Endings

In the time between the first two posts on this blog, many things happened - not least of which the name of the blog changed from MinMaxMe to Errant-Nerd, a change that I'll write on at a later time. Or... you know what, maybe I'll write a bit about it now. There's no big mystery about it to be honest. In medieval lore, an errant-knight was the superhero of the day. They'd travel the lands, righting wrongs and proving their worth against the moral code of the time, which centred around seven virtues. More often then not, their motivations was romantic in nature - they would dedicate their accomplishments to a woman, who waited back home for tales of their lord's success while working up an appetite for some... reward for their man. I can personally relate strongly to many of these notions. In particular the need to prove my worth to a lady friend. It's unfortunately a little dude bro-esque but yes, there it is. I have a strong urge to show off for the affections of a female. Anyway there's a sad lack of place for armour-clad sword and lance wielding horsemen, and in any case it's not a skill set that I'm particularly interested in developing (that's a damn dirty lie; if someone offered me that opportunity I would leap at it with reckless abandon). My actual area of expertise is in bits and bytes, stage crafts, ludology and other random assortments of things that I invariably take a deep deep interest in. Sometimes to the point of obsession. So: Errant-Nerd. All this is preamble to the point I wanted to get to with this post, which is this: Currently I am single and lonely and sad. It's probably why I'm blogging again. But when contrasted with my mental state earlier this year, everything I wrote above comes into crystal clear focus. Then I was successful and happy to be successful. Now I'm successful and the success brings me no joy. The difference? Isn't it obvious by now?

Do over

So after writing my first post, I promptly forgot that this was a thing and went on my merry way, which is completely unsurprising but hell what even was the point of it?

Anyway consign that shit to the flames, and from the ashes regrow the world. This blog is the entire world, yes.

So I have some hazy memory that I created this blog to chronicle my own efforts to improve myself. I can't remember when I created this blog, and under what circumstances I was labouring under at the time, but certainly things have happened since then, and I am unsure whether the me of now is closer or farther from the me I would eventually like me to be, relative to the me of then.

And if you could make sense of that last sentence, well done! My mind will be an open book. I don't plan on making any concessions to your human grammers and spellings except as far as I personally give a shit about that stuff. And I do, truly. But if conveying meaning in my way requires tangling words in unconventional constructions because my brain is twisted like that, I'm just gonna put it out that way and damn it all.

Who the fuck else would be reading this thing anyway?

Edit: I just checked the first post. September 2011?! I could've sworn it was much more recent than that. Well we have some catching up to do, then...

MinMaxMe Mission statement

I've created and abandoned more blogs than I probably should have. This new one, in particular, comes hot on the heels of another one that has only managed to make it to 6 posts. Not that any of the others were much more successful. So what makes this one different? Not a great deal, to be honest. But I feel like at least this one has a neat title that sums up what I want to achieve with it, and the type of posts and topics I'll be writing here. So. MinMaxMe. What does that mean? Min Maxing is a practice I first heard of around a Dungeons and Dragons game table. As I understand it, it essentially refers to squeezing out the most you can from the dice rolls that the fates have blessed or cursed you with. In that particular context, it meant pushing one stat higher than the rest so that my character would be incredibly capable at a specific task. In that case, punching things in the face. More broadly, it refers to generally minimising losses or weaknesses and maximising gains or strengths. It's mostly applied to games, but with this whole gamification craze happening, why can't it apply to other decisions in life? Take weight loss, for example. To me (and to Weight Watchers and other programs) it's a simple equation. In human body terms, food is energy. It can be stored as fat or expended during exercise. Food coming in is energy input, exercise is energy output. When output exceeds input, energy comes from storage. Net result: weight loss! But there are other factors. Different foods fill you up at different rates, and convert to body fat in different ways. Different exercises work the body differently. Finding the right combination of pleasing yet filling foods and pleasing yet energy burning activities will make weight loss a lot easier than eating rubbish healthy foods while trudging on a treadmill. So essentially this blog will be a chronicle of my attempts to gamify my life and maximise my potential. I'm not even a fan of gamification so I'm not going to take it incredibly far in terms of enumerating everything I do, but I will take note of particular activities and habits I change and try to present a reasonable estimation of how the changes impact my life for good or bad. So let's do this, giant invisible dice roller in the sky. Let's Min Max Me.