Where's the fun in that?! (REVISED)

While drafting one of these rogue Quirky Muffins, it is quite common for me to come up with two or three titles and then start them all before finally settling on one, and keeping the others open for another day. It's an essential part of the fun of it, and there should be fun in the things we do for recreation. Fun! It's easy to lose track of that in the frenzy of everyday life, and then it only pops back into the mind in odd circumstances. You can be trawling through that pile of podcasts that have been lined up for weeks, and then just throw them away from the duty of it all. It's recreation, not duty! (Recreation is a duty for some people with instabilities, but let's not get into that too much.)

For me, it all snapped back when I was writing part thirteen (oh, they do go on forever!) of 'Wordspace' and just realised how sick I was of the endless setup. Hence the mighty invader got floored by a speeding embodiment of Earth, a fast track to the Zone of Meaningless Jargon, and lo and behold, the story became interesting again! One of the problems with keeping the Quirky Muffin going is the challenge in maintaining its benefits against the onslaught of influences which can render it a 'chore'. You have got to keep the fun.

From my point of view, fun is a rare thing. If you look for it, it never comes, so the best thing to do is relax and do something different and grasp if it comes along. Is that a very naive outlook on life? It's hard to say, although it is certainly a very solitary attitude to have as it requires magnificent levels of practical spontaneity!

<interruption>

Gosh, this is one of the tougher entries to write after all. A few rough days and a week of non-solid sleep can really affect the creative faculties but lets go anyway. Yesterday there actually was fun in a spell of playing crazy golf in Pembrey Country Park and tomorrow there will be fun in some creative mathematical puzzle solving but is it enough? That crazy golf course is actually quite good, by the way, distinct from a lot of the other more antiquated generic ones you find dotted across the country. It also makes a satisfactory 'clang', which shall not be explained further. Oh, fun, sometimes you come with satisfactory clangs...

And with that, this abortive Quirky Muffin will begin to come to a close. The fun wasn't there in the first writing, but this revision has made it worthwhile. I was buried beneath podcast editing and note taking, and watching through DVDs for indexing purposes instead of enjoyment. I think that between cataloguing the ridiculous number of television episodes and evaluating movies for Film Bin about 90% of the entertainment has been deducted from the process of enjoying media. Someday in the far future, two or three years at least at this rate, the last episode of whatever will have its details taken and then I'll have to remember how to watch things because I might want to. It shall be strange... Oh, the grand survey has revealed one thing fairly definitively so far, and that is that television and movies and indeed books have increasingly lost that vital sense of fun over recent decades. It seeped through abundantly in the 1960s and 1980s, that joie de vivre of being involved in things bigger than themselves, and then only in exceptional cases otherwise. How's that for a massive, sweeping generalisation? Strangely my only current show that exhibits that mystic sense of fun (and barely as its last season is coming) is 'The Mentalist' and that has more murders than could be considered in any way optimistic.

Oh, 'Star Trek', bring it on! Fun, Kirk, fun!

O.

Note: The other possible Muffins for today were 'Abandonware', 'Correspondences', and 'Why it's good to have capacious pantaloons'. Consider yourself lucky.