07 – Metapost: Looking back on the first leg of a forced march

If I don’t review, then there’s really no point in keeping up the writing: hence, a brief look back and attempt at picking apart my writing.

• The Reluctant Gamer

  A bit forced: the paragraph containing “all work and no play” could have been cut, but I wanted to include every phrase I thought might be included, instead of taking a butcher’s knife to it. And the speculation over how hedeons work is pretty personal and mostly useless, since I haven’t done the appropriate literature search. Overall, I’m okay with this post.

• Christmas

  I let my sensational side get away from me, because I really really really wanted to include the line “Wrong! I want to [learn something] so I can [do some surprisingly broad action]”, akin to HPMOR. Lots of discursive lines of wandering thought, a bad appeal to science and a clumsy pointer to transhumanism; a closing line I’m not proud of. However, I’m not sure what else I would have filled into the slot, and it did seem the day to post it.

• Shopping

  I went shopping. I decided to post about it. Also, I just wrote the Christmas post, which was a bit long, so I didn’t want to write too much, and instead weighed in on a tired topic, with an obvious ending. Of course, the internet is winning: it has already won.

• Intentionality

  I started freaking out because I couldn’t control my own time allocation. Well, some portion of me started to freak out, and then I dumped this post promising further posts about how I was going to fix that, and then I went right back to playing Bastion, or going to sleep.

• Winter Break Game Reviews

  I finished the current crop of games I bought during the Steam holiday sales, and of course I had to write something about them, because it was easy writing fodder. Sometimes I digressed, but overall I think I stayed pretty close to the reviewing games core.

• The Middle

  An old post that has been sitting in my drafts folder as an outline for a few months. It sprang from some memories, and I realized halfway through that I was whining (maybe something deserving of #firstworldproblems), instead of writing something interesting. I didn’t know where to go after that, so I wrapped up pretty abruptly. Maybe it could have been massaged into something given the theme, but not in the hour I gave it.

Overall: I’m not writing fast enough. The Game Reviews took an entire evening (partially because I was chatting for much of it, but nevermind), and even short posts take a long time. If I write faster, then I can either get more revisions in, or I can write for shorter periods of time so that I don’t push writing these off to the end of the night (that is obviously a bad thing to do). Also, interleaving posts instead of writing them all in one go each night could raise the quality of writing through imposed revisions. Given that I think I’m done with gaming for the rest of the year, I’ll be trying to write faster and in revisions this next week.