From time to time, I’ve gotten heavily involved in the world of poker which is rife with bad streaks where no matter how well you play, sometimes you just lose and then lose some more.  There is little fun to be had in any activity where you can consistently make the right decision and yet still get punished; Sadly, there is a lot of that in poker.

More recently, I’ve spent much of my free time playing Civilization: Revolution.  The Civilization series is notorious for their addictive nature.  Civ:Rev might not be perfect but it’s still fun and engrossing.  Well, that is until you encounter the bugs or the ridiculous cheating the artificial intelligence that takes place.  Firaxis, the company behind Civilization, seems to be blessed with great design abilities and terrible implementation skills.  In a game like Civ, I’m expecting a simulation where the difficulty increases generate smarter opponents, not an arcade-like style of game where unrealistic and annoying cheats detract from the game.

As an avid reader, I readily pick and read all sorts of books.  Unfortunately, all too often I can get pretty far into a book before I realize that I’m simply not enjoying this story.  My favorite genre, epic fantasy, is notorious for starting out strong but ending weakly.  I’ve found far too few “must read” and too many “waste of money” books.

Yet for all the frustrations these things bring, I find myself returning time and time again to each of them.  I have no doubt I’ll go back to playing poker at some point, perhaps around my birthday when I go to Vegas.  I’m still trying to setup games of Civ:Rev with my friends.  And I’m also wandering the bookstores, picking up new stories, hoping for a winner.  In some way, the frustration has also been inspiring.  Though little has come of it, more than once I’ve entertained the thought of building my own Civ-like game.  Or writing my epic novel.  Perhaps one day these frustrations will eventually drive me far enough to do actually followup on my ideas.