[note: I'm about 8 episodes into season 1]
I had heard good things of this show. Still, it wasn’t until an attractive girl told me I reminded her of a character in the show that I was finally driven to watch it. If you know me, then it’s pretty obvious which character I physically resemble. Non-physically I hope we are not too similar (being in a shitty marriage never really appealed to me). But enough of the walking penis, I meant to talk about the show itself.
Every few months or years or so I go and find all the old junk I wrote in my formative years and read it over. I love it. Nothing rocks the ego quite like reading something you wrote–it’s GREAT to agree so fully with something you read, and it’s also great to know someone is totally agreeing with something you wrote. Unfortunately I’ve run into some lameness: I’m static. My philosophy (as concerns Life, the Universe, and Everything) over the years doesn’t seem to have changed, it’s a big giant rock that just sits there.
Ok the words were the same because the blurb was the exact same text as the article. Perhaps I should come up with a new rule. #12 from headliner article, and #12 from the first article under “latest news,” provided it isn’t a “video.” Going by those rules, the words would be “Exit Challenges.”
I’m not too pleased with “Exit Challenges,” but instead of thinking them over I’m just going to dive right in and see what comes.
I’ve decided to write. I thought today about how I should do something to force myself to write, but I wasn’t sure what. I also wasn’t sure what I’d write about. I was thinking first of a random word generator, but then I realized I had an infinite number of random words at my fingertips. “The 12th word,” I thought. “I will use the 12th word of the top story at cnn.com as my seed word.” Imagining I would take that word and twist it into an irreverent mess of a story, I smiled. But one word was a little too limitless. I clicked through to open the story, the short blurb on the front wasn’t, as I had expected, the first few paragraphs of the story. “The 12th words,” I revised. “I will use the 12th word of the blurb, and the 12th word of the story itself. Except in the case of stupid words like ‘the,’ and whatever else I deem stupid. I shall have ultimate veto power!”
I grinned. I like power.
And when I got home, I checked my words: His. “That works, I guess,” I thought. Next word: “the.” Lame. Ok 11th word: Monday. That seemed to work for me. “His Monday.” And off I went, to write this post. Only once looking back when I needed to confirm that the 12th word had indeed been ‘the.’ It was. But the 11th word was not ‘Monday.’ How did I fuck that up? The real 11th word ended up being ‘make.’ Was I going crazy? Perhaps CNN often updates stories ‘live,’ especially those that are popular. “His Make” is stupid, I will go with “His Monday,” because I have ULTIMATE VETO POWER.
And so the tale begins: His Monday.
Recently–both in the near-recent and the far-recent–I’ve missed the feeling of self discovery I once found through writing. Occasionally I’ll ‘pick up the keyboard’ (as the phrase may go) and try to discover something about myself. Mostly it doesn’t work. Tonight I may have discovered something, but even if I didn’t it felt good to write. It spurred a searching of old emails and a re-reading of a long dialog I had with an old ex.
Interestingly enough the dialog begin because she had stumbled upon my original ‘blog,’ (produced wholly within a self-created php blog engine!) found herself mentioned numerous times, and taken issue with the light in which I had portrayed her. It was a fair complaint. But, then, so were my lighting decisions.
Nothing came of this dialog. It was clear then, as it had been clear fresh out of that relationship, that we were different. And what I did was place a lot of blame on the hardship of that relationship upon her.
You see, at a young age I had come to the habit of presenting myself as wise beyond my years. Being a frequenter of MMOs at the time (and, indeed, this being the original meeting place of myself and this ex) I had ample opportunity to hone this habit. And it affected our relationship greatly. For in my ongoing attempts to appear mature I managed to convince her that I was. She, being my senior, treated the relationship as any other. And so when I saw faults in her or in us, instead of handling them maturely I buried them. So handy at this was I that I managed to stretch what should’ve been over within a matter of months to a gruelling period of almost 2 years (such a number I merely guess at). Impressive, no?
And then, tragically, it ended! Acting the part of a mature person, I did my best to make up reasons for the relationship’s failure. I think my repeated stabs at pinning down the ‘culprit’ came close to the truth a number of times, but I was so caught up in not letting such a failed relationship ruin me that I ignored its effect on me. No, it wasn’t like this one single event changed my life, but the shell I had been in my entire life (growing up as a shy person, that is)–a hole out of which I mislabeled this relationship–remained and I was so trying to claim myself unaffected and unchanged that I let it harden, let it scar up. A mistake I believe I took with me through the years, and may still be making today.
To call it ’shyness’ isn’t to explore it fully, but my own perspective it will serve the purpose. Perhaps writing again, assuming it keep it up (which I never do), will define it further and deliver me from it.
It isn’t common lately that I am “pushed” to write. I’m not sure what it is, exactly, but I am often quite content just sitting around and wasting my time. Lately, however, the issue of story in games has been knocking at my door. So why don’t I go ahead and jump on in?
I finished Mass Effect a while back. I most definitely enjoyed the game. I was a fan of the story and the methods in which it was told. It was because I enjoyed the storytelling that one specific example of “bleugh” jumped out at me.
Read the rest of this entry »
Mirrored from: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/30/080630fa_fact_gawande?printable=true
It was still shocking to M. how much a few wrong turns could change your life. She had graduated from Boston College with a degree in psychology, married at twenty-five, and had two children, a son and a daughter. She and her family settled in a town on Massachusetts’ southern shore. She worked for thirteen years in health care, becoming the director of a residence program for men who’d suffered severe head injuries. But she and her husband began fighting. There were betrayals. By the time she was thirty-two, her marriage had disintegrated. In the divorce, she lost possession of their home, and, amid her financial and psychological struggles, she saw that she was losing her children, too. Within a few years, she was drinking. She began dating someone, and they drank together. After a while, he brought some drugs home, and she tried them. The drugs got harder. Eventually, they were doing heroin, which turned out to be readily available from a street dealer a block away from her apartment.
I spend days in thought
Then hours in writing
Still more days in waiting.
And finally I had created
That which I needed
To prove your shortcomings.
And as I reread it
To affirm and to edit
I found my own failures
staring back at me.
Outside of a few graphic design classes, I’ve never really used an Apple OS. From what I understand, it makes things very, very simple. I imagine the “goal” people at Microsoft had in mind when they set out to make certain “enhanced usability” tools for their operating systems was to match the Apple OS usability. “People say our OS sucks compared to Apple’s,” the Microsoft execs would say, “you, guy who has been working on windows his entire life and never taken a software usability course, fix it!” What we ended up getting were things that touted themselves as usable and helpful, but that didn’t quite work, and were *so* usable that you couldn’t turn them off if you wanted to.
In Vista this means that when I was searching my music folder for something I ended up getting 0 results for something I knew I owned. I clicked advanced search and saw that by default I wasn’t searching anything that wasn’t indexed. Indexing was a system hog in XP so I had turned it off in Vista. “Ok,” I told myself, “I give, I’ll try turning on indexing.” And so I tried. But when I try to turn it on I just get an error for every single file that it’s trying to index, stating “access denied.” When I hit “cancel,” Windows then hilariously thinks indexing is turned on.
So far the one thing Vista has done that has impressed me is make it so then I hit F2 to rename a file, it doesn’t include the extension by default. That’s it. That’s the only thing.
A short while ago I posted something I had written a long while ago. It went like this: “people who think might makes right are pretty much assholes.”
Since then, I’ve had an opportunity to call myself an asshole for doing just that.
When it comes to PvP, I thought of myself as a “nice guy.” I don’t attack other players unprovoked. I thought this meant my philosophy was, “don’t be a dick.” But that explanation didn’t quite cover my actions. You see, while I am definitely not a dick “because I can,” I most certainly AM a dick to people who choose to be a dick to me first. If you kill me for no reason, I absolutely will retaliate. If you kill me while I’m doing an escort quest or fighting mobs or weakened for some reason, I will retaliate three three fold. I happen to be a class that is especially suited for world PvP retaliation, and I happen to be a HUGE dick when I think people deserve it.
I was participating in a “Fishing Contest” that takes place in the game world. Winning the contest nets you a neat fishing pole (which I already have) or a neat trinket (which I don’t need). I wasn’t there to win. I was there because I wanted one of the rare fish you could only catch during the contest. I happen to know that this contest is generally ruthless, so I tried to fish off the beaten path. It didn’t work. A particularly well-geared shaman found me and started attacking me. I attacked back. I came to realize he had pretty nearly infinite mana, and my mediocre dps and inability to interrupt his heals sufficiently meant that I wasn’t going to be able to kill him. That’s fine, I told myself, as I swam to my escape. As I swam back to that area, however, I found him standing by the fishing pool but not fishing. He was “spotting” for his friend, who came up a bit later. His friend was trying to win the contest, and he aimed to help his friend win by attacking any other person fishing they came across. Well, that didn’t sit right with me, so I decided to do something about it. I decided that this guy would not successfully help his friend win the fishing contest. How did I do that? By casting a stun spell on his friend (which interrupted his fishing) and then swimming away (preventing them from following and killing me). I did this over and over for the next 20 minutes until someone else won the contest and these two left.
They messed with the wrong druid, ya know?
I’m a self righteous dick. I decide that you won’t win the fishing contest and then make it so; not because I am skilled enough to take on two people who outgear me, but because my class just happens to have the skills that make it possible for me to pull it off.
I’ve thought about it quite a bit recently and I can’t justify it as anything other than that “asshole philosophy” I mentioned earlier. No, I don’t apply the philosophy to people who don’t “deserve it” in my opinion (well… unless they’re friends with someone who does deserve it I guess), but I sure take advantage of such a philosophy whenever I get the chance. It’s sort of the basic reason I have fun on a PvP server, I like the feeling of power that comes along with punishing someone who I think is a jerk. It’s probably very similar to the feeling of power those jerks get when killing someone who is low on life fighting 3 mobs.
Sure I consider myself better than them, but we run on the same juice. Philosophically I’d say my original “don’t be a dick” philosophy still stands, it just has the rather “Punisher-esque” caveat that if someone is a dick to me or my friends, then I will turn their philosophy against them. I’m like a gentle giant who turns into a douche when you are mean :D
(10:09:18 PM) ElleryTheJones: then I wander out father, and find the mom I’m actually supposed to kill
(10:09:30 PM) ElleryTheJones: mom?
(10:09:31 PM) ElleryTheJones: rofl
(10:09:32 PM) ElleryTheJones: mob
(10:09:46 PM) famous last slur: you said father too dude
(10:09:52 PM) famous last slur: you’re creepin’ me out here haha
Note: I originally wrote this in Jan of 2007, and only recently dug it up and decided to give it an edit and post it up.
I have always taken issue with people who adhered to the tenets of Nietzsche*, or proposed a ‘might makes right’ attitude. The adopted brother (I believe) in “The Brother’s Karamazov” argued that if there was a God, then it was God who was responsible for his [the brother's] evil actions, and if there was not a God then there was thus no afterlife in which he was judged for his evil actions, and as such the evil actions were perfectly acceptable. Now, that isn’t the exact argument, no doubt, and it may even be the wrong book or character (indeed, I never read the book, I am recalling only a single scene I saw in some English class many years ago). The point is, I’ve always seen that “sort” of philosophy as inherently flawed. The “Ring of Gyges” type of philosophy.
*[I’ve never read Nietzsche, only briefly studied]
I had always internally characterized this sort of philosophy as an “asshole philosophy.” That is to say, this is the philosophy adopted by an asshole who wishes to rationalize their behavior. This fatalist (a term which I will self apply often enough) attitude that equates to: “I can, and you would, so I do.” Whenever I heard people speak like this I would judge them internally as assholes, and consider their path to philosophy not one born from questions and curiosity, but instead one born from a need to defend their actions, to defend actions which they felt guilty for.
It worked. I could think of people who took this path as assholes, but I had never put any thought into why one would have such a need to take this path in the first place. That is to say, I didn’t take this path, and as such I never thought deeply on it. And, only recently I sheepishly realized how flawed my own philosophical path was. I didn’t necessarily think at length about the questions of life and come to whatever conclusions I have come to, not by a long shot. Instead I merely looked at my own life–which of course includes the horrible things I see in the news or otherwise–and from that evidence (empiricism, yay) made my conclusions.
Is having an “asshole philosophy” a weakness? It obviously betrays a lack of trust in humanity, but is that something that can be seen as a weakness in the person who comes to such a conclusion? My life has been exceptionally good. Because of this, my general philosophy has been a positive one: don’t fuck with other people. But what of people whose lives have not been good. What reason would they have to believe that, “don’t fuck with other people,” is even remotely applicable? They know all too well that such a philosophy is obviously not going to work because invariably others will fuck with them.
How is it possible for me to judge people when it comes to something as uncertain as philosophy? Yet I cannot shake the notion that people who do feel that might makes right are somehow inferior to me. Force is a trump card. In things large and small it is inarguably a way to get what you want. Granted, it can have consequences, but what of them? If the consequence is that you are then killed or harmed, well that just proves the rule further. If the consequence is that you are suddenly unloved or distrusted, does that necessarily disprove the rule?
What if it does? What if might does not make right simply because you cannot control the thoughts of others, and thus cannot determine how others judge you. That is, perhaps, the ultimate failing point of such a philosophy: you can use it to take physical things, or to inflict pain, but you cannot use it to force someone to believe something you wish them to believe. It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to write in that previous sentence, and in the end it turned out I couldn’t think of a “good” “failing point” of such a philosophy that doesn’t apply to every other philosophy out there: there is nothing you can do, physical or otherwise, that will force someone to believe what you wish them to believe. You can mislead, lie, bribe, threaten, torture, but you cannot change another person’s mind, truly.
And no philosophy is “best” at convincing others. While one man may be turned off at the demonstration of physical force, another may be impressed. While one scoffs at an attempt at reasoning, another may be intrigued.
When I read “A Song of Ice and Fire” I am often upset at how easily some characters are swayed by others, at how quickly lies can turn someone. And though I do still consider myself a pessimist, I temper that with a general attitude of ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ That is to say I will approach most new people with the assumption that they are ‘good’ until they prove otherwise. So I am curious: is my philosophy working for me? Were I to exist in the seedy world of Ice and Fire, would I be a pawn in someone else’s game because of my philosophy, or do my wits pick out the flaws in others quick enough that I could avoid such traps. And, indeed, I am rare to open up, but when I sense innocence I tend to display my feelings, and yet feigned innocence is no doubt easy to achieve.
Where do I sit? Am I but a weak minded fool put to use by others, yet driven by my belief that most people are good? Or am I the distrusting curmudgeon who lives a long and unfulfilled life?
What philosophy avoids the pit traps in a world where Nietzsche exists? Must one always be on their guard? Such a dismal place, this. And yet, that is where the excitement of life lies: the pain.
Really interesting lecture by some guy named Randy Pausch. Includes a “world destruction” sequence reminiscent of Don Hertzfeldt’s “Rejected,” as well as a random guy who kind of looks like “the Dude,” but with louder clothing. Oh, and a lot of wisdom as well :)
Give it a watch if you’ve the time and inkling.
I just got off of the 15 at Mira Mesa Blvd. I was in the middle lane of three. A guy to my right was about three car lengths in front of me, and nobody else was near us. The light, the intersection for which the other guy was about 1/4 through, turned yellow. I decided I had time and applied a bit of gas to make sure. Suddenly, the guy in the lane to my right had to slam on his brakes. Some goof from the freeway off-ramp is pulling out in front of him, despite his light being red. Of the “right turn” lanes, this new guy is in the *left* lane, so he’s actually pulling out in front of me. I, too, have to slam on the brakes. So now me and this other guy are sitting in the intersection (myself only a little bit, him about 1/3 of the way throuhg), but the light is now red. So we just sit there. Then the light turns green and we start to go. Suddenly, he has to slam on his brakes AGAIN, as someone on the off-ramp has decided that since the light was *just* yellow, he should be safe if he just runs the red light.
So I finished Minion. Still uncertain on the book. My current opinion is that without reading more of the series, there just isn’t enough in the first book to give it a grade. The writing is still ok, a couple of characters have broken from their casts and started to show a little bit of depth (just a little), and the plot hasn’t really advanced very far at all. In the last few chapters there was finally some broader parts of the lore “revealed” that started getting me curious (just as the lexicon had done) so that’s good. I figure I’ll order the sequel and read it, perhaps it will blossom into what I hope :)
For now, I’ve picked up He’s Scared She’s Scared. My fear, going into this book, is that it will be informative and fun but I won’t really feel like I’ve gleaned anything from it. I was also afraid I wouldn’t be able to connect with it. However, in the first bulleted list I found an example that applied to me, and then I came across this sentence:
Years of conducting interviews have convinced us that people with commitment problems gravitate toward each other.
That spoke to me, and I liked it. All right, Steven Carter and Julia Sokol, I’m in! I look forward to getting deeper into this book.