Steaming ahead

 After all these years, I have lost my personal laptop to a motherboard failure, lost both by huge external disks to failures, and all the mega collections of CD/DVD are either unreadable or have no device to put them into.

If one wants to be sad about it, there is a lot of content in there which I can never recreate ( photos from camera, phones, notes ), and some that would would be punishing to collect ( e-books, movies, music, games). So I am definitely not wishing to walk that path anymore.

And as part of the moving on strategy, or general passion, I have now re-activated by Steam account and even purchased  a title - AOEII Definitive Edition. Of course, it had to be AOE. I can play loads of new civs in wonderful new campaigns, great tutorials or just play online. I can share account with family also it seems from Steam. 

I will probably put up more stuff about this later, but at this point I am excited by my own action. 

The only challenge would be to find time to play these games in an immersive fashion, especially with my son peeking over my shoulders, and the ethics of spending more time with the laptop. Only argument is to help boost productivity during work hours and motivate a healthy balance. Of course being a history buff, I simply love the game for its content, and not just the gameplay aspects. It is like an extra accessory to my various books and podcasts.

So that is the full steam ahead..

going back for a while to Anno 1404

 The peasants need only a bit of fish to eat initially, which is fine given the human nature.

Then as the population increases, their wants also increase. Now, how is this logical you might ask.

I can consider this in light of needs arising due to presence of resources or technologies to extract them.

And once people have a taste of these new goods, it never goes off. It is very clear in the game too that if you take away any of the basic needs once the population has advanced, they get very pissed off quickly and start leaving or raising rebellions.

You feed the hungry lion once, you need to keep feeding. There in lies the challenge in raising huge cities with large populations, surplus stock of all stuff and good control of the multiple islands. If there is also a military goal, significant amount of resources get redirected in that side too.

Most of the time, the supply and smooth running of resources between various islands requires a lot of micro management, until there is enough cash and population to support enough trade ships, large and quick enough raw material productions, huge storage and a large enough set of war ships to protect your shipping lanes. Due to the imbalanced nature of resources and development level in each island ( resulted by our own decisions to direct attention and vision to particular aspects), it takes a few attempts and a few rebellions to get the tempo going.

Now I know that before raising the population for a given level, I need to ensure a strong supply and it is prudent to spend time and pile up materials and ships as required to keep the supply up and running for the expected higher demands.

Combining this with the impromptu missions requiring a variety of resources, one would start expecting production lines to keep every single resources at a level higher than its need. This is practically impossible to achieve because even raw materials which are abundant might often need to be redirected to its next level of production to get a very efficient generation of the higher valued product.

A sudden demand for the underlying raw material might be difficult to satisfy, and one might have to resort to buying for the needs while borrowing from the existing stock or shutting down a few production plants to get the raw materials piled up. 

There is also a risk with shipping products in excess of its use across islands. Ships tend to get filled up with goods that are not needed, and take away slots meant for other critical goods and suddenly you might notice a rebellion and it might be too late to take recovery actions. This is why constantly checking your stockpiles and cargo loads on key shipping lanes helps keeping the lanes healthy.

The fun part of the game is the ability to keep switching between raising the automated systematic shipping lanes and production queues while also doing a tiny bit of exploration, investments in resources and strategically raising population levels, wars etc.

walking through a bramble bush

 some sort of impasse seems to be built when things don't exactly go at the same pace as I wish them to.

The resulting frustration is sometimes responsible for leading me into various other paths. Of course I am not trying to absolve my own thinking, feeling and aware brain of its responsibilities in finding meaning, keeping up the tempo and trying to enjoy life.

But quite often, the multiple paths or intentions tend to get muddled up. Specifically, if you look at the simple goal of trying to be happy, comfortable and trying to be super productive, or even perfect. These are kind of built to conflict at various stages, as trying to do something or achieve something, often makes us move from a particular state of mind to another. And all movement requires a bit of stress, attention and focus to get it right. This is in contrast with the staple amounts of peace or comfort at staying in one point.

The feeling gets stronger and stronger that we are not going to be the perfect <anything> , as per any criteria of perfection defined without touching my very specific needs and persona. If anything, in order to get a fine balance between my own definition of perfections and the external triggers for action, there is a complex interplay between these two forces. It is not easy to state the importance of any one, or to predict how in a particular moment, a decision may be taken.

But the external practical world craves stability and predictability, and being actors on this stage, I too have developed a few skills in providing these to others, and am capable of judging the same of others, to some extent. To claim mastery on these, is akin to accepting the folly of accepting the need and the resulting abilities in living with those rules. It also gives and internally thumbs up to continue boosting those attributes. 

Let us be clear that I am in no way already favouring one side of things. I might be just going a circuitous way to say that these things require a fine and delicate hand to let each side take turns winning, or sometimes generate completely unique and wild things by combining with each other in various proportions and manners.

That unpredictability and the bound in the stride that it provides is afterall the elixir of life.

Am I too good for myself

Well, here I am, opening this Blogger interface after long long breaks and gaps.

The question in the title is the one I always find myself asking, when I am back here.

I end up browsing through my past articles and give up on writing anything.

I think I am holding up my past work to myself as the heights of my achievement. Some parts of me wants to believe that it is indeed the best I was. But I am now questioning that notion, because..well.. you know..I think I am the best in the current state always.

After all, I am here in the current state only after being in the past state, which naturally makes my current state a superset of my past states too. So why shouldn't it be better than the past state, which doesn't have the benefit of hindsight that my current state of mind has?

So here is to a new beginning..