150! (What do I get?)

This being my 150th post (well, 151st if you count the post I took down a few years ago when I decided it was too personal, which is a shame since it was such a good post) I thought I ought to do something special. Of course it's exactly that sort of attitude of expecting "specialness" that's bound to give me a horrible case of writer's block, and as soon as I started thinking that way, my well of post ideas instantly dried up.

It's really a shame that Google seems to be doing some sort of search blocking, as I can't do one of my old posts where I'd talk about interesting search terms that brought people here. What I can tell you is that my most popular entries are on the 2006 Comic-Con and Milhouse as an internet meme. I guess that's good as the Milhouse one is one my personal favorites.

Maybe the thing to talk about though is that while I do seem to be getting a pretty good number of hits, I don't get a lot of comments. Most of the time, the thing that I'm thinking when I write blog posts (and this goes for my other blog as well) is, "What will my readers think about this?" Of course I have no idea what the answer to that is unless someone posts a comment.

The thing that I really like about the internet is the opportunity for dialogue with people you might not otherwise have a chance to come into contact with. Currently, when I'm not online the only people I really get to talk with are a few old high school friends and people from my current church. Sure, these are all people I do want to have interaction with, but I hate limiting myself. I'm not even looking for agreement; some time ago there was a guy that read through a bunch of my posts and largely gave rather eloquent explanations of why he thinks I'm full of crap; I can easily and honestly say that that guy was one of my favorite commenters!

Maybe what I'm missing is more questions? Maybe if what I'm looking for is discussion, I should end each of my posts with a number of discussion questions. What do you think about the Second Amendment? Have you ever had a serious disagreement with a Facebook friend? Do you have an interesting perspective on the evolution/creation debate? Is this what I'm missing?

Then again, maybe as I suspect is sometimes the case, I may be missing the whole point of blogging. Maybe it's just about generating hits and doing so as simply and uncontroversially as possible. If it is, is that what I really want? Lately I've been playing around with redefining what success means in my life so that it becomes something realistic and yet achievable; how should I really define success in blogging?

You know, maybe one of the things that's especially frustrating for me is that I know a large number of friends and family are aware of the fact that I blog, and yet I get virtually no feedback from them. Maybe that's odd to say since that's sort of complaining the opposite of what I was complaining about three paragraphs ago. Still, why shouldn't I have feedback from IRL people as well? There's something maddening in the cycle of, "Oh, you blog?" "Yes, here's the address!" followed by apparent complete silence from those who feigned such intense interest. (I did have an old friend read my blog and give actual comments recently, and even though it was just a couple comments, it really felt good!)

Anyway, I don't know if I have anything of substance to add to this, so I'll just leave it off now with a few discussion questions in hope that it will spark something. How do you define success in blogging? Do you think that I should expect feedback or dialogue from my blogging efforts? What, if anything, do you like about my blog(s) and what would you suggest, if anything, would improve my blogging?

The treachery of video games

When I was a kid, I used to have this space game on my home computer. It was really cool. This was before the age of the NES, and yet this game had 3D graphics and an awesome soundtrack. The funny thing about this game was that instead of being controlled in a simple up-down-left-right fashion by a joystick, the controls were all on a keyboard and the spacecraft moved like an airplane, pitching and rolling instead of moving in the standard way most of us probably expected of video game flying craft. You had to navigate through space and carefully synchronize the movement of your craft with rotating space stations that you had to dock with, all the while fighting off space pirates and dodging bits of space debris. It was a tough game, but for some reason, I liked it.

I think one of the main reasons that I liked it was that the game play was supposed to be a bit more open-ended than most games of its age. While the main idea of the game was to trade goods between one star system and another, you could beef up your ship with good weaponry and capture bounty for chasing down space pirates. You could equip your ship with an ore scoop and mine asteroids. If you wanted to, you could actually become a space pirate yourself and destroy other ships to take their cargo. I used to play around with the possibilities.

The thing that really made it easy to play around was that the game had a save feature, but it was of course optional. That is to say, if you ran a mission and it didn't turn out quite the way you wanted it to turn out, you could just reset the game and reload your last save. I think with a lot of games these days, that's almost something you take for granted, isn't it?

I never realized until just recently how strange the world of most video games is, at least in comparison to the world we live in. When you're playing some Legend of Zelda game, and Link dies, what are the consequences? Hyrule is lost? Princess Zelda is doomed? Ganondorf reigns triumphant forever? No, not at all. The consequence is this: "Would you like to try again? YES/NO"

Of course it's not a universal truth of video games, although I think it may nearly be so, but whereas reality as we know it has no consideration for whether you come out of your next adventure triumphant, reality as known in video games is looking for you to win. If you don't win, reality itself grinds to a halt and says, "Wait, it looks like we should try that again!" Time and space realign themselves to a place back before you made your big mistake and says, "Okay, take two!"

I started to wonder, does this warped view of the inevitability of success do something to the minds of people of my generation and younger? I've heard it said that young people today are disgruntled by the fact that they don't see much chance for success in their future, and maybe some of that is the economy that our forefathers messed up to some degree. Then again, maybe young people have had their brains wired to expect success to be handed to them. No, not fresh and steaming on a silver platter, but rather that if things don't go the way we want, there's a part of our brains that expects there has to be a way to go back and do it all over again until it turns out right.

Around the same time I had that space game that I talked about above, there was an unfortunate incident that happened to me. I was in my grandmother's garden one day, and I was foolishly playing with a knife. I'll spare you details, but I ended up in the hospital with forty stitches in my hand. I have a scar on the palm of my hand and nerve damage that will be with me for my whole life. No doubt there was a moment when I looked at the cut in my hand and would have been very happy for a chance to back up to the last save point, but life doesn't come with save points. "Would you like to try again? Too bad."

Maybe I'm overestimating the effect that video games might be having on our collective psychology, but I've started to notice something strange in me lately. The more my life seems to be messed up and in need of a magical restoration at the click of a button, the less I find myself interested in video games.