⊕ the end of the year, a natural time for retrospection. fortunately it's easy these days to avoid any particularly deep retrospective introspection because every app that keeps data on you (which is all of them, more or less) now spits out a bunch of numbers to "sum up" your year (whether or not they all add up to one complete year is left as an exercise to the reader). you can compare with others and then move right along to racking them up for next year. this year i see that even steam has joined in, when i saw people posting these steam replay things and competing to see who had the biggest numbers. fools, i thought as i posted mine in response and utterly blew them out of the water, this is one of those games in which you win if you have the lowest number, like golf. everyone kneeled out of respect and deemed me the king of gamers.

it wasn't too long ago that my assured victory this year would have been completely unthinkable. i would like to ascribe it to my indomitable will, courage, etc. etc. but i can't help but wonder if i just got lucky, or if i simply grew up. maybe i shouldn't feel so smug and superior about my stats, the exact thing i just dunked on people for doing in the last paragraph. maybe i should aim to be like the guy who got the message "Sorry, this account does not have any playtime this year". then again, perfect abstinence wouldn't be very suboptimal, so i think i am doing just fine.

i also think it is funny that the steam replay stats are all in percentages. i feel like this was a deliberate design decision they made, for fear that if they put in some people's actual gameplay numbers they would be horrified and perhaps take it as some sort of wake-up call. i suppose they do not realize just how far gone some gamers are.