Update on That Accomplishment Thing …

So, it’s been about three months since I last talked about how my accomplishment kick was going, so I thought this might be a good time to look at it, especially since Christmas is coming and after Christmas I need to readjust my schedule, so it’s a good time to reflect on it and assess and reassess what I’m trying to do. I’m going to follow the order from the previous post, even though that might no longer reflect what’s going best.

(Ah, who am I kidding? It’s still going to be pretty much accurate [grin]).

DVDs continue to be the star of the new focus. I managed to finish He-Man, She-Ra, and two anime series from my half-hour stack, and am almost through Matt Smith’s run in Doctor Who over those three months after finishing Dynasty. The only thing that hasn’t gone as well as it had when I wrote the previous post is watching movies. Well, it’s both gone better and worse. Rewatching movies that I wanted to rewatch has stalled, mostly because I’ve stopped playing games or, at least, stopped playing games where it’s convenient to watch a movie (more on that later). I wanted to rewatch all the Star Trek movies again and after at least a month if not longer I’ve gotten through “The Wrath of Khan”. However, I’m making pretty good progress on those cheap little horror movies — I’ve finished off the “The Shadows” collection — and am even making some progress on some older movies that I picked up cheap, having recently watched Casper and one of the Naked Gun movies, as well as Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. I hope to continue doing that as things go along (they’re pretty good to watch while I’m eating or in an evening when I don’t want to do anything else).

The downside here is that my stacks are getting pretty large. Well, the half-hour stack is going pretty well for now, but the hour stack is getting larger and larger. I have a ton of TV shows that I haven’t watched and want to — made worse by the fact that I’ve actually bought some new ones — and also want to rewatch some of the shows that I’ve already watched, like Babylon 5 or Buffy/Angel. This is getting a bit concerning to me, especially since it will take longer to watch hourly shows than half-hour ones. But still, I’m making progress and now have the actual ability to watch hour-long shows and make progress, so it’s still better than the alternative.

Reading, however, has taken a bit of a hit. After finishing my list of historical works, I started reading some Ben Bova science fiction novels. Despite them being relatively short, I’ve only finished two of them so far. Part of the reason for that is because I don’t read for as long as I used to in the evenings (due to winter coming on I fall asleep earlier in the evenings) and part of it is that I bought some comic trade paperbacks and also a “grab bag” box of 100 comics that I’m now working through. So I expect this to pick up once I get through that. At least the stack/list here isn’t getting any longer.

Video games are a mixed bag, but that’s better than the disaster they were in the last post. I abandoned my Persona 3 run and instead finished off all of my Dragon Age: Origins characters and replayed Dragon Age 2 to do an analysis of it, which was very good. And then I mostly stopped playing games for about a month, except for trying out Cultist Simulator and Sunrider Academy. Since I wasn’t playing games and especially not playing console games, this pretty much stopped me having anything on while playing console games, especially since for DA2 I really wanted to pay attention to the story and found that having the TV on at all kinda drowned that out. So it’s a lot better, but …

… I have a lot of games that I want to or should play. On GOG, I have about 170 games including freebies. I have finished something like three of them — Huniepop and Knights of the Old Republic are the two I remember, but there’s probably another one in there somewhere — and have played for any significant amount of time somewhere around 10 or so of them. I would really like to make a dent in those games. I also have a large stack of console games to play, including new ones that I bought and would like to try out. A big consideration for my schedule in the New Year is trying to figure out when I can play games and which ones I should play to make a dent in that stack/list.

I even did better with little projects, in that I’ve started a couple and a couple of things for them. But I still don’t work on them anywhere near as much as I should. However, some of the timeslots that they would normally been in have been ones where I’ve done things for the blog, like writing posts or watching those horror movies to generate blog content. This is the only reason that I can post pretty much every day right now, which I’m doing so that I can clear out the backlog of blog content that I have … and I’m not there yet (philosophy posts are struggling under this model). Still, I’m even making good progress there, which is taking some of the pressure off of me. So that’s good. Still, I do need to find the time and motivation to do the actual projects that I want to do.

So, things are working out pretty well. The biggest issues right now are built around this model actually being successful, and so my feeling that I can get things accomplished and thus setting bigger goals for myself, which then can add up and seem overwhelming. But it’s still better than it was in almost all areas, and that’s good enough for me.