silveradept | Entries tagged with december days: self-knowledge

[It's December Days time! There's no overarching theme this year, so if you have ideas of things to write about, I'm more than happy to hear them.]

bethany_lauren wanted to know what one piece of advice I would tell my younger self.

A question like this often stalls out on the need to only give one piece of advice to the younger you. There are a lot of things that produce regrets or hopes to do things over again.

There's also the matter of which younger self I get to talk to. If it's childhood me, the advice has to be couched in such a way as to be comprehensible to younger-me or that it will be written down and not lost over time, so that when I need it again, it's there so that it will influence in the right direction. Teenage-me would need serious convincing of any sort of advice at all. College-me might be wise enough to actually get it and put it to use. And professional me would get it, and then have to do something about it.

Depending on which person I'm talking to, the advice shifts. Many of my younger selves, if given one piece of advice, would probably get "Your friends are more interested in you than you believe. Pursue them," as their takeaway. If I had managed that earlier on in life, I probably would have made some other mistakes, and there would be no guarantees on anything, of course, but I might have managed to avoid being as forlorn as I was about relationships at that point. Considering that my natural state is "clueless", some advice from my future self about how to go about things would have been pretty useful.

At a certain point, though, the advice stops being about pursuing someone and more about paying better attention. The post-college me gets a different piece of advice - "Someone who wants that much that quickly, and doesn't give in return, is not going to turn out well. [Keep your original appointment.]"

Following that piece might alter the time stream significantly enough that the third time that have happened would have washed away and something else taken their place, but I think the me of that timeline would be significantly happier than the one of this timeline, so it's probably worth the risk of scratching out some other things. And maybe they would have happened anyway. Gods only know, and it's ultimately not important until there is a time machine at work.

I realize now that this question always seems to attract regrets and things to do differently. How nice it would be that, if given a time machine, a person used it to go back and just enjoy their younger years again. No need to change anything, just the ability to go back and enjoy things.

(And not like that cruel twist in About Time where you can only go back until the birth of a child, and therefore lose the people you love anyway.)

This year is full of sadness and regrets. Many of them of my own doing. I can only hope that the time traveler's advice for me at this point is "You're almost there. Keep it up, and things will get better."

Current Mood: disappointed
Current Music: Yoko Shimomura - End of the World

[It's December Days time! There's no overarching theme this year, so if you have ideas of things to write about, I'm more than happy to hear them.]

Well, this spot was going to be taken up with the showing off of a shiny, but then I realized it's not actually going to be here until much later on, and so instead, I'll talk about something else.

I made my deadlines for all my writing this year. I even have some buffer on certain things, which is coming in handy. That said, I'm way behind on looking at all the links, and maybe I can spend some time getting those all caught up over the next week of holiday.

Deadlines are useful things for getting stuff done. Without them, projects become indefinite and suffer from the need to become perfect. Fic deadlines are good, too, as they make sure that people get gifts on something like a regular basis.

There's a certain amount of odd feeling that goes with seeing your request go out to a pinch hit list. I don't usually know the reasons why, but it seems like a disappointment - that the request of the match wasn't good enough for the original, and now someone gets a second person trying on a much shorter deadline. It doesn't mean that the work will be of lesser quality (in fact, my most kudoed work at this point was a pinch hit), but I don't know many people who can throw off epic-length works on the time between the deadline and the pinch hit deadline.

I guess I feel like I've been out to pinch hit a lot this year, that I know of, and it very well could have been a hundred thousand factors in the writer's life and not anything to do with my prompts, but I feel a little like it's somehow my fault. Because I'm not yet going "well, I love these tropes, hate the other ones, and I want this" in my prompts.

It's the same feeling as being geek-adjacent - I can speak the lingo well enough to pass as someone who knows this, but I'm just not feeling as being part of the tribe. I wouldn't be surprised if it is some part of my brain craving a work that brings in accolades, kudos, comments, and transformations. Hufflepuff ethic wanting Gryffindor results.

I've been trying to train my brain out of that, really. Because I'm never going to get those results unless the work itself really is that good. I won't know whether that work is good enough until it's there and others see it. So it's foolish to want something you can't actually make manifest.

And so we practice. Stuck in the place where Ira Glass referred to where our actual ability isn't up to our own taste, waiting for the time when the two will meet up with each other, and in the meantime, making works that can be enjoyed by others along the way. It should be an uplifting experience, and being in a pinch hit list should only indicate that the community wants to thank you for doing your part by making sure that you get a gift of value in exchange for the work that you have done.

Yeah. Deadlines help move things along. They keep things from being stagnant, which is an important thing, indeed.

Current Mood: apathetic
Current Music: Yasunori Mitsuda - Frozen Flame

[It's December Days time! There's no overarching theme this year, so if you have ideas of things to write about, I'm more than happy to hear them.]

My previous self had issues with their geek cred. Because my friends' interests and expertise in electronics and circuit building, radio transmission, and computers and programming are the sort of thing that are solidly in the pocket of the nerd culture of my upbringing. I, on the other hand, was not so much fascinated by these things, much to the...something of my father, whose profession involves working with such things for pay.

My pursuits of technology have been mostly in favor of entertainment and playing games. Much of the things I have learned in pursuit of technology have been in the service of getting games and things to work. Which is why I know how to assemble a computer from parts - if I wanted to have a machine with sufficient power and memory and hard drive space, that meant putting it all together myself on the cheap. Which is why I know about things like boot disks, about arcane command prompts to make programs work, and is the reason I ended up learning command line things - because menu programs took up too much memory to run the games. I know console tricks and have seen game guides and performed some very cool things. I've hacked savegames, hexedited, used cheat devices, probably voided more warranties than I particularly want to count, and practiced the time honored craft of following in the footsteps of others with a fuckton more technical skill than I have. I have learned how to do research to find all of these things and their usage guides. I learned why to install anti-virus software, and the importance of backups.

And then, as time progressed, I learned that tools exist to unlock smartphones and root devices, and practiced with those tools during their copyright exempt statuses, against the difficult ones, and the ones that made it much easier. I learned Linux to capture tools that aren't available on Windows. I learned website programming and a little bit of scripting, and a lot of bits and pieces of where settings go and what they do.

Almost none of it was learned formally, just as needed to accomplish the next task or to make the game more enjoyable. It provides a prodigious amount of useful knowledge to use to tweak things here and there or to help a user get out of a jam.

But I'm still the kid who plays games. Not one of the people with the eidetic memory for shows and their minutiae. Not one of the people who can build a proton pack - whether as a prop or as a prototype. Not even, until somewhat recently (...well, sort of), that kid that wrote new stories for their world and shared them with others.

And while I play games, I'm not good enough to be the competitive circuit kind of player, so even in the place where my time invests, my results aren't top tier. It's the blessing and the curse of the Hufflepuff. We are best together and create all sorts of things. Individually, though, we're not necessarily the standouts in our field, and we've often got some weird secondary abilities that help us move things along paths more efficiently. But a lot of Hufflepuffs occasionally or constantly crave something closer to real credit and recognition for their work. And I've almost always felt like geek-adjacent for much of my life.

But I do have a damn good time playing all those games.

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Dream Theater - In the Presence of Our Enemies

[It's December Days time! There's no overarching theme this year, so if you have ideas of things to write about, I'm more than happy to hear them.]

Playing in a small ensemble develops the ear of a player more than playing in a large one, assuming that there is enough skill in the player to be able to hear what is going wrong. It is only recently that I feel like I have managed to develop things with that I can start hearing what others presumably always have been.

I'm not exactly a player that has had a lot of private lessons or elite group playing. And I don't really do a lot of practicing for lack of time and lack of seeming difficulty in many pieces. There is virtue in holding out long notes to build endurance and tune the ear to what the actual pitch is. I don't really have that.

I do, however, feel that there's an underappreciated thing in playing less than first parts on a regular basis. After you get out of the first few years where everyone is playing mostly the same thing into actual pieces, much of school bands is about trying to get to the first part so that one can play the actually interesting part of the piece. (This is usually the fault of bad piece selection by the conductor.) Second (and third) parts in these situations are often relegated to long notes that build the chord structure underneath the melodic line or the pluck of the offbeat (or on beat) oohm-pah underlying the march or the faster-paced music. Which are...necessary, but not necessarily interesting to the easily-bored teenager.

Better pieces with more complexity actually pass the melodic line around among the instruments and their parts. There's still a lot of pluck going on as well as whole note sequences, and long stretches of rest while woodwind instruments play runs that are only possible with keyed instruments, but things are better. In any case, much of the time I took in university probably improved technique and ability and the ability to produce volume on demand, but it wasn't as good for developing my ear, necessarily. But the pieces are better there, as well.

Which finally loops me back to the current day and my current group - mostly one or two people to each part, in an environment of musicians that have finally learned the importance of being able to engage in dynamic contrast. I've been told that the second and third parts have importance in the whole piece for my whole life, but it's only recently that I've been able to actually hear why. I'm not sure if I was finally able to get over myself, or whether I'm finally in a small enough group to feel important enough, but the texture of the part now comes through where it didn't before. And I can hear the difference when the part is present and when it isn't.

Funny how the things that everyone says with adult wisdom don't always come into existence until you've achieved some sort of adulthood. And they usually arrive after having been fought over and resisted and otherwise told to get lost. It could be equally a loss of ambition and a gathering of wisdom that allows me to finally hear the whole and realize how important my part is to the success of the piece.

So I highly recommend being in both a lead part and a supporting part for your endeavor. Being in support and seeing yourself as valuable is the more difficult operation. Always the more difficult option. But if you can do it, you will be rewarded in great ways.

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Yoko Kanno / Seatbelts - Tank!