{"id":3287,"date":"2015-09-27T22:25:16","date_gmt":"2015-09-28T02:25:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/?p=3287"},"modified":"2015-09-27T22:33:05","modified_gmt":"2015-09-28T02:33:05","slug":"nostalgia-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/?p=3287","title":{"rendered":"Nostalgia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Four posts in one month?! What is this madness?<\/p>\n<p>I got a bear. His name is Bob. He&#8217;s ridiculously cute, and also rather large and very cuddly. He makes a reasonable spouse-substitute while I am by myself.<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/images2\/092715bear1.jpg\" \/><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/images2\/092715bear2.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I spent a large part of the day re-reading old journal posts, and as seems to happen every time I do this, I keep feeling a sense of nostalgia for things that are no longer a thing. So here is a list of things that I wish still happened or miss or generally am thinking about.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I wish people still wrote long-form journal posts.<br \/>I don&#8217;t really follow Facebook, but the few times I do sign in (mostly to send messages to people) and see stuff&#8230; it&#8217;s never in-depth and interesting the same way LiveJournal or Xanga or individual blogs were. I still read LiveJornal daily, and it&#8217;s still nice to see some people posting there, but it&#8217;s not nearly the same quantity or level of engagement it used to be. See also: I *can* go back and read through everything again years in the future. I don&#8217;t really think the quantity-to-quality ratio on Facebook is nearly good enough for that (even if you display just your own posts&#8230; if that&#8217;s even a thing you can do), and even if it was, you&#8217;re contending with the horribleness of Facebook around you just trying to read years into the past. (Also, I like being able to go back and read past years of other people&#8217;s journals. Really wish people still kept those.)<\/li>\n<li>I miss the college environment.<br \/>Not the classes, but the general &#8220;people are around and you can go to a friend&#8217;s room for board games any time.&#8221; I guess I&#8217;m super fortunate in that I have a lot of awesome friends around and we play board games a lot (every Sunday and Thursday for the last 3 weeks! :D), but it still feels somewhat different to have to schedule things. But board games are still awesome. (Photos from the last month of gaming have been posted to <a href=\"http:\/\/photos2.alanv.org\/?list=Games915\">photos<\/a>.)<\/li>\n<li>I love being married.<br \/>It&#8217;s amazing to have someone always around with you, even if you&#8217;re just sitting at your respective computers watching YouTube, or sitting next to each other reading. A lot of my older unhappy posts seem to involve feeling lonely, or wishing someone was around just so someone was *there*. And it&#8217;s really nice to not have to worry about that anymore. (Well, except for when one of us is on a business trip&#8230; like right now.)<\/li>\n<li>I used to take much better photos than I do now.<br \/>This is true of both portraits, and more abstract photography. I look back at things I&#8217;ve posted on my journal, and I just wonder how I&#8217;ve managed to get so much worse at photography, while being significantly more technically knowledgeable now. I guess I also miss college campuses for the ability to sit and watch (and photograph) the world&#8230; some of my best shots have been random outdoor things with (sometimes random, unknown) people, and that doesn&#8217;t really happen anymore in the world of 9-5, see-people-on-weekends, gaming-in-the-evenings adulthood. (For one, the lighting is much worse.) I wonder if I take photos more now out of some sense of responsibility, or fear of missing something important, rather than actually enjoying photography.<\/li>\n<li>My laptop is 5 years old.<br \/>And it has never had a reformat or reinstall of Windows. I&#8217;m actually really amazed it&#8217;s still running so well, all things considered.<\/li>\n<li>I should work on card games again.<br \/>RPG Get! still remains one of my more interesting concepts (especially the latest constructed-deck variant that has never gotten beyond some conceptual index-card cards), and I wish I had the motivation or time to dedicate to it that it deserves. But with life being what it is, I find I&#8217;d rather spend free time either relaxing with mindless things to destress from work, or with people doing things like board gaming.<\/li>\n<li>Adulthood is weird.<br \/>I guess I&#8217;ve been an adult for a while now. But it&#8217;s still really weird to me that my friends are all going to start turning 30 soon, and that we&#8217;re allowed (and have) so much responsibility. Sometimes it feels like I should still have someone excusing me to the bathroom&#8230; and it&#8217;s really weird when I start looking at things like buying a house, or booking plane tickets, or deciding to take vacation time. I guess I really like the freedom, but at times I miss the balance of freedom and decisions provided by college.<\/li>\n<li>I miss #cslounge and SF people.<br \/>It&#8217;s been a long time since I&#8217;ve really seen SF people outside the core gaming group that meets up with me every SF trip. Part of it seems to be that they&#8217;ve gotten so difficult to reach (no one seems to really use email anymore?), and part of it is that I&#8221;m never there long enough to have time for south bay. But there was a nice sense of connection and togetherness that came both in-person with clusterness and after-college with #cslounge that I guess I&#8217;ve stopped being as interested in, but still miss?<\/li>\n<li>I used to play more video games.<br \/>Primarily PSO, but also some random Gamecube and Dreamcast games. Video games have gotten so weird nowadays, I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;d be interested in them anymore, but I still feel some sense of nostalgia for the games I did play. I guess Kingdom of Loathing, at this point, is really the only thing I have time for though.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know. We&#8217;re closing on a house in less than a month, so I guess that&#8217;s a new chapter of my life. And while I think my life is awesome and I am super fortunate to be where I am with things the way they are, I still feel a sense of longing for some of the past.<\/p>\n<p>This was a wall of text, so let&#8217;s close with some more photos from <a href=\"http:\/\/photos2.alanv.org\/?list=Games915\">this month&#8217;s gaming<\/a>.<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/photos2.alanv.org\/knowngalleries\/Games915\/DSC_7117.jpg\" \/><br \/>\nAll tokens on the same space in Trajan.<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/photos2.alanv.org\/knowngalleries\/Games915\/DSC_7362.jpg\" \/><br \/>\nSteampunk Rallying. (I finished the game with a 1-card contraption, and was extremely close to blowing up. Yay bad planning.)<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/photos2.alanv.org\/knowngalleries\/Games915\/DSC_7571.jpg\" \/><br \/>\nImmediately blocked from building where I wanted to in Kingdom Builder. Was trying to connect tiles for points, but other players got the terrain types and immediately played where I&#8217;d wanted to play. So that was sadness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Four posts in one month?! What is this madness? I got a bear. His name is Bob. He&#8217;s ridiculously cute, and also rather large and very cuddly. He makes a reasonable spouse-substitute while I am by myself. I spent a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/?p=3287\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-board-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3287\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal2.alanv.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}