due88

My day numbering doesn't make any sense if I'm talking about the previous day... September 28 (4/90) Yesterday could've been a disaster. My wife was going away for a concert so I'd have the house to myself. That's usually some prime gaming time, but I managed to turn it into a really long reading session. Managed to finally finish American Gods, which was amazing. Not much else to say about yesterday, I suppose. Today I guess I'll figure out what my next book will be. Or maybe I'll jump into the American Gods TV series. Nice having a multiple choice evening ahead of me rather than "just gaming"

September 27 (3/90) Yesterday was a pretty good day. I spent the latter half of my work day stuck in the most boring meeting I've ever been in. Came home, ate dinner, and watched TV all evening with my wife. After she went to bed, I threw myself into a book. I've been slowly making my way through American Gods by Neil Gaiman for the past few months. It's such a slow book at times, but it's so captivating at others. Last night I managed to plow through a good 1/8th of the book in a sitting. May not sound like much, but this is a massive book. Like I'm 'only' on page 400-something and there's quite a ways left to go. Plus I'm really bad at staying focused long enough to read like that. So I'm pretty proud of myself. Can't wait to finish the book so I can jump into the TV series.

Oh man gods of willpower give me strength when the next expansion comes out. November (Blizzcon) is going to be a challenging month as well. Definitely going to give that extension a shot, looks like fun.

Do you come up with nonsense excuses not to do things too? At one point I thought about going upstairs and cleaning my office a bit, but my excuse was "oh yeah don't want to wake my wife up, she's right below the office". But this is a woman who sleeps through 3 alarms every morning and I take zero precautions to avoid waking up when I come to bed late or wake up early. She can sleep through some light cleaning going on in the room above haha.

Sorry to necro bump this, but I've been trying to get into raspberry pis myself. I have two pi zeros, which I had at one point setup to be a NES/Gameboy emulation box. Stuffed it all inside of an old NES cartridge, too. Was pretty neat. But I guess I won't be needing that now I've also really been getting into Python, so I guess all I need now are some project ideas. Any ideas?

Sept 26, 2017 (2/90) I think for the time being I'm going to try to write in this each morning about the previous day's struggles/triumphs. 15-20 minutes of writing in the morning seems like a good way start the day. Yesterday was my first proper day without gaming. I work from home sometimes and in the past when I've had little to do I'd play something I can easily hop in/out of (like WoW or MC). But yesterday I just didn't. I forced myself to find something to do. It wasn't always work-related, but it was never gaming. Since I'm also trying to phase reddit and facebook out as well, I think that was the larger struggle for me. The Chrome plugin I'm using to block them counted like 15 attempts to visit each of those sites by the end of the day. CTRL+T, "reddit.com" or "facebook.com" is habitual at this point. I don't even think about it and in the past all it really led to was a loop of "wonder what's on reddit...nothing...wonder what's on facebook...nothing...wonder what's on facebook...etc.etc." Super unproductive. I've thought about whitelisting a few subreddits because there are quite a few super high-quality ones in line with my non-gaming hobbies (/r/artisanvideos, /r/gardening, /r/worldbuilding). I'm worried that will be a slippery slope. Maybe a good solution would be ot create a new account and subscribe only to a handful of solid, quality subreddits. But back to not gaming! My wife and I caught up on Bob's Burgers and after that I got really bored. That post-TV, pre-bed time is usually where I did most of my evening gaming, so I guess that was my first major challenge. I decided to watch a YouTube series on playing DnD. As I said in my first post, I recently joined a DnD group. Well the only one in the group that knows how to play is the DM, so the rest of us are doing everything we can to get a grasp on the rules of the game. I figured a video series was a good approach. While watching one of the videos I got the idea to make my character with some lego minifigs I have. You see, I've got more lego than any adult of my age should ever own. I began collecting as a kid and as soon as I could afford to buy my own sets I began buying the bigger, more complicated sets that looked challenging. As a result, I've got quite the collection of lego people. So I mashed together pieces and built my Dwarven ranger Sent the pic to my DnD group and now the plan is for me to bring in some pieces for us all to make our characters rather than spend money on figurines. Going to be a blast this weekend but I guess the take away from that was that I threw myself into something other than gaming and it provided me with the inspiration to do something else that wasn't gaming and now I've got plans for yet another non-gaming thing later this week.

Thanks of the welcomes and words of encouragement, guys!

Yep, I hadn't played in a steady guild for months and prior to the guild I had been in, it had been years. I never grouped with people if I could help it. And sometimes it felt like I was constantly chasing the experience I'd had with the game in the early days when it was this impossibly massive world and I had an amazing guild to play with. I'm really excited for a game-free life can be like

Thanks! Yeah, I'm not actually worried about the laptop. I just thought it was kind of funny because if I'd had this realization a month ago I could've saved quite a lot of money and gotten a cheaper one that isn't good for gaming. But I'm not worried I probably should just install linux on this thing. Gaming was literally the only thing keeping me from being 100% linux across all computer (already rocking Kubuntu at work).

I decided to tackle quitting games and social media (well mostly just facebook and reddit) at the same time. I just get way too pissed off by things on both and it's not worth it. Getting into arguments with family on facebook about politics just makes everyone look stupid. And for what? I still need it to manage my employer's page, so I won't be deleting it. But at home at least I've got it blocked at the browser level.

Sept 25, 2017 (1/90) I quit gaming last night. Never mind that I just bought a $1200 gaming laptop a few weeks ago. I mean it's a great laptop and it will serve non-gaming needs for at least 5 years or so, so I guess it's not that big of a deal. Just seems a tad stupid to have spent the money on a GAMING laptop just to quit gaming a few weeks later. Ah well.. I spent 15 minutes or so uninstalling every game I had on my computer and all of the games on my phones. Phone games have never been a problem for me, but I could see them becoming one with PC gaming on its way out of my system. Was kind of fun and liberating to free up all of that space on my computer. So much more room for programming stuff! I'm hoping this place will help me through this. Plus I'm excited to spend more time with my wife and I recently joined a Dungeons & Dragons group with some friends, so that should satisfy my love of fantasy and other nerd stuff I figure since it's impossible for me to sit around my house all day playing DnD alone, it's not consider gaming in this contest

Hey folks! So basically last night I had a sudden moment of clarity last night where I realized I've got a really long list of interests and hobbies, but I never make time for them. Reading, writing, world building, programming, and others are all things I absolutely love doing and few things give me such a great feeling of pride and accomplishment as those things do. Sure, I'll get hooked on a book every now and then (most recently, and rather humorously, Ready Player One) or get an idea for a program and run with it for a while, but I would say 9 times out of 10 I'll get the urge to do something like that, but my brain will go "Nah, let's just play WoW instead. Gotta get that one mount or something" and I'll just go do that. And I've always thought that WoW was the problem, so I'd force myself to play other games...but in my moment of clarity I realized WoW was never the problem. It's my unhealthy approach to gaming. I should be able to hop into a game for an hour or two here and there and call it a day, but I either don't or I can't. I don't enjoy playing WoW...I really haven't for years. But I still shell out the money and play for hours a day. Plus I'm almost 30. I really should be transitioning into more useful hobbies. Not that there's anything wrong with gaming beyond 30, a lot of people do that. Just for me I can't allow for it to remain the priority it did during my 20s. I wasted a lot of my 20s playing video games. Plus the wife and I are talking about kids and my loose plan was to quit gaming for when we have a kid, but would I really want to deal with that much difficulty all at once in my life? Seems like it would make more sense to quit gaming, setup healthier coping mechanisms for stress, then tackle parenthood with those mechanisms in place. So I googled and found a subreddit about quitting gaming and that ultimately led me to the Game Quitter YouTube channel, which led me here. I wasn't really interested in joining a community, but I also realized that reddit and facebook are a huge source of anger and stress for me (let's just say I'm way too into politics sometimes) and decided to block both sites in my browser. I got to thinking and maybe having an active community to participate in would help me accomplish both the game and social media goals I'd set for myself. I think where I'm going to struggle the most is with sim games--like city builder games and such. Those have been a really enjoyable outlet for my creativity, and while I'm not sure they're as detrimental to me as other games are, I don't think I could do this without going completely cold turkey. Guess I'll have to tap into my fondness for world building and start drawing city maps to cover that base