I mean, it worked. It’s Easter Morning, and aside from any minor gaming I’ve done while writing about gamification for work or testing game-y things we’ve built and a brief demo or two in the name of parenting, I haven’t played a video game since Februrary 21st. (That’s 47 days, btw). So, yay me.

But it didn’t really work.

My goal was to backfill all that time spent playing video games with more productive tasks. I shot myself in the foot by not having a more specific plan than “write some things, read some things, update somethings.” That would have tremendously helped, especially in the evenings. But those idle moments in the day where i’m spending a few moments playing on my phone? those to get to be made productive. They’re wasted time, no matter what I do. In those moments I spent time on Twitter and Tumblr, browsing content created by others. I diligently kept all my apps up to date. Basically, I found proto-games to fill my time without reaping any of the actual benefits of these games. DrawSome took off while I was away. There’s apparently some Avengers-movie tie-in Facebook Game that i’m now woefully behind on. Once you step out of IM conversations, every social interaction online has some sort of game element and I avoided those as best I could.

I really tried when it came to the larger chunk of free time in the evening, but fate conspired against me.Through a series of unanticipatable events (vague, i know. we’ll work on that later), life has left exhausted, and I didn’t have the mental energy left to write. I hardly had the strength to read. I got a bit further in Reamde, but Stephenson was too dense for me to maintain. In fact, the only “to do” item that I was able to keep up on was comics. There were a few series that I wanted to get “caught up” with before heading to C2E2 this week. I did that. I also watched the first season of Supernatural and some of the second. I’m waiting for it to get good and I’ve been promised it will. I stuck it out and didn’t spend any time playing games, but it was frustrating. Insomnia made of worry is a bitch and not having games to distract me to sleep was so very not fun.

There is a bright side to all of this. I learned something about who I am: I’m a gamer. It’s one thing to recognize that a particular game is taking over my world and walk away. It’s important to keep and eye on how much I play to make sure that aspect of me isn’t squashing other aspects like “mother, wife, reader, writer, … employed”. But it’s part of me. Can I go 47 days without gaming? Sure. I could probably go forever if I wanted. I know I don’t “need” to play Skryim again. I know I’ll be able to resist Diablo 3 when it comes out next month. But I like playing these games. It’s one of my favorite past times. I know I could avoid all the gaming apps on my phone and use it This might become harder to do as gamification takes over everything we do and the definition of “game” and “gamified tool” gets blurrier and blurrier.

But then I wouldn’t be me. And that’s no fun.

You know what is fun? DrawSome with my friends. Rocking out with Elmo and Cookie Monster and my kids via the Kinect. The tiny feeling of satisfaction I get when I accomplish some minor goal in one of those build/maintain Facebook games. Spending an evening immersed in a fantasy world where i’m a Dragon-slaying BAMF. Those things are fun and I miss them.

Happy Easter!

We knew before we looked at this house that it was probably a long shot. It had recently dropped into our range, but the description suggested it was going to need a significant of work. The room dimensions were irresistible, the location (although at a relatively high-traffic corner) was perfect. We had to take a look because if we’ve learned anything in this search it’s that you never know.

I fell in love the moment we crossed the threshold.

Completely unlike the haunted house from a few weeks back, this house felt beyond welcoming. Like it had thrown us a surprise “Welcome Home!” party in preparation for our arrival. The more we wandered through the giant rooms, the stronger the feeling grew. I was giggling. This wasn’t a house. This was a home. Whether it was our home remained to be seen, but it definitely wasn’t the sort of place you lived in for a few years and then walked away from. This house becomes the center-point for your entire clan. Christmases, Easters, Summer Barbecues, Wakes. It all happens in this house. You could feel it. This house had seen so many celebrations and was ready for more.

As we walked through the giant kitchen (complete with a butler’s pantry and the original ironing board carved into the wall), wandered through the gorgeous dining room (large enough the 10-person dining room table in it looked almost small), and made our way upstairs, I could see my family living there. And not just “oh, this would be fine” acceptance. For the first time really ever, I could effortless imagine my tiny children as teenagers running through this house. I felt myself age into the grandmother that hosts thanksgiving dinner for the clan. Usually thoughts of growing old make me shudder, but not here. It was amazing. I wanted to live there for the next 50 or 60 years and die there.

And that was the problem.

It was an amazing house, but everything was going to need to be updated. Plumbing, electric, the floors, the kitchen. It was livable, but it wasn’t livable. You’d end up spending 50% of the asking price again before moving in. That pushed it far out of our price range. We aren’t shopping for our forever home right now. We’re shopping for a home that can hold us for the next 5-10 years while the market recovers and we can buy our forever home. Oh sure, we could try to make it happen, but even if we could, it would be at too much of a financial risk.

We had some tough conversations but in the end we decided to pass on this opportunity. It just wasn’t the right house at the right time.

I spend all week struggling with all the “idle moments” urges to play an app on my phone for 5 minutes. I start twitching at work because of the standard work-related chaos that I usually relieve at the end of the day with a bit of Skyrim (or those idle moments with apps). It builds to a head until the whistle blows on Friday. It starts to fade, only to be completely eclipsed by a desire to spend a few lazy hours on Sunday playing Skyrim. Which I can’t do.

Oh sure, there are lots of folks, some even with legitimate catechismal reasons, who consider Sunday a “skip” day when it comes to giving up things for Lent. I have never subscribed to that and I’m not going to suddenly decide that’s totally cool just because I can’t handle it this year. I’m hoping that in a week or two, this anxiety fades and I’ve either resigned myself to my fate or gone completely bonkers without my go-to stress reliever.

Video games, for all their negative qualities, fill some need inside of me that can’t easily be filled elsewhere. I’ve tried reading and writing. I’ve tried cooking, which comes pretty dang close, but it leaves piles of messy dishes, which pretty much negate all the filling. This was a bad idea. Worse than giving up the Internet.

Next time–and I know there will be a next time–next time I give up video games for Lent there will be caveats. Give up Apps but not Xbox. Or vice versa. Limit total play time to 2 hours per week. Something. This is going to get very ugly before Easter Sunday.

Our visit to this turn of the century victorian house started out better than most. This house was larger and older than others in the same general area and price range. It was 3 stories, and for the first two stories everything was fine. It needed a healthy amount of updates, but we really liked some of the features. While we were chatting, we made our way to the third floor: an attic that had been converted into two bedrooms. The first bedroom had an exposed seam along the wall, and Ryan, his dad and the agent set about figuring out why that might be. I have little to contribute to those conversations, so I wandered out and went into the next bedroom.

The second bedroom started off with a small hallway that opened up into the bedroom proper. I took two steps down the innocuous-looking hallway and froze. I was terrified, as if someone had just appeared out of nowhere and screamed in my face to get out. I didn’t see or hear anything, though. It was as if I’d crossed some invisible barrier and a switch had flipped in my head. One moment I was happy and imagining living in the house. The next moment, all I wanted to do was run away as fast as I could. I took a deep breath and tried to calm down. I even took another step into the room, trying my best to prove something to someone. Or not appear rude. Or something. I don’t know. It’s hard to stay rational when something so wild happens to you.

“So, it’s haunted,” I said, casually as I could when I rejoined the party.

Because my family and our real-estate agent are awesome, everyone took me seriously while still remaining skeptical. I was skeptical. I try really hard not to believe in these sorts of things and search for rational explanations whenever I can. But this…this was hard to deny. We’ve looked at lots of older houses, and my imagination has led me down some silly, hypothetical paths, but what I experienced in that room is a different sort of thing.

We investigated the room as a group and found the creepiest little door boarded up in the back of the closet (which was just access to the crawlspace that wasn’t converted, but would have creeped us all out regardless). We all had a good laugh and some of the tension lifted. Trying to do my part as a critical observer of the house, and block out all the heeby-jeeby vibes, I mentioned that this room was a bit cooler than the rest of the house. Not uncommon in attic conversions, but noteworthy. Later, I would learn that my husband and his father didn’t notice any coolness. I always forget that’s a sign others attribute to ghosts. It’s probably for the best that I do.

Before we left, I spent some more time in the bedroom and I decided that something bad happened there. Probably repeatedly, which is why enough bad mojo had built up to be detected. I’m fairly certain that what I ran across wasn’t an evil presence as much as it was feral and protective of the house. I spooked it when I entered the room, which is why it lashed out at me. It might have been fine with us eventually, but I couldn’t shake the idea that someone who grows up sleeping in that room grows up a little …off.

Rational or not, that’s a deal-breaker for me. Even without that rider, the house had several challenges that meant it wasn’t a good match for us. We moved on.

This year I’m taking the bold step of giving up video games.

This may sound like a sacrifice more fitting of a 14 year old boy, but trust me, this is Up There for me. No Skyrim, No game apps on the phone, not even the ones that are mostly just project management simulations. The only exceptions I’m allowing myself are the music simulators that are part of our children’s bedtime routines, and the kinect games we play as a family. other than that, it’s off limits. It’s not as crazy as giving up the Internet, but a) I can’t really do that because I’d the nature of my job and b) I’m not that crazy.

Like previous Lents, I’m not just giving up something, I’m adding something in the way of self-improvement as well. While I don’t quite consider Skyrim as “cheap vodka” as it’s counterpart World of Warcraft, it has definitely gotten in the way of other avenues of storygathering and storycreating. It’s time to fix that. As “luck” would have it, I’m also experiencing a complete dryspell with regards to all the TV shows I catch (or try to catch) close to their air dates (that’d be: Doctor Who, Vampire Diaries, Downton Abbey, True Blood and Game of Thrones).

In short, I have approximately 1-3 hours every night of “free time” that needs filling.

So how am I going to do it? Well, I haven’t quite worked out the kinks on that. I need to take a more critical look at the calendar and my goals, but I know that it will involve some combination of blog posting, comic reviewing, comic reading, book reading and that elusive beast: fiction writing. My website is woefully outdated and my professional online presence needs a kick in the tush. There are a lot of projects I’ve let languish that I need to push through before I can let myself indulge in world building, but the goal is to get there.

And hopefully, when Easter Sunday rolls around in …however many days that actually is… and I fire up Skyrim or move my iPhone apps back into view, I’ve established enough good habits to help me keep everything in moderation.

The Conditions: To start with, I could have seen it under better conditions. While a quality movie shouldn’t be dependent on context, pretending that context doesn’t play a role in enjoyment and perceived quality is naive. I could have seen it in a crowded theatre with a giant screen surrounded by the fans that would have laughed and cheered along with me. Instead, I saw it with a small crowd in a small theatre. I’m not sure how much of that contributed to the 3D aspects being extremely underwhelming to the point of making the movie look cheap, but that was only half the problem. Without the fanboys, there was no excitement or fervor in the air. Studies I totally just made up show that being surrounded by people enjoying a thing contributes to your enjoyment. It’s subconscious peer-pressure. Instead, I was left turning to Ryan asking if the Asgard bits were as silly as I thought. (they were)

I was the only one who cheered when Hawkeye showed up. For serious. Also, I cheered when Hawkeye showed up. What have I become?

The “Ironman” Factor: “People” kept comparing this movie to Ironman. It doesn’t matter if they said it was almost as good as Ironman or not, I walked into the theatre with the expectation that I was going to heart it as much as I heart Ironman. And beyond any discussion of quality, this movie has very little in common with what I enjoyed about Ironman. There’s something about movies made by Jon Favreau that work on me in a special way. WIthout realizing it, I went in expecting to be entertained by Kenneth Branagh the same way I’m entertained by Jon Favreau. Lord, what fools these mortals be, indeed.

If I had considered this movie was going to be similar to Ang Lee’s The Hulk (which I liked and it totally is), I think i would have enjoyed it much more.

The Super Story: But here’s the real “problem:” Thor’s story and Thor’s problems aren’t interesting to me. What I dig most about superheros and supervillans are their origin stories. What were they like before they got this power? How did that transformation change them? How do they deal with their new lives within the context of their old ones? Thor was never not a god. He starts the movie as a big, arrogant, blonde oaf who solves every problem with a hammer swing. He ends the movie slightly less arrogant (arguably more arrogant), but other than that, pretty much the same. Yaaaaaaaaaawn. Add to that the choice to have most of the peril/battle/ultimate stakes take place on worlds other than mine? Why am I invested in this?

There were so many interesting looking characters with stories just begging to be told, but nothing came of any of them. The only character that didn’t end exactly the same as he’d begun was Loki. His arc was as close to interesting as the movie was. Even though he’d always had the power, there was still a rather traumatic “reveal” and aftermath. The movie glossed over most of that, since he wasn’t the big, dumb hero.

The Fallout: Consider my expectations completely reset for Captain America. I don’t really know Joe Johnston from a hole in the wall, and the movie certainly doesn’t lend itself to a Favreau-style joy ride. I do hope/want the actual Avengers movie to have a Favreau-like tone, and with Joss at the helm, it should.

I am suddenly terrified for X-Men: First Class, though. That’s the one that I’ve been most looking forward to and that I “need” to be great.

There wasn’t much to recommend it, however. I have no idea how you could have followed much of it if you hadn’t read the books, and I certainly don’t know why you’d bother with the second episode. I’m not going to speak to any plot points/characters specifically because I know lots of folks who are watching the show instead of reading the books. Stop watching the show and read them. for serious.

The biggest thing that stood out for me was the mangled accents. While these places are all fictional and people from different areas would have different accents, every actor seemed to be doing their personal version of what someone in a fairytale set in medieval England would sound like, with varying degrees of success. It was all annoying and it added to the melodramatic overtones of the entire episode. (Melodramatic is not a compliment)

Aside from the accents, there were some effects hiccups (both of the “special” variety and the “cheap wigs and pancake makeup” variety) that pulled me right out of the bits of story I was trying engage myself with. They picked strange places to cut costs.

As for the sexing, which was labeled excessive and/or gratuitous by some and pandering to the poor women forced to sit through it by others, it was pretty much neither. It all fit with the moments, especially when it was establishing characters and their relationships with others. I was bored by the few sexy bits there were and none of them seemed exactly “for the women.” Given how “yipee! we’re on HBO!” True Blood was the season it started, I expect this to be much worse.

In short, I’ll be back, because it’s there, but if it doesn’t get more cohesive and level off the production values, I don’t give it much hope of succeeding.

Saturday: Panel-Hopping The panel I enjoyed the most was the one I knew the least about. I’m barely literate in Marvel and don’t speak DC at all, hardly, but that’s where the group was headed first, so I tagged along to see what these were like. It was pretty fine, but sitting by Jeff, Louis, and Ali and having a running commentary about who the guys at the front were and what they were (not) talking about made all the difference.

It was clear (and it had been before) that panels pretty much go like this:

Moderator: Here are people who write and illustrate things you like.
Crowd: Yay!
Artist (one by one): I am working on something awesome. You’ll be excited.
Crowd: We will!
Artist: Inside Joke!
Crowd: Ha ha ha!
Moderator: Wouldn’t it be cool if this thing we totally planned to reveal at this panel were to happen?
Crowd: …yes?
Moderator: I said wouldn’t it be cool if this thing we totally planned to reveal at this panel were to happen?
Crowd: Sorry we were confused. Yes! It would be Very Cool!
Moderator: Then it’s going to happen!
Crowd: Hurrah!
Moderator: And now for some Q&A from our audience!
Audience Member: Will this thing I want to happen ever happen?
Moderator/Artist/Guy in the back who’s in charge of Spoiler Leakage: Maybe
5-10% of the crowd leaves as another person steps to the mic.
Other Audience Member: OMG I love you guys!
M/A: Thanks?
5-10% of the crowd leaves as another person steps to the mic.
Other-Other Audience Member: Will you please spoil the thing you said you would in no way shape or form spoil?
M/A: No
5-10% of the crowd leaves as another person steps to the mic. et cetera, et cetera.

This is fun when you’re with a group (and leave after the first few questions), but when I was by myself it was hard to feel like it was a good use of my time. I kept feeling like there was other fun I could be having on the floor with friends.

I didn’t stay very long at the Vertigo panel, just long enough to listen to Jill Thompson completely sell me on her Little Endless books and to hear Scott Snyder talk about collaborating with Stephen King for some of American Vampires, which after only a few issues is becoming my All Time Favorite Vampire Thing Of All Time.

Speaking of vampires, I did hang out in the True Blood panel for most of it. I liked hearing about some of the on set shenanigans, but the constant “wooo!”-ing from the crowd every time someone talked about being naked on set and such got old. The moderator also greeted us with “Hey there, Fangbangers!” which didn’t sit well with most of the audience, me included. In the True Blood universe, fangbangers is a derogatory term for humans that are more or less obsessed with the vampires to the point of putting their life at risk, doing anything just to be near them, etc etc. It’s a bit like greeting Harry Potter fans by calling them “Mudbloods” and expecting them to cheer. It’s true, but it’s not exactly nice.

The cast members on the panel were entertaining through. Sam Trammel is very similar to his character and seemed to be a bit ill-at-ease with all the woo-ing. Brit Morgan is just on this side of being a “I can’t believe I’m actually acting with these people” fangirl herself and nothing like her character. I’m guessing that after seeing the actress, I might be able to stand the character a bit more. A good thing, since likely without meaning to, or realizing what she was saying, she implied that her character isn’t going away any time soon. She’s got more episodes in season 4 than she had in 3, despite dying either at the end of the 3rd book or the beginning of the 3rd. That’s the only thing I “learned” from the panel that wasn’t already more or less common knowledge. These 3 were so cautious about spoilers that they were worried about mentioning things that they worried about “revealing” things from previous seasons.

Kristen Bauer, though. Wow. First of all, while she’s the “full figured” character on the show (by no means heavy, but not a twig like Sookie or Jessica), she is practically a twig in real life. I hardly recognized her when I was people watching earlier and she was at the photo-op station. Mostly, however, she is exactly how I’d hoped she’d be. Pam is my “if I were a vampire, I’d hopefully be just like that” character on the show, and I feel the same way about the actress. She’s sassy without being crass or cruel, articulate and clearly very intelligent, and drop dead gorgeous.

It may come as a surprise, but I didn’t stick around for the Vampire Diaries panel and I don’t really regret it. Hanging out by myself wasn’t nearly as fun and I didn’t want to spend another hour doing it. Between the Vertigo and True Blood panels, I’d had my fill.

On an intellectual level, I do not believe in a predicted “end times”, but the more world events keep stacking up in favor of a man-made apocalypse with a “natural” catalyst, I worry that some sort of end is nearing and that those who consider themselves believers are going to reach a tipping point and their panic will infect enough of us that it won’t matter what I believe anymore.

(I really need to finish The Passage.)