Football, Baseball, and Novels

Keeping the thread of personal responsibility alive for at least one more post but switching the lens from gaming to sports, I'm going to talk for a moment about Shawne Merriman.

Those of you who know me know that I love baseball. For the past couple years that has meant trying to sort out the steroid issue and how it factors in to the "purity" or "history" of the game. The conclusion I eventually came to is that there really isn't such a thing as "pure" professional sports anyway, because when that much money is involved, some folks are going to do what they can to get an extra edge. If injecting yourself with steroids means you might be able to squeeze one or two more home runs out of a year or one or two more innings out of your arm, that difference can mean millions of dollars on your paycheck.

Call it what you will, but it is a tempting proposition.

Baseball has been the face of the steroids in sports discussion for the past few years now. Somehow, football has completely flown under the radar.

Those of you who know me know that I'm not a big NFL fan. So I'm clearly biased in this. But Shawn Merriman's positive steroid test and his subsequent excuses smack of good old fashioned BS to me.

Maybe it's not. It's possible he's telling the truth and he really is the "victim" of an overly harsh drug testing policy.

But if he is a "victim" for taking something on the banned list of substances: isn't it pretty clear that he or his trainer just flat out screwed up?

Bored at Life has a nice writeup on just this.

Now, getting back to the important stuff for a moment (namely me). As I mentioned previously (but before the World of Warcraft firestorm), this year I'm participating in National Novel Writing Month. Like many others I'm sure, I've talked about "someday" writing a novel many times, but never actually done it. The goal of this event is to crank out 50,000 words in the month of November.

Just before November 1, I almost threw a giant Molotov cocktail into that plan. Final Fantasy XII was released.

I admit, I almost bagged the entire thing to go out and buy this game. I knew if I did it, I would never, ever, reach the goal of 50,000 words because I'd be playing the damn game every day for at least a month.

So I held off, and promised myself I'd get it on December 1.

Pathetic? Yeah, probably. After all the talk of "addictive behavior" and the "wasted time" flying around here, it would've been pretty funny if I had bagged an attempt at writing a novel for a video game.

Then again, an argument was made in some of the comments that there is no intrinsic difference between spending time writing a novel and playing a video game. Maybe they're right.

I just know that for me personally, buying the video game would've been the easy way out.

5000 words and counting.