Witty names are hard to come up with, especially for someone lazy like me
Holy crap, has it really been 5 months since I last posted? I’m a pathetic blogger…
I’ve been working on new projects and decided I’d let what little portion of the world that reads this site know something about them. Besides Aldahar (which is going pretty well and might reach public beta in the next few years), I’ve started work on a web-based (à la WarFish) version of Settlers of Catan (I had no idea how addicting this game was until I played it the first time) which I call Colony Islands, as well as a Java-based representation of a popular collectible-card game. I suppose it’s a curse of a programming freak such as myself to constantly commit to projects which end up taking a great deal of time more than originally thought. Getting in the way, of course, are work (Whoo, getting paid!), hanging out with friends, and reading other people’s blogs.
A side topic, which is actually what gave me the incentive to write this post in the first place, is thoughts on my willingness to help people, even when I know it will hurt me. I keep in seldom contact with a friend who I am always willing to help but has a tendency to let me down. For instance, I drove 1.5 hours away (which is a feat for me, especially during the night) to give this friend an emergency pick-up due to parental problems. Only when I arrived and waited for an hour did I find out that the arrival time had been delayed for 6 hours past midnight. I’d chalk this up to bad communication or coincidence, but similar situations have come up often enough to know that I’m seen as merely a dependable rescuer and not as a friend.
This raises the question: why do I do it? If I know I’m going to get hurt, why do I commit myself to it. Perhaps I feel better being taken advantage of rather than letting someone down? Perhaps I derive some perverse pleasure from putting myself into situations like this? I won’t know without some deep introspection, and I’m not up for that kind of thing often. The wildly popular V (whose opinion on such matters seem to fit very well with what I would consider as ideal for myself, not that I know the author personally) would tell me that I need to dump this friend and move on with my life.
Crap, I just noticed that one of V’s catch-phrases was “Because Obsessing Over My Opinions is Easier Than Forming Your Own”…