“At Christmas play and make good cheer, For Christmas comes but once a year.”
Posted by lorneau in UncategorizedThere is beauty in mastering a craft, no matter how arbitrary or useless.
Digg led me a few days ago to a video of a young boy playing “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” on Guitar Hero, on Expert mode, and getting 100% on everything. I was expecting to see Sheng Long at the end! An amazing feat, no doubt.
The comments on Digg were most in the line of “great, now get a life”, “go play a real guitar instead” and “find something you’re good at that’s actually useful”. I assume most of this bitterness was fueled by envy; in fact, I hope so, because people on Digg have no business whatsoever complaining that someone is wasting time with something useless.
One comment amidst the sea of “get a life” caught my attention. “Do you tell people playing Call of Duty or Medal of Honor to go fight in a real war instead?”, or something in that line. Extremely valid, I believe. I never played Guitar Hero or any other instrument-based game, and I have very little contact with gaming communities, but I see Guitar Hero gets some unfair attacks. “Quit playing Stalker and go loot the real Prypiat!”, “Drop that Tetris and go lay some real bricks to make a wall!”.
No matter. What I really wanted to talk about was a quote from John Normal Collie I remembered as I read those comments:
Every man has one thing he can do better than anyone else – and usually it’s reading his own handwriting.
I am not sure I found this thing I can do better than anyone else yet. I am not even sure I am the best at reading my own handwriting – depending on my mood when I wrote it, it can be a challenge even to myself. But I hope to find this thing I am so good at, someday. I hope my few readers find it, too. May they be more useful than playing “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” on Guitar Hero, but if not, may they be at least that impressive, and let us all be proud of them. Because we can always type.
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