Freedom is important to happiness and well-being. However, freedom is not that straightforward to pin down. When do we perceive an influence as coercion, and when do we accept it as natural law? I'm sure the inability to violate the constraints of physics does not cause anyone grief. That's because we are pretty certain that other people cannot violate those laws either.

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Freedom is the possession of the relevant capabilities needed to pursue your goals, as measured against a specific reference. Even though being able to teleport to work is something that does aid me in the pursuit of my goals, my inability to do so does not cause me grief because it is a capability that is far beyond my reference point.

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People feel more free when rules are clear, because in those situations choices are made by examining the different consequences in your head and then picking the choice with the consequences that you most prefer. This thought pattern pretty much defines what free will is. This is the reason why games are enjoyable. This is why computer programming is fun -- the product is difficult to produce but easy to judge.

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Freedom can bring unhappiness. A tough choice is a choice for which you know that the consequences vary widely but you don't know in which direction. It's uncertainty in outcomes resulting from ignorance, a situation where you know that it's important to make the right decision but you don't know which decision is correct. Feeling vexed in this situation is important because it motivates the improvement of knowledge - by necessity, the failure to improve knowledge has to feel frustrating.

I've started using connectedhq.com. It's a website that integrates your Gmail, Facebook and LinkedIn contacts, and allows you to write down notes and also set intervals at which to remind yourself to keep in touch. This addresses one of my shortcomings, which is the inability to keep track of more than five people in my head for any decent period of time.

I've given some thought to the idea of networking recently, and so far the most sincere interpretation is that it's a form of marketing - you basically advertise what you have to offer, and hope that a chance to fruitfully trade comes up in the future. To network effectively, you must have something to offer (in my case I think of that as a technical orientation towards the world, and the desire to give advice / nag at people) that people will remember. Trade is a truly rewarding activity, but in lieu of that I'm pretty much willing to blabber on and analyze random situations as long as it entertains everyone.

Sports commentary was never my thing. It's only when I started watching Starcraft 2 commentators a few months ago (mainly Day9, Force and Husky) that I've really started to find game commentary interesting.

Starcraft 2 is a competitive game that is played between people. In most professional games it is played 1 vs 1, and players aim to make the right choices between building up an economy and using that economy to build up different types of armies and air forces.

The game is pretty complex, and it's often difficult for someone who is watching a professional game to understand the full significance of the professional's actions. What the commentators do is to describe the game choices in the appropriate context, informing the viewer not only about the choice that was picked, but also the choices that were not picked.

In order for commentators to be able to do this, they need to have a certain depth of knowledge about the game themselves. The knowledge is necessary but not sufficient for someone to be a competitive player - it takes significant physical training and skill to execute some of the maneuvers, something which is measured in-game by the number of actions per minute (APM) the players are sending the game. I also imagine the type of insight needed to weave a good story is not the same as the type of insight needed to play well. For one thing, there are three species in Starcraft 2 and most professionals specialize to one, but commentators need to be familiar with all three.

At the end of the day, it's storytelling and analysis as entertainment. Day9 often pokes fun at the fact that a lot of the people watching his show probably don't play much Starcraft 2 at all. It's when he mentioned this that I realized it's really not that different from football commentary.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPrd73VvmKY#t=172s