Category: Blog

How to Reach Your Goals, Even When it’s Frustrating

~ Joseph Tingle ~ Leave a comment

As adults with full-time responsibilities, learning can be hard. The inefficient 10 hour days at the library or long gym sessions that may have gotten us through our youths are no longer options for us, and it feels like there’s never enough time to learn anything new or do anything well. But, we can help ourselves out by adjusting our approach to learning and our expectations for ourselves. Personally, since starting my family, I’ve found it difficult to find the time to cultivate new skills or explore new passions. But, in the past 5 years, I’ve managed to achieve at least some of my goals, such as learning a new language and transitioning into a new career. Here are a few things I’ve learned along the way:

Focus on Process, not Product

In today’s world, we tend to be very “results oriented”. Unfortunately, reaching goals takes time. Making a New Year’s resolution or sharing a goal with friends (“I’m going to learn Chinese!”) may make you feel good and give you a little bit of a dopamine boost when your friends and family predictably congratulate you on undertaking such a positive effort, but unfortunately real learning is more difficult to quantify than our world of convenient milestones and personal plans would like. 6 months into studying a new language, or learning computer programming, and you will likely not have much more to show for yourself than when you began. That dopamine rush will be long gone, and you will suddenly feel embarrassed to bring your new initiative up to family and friends again.

But here’s the thing – learning takes time, and that’s OK. Learning is not about generating quick results, but rather, learning is about committing to a process that eventually leads to personal transformation. When it comes to learning something new, I wouldn’t bother setting goals that revolve around results. Instead, I’d set a goal around committing to a certain process. “I’ll jog for 30 minutes three times per week” is better than “I’ll complete my first marathon by March.” “I’ll make a deliberate effort to study Japanese for 20 minutes per day, every night after dinner” is better than “I’ll pass the first level Japanese Language Proficiency Test by the end of the year”.

Beware of Habit Trackers

I really dislike a lot of the popular online habit trackers that provide users with data analytics around their various goals and other hobbies. Why? Well, because unless we know why we want to see this data, it’s only bound to confuse us. Sites like StoryGraph and their ilk can be fun, but at the end of the day, we need to be deliberate about our goals and what it means to achieve them. Should anyone burden themselves with the goal of “reading more”? I don’t think so. I love to read, but quality reading is more important than quantity. A goal to read Anna Karenina is probably more worthwhile than a goal to read 501 trashy romance novels in 2025, an “improvement” over a mere 500 in 2024. I guess my point here is, if we are going to track our habits, we should have some kind of plan in response to the results we see. On a related note: aggressively time-tracking for a week or three can be a good way to learn where your time is going, but keeping up with it can become a burden all its own. If you’ve learned that there’s something you really want to track – for example, hours of exercise per week, or time spend doing math problems – fine, track that. Don’t track everything. It’s just not worth it to be so stressed out over all of your time. To bring it back to StoryGraph – maybe I do read too many crappy novels, but if that’s how I relax, and I’m still working towards my goals, who cares? What’s the point of quantifying this data?

Be Reasonable and Acknowledge Limits

I truly believe that we can have everything that we want, within reason. This is where it helps to have done some soul searching, and to not let your goals become objects of ego. Instead, be as sure as possible about what things you want to achieve. As an adult with a full range of responsibilities, you might be able to take a music lesson or pass a science class, but you’re not going to do both while also staying fit and becoming a grand master at chess – and there’s no reason to feel bad about this! Imagine how unfair it would be to all the people who are great at something if you were such a gifted and talented person that you could just be as good as they are at said thing while juggling 5 other spinning plates. Unfortunately, as much as we’d all like to believe that we could be jack-of-all-trades who are perhaps masters at some, that’s not how the real world works, and surely, it’d be pretty boring to do anything if it were really that easy. When thinking about getting serious about learning something new or achieving a new goal, ask yourself: “Why am I doing this? Am I really interested in it, or is it just about my ego?”

Learning gets harder as we get older, but it can also be fun without adding unnecessary pressure to our lives. By being honest about our limits, not getting caught up in out-of-the-box solutions, and emphasizing the learning process over results-oriented goal-setting, we too can enjoy learning and the enrichment in brings to our lives.

Down Time: I Finally Got My Official Steam Deck Dock to Work, Because My Scrawny Forearms Got Too Tired of Holding the Steam Deck

~ Joseph Tingle ~ Leave a comment

For several years, I’ve been telling myself that I’d get around to playing The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. As a JRPG-lover like myself, the Trails series has been an embarrassing blindspot that I’ve meant to rectify time and time again. But, opportunities would come and go, and I would just keep finding excuses to not start the game.

When I finally secured a Steam Deck pre-order back in mid-2022, I told myself “now’s the time”. Trails in the Sky would be the first game I played on my new console. Tragically, though, Trails in the Sky has a status of “incompatible” on the Steam store’s compatibility page. I did some research, and I found pages of comments on Steam, reddit, and even from the developer themselves reassuring me that, with one minor caveat (an anime cutscene intro does not work), the game was perfectly playable on Steam Deck.

For some reason, I did not start the game.

I gave into the hype and played Tunic instead. Then I played Unsighted. Then I dicked around with American Truck Simulator and Final Fantasy XIV. Then I played Pentiment. Then I broke up with my Steam Deck (I’ll explain that in a minute) and went back to playing my Switch, apparently for a whopping 347 hours in 2023. It was starting to look like I would never find a reason for the Falcom RPG to be elevated to my “now playing status”.

You can’t play The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky on Switch, but if you could, maybe I’d have gotten around to it sooner. People make fun of the Switch in 2023, but it’s still a perfectly good console that runs most games I’d like to play to an acceptable standard. When the Steam Deck came out, a lot of people talked about it like it was a “Switch-killer”, and I certainly thought my Switch would be decommissioned after my first few sessions with the sexier Valve device, but the Steam Deck (still) has two main drawbacks, at least as far as I’m concerned:

  1. It’s Heavy as Shit
  2. The Official Dock Sucks

As it happens, I’d wanted to use the Steam Deck as both a portable and a living room device at one point, but I just kept running into problems. The biggest one of these was that the Dock just seemed to hate my TV. Its display would shutter and blink constantly, and sometimes it would not display at all.

I worked the problem for an hour or so, but eventually, I gave up after a rare “gaming date night” with my wife turned into a night of her sipping wine on the couch, scrolling her phone and watching me as a sat on the floor troubleshooting. Instead, we decided to play a game on the Switch, because the Switch just works. Our evening was salvaged, and my Steam Deck was ushered off to an empty drawer where its battery gracelessly drained completely over the next 9 days.

No harm, no foul. I had a great year playing my JRPGs on my Switch. I sunk about 80 hours into Octopath Traveller II, many of those hours in the console’s portable mode whilst on a train or in the work cafeteria, but also via longer sessions docked to the TV (and sound system) on weekend nights (the Octopath Traveller 2 audio and soundtrack is glorious, by the way, especially hearing it come through a real set of speakers). I played Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster, Dragon Quest, and Phantasy Star much the same way. Then I played Super Mario RPG (2023) and fell into a hole. It was such a special experience for me that I wanted my next game to be something that could be just a special. I thought again about Trails in the Sky, a game beloved by many, just sitting installed on my Steam Deck for over a year now. I thought “now’s the time”.

With great trepidation, I plugged my comatose Steam Deck into its Official Steam Deck Charger, and prepared myself for my next great video game experience. Later that night, I made myself a cup of chamomile tea, and sat down on the couch with the Deck. It was time to finally play The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky.

I played it for an hour or two, and then put the game down. It felt slow, with lots of inconsequential writing. Over the next several nights, I kept going, knowing that many good RPGs take time to get going, and armed with the knowledge that many before me had made it through this common complaint regarding this particular game and its subsequent entries. Around 8 hours in, the magic of the game was starting to work on me. I was starting to care about the characters, and the world around them. I was becoming invested in what would happen next.

Unfortunately, after a week of daily Steam Deck sessions, my wrists were also starting to strain under the device’s immense weight.

I tried propping the Deck up with a lap pillow, but it only worked so well. It was then that I knew that, if I wanted to keep playing The Legend of Heroes, I’d have to once again see if I could get the Dock to work.

Long story short, my Steam Deck dock wasn’t outputting to a display that my TV liked, so once I manually changed the display to something I knew my TV could handle, it was relatively smooth sailing. Pretty weird that I had to do that, and I wish I’d have thought of it back months ago as my date gaming night was slowly melting away, but whatever. No harm, no foul.

Now, life is good. I’m relaxing on the coach on a Friday night, playing The Legend of Heroes on a 55″ flatscreen, and I’m finally getting some good use out of my 8bitdo Pro 2. I’ve got a lot of Trails left to play – more than enough to get me through the holidays, and then some – but truly, now that I’ve figured out this docking situation, the “sky” is the limit. I’m living the dream, something close to the exact ideal circumstances that any gamer with a real affection and interest in old video games hopes to find themselves in one day.

Next up, maybe I’ll figure out how to get that emulator audio to stop crackling.

Learning Japanese: What Happened?

~ Joseph Tingle ~ Leave a comment

In 2020 I committed to explore one of my lifelong fascinations: the Japanese language. Lack of a focused plan of study and other life priorities allowed my efforts to dissolve.

In 2019, my life was a carnival of free time. I had time for all my hobbies. I even exercised on most days. The only existential dread I felt was directed at how I should be spending all this time – is it worthier to play a guitar at a high level, or work on Classical Chinese? Should I learn a new language, or should I enroll in a degree program? As time went on, I felt like my schedule was pretty solid and that I was ready to begin a new hobby. I committed to “Learning Japanese” as my 2020 New Year’s resolution. But change was coming: one change was something I knew about – my wife was just beginning her second trimester. The other – the coronavirus – was just a rumor, like West Nile Virus or Swine Flu.

The coronavirus was initially a boon to my study time. With a pregnant wife and so much indoor time, I committed to as much study as possible, as has been documented pretty thoroughly in this blog. When I became a parent, that changed. Initially trying to work from home with an infant was incredibly demanding, robbing me of the mental energy and relaxed conditions I required to focus on myself. After those hard first though, I found that I had a little bit of room to get back to some of my old hobbies – just not all of them. I opted to “declutter” my personal life of all the things that I didn’t see as essential to my identity, and focused entirely on playing guitar and maintaining my Mandarin language skills. That’s what I did before COVID and being a parent, right? So those things logically must be the real “me”, with everything else being little more than superfluous activities resulting from an excess of free time.

Or so I thought. For sure, quitting Japanese and declining to try anything new helped alleviate some of the stress that was beginning to overwhelm me in 2020. But after a bit of a reprieve, I started to feel that 2021 offered a real dearth of new experiences for me other than the ones prompted by parenthood, and as a result I’ve felt pretty hollow. Looking back on my experience learning Japanese, it’s clear that I was just fumbling around, first with Pimsluer, then with other methods – mostly self-guided. I never had a plan, or a clear motivation. I never really invested in a class, or tutoring. I just wanted to be someone who is good at new things they try, and rarely did I ever stop and think about how much enjoyment I was getting along the way. It almost feels like language acquisition – along with my other hobbies – were devolving into exercises of self-esteem, rather than pleasure. An abundance of time smoothed over the edges caused by abruptly shifting goals, as will as inconsistent temperaments and rationalizations for studying. As a young parent, I learned that doesn’t work. I need to do things for myself, for the pleasure of doing them.

In the end, I still haven’t learned Japanese. And maybe I never will. But I’ve learned something more valuable – that time is precious. When I started Learning Japanese, I went the cheap route. I didn’t want to commit to classes or tutoring until way too late, because I felt insecure about the whole project – why should I invest a lot of myself into something that might not get my anywhere? Through all this, I never allowed myself to consider that my own pleasure was worth it. In the future, I hope I’ll continue to try new things, like I did with Learning Japanese. But I also hope that I’ll have the courage to really commit to them both financially and as far as my schedule and personal priorities allow. Because I am worth it.

2014 Review

~ Joseph Tingle ~ Leave a comment

This year, I started a number of self-improvement projects. With major events like grad school, finding a job, and getting married out of the way, I found that I once again had time to my various hobbies. I started listening to more music; I began actually recording my own music. I started studying Chinese again, and learned new techniques for playing guitar. I began to pay attention to my diet, and joined a gym. Perhaps more than anything, I caught up on TV shows and finished several video games.

It’s been a pretty good year: not too exciting, but not very boring either. Going into next year, I would like spend a little bit less time in front of the TV, and more time on music and language. I would also like to revive this blog.

Somewhere, the purpose of the Tingle Review was lost. Initially, I saw the Review as a purveyor of how I experience culture.  As time went on, however, it diminished to this sparse wasteland of lists. I’m hoping to change that in 2015.

Here are a few books, games, and albums that gave me inspiration that I’ll carry into whatever I do next year:

Book – The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

I’ve read a few of Mitchell’s books in the past. This one wasn’t my favorite, but I still really enjoyed the way this book seamlessly wove several different points of view and unique plots around the common thread provided by the main character. Maybe this has been done before and I have simply never read another book like it. Regardless, I found Mitchell’s style to be refreshing, and clever. Increasingly complex worlds and characters are built in a way that feels completely organic.

Book – Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

Unfortunately, I haven’t read many of Murakami’s books. This one was great, though. This book perfectly captures the feeling of being isolated by friends, as well as being vindicated by the discovery of new friends.  The loneliness Tazaki experiences is inherent in human relationships, even successful ones.

Music – Casualties of Cool by Casualties of Cool

Devin Townsend really outdid himself with this collaboration. Having delved more into acoustic music and ambient music lately, this album came out of the woodwork and knocked me flat with its genre defying style. I know for sure that Townsend’s empty, ambient folk is going to be a huge influence on any music I make on my own.

Game – Mario Kart 8

If for nothing else, for at least reminding me that games can be simple games and still just as fun as the big-budget interactive movies you see on the other next gen consoles.

Holy Smoke: 6 Iron Maiden Songs for the Catholic Conclave

~ Joseph Tingle ~ Leave a comment

If the conclave of Catholic Cardinals is leaving you a little bit cold, you’re not alone. Here are six Iron Maiden tunes to lighten the atmosphere.

 

1.      “The Number of the Beast” from The Number of the Beast (1982)

Here’s the song that started it all. Even though “The Number of the Beast” wasn’t actually promoting evil, the religious right didn’t care and launched a campaign against it anyway, which really just amounted in lots of free press for Iron Maiden. While “The Number of the Beast” isn’t Iron Maiden’s first song or biggest hit, it’s the song that made Maiden a household name.

 

2.      “Heaven Can Wait” from Somewhere in Time (1986)

“Heaven can wait for another day”: That’s a sentiment apparently not only expressed by Iron Maiden bassist Steve Harris, but also a handful of corrupted and greedy Vatican insiders. Hopefully, the conclave and new Pope won’t allow reforming the Church to wait much longer!

 

3.      “Only the Good Die Young” from Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (1988)

The title of Billy Joel’s “not anti-Catholic, but pro-lust” song gets turned on its head here, in Iron Maiden’s indeed anti-Catholic (but also anti-lust) album closer. The song follows The Clairvoyant, a character from the Seventh Son pseudo-concept album, as he expresses frustrations with a hyprocritical religious hierarchy consumed by lust and other deadly sins.

 

4.      “Holy Smoke” from No Prayer for the Dying (1990)

Like “Only the Good Die Young”, “Holy Smoke” is another song poking fun at Church hypocrisy, though this time from the tongue-in-cheek viewpoint of Jesus: “Lot of my friends making me a joke/ mixed up my words like I never spoke!”, or something like that. Hey! Bruce is singing in a flowerbed!

 

5.      “From Here to Eternity” from Fear of the Dark (1992)

A pretty straightforward song about giving into sinful temptations, kinda like “Heaven Can Wait”, but much more shallow. This time, there’s gang vocals, too—had Maiden gone glam? “Hell! Ain’t a bad place. Hell is from here to eternity!”

 

6.      “Judas Be My Guide” from Fear of the Dark (1992)

Maybe one of Maiden’s most underrated songs ever, and definitely one of their most misanthropic. How does one live in a world full of darkness, where everything is for sale and nothing is sacred? Who can one turn to in this Ayn Randian dystopia? Judas, my guide!

 

Bonus Tracks

If there’s no “holy smoke” by the end of the day, you might need a few more songs to get you through. Here’s a couple more from beyond Maiden’s “classic” era:

 1.      “The Sign of the Cross” from The X Factor (1995)

Most Iron Maiden fans consider the Blaze Bayley era to be a bit plodding and dull, but “The Sign of the Cross” still gets a little love now and then for its haunting, gothic atmosphere. I’m not sure what this song is about. Is it a genuine call for absolution, or another dark and twisted parody of the Vatican’s shadowy inner machinations? Or is it about “The Name of the Rose”? (The movie version, not the book, obviously).

2.      “Montsegur” from Dance of Death (2003)

Only Iron Maiden can make medieval persecution of Gnosticism rock this hard. “As we kill them all so that God knows his own/ the innocents died for the Pope on his throne”, etc, etc. Anyway, great song. Definitely still gets the blood boiling over crimes against humanity committed eons ago.

That’s all for now! I’m sure there are even more Maiden songs that’d be great for the conclave, so feel free to post them in the comments.

Election Night Facebook Musings

~ Joseph Tingle ~ Leave a comment

“Facebook wants YOU to vote in tonight’s election!”

As election night draws on, I’m sitting on my laptop. I flick back and forth between MSNBC and CNN while refreshing RealClearPolitics every five minutes. I’m waiting for 11 pm, when Stewart and Colbert begin their hilarious annual coverage. In the meantime, I’m browsing Facebook, too. Hurrah for multitasking.

Facebook on election night is exactly what you’d imagine it to be. One out of every three statuses to reach my newsfeed is something about the election. Out of these election statuses, a considerable number of them can be filed into the category of smarmy, sarcastic mockery; statuses like “insert political opinion here” and “UGH, I’m tired of hearing about election crap on Facebook!”

Statuses of that variety are interesting to me, because it seems like every time something is trending on Facebook or Twitter, there’s someone out there who wants to make sure you know that they don’t care. This doesn’t just happen on election night; this happens before hurricanes, and when breaking news comes out, and even over the holidays. And, this begs the question: if someone really doesn’t give a damn about what Facebook is talking about, and is even annoyed about what they’re seeing on their Facebook newsfeeds, then why is that person still spending so much time hanging out on Facebook?

I’m thinking the internet, and Facebook, is like some kind of addictive substance. When I’m annoyed by something in real life, I have no problem keeping quiet and removing myself from the situation. But, that seems harder to do on Facebook, or anywhere online. That might be because the internet makes people courageous: when physical confrontation is taken out of the equation, it’s easy for anyone to suddenly become a loudmouth. It might also be because of the nature of Facebook and the internet itself. The internet is a place for clicking things, opening new taps and refreshing old ones. When I boot up Chrome, I automatically open up several tabs to accommodate my favorite sites. It’s automatic, formed gradually by habit.

Maybe it’s also because Facebook and other internet discussion mediums have become such a major arena of discussion in our personal lives. I vent on Facebook. I make plans on it, too. I know people who’ve began and ended their relationships using Facebook. I know lots of people who don’t know what’d they’d do if there was no Facebook. And, just about everyone I know is stuck on Facebook, for better or worse, despite concerns over their own internet habits and  reservations about the company’s stance on user privacy. We just can’t remove ourselves from Facebook, and we can’t imagine a world where Facebook removes itself from us. We’re stuck with it.

Kinda like we’re stuck with the two party system…