The Power of Gratitude -- An Introduction

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TacticalTrickery
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The Power of Gratitude -- An Introduction

Post by TacticalTrickery »

I have recently realized that a major improvement I developed for DF classic, ~20yrs ago, has not been fully realized by anyone else, as far as I can tell, anywhere. I have been forced recently to reflect upon many challenging things from my past; which is a good thing to do, but hard. As a result, I am in the spirit of giving back lately. Rather than hanging onto this improvement exclusively for myself, as I have done, I would rather share it with all of you, as it is completely compatible with DFU... I think many of you will find it quite practically-useful, and pretty awesome! I have recently made my account here for this exact purpose.

Even though I have been very ill lately, I needed to distract myself, so I reworked a bunch of the improvement (and its associated tools) for your maximum collective benefit; and I was happy to do it. I had entirely solved the issue of HUD debuffs and default spell icons in DFC (including traps and magic items!), and now with an eye towards DFU's future I have made it significantly better still. I look forward to sharing it with you all, this coming week in Creator's Corner.

Before doing so, I was first going to make a small introduction here, mainly thanking individual devs (and modders) for so many of the fun things I've recently ran into while installing DFU a couple weeks ago to cheer myself up while ill. There are so many awesome little improvements... it's incredible!

But instead of that, which I will probably do another time not too long from now, I feel strongly prompted to share a small portion of that which I have been reflecting upon since Thanksgiving in November. I have the unshakable feeling that at least one thing in what follows will move each of you in at least a small way, to become greater than you currently are; for your own benefit, and for those around you.

This is long. But I think it safe to say that I can promise you it is worth your time.

==============================================

When I was a young child, I grew up in a very poor neighborhood... a mix of hard working people, tweakers, and drug houses.

I found, very early on, that life is certainly what you make of it.

I was lucky, that every other weekend or so I was able to spend a lotta quality time with my grandparents. Because of my circumstance, my grandfather was really a father to me from the time I was born. He was a hard working military man, who originally enlisted as a Private at the end of WW2. He eventually retired as a very high ranking officer, and became a military professor, a civic leader, and a farmer... a man that was never happy to do nothing. He was a strategist, a logistician, incredibly patient, selfless, great with people, and seemed to know literally everyone. Because of his position, he had an IBM PS/2 that he'd let me use when he wasn't working. He had the full tilt setup!, with multiple machines, early-gen modems, 3 phone lines, a laser printer, and a fancy fax machine. He had this awesome wooden rocking computer chair I loved to sit in, that he kept in great condition and used for like 30yrs! That was the most comfortable wooden chair I've ever sat in... I was about 6 when he first let me start using his IBM.

My favorite thing to do in the beginning was to make math formulas at like 96pt font in DOS Word Perfect, with the eye-burning solid blue-screen background. I'd find all the cool little symbols that I didn't recognize in different fonts, and then mix them together to form art. I loved how crisp it would come out on his fancy laser printer! I'd save the prints to proudly show my grandparents in the kitchen around dinner time, always so pleased with myself for finding new symbols to use... lol, they would always smile. Thinking back, what interesting and strange behavior for a 6yr-old. Eventually using my grandpa's computer became about understanding the not-so-subtle inner workings of DOS, and optimization.

Everything about computers came to me naturally when I was a child, but I don't really know why... I think my grandfather recognized so, and knew I was exceptionally responsible, so he wasn't concerned leaving me unattended. My elementary school was full of old Apple's with green monochrome screens; the Apple IIe, with 5 & 1/4inch floppies. What a pain those disks could be. A few years before I started using them (I looked it up just now) each full Apple setup woulda cost ~2 grand back then, in US$. Adjusted for inflation, that's about $5,000 today!! You know those processors only ran at ONE MHz?

I always thought those Apple's were a piece of crap, and sometimes so irritating! ...but with time, I learned their quirks, and mastered their use. I became grateful to have an entire room full of them that I could use almost every day, in my relatively poor school. Strangely enough, I always knew how to fix what was wrong in that lab. The adults that did tech support there started asking me how to solve their computer problems. It was common for me to finish in-class assignments in elementary school very quickly, and then be doing whatever I wanted for the rest of class; usually helping other students, drawing electronic circuits, or creating mazes on graph paper. Often one of the tech people would come to my classroom, and ask the teacher if they could pull me away to repair something yet again. Eventually they didn't have to ask any more.

In the last few years there, we finally got the Apple IIGS with a full color tiny screen, much better 3.5inch floppies, and a whopping 2.8MHz CPU! Make no mistake, it felt incredibly faster than the green-screen Apples I was used to, but it was far less than half the speed of my grandfather's workstation that I had already been playing with for 5yrs. When I graduated elementary school at age 11, and was moving to junior high, without me knowing, the tech support crew and some of my teachers got together... They said that as a gift for all the tech support I provided, they were giving me a couple of the IIe's, one of the new IIGS's, a dot matrix printer, and a pile of periphery equipment & software! I think I had a few games, like Oregon Trail (awesome!), but I mostly spent my time figuring out how to mess with the OS and hack everything. It's true that I was grateful, and messed with those machines like mad many nights and all thru the heat of the summer. I didn't think all that much of it tho to be honest, because I thought they were giving away gear that they were retiring and replacing anyway, and was already dated when our school first got it. Little did I know tho that what they had gifted me was worth >$10,000 in today's money, and the many late nights spent messing with those machines would be essential in forming the foundation of my eventual deep understanding of technology.

Strange that it can take so long to look back and finally see things for what they truly are.

I always had incredibly great teachers as a child, but due to my rough upbringing and all the distractions of my neighborhood, it took me some years to realize how blessed I was to have the teachers that I did. This was also true of many mentors thru various social circles; my friend's fathers, and many of my neighbors. Despite their own personal challenges and addictions, most of the adults on my little street tried their best to look out for all the kids that would play outside all the time; which is where I always was when the weather was good. One of those people was my neighbor, Jack, who built what would've been considered a high-end gaming PC in the mid 90's. Life was rough there, for sure, but everyone on that street seemed to have a few nice things that stood out as their prized possessions. Whether it be a pile of CB radios, a huge arc welder, a little boat, a 20yr-old Corvette that they bought used, or a powerful PC... the contrast you find with this in neighborhoods like that is striking.

Jack worked a lot during the day, and his wife stayed home. She had some health challenges so it was hard for her to move around a lot, to vacuum or do other similar things. When I was 8, I used to mow lawns for 5 bucks. After a few years of doing that, everyone started offering me a bunch of other odd jobs (that were frankly easier) and paid more. Jack's wife would often pay me to clean up something simple, and as further reward Jack would let me play on his computer after school but before he'd get home and use it in the evening. Among his games were Ultima Underworld, and TES:Arena.

He was the one who introduced me to PC gaming and first-person RPGs, and for that I am truly grateful; as they have fueled my imagination. Many times he clearly had planned to play after work, but seeing how engrossed I was with one of those games that evening, I would end up just eating dinner with them while talking with him about the games to no end, and he'd let me play for another hour. I remember when he was first showing off the two games, he said that playing skillfully in Arena was easier than UU; and I would agree with that. He didn't teach me either of the games (tho I did pick some stuff up while watching him) he just showed them off in-game and pointed out how to launch them with proper configuration. Then he gave me both of the manuals, and said: "you're sharp, you'll figure it all out. You'll have more fun that way." ...how truly wise this approach is, to the non-risky areas of life.

You can find a lot of good people in rough places, who have more kindness and wisdom than one would typically imagine so, given the circumstance.

Maybe Jack took pity on me for being stuck gaming on old Apples (lol)... he did love to talk about how much better PCs were, and how they would "become the future of gaming" as he would always say. He was right. Consoles now take after PCs, with Zen2's... huh, fancy that. Even with the absolute proliferation of mobile hardware, it just isn't the same, is it? Truthfully tho, I think Jack took pity on me for reasons of my personal life, and that's why they offered me so many extra hours over there with free dinner, when he could just be playing RPGs himself.

After a year or two of playing at Jack's place and helping his wife with chores, I moved away. He gave me UU and Arena, with all their manuals and cool boxes, and said I could borrow them for a few years... I think he was just using that as an excuse to gift them to me. I used money I had saved up from all the lawns and odd jobs (plus gifts from extended family) to build my own gaming PC, specifically to run WarCraft II, UU, and Arena, lol. But I also knew a 2nd TES was coming out somewhat soon, so I really built it for that!

In the first few months after I moved away, once I got Arena running well and had progressed into the main quest, sometimes I had trouble answering the riddles to move past whatever those lock things were. I would usually ask my grandpa and he would help by giving me hints. When very young, I was never particularly good with words. Sometimes my grandpa was busy and away, so a few times I called Jack... The first time I called him and asked him the riddle, he laughed, and then sighed (lol), but even when he was busy or couldn't remember the answer to the riddle from his earlier play-through, he'd patiently think about it, and then help me figure it out myself over the phone. That must've happened a couple times; same kindness each time.

I knew many of my other mentors better than I knew this man. But look how much he gave me that's intangible, and look how much those moments stuck with me many decades later.

On what I think was my 2nd play-through of Arena, one of my floppies became corrupted causing a critical crash, and so did my backup copies! I was super bummed. So I wrote a letter to the developers, explaining how much I loved it, and asked if I could have a replacement to the single ruined disk. They sent me a brand new shrink-wrapped box of Arena, with a little personal note. Pretty cool... You know, I still have that new box.

Eventually the years flew by, and I played the absolute heck outta Daggerfall across many old machines which I had saved just for that; never on DOSbox, always on metal. Musta had over a dozen characters at high-lvl. Plus a ton more, below Clvl 5, for testing. It was a great escape, and a true fertilizer of imagination. I had a habit of thoroughly enjoying the character creation, the early game, and just running around doing whatever the heck I wanted (lol). DF quickly became one of my all-time favorite games, that actually lasted in my mind as time passed. You know, that's despite something like 100 hard-locks or crashes to DOS, and well over 200 falls into the void. And that's conservative!

As I said earlier, life is what you make it of... Above, is a great example of whether you benefit from the Power of Gratitude -- or you don't. Would it not have been incredibly easy to become entirely frustrated with the instability of DF, and given up early on before seeing what was truly there? Or quiting early because of the sammyness, rather than being grateful for what you have at the time, and using your imagination?? And what of UU and Arena? I started with UU first, and I remember it being honestly quite challenging, at least for a ~10yr old who had never seen anything remotely like it, and was coming from NES Zelda! (tho that was frankly an advantage) And then the riddles in Arena, and the jacked up floppy disks, and the endless quirks of those old Apples before that... Could I have easily become so irritated early on that I just gave up on RPGs, PC gaming, or computers altogether(!), and said "these suck!" Yeah, distinct possibility.

You know, I was really small for my age, so it was hella hard pushing a lawn mower at like 8yrs old looking like a 6yr old... and everyone's drug-house-lawns were often too high, full of poop, or the dirt was hard-as-hell and super bumpy with roots and holes that no one would ever fix... Jack's wife was a chain smoker, and every time I would come home from there, my mother would make me take a 2nd shower. I could have easily been ungrateful for the work and the opportunity due to unique challenges, in all areas, and simply not done it.

If that was true tho, I would have never got to know Jack and his wife deeply, and learned to love them. I may never have developed work-ethic. I would not have been introduced to PC gaming and RPGs like I was. I would not have the money saved up to buy myself serious equipment, which I used to advance myself in a multitude of ways. And I may not have developed key digital hobbies, that grew into far greater production in adulthood.

It was gratitude for opportunity, and for the blessings that those opportunities were, that I occasionally used -- in my mind -- in key moments of difficulty in that neighborhood, to press forward, and make the most. I don't think I would have had the strength or will to do so, if not for this.

In recent years, I have observed that norms and respect among people are breaking down across much of civilization, and almost no one is grateful for anything anymore. (Though there is so much to be grateful for!) What an unidentified civilization-wide weakness... that impacts us all. How often do you see people who are so unhappy with their lives, yet they have so many positive things going for them, that they don't even identify? How often do you see online, one person criticizes another person's creative work, w/o first expressing their thanks in a genuine manner for the creation itself, and w/o asking if criticism is even wanted?? Communication is a two-way street. Earn respect from others, by seeing that you proceed in the proper order of operations with them.

I have not always lived as well -- with respect to my treatment of others -- as I wish I would have. Though I have certainly given it an incredibly sacrificial effort... I still feel that I have missed the mark greatly. I have not always realized the true impact of a mentor, or my love for them, until it's too late and they're already gone. Frequently the idea of an opportunity has come to my mind to do some small kind thing for another person, to uplift their life in private. I have acted upon these opportunities on more than a few occasions, and it has been incredibly impactful in the life of another, but far more often or not, I have not acted in time, or at all.

Over 20yrs ago I had the idea of giving that mint-condition Arena box to Jack, as a gift in return. I never quite "got around to it." Years later I drove there to find old friends, and the whole neighborhood had changed. I looked up property records, and tried all kinds of hacker-ways to find him (and other mentors there), but I don't even know their last name, and they lived in a rented duplex. Being chain smokers, they're probably long gone anyway. I never truly properly thanked him... and now I can't.

This is true for so many others.

I had the idea to look up many of my old teachers from elementary school and junior high; many excellent ones who made such an incredible impact, and always went the extra mile. I wanted to thank them at-length, with powerful words as I looked them in the eyes, and give them a few gifts. I remember about half of them being quite young, so I figured there was a decent chance many of them were still alive. I drove by there when I was already in the region, many years after I had first had the idea, and thought I could use charisma and my strength of personality to talk to anyone who works there now, to get leads on the teacher's full names to eventually track them all down, and maybe even luck out to find 2 or 3 that still maybe even work there... When I drove by in that rough and poor area, both schools had been torn down. Everything was gone.

Last year, my grandfather passed away. I spoke some of the words at his funeral, in front of a flag-draped casket as the AirForce flew over. It was so, incredibly, hard... just to speak. I told my grandfather endless times how much he meant to me, in a multitude of differing ways, but I didn't fully realize until I wrote the words for his funeral. Even after letting him know so much, why is it that I still feel that I did not let him know enough?

I am long past tired of having such frequent ideas to boost up the lives of others, and then not acting upon them.

I inherited that favorite wooden rocking computer chair, that I had sat in when I first learned DOS on his IBM PS/2. I can still remember the incredible clicky-clack of that keyboard... and the subtle sound that the spring of the chair makes as it rocks reminds me of my childhood. In the last few years of my grandfather's life, I hired a Filipino nurse to take care of him. Eventually he moved into the house and took care of him 24/7. Most of his family was still in the Philippines, with lots of children, and not particularly financially well-off. That man sat in the same favorite chair, in a new office, for years. As my grandpa took frequent long naps, that nurse took college classes online. Eventually he got a master's degree because of my family. We're like brothers now.

When my grandfather passed away, that nurse was incredibly distraught; he had learned to love my grandfather so deeply, for the same reasons I did. He had trouble not crying for most of the day, for two straight weeks. He had mentioned how much my favorite chair, that he had sat in for years while working on his masters degree, reminds him of my grandfather. So rather than making the same mistakes of the past, I gave it to him on the spot.

The truth is, life is short. Life, is short. We would be wise to make the most of it, especially when it comes to opportunities to do good in the life of another.

I learned the power of gratitude from my grandfather's example at a very young age. His family was remarkably poor when he was a boy. So much so, that he would often go to bed w/o eating dinner. Sometimes, when it was available, he would go out in the middle of the night to the garden, pick a white onion, and eat it raw like an apple, because that's all there was. And then he'd go to bed.

Most everyone in his town was a coal miner, and died young. As did many of my ancestors.

We have so much to be grateful for, small and large, differing between us in our own lives, and throughout all of civilization... there is so much. See that you do not rob yourself of your own happiness and strength, that is yours for the taking, by consistently making the right choices in your mind.

I've used this as an opportunity to share a small portion of my past experiences that I have been able to benefit from, thru recent reflection. Reflecting on these things is not easy, but it is worthwhile. Perhaps this reflection, and the actions of these people, now passed, may benefit you as well. I did not always recognize my gratitude for those who mentored me, in the course of their own lifetime; and I certainly did not often express it to them directly, though I now wish that I had. Though many of them are long gone now, in a way, for what they have taught me, they live on through me. Now, if you benefit from the same things, they live on through you.
ENEMY SPELLBOOK @Nexus: Yellow-square spam, be gone!!
Ancient African proverb: To go fast, go alone. To go far, go together. ~ Humanity's greatest strength is in each other... don't waste it.

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King of Worms
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Re: The Power of Gratitude -- An Introduction

Post by King of Worms »

Oh my god this was incredible and motivating, thanks a lot, it clicked for sure with me. Also it moved me. This was the best thing Ive read in a looong time. Took me by surprise... cant add much but wishes you feel good. These retrospectives can be painful, I tend to not look into past as it hurts me quite a lot at times.. I will try to remember the part of impacting others lives, I know its possible. These chances come and go, and you either do it, or not. I think the ppl who helped in your past and you was not able to give them grattitude for that - they know. Dont worry. They saw something in you and wanted to nourish that quality, it made their lives better as well...

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TacticalTrickery
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Re: The Power of Gratitude -- An Introduction

Post by TacticalTrickery »

King of Worms wrote: Sun Jan 16, 2022 6:20 pm Oh my god this was incredible and motivating, thanks a lot, it clicked for sure with me. Also it moved me. This was the best thing Ive read in a looong time. Took me by surprise... cant add much but wishes you feel good. These retrospectives can be painful, I tend to not look into past as it hurts me quite a lot at times.. I will try to remember the part of impacting others lives, I know its possible. These chances come and go, and you either do it, or not. I think the ppl who helped in your past and you was not able to give them grattitude for that - they know. Dont worry. They saw something in you and wanted to nourish that quality, it made their lives better as well...
Thank you, brother. Truly.
ENEMY SPELLBOOK @Nexus: Yellow-square spam, be gone!!
Ancient African proverb: To go fast, go alone. To go far, go together. ~ Humanity's greatest strength is in each other... don't waste it.

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