Twice a day at work I walk into the storage annex, check a hygrometer, and write a number in a binder. Most days the number is nearly identical to the day before. I did this for probably two years before I stopped experiencing it as tedious, and I want to try to explain what changed, because I think it’s a small, useful thing that has nothing to do with books or games directly and everything to do with how I approach both.
When I started at the historical society, the daily log felt like the most obviously skippable part of the job, a box to check, a formality, since the room’s climate control does the actual work and the number rarely moves more than a point or two either direction. I used to write it down fast, barely looking, mentally already on to the next task. Then, about a year and a half in, I caught a slow drift, half a percentage point a day for almost two weeks, nothing dramatic, nothing that would have shown up if I’d only checked once a week instead of daily, and it turned out to be a failing seal on an exterior door that would have, left unnoticed for another month or two, caused real condition problems in materials that can’t be un-damaged once they’re damaged.
That’s when the boring log stopped being boring to me. Not because anything exciting happened, exactly the opposite, because I understood that its entire value was in its boringness, in the fact that ninety-nine entries in a row look identical, which is precisely what lets you notice the hundredth one that doesn’t. A log that mostly recorded fascinating daily drama would actually be useless for this purpose. The whole point is a long, flat, unremarkable baseline against which one real deviation becomes visible.
I think about this constantly now in ways that have nothing to do with humidity. It’s the same logic behind the reading log I keep, the same logic behind noticing, across thirty plays of a game, that a strategy which felt fresh the first several times has become the only strategy anyone uses, a slow drift you’d never catch from any single session but that’s obvious once you’ve got the accumulated record to compare against. Patience with unglamorous, repetitive record-keeping is not actually a personality trait I was born with, whatever it might look like from outside. It’s a skill I built specifically because I once nearly missed something that mattered by not paying steady attention to something that, on any given day, looked like nothing at all.
I don’t have a grand life lesson to wrap this up with, and I think that’s honest to the subject matter. Most days the number really is the same as yesterday. That’s not a failure of the process. That’s the process working exactly as intended, and I’ve come to find something genuinely calming in writing down the same number, twice a day, waiting to notice the day it isn’t.