February 22nd, 2007
Lift the paw!
吸収 (kyushuu) is the Japanese word meaning, “absorb” or “assimilate”. That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing this week. I don’t know what it is, but personal things have been getting progressively better as the year picks up speed, and it’s been helping my mood. Work being in a transitional phase with little in the way of deadlines and bugs is probably helping too. The upshot is, things are snowballing into a katamari of improvement and I’m sucking in ridiculous amounts of knowledge as a result. I’m becoming able to build considerable overlap with my study of physical theory and what I’m doing at the office, so I have a lot more structure and motivation during the day. I’ve been spending about as much time devouring Wikipedia as I have been sleeping, and this week I’ve run down close to a hundred articles on optics and music. It’s at the point where I’m reading so much I have to make notes as I go along so I don’t forget the material I’m consuming. If this starting to sound a lot like school, that’s probably why I’m so happy.
I’m standing up straighter, I’m more amiable when people come to me for questions, and I’ve been for the most part in less of a hurry, more relaxed. It would be great if I could maintain this kind of pace for the better part of the year. I’m sure I”ll run into some walls again, but for the near future I don’t see the format of my daily life changing much, so in the meantime I’m looking to make some considerable advances in craft this year. I already have a mile-long laundry list of techniques to experiment with at night when I get home to my tools (toys).
I think I’m going to take another break from gaming starting next month. I’m loaning my PS2 to a co-worker after GDC, so I’m kind of on a binge to finish Silent Hill 4 now. There’s nothing really wrong with playing games, it’s what I do. But an unfortunate disadvantage of games is they’re generally one dimensional; I consume them and that’s it. They don’t change me very much, I don’t produce anything in consuming them, so in the end they’re still just emotional snack food. I have a limited amount of time, in a lot of ways. How I spend that time is one of the most important decisions I can make in my life. One of the core tenets of my philosophy is that humans are not just consumers. We’re gifted enough to be much more than that; this is an important factor in dilleniating us from animals. My goal is to be as efficient a medium of life as possible, of converting as much of what I take in to something once again useful. Refine knowledge, refract life, be a thick lens for chemical energy. This is why time exploring, time studying, time creating, is time well spent. I’ll probably never give up hamburgers completely, but I’m sure going to try to make them a very small part of what I eat.
