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Summed up

The tagline on this website is there for a reason.  For a very very long time previous, it said something about Falling Down, and while that Something is still true, it’s not entirely relevant as an introduction (and warning) about what goes on with this site.

For those who know me (and who inexplicably choose not to flee as soon as they figure this out) it’s a familiar joke – wondering aloud about whatever my current obsession might be, or how one of my nigh-on-neverending projects is going.  (My obsessions change often, but I am constant in my affections.)

Paul Tevis (whose podcasts I’ve enjoyed for quite awhile, but whose blog I’ve only just discovered) summed the whole problem up very nicely in this post, in which he inadvertently reveals that we share the same brain.

Time is a problem for a dabbler like me. When I want to do something, I want to do it well. I’ve learned enough to know that if I want to do it well, I need to do it regularly. There are only so many hours in the week, which means that if I want to do something, I need to not do something else. The problem is that I want to do everything. This inevitably means I want to do more things than I can do regularly, and thus I end up clinging to things that I do infrequently, taking time away from things I could do well, and spiraling into an overbooked and yet unproductive schedule.

Yeah… tell you what, Paul: whichever one of us figures out how to deal with this first, we’ll let the other one know, deal?

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The Compleat Obsessionist

3295467822_62dcda39fb_m“Find your obsession. Every day, explain it to one person you respect […] and try not to be a dick.” — Merlin Mann, 43 Folders

While bowling this week (which I do with Kate, two of my gamer friends, and one gamer’s better half) I was talking with Tim about various ways one could cook up a blog in wordpress, and he expressed a small frustration with wanting to have a blog about everything he was into, but at the same time wanting to split things out into seperate tabs or something of that nature.

My response to this was a garbled version of some advice I couldn’t quite remember verbatim (the quote at the top of this post, actually); I said that in my opinion the thing to do was put all one’s interests “out there” without apology and trust that over time, adherance to that honesty (and, you know, interesting stuff to say) would ensure that the site would find people who’d find the whole mess interesting (or vice versa).

I then mentioned (as I sometimes do) that if I had it to do over, I’d have put all my gaming stuff and my ‘main blog’ stuff in one big kettle and let it simmer, no apologies.  Highsight. C’est la vie.

Unfortunately, I think Random Average had grown for too long on its own to allow it to be successfully grafted on here anymore, but that doesn’t mean I won’t still try to weave the two together when I can.  To that purpose, I’ve set up an interesting plugin on both sites that allows both blogs to pick up and crosspost specially-flagged entries from their sibling.  We’ll see how that works.

In the meantime I’ll continue my current blogging practice for this site: dumping my daily obsessions into a big pile and poking at the strange unions and bastard offspring that crawl out.