Nerd Girl Thoughts

Blaugust Promptapalooza 2020 is this crazy year’s crazy twist on the August blogging challenge cooked up by Belghast over on Tales of the Aggronaut. Instead of writing every day, a whole bunch of us have committed to being “prompt-bearers”. Today’s prompt comes from Nogamara over at Battle Stance:

Do you “finish” games/hobbies/projects and move on or do you come back to the same things again and again?

Promptapalooza (August 18, 2020)

Finishing what I start is such a stumbling block for me that I once created a blog to try to get a handle on the issue. It lasted less than six months. I blamed the project’s failure on the fact that I returned to playing World of Warcraft, a game that is for all intents and purposes unfinishable. Really, I think it was just a meta reflection of the problem at hand.

Often the question is not whether or not I’m actually going to finish something, but why I’m not going to finish it. There are four major reasons why I might not finish something, and I’m going to touch on all of them in order from what I feel is – for me – most acceptable to most ridiculous.

New things are interesting, but sometimes, they’re only interesting for a very short period before they become tedious.

Although this does happen sometimes with video games, mostly, this is a problem I have with craft projects. I can usually power through making a scarf. I’ve even successfully finished a few baby blankets. But (I think) I’ve finally learned my lesson on full sized afghans – I’m sick of the pattern long before I’m finished, and now the goddamned thing is heavy and difficult to handle. If I get to about three quarters done before I realize I’m no longer enjoying something, the satisfaction of completion might be enough for me to push through, but even then, it’s not guaranteed.

I want to believe I am better at (insert hobby here) than I actually am.

While I logically understand that trying something that’s beyond your current skill set is how you learn something new, or improve at something, in practice, it’s often frustrating, and I usually like my leisure time to be more leisurely than that.

Something else came up, and now I’ve forgotten whatever I once knew about this. Guess I should start over. Then something else comes up. Repeat until the end of time.

I flat out refuse to even contemplate how many epic-length video games I have played the first few hours of more than three times. There’s been many, that I can tell you. It almost always is a combination of “story I have forgotten” and “mechanics I have forgotten”, but sometimes, it’s merely one or the other. I also tend to restart TV series for the same reason – I don’t remember all the details, and since I figure I liked it the first time, no reason not to start over. It happens less frequently with long books (thank god, I read fast), but the risk is there with just about any narrative with a serious time commitment.

I don’t want (thing) to be over, so I “save” the last little bit.

This is – by miles – the most irritating reason (to me) that I don’t finish something. Thankfully, it almost never stops me from finishing a game I’m enjoying, but it’s definitely prevented me from diving right into the next one of a series. But the last book or two in a series, or the last few episodes or even seasons of a television show? Yep, I do this, and it’s a huge struggle to then force myself to finish something I had – up until that point – been really really enjoying.

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I admire people who (at least generally speaking) finish what they start, but it just isn’t me.