Breaking Up With Your Phone

I just finished reading a book titled How to Break Up with Your Phone, by Catherine Price (2018). I go through phases where I spend entirely too much time on my phone, but when I do go down a rabbit hole, it can be quite a deep rabbit hole. I hate that feeling where the phone (or just being on the internet) feels more like a requirement than a thing I can enjoy. While I didn't learn a lot of new things from the book (much of the research about social media and compulsive screen time is well-established at this point), the book was a reminder that I don't need to spend so much time on my phone, or the internet in general, to make use of it.

What I like about the book is that it's not just saying "never use your phone," though I imagine people may read the title and treat the title as that being the literal meaning of it. It's about being mindful of when we use our phones. What purpose are we using them for? Do we have a specific objective we are trying to accomplish (such as reading the news or checking our email), or is it part of a habit? A lot of times, it is definitely a habit for me. I am looking for ways to cool it on my phone and internet use, to get back to that point where I want to use these things for specific purposes (chat with friends, play games online, share things, read things) rather than let that be my default. I don't want life to pass me by.

Price asks us to consider: how do we want to spend the time in our life? Sometimes it is to be a little distracted, and that's OK too, but is distraction the default mode we want to be in?

If you're looking for a way to lighten up your own tech use, I would personally recommend the book. It's an easy read; I was able to knock it out over a few sittings. I'm already starting to use some of the tips (Discord is uninstalled from my phone once again, and I am limiting my other notifications).

Obsessive Gaming Challenges Part 2

Sometimes obsessive gaming challenges come premediated. Others come organically. I got into playing Resident Evil, the remake on PS4. I've never played any of them in the series before, but I have both that and Code: Veronica X due to a Humble Bundle I purchased years ago. I finally decided I needed to try it since I played Silent Hill and Parasite Eve and loved them. In fact, I enjoyed the RE remake so much that I wound up playing it a few more times in short succession and at some point will buy the first three on PC through Good Old Games. There's just something about the game design that clicked with me. I think it scratched that itch that Metroid-style games do sometimes, where you figure out where to find certain items to get you to certain places. It doesn't have movement-type upgrades like a Metroid would, but when you boil down the components, that's where you ultimately land.

Anyway, I eventually played through the game again with Jill on hard mode. It took a few tries before I was comfortable enough with the beginning to burn an ink ribbon on a save. Not having looked anything up about the difficulty level, I was concerned I would have a very limited number of saves, but it's surprisingly generous. In retrospect, I could have tried doing much less before taking my initial save. Instead, I had to skip past the initial cutscenes multiple times. Considering the amount of time that the version I was playing on took to load, I spent a lot of time waiting. It kind of made me feel like I was playing a PS1 game again. I ultimately made it through. Funnily enough, like Metroid-style games, I found the beginning of the game harder than the end, but that may have been because I tried to conserve a lot of healing items and ammo. It paid off big time when I reached the end. For my efforts, I unlocked Real Survival mode, which unlinks the item boxes (time to get that notebook out and keep track of where I leave things) and implements manual aiming. Geez! Not sure when I'll go back to that. I ended up playing the game three times in a row before I decided I needed to give it a rest. It'll be waiting for me when I get back, though.