Comfort Media

I've always been a big reader, and I fall into a few patterns of what I read. The main ones are "reading new books" and "comfort reading"; I do the same in other media as well. Sometimes, I'll happily re-read a book for the umpteenth time because that's what I'm in the mood for.

Comfort food and comfort reading

Books

I read a mix of fiction and non-fiction books, typically only one or two at a time. A few years ago I feared I had lost my love of reading: I found myself re-reading my favorite books and moments and not picking up anything new. Even when I did, often I'd lose interest and slog through it out of a sense of obligation. Then I picked up a few books that I really enjoyed and did devour them, and it turned out that I just hadn't been reading the right books.

"Comfort reading" is a book I've already read that has plenty of "stand up and cheer" moments. I can enjoy the emotional high while being too tired to absorb anything new, or desiring the familiarity. Like comfort food, it isn't necessarily high literature (although I'd argue that my favorite comfort reads are extremely well-written), but I know what I'm getting and I know I'll enjoy it. Because I do most of my reading on an e-reader, I can pull up those comfort reads at any time.

Movies / TV

Movies and TV comfort viewing is different. Sometimes it is to re-live those favorite moments; I've spent a huge amount of time re-watching How to Train Your Dragon or Pacific Rim because of their combinations of great music and heroic triumphs. But more often it's to facilitate having something on in the background: a "comfort watch" (show or movie) is the ability to follow the action without having to be fully engaged all of the time. Watching a new show or movie can be tiring for me because I need to be 100% engaged, but those media often don't hold my attention as well as a good book so I have to work to maintain focus. The re-watching is comforting because the demands on me are lower.

Sometimes that backfires: they're my comfort watches because I like them, so I might intend to have Who Framed Roger Rabbit? or The Princess Bride on in the background and then find myself completely sucked in and ignoring what else I was supposed to be doing.

Computer games

This was an odd discovery for me. I mostly play older games because I tend to use older computers and not spend much on games. So I continue to cart around my game CDs from the 1990s / early aughts and sometimes buy / re-buy from Good Old Games (GOG) if they run better. But in a recent play-through of Tyranny (yes, I know, 2018 is still seven years old), I still haven't finished the game after more than two years. Some of that is my schedule changing: I was literally booting up the game and making big plot-critical choices when my wife called to tell me to grab our "baby being born" hospital bags. But it's been hard to get back into because Tyranny is good at making those plot-critical decisions have emotional and moral weight, which also made it stressful to play in some ways.

So I keep gravitating back to games that are known quantities for me. I don't do much gaming on the computer, and when I do it's a "brain off" activity, so I'm often looking for those games where I played them enough as a teen that the muscle memory still exists to a frightening degree.

Related to my fear that I'd lost the love of reading, I also began to wonder if my memory wasn't as good as it used to be: I had casually memorized gobs of statistics about weapons and vehicles for games in my teens, and can still rattle off many of them today. But am I learning new things that way? My inability to keep F-35 part numbers straight made me worry, but a few years ago I picked up Battlestar Galactica - Deadlock on the recommendation of Dr. Bret Devereaux of ACOUP and sure enough I soon knew the point value, squadron sizes, and gun/missile loadouts of the various classes of ships. A different kind of scar tissue I guess.

Conclusions

Sometimes you just want meatloaf and potatoes, and sometimes you just want to re-read a favorite book. I'm happy to share more about my lists of comfort media, or let me know your favorites in the comments!

I guess I've taken a few of these photos