this might be a good place to collect a few observations about video games that recently became obvious to me.

video games changed the timing of my thinking in some ways:

>pausing

a video game i can just stop whenever it is convenient to me. if someone calls me and i want to respond, when something was cooking (back when i ate cooked food) and i wanted to check on it, when there is something urgent happening or even an emergency i just hit the start-button or hit spacebar or whatever, the game halts and waits for me.

when there is a difficult part in a game, i can pause and take all the time i need to come up with a good plan and then resume time when i feel ready.

REAL LIFE DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY! you can never pause, there is no such thing. time is a continuous river that can not be contained.

life experience taught me something life-affirming about this though that i would not have expected as a young person and did not know about until i experienced it myself: when you need it the most if you can succeed in remaining unafraid, your brain changes the frame rate and slows down time for you to 1 fps! i experienced this multiple times during skating. i fell and could have easily injured myself seriously but i didn't. time slowed down when i needed it most and in that split second for some reason i found all the time in the world that i needed to come up with a good plan on how to swing my arms to make my upper body rotate in a way where i can absorb the energy that was about to slam into the floor and roll away unharmed like i was sonic the hedgehog.


>reloading

in many video games i can save and load whenever i want or at least at several points throughout the game. when i make a mistake or if one of my decisions on what to next was bad, i can go back in time to a point in which i did not make the mistake and choose differently.

REAL LIFE IS NOT LIKE THAT EITHER! unfortunately nothing like this exists in reality. mistakes are permanent. you can not go back and relieve your childhood without doing the mistakes.

maybe that's why video games are fun, because they don't matter and mistakes are meaningless in them.


>expectation of things being instant

a few years ago i remember being annoyed that when i try to manifest something, that i can't just do it in 10 minutes but there are just tons of points in which i can't continue and have to wait for someone or something else to occur and just can't continue and that i have to interrupt.

so when my though processes are used to video games where everything is instant and plans can be implemented in seconds, i guess i got in the habit of believing everything can be instant in reality too and some kind of expectation or entitlement became the basis of my though process that HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH REALITY.

everything is so slow and tedious in reality. ordering something on amazon the moment i needed it and then having to wait a week for it to arrive often interrupted projects i did and i could never pick them back up once the thing arrived. this is almost shameful to admit but waiting for delivery has on occasion taken the wind out of my sails until i got used to how slow everything is outside of video games.

one more thing on reloading not being possible IRL:

that's one reason why i like using a paper system. in a system on the computer i can just re-arrange words and sentences endlessly until it is perfect but when i use paper, i have to like what i write enough to commit it to paper. sometimes i tear a paper appart and start a new one when i come up with a better way but more often then not i make a rough version 1 and then a way better version 2. that makes the system i am using to bring something into reality a microcosm of reality where i already have to adhere to the specifications of reality.

I've got this problem where I dedicate a lot of time to one skill or hobby over a certain number of weeks or months, and then I'll switch over to another hobby and do the same thing. But then when I come back to the first hobby, I've forgotten basically everything I learned, or lost whatever articulation I had with a particular skill. It's like starting over every time I try to return to a beloved hobby.

>>76295
>>76295
> I've got this problem where I dedicate a lot of time to one skill or hobby over a certain number of weeks or months, and then I'll switch over to another hobby and do the same thing. But then when I come back to the first hobby, I've forgotten basically everything I learned, or lost whatever articulation I had with a particular skill. It's like starting over every time I try to return to a beloved hobby.


i also noticed this, mostly with computer stuff i only do every so often. there is something i have been doing about that, maybe it can apply to some of your situations. i learned this from the programmers, apparently they have long known about this.

whenever i learn something new that i am sure i will have forgotten by the next time i could use it, i write the most important things in a text file.

i have a specific folder called DOCUMENTATION and all those text files go in there so i always know where to look later to see if maybe i made such a file. let's say i am learning the commandline-based videoeditor called ffmpeg. the commands i am using, i am collecting in this textfile knowing already i will have probably forgotten them next time. so i am writing little tutorials tailored to myself and what i expect to be doing with whatever i am writing about. if this was today and i was learning the program, i would create the textfile

2026-04 ffmpeg.txt

the reason for the date (2026-04) in the beginning of the file name is that way i can kind of remember when it was. when i vaguely remember that i did this half a year ago, this helps me find the file the moment i am looking for it. i sort by name and can look at all the little files i wrote chronologically and since it aren't that many, it is easy to find. since i also include the name of the program (ffmpeg) search function / filter function will also find it.

another thing i do is trying to tell one person (or one imageboard since i don't know many people) vaguely about it or maybe even teach one person who might like to hear about it a few things about it and then not only do i learn it better, there is someone else who benefits who might later remind me or tell me something cool about it or about something similar.

with more athletic, tool-based or physical stuff i noticed i don't get worse, i noticed when i am inactive in one area i don't get worse at it, i get better but slower and what i have to relearn is the speed at which i am doing it. same thing with talking. since i am hermit and don't talk to people all that often, i get very slow at talking irl and building sentences but after a while of talking with someone, i regain the speed.

HOPE THAT HELPS YOU BIG BOI, DON'T BE EATING CANDY NO MORE, CANDY IS POISON UNFORTUNATELY AND YOU HAVE TO WALK IT OFF WHILE ONLY EATING CUCUMBER AND BANANA. that bird better be knocking all the candy out of your fingers before you can eat them!

>ideas on paper scraps
for a time i would always write things i want to do on scraps of paper and just place them somewhere close, hoping they would magically get done later and then they never got done magically later. took me years to get past that. i kept and kept doing this without things i wrote getting done.

sometimes i would try using paper calendars instead of scraps but unless i was using them to count working hours, i would never follow through with using them because i never even looked inside my calendar.

>to do lists didn't work all that good

sometimes little piles of scrap would form and then sometimes i would make todo lists out of that pile and place those todo lists somewhere close and then often forgot about them.

i only ever did a few of the things and barely ever everything and what i wanted to do just grew cancerously while i would ignore it. for decades my systems were shit. i only got done very little.

i still don't like to-do lists. i have something now that is pretty close to a todo list but when i first started i encountered something i hated that i still hate. i would have a todo list and do a few things and then i would want to start another list while the old list was still incomplete. i guess i hated the idea of having two lists so i would always carry over everything i didn't do from the old list to the new list. i still consider this agony! this is so awful it almost wants to make me go digital with it but i don't want to involve electricity in my planning when everything else is already electric. and there is a reason for it:

>ideas sometimes fly away from me so fast that literally every second counts.
having to wake a computer or phone out of sleep and then opening the file or the app or the file explorer where the file is in SOMETIMES is already enough of a burden for the idea to fly away again. yes my creativity is this brittle, volatile and delicate. i could get distracted with something else i have open or i could habitually visit some website or open some app and poof half the idea might already be gone, then i would feel that the idea has lost some weight and i would be angry about it POOF half or the remaining half gone too! this was worse when i had apps installed where i could just scroll my phone forever to get interesting pictures. i don't have this anymore because i hated how i would do this any time i had 5 seconds of idleness.

after understanding this i knew i wanted a system that is always reliable, free of distraction and not dependent on having battery remaining or electricity working.

>>76308
Thanks, I appreciate the tips! It's funny, I kinda do that too with scripting, including ffmpeg. I'll write little example bash scripts for my future self to give myself working examples for the types of things I normally use it for. I don't date them though, that's a good idea I'll start doing!

Other areas are like... Blender, I got really good at modeling for a while, with good topology and everything. And then I got on a job for six months and when I came back to it, I lost that intuition for how to approach a model. Or I also try to learn violin, and I'll be making progress but then my wife will be off work for a while so I can't really make my screetchy sounds, and when she's back to being gone again, I've lost what I had been practicing a far as finger positions, bowing technique, etc.

>>76323
>I'll write little example bash scripts for my future self to give myself working examples for the types of things I normally use it for.

usually all i bother to do is a short explanation and the command and if the textfile is small, i bother to put the thing i most likely will use at the top of the textfile but in the case of ffmpeg i made what i called an ffmpeg arsenal ^^

i made a textfile that just has commands for different resolutions and quality levels, listed one underneath the other

>Other areas are like... Blender,
i noticed this happening to me when i force myself to learn something because i assume it would be useful to know in general and then not immedeatly use it for something. i wouldn't even know how it affects instrument use, i have not been making music with an instrument since childhood. strangely with skating when i take a break from it and then come back to it, i suddenly have unlocked more of my body and can make bigger movements, though slower.

one more thing i wanted to say about video games making the brain think in terms that are incompatible with actual reality:

>inventory
in a video game you can just find and hoard things easily. this sets up the wrong expectations.

in pokemon red/blue you don't have an infinite inventory but you can just find stuff lying around on the road and put them in your backpack. one of the things you can put in your backpack is a bicycle...

managing belongings in real life is way harder, space is way more precious. stuff has to be left at the side of the road way more often because you see how people referred to as horaders live: every little space of their appartment is filled with junk that they hoard, sometimes they do have some organizational structure underneath like geological layers of a mountain but it seems like inevitably the system becomes overcapacitated and then suddenly a layer of trash or dirty dishes builds up on top of the mess at which point it is over and mold starts to grow and rats move in and stuff like that or cat pee is burried underneath some pile.

dragon ball with the capsules are also an example of how fiction just flatout refused to deal with the horrible burdensome reality of owning things. unless approached intelligently this is a nightmare.

it's not just pokemon and dragon ball, but most games. i can think of very few games who try to at least somewhat limit inventory space to more realistic dimensions. resident evil 4 is a game i played where the player begins with a very small inventory and can only carry a few weapons which forces the player to leave perfectly good weapons behind. i remember how annoyed i was when i first experienced this in re4. at that time i was lucky and owned so little that it was only a small nightmare. now i own way more but i have a great system where i can make use of every little space in my tiny space of living and most of the time with very little exception i can find what i am looking for.

the only game that i thought did it just right is a procedurally generated car adventure game for pc called JALOPY. it isn't perfect but you actually have to manage the trunk of the car using physical limitations.

i play a lot of factorio and factorio is as unrealistic as can be in terms of inventory. you can keep like 50 rocket silo in your inventory and just plop them down on the ground in 50 seconds and they are instantly ready to go no setup whatsoever. the difference between the convenience of building something in factorio and building something in real life can make a sane mane crazy.

while on the topic the way video games handle belongings sets up one more false expectation: being able to find what i own. that's a big problem that drove me mad before i solved it. i knew i had a certain thing or tool but i just couldn't find it. i knew it was somewhere but i just could not get to it when i needed it. then weeks later when the opportunity to use it was over, then i would randomly find it burried in some crate that i had packed because i just quickly wanted to gain space in this narrow hell that my appartment used to be before i revolutionized the way i organize my belongings.

the early zelda games did have link carry around a few tools but since they began introducing moster loot around the time of windwaker link's inventory became ridiculous. link would need a truck to carry all the shit he has in his backpack these days...