So, after abandoning “Hearts of Iron”, I wanted to get back into playing other video games. I mused about it for a while, as is my wont, and then decided that I’d be clever and schedule in finishing off that run of Dragon Age Origins with all of the expansions and playing as Spencer from “Pretty Little Liars”. And, well, so far I’ve booted the game up once to see where I was. Now, one of the issues with my picking that up again is that it’s the PC version and I have a subconscious — and probably invalid, since it wasn’t an issue when I started playing the game — paranoia that I won’t remember how the controls work and so won’t be able to do well in the fights (this is also the reason that I never returned to a character in VTM: Bloodlines, although in that game that fear is more valid). But another issue that I was having was that there still were a lot of options that I was musing about to fill my rather limited video gaming time even after I had supposedly made up my mind. I keep thinking about playing “Star Wars: Rebellion” again as the Rebel Alliance. I’ve mused about picking up “Wizardry 8” again, since I was having fun with my last run. I’ve thought about picking up some of my PS2/PS3/PS4 games again. I’ve thought about picking up games like “Icewind Dale”, or Might and Magic, or the Gold Box games, or other older RPGs (I’ve been reading the CRPG Addict again, which makes me think of that). I’ve also pondered hooking up one of those classic consoles and playing some of those games. Thus, one of the things that’s stopping me from committing myself to Dragon Age Origins is all of the other games that I have in the back in my mind that I could be doing instead.
So the only game that I’ve been playing regularly is “The Old Republic”, and the only reason that works is because it slots into a specific time slot that I have set aside specifically for it and almost nothing else (occasionally, errands). It’s not that it’s an MMO because I haven’t been playing “Dark Age of Camelot” for a while despite having a semi-set time slot for it. No, the main reason I can play it is because I have a specific set of characters I want to get through and I have a time set aside for it and nothing else. But when I have time slots that cover more a specific hobby rather than a specific instance of that hobby I often can find myself not doing any of them because I can’t decide which of them to do. In fact, my scheduling things exist because of this, because when I left time slots open I found that I spent so much time deciding what to do that I didn’t do anything that I wanted to do. At least here this only happens for specific hobbies or things to do.
This hits video games the worst — I mean, I’ve even managed to have specific “Wizardry 8” runs shortcircuited by my coming up with another party that I want to try instead — but, yeah, it can in theory hit anything. The main reason that I haven’t hit it with DVDs for the past while is that I create a specific time slot and a specific stack to watch them, and so all I do is proceed through the stack. And since I in general want to finish a series to talk about it, I have another incentive to stick with it and not switch to anything else. And yet when I switched to rewatching Babylon 5 in December the urge to pick something else, even while watching it, from the stacks of things I wanted to watch again rose. For books, again right now I have a stack of historical books to read in my general reading time and a set commitment to Shakespeare in a specific time set aside to read those sorts of things (while doing laundry) and so far that’s working, but at one point not so long ago I ditched finally reading the “Heroes in Hell” books because, if I recall correctly, I wanted to re-read the “X-Wing” series more. Right now, I have shelves of books that I want to read in that time and hope that when the time comes to get around to them the stack and commitment to the stack will help me stick to them (again, there are some book series that I started and wanted to finish but never got around to finishing).
But, yeah, video games are the worst. I was busy this week and used my video gaming time for other things, but I hope that when it starts up again I’ll finally be able to commit to something. Otherwise, I may not be playing games for a while.
Shallow Thoughts on “The Divine Comedy”
March 9, 2022I’ll talk more about the process in my next “Accomplishments Update” post — there are a number of interesting things to say about my thought processes in that one — but suffice it to say I ended up setting time aside to read some of the classic works that I’d had lying around for a while, including the complete works of Lovecraft that I was reading about five or six years ago and the complete works of Shakespeare that I bought at the same time, but I thought I’d start with trying to get through “The Divine Comedy”, especially since I was reminded of it while reading the “Heroes in Hell” series. Now, the problem that I had always had with it was that it was poetry, and I’m not a huge fan of poetry, and also find it hard to follow a narrative in poetry. So I had tried reading it once, didn’t care for the stanza structure, and stopped reading it. I was determined this time to get through it, and succeeded.
I actually found it to be fairly easy to get through. The structure, at least in the translation, was less poetic than it could have been, and so it didn’t trigger my issues with poetry. However, given its nature in order to really get the most out of it I would have had to pay far more attention to it than I did, because there are a lot of weighty ideas in it and a lot of things that you need to know or read the notes about to really get. I was reading it to get through and get the sense of it, but it’s a work that it would be better to study and reference instead of just read for the heck of it (which was not the case for “War and Peace”, for example). Still, it flowed well enough that I did enjoy reading it and didn’t struggle with it much at all.
However, one of the big problems it has is that Dante focuses far too much on people he knew in Italy. This is understandable and is likely his intent (he seems to be making some political points with the work, especially given the notes). However, it means that it doesn’t really have the staying power that it could have had given the universal — at least for Christians — elements of Heaven and Hell that it is exploring. The work stops far too often for Dante to interrogate and reference people that would be known to Italians which would probably appeal to his audience but who are mostly unknowns to a modern audience, and he often seems to give a bit of a short shrift to more famous people like Caesar. We don’t really get any real feelings for finding out that some of those people are in Hell or in Purgatory or what level of Heaven they’re in because we have no idea who they are, while people who know them would be interested in finding out where they ended up.
As such, I think I enjoyed Purgatorio the best. Inferno spends too much time identifying these people and coming up with ironic punishments for them, but people ending up in Purgatory is far less something to feel schadenfreude about and so more time needs to be spent explaining why they ended up there and what that means for the nature of humans and of sin itself. Paradiso has similar ideas, but Heaven is good no matter what, and good people end up there no matter what, so there are far less philosophical issues to be explored and so it can be difficult to wrap one’s head around why it all matters. Purgatorio is closer to what most people will experience and yet raises philosophical issues that it is interesting to address.
Still, all of them work in their own way, and were interesting enough and easy enough to get through that I wasn’t bored or annoyed reading it. I probably should read it more carefully at some point, but I have no idea when I’d get the time to do that.
Posted in Books, Not-So-Casual Commentary | 9 Comments »