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.