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I was walking home from dinner today, and 2 buskers were playing in an underground passageway. They were playing 'Stand By Me'. One was on the guitar, the other on vocals and some portable bass drum thing. They seemed to be having fun with their music-making.
I, too, want to have fun. But wait - haven't I had enough fun? I've been in Europe for 6 weeks on vacation. I have also generally been playing lots of computer games and some board games. Reply: No. The kind of fun I was referring to isn't the kind of fun that I had in Europe, nor the fun I'm having with my games now.
That sort of fun is what I would, for lack of a better term, call artistic fun. Artistic fun is where you combine conventional fun with a sense of craftmanship. There's no sense of craftmanship in holidaying, at least not the way I had it. And I now play games for unbridled pleasure, without any sense of craftmanship. The 2 buskers, on the other hand, were having fun with a sense of craftmanship because they seemed to enjoy their activity and at the same time they were performing for an audience. There's usually an element of craftmanship when you perform for someone. (I'm going to leave 'craftmanship' deliberately vague here; a greater sense of it may emerge in what follows).
There are 2 avenues for having artistic fun for me now. 1) Write fiction. 2) Play games, with a sense of craftmanship. 1) is on hold now because I've got little motivation. I've got little motivation because writing shares the same kind of resource as studying Philosophy. My priority is studying Philosophy now, and, for example, if I've spent half the day studying Philosophy I wouldn't feel like writing fiction later in the day (note that 'studying Philosophy' includes attending classes, teaching, marking etc). It's probably similar to people who work. It's generally hard to craft a hobby when one has worked the whole day. Many people can indeed do it - I usually find such people commendable. I suspect they either have a high amount of resource to draw on (that is to say, they're highly diligent), or their hobbies draw on a different kind of resource from their work (that is to say, they derive a lot of pleasure from their hobby, such that they feel it's effortless).
I'm going to depend on 2) for having artistic fun in the foreseeable future; I will write about it when the time comes. It will do to say here that I do want to develop a serious hobby. I want to craft, nurture, improve on something. I've thought of picking up a musical instrument too, but that will be costly; I'll leave that for the unforeseeable future.
The game 'Agricola' came close to being a serious hobby. But I've lost the motivation now to play it because, after playing almost 500 games, I've come to suspect that the game is too luck-dependent. More precisely: it's too dependent on the actions of other players, and sometimes you get weaker players whose actions unwittingly influence your chances of winning. This is not to say it is a poor game. It's not. In fact, it is the best board game I've played to date. And there's really nothing wrong having luck in a game, as long as a significant amount of skill is still needed. The only problem is that for such games, you'd need a large number of games to determine where exactly you stand. Losing or winning an individual game usually can't tell you much, and can get pretty frustrating sometimes. And since each game at its fastest took 1.5-2 hours, the game became something I couldn't sustain ultimately. But in any case, I haven't wrote it off completely yet. I'm still waiting for a good time to dive back in and see what I feel about the game again.
Serious, crafted, artistic fun aside, I am going to be pretty busy this semester. I've got a presentation coming up in a few weeks, research to do, and 2 classes to manage this time. These classes take up a lot of time, I might decide to mark assignments without writing detailed, individual comments, as I did last time. I am also taking German II, which is very time-consuming. When German was spoken on the first lecture though, I felt mildly surreal, because I was immediately transported back to Europe.
I'll post the vacation photos on Facebook in time. Days, weeks, months, I don't know.
I, too, want to have fun. But wait - haven't I had enough fun? I've been in Europe for 6 weeks on vacation. I have also generally been playing lots of computer games and some board games. Reply: No. The kind of fun I was referring to isn't the kind of fun that I had in Europe, nor the fun I'm having with my games now.
That sort of fun is what I would, for lack of a better term, call artistic fun. Artistic fun is where you combine conventional fun with a sense of craftmanship. There's no sense of craftmanship in holidaying, at least not the way I had it. And I now play games for unbridled pleasure, without any sense of craftmanship. The 2 buskers, on the other hand, were having fun with a sense of craftmanship because they seemed to enjoy their activity and at the same time they were performing for an audience. There's usually an element of craftmanship when you perform for someone. (I'm going to leave 'craftmanship' deliberately vague here; a greater sense of it may emerge in what follows).
There are 2 avenues for having artistic fun for me now. 1) Write fiction. 2) Play games, with a sense of craftmanship. 1) is on hold now because I've got little motivation. I've got little motivation because writing shares the same kind of resource as studying Philosophy. My priority is studying Philosophy now, and, for example, if I've spent half the day studying Philosophy I wouldn't feel like writing fiction later in the day (note that 'studying Philosophy' includes attending classes, teaching, marking etc). It's probably similar to people who work. It's generally hard to craft a hobby when one has worked the whole day. Many people can indeed do it - I usually find such people commendable. I suspect they either have a high amount of resource to draw on (that is to say, they're highly diligent), or their hobbies draw on a different kind of resource from their work (that is to say, they derive a lot of pleasure from their hobby, such that they feel it's effortless).
I'm going to depend on 2) for having artistic fun in the foreseeable future; I will write about it when the time comes. It will do to say here that I do want to develop a serious hobby. I want to craft, nurture, improve on something. I've thought of picking up a musical instrument too, but that will be costly; I'll leave that for the unforeseeable future.
The game 'Agricola' came close to being a serious hobby. But I've lost the motivation now to play it because, after playing almost 500 games, I've come to suspect that the game is too luck-dependent. More precisely: it's too dependent on the actions of other players, and sometimes you get weaker players whose actions unwittingly influence your chances of winning. This is not to say it is a poor game. It's not. In fact, it is the best board game I've played to date. And there's really nothing wrong having luck in a game, as long as a significant amount of skill is still needed. The only problem is that for such games, you'd need a large number of games to determine where exactly you stand. Losing or winning an individual game usually can't tell you much, and can get pretty frustrating sometimes. And since each game at its fastest took 1.5-2 hours, the game became something I couldn't sustain ultimately. But in any case, I haven't wrote it off completely yet. I'm still waiting for a good time to dive back in and see what I feel about the game again.
Serious, crafted, artistic fun aside, I am going to be pretty busy this semester. I've got a presentation coming up in a few weeks, research to do, and 2 classes to manage this time. These classes take up a lot of time, I might decide to mark assignments without writing detailed, individual comments, as I did last time. I am also taking German II, which is very time-consuming. When German was spoken on the first lecture though, I felt mildly surreal, because I was immediately transported back to Europe.
I'll post the vacation photos on Facebook in time. Days, weeks, months, I don't know.
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