Placing the blame where it belongs

Back on August 11th, I mentioned that I had been wasting what I considered too much time on Amiga emulators and related software. It's under control now, though I've been waiting on a torrent of old software nine days running (stuck at 97.9% and seeders only appear at random moments, drive the ETA down to under an hour, then disappear after I get 8k or so of new stuff).

This has been a dual-edged sword. On one hand, I'm really angry at myself for frittering away a lot of precious vacation time on nostalgia over stuff that I never used effectively. I had DCTV at one point, and connected it to my camcorder, and apart from making a handful of self-portraits with my eyes completely whited/blacked out (with shadows or highlights applied to make it really creepy) I had no use for such a thing. I only bought it because I had lusted after it in magazine ads years before, and employment combined with the advent of eBay to make the acquisition possible. I also downloaded a lot of software from usenet groups that had eluded me in the pre-internet days. I never used any of it. So I find myself thinking, "This is cool that I finally have this, but why the fuck did I want it now?"

This was part of the reason. Ars Technica ran an article on the history of the Amiga. I forgot about that until they ran the second segment today.

I'm hoping now to put the obsession and ambivalent feelings surrounding said obsession to some use in another project I started. Frequently, I have run across the advice to "write what you know." I suppose it's time to put that into practice, at least until next week when part three of the series lands in my RSS reader.