The Sunday after

 I sit here today as I try to ponder on the inner workings of my mind on this silent afternoon, the Sunday after my escapades. It is something I often do after a long bout of extroverted-ness, my chronic condition of expanding more energy than I would care to on various musings of life. So much has happened in the past three weeks, but most of it too private to tell-tale on a public blog.  But know this: there's a bitter coffee to my right, just within reach, and then the ever pervasive sound of the ceiling fan running as my mind tries to count its rotations with accuracy. I sit donning a jade shalwar kameez, buttons of the sleeves in place, back straight as it soothes the pain, I am back in the confines of sunny equatorial Lahore, the city of gardens, home to guardrails of the Punjab.  I am reminded, suddenly and somberly of my grandfather, typing as I typed, with both hands on his keyboard, fingers pushing buttons, the learnings of his typewriter days being translated to the memo
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Sun, Me, Pokemon

If you grew up post internet but before social media absorbed the world, you might recall countless sunny evenings after school lost to Pokemon games, specially ruby, emerald and sapphire


I was chasing that nostalgia when I put on this Speedrun. A few awesome things I noticed and wanted to document


1. This YouTuber, Gunnermaniac has been doing Pokemon Speedruns for more than 10 years - ridiculous consistency - something anyone entrepreneurial will appreciate, I cant go two months without pivoting to a new project


2. Throughout much of the game, Gunner often iterates that hes spent 30-40 hours perfecting a certain movement or replayed a certain portion of the game almost as many times, and that really made me pause and think about how undervalued his effort would be to the average person, who might look at this and scoff "get a real job"


3. There is an extreme level of detail to be found even in the simplest of things, if we choose to uncover it, to a novice like myself eating my sandwich and thinking this isnt that hard, but then I realize how every move is calculated by the player, and even though the game is mostly menuing (meaning selecting menu options), there is a underlying level of logic that is abstracted unless youve put in the hours to figure it out


Im sure if Gunner, did something else, hed be good at that too, simply because how you do something is how you do everything


What joy it would be to find something to be this obsessed about, life would truly be a journey then, and everyday would be like those sunny evenings way back when 





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