Following the clock

Typical day:

5-6 AM wakeup -> Afternoon rush

Evening

At close of work, either go to gym, or get to reading/helping with homework/cooking.

Post dinner, get school work done, get reading.

Put child to sleep, and if I survive, get back to reading

Else, continue with step #1, the next day.

I observe that books and some form of exercise are the regular habits, which can be classified as good.

The regular digital habits, on the other hand required some monitoring and introspection:

a) Twitter(X)

Scroll through a list of regular people whom I follow, with very very limited political exposure (unavoidable, unless I want to be proverbially living under the rock).

With interesting events happening, I might over 40 mins a day scrolling and retweeting. Otherwise it might be within the 30 mins window.

Main topics I find myself reading/responding are: Fitness, travel, wildlife, world events, very specific trolling incidents outside my lil echo chamber. I had over the last two years trimmed the list of people I follow significantly, weeding out inactive or toxic accounts for people who consistently post relevant, informative or creative content. Biggest examples would be Sandeep Mall, Science Girl etc.

b) Youtube

I don't use the standard Youtube app due to the ads, and rely on the Youtube Vanced app [boohoo, this is now gone, and I'm subjected to the horrors of watching ads] for my video binging which I try to also avoid when my son is around. After all, we are lecturing him to restrict his screen time, all the time. 

On a average, I find I use Youtube for 30-40 mins a day. Rarely it can go beyond an hour if I sit late night to finish watching some long pending ones, or get into a YT Shorts binge-until-burnout.

Again, the contents mainly seem to either personal finance (quality/novelty over quantity here), medieval history (mostly related to something  I am reading/playing/listening), documentaries of something being manufactured or cooked, and sometimes fitness/workout videos and comedies or movie based stuff. 

c) Finance apps

I have off late got myself out of the personal finance/investment whirlpool by removing the Stock broker and Mutual fund apps from phone main screen. This significantly helps with not worrying about markets, investment levels and missed opportunities. So these app take hardly 2 min on a average every day, considering that these aren't opened at all most of the time, and when opened for checkpoints, I do spend some time analyzing trends.

Apps: Kite, MyCams, KFintech

d) Chrome:

This is too generic, and its usage widely depends on what I am googling. Regular websites would only be Farnam Street Blog, HackerNews etc, which are bookmarked. Most others are irregular investment related ones or yes, one minor whirlpool known as LinkedIn.

e) Steam:

This is a relatively new habit of mine, by virtue of getting Age of Empires 2 Defnitive Edition on my laptop through Steam ( paid for, really!). Not only have I spent 120+hrs already on the game (with 2+hrs in each session, leaving me mildly numb in the right arm afterwards ), but I have been induced to find and install a few more time draining Free-To-Play games. Off late, I uninstalled all of those additional ones as these were just straining my arms and eyes and plainly boring/violent games which my young son gets inspired with. AoE2 is relatively benign/boring/exciting depending on level of play and time sunk into it. Playing with a context, and strategy makes it rewarding especially campaigns which provide some historical stories also. Plain fighting it out makes it a burnout game though.

Ahem, after which, I found the "Uncharted Waters:Origins". It was a craze, engulfing many hours of my life until when I reached Level 40, and the satisfaction is saturated.  I find myself more gravitated to the non-digital activities to cope with higher hours on the work side.

f) Podcasts:

This is almost exclusively reserved for use while driving ( that too when I'm alone ), but there are also podcasts which I need a OneNote to take notes with too. These I re-listen after the car episode to distill the information, in the good imitation of Farnam Street advice on good reading practices.

Some of the podcasts I'm listening are:

a) The Knowledge Project of Farnam Street fame. Not bad, but not daily digestible content either.

b) Huberman lab. Wonderful topics, but need dedicated attention, filtering and note taking, plus followup.

c) Empire. This is my favourite go-to podcast because of the history, adventure, facts, relatable events with unknown backgrounds, funny banter of my favourite author and the ability to travel all over the world in my mind. But I have been slow on catching up the pace at which they release pods.

d) The seen and the unseen. Again, a masterful show. I pick topics I want to listen, because these are 2-3 hrs deep dives, but completely worth it.

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.

Cultures - A forgotten game

Funatics - that is the name of the German game company which developed the Cultures series.

I came into contact with the first one sometime in early college or late 12th std. Anyway it was quite some time back. And I didn't have a backup setup or copy of the game. Also there was a HDD crash in between which created a situation of gross unavailability of digital data.

Anyway a few days back I had a strong urge to hunt down this game and play it. I couldn't even recall its name properly. I was having the name "Civs" or "Civilization" in my mind. I was trying to find this game without running into any one of the Sid Meier's series.

After a frantic search session lasting about an hour and after trying out various questionable ways of querying Google, I gave up.

While closing the open browser tabs, I glanced upon a Civ 4 forum talking something about another game.. and I was just skimming through the lines, when a post one fellow caught my attention.

He spoke of the exactly same game that I was looking for and was asking for its name. Someone followed it up with the name "Cultures". I felt as if all gaming neurons fired at once. That night(yesterday), the game was found and safely downloaded to my disk. Additionally I got hold of the 2nd,3rd and 4th installations of the same game.

Reviews spoke of a lame and slow game filled with micromanagement. Exactly what I had in mind for a relaxing night.

Played a lil bit yesterday before moving onto some intense action of Call of Duty:Black Ops.

It is true that the game is quite slow, and requires almost continuous attention to minute details like whether ur fellows are hungry, they have homes, and so on and so off. Doesn't sound surprising to a player of Caesar,Zeus or any of that genre. Does it? But then in those game you play the role of a facilitator. You build roads and buildings, and people work and produce stuff you get to use. In case of Cultures, you need to take care of each person's individual needs too. You get a more closer approach and it feels bad when one person dies or war affects them. Without sounding philosophical, this game is quite relaxing and addictive because it requires you to be part of each and every thing in it.

But as most of the reviews point out, such a game is not welcome in many places, especially so in USA. In Europe and other parts of the world it has gained more support. I guess they have one sure fan in India. Maybe a couple more that I know of.

Overall it is a good game for people interested in RTS but don't want to be grilled with the fast pace of most of such games. A moment of ignorance or a single wrong decision can derail your entire built nation in most of such games, whereas Cultures can be quite forgiving to the player in such situations.

And hey look what I found Funatics Website. Seems Cultures is available online too. And they have a few more games too. Enjoy!

Here is also a link to Gamespot entry for this game Cultures (5.8/10)

Age of Games

Gaming; a hobby I picked up in my 9th std when a new PC was bought at home.
Edit: Technically speaking the Brick Game was the initiator of the hobby about 3 yrs before PCs came in.

My first one was Age of Empires Demo. To think of it now, demos sound funny. But back then that is all we could muster. I remember the frenzy with which games were collected, shared and played.

Not many had computers in their homes back then, at least I didn't know many who had one and played games too. After all, that was the time kids were becoming serious about the 10th board exams and future life and so on.

But me? I was happily engrossed in learning about the various civilizations, their strengths, weaknesses, failures, battle strategies etc. Also the usual arcade games and adrenaline rushing shooter games were quite popular.

Some genres became my favourite while some games remained in my fav list irrespective of the genre - majorly owing to the nostalgia for the fervor with which they were played.

Age of Empires - Never has the value of this game decayed in my mind. Even today I can sit for hours together in front of this game, just as I used to do in the evenings after school, simultaneously arguing with mother who wanted me to take a bath and get to studies , and my brother who waited his turn. Or sometimes I would be the one fighting for the turn. :)

Yesterday I stumbled upon Age of Empires Online from Microsoft Games Marketplace. It was 27mb download and the time was nearly 1 AM. And it is FREE. Only 2 games are FREE in the marketplace - this and Microsoft Flight. So I thought, why not give it a try. Soon after the quick download, I was ready to check it out, but then the game started patching itself and that consumed nearly a couple of hours. Meanwhile I finished watching the  movie "Johny English Reborn".

At about 3 AM I started the game play. Instead of the game, I was informed that Windows LIVE too was outdated and needs to be reinstalled 'n' restarted. Sham! Finally was into the game by 3.30. Went on till 7 maybe when I saw the sun rays illuminating the room. The exp was different from AOE but quite good. And its gameplay borrows from Warcraft and Civilization(Not Sid Meier's) Just one word of caution though: More than half of the game is split into packs that you have to purchase, making it a sour deal for a free loaders (like me).

More strategy games in download queue as my interest has risen again amongst the fun games. No first person or tactical shooters for me. All hypocritical storylines. Edit: Not all, just quite a lot.