I’ve been a bad blogger. I see interesting content on the internet and don’t share it. I think, “eventually I’ll write an intelligent and meaningful post about it.” Then, months (years) later, I haven’t ever done anything and this blog goes months (years) without new content. Today is the day I stop the bad habit. Here’s the first in a (hopefully) long line of posts about small little things I like, or at least things I find insightful.
Fittingly, my first share is about someone displaying the kind of discipline I can only dream of:
Long story short: Mr. “Dick Tree” had a theory that you could max out your character at the very beginning of a video game. That person promised a follow up proving it was possible, then fell off the map. Frustrated, anonymous internet writer “CirclMastr” did it himself. He spent five hundred hours manually beating the smallest enemies in the earliest stages of the video game to prove it was possible. This is boring, menial, tedious labor, to say the least.
Necessary disclosures:
- Final Fantasy VII was (is) my favorite video game of all time, but this sounds like torture
- I’ve made a career out of “just doing it to get it done”, so I totally get the attitude of CirclMastr, but this still sounds like torture
- I dream of being the kind of person with the kind of discipline this would take, but fuck that, discipline for discipline’s sake is torture
I think my initial reaction was probably the same you feel right now: what a fucking waste of time. Even if he’s listening to podcasts while playing… or working out… or some other distraction… it is a shocking amount of time to spend with no pay off. I mean, this guy will get no money from it. No one will invite this guy to speak at a video gaming conference. Heck, he did it to spite someone that may never know he did it.
So… meaningless? Should we laugh at this guy?
CirclMastr has a response:
Life does not have inherent meaning; to say that our lives are pointless and our achievements meaningless is to state the obvious. No matter how grand our achievements or how broad their scope, time turns all to dust and death destroys all memory. But that does not mean we cannot ascribe our own meaning to what we do. It is because nothing has meaning unto itself that we are free to create meaning, to make metaphor, and in doing so reflect on ourselves and our world.
I found this article via reddit back on September 1st, 2017, but I still think about it. This story is perhaps the most meaningful thing I’ve read in recent memory. When it comes down to it, stupid passion is still passion.