Blogocentric Formulations

Last trip to Blog City for 2024

Day 2427 Prompt ▼

Today is National Card Playing Day. What card games do you enjoy? Do you ever play cards for money?

I enjoy playing card games (everything from traditional games like Blackjack and Poker, to party games like Go Fish and War and Crazy Eights. I even like some collectible card games that aren't played with a standard deck (Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon, etc.), although I don't typically play for money outside a friendly low-stakes game playing Thirty-One for quarters during a family get-together.

The one thing I don't like about card games are the competitiveness that some players exhibit, or the arguments about skill versus luck. To me, playing cards is a trivial entertainment; it's a game to be played to pass the time. I know that some people see card games as very serious business, or even a way to make a living, but that's just not how or why I play cards.

And let's not forget my favorite type of card games... party games like Cards Against Humanity, Apples to Apples, What Do You Meme?, etc. Those are easily my favorites these days, where the purpose is just to have a good time and laugh your butt of with your friends while you play a ridiculous game with ridiculous rules and hilarious if not borderline offensive cards to play for shock value.



Day 2429 Prompt ▼

A worldview is a person's or society's fundamental way of thinking about the world, including their knowledge, culture, and point of view. Do you ever challenge your own worldview or any other views? And have you ever replaced them?

I'm constantly challenging and reexamining my worldview. I think that one of the hallmarks of an intelligent, thoughtful person should be the ability to think critically about themselves and their positions and admit when something needs to be adjusted or even outright changed. That said, I think I have a tendency to refine my worldview rather than change it wholesale.

For example, most people tend to be more liberal when they're younger, and become more conservative as they get older. This tends to happen as people establish lives that they've invested in; as you get older, you earn more money and tend to want more conservative fiscal policy to allow you to keep more of your money. As you get older, you tend to view your formative years with more nostalgia, and are more likely to become more socially conservative if you disagree with the direction society is trending toward.

I actually find myself more liberal (progressive would probably be a better term, since the main focus of my worldview is making progress on issues that leads to meaningful improvement in peoples' lives) than I was when I was younger. I attribute a lot of this to the fact that I moved from an affluent small town where I grew up, to a major metropolitan city when I went to college and started working. I also started traveling and seeing other cities, other countries, etc. which showed me very clearly that not everyone had the same upbringing I did. I was very privileged to grow up in a place where food, housing, money, security, etc. were all things that were taken for granted rather than hard to come by. But different people have different upbringings, and that affects their options and their choices about where life takes them.

The part of my worldview that I think I've probably changed the most in recent years is my default assumption that "the system" is inherently good and worth preserving. I still think that success is more likely to come from reforming the system itself rather than burning things to the ground and starting from scratch (in most cases), but I've really started to realize the systemic problems that exist in society, particularly where it relates to opportunity, equality, and justice. I used to assume everyone was treated the same and had the same opportunity to rise up and live out the American Dream, and I've realized just how hard that is for some people to do given the hand they were dealt at birth, growing up, etc. And I'm much more sympathetic toward arguments and policies that are aimed at leveling the playing field, taking care of those who the system has failed, etc.



Day 2430 Prompt ▼

What impresses you the most and how about the role that a certain activity (sports, theater books, music, etc.) has had on your life? And can you predict what will impress you in 2025?

I'm honestly not really sure what the first part of this prompt means, so I'm going to deviate a little bit and talk about certain activities and interests that have played an important role in my life, as well as activities and interests that I'm looking forward to exploring in 2025.

Activities and interests that have played a key role in my life up until this point have been media and learning.

Media (and I include so many things under that umbrella: movies, music, books, video games, etc.) has unquestioningly had a bigger influence on my life than anything else. I went into the entertainment business because I fell in love with telling stories in different ways. I connect some of my strongest emotions and relate the way I understand the world around me through specific songs and books and movies. I think art in nearly all its forms is one of the most incredible things humans have developed, and our imaginations are what make us unique. It's a rare day that I'm not consuming some form - if not multiple forms - of media to satiate my varied interests.

Which brings me to the next piece of it, which is learning. I love learning new things, and I constantly strive to add to the information that I have in my brain. In a lot of cases it's just random facts and trivia that I stumble across and find interesting enough to retain, but I also have a tendency to get really into a particular topic which will then consume a ton of my bandwidth until I feel like I've sufficiently exhausted it. This has been the case for topics as "serious" as religion/philosophy, the film/television business I've chosen as my profession, writing, etc. to topics as fun or trivial as building a computer from scratch, learning how to play tennis so I can enjoy watching the sport more, etc.

When it comes to activities and interests in 2025, there are two that I'm looking forward to and they both fall into each category in a way.

In 2024, I got back into Dungeons & Dragons in a major way. I found a group that was in need of a Dungeon Master (the person who runs the game for a group of players), so I started playing with them and re-teaching myself how to play the game. It's also my first experience with a regular group in a long time (my previous group was a monthly game at best, and that fell off over five years ago), so planning for a weekly session has motivated me to not just re-learn the rules, but to strive to improve myself as a DM by reading a lot of books and watching a lot of YouTube videos on the topic of how to be more effective at telling a collaborative story. This past year was a bit of a learning curve, not just in terms of getting up to speed on how to play the game again but also in terms of getting to know a new group of players (and these ones have been playing together for years, many of whom have known each other since they were kids), and I'm excited to enter 2025 having hit my stride with the campaign I've built, and seeing where it goes from there.

The second thing that I'm excited about exploring in 2025 is my newfound interest in Formula One racing. I started watching Formula One: Drive to Survive on Netflix this year, and got absolutely hooked. I've been reading extensively about the sport above and beyond what's in the show, and I'm awed by all of the work that goes into professional racing. Knowing that I'll be caught up on the past several years of history heading into the 2025 Formula One season, I'm really looking forward to following along and seeing what happens now that I'm better educated on the sport. I'm hoping to maybe even make it out to Las Vegas for the race that takes place there in November! Either way, with my interest in tennis sort of waning in recent years after more than a decade of being really into it, I'm excited to have found a new sport that I'm interested in learning about and following.