02.28.06
Posted in Suggestions at 10:40 pm by Ode to Joy
There are lots of people (Americans anyway) that don’t have the patience for board games in their adult lives. This is a great shame and due in large part I believe to how boring many of the popular American board games are. Monopoly, Risk, Life, Candy land, they just don’t have the same appeal past the age of 12. However, if you expand your horizon a bit, you’ll find a ton of great games out there that are entertaining and engaging for even the most jaded member of the intelligentsia among you.
Two games that I have been playing lately that I’m quite fond of are The Settlers of Catan, and Carcassonne. Settlers is a strategy game that is somewhat of a cross between monopoly, risk, and civilization. You are competing with the other plays to build roads, settlements, and armed forces to wrest control of an Island. The seemingly simple sets of rules you play with lend themselves to a wide variety of strategic options, and the replay value is extremely high. The only downside to this game is you need 3 people to play. Also, there is an element of chance to the game, as the roll of the dice determines how resources are distributed to players. There are a ton of expansion packs you can get, so if you find you like this game, there are accessories galore to keep you busy for years to come. Carcassonne can be played with only 2 players, and has a quite different premise. Rather than starting with a pre-built world which you subsequently occupy, in Carcassonne, each turn you take a card and help build out a world, choosing how you wish to connect your new piece of territory to the existing game board map. In addition to deciding how to build out the map, you have control over where you place your minions, which can become thieves, knights, farmers or monks depending on what type of territory you set them in. This game is incredibly addictive and again gives rise to a wide variety of playing scenarios based on a few simple rules. Again, there are also a ton of add on accessories and alternate rule sets, so if you grow bored with the initial variation there are lots more to choose from.
For both of these games, there are large communities of fans on and offline, so chances are if your living companion isn’t a game player you’ll be able to find some other like-minded souls to play with you.
Follow this link to learn more about the Settlers of Catan board game.
Permalink
02.20.06
Posted in Suggestions at 10:35 pm by Ode to Joy
One of the things I used to enjoy doing was watching a movie with friends with the sound turned off. You and your friends pick characters and make up your own soundtrack, acting out the movie as it is going along with your own script that you create on the fly. It was kind of a like a do it yourself mystery science 3000 kind of activity. I call this Soundhacking.
If you’ve never done it, I would say give it a try. If you have a digital recorder, you can even tape the session and later synch it up with the video. There are a couple of movies (most notably It’s A Wonderful life) where the soundtrack is still under copyright protection but the visual aspect is in the public sphere. So, if you can come up with something funny that you record and synch to the movie, you can even distribute it legally.
Permalink
02.19.06
Posted in Suggestions at 9:37 pm by Ode to Joy
TV is an invention with infinite possibility. Unfortunately, the content that is available for TV doesn’t often live up to this potential. The experience of watching itself is also so similar to sleep physiologically that you should spend a good portion of your leisure time away from the happy box.
I challenge you to spend an entire month without watching TV. There are lots of months without a meaningful sports series, or new shows, when you can safely wean yourself away without falling out of step with the culture. Plus, if you have TIVO, you can always watch it later anyway. So, just turn it off, and see what happens.
Permalink
02.16.06
Posted in Suggestions at 2:00 am by Ode to Joy
Winning is great, but losing in a really extreme fashion can be even better.
To give you an example, I play on a soccer team at work. We are generally pretty terrible but continue to improve all the time. One week, our goalie was absent, so I played substitute goalkeeper. Not only did I play during my team’s match, but 2 subsequent teams asked me to play for them as well (I suppose there was a goalie strike that week or somesuch nonsense).
To say that things went badly would be an understatement. I would have been thrilled if things had gone well enough to be described as merely a poor performance. I was a disaster, letting in 14 goals over the 3 games. For those of you that aren’t soccer fans, to put this in perspective, there are professional goalkeepers that can go for half a season without allowing in 14 goals. To my credit, I did stop a number of shots, and the teams I played with weren’t good defenders, but it was a disaster, plain and simple.
Not only was the scoreline a problem, but the teams I was playing for were very vocal in their displeasure with my performance. Each game, things started off friendly, but by the end I was almost as afraid of my team as of our opponents.
At this point, you are probably saying to yourself, what does this have to do with fun? Despite the misery of the experience at the time, I have to say, it is one of the better days of my life. Never have I so abjectly failed at anything. I now know what a true disaster is like, and it all happened in a very controlled way with no long term consequences. I have known tons of people that won’t try new things because they are worried they will be bad at them. Well, I tell you all, that is the precise reason you should try new things. You are terrible at first, and can experience the intense awareness of your inability in a direct way with no real impact on your life. Being acutely aware of your lack of ability in an area shows you how much room you have for self improvement. It is only that feeling that gets you motivated to do anything of any substance in the world. So get our there and start failing today!
Permalink
02.12.06
Posted in Suggestions at 7:19 pm by Ode to Joy
There are few things as exciting as changing the nature of your physical & mental relationship to the world. Last summer I read a book called Geomancy which looked at common threads in the design and implementation of sacred spaces in different world systems and religions. Common to most of them was some form of altered consciousness, either created by having a user climb a hill, or sit for a long period of time in a space with little light (or tons of colored light - stained glass cathedrals for example), or somesuch similar technique.
This book resonated with me as I’ve always been a big believer in pushing yourself to physical and mental limits for purely pleasurable purposes. Once in a while for example, I like to either go without sleep or food for a long period of time. If you go two days without sleep for example, and then sleep next to an alarm that is going off every 15 minutes, you’ll find yourself dropping back into REM sleep over and over again, and can have a full day of vivid dreams. If you go without food, you’ll find your mind becomes sharper and you’ll become more imaginative as well. Vacations can often be boring I believe because people over satisfy themselves, eating and sleeping too much.
Physical exercise can alter the conciousness as well. Many people have talked about the joys of the natural high they experience. I would suggest trying different types of exertion though to see what they do to you. For example, really work out your legs a lot by going for a really long hike for example. Then another time, really work your arms and not your legs. See what it does to the way you think and feel.
Food can be a great drug as well. Try eating a ton of sugar for example, or go without sugar for a long period of time. The second week of the atkins diet for example can be an amazing experience mentally as you all of a sudden have tons of even energy without the highs and lows the day usually brings.
As my brother once pointed out, one of the most dynamic ways to alter your consciousness is to have an encounter with someone else. Interacting with someone you’ve never met is a complex and engaging process which requires you to rethink who you are and what your boundaries should be. Old friends are great, but after a while they won’t challenge you like a new person in your life will.
If you don’t have living, breathing people to interact with, don’t forget the communities available in books or online. Once in a while, instead of reading a mystery novel, read a really difficult book put together by someone really trying to piece together the universe. Check out The Book of Disquiet
by Pessoa for example, or the Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini, an encyclopedia of an imaginary world written in an imaginary language. The challenges school gives you as a child can still be exciting when you’re older.
Time speeds up I believe as you grow older precisely because you get the resources to prevent your conciousness from being altered in these simple ways. If things go well, you have a group of friends, enough food to eat, time to sleep, and can smooth out the edges of an otherwise rough physical existence. As you simplify your environment and your world though, your consciousness fades into the background, and your mind is less challenged. Keep your brain alive! Change your world up today!
Permalink
02.04.06
Posted in Suggestions at 10:16 am by Ode to Joy
If you have anything to say about anything, and an extra $10 a month lying around, there is no excuse not to have your own blog. For those of you that don’t know what a blog is, it’s short for web log, and basically means a website you can manage and add content for with almost no technical skills.
As someone who has built lots of sites from scratch, I was skeptical about the value of using a blogging system, thinking it would limit one’s creativity by limiting control over the site design. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Using a blogging system such as wordpress (what this site uses as well as my site http://www.searchphilosophy.org ), drupal (what i use for http://www.consumity.com and http://www.22pages.com), or one of the many others out there makes the whole process of having personal websites more manageable and frankly a lot more fun.
I find myself writing almost every night now, something that wouldn’t have happened if I had to worry about getting into the html and putting table tags around things to format them well. I just login to one of my various sites, type up my latest idea, and voila, I’m done.
I think that writing is a natural mood elevator. I have found myself having more dreams and a lot more ideas than normal. There is something about activating the speech related areas of the brain that seemingly has a net positive overall life effect.
Here’s how to get started.
1. Figure out something you want to write about. Come on, you have something to say. If nothing else, use it as a forum to keep your friends and family up to date with what is going on in your life.
2. Get a domain name. http://www.whois.sc is a useful site for searching for available domain names. Once you find something you like, register it through http://www.godaddy.com or somesuch registration service. I like godaddy because they have a very usable interface and lots of good add-on products like domain privacy.
3. Get a hosting account with BlueHost.com. They are great. For $6.95 a month you can host up to 6 domains with 10GB of storage space. More importantly they have an installer system called Fantastico that will automatically install just about any of the open source content management systems for you like WordPress, Drupal, PHP-Nuke, etc. You just hit a few buttons and you have a website you can begin using. Their service is great too. I have used other hosting companies and these guys are leaps and bounds above the rest.
4. Install one of the content management systems through Fantastico.
5. Start writing.
6. Email me the url of your blog. (admin@makelifemorefun.com).
7. Keep writing.
8. Market your blog through free methods to get readers. (More on this later.)
Get blogging today. You won’t regret it, I promise.
Permalink