Belated Christmas Posting

I didn't want to write on Christmas, because, truth be told, I had a bit of a personal crisis that night.

In review, it does seem like I did okay. I found a job despite the pandemic. I learned things. I achieved some of my resolutions from last year. But when I look at the external things, such as finding new friends, making a game - I haven't really made the progress I desire.

If one were to ask my father, he would say these things are secondary, and now is the moment to build career and wealth. If one were to ask my mother, she would say I should stop playing video games and chase those things instead (and somehow fit doing more household chores in there). I don't think they're strictly wrong per se, but they're not exactly right, either.

Firstly, the truth is I am not my parents, who work all their lives and derive a majority of their self-worth from that work. My parents became this way because they were driven by survival in a Singapore that was much poorer. I am instead driven towards achieving a higher state within Maslow's hierarchy (without forgoing the base my parents have built).

Secondly, I was under the impression that playing games would provide me greater "inspiration" for my own designs. After all, the original idea for my designs came from two games. Yet it's effectiveness has been quickly diminishing, and I admit I've been in a "block" for the past 3-4 weeks. Not to mention I also stumbled upon this piece of advice from a developer a couple weeks ago:

Saw some vague discourse about "getting pro skill at game design". "play more [digital] games" is a myopic (and potentially prohibitive) answer imo, especially considering that most of the greats of the last century predated the current medium as we know it 

I feel weirdly about this one because it's generally good advice to play a lot of games bc it's shorthand for developing systemic intuition, but studying genres you like/are working in can be a slippery slope towards homogeneity

I already dedicated myself against playing Hades, Diablo, or Grim Dawn for the time being, but I think I've been spending too much time playing similar games e.g. League of Legends that have little relevance to my actual goals. So my mom is right, but not for the reasons she thinks.

Anyway, my point is that I really need to realign my goals. It's been absolutely great that at least I got something done this year in spite of COVID-19. But I really need to be a bit more focused and ambitious if I want to make next year better.

December Writing

Dec 14

A quiet day in the office without much work.
I look back at my resolutions for this year.

• "Get a job"
  Done, but I'll need another one soon as the contract will end in April.
• "Finish the SAP course"
  Done, although afterwards my dad made my buy the subsequent intermediate course and I failed to finish in the requisite time. I guess I should still feel happy about finishing the resolution.
• "Finish the Python course"
  Not done - thankfully this thing doesn't have an expiry date.
• "Finish reading a book"
  Not done, unless you count Hellboy Vol. 1 as a book. Although to be honest I don't know why I wrote this resolution, as I find most self-improvement books aren't worth the cover-to-cover read. Might just count the comic as a book and call it a year.
• "Clear 24 heat (difficulty) in Hades"
  Abandoned. It's way too difficult and with my job I have no time to practice games that hard anymore. I did succeed in my alternate goal of beating the game (at low difficulty) in under 20 minutes, so that's that.

So my success rate is 2/5, but closer to 2/3 if I ignore the last two as bad goals. I'm disappointed, not because of the rate I'm succeeding my resolutions at, but because I feel I could be more ambitious with my resolutions. Yet if I add more, I might really dip hard in my success rate.


Dec 15
Okay, so I didn't post about it, but lately I've been thinking about two aspects of my life that I feel I really haven't sorted:

My social/dating life
If you gave my introversion a strength rating out of 100, I would score 95+ with ease. As an introvert, I make very few friends. The nice thing is the ones I do make tend to be close. But herein lies the problem: the few friends that I have made now are scattered about the planet. So as close as they might have been, I find myself rarely having people to confide in.

I was planning to take the effort to make some new friends this year, now that I'm done with college and am a 'proper adult' and all, but then this COVID thing happened. Now, thankfully, the country is on the road to recovery, with Phase 3 hitting on the 28th, so I think it's time to revisit the topic.

And, uh, dating. I do think I need to work a little bit on the platonic friend base first before I go there. Walk before running, the saying goes. Also I think I'm being influenced by my colleagues, who have been talking about OLD as of late (they're trying to find the socially awkward WFD specialist a partner). But I do figure that, like, half of the way my life has gone is because of one breakup almost 4 years ago. While not all the consequences were bad - I did get to reassess my life because of it - I don't think I should live in the shadow of that event forever.

My hobbies
Despite my spending over a third of my life on my hobbies, I actually don't think I've fully settled on what they are. As in: in social situations, I'm not particularly stoked to reveal to others that I draw or write, as a lot of that is pretty personal; I'm also not really stoked to mention gaming as it tends to become a social label and I consider myself much more than just my games. I would like to say I attend the gym but I don't actually go frequently enough; same with reading.