I've been holding up all right, and dry, since my defeat at the Battle of the Three Wines. And I quit another addiction this week: this one involving my phone.
I mentioned a while back that I was playing a stylized version of solitaire on my phone, one that is free-to-play but pay-to-win, in the tradition of Candy Crush and similar titles whose mechanism is in-game currency and power-ups and boosters, making all these good things available to the player for a little cash, or not-so-readily available for the expenditure of a lot of time and effort.
I chose the time and effort route...always. I never paid a dime for the game. I shouldn't be smug about that because I did, however, play the game every day for 850 consecutive days. I know that because the game rewarded me for it, every 50 days or so, with increasing amounts of in-game goodies.
Thus we come to the aphorism that if you're not paying for the product, then you
are the product. In this case me as the product was my labor in watching ads. I played the game seven days a week for a little over two hours a day, a span interrupted regularly by ads, which added up to about a half an hour out of the two hour session--so I watched around three and a half hours of in-game ads every week.
I also participated in helping others stay hooked on the game by being part of a player team that earned perks through meeting daily team goals, and separate to that, I had 30 "friends"--the maximum allowed--with whom I would give and receive in-game currency as often as every 4 hours.
It was through a near-GTO strat of ad-watching, team participation and friend management that I never came close to running out of the in-game currency that's required to keep playing the game. But actually...
the game developers had me where they wanted me. Playing several hours a day and watching ads.
The hardest part about quitting was the prospect of disappointing my team and my "friends." I actually made an announcement to my team that I was retiring from the game, before I uninstalled it. As for my friends: the game doesn't let us contact each other. All they know is that I've stopped playing.
Some of them were with me for more than two years, and after a certain number of days, they'll have to conclude that I'm gone forever, and they'll have to unfriend me and reach out and find someone else to take my place, which in that game is a process that is rife with rejection, as most players tend to carry the max complement of friends.
I am now making 30 people go through that process. This feeling of being a disappointment is entirely game developer-generated, of course, but no less real for that.
Anyways, the good thing about this is that I'll have two more hours a day to do something more useful.
Two weeks ago I read an advice column piece in which a husband complained about his wife because she had broken her promise to forgo her work as a part-time novelist to spend that time taking care of their infant child. He was mad because without telling him, she had spent her lunch hour every day at her full-time job working on a new novel. After a year or so of this, she'd finished the book and turned it over to her publisher, and for this she picked up a $100,000 advance.
And the husband was ****ing mad about it. He felt betrayed that she didn't skip her lunch and come home to the baby an hour early every day. And after brooding about it for quite a while, I started to suspect that the piece might be a fake, generated by the advice columnist for clicks. I was too perfectly outraged by the thought that a man would be mad at his wife for making them $100k by writing for an hour a day.
Good job to the columnist in either case: either choosing the missive or making it up. That's a bit of art right there, that is.
But it's the idea of writing a book for an hour a day that goes on to make six figures...that idea has stayed with me. I've probably averaged much less than an hour a day typing in this thread, and after three years I would wager that my contribution here is at least book length by now.
Next, I would like to review
Apocalypse Now, one of my favorite movies. If I'm feeling frisky, then I might bring in
Natural Born Killers--another favorite--for comparison and contrast
Last edited by suitedjustice; 12-18-2021 at 09:59 PM.