I’m a digital hoarder. Right now my laptop has thousands of hours of unplayed games on it, hundreds of archived podcasts and as many unread articles and eBooks.
With the amount of tutorials and resources stored and accessible on there, a motivated person could learnt how to do anything they wanted by now. I’ve barely done anything. I’ve had free access to so much knowledge and ignored almost all of it.
Continue reading “Resources”
The sheer amount of publications, information sources, and people that I follow has become too much to read, and too much to mean anything. Continual anxiety means I’m struggling to focus on anything useful, like uni work or project planning. But trying to escape or get ideas by reading non-uni media isn’t helping at all.
Between my Twitter feed, Medium recommendations and Pocket list, there’s almost 1000 items of “do this to be happy”, “do this to be better”,”here’s how everyone else is succeeding”, and “you need to care about this”.
Yesterday, Xbox sent out round-up emails with stats about our year in Xbox. Usually, I’m interested in that kind of thing, but reading these stats was uncomfortable.
I’m in the top 5% for amount played, at about 1500 hours in 2015. I honestly didn’t expect to be that high a percentile, more like 15/20%. That number annoys me- at least 1/3 of those hours happened as deliberate escapism or inertia. What could I have done with them instead?
The first argument I’m using to justify it is “I don’t play as much as my friends do”. This is kind of true as amongst my group I had the lowest hours, and some had double the hours I did. However, the gap between my time and theirs is smaller than I expect. I’ve been the last person online at night quite a lot, even on nights where I was intending to do something else.
Continue reading “The Year of Gaming…”
This week has been bad in terms of anxiety and depersonalisation; simple things like a busy bus or a doubting thought, that normally I can deal with absolutely fine, have been sources of fear and thought-loops instead.
Considering this was also the week where I started the Broadcasting module, I was worried. While the course as a whole is outside of my comfort zone, a module where I’d potentially have to appear on microphone and on camera is lightyears away from comfortable.
But today, I woke up feeling calmer. Then something happened that put the last few years in perspective.
Today was the second day of our broadcasting group, and we were focusing on radio. Our first task was trying out voice recorders to interview a classmate. I returned our voice recorder to my lecturer as we were finished, only to find the next task was analysing an interview as a full group.
Continue reading “The Lion’s Den of Broadcasting”
Sinead Harold 