Beanstack

Geek Punditry #72: They Call it The Streak

blakemp Geek Punditry , , , ,

My streaks, as I write this, are in mortal danger.

Last night, a nasty storm ripped through my part of Louisiana. Although my family is fine, no one was hurt, and we didn’t suffer any real damage, our power was knocked out at about 11:30 pm and, as of right now, they’re not estimating that it will be returned to my street until about midnight. We live in a weird nexus of energy, right near the parish line but connected to the grid in the neighboring parish, so when weather strikes it is not at all uncommon for us to lose power while the street on the other side of us still has theirs. When I left the house to go to work this morning, I saw that not only was the street to the west still juiced up, but so was the eastern territory to which we are ostensibly connected. In other words, it is literally JUST my street that is out of power.

So my streaks are in trouble.

It’s weird how many of us have started to carve away little corners of our lives in deference to keeping a streak intact. I kind of blame Wordle. Wordle didn’t start the concept of a streak, of course, but I think that the rush of popularity when that particular game was new and fresh is what kickstarted it. If you guys recall, back in 2021 the then-new Wordle game added a function that allowed people to share their results on social media. Suddenly, it became the hot thing, and everybody’s Facebook wall looked like they were showing screenshots of a Tetris game that only had blocks in green, gray, and gold. That’s what made Wordle catch fire, but I think one of the things that has kept that fire burning is the concept of the “streak.” How many days in a row can you play? How many days in a row can you WIN? Falling asleep at night without at least having attempted the day’s Wordle is unthinkable to the devoted. 

My Wordle for the day looks like a duckie.

Then came the Wordle imitators – the ones specific to different TV shows, sports, genres. Similar daily games started to crop up that asked you to guess movie box office totals from the past. Other games were based on Major League Baseball or the NFL. Then the New York Times bought Wordle and added it to their own growing accumulation of word games (they’ve got to do something to get people interested, no one is buying newspapers anymore), and each of those individual games has, of course, its own streak counter. And the streak CANNOT BE BROKEN. If your spouse suddenly leaps from bed at 11:45 and sneaks off downstairs, don’t worry. They’re not cheating on you, they just remembered that they haven’t done today’s “Connections” puzzle.

Besides the NYT word games, I have two other game apps where I’ve got a streak going that I admit I feel nervous to allow to lapse. It’s ridiculous, of course. There’s no practical benefit to maintaining said streak. There’s no prize or reward, except for the occasional in-game bonus, that makes it worth your while to be certain there’s five minutes carved out every single day for this particular game. And yet somehow, the idea of intentionally walking away and abandoning my streak gives me the same kind of anxiety I would have if I realized that I hadn’t eaten that day. Worse, actually, because Lord knows I could afford to skip a meal or two, but if I skip a day of playing Disney Magic Kingdoms I might not unlock Zeus in the all-new Hercules mini-event. It’s a terrifying thought.

The most inaccurate thing in Disney history is portraying these two as loving parents.

Other streaks give you little, silly awards like badges that you can only view in the app or share on social media. It’s not like they give you an actual prize, an actual medal, an actual award. I can’t walk into a coffee shop and claim a discount by flashing my Spirit Pegasus badge (believe me, I’ve tried). So why do it?

Because streaks help breed consistency, and while things like the Disney game are admittedly silly, there are other areas of my life in which consistency has real value. 

There are two streaks I’m on that I’m actually proud of, both of which are terribly close to reaching a solid year and both of which I feel I’m better off for having maintained. The first is in the Beanstack app, an app that I was introduced to last year when my wife Erin signed up the entire family for the library’s summer reading program. That particular challenge does have a few physical prizes – we got umbrellas last year for signing up, for example. We were to use that app to log our reading each day. Perhaps it’s the part of me that’s terrified to lose a streak, but of the three of us in the household, I am easily the one who used it the most. And when last summer ended, I realized I could continue to use Beanstack to track my reading, even though the summer reading challenge was over. I’ve always been an avid reader, but that reading fell off considerably after my son was born. My fear of losing my Beanstack streak has brought it back to me in force. As of right now I’ve read at least a few minutes (usually more, of course) every day for 353 consecutive days. I have logged 69 separate books at 11,822 minutes of reading time spread across 451 sessions. At this rate, I may well turn out to be the Joey Chestnut of licensed Star Trek novels, and I’m okay with that.

With summer approaching again, yesterday Beanstack let me know that my local library is once again participating in the summer reading challenge and asked me if I wanted to sign up for it again. I certainly did. Later that day, I got a text from my wife (whose email address is the one attached to the family Beanstack account) asking why she just got an email informing her that I had earned a free minitool that I can pick up at any library branch any time after June 1. That moment of confusion on her part, in and of itself, made the whole challenge worthwhile.

The other streak I’ve maintained comes from a website (not an actual app, oddly enough) called 750 Words. This is a site used to track not your reading, but your writing, with the goal of logging a minimum of 750 words a day. And guys, I’m ecstatic to announce that as of this column you are currently reading, I’ve hit 363 consecutive days, just short of a year. A lot of those words were generated via these very Geek Punditry columns I give to you every Friday. Many of them, up until January of this year, were in the service of Little Stars. There have been other assorted short stories and pieces of writing effluvia, and then a while back I started the new novel I’m working on (which I occasionally will update you on in my handy dandy newsletter). And on some days when I just plain have no juice and no energy for anything in a creative vein, I keep a journal. But whatever the case, I’ve gone almost an entire year writing at least 750 words a day, and I am quite proud of that. And yeah, I give the credit for that to me not wanting to break my dang streak.

Who knew that this would turn out to be the all-time writing motivator?

So to these last two streaks, at least, I owe a debt of gratitude. And I’m glad I live in an era where, even if there’s no power to my laptop computer, I can turn out 750 words on a tablet or phone, because it’ll still count, dang it. And I’ll play my silly little games. And I’ll read, if I have to, in the dark, to make sure that streak doesn’t die.

Because sometimes it’s the little things that make it all count. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He is currently on a 17,067-day uninterrupted streak of not wearing Crocs, and he has no intention of stopping that any time soon. 

Geek Punditry #30: Summer Reading

blakemp Geek Punditry , , , , , , , , ,

Summer reading. The phrase calls up different memories, different emotions, depending on how old you are. If you’re my age (or you’ve seen the memes), it may bring you back to those halcyon days when you were tracking each book you read in the pursuit of a free personal pan pizza. Depending on what school you went to, it may cause you to recall those last few hours before a new school year began, binging A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or Of Mice and Men, even though you had two months with virtually no responsibilities in which to get it done. For a lot of people, it brings to mind the beach or the pool, where you set up on a towel or a chair and pull out a romance novel, a potboiler mystery, a spy thriller, or whatever it is that you connect to. Whatever the specifics of your personal relationship with books, it seems very curious to me that people have settled on the summer as the time to read.

Of course, if you’re just trying to SOUND smart, this sucker is available on Amazon and can tell you everything you need to know.

And we can blame teachers and Pizza Hut all we want, but there’s something that makes us all reach for that to-be-read pile during the summer months. Any book lover will tell you that we add to that pile constantly, most of us have stacks and shelves (or files bursting with digital downloads) of books that we know we have no hope of finishing in our lifetime, barring one of those Twilight Zone scenarios and minus the poor eyesight. That doesn’t stop us from piling new books on, of course, as we constantly tell ourselves and our partners that we need to be grateful it’s books and not, for example, meth. As that pile gets bigger and bigger, summertime is the only time where it seems to dip a little (or at least grow more slowly). 

Me on June 1.

This is even true for those of us who, through a terrible confluence of biology and neurochemistry, happen to love both books and our own children. In my entire life, there has never been a single event that slowed down my reading more than the birth of my son. And he’s worth it, of course. I love him to death, and I make sure to tell him that every time I look at the 17 books Stephen King has published since his last haircut that I haven’t gotten around to consuming yet.

The good news, parents, is that kids get older, and eventually they do reach a point that makes it a little easier to start reading again, and this summer seems to have finally gotten my family to that sweet spot. Of course, we did need a little help. Our local public library, as they always do, has issued a “summer reading challenge” to its patrons, both children and adults. There are prizes (no pizza, sadly), and of course, bragging rights, and the weird thing is that having this carrot dangling in front of us has really worked for my family.

Not quite as well as this, of course.

The St. Charles Parish Public Library is affiliated with a reading app called “Beanstack,” which allows you to track your reading time, track books you’ve read, even track the number of pages read (although I personally have not taken advantage of this feature, as most of the books I read these days are eBooks, and tracking the pages isn’t always easy). You can write reviews as well, and share your reading with others. You earn points and badges. I got a free umbrella. It’s kind of goofy that a grown ass adult (or whatever I am) would need to treat reading books like accumulating a high score on a video game, but by God, it worked.

My summer ends next week, when the teachers at my school report back for a few days of professional development in advance of the avalanche of students the week after, but when it comes to reading, I’ve really taken advantage of this summer. Since school let out in May, I’ve recorded 80 different reading sessions, 20 different books, and a whopping 2578 minutes of reading time, most of that at night before bed, because knowing I don’t have to wake up at 5 am makes me feel a little more free to stay up late with a book like I did when I was a kid. My wife – who is not a teacher and thus does not have the summer away from work – hasn’t quite matched my numbers, but she’s also found herself reading more thanks to the use of the app. There’s something oddly communal about the experience, knowing that other people in the system are reading as well, trying to stack up their numbers, and having fun doing it.

Um…just ignore that second stat.

The communal aspect, I think, is one of the things that makes it work. I can see how many reading minutes everybody signed up for the Library system has accumulated over the summer (currently hovering at about 2.1 million, which means some of you people have been slacking), and there’s something about knowing that other people are reaching for the same goal as you are at the same time that makes it a little bit easier and a little bit more exciting. It’s the same reason people share their steps from a Fitbit, the same reason so many of us jump into NaNoWriMo every November. You’re aiming for a goal that you always have on some level. It’s easier to go after that goal when you know you’re not doing it alone.

Those 20 books that I’ve dug into, by the way, are also in pursuit of various smaller goals. Most of them are in series or by authors I enjoy, but that I’ve never gotten around to finishing. I’ve started a re-read of all of L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels (in case you were wondering why I wrote about that back at the beginning of summer) with the intention of continuing on and reading the other books in the “Famous Forty” that weren’t written by him, most of which I’ve never read before. I’ve read a few Star Trek novels. I’ve read books in George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series and Hugh Howey’s Silo saga. I’ve even tackled two of those Stephen King books that I hadn’t gotten around to yet. He wrote four more in the time that it took me, but baby steps. 

If you can think of a better way to spend the summer, I’d love to hear what it is.

The only problem I’ve got with Beanstack is that I don’t think you can add friends from outside your own library system, so I don’t know that all of you fine folks out there could link up with me there – although if anybody knows of a similar app that’s not geographically-locked, by all means let me know. And while you’re at it, let me know how your own summer reading has gone. What have you read on the beach, what books have finally escaped your-to-read pile, and do you too feel like you read more when the heat is on?

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. Blake is also considering doing a total read-through of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson universe, but that dang Stephen King keeps adding other books he need to get to first.