easy, right? Except that I’ve grown disenchanted with the idea that the community knows stuff, as well as the idea of the community as an aggregate entity. It’s all kind of boring and banal, with all the things and potentials that excited or surprised me about it now seeming dull and mundane.

Okay fine, so I can’t just withdraw the piece from the anthology because I think my piece is stupid, gotta keep the publishing record up after all. So what’s my option? Go with the pat ‘there were no conclusions reached/further research needed’ option?

A journal article I discovered the other day might have a useful “out”, and I’ll excerpt the intro:

“The 2011 revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and neighbouring countries have brought blogging and other social and citizens’ media to the forefront of the public imagination. Major news corporations have interviewed bloggers and drawn heavily on Twitter and Facebook. Social media have been celebrated as creating or, at the very least, fuelling the revolutionary movements. On the other hand, ‘pre-revolutionary’ scholarship on blogs and other forms of online journalism, citizens’ media and user-generated content argued that they were unsuccessful because they did not appear on the radar of commercial media and/or have not themselves become big media, accessed by a large number of readers/users. For some observers this means that journalism 2.0 has not lived up to its promise (Rebillard and Touboul, 2010).

These two apparently opposing arguments draw on the same logic: media are considered political if, and only if, they have a major impact on political decision-makers and the public sphere. …The danger for media analysis is that we then forget about the political import of mundane, quotidian everyday practices: they no longer fit within the notion of politics.”

They then go on to position the German news-blogosphere (a considerably larger one than the CVG blogosophere) as political via Oliver Marchart’s who “has elaborated an extended definition of minimal politics, the minimal criteria required for an action to be considered political.” So that could be an out: do something with Marchart’s 6 criteria for minimal politics and say the CVG blogosphere meets the criteria (probably like: sometimes it will, sometimes it won’t).

The bits I have that do feel strong are about community formation, and how the CVGBlogosophere emerged and how to talk about community when it’s a techno-human community… but why would a chapter primarily about that end up in a book about videogames (and more to the point: in a section on identity and gameplay?? Unless I want to get all Clifford Geertz up in this piece and treat blogging as a “game” – also a. la Chris Bateman, but I have some problems with that book…)

So I don’t know.  I think I’ve about reached my limit for the day, and it’s time for some relaxing Starcraft instead.

I don’t really read about videogames all that much anymore. I’m just not that interested. But I’m heading up CD’s Blogs of the Round Table… that’s a quandry. Which reminds me, January is over and it’s time to move on to February. I don’t have a topic ready yet.

But what have I been reading? Well, I’ve started reading in pomodoro chunks, and it’s working pretty well. I finally finished the Preface to Jane Bennett’s vibrant matter which looks stunning, and I can’t believe I didn’t finish it earlier. Right up my alley and all that. Second I got out Bernard Stiegler’s “Looking After Youth and The Generations” which blew me away in the first page but which started to get bogged down in Freud and psychoanalysis which is just not really my bag. Perhaps it’s because I don’t understand it/was never taught it, or perhaps my bullshit detector is just right when it tells me much of what passes for psychoanalytic discussion is a bit of a giant wank with little relation to reality. But that’s okay. Wanking never hurt anyone, just don’t expect me to watch and enjoy it.

Apparently Chapter 7 of Steigler’s work is the really good bit, called “What is philosophy?” it (acording to Alex Galloway’s review of the book) plugs into this whole French conversation between Deleuze/Stiegler and someone who Deleuze was kind of riffing off when he wrote his own book “What is philosophy?”.  Anyway I really like Stiegler’s giving-a-fuck-about-youth business, and the first three or four pages of the book which talk about responsibility and how youths are made responsible for their actions (esp. criminal actions) we actually remove responsibility from adults and society responsible for making the youths  into responsible adults. In essence, we say two things: to kids “Be responsible!” and to adults “You don’t have to be responsible!” which is no doubt the source of some serious fucking conflict.

I’m looking forward to reading more of Bennett and Stiegler soon, but this fucking book chapter needs writing (that’s what I was reading these two for. I think it’s probably a bit late to include any more than a cursory mention of either of them though. Stupid chapter is due in two and a half weeks, and I haven’t quite finished my first expanded draft).

So I’ve totally messed up my early #pomodorojerk momentum by catching tonsilitis two weeks in a row. I think I’ve done my daily writing allotment maybe one or twice in the whole of the past two weeks. But now that I’m on the mend, I should really start it up again – but the piece I’m writing (a chapter, expanded from a paper I wrote for the Oxford conference last July)  is at the stage where it doesn’t really need any more writing. At least, not any more of the kind of writing that the pomodoro brings out – new, alternative perspectives and angles and connections. Rather, it needs edits and connections and prunings – like what happens to the brain as it goes from being highly connected as a child, to greatly refined with fewer, more deliberate connections as the brain matures.

Supposedly one can do a pomodoro edit too – just stick to the clock and see how much you can get done, but that hasn’t really worked super well for me so far. I’ll give it another go, however.

But for the moment – I need something new to be writing to get back into my usual pomodorojerk routine. On my pomodoro list are two things – my review of Chris Bateman’s ‘Imaginary Games’ about which I have quite a bit to say (but my reading isn’t quite finished), and an essay for Robert Yang’s Territory initiative. The latter I’ve done a number of drafts of, none of which I’ve been particularly pleased with. They all ended up in rambly, confused territory as it’s hard to explain Latour’s ‘Never Modern’ in a short space, and without trying to explain all of it at once…