Us parents, at least with young kids, seem to live in a different time zone or parallel timeline to our non-parent friends. We can meet up with other parent friends that we haven’t seen in three… five… years and it’s like we haven’t seen each other in only weeks. There is an acceptance that time moves different once you have kids. Literally years can zip by where you don’t keep up with some friends and it’s not because you don’t like them or don’t want to keep up with them. It’s just not practical, or rather our priorities are different.
With my single friends though, a year is an age. Meeting up with single or non-parent folk after not seeing or talking them in a year or two, they can be seemingly different people! I don’t mean this to say that parents are “better” than non-parents (or vice-versa), please don’t take it that way. I’m not jealous either, we made our choice and I love my kids.
But just sometimes I find that the time deferential generates a gap between myself and others and that it remains even after they have kids. Which saddens me sometimes.
I don’t think non-parents get what it’s like being a parent. Certainly I didn’t. You can watch all the movies you like, you won’t know. There are some books that can prepare you a bit, but still, everything changes when you have kids. Apparent our male brains change too once we become fathers too (certainly I’ve become incredible sensitive to hearing kids cry or more specifically my kids cry, I can hear them across the playground or the other side of a field).
It certainly makes it harder to adapt to things outside of the parental sphere. It’s quite difficult to start something new unless you have all the support in place as you often have to trade against family time or the few other things that currently keep you sane and you don’t know if it’ll be worth it ahead of time. The “cost” (being away from the kids or leaving your partner to handle the thick of it) can feel like too much. The stereotype of the father who buys exercise equipment but never uses them or buys “useless” gadgets has some truth in it. (I bought my Wii in the full knowledge that I wouldn’t use it as much as I could… I haven’t even finished Zelda yet and it’s three years old). It’s easier to maintain hobbies that you started before becoming a parent, or at least that’s what I’ve found. (And I’m glad to have some old friends that I can still meet up/game with it).
I’m curious if other parents feel/think the same and what is the non-parent perspective? Are us parents just a bunch of lazy showers or is it appreciated that were simply moving more slowly?
I only offer one possible explanation (there may be others) but this one certainly applies to me. By trade, I’m a Software Engineer and, as my project leader said “you’re being paid to be pedantic.” This is quite true: I have to be pedantic, because that thing that fucks up shit at some point in the future (i.e. the devil) is in the details. So I dissect, criticize and over-analysis stuff. You wouldn’t want it any other way though (just think about the software that runs in your set-top-box or medical equipment even). This need to critically analysis stuff spills into everything else I do though.
It’s not bad, it just means we see more “levels” to things. Take a flower, sure we can appreciate it’s beauty and why others find it beautiful, but we also appreciate it’s construction, the clever mechanisms of it’s survival and how it gets insects to carry it’s seeds and so on. Same with the movies we love, and because we love them, we take them apart, argue over what seem like trivia to others, recognise their flaws, etc. It doesn’t diminish our love for such things, but sure as heck pisses everyone else off. (Not that I have a problem appreciating something at a surface level. I love drawing and despite my amateur skills, I enjoy studying the surface and physical level nature of things when I draw).
My wife sometimes cuts me off when I correct our six year old daughter, because not only do I give the basic correction to her simply mistake, I try to address the underlying mistaken assumptions. I try to share with her my love of the details underneath.
It’s why, being a huge fan of Lord of the Rings (I’ve read all the books only three times so I’m not heavyweight) I didn’t like the movies but I accepted and enjoyed them for what they were.
Of course the side-effect is that with experience it makes you cynical. It’s why we hate marketing and “buzz” as it appears to be an attempt to gloss over and even give a different impression of (what we expect to be) the details. And to us, someone who is very enthusiastic about something can sometimes appear to be either a fool who hasn’t looked under the surface or a salesperson.
In conclusion, some of us geeks/nerds are pedants with good reason and hence we can appear to hate the things we love because we appear to be over-critical (but we are simply enjoying it in a different way).
I know of plugins that can take your Google Reader Shared Items and automatically generate a post for you. (I was using this one and it’s quite good). This is nice, but doesn’t actually make a great post.
My plan is to post some or occasional items from my Google Reader shared items. I want to control the flow and only post those few that I think people may like (who see my blog).
I never enjoy reading a blog post of someone’s tweets or what they shared on Google Reader. If I want to read your tweets, I’ll follow you on twitter. If I want to see your shared items, I’ll follow you on Google Reader right?
So I’ve disabled the auto-generated post of tweets and shared items and have scrubbed the existing ones from my database. A dead blog with automated posts looks worse than a dead blog right?
I know, I haven’t been blogging. Many excuses that no-one cares about. To fill the void that is this blog, here is a recent post I made on lostheroesrpg.com. Enjoy!
I’ve been working my way through the current draft of the setting. I had hoped this would only take a week or two, but it’s taken much longer for various IRL reasons (including a car crash and its subsequent fallout), mostly because the only time I can work on it, is the few hours spare I get after the kids are in bed and I’m not always as mentally focused at that time. (I’m getting old, I fall asleep in the sofa at 10.30 in the evening!)
The first half of the text required a lot more re-work than later pieces, yet it was the later pieces I struggled with the most first time round. It seems as a general rule, depending on the length of the chapter, the more I struggled with it the less re-working it requires. With that in mind I started working on the Pantheon chapters in reverse order, hoping to populate the better changes and feel from the later chapters back to the previous chapters.
It was only when I got to the chapter on Demons that something started to worry me. Not the writing, but something I had put to the back of my mind since starting this run. Demons are nasty things. Not nasty as in anti-hero way (like Vampires are sorta cool yet there still “monsters”) but the worst of mankind, supernaturally empowered. Rapists, murderers, abusers, molesters and so on. While it’s possible to create “good” Demons (Fallen Demons or Demonic Bloodlines that avoided the influence of Hell for example), the vast majority of character types are bad, real bad.
Lets get this out of the way now, Lost Heroes is based on old mythologies. These old religions contain stuff that modern readers may find tasteless or even offensive. I can already think of several bits and pieces that might offend some. I’m aware of them but I didn’t want to PC-ify these old stories, just for the sake of writing an RPG. So instead I tried to emphasis some over others. I don’t know if this works or if I should be more cautious in how I treat these themes in the setting. In part, this is the purpose of trying to make this “Book of the Gods” so that I can present something to others and get a real feel for the reader’s reactions. To put it another way, when does editing become censorship? I can’t tell because I’m buried in the forest, checking the bark on each of the trees.
And here I am, reading through the Demons chapter, realising there is very little balance to this chapter. It is dark and it remains dark. There is, preceding this chapter, an chapter on Angels who battle constantly with Hell to prevent Demons destroying everything. While some parts of Angels are dark, there is much light. When I was writing it, I tried to get my head into what might be the motivations of these Demons and their masters. It did haunt my dreams for a while, imaging the horrific nature of Hell, but I felt it was important to get it down on paper. A starting point.
One thing, from the beginning, of Lost Heroes is that I didn’t want to restrict your choice of characters. Of course a GM may apply their own restrictions for the sake of the game, but I wanted there to be a choice. Even if that option was only really available to allow the GM to create antagonistic NPCs, it should be there. Choice is also an incredible important theme in the setting. Everything is about choice. A True Chosen Demon… is a human who accepted to become a Demon. The evils of Demon are the evils of humans, amplified by the supernatural. Do you chose to be the monster or the hero? And so the gamer is already making a choice.
Reading about the monstrous Demons of Lilith, wife of Satan, I started to have doubts. I posted this on twitter:
Just re-read the Demons chap. in Lost Heroes. Am a bit worried that u can create evil and disturbing demons as PCs. Should I take chap. out?
More photos of the crash: http://is.gd/6fryI – Quite drained, lots of calls with insurances etc. The car is officially a write-off.
I remember reading an article about on “luck” and that it mostly boils down to perspective. The car may be write up, but I walked away from it and no-one else was hurt. Thats luck.
I just got this in my “possible spam comment for approval” email for this blog:
HELP! I’m currently being held prisoner by the Russian mafia and being forced to post spam comments on blogs! If you don’t approve this they will kill me. They’re coming back now. Please send help!
I like the little touches to the spam, the email address for the comment is in the format:
The bad joke comment-spam keeps rolling in today on one of my blogs:
Here there can not be a mistake? I have a fresh joke for you) Why did the bunnies go on strike? They wanted a raise in celery.
You are not right. I am assured. I can defend the position. Write to me in PM. A joke for you peoples! What did the worm say to the caterpillar? What did you do to get that fur coat?
It is remarkable, rather amusing information Wanna joke?) Why do Vampire have to brush their teeth? Because they have Bat-Breath.
The best comment spam ever?
I just got this in my “possible spam comment for approval” email for this blog:
I like the little touches to the spam, the email address for the comment is in the format: