GregHowley.com

My passions and hobbies move in waves; they come in phases. I'll find a thing I enjoy and dive in heedlessly for months or years. Eventually my drive for that thing will fade, and I'll move along to another thing. It's shame I can't force my manic focus towards something like learning a new language, or exercise, or training myself with new job skills. I guess I'm like most people in that, though.

At the risk of this becoming a personal memoir, I thought it might be fun to catalog a dozen or so of my more notable hobby fixations over the years. Just the things I got so into that I found myself thinking of them nonstop, day and night. When I got to writing these down, I came up with more than a dozen, going back to my high school years.

It's interesting to note before I start, that my daughter Lia, though she's only 11 years old, has already gone through a number of similar manias. When she was 2-3 years old, everything was Thomas the Train. We watched Avatar: The Last Airbender, and she was super into that. Later came Minecraft, a hobby which soon infected me as well. Every time she has a new theater play, she'll be singing the songs non-stop. And lately, her primary fixation seems to be warrior cats. Click the link if you really want to know about that one. It seems that short-lived but single-minded fixations on various hobbies isn't something unique to myself.

Probably most of these won't be a shock to anyone, but here goes...

Commodore 64 (1988 - 1990)

As a kid, I was way into my Commodore 64 personal computer. It wasn't my first, but it was the most impactful. Before the Commodore, I had an Atari 800XL, and before that, a Timex-Sinclair personal computer. But that Commodore is the one that held my interest, mostly due to the games. A couple years back, I thanked my parents for buying me that computer, because without it, I certainly would not have the career I do today.

I made a post back in 2007 wherein I listed some of my favorite commodore games, if you're interested in looking at such things, but by far my favorite game was Ultima V. I had played Ultima III and Ultima IV, although I'd never finished either. This was back in a time when the games were as demanding of your time as Skyrim, but there was no hand-holding, no automap, and no internet to look up how to get past various problems and challenges. The game was not easy, and just explaining the entirety of the plot would take an article far longer than most I write here. It was epic.

Dungeons & Dragons (1990-1992)

Dungeons and Dragons was a huge thing in the eighties. But although I got my red box set from Bradlees and opened it at Christmas sometime around 1984, and I probably picked up the 1st Edition AD&D book around 1986, I never really played in earnest until second edition, which launched in 1989. I remember reading about the forthcoming edition in Dragon magazine.

At the time, I was way into Ultima V, and I finished that game at just around the time when I really wanted to run my own D&D game. So naturally, I decided to create an adventure which would mimic that game. I did so, creating a massive world map, nine or so eight-level dungeons, characters populating the dozen-or-so major cities in Brittania, and so on. It was a huge undertaking, and I set to it with zeal. I later ran that entire campaign to its conclusion, and it took years. We had a blast.

Street Fighter 2 (1991 - 1994)

I love video games, but there aren't too many I'd consider myself good at. Street Fighter is at the top of a very short list. I wrote a post in 2005 about how I beat a guy at an arcade in Pueblo, just after we first bought the car my wife still drives today.

I worked at an arcade the last year of high school into the first couple years of college, so I played the game for free. A lot. I got pretty good. Later, I bought a massive SlikStik controller with two sticks and like 17 buttons so that I could play at home the way I could at the arcade. I still have it, although it's been years since it was hooked up. I played at college after I left the arcade, and although I wasn't always the best, I was always amongst the best.

In 2009, when Street Fighter 4 came out on PC, I lived in Colorado. The game had online functionality, but I was skeptical at first that the internet connectivity would allow for the split-second reaction time that was critical to a game like this. Surprisingly, it worked. Wow! I was going to go online and wreck everyone! Guess what. I really didn't know what online gaming was like. My mad skills allowed me to compete at a not-above-average level. I didn't suck, but I absolutely was not exceptional. Got to love the internet. I wrote about it here.

Writing (1994)

Although I did a bit of creative writing in high school and college, and even posted some of it on this blog, this phase of my mania refers specifically to the writing a friend and myself did on the fantasy setting we created. It was initially going to be a campaign setting for D&D, but after it reached a certain level of depth/complexity, we decided that we wanted to write actual fiction in this setting.

We would get together between classes and on weekends for well over a year, creating the cultures of various nations, timelines going back millennia, and various governmental structures and historical events. I still have the large notebook we'd cobbled together. It's in a box in my basement.

Any actual story-writing we might have done never panned out, but we did create a lot of content.

Fantasy Quest (1997 - 1998)

Of all the nerdy things I've ever done, Fantasy Quest likely takes the cake. My closest group of friends started going, then raved about the experience, so I joined them. To a 24-year-old nerd, live-action fantasy roleplaying was the greatest thing ever. We built foam swords and beat the crap out of each other. It was like playing paintball, except we did it with fake swords instead of fake guns.

Lindy Hop (1998 - 2004)

After breaking off an engagement in 1996, it took me a couple years before I was ready to seriously date again. When friends invited me to swing dance night at a bar in Hartford in August of 1998, I said sure, despite the fact that I didn't know what swing dance was, and I certainly had never danced. After all, it was a way to meet girls, right? How funny that after a number of months of getting into swing dancing, my priorities shifted. Dance first, girls second. I won't lie - I dated more during this five year period than I did the rest of my life. But it was really all about the dance. There was a long stretch of time when I would literally go out dancing five nights per week, to different venues each time, often with different crowds.

I started teaching classes. I created Swingmonkey.com. I danced at competitions. I performed at jazz festivals, concert openings, and once along with Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and the Cherry Poppin Daddies, who were big at the time. I ran events and fundraisers. I made and sold tee-shirts. I was one of the leaders of a small community that was spread out over quite a wide area. It was an odd time in my life. And I met my wife at a dance camp.

While I was still living in Colorado, I wrote a post about dancing. It has some photos of me which are fun to look back at.

Dance Dance Revolution (2001 - 2002)

I was seriously into DDR on the Playstation 1 well before I ever saw it in an arcade. I owned at least three or four dance mats for my Playstation 1 during this time frame, and I played the game nightly for years. At work, I'd listen to Boom Boom Dollar and Afronova on my mp3 player and practice footwork under my desk, because having the patterns memorized and committed to muscle memory really helped on the hardest difficulty. This is a catalog of obsessions, remember.

Neverwinter Nights Game Design (2002 - 2003)

After playing through Neverwinter Nights, I realized that not only was there a fairly sophisticated design tool built in, there was a built-in programming language, very much like C, and you could add code to the game. I added scripted traps, layered optional subquests, and multiple endings to the adventure. I even added a custom rest system which let you heal fully only at inns, and would allow a chance for outdoor rest to be interrupted by area-appropriate monsters. All-in-all, I worked on the game for just over a year before releasing it via the game's community forums. The story and the setting were entirely based on the world that my friend and I had created in 1994.

Web Design (2005)

Just after moving to Colorado, I hadn't yet found a job out there. So I started dabbling more and more in web design, spending time on CSS Zen Garden, and designed an updated version of this blog which became my short-lived web design site, WebFu. I did some very cool things on that site, but in the end found that the whole freelance web design thing was too much of a hassle, and not very profitable. Today, the site has mostly fallen into ruin due to lack of maintenance.

Video Games (2005-2009)

In Colorado, I was away from my oldest friends. Although I did make friends out there, it was harder to find people with whom I had common interests. So I stayed home and played video games a lot. I mapped out my own video game tree. I even started my own dedicated video game blog, Lungfishopolis.com, which I've since let lapse. The design of that site (mirror), the random header and footer, the custom Wordpress gamer badge plugin I designed, it's all just one of the best web design things I've ever done.

D&D Again (2010 - 2011)

After coming back from Colorado, I reunited with my Connecticut friends. It had been years since any of us had been into any tabletop RPG, and 4th Edition was the new thing. Overall, 4th Edition was my least favorite of all of them, but it did have certain elements I really liked.

I dove in with gusto. I came up with a huge earth-shaking plot that would evolve, ask questions, and then have those answered only to have new questions emerge. An extradimensional invasion which initially presented itself only as the poisoned berries of an increasingly invasive plant species, but which eventually became evident as the means by which demons would ultimately enter our world. I drew inspiration from The 4400, The Dresden Files, and a number of my other favorite fictions. The campaign never reached its conclusion, but I was deep into it for a while.

Board Game Design (2011 - 2012)

I don't remember where I was first bitten by the game design bug, but I had at one point four separate games in process, although only one was far along. That primary game was Junkyard Derby, based on the notion that the customizing a vehicle and then fighting with it was a blast in Car Wars, but way too complex and time-consuming. I wanted a quicker and easier version. So I created a game board, car mats, and decks of cards. You run a draft for car parts at the game's outset, and assemble a vehicle. Then you move your vehicle along the track using movement and maneuver cards. Better engines and tires allow for better track position, but better weapons and armor mean you might destroy the opponents' cars before they can finish three laps. I'd really like to go back and finish the game at some point - it was beginning to be really fun. Hopefully all my parts and design notes are still around somewhere.

Minecraft (2012 - 2013)

I'd been presented with Minecraft a number of times - I was familiar with it. But it was my daughter Lia who finally got me into Minecraft pocket edition on the iPad. It wasn't until later that I got into the PC version. There were many many hours of happy gaming. Most of it was single-player, but there were also a number of times I hopped onto a friend's server for some group creation. I learned how to design logic gates with redstone, I built transdimensional railways through the nether, and I engineered massive structures with stained glass pixel art. Good times.

Sentinels of the Multiverse (2014 - 2015)

This one is just a card game I love, but I was so into it at one point in time that after writing the initial post in which I described each base character in detail, I wrote up a second post in which I talked about various team-up between the heroes.

Don't misunderstand - I still really enjoy this game. My fixation on it hasn't ceased; it's only lessened below the level I'd consider obsession. Where I used to play multiple times weekly, I now no longer play every month. I have listened to every episode of the Letters Page podcast and I just got my copy of the game's final expansion last month. I just haven't had a chance to play that final expansion. Yet.

Warmachine (2015 - 2018)

And so we reach the last item on the list. Warmachine. Although interest among my friends has faded, and I've not had the opportunity to play since July, I still like the game a lot, and wish I had more time to play. The strategy is so deep and complex, and the amount of thinking required - the number of variables to consider when playing a game - is just immense. And so very interesting.

I very much enjoy painting the miniatures in what little free time I have at home. I may not be a great painter, but I derive quite a bit of satisfaction from turning a hunk of unpainted plastic into a fully painted miniature on a plastic base with rocks and grass. I love the way the scene looks after both armies are on a table with three dimensional terrain.