Fear of failure

This weekend, I’m doing something foolish. I’m taking part in the Hell and Back. It’s a 10k race up and down the Little Sugarloaf, with a few obstacles thrown in for good measure. There’s a lot to be scared of. Never mind the cold, I’ve also got to haul my fat ass over a 7 foot wall, and deliberately subject myself to an electric shock. And then there’s the very real possibility that I will injure myself, badly.

But the thing that’s really got me scared – the thing that’s actually keeping me up at night – is the fear of failure. Of not finishing the course at all. Or worse, coming dead last. This is scaring me more than serious bodily harm. I can handle physical pain. Anyone who knows me knows I can’t handle emotional pain.

Ze Frank has some comforting things to say about this. Especially this line:

Let me think about the people who I care about the most, and how when they fail or disappoint me… I still love them, I still give them chances, and I still see the best in them. Let me extend that generosity to myself.

If my wife did anything like this, if she even signed up for something like this, I would be so proud of her. If she came dead last – if it took her eight hours to finish the course and everyone else had gone home – I’d still be at the finish line, cheering for her like she’d just out-run Usain Bolt. Can I do the same for myself?

On second thought, maybe I should be watching clips from Rocky instead. Much less likely to make me cry.

I made this

Most videogame writing is shit.

And don’t give me any bollocks about objective vs subjective, or “yeah, well, y’know that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” It’s true. More than any other entertainment industry, videogame writing is dominated by churnalism – press releases repackaged as news or editorial. Most videogame writers could be replaced by a Markov Engine and I doubt many people would notice the difference.

Rab Florence’s Lost Humanity series on Eurogamer was something special. He wrote with wit, humour and passion. He wrote with honesty. He wrote the kind of videogame writing I wanted to read. Then there was a bit of a kerfuffle and he stopped writing for them.

Remember what I was saying about digital entropy? I didn’t want that to happen to this writing. It’s too precious to allow it to crumble away to nothing.

So I made a book of it.

I took all Rab’s original Lost Humanity articles – screenshots and all – and some of the post-kerfuffle articles that were written on other sites and dumped them into LaTeX using Zed Shaw’s learn-x-the-hard-way as a basic template. I added an index. I wrote a little introduction (I don’t know why). From all this, I generated a PDF, which I sent across to lulu.com. And for less than the price of a decent cocktail, I had a hard-copy of some of my favourite game writing.

I’m really happy with the way this turned out and it’s something I can see myself doing a lot in the future. Or at least, I could see myself doing it a lot in the future if I can sort out my LaTeX workflow. I haven’t found a decent/reliable tool for dumping HTML/XML to LaTeX, so it takes a good bit of manual futzing to get it to a print-ready state. There’s also Blackstrap, which will generate a book of your Instapaper/Pocket queue, which seems like it’s scratching a similar itch.