So I've still not started playing again, not counting a few igowin games at work that probably do more harm than good to my already shaky go skills. When I have not played in a long time I always have a hard time starting again. It's like a weird fear of playing, some people call it Online Go Anxiety (OGA) but it's not specific to online play and it should not be confused with a fear of losing, it's not even a fear of playing ridiculously badly. I think it's just a reaction to the high level of stress caused by go. When that happens I try to slowly build my motivation with go related activities until the urge to play is stronger than the fear.

Among those, my favorite is certainly watching the Hikaru no Go anime again. I watched the whole series again in less than a week. Which wouldn't be that bad if I had not already seen it more time than I can remember (I wouldn't be surprised if I had seen the first episodes 10 times already). But Hikaru never fails, it's impossible to watch that series (or read the manga) and not want to play go.

One thing that the casual viewer may not realize, though, is that many of the places shown in the anime not only exist in reality, but were carefully reproduced. I used Google Earth to try to find the Nihon Kiin headquarters and I was amazed at how easy it was to recognize the area from watching it in Hikaru no Go.

For a while, I wondered what these pool-like things were. It turns out, they are fishing ponds, right in the middle of the city. The ponds are always refilled with fishes and equipment is available so that people can go fish during their lunch break.

(photo by "the detestrian's", used under creative commons license)

My new blog is certainly a source of motivation too, after all it wouldn't make much sense to keep a go blog if I never played again. But it can also be a way to procrastinate as there are always thing to improve on a blog. Tonight, I've integrated Sensei's Library go diagram generator into dotclear (the blogging script I use) so that now I can easily have diagrams just like on Sensei's or go discussions. I don't really have any use for it now but at least it makes my blog look more like a 'go blog'!