The Highest Resolutions

My new year’s resolution is 1920 x 1080, thanks to my new monitor.

I’m not really into the practice of New Year’s resolutions, partly because I operate on an academic calendar, but mostly because I don’t see any reason to wait until New Year’s to start doing things that are good for me. I get it, new year, new energy, new start, etc. I just don’t do it. If you do, I’ve taken care of it for you in yesterday’s Woot Suit Riot video.

We make the same promises over and over again, but which ones do we actually keep? There isn’t something magical about our dedication in the new year that will keep us going to the gym, and a promise to ourselves holds exactly as much weight as we let it. There’s also a temptation to set impossible or unlikely goals, and the general counter-resolution movement that thinks they’re stupid. I think I’ve reconciled all these things by setting New Year’s resolutions that are weird and reasonable but that I don’t care if I keep. The kinds of things I can do while procrastinating in order to feel like I’m not procrastinating.

1. Watch MST3k

Woody Guthrie's resolutionsI have never seen an episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000. I know. I’ve also never seen Labyrinth, or My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I am a fake nerd, it’s true. I’ve been lying about it this whole time. It’s one of the nerd comedy greats, and I really want to watch it, but I’ve never taken the time and, like the Rocky Horror Picture Show, it seems like something best watched with friends rather than while playing games or sitting at home. So this year, I will endeavour to watch some MST3k and some other geek classics while getting together with friends and having a good time.

2. Finish some games

I changed my gaming philosophy over the holidays, something I intend to write about at some point, but the short version is that I no longer desire that games brutally punish me in order to make me learn. I want to finish them and get some closure instead of looking at my ever-increasing list of Steam games and realizing I’ve barely finished any of them. On the docket are Deadpool, Metro 2033, Bioshock Infinite, and Fallout: New Vegas, along with an assortment of others as I go. I like finishing games, and I want to do some filming in them, and my new philosophy is conducive to this.

3. Read more books

I stopped using my phone on the bus months ago, and started reading instead. As a result, along with the bits of travelling I’ve been doing, I’ve read twenty books in the past two months. I want to read more books and better books. There’s a lot of contemporary fiction I’ve got my eye on, and now that I’ve fallen back in love with novels again I want to get my head into some non-fiction. There’s some philosophy and neuroscience texts calling my name from my shelf. Chuck Wendig always says that “Write what you know” means “Know more things”, and he’s dead on with that assessment.

4. Paint all the things

I have 250+ miniatures from the first Reaper miniatures Kickstarter, and have actually been passing them around to friends who want to paint them both as a way of outsourcing the work and getting miniatures that actually look decent (I’m still at the stage where I’m painting bad things before I can paint good ones). Thing is, next year I have a ton more minis coming from their second Kickstarter, and I want to have most of these licked by then. I also want to have painted minis for the D&D charity project I want to run in the summer. Also, painting is a good time most of the time, and a fun way to hang out with friends.

So there are my new year’s resolutions. Nothing about work, nothing about fitness, nothing about anything remotely serious, but instead a way of being dorky and legitimizing my procrastination. Which means I’m almost certain to keep them. Dan’ll be back on Friday with a post about how he hates news year’s resolutions entirely, so we’ll see you then.

4 Comments

  1. Re: Painting Miniatures

    I made the mistake early on of telling myself I’d save this really nice ones for painting when I got good, then painted some other ones. You’re just setting yourself up for never wanting to paint those “really nice ones”, because you’ll never feel like your skills are up to the task of painting them. I think I’ve psyched myself out of painting that dragon on my shelf.

    My advice? Grab a brush and go for it.

    • Well, I’m lucky enough to have some friends who are amazing painters and I’m hoping to pick up some better technique, but you’re right. I’m dangerously close to running out of rats and goblins, so pretty soon it’ll be time to shit or get off the pot.

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