It feels like ages since I’ve posted, but I don’t want to dwell on that too much or I risk being this guy. Instead, I’m just going to be unapologetic. So this is me being unapologetic:

Two things have kept me from posting much during October: Playstation 3 and cigarette smoking cessation. I want to talk about them both, because I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about them lately.

1: I bought a PS3 a few weeks ago, so I’ve been spending more time than I should be lately playing games and getting acclimated to the console scene. It’s been awhile (6 years) since I’ve been anything but a PC gamer. The two spheres are so dissimilar as to seem separate genera.

Console gaming is so easy. I don’t mean the content – the games are just as difficult (maybe more, since mouse based control schemes are easier to operate, in my opinion, than analogue stick based controls, at least for things like aiming), but the accessibility is so much higher on consoles than computers.

If I want to play a console game, I insert the disc and hit start in the PS3’s operating system. If there’s an update, it automatically downloads, patches itself, and starts. All I have to do is sit there and button mash the “X” button. I don’t have to know anything or learn anything. I’m sure there are bugs with this system from time to time, but I haven’t seen any yet, and I imagine any bugs get ironed out quick since the customers are unforgiving. There’s no DRM to worry about (there is, but it’s baked into the console, so it’s not invasive), no patch management, and no tweaking settings or drivers.

If I buy a game on the PC, it’s a whole different story – I have to make sure it works with my hardware, get driver updates, install the game, patch it, tweak settings to get the multiplayer to work, deal with bug fixes – it’s a long process. Recently I took a break from my PS3 to play Borderlands with some friends (I won’t play shooters on a console if I can get it on the PC) and getting the multiplayer to work is so convoluted (requiring port forwarding, TCP/IP tweaks, and spooky mumbo-jumbo chicanery) that we finally resorted to using Himachi to create a VPN and played using the LAN mode instead of the public game option. Even then, one of us could use the built in voice chat and two of us couldn’t, so we ended up using Ventrilo so we could use voice chat. What a goddamn headache. (I’d swear it off, but the game is crazy fun, so I return, night after night, to hosting a VPN and a Vent server just to play a friggin PC game.

I didn’t realize how used to that process I was until I started playing games on the console again. It’s so easy it’s almost criminal. I’m still not used to it. I’m used to having to fight to get things to work. Even though I still consider myself a PC gamer at heart, I understand why so many people are committed to consoles and consoles only. It’s truly plug and play.

Needless to say, I’ve spent most of the last month catching up on the titles that I’ve wanted to play since the PS3 game out. I tend to binge whatever I’m doing, so lately it’s been PS3 gaming.

2: Secondly, I haven’t been blogging as much because, after seven years, I’ve finally quit smoking. It’s been almost a month now. I’ve never made it beyond two or three days before, so I feel pretty comfortable announcing that I quit.

I quit because even though there were things I enjoyed about smoking, it was starting to get to my health. Going up stairs or any amorous activity wouldn’t leave me out of breath, but my breath was getting to feel less easy than it should be. I felt like I was always on the beach, buried under pounds and pound of wet sand.
I’ve always been a guy that has to experience things to understand them – I have a hard time just imagining things I have no basis for, though it’s pretty easy for me to take the basic seed of an idea and upscale it into something bigger. When my lungs started to feel heavy, like I was breathing with a sandbag on my chest all the time, it wasn’t hard to imagine how crushingly awful something like emphysema would be like. The idea of suffocation like that scared me down cold. It still does. I get friggin chills.

So, I quit smoking three weeks ago. Why should that affect my blog entries, you ask?

I’ve read a bunch about the effect of nicotine and creativity, and whether you believe that nicotine effects creativity or not, nicotine withdrawal certainly does. It severely lowers it, because nicotine withdrawal severely lowers brain function, at least for a while. I’ve seen a bunch of MRI’s (CAT scans? I dunno – the colored ones, which ever those are) on the net that show lowered brain activity during nicotine withdrawal. I can’t seem to find them right now to link them, but it doesn’t really matter.

I believe it.

As a result, though I am happy to no longer smoke cigarettes, I’ve felt slow and stupid for weeks. Combine that feeling with a new video game system that makes vedging out on the couch pretty easy and there isn’t much writing getting done. It’s starting to turn around, I’ve felt like writing again, but I couldn’t for a little while. Even sitting there for hours, no sparks came. It wasn’t that I couldn’t type – it was that nothing interested me enough to type about it.

Hopefully, that’s over now.

As a side note – those of you participating in NaNoWriMo – good for you. Good luck.

-m.