It's Thanksgiving, folks.

Today, my life was a Mr. Bean gag reel.

After an unproductive morning, I got it into my head to donate blood. I posted a Facebook status to encourage everyone to do the same, and I hopped into my car. Fifteen minutes later, I realized I was on the wrong street, and I’d overshot directly into the heart of Mountain View traffic. Ten minutes, a u-turn, and just fifty feet later, I got stuck in a right turn lane.

Which funneled me into a grocery store parking lot. At 2:30 p.m. The day before Thanksgiving.

And when I got to the blood center, I found out that I’d left my photo I.D. at home; not only did that mean I couldn’t give blood, but I was driving without a license, and I passed a cop on my way out of the parking lot.

Thankfully, the cop wasn’t psychic, but the mission was a horrible failure.

I’d like to take a moment to give thanks that my vicious cycle is a comedy, and that my definition of a horrible failure is that blood stays inside my body.

And now for something completely different.

I got the urge to write a poem, so here it is. I’ll probably describe the thought process behind it some other time, because I feel like explaining it now would ruin it.

Quick note: “field” is one syllable.

They March

I sit at the window and watch them march past

Their ranks and their columns in field gray and black.

They scorn the mundane as potential denied:

Betrayal of passion, it's Man gentrified;

A man without struggle’s awash in the tide,

So join in the cause — my brother, decide.

We called them salvation and begged them for more;

Who gave them the right? We opened the door.

Our brothers in arms would have hero’s reward;

What blinded our sight? Our honor restored.

I sit by the window and force myself back

From cheering their columns in field gray and black.

The Saga of the MattressMobile

I wrote this for an email to convince a house of 20-somethings to let me live with them, but I got carried away and it turned into blog post-fodder. Yes, this is totally true; I do this kind of ridiculous stuff.

June, 2009. I stayed in San Diego after school finished because I wanted to find a job there, and while most of my friends had gone back up north, I was still closer to my San Diego friends than my hometown friends. I budgeted a week and a half to find a job and a room; by the end of that, still with no job, I called it quits and got ready to fly up north. Before that, I had to get everything to storage.

When everyone else moved out, we had a jeep and a van to haul mattresses. The jeep was gone, and I assumed I could borrow the van. Assumptions aren't a good idea, and the day before I was supposed to fly out, I had nothing to move with.

Cue my brilliant insight: the mattress frame had wheels.

A Musical Counter-Point, re:Nerd Rock

Last night, I was procrastinating going to bed – checking comics, flipping through blogs, checking comics, nuking a bowl of Rice-a-Roni, checking comics – and came across a link to this, by Something Awful user Daryl Hall. I was going to do my standard shrug, I think you’re wrong but it’s whatever, kinda thing — but I changed my mind; I wasn’t just going to accept this.

First off, because I believe in disclaimers: It might be that we’ve listened to entirely different bands and have different ideas of what constitutes nerd rock; I follow BrentalFloss religiously, but because it isn’t aimed to be music, I don’t count it in the genre. That being said, I’ve listened extensively to the only band that he name-drops (The Protomen), so I think we’re on roughly the same page.

Second, because I believe in theses: Nerdcore is not as one-dimensional or lazy as Mr. Hall portrays it.

Marvel's Civil War began when I was just out of high school. It didn't age well.

Thought-Provoking Comics Comments!

I’ve been out of the loop with the Marvel Universe since Civil War, and it’s been a while since I revisited that. I’ve read enough to hate Brand New Day, but my Bay Area libraries didn’t stock much more than that. Up here, though, I’ve been reading bits and pieces of Civil War, Secret Invasion, Dark Reign – the whole shebang, and it’s reminded me what I love and hate about Marvel.

Entry: Janc Limm.

Something a little different today. It owes a debt to Eclipse Phase; I went to the library today, but couldn't find any transhuman sci-fi. Instead, here's this, formatted as a Wikipedia-style article, a bit of an experiment.

Janc Limm

(Jack Lamark redirects here)

(The neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page.)

Janc Limm (born Jack Lamark January 23, 2258, third-generation sentient) was an actor on the vidcast Prospect. One of the first Uplifted octopi to become a celebrity, he was seen as a vanguard of a growing Uplifted subculture. He quit the show abruptly in 2269, becoming a radical spokesman for the creation of octopus societies separate from humanity.

Limm is currently awaiting trial for the 2271 murder of human Chris Johnson.

Almost six months after mourning.

This spring, my high-school drama teacher, a surrogate father for some of his students and a friend and inspiration to me, died of a heart attack. We’ll call him Tim, because if I called him Timothy Marie, you wouldn’t get the joke.

Last week, I was visited by Tim.

Disclaimer: I’m not a superstitious man; I don’t believe this was a visitation by anything but my subconscious. Nevertheless…

I’d been having trouble sleeping, despite trying to wake up by 8 each morning. This was around when I posted the Chinese Democracy post, which I finished at 6:30 a.m. after pulling myself out of bed at 3 a.m., never having actually slept. Other nights were much the same, with me hopping into bed early and hopping back out an hour later. This was also when I was reaching crunch time for finding a job — two weeks until the end of the month, probably two weeks before I could get paid, and judging by the lack of replies, Safeway was prominent in my future. This night, I think I’d been drifting between exhaustion, hyperactivity, and self-loathing in my bed for an hour.

For some reason, I thought of Tim, and I heard his voice in my head.

I’d spent enough time around Tim that I could imagine him saying about anything — most of my friends and I spent lunch in the drama room — so I assumed I was just putting words into his mouth. But I was curious, so I tried to turn off my brain.

His voice started to sound echoed, with only a moment’s delay; the source was distant and indistinct, and the echo was like a subtitle. The subtitles were perfectly clear, and my conscious brain — the part that was trying to find patterns or make sense of this — was only involved in the subtitles. The original was coming from somewhere else.

I don’t remember what Tim said, and it’s possible that I’m jumbling up even the pieces that stuck in my head. I remember the word “job”; I remember that he was stern; I remember feeling supported.

My best guess is that my conscious brain was drowsy and silent, letting my subconscious through, so there wasn’t any supernatural significance to this. I don’t know if this was the night before I woke up at 8 a.m. and got myself a job, so there’s dubious fiscal significance.

No matter what, for a little while, Tim was the voice of my conscience; I can’t decide whether I’ve been honored or if I was honoring him.

Would Seattlites even notice rain on a wedding day?

I’m reading on the front porch during rush hour, with the I-5 groaning on the other side of the street. A guy, long-sleeved green sweatshirt and shaggy beard, starts to walk by with a dog. I nod hello and go back to the book.

Then he starts up the stairs. “You got any…” — I’m caught between shrugging that I’ve got no change and flinching away from the intrusion — “… nugs of ganja here, man?”

I suppress a laugh. Nah, nothing man, sorry. He pulls out his medical card; I pet the dog; he talks about the dispensary he’s planning. The dog decides to move on.

He starts down the steps, sees the book in my lap. “Study hard. Cheat if you have to – everyone else does.”

“Nah, I’m graduated, I’m just reading this for fun.”

He pauses. “Cheat anyways.”

You have my permission to cite this as an example, because this is a Mirriam-Webster-class example of dramatic irony: when a middle-aged stoner, living in an illegally-parked mobile home, who most definitely never saw the cover of your book, gives you permission to skim-read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

Everything you wanted to know but I forgot to follow up on.

Roundup time!

There Was A Time

I’ve got songs, albums that’ll always be tied to a particular time in my head. The Bravery’s “Believe” is summer depression ’07; “Bohemian Rhapsody” on infinite loop is freshman year of high school; “Rock You Like a Hurricane” is Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri; “Mustapha” will always make me wince with the memory of saying I liked Night at the Opera more than the just-gifted Jazz.

Guns ‘n’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy is one of the few free radicals, tying together four years of college and the rise and fall of Camelot — however overdramatic that might be, it’s true.

So vanguard-ish that he preceded the party.

Sometimes, sandbox games lead to... interesting word combinations.

EDITED to fit the page. Also, I realize that Microprose probably designed this joke into the game (Civilization 2), but one of the benefits of playing games from my childhood is that I actually get the references. If anyone out there used to read the Sonic comics between 3D Blast and Sonic Adventure, they're well worth a reread for the pop-culture references.

//I went into high school thinking that Brave New World was about post-humans going to a nuked city because of Ken Penders, that magnificent bastard.

I disappear for a while, and I come back with an existential doozy.

No sleep, but I’ve read plenty of A Girl and her Fed and David Brin’s The Uplift War, so you get a musing on transhumanity.

Disclaimer: What I’m about to say might make complete sense to you; it might also seem completely unnecessary. Remember Newspeak and keep in mind that definitions do matter.

Abstract: This isn’t going to be nearly long or deep enough to be an argument or essay; rather, it’ll be a brief introduction to ideas for the reader to mull over, with my opinions attached. I’ll first argue that for the future, we’ll eventually need to expand the highest-level word for “us” to include non-human and post-human iterations, then present my proposed definition for this identity.

I posted this without a title, but now I've edited one in.

I’d apologize for not updating the past few days, but A) I never promised an update schedule and B) I’ve got an audience of like five people.  Either way, this is another quickie.

Dear game designers: If you’re building a sandbox, let me in.

Veracity. There's your word for the day.

Today, I read Neil Gaiman’s Eternals, the first three volumes of Scott Pilgrim, and watched the most recent episode of The Guild. I can’t say I was blown away by any of it, but I was very satisfied. Also, I realized one of the reasons that I like the whole indie scene: the veracity.

Any time that something comes off as assumed or forced — Bon Jovi, anyone? — it’s going to hit me as wrong. I’m not as sensitive to this as Indie Rock Pete (#dieselsweeties), but I stopped taking Green Day so seriously when I saw them in a commercial. For Verizon, if I remember right.

That little sliver that's the audience for Blood Bowl.

Quick — what’s the difference between the Yankees buying championships and that guy with the Darksteel Forge & Platinum Angel deck? If the average Indianapolis fan met the Mannings, could you tell the difference between him and the Robot Chicken tauntaun guy?

I live in the Venn diagram’s intersection between sports and gaming, and I’m amazed at how lonely it is — not because fantasy leagues are 90% number-crunching, or any of the other obvious reasons, but because sports and gaming are the same things. Whether you’re playing them or just jawing about them, there’s no difference between football and 40K, because they’re both recipes for instant interaction.

Oscare Wilde and Tycho Brahe -- I'll skip that slash, please.

Ugh, all right, lesson learned: after midnight, don’t start a post that you haven’t completely thought out. This’ll be a quickie so that I can get at least a little sleep.

I think I’m finally getting over a case of writer’s block (more on that another time), and while I don’t know if this has helped me per se, I’ve found it fascinating to watch other people’s creative process. Penny Arcade TV is probably best when it deals with things like PAX, the charity Child’s Play, or Mike and Jerry’s family lives, but the recordings of them just coming up with and writing comics was what hooked me.

Eclipse Phase

I have a new game system that I need to try:

“Some activists advocate that uplifts should be in control of their own genetic futures, rather than suffering the manipulation of human scientists. At the radical end of the spectrum, certain uplifts oppose the manner in which their brains are modified and their children socialized as anthropocentric, arguing that uplifts should be free to develop their own unique non-human modes of behavior, thought, culture, and social organization [italics mine]—even go so far as to establish their own habitats to do exactly that.”

This is from Eclipse Phase, a sci-fi transhumanist RPG. As in, a science fiction setting that doesn’t discount keep the characters just kid-next-door normal or discount the possibility of the singularity. That’s Not exactly a common commodity.

The paragraph above is what sold me on the game: it doesn’t talk about unrest among uplifted species at being treated as second-class citizens, but about a debate over identity. This is a pen-and-paper RPG system that specifically addresses issues parallel to bi-erasure, cultural extinction, and globalization. And all that’s just part of a broader setting of post-Earth, intra- and extra-solar exploration.

These guys are local; swear to God, on Monday I’m going to go in and find out if they’re hiring.

Press Play

Today I went to a gaming store about an hour’s walk away and listened to music. Usually music’s a placebo for or reflection of my mood, but today it was out of my hands; I’m going to let the music speak for itself.

Walking there, two beers deep: Metallica on my iPod, “Whiplash”.

While I’m there: NPR on the store radio, classical.

Walking back in the rain, going east (west? north?): The Navigators on my iPod, “One Line Epitaph”.

Cresting a hill and seeing the U-District emerge from the darkness: Bonnie Tyler on my iPod, right at the key change in the middle of “Total Eclipse of the Heart”.

Drinking coffee when none of the baristas I know are working: The Shins on the store radio, “New Slang”.

Twitter

Yesterday, I posted a formspring question for Jeph Jacques (of Questionable Content):

>>For those of us on Twitter who are fans and not RL friends, if you tweet something that we want to comment on, is it fun/conversational or annoying/creepy/intruding if we toss in our two cents with an @jeph tweet?

>>uh isn't that what twitter is FOR?

Keep Yourself Sane, Boyo.

I was going to write about libraries and architecture (maybe tomorrow?), but at about 11PM, I got an AIM message from a friend. Short version is, for the second time in two weeks, I’ve found myself as a consultant on drama. This isn't common for me; pretty much the only drama I talk over is the long-term, had-an-attack-of-the-blehs kind.

So no real humor today, just two pieces of advice. They’re simple, but they aren’t easy to execute on or remember to do — it’s tempting to walk away instead of just stepping back.

1) Nine times out of ten, all that needs to happen is for the yelling to stop and the explanations to come out. Last year I got in a stare-down because I thought that a friend should have to have his room cleaned to show to prospective renters, and he thought that he didn’t because we hadn’t shown off the room the last time. Come up with some way to cue everyone to back off and reassess, see things from the other person’s point of view. Our house used the phrase “green sandals”.

2) Open up to people. A degree of depression seems to be pretty normal, especially for 22-year-old, unemployed liberal arts post-grads, but when you’re ready to talk to someone about it, talk to them. If you don’t have a best friend, you’ve got parents; if you don’t have parents you trust, you have a journal; if you don’t have a journal, there are always strippers.

//Seriously though, you can have great conversations with anyone if you remember where their eyes are. I talked with a GnR and Rage Against the Machine fan for about an hour in Vegas one time. The point isn’t that you should tell strippers your life story, but that people are chill and deserve more credit for being so.

Apparently you can also call them gull wings.

Things that bug me about grammar:

-The only reason besides nostalgia and sheer nitpickery for proselytizing proper punctuation is that it makes the written word more comprehensible. AP Style Guide be damned, though, we need to clean house on the English language — punctuation should go outside the quotes, and I give a fuck about an Oxford comma. I write winding, complex sentences, the spoken word still has a pause where the second comma should go, and I need signposts to keep my point clear and easily-understood.

-Why isn’t the punctuation for titles standardized? If you put a memoir in italics and the based-on-a-true-story movie in quotes, what’s the filming blog or the TV mini-series? Can we just pick one for chapters/songs/episodes and another for the full product?

-Any time I write about Mr. Rogers I feel un-American, because I always start to write it “neighbourhood”.

-I get that the curly brackets are used for showing a series of equal choices, the derivative/root of their use in math, but why the Wheaton is Wikipedia’s example "Select your animal {goat, sheep, cow, horse} and follow me"? Milking Shorthorn, I choose you!

Also, if you’re an audiophile, you should be checking spinner.com at least every Tuesday. Free music, no ads, and all that without torrents — it’s like NPR, but with indie and electronica (mainly).

The UW Architecture

In the course of scouring the University of Washington for their main campus bookstore (which, it turns out, is off campus), I’ve come up with a new motto for the institution, drawing on its unique architectural and horticultural design:

“Claustrophobia? Uh, Can I Hear It In A Sentence?”

The Guild, Addendum

Those of you who have already watched The Guild are probably in hysterics right now, gleeful schadenfreude at my suffering when I realized that what I thought was the first episode was the entire first season.

Laugh if you must. Make fun of me behind my back for being so naive and innocent in the ways of the world. But guess who’s got two thumbs and stayed awake watching the other two and a half seasons? Who's the tough guy now, tough guy?

#probablysomeonewhoactuallyslept

The Guild / The Beta Face

I’ve been a Captain Tightpants fan since Firefly, I watched “Dr. Horrible” as it came out, and I’m following Wil Wheaton on Twitter – but somehow I’ve only now started watching The Guild. Didn’t want to pay, DVDs, too lazy to see how much of the show was online, etc. It turns out that with the family Netflix account, I’ve got access to the first three seasons, so I watched the first episode. What did I think? Time for an explanation by tangent!

Among my college friends, there was a facial expression so untouchably unique that we named it after its inventor and discoverer: The Beta Face. (Yes, we called him Beta.) Most people aren’t fluent in body language, but there are a few phrases that everyone can recognize, like “Fuck you” and “Fuck me.” The slack-jawed, wide-eyed, no-sound cry of dismay that is the Beta Face is similarly unambiguous: “While that’s hilarious, the only way I could be more disturbed or offended is if you shoved your dick in my mouth.”

I had to actually pause the episode to make The Beta Face eight times. I invented a corollary, The Pecot Clench, which involves clenching your hands into claws, recoiling in horror, and whimpering.

The Reset Button?

When people ask me why I moved from San Diego and the Bay Area to Seattle – a city where I’d have no friends, no job, and no clue – I’ve got my schtick memorized.

“There’re three reasons,” I say at the same steady pace each time. The two summers as a carnie are paying off. “First is that it’s a creative city, and I want to be a writer. Second is that it’s far from home, but I can still drive all my stuff up. Third is that I don’t know anyone there, so I’ll have to find myself.”

I sat down today to write about that last – how a move away from everyone you know is the ultimate placebo. I started outlining the way that actually making the move and getting to 1^st and Pike was a collapse of possibilities into a few unshakable uncertainties, how tours of Valve don’t always lead to jobs, how one-in-a-million airport meetings don’t pan out.

Instead, I was sitting next to an elderly woman sniffling and wiping her nose with her sleeve, and across the table from a man reading a paperback with hands he couldn’t keep from shaking. It’s the anniversary of 9/11, football season is beginning, and the sun is out. The first non-posthumous Medal of Honor since Vietnam has been announced. At the top of my outline, I wrote “Geeze, I sound like a whiner.”

Travel Tip: Any time you’re waiting, you could be talking. At a bar, people already have a plan and might brush you off, but on the bus ride, everyone’s just waiting to get there. Pop those earbuds out and make small talk.

Jogging in Seattle

I went running today. It was some of the first real exercise I’ve gotten in Seattle, aside from a few long walks.

And it hurt, more than jogging should hurt a former NCAA athlete, and in ways that jogging shouldn’t hurt someone who’s responsible. My lower back throbbed and hobbled me from sleeping half-fetal to fit under the blanket; my lungs were pressed from the inside by the cold air I was breathing; after less than a mile, my legs had the jello instability that I associated with East European conditioning coaches; I had a mohawk of headache. I’ve felt powerless, but it’s been a while since I’ve felt weak.

I left thinking that I would go to Fremont and swing back from the north. I got a mile before stopping abruptly, almost unwillingly, then totally. I spent five minutes wondering whether the pain in my ears was normal. I jogged some of the way back, walked like a zombie, then jogged for the last two minutes.

I took a shower. Cold, sweaty, frustrated that I stopped, glad that I went in the first place, unsure whether or when I would see the fruits of my labors. And now it’s 4 in the afternoon, and in the past four hours I’ve outlined a blog post, jogged a mile, written a blog post, and gotten my UCSD Fencing shirt a very little bit sweaty.

It’s a pretty good analogy for my time in Seattle so far.

The Medal of Honor controversy

I’ve read the wiki and a few of the articles about the playing-as-the-Taliban controversy surrounding the Medal of Honor reboot. Oddly enough, I haven’t seen any real gamer reaction, so here’s my unasked-for take on it. Gamers, if you start getting hassled by soccer moms, here’s a cheat sheet; parents and adults, I’m here to answer your questions. This is both a response to this particular instance and thoughts on every violent-multiplayer controversy ever, so feel free to generalize these ideas as appropriate.

Thesis: Guys, it’s only in multiplayer, which isn’t built for or experienced as realistic. Chill out – it’s more than a little insensitive, but no one’s going to learn to hate America through this.