Foot Notes

I think of this blog regularly, but I've had problems with self-confidence for most of my life and as a result can't think of any idea to write about here without immediately thinking "that's no good, no one will want to read that" or "that's not funny enough" (and damnit, none of it is very funny, though I think I can be funny in conversation). So you see almost nothing here, over a year after starting this up.

As someone who turned 33 earlier this summer, I am not proud of the fact that I still spend too much time playing video games. Well, shit, my job is only 40 hours a week (though I just clawed back the ability to work 5 hours of OT/week, which will help the wallet). I don't enjoy work enough to take on a second job. I have no children. I live with my girlfriend and love her dearly, and I really like her cat that is with us too...but I just don't have any other friends in this town I've been in for three and a half years. I want to get into woodworking, and have been building my tool collection, but it can be an expensive hobby and I have to do it on the back patio, as we have no garage/shop/basement. This makes every project a pain in the ass that has to be moved inside and outside a dozen times. So video games remain a great distraction and timesink.

One idea that I got off the ground very briefly a year or two ago (has it been that long?) was playing an old copy of Madden on the PC and simulating the results. On PC you could export the statistics, which would enable me (a novice Excel nerd) the opportunity to fiddle with the exported data and try to make it presentable. I enlisted a buddy to control a second team, so that it wouldn't just be me me tinkering away, and we could discuss strategy and talk trash and share desktop video of the Super Bowl when it was played every season.

The theoretical product of much of this was intended to be a hard copy newsletter entitled Foot Notes that I would mail to him, like gaming zines of old, and if it went well I could always enlist more people to increase my readership. It would include statistics of the current season, historic data, parodies or comparisons to what really happened back then, news reporting of the goings-on of the feaux-league, and so on. In reality, I got one issue out, and some sort of Windows Update made the game unplayable (it was the 2004 version of the game, running on a Windows 7 machine). The project was quickly tabled. Seems to be about how most of my other interests die.