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Doug Avery: Mele Avery, Design, illustration, Viget Labs, photos, old time religion, indie rock, survivalist food, brown clothes, ambient music, cats.
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Been struggling a lot with entertainment itself recently - mostly the use of it to just numb out large sections of spare time, rather than really engage in something. It seems like we’re an incredibly entertained people, and yet, we’re NOT entertained — it’s never enough, you can never watch enough or listen to enough or play enough to be satisfied and move on. Worse, a lot of modern entertainment is built around constant consumption - devices like serial TV shows, video games, and even series of books are designed to keep you engaging with the entertainment for as long as possible, until (inevitably) you get bored and have to find something else.
I see a line between passive and engaged entertainment that’s defined on a person-by-person basis. Example: i can’t listen to five This American Lifes in a day because it’s exhausting and requires focus and a constant sorting of ideas, but I can watch 30 episodes of Futurama in a row because it’s just kind of there, whether i’m paying attention or not, humming in the background and moderately amusing me and draining my attention and time away.
so the point of all this is to publicly commit to something, because otherwise I’ll chicken out: THE REMAINDER OF JULY IS NO-ENTERTAINMENT MONTH. most of these rules apply to being alone, so if you hang out with me this month, don’t turn off your TV or anything - public entertainment is, to me, an engaged activity.
As with any personal goal announced on a blog, I’ll probably stop by here later to whine about how boring things are. Feel free to ignore me.
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Personal Rules of Entertainment Consumption in July
TV - no TV except the weekly netflix DVD. no re-watching old DVDs, no endlessly browsing stuff on youtube
video games - no video games period. sorry, buddy, but we’ll get you to 80 someday
music - only education-oriented podcasts, this american life, the moth, and focus-creating music (ambient, drone)
food - no chex mix, no alcohol, no pound bags of jelly beans, nothing that either requires no thought to consume or progressively wipes out thoughts as you consume it.
internet - no scrolling through slightlyamusing or fuckingspiders or theonion or lamebook. no webcomics. no “related videos”. no facebook dashboard.
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okay here we go!
