This was a tough week and I don’t feel like I made much progress. I did stay off social media, but not through any great show of willpower, but because of work. I didn’t have a moment free during the whole week.

I can’t go in details but we were pulling 12+ hour shifts Tuesday – Thursday this week, while at the same time our future at the company is very much up in the air; a 3rd party bought the company I work for as well as another company in the same marketspace, merging the two into one bigger company. They picked the CEO of the other company to run the new, combined company (good choice as our CEO wasn’t great). So now there are two web teams (as well as 2 IT teams, 2 HR teams, 2 everything teams) and these need to be combined into one, with the assumption (by me at least) that there’s going to be redundancies. Having Something Bad happen on our team this week was about the worst possible timing. So far it seems like most of the redundancies have been from our company, not the other one. Understandable, I guess, that the CEO prefers to keep people he’s been working with. But having this problem happen with our sites will not make him more apt to choose to keep us. So who knows what will happen. Anxiety fuel for sure, though.

Friday afternoon/evening Partpurple had a craft show. I was supposed to have the afternoon off to help her out but due to the Bad Things I had to negotiate with my manager to get a break to help Purple transport and unload her gear, then I came back home to finish working. When that was finally done I went back over to her show. She did OK as these things go and I actually sat at the bar (the craft show was held at a local microbrewery) and had a couple beers while chatting with folks. I have not sat at a bar in probably a decade at this point and I quite enjoyed it. By the time we got home we were pretty much spent and I’d logged 12K+ steps when my average is about 5K.

Saturday it was pouring rain in the morning. We decided that was a sign it was time for a rest day. I spent the morning doing the things I’ve been trying to give up: earning MS Rewards points. Haven’t been able to shake that habit yet. When we had a break in the rain we unloaded her car (we’d left most of her stuff in it Friday night since it was raining when we got home) and packed everything away until the next show. Saturday after lunch I jumped into the new story content for Neverness to Everness version 1.3. Spent a solid few hours getting through that. Maybe I’ll do a post on it. I also took rather a long nap which felt pretty well-deserved after the week I’d had.

Saturday evening we watched a bad movie on Netflix (The Last House… it was super stupid and not even in a very fun way) and soon after I was ready for more sleep. Kind of a non-day.

Sunday I got up and headed over to a ‘riverwalk’ park that I hadn’t visited yet. I saw an alligator. PartPurple and I have had a running joke where I swear alligators are mythical creatures because we’ve lived down here for, I dunno, 12 or 13 years and I’d never spotted one, only constant warning signs about them. Now I know they are real. 🙂

It was an OK walk. Not very long; I had to do two laps to get to 5K steps. And it’s kind of a serpentine path in what is actually a fairly small area so, overall it was mid, as the kids say. (Do the kids still say that?) Still searching for the best walking spot for when I want something other than to go around an asphalt loop.

After lunch I started writing this post, then played more Neverness To Everness. Sadly I think I might be done with NTE. This patch brought the story content I got through yesterday (and didn’t enjoy that much). Today I tried some of the other activites. Did all the personal-vehicle (can’t say Jet Ski cuz copyright) races which were super easy. I tried the volleyball but found it hard to get the hang of. I enjoy the world of NTE but these days it’s mostly grinding out boss fights and I honestly don’t find the combat that interesting. Anyway this isn’t an NTE review post.

I did sit down in a cozy corner away from screens and read a magazine of short stories for about an hour. I keep telling myself I’m going to read more then never get around to it. So that was one of the few wins of this week.

Then it back to the comforting electronic glow of screens. I saw what looked like an interesting video series on YouTube: Joanna Lumley, who to me is just Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous, has a documentary series about traveling up the Nile. That sounded so odd to me, but it was almost an hour long (pretty sure it aired on BBC or something originally, back in 2010) which is generally way too long for a YouTube video. But I caught myself and decided to devote the time to watching it, and it was pretty good. As good as any other show like this anyway. There’s actually 4 episodes and I’ve book marked the others for watching some time in the future.

Now it’s Sunday evening, back to the Hellmouth tomorrow morning, but for the last couple hours of the weekend I’m going to go play a video game, I guess. Ideally just one, for a couple of hours. All in all I’m a bit disappointed in my progress, or lack thereof, this past week but I will give myself a bit of a pass due to the extenuating circumstances of work turning into such a sh*t show. Ideally I’d like to get to where I’m really sinking my teeth into SOMETHING that feels more substantial than just grazing on social media, video games and YouTube vids. I just don’t yet know what that something is going to be, let alone how to get myself to focus on it. Guess this all takes time.

The title is a joke, get it? Like I don’t have the attention span to finish the last word. C’mon, it’s hilarious. No? No one!!? Sheesh, tough room.

So after a hell-week at work I slid into weekend 2 of my social media cleanse which has kind of morphed into an exploration of my 5-second attention span. Yeah I’ve been drinking deep from the YouTube Shelf-Help Firehose [I picked up that term, shelf-help, from a YouTuber whose name I can’t recall but I love it. He used it to refer to when we read all the books and watch all the videos about improving our life but then don’t actually change our behavior in any way.]

But I keep watching these videos, starting out skeptical then thinking to myself “Holy heck this really sounds like me!” I flit from thing to thing like a cranky old butterfly. I’m going to see if I can change that.

So Saturday PartPurple had another craft show. That kept me pretty busy and by the time we get home from those we’re fairly spent. No attention span worries there.

Sunday, though I was in the dark zone. Not really doing anything, irritable for no clear reason, kind of wanting to pick up my phone and doom scroll, and feeling alarmed by how much I missed social media.

I decided it was time to focus on one thing, which turned out to be Diablo IV. I played a bunch of it, finishing the campaign from the new expansion. More than a few times I felt tugs in my brain “Ok this is enough of this let’s go do something else.” But I stuck with it.

Here’s one of the traps I’m having to navigate carefully. There’s a fine line between “This isn’t fun and it’s dumb playing a game I’m not enjoying, let’s move on” and “This is fine and I want to finish it but I’ve been doing the same thing for 20 WHOLE MINUTES and I need more variety in my life!”

In this case I wasn’t LOVING the gameplay in Diablo IV but I did really want to finish the campaign so I stuck with it, finished, even wrote a blog post about it, and that all felt pretty satisfying.

I also watched a movie this weekend, on my own. Purple and I always watch a movie together on Saturday nights and honestly I sometimes dread it because the idea of sitting there watching something for two hours seems daunting. But I do it for, y’know, domestic bliss and all that (remember that the whole time we’re watching she is dinking around on her iPad). So that’s kind of a ‘forced attention span’ thing.

Choosing to watch a 2nd movie was…well, a choice. I was interrupted a couple times by real life, but in the end I did go back and finish it. Sounds trivial but my streaming service accounts are FULL of partially watched movies and partially watched TV show seasons. Even stuff I’m enjoying I just drift away from for some reason.

By late Sunday afternoon I was getting SUPER antsy but we had a break in the weather (heat and storms both) and I did a walk and that helped a ton. Got me out of the house, some fresh, extremely humid air, and of course desperately needed exercise. Image at the top of my post is of the angry clouds gathering strength for the next deluge. I got home just as it started raining again.

After dinner I finished a playthrough of Coffee Talk (weird game, I completely missed the actual gameplay) and then spent some time choosing my next game to try to focus on.

In the midst of all this I realized that it isn’t just social media crashing my attention span. It’s also all the ‘daily tasks’ I have in Todoist:

1) Play a Game Pass Game for 15 minutes
2) Play a PC Game for 15 minutes
3) Play an Xbox Game for 15 minutes
4) Make an AI image on Night Cafe to earn points
5) Do a lesson in Brilliant
6) Log into whatever Gacha game I have a monthly sub to in order to collect the daily goodies

The first 3 of those are to earn Microsoft Rewards points, and item 1 can be combined with either item 2 or 3. But these are not contributing to me rebuilding my attention span. I play with one eye on the clock and as soon as that 15 minutes clicks over I quit. I’m turning gaming into a chore I have to do in order to earn points that I can spend on games that I don’t want to play because I’ve turned gaming into a chore. LOL I feel like I need to give that up.

The AI image thing is just dumb. I have SO many credits on that service and I don’t even really like it that much. I can make better images using local AI models, or ChatGPT. And honestly in general the desire to create AI images just for the sake of making images has kind of lost its appeal. The novelty has worn off and I can’t actually USE them anywhere or y’all will come at me with torches and pitchforks and blocking me and my blog.

Brilliant still feels useful as long as I resist the urge to game it to stay on the leaderboards. It’s always tempting to start some really rudimentary course so I can just churn through lessons and shoot up the leaderboard, which is NOT the point. Learning and thinking is the point. Why is every damned thing gamified these days!?

And then there’s the gacha daily log-in thing. I only have one sub (Neverness to Everness) running and don’t think I’ll renew it.

So if I chop these 6 ‘daily chores’ to one, and that one which has some real value, I think that should help.

Circling back to the gaming: I farm Microsoft Rewards points to pay for Game Pass and I’m not sure I want Game Pass any more. All these subscription services are both a great deal but also kind of de-value games and cause choice paralysis and sometimes make me feel like a gaming Sisyphus as I low-key try to clear the backlog. My Playstation Plus expires in November and I don’t think I will renew that, but I have Game Pass pre-paid for the next few years and I almost wish I could cancel it. I really don’t need more MS Rewards Points and don’t need any more games for quite a while. Heck I’m not even sure what kinds of games I like at this point. But that’s another whole discussion – you’ve been warned.

So, that’s where I stand now. Feeling pretty OK about things in general. I did NOT get any significant reading in this weekend and that is still something I would like to improve on. I miss all those many years when I absolutely LOVED to read and I’m sad it is no longer part of my daily routine. But I want to reintroduce that organically, if that makes sense. I mean, adding “Read for 15 minutes every day” into my Todoist is exactly what I’m trying to get away from!

This all feels like progress to me. Perhaps more accurately, setting up for progress. Social Media is no longer the bogeyman under my attention span’s bed. Or at least not the only one. I’ve managed to put in place so many systems that seem almost deliberately designed to fracture my concentration. For now I’ll stay off social media, quit the Night Cafe thing, let the gacha subs expire. Those are pretty easy. The thing that feels hardest (but is the worst offender) is giving up the Microsoft Points habit, because that is actual value being left on the table. I’ve redeemed hundreds of dollars worth of Rewards Points over the years. But going back to only playing games because I want to be playing a game, and not to earn a few cents in points, feels like the right move and one that just might bring back the joy that gaming used to be a source of.