Skip this Post if You Don't Like Self Pity

When you put it in perspective, I have not - in my life - been confronted with particularly many threats. No large predatory cats, no potato famine, no one has ever leveled a gun at my head. So when I receive a threat, I guess I find myself lacking in experience.

Today, I received a threat. Today I was threatened with expulsion. And I suppose as a corollary I might get fired, too.

It's not easy to react to, and not productive. I'm sitting there looking off into space thinking "it seems as though you want a response, but you've left me no options. I have no defense. What do you want?". And what did he want? All I could offer him was a meek "alright" (or whatever it is I said) anyhow. And so now I'm living day-to-day, one-more-strike and you're out style. And the part that concerns me is: I know I won't make it. Maybe it'll be a day, maybe a week: I'm going to screw up. I'll go to bed too late, or the alarm won't work, or my bike's gonna break, or I'll have a moment of weakness while staring down a sleet storm in the 7AM darkness and I am going to flunk my pasty white ass out of school and out of Adulthood itself, if my parents have anything to say about it. And unless I find a job that'll pay me rent and food it'll be back to Ottawa, to live forever in the flawless shadow of my sister the Engineer.

The problem is, of course, that I have no one to blame but myself

LOUD!

Points of Failure (20/??)

The important question is "where did I fail?", or in more charitable terms, "what did I learn?".

I suppose it is true that I have not yet failed to provide you with 30 posts in 30 days, but it seems likely that I will get no higher than 25 or 26 if I am diligent over the next couple of days. It is certainly possible that I could concoct 10 posts in 3 days, but at that pace I think the sacrifice of quality might defeat the purpose. We shall see. At this point, however, let's assume I don't quite make my target number. I haven't really learned anything new about my "work" habits. Procrastination hurts my recreational efforts as much as the professional. At least this blog doesn't cost my parents tens of thousands of dollars per annum, unlike some of my other failures. Which is perhaps a lesson in itself - high or low stakes don't seem to affect my performance too much. So it doesn't behoove me to look for either in a job, although obviously if I have a tendency to drop the ball I'd rather it be less than a critical error. Whatever.

Pursuant to this, I think it has reenforced a few things. Back in Polysci (especially first year), I had a tendency to write drafts on paper of blog posts. Usually something would occur to me during a debate or a lecture. Without that back-and-forth environment (and without input from beyond a limited social circle), I'm losing opportunities for new material. I also don't read the news half as much as when it was pertinent to a degree I thought I wanted. I guess Polysci doesn't get a lot of love either from the Engineers ("McDonalds" was the sickening refrain that my Engineer sister was encouraged to sing whenever a pack of Poli majors walked by during frosh week*) and real sciences...I dunno about its relationship to the rest of the humanities. I imagine that its pretense to some kind of objective/empirical study of politics puts it at odds with historical and philosophical perspectives that stress an understanding of the specific people, ideas, and cultures involved with a movement or event rather than push all-encompassing theories. But for whatever reason I was prepared to adopt it as a career path. And probably because someone suggested it to me offhandedly, too; I didn't have the marks for a science degree, so why did it matter what I did?

*I say "sickening" even though I still think in terms of Science/Engineering > Humanities > Trades. I think I'm allowed to be wrong as long as I'm aware of my error and try to correct it. Yeah, maybe it is funny, but like a lot of "just a jokes" it reflects a bias that we're not even trying to rid ourselves of. Engineers have more classes than I do, they do a harder job than I will (unless I get my shit together), they will have a deeper understanding of science than I do. Do I think that means we ought to tacitly endorse a heirarchy that puts them on top? No. And I'm sorry if I'm being humourless about this, but I bet it stings for those polysci majors to be told for a week that their degree is just a useless piece of paper. Enough arts majors have those worries already.

That's not really about what I learned, though. But yeah, I think I need to get back to drafting posts beforehand. It gives me a greater opportunity to put thoughts in order and eliminate some of the worse tangents (like what I didn't do just now for a paragraph and a half). I think I should read the news more. I think I need to widen my circle of discussions and opinions. I think these are all valid lessons to have learned.

And that is all for tonight. Tomorrow: something else, probably.

LOUD!

PS. I totally played a game of Civ V online with someone internet-famous (the instigator of Boobquake, no less) today. The MP is kinda buggy, although between all the players I think the game spanned from the west coast of the US to France, so it might just be that trying to play a game across, like, ten time zones is a really bad idea.

"Then, one day, you find / 10 years have got behind you / No one told you when to run / You missed the starting gun"

In response to this post on Gnomesque's blog:

I used to think that all smart people go to university. On some level, I think I still do. Every couple of days when I'm working I'll have this thought: "If 10 years ago I had thought about the life of a person who gets mediocre marks in college and cleans the bathrooms as a part-part-part time job, I think I might have considered it a fate worse than death". And yet here I am, now embodying the nightmare-closet visions of Future Binkley from Bloom County (and we don't even have self-tying shoelaces yet!)...at least in part.

Do I think I went to University for the wrong reasons? Yes. No. I think I went to University with the wrong mindset. I didn't work very hard in my last years of high school. I didn't actually do any research on what university would be best suited for me. Frankly, I didn't have the marks to get into the kind of program I was really interested in doing*, and so what was the point, anyhow? Even coming to Dal, I didn't really look into what it was renowned for. In the end, one big university turns out to be just like another. Carleton and Dalhousie did not feel substantially different, at least not at the undergraduate level.

I haven't read More Money Than Brains, so my understanding of the author's arguments will be limited. I don't think Engineering belongs in a college system just because "Engineer" is a career choice. I think that's a little ridiculous. What about "Historian"? That's a career, too. Is it that the Engineer will probably make more money? I don't think that makes it any more of a trade and any less of an intellectual endeavor. Is the idea that only those interested in "Academia" should go to university? Because that's not only its own career path, it's also potentially quite lucrative. I even think that if universities only existed to train their future faculties that would end up being a little bit circular. I'm not sure I understand the reason for this distinction.

Sillier still is to object to the idea of a university education as a monetary investment. Dare I ask why it's intelligent to spend thousands of dollars per year without some reasonable assurance that you'll be able to pay your way back out of the hole on the other end? What is this ridiculous scholar-figure who pays money to study just because he or she wants to learn? The OpenCourseWare Consortium and movements like it exist precisely to provide learning materials at no cost, but - of course - they don't come with a degree. And if you only want to learn for the sake of learning, why do you need the piece of paper? Ego? Or, more likely, because no one will hire you for an intellectually demanding job without one, unless the social aspect of university is so difficult to duplicate that the thousands of dollars of debt are worth it and the piece of paper that multiplies your value possibly tenfold is just a "side benefit".

People with university degrees make a lot more in a lifetime than those without, generally speaking. As long as this fact remains true, the rhetoric of "learning for learning's sake" seems to ring pretty hollow in my ears. But what would I know? I'm just a bitter dropout who couldn't write an essay to save his grades.

PS. I sometimes get the question "why are you ashamed of going to College?" (really just from ELI and Etarran). Now you know.

I'll stop whining soon, promise!

So I was recently approached by a friend of mine who wanted to enlist my aid for a project that he is planning. I'm not sure how much I should say about it, but I will tell you that my job will involve photography. Etarran suggested that I should probably get some practice in with my digital camera (which I use rather sporadically at best, even though I enjoy doing so). I was at a loss for things in my house that I could take cool pictures of, so I figured I'd go out walking this week or next and find something inspiring. Then, I woke up this morning, and:

That shot is maybe a little blurry, but to get this exposure I had to hold the camera steady with my hands (no tripod) and use the *Bulb* setting (keeps the shutter open as long as you hold the button down). This was about a 1 second exposure, if memory serves, so I'm pretty happy that I could hold a camera even that steady.

This one I like also.

So this is a good start, only the project is going to require night photography. Low lighting conditions are my bane, having only the little integrated flash that comes with my camera, and no fancy lighting equipment, etc. Still, I'm pretty excited for this, and I will definitely provide linkage when it gets underway.

On another note, I start school monday. This year it's College (more on this in a second), which now makes a pattern of spending a year in one institution and then disappearing without a trace. I could be happier about it, considering that it's more or less the only choice I have - unless I like the idea of subsisting on minimum wage for the rest of my natural existence. In a year's time Dalhousie will be willing to let me resume my studies, but given that I'll be committed to an 85-week continuous program with only a token break over the winter holidays, It will likely be more along the lines of two years before I'll consider going back. Even then, I'm beginning to wonder if I will. I've always liked to believe that I'm the kind of person who values education for education's sake. A smart person, and smart people go to university and do well (that's what we are told). For a time, I even imagined that I might pursue a PhD. And it came to me when I was examining my motivations that what I wanted was letters attached to my name, a milestone, something I could point to and be proud of. I don't think I really considered the investment of time and effort that it would require, only the prestige it would bring thereafter. I suppose I can live without prestige (seems to be the way things are panning out so far), but what I'm doing right now is gearing up to learn how to be a sysadmin, more or less. I love computers, I should love that sort of job. That's the goal, to do what you love. All things considered it's not a job that's unintellectual; it's mostly problem-solving, after all. I think I could be good at it. But then, I could be good at anything, if I wanted to be. And the thing is, I think I'd like to make more of a difference in people's lives than I could possibly do being the guy who makes everything better again when the computer demons come calling. I think I'd also like certification that qualifies me for more than just one kind of job, something that tells people that I'm capable, adaptable, intelligent. Sure I can project these qualities in person, but I may only get to be seen in person if I have the right letters attached to my name. And so the necessary conclusion is that I should go back to university and tack myself some letters onto this here name of mine.

And that's a little depressing, because I'll likely have to start from scratch. It's intriguing because I could have a chance to do a first year properly, meet people and make friends of my own accord. Weird because by the time I stop getting an education I will be most of the way to 30. That's terrifying to a guy who has only just turned 20, because I've already lived the life of a student for 2 years, and I don't know if it's something I want to keep doing for next to a decade. I think I'd like real life to start at some point. And that's option two, isn't it? Get qualifications, whatever they are, then get paid enough money that I can afford to quit working and backpack a continent or two. Meet someone, settle down (or go nomadic together). These things start looking pretty important when you can see 30 looming at you from 10 years down the road!

So that's my state of mind in the here and now, a little bit to be hopeful about and plenty to worry over. I promise at some point soon to return to my more usual punditry, which mostly subsided because I don't have my parents' newspapers and New Scientist to keep me up to date at the breakfast table. This year I think I'll try to find money for some subscriptions...


PS. I'm playing a tonne of Assassin's Creed and listening to the new Imogen Heap album, so maybe there will be some review-like substance available soon.

Possible Anticlimax

A new, and rather overdue link on the sidebar comes with this update.

The very real possibility of being marooned for several days with the ghost of relationships past has a way of dampening one's enthusiasm. The option of taking some alternate transportation out of the city, though? That's something. Turns out that Via rail trains stop in Riviere-du-Loup at sometime around midnight, except on tuesdays. Guess which day of the week it was. The station is open for something like an hour and a half in the middle of the night when the trains do run, and it's housed in a brick building that looks like it's recieved more attention from vandals than passengers. I don't have a picture of it, I don't think. You're not missing much. The bus station is inside a Petro Canada at another edge of town, and the express bus to Halifax leaves at 4AM. Actually rather boring.

 

Some of the walls about town had been enhanced with these murals. Not so boring.

Our first stop was the...I want to say "beach", but the reality is more along the lines of "rock". The coast of the St. Lawrence, at any rate. The road to the coast intersects with the highway(?) to Cacouna, and at that intersection stands a familiar ice cream store. I didn't take a picture of that, either. I intended to, and caption it something like "I'm in ur cottage town, invadin' ur memories", but then:

Mom: "Actually, it sounds like you aren't invading her memories, and that's your problem"

Me (despondently): "Yeah. Guess it is"

And so that notion was abandoned.

See? Rocks. Pretty rocks, though.

A few minutes later, and there was some brief respite from dark thoughts, in the form of a weird playground structure. Check out the whirly pole thing!

 

I'm still not quite sure what you're *actually* supposed to do with it, especially considering that if you monkey bar your way across to the top of the thing to use it like a helical fireman's pole (and I did), it isn't (as far as I can tell) supposed to be accessible that way. Didn't stop me, of course. 

Wheeeee!

The park seemed to end not far past this metal curiousity, and the presence of homes on the waterfront coupled with an ignorance of Quebec property law discouraged us from continuing along the river. We did stop to look at cottages for sale ("Seven hours? too far!"/ "But they *are* halfway between Ottawa and Halifax so we could meet up during the year!"), and also this really nice garden:

And shortly thereafter, was this:

 

 The usual ensuing conversation, only on our side in very rusty French. I was translating in my head at the time, so I don't remember the phrasing perfectly. They asked us our dog's name, and we replied easily enough. What was said back to us didn't quite parse, and after a beat came "parlez vous anglais?", and the conversation changed languages. Their response was that their dog's name was "Ruby" as well, but they were wondering how we spelled it. Theirs turned out to be R-U-B-I-S, incidentally. They asked us where we were from. Turns out they were from Ottawa as well, although they had moved to Aylmer (I think, my recollection is a little spotty) some years ago. I think they may have mentioned living in Orleans, but that could be my memory playing tricks on me after the fact. They were there because the area was special to them, but for what reason I cannot remember. Our car had broken down, and we might not have stopped there at all. She (not pictured), observed that this was indeed quite the coincidence, and that we were none of us yet privy to the meaning behind it. I wished again that there might actually be some. We parted ways, and we walked back to the car. We met up with them again in the parking lot. She said again that this meant something, but we knew not yet what. 

If it did mean anything, I'm still none the wiser. I can tell you, though, that our stop in Riviere-du-Loup did mean something for sure: another waterfall:

That's it for coincidence, but I have *many* more photos, so don't miss Part III

May This Be Love

If there is one aspect of rational scepticism that I can be said to dislike, it is that I can't really believe that coincidences are fate. Certainly, I do find it preferable on the whole to think that my future is unwritten, that I'm not simply going through the motions of a destiny that has been fixed since the very beginnings of time. From time to time, however, events will occur that I imagine would make much more sense if there was such a force as fate at work in the universe. Sometimes small things; running into old friends you hadn't expected to see again, a second-grade test score which doesn't earn you a seventh-grade transfer to a different school which, in turn, leads to you hanging out with people who influence your choice of high school leading to a tenth-grade dream girl. I accept such events as random chance, just the one branch of possibilities I happened to experience instead of all the others. I've just been watching enough Heroes to make me wistful, I suppose. The particular coincidence which provided the creative spark for this post, well, it's part of a bigger story*.

I would love to start at the beginning, but should I try to isolate it I fear I would wind up starting this story with the genetic material which dictated the very chemistry of my brain. But then, ADHD being still poorly understood as I hear it, maybe the genes are just a part of some greater set of causes. At any rate, I would not be starting in a useful place, so let us skip a few chapters to the tenth grade dream girl. The chain of events from this point onward is somewhat more relevant. There's a three-year long relationship which she moves on from and I don't, for whatever reason. There's a friend who believed that my life in Ottawa had thereafter become stagnant, and so invited me to live with him in Halifax. At this point the ADHD – which I have been unsuccessfully attempting to deal with sans medication for several years now – comes right 'round and bites me in the ass. I have, therefore, been - how shall I say this? - “persuaded” to spend this year reflecting on my personal and academic ambitions in lieu of pursuing my previous course of study. It seems, so far, that my ambitions seems to revolve a great deal around the three-tube CRT projector in our living room in Halifax. Not much of a life, but I've seen some good movies. Art criticism, then? I imagine that's a hard market to break into.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

When I made it plain that my ambitions did not include spending a year in Ottawa living some two blocks away from the walking emotional torture rack I used to call my girlfriend, the next step was to ensure some sort of income for myself in Halifax. Gotta pay the bills, after all, and as “technically not a student” a number of previous avenues for the acquisition of wealth have become inaccessable. My parents considered putting me on a plane, but eventually decided to drive down in their newly- purchased 1982 Volkswagen Westfalia (camper type). Some of the prettier stops along the way I captured on film. Turns out that means mostly waterfalls. To wit:

 

These falls are just outside Quebec city. There is also a pedestrian bridge over the river, further down:

And the crossing (very wobbly, though you'll not see it in the picture):

 

Next, the view from the bridge looking away from the falls:

 

  

 Continuing on the other side, there are bike trails which enter a forest. Therein can be found the following pond:

And, finally, there was this little man-made rock formation (lower middle, to the right) which was too darling not to photograph:

Part one of my much-vaunted coincidence occurs maybe two hours after these photos were taken. Two hours east of Quebec city in another town along la Fleuve Saint-Laurent, as they call it in those parts. This town:

Of course, we didn't actually arrive in Riviere-du-Loup proper until the next morning. Our van broke down on the highway as I was driving. We were maybe 40km outside of town. I had been driving a little fast that day, so at that time it seemed possible that 7 hours at what might have been 110km/h had simply been too much for the old girl. I say “what might have been” because at some point during its long history, our VW's speedometer had become calibrated to a system that was neither metric nor imperial. My father and I used mileposts and counting to discern our speed, and it turned out that what the VW said was 70mph was actually about 90kph (some 57mph, if you want apples-to-apples). Of course, it took us a while to get the counting right, so for a while we thought 80mph might be 90kph, that sort of thing. I affectionately dubbed the big numbers which had used to denote speed in mph “Intergalactic Units”. At any rate, the engine did not want to start again. One CAA towtruck later, and we were parked beside a 24-hour garage (sort of? Their towtruck service was round-the-clock perhaps, but their mechanics were not), worrying that the van would never start again. We cooked dinner on the propane stove (this is why you buy a Westfalia, people!), and then slept the night, hoping against hope that it might just be that the fuel filter had clogged. The next morning:

DOG! (^_^)

Riviere-du-Loup sits very near the teeny-tiny town of Cacouna. Shouldn't mean much to me. Shouldn't mean anything to me at all, except it does - because it mattered to her. The next day, with there being no sense waiting around in a place where the closest thing to civilization is an Irving Big Stop, we rented a car and headed into town. It was like walking with a ghost. It's one thing to avoid the sort of stimuli that remind you unpleasantly of an old flame, but when it's a place, well, there's really no escaping it. Of all the places we could have broken down, it was there. Times like those, you really wish it all meant something in the grand scheme of things, like you were meant to break down there and confront the demons of a failed relationship. But no such luck.

Stay tuned for Part II!

I'll give you three guesses as to why this post was late...

These are my last days in Halifax (for 2008), and while I should be patting myself on the back for a semester well-done, and looking forward to the ability to goof off, I can't. Once I get home I have what a conservative estimate would put at 10 000 words or so to research, type up, and email in. It will be mathematically possible to get more than 50% on maybe 5000 of these words. Ladies and gentlemen, I am going to have to type something like 6 or 7 thousand words for absolutely no benefit to anyone. They aren't going to make the poor TA who gets stuck reading them a week or two after they thought they wouldn't have to worry about this kind of thing, they're not going to be worth any marks. For that matter, if I were on time it still wouldn't inspire anyone to read what I had submitted.

Of course, that's not the point. An essay's just a take-home exam with some arbitrary rules attached. Similarly, the point and purpose of writing an essay isn't what I wanted to write about. This post is about procrastination, and how it can ruin your ability to live – and maybe even love – comfortably. 

 

The Motto of the Procrastinator

“Too little, too late” (free association: Too Little Too Late is the first track on Maroon by Barenaked Ladies, and the next song on that album, Never Do Anything [I think it's called] is a perfect anthem for procrastination). Runners-up would include such greats as “Why do today what you can put off 'til tomorrow?”, and “but I still have three whole hours until it's due!”. Procrastination affects the quality of the work, as much as the scheduling. With most schoolwork, this isn't as much of a problem as one might assume. Unless you're the highly-motivated sort (ie. My sister), a B on your report card is no Bee in your bonnet. The problem with procrastination is when it begins to seep outside school, and you start to see every task as an essay, in some sort of perverse twist on Math Curse! Dishes, appointments, housecleaning, laundry, Friends*...

...what I guess I'm trying to say here is that I've spent the last few months slamming the snooze button on everything. That doesn't even make much sense! I don't even pound the snooze button on my alarm! I either turn it off or stay in bed and listen to the radio. And there you go, I put off getting out of bed. I didn't leave the house today, so I haven't even changed out of my pyjamas. Before this goes into the realm of TMI (which it may have done already, for all I know), I'm sure you'll see the pattern. This goes beyond poor study habits, and into the realm of actually serious problems here.

*like, organizing things with them. I don't mean the TV show

The Reader's Question

Why?

Why must I read about your terrible habits? Aren't you supposed to be lecturing me on copyright?

Yeah. I'll get to that someday. I think I've made enough of a ruckus, and the conservative party might not even get the chance to put their brain-dead bill-for-Bill** through the house. Speaking of procrastination, what the fuck, Harper? As if I weren't tired of your pseudo-propaganda about how, in some way, a majority of seats in the House of Commons isn't actually a majority, but in fact a slight against Canadians, you had to go and let this rotten issue fester through the holiday season. I did really try not to become so antipathetic toward your party, once. With C-61 you certainly lost some confidence, but it was the sort of legislation that any government sufficiently in the pocket of big business would enact, no big deal, right? But between that, the whole “unborn victims of crime” business, and now, this, a political crisis of your own making...well, let's just say you've lost my sympathies. Look, if you took it on the chin and moved out of 24 Sussex like a big boy, you could at least crack a sm—oh who am I kidding? -- popped and locked***(?) in a satisfied-looking manner for having left Dion with the tab for those much needed renovations. 
 

** Bill, as in Gates, the guy who wants to control your mind **** < /sarcasm >

*** Do you see what I did there it is because he is a robot ha ha.

**** Actually those ads with Sienfeld would make a lot more sense if they were just a vehicle for some kind of subliminal messages. Conspiracy Theory? THEORIZED!

Ok, reader. There art thou happy? 

Ah, but you are not yet fully answered, you claim? Why write a post in the form “[clearly bad thing] is bad for [clearly valid reasons] and I am [clearly upset] about this”?

I think it is because I don't think I am the only one. Pretty much everyone in my house has been struggling to adapt to a second-year that places all the work at the end of the semester. While I didn't have quite the distributed load of FYP (one essay per two weeks, for the uninitiated), only some of my courses had very much work before the end. Only one of my courses had ongoing homework assignments. The rest had no more than four. The downside of this, I find, is that missing an assignment carries a penalty that is likely to be somewhere around 25% of the total grade (estimate). Add to this the fact that I haven't properly prepared for an exam since Grade 9, and that the only exam I've felt positive about my performance on in the last 5 years or so was first-year political science at Carleton, and you can see that things are not looking up for me.

So, your answer: I'm writing this because I want out. Not necessarily out of school, unless I had a very solid business plan to scape up cash (for an eventual return to education, maybe a house, maybe a cardboard box if things go south, I have no idea). Mostly, I want out of this mindset that playing Bioshock now is going to have a positive enough effect on me that it will offset the misery of late essays and inevitable failure. There, I said it. Failure. Clearly I am going to fail some courses this semester. I failed some last semester. Possibly not the semester before that, depending on how you handle a full-year course in the equations. Usually, I don't think I'd say anything about this, because poor academic performance seems like it would carry a significant amount of stigma in my usual social group. The key mitigating factor here is that this is on the internet, and therefore not real. But also, I'm tired of saying “eh, not great” whenever someone asks. 

 

I want out of this mindset, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.

Clearly, wasting thousands of dollars isn't doing anything for my sanity. I'm going to owe my parents...probably all of it, when things are said and done, and it seems mighty foolish not to derive any benefit from it. 

 

Lessons

The glorious thing about failure is that it permits us to learn. I've always felt cheated when in, say, math class, the teacher will generally give an example for how a particular problem is solved, how a variable is attained. I always wanted to find the answer for myself, no matter how many different approaches I had to try. The satisfaction of doing something is ever so much greater when the path wasn't mapped out ahead of you. Of course, I don't tend to make my own ruts when I cross-country ski, but since you, the reader, are 100% likely not to be Jean-Paul Sartre, we can talk about this kind of bad faith another time.

In actually good faith, however, I don't think I'm going to type up any kind of proposed solution. I think I know the first couple of steps that I'm going to take, and I'll update once they have been taken. At some point, I'll also have to finish those assignments, but just leaving the house once this week to do something that isn't Bioshock or Slings and Arrows or Dungeons and Dragons will be achievement enough.

What I will do is solicit anonymous comments. Even if you have a blogger sign-in or OpenID or whatever. How has procrastination made your life suck worse than it normally does? Have you tried to do anything about it? Will you?

-Loud! 

 

Still to come:

Run Lola Run: Critique of Existentialism?

An examination of various admixtures of hip-hop, or Can Nerdcore be Buck*****?

The Liberal Party, and why replacing Dion might be good for them, but not us. 

 

***** Last note, I swear. Watch the video. Once the male judge has finished speaking STOP WATCHING, but more importantly STOP LISTENING. I am not responsible for the damage that hearing Mary Murphy's godawful screech can inflict upon a person. Incidentally, while guest judge lil' C uses “buck” to refer specifically to physical performance, I'm fudging my definition to refer more generally to any external expression, mmmkay?

Far Cry 2: (if) Anything Goes (wrong with SecuROM, you're fucked)

Today's title is a not-so-clever play upon the title of one in a series of trailers for the inexplicably-named Far Cry 2. Inexplicably named?, you wonder, whatever could he mean? Put simply, Far Cry 2 has, besides being a shooter which takes place mostly out of doors with fairly remarkable human AI and semi-realistic weapon handling dynamics, nothing to do with Far Cry. Neither the game engine, nor the development team itself are constant between games. The closest analogue to the situation that exists with Far Cry, Far Cry 2, and Crysis was that of the Age of Empires series compared to the first Empire Earth. The latter was the far more audacious brainchild of original AoE developer Bruce Shelley, who split with Ensemble studios, whose plan for Age of Empires 2 was simply more of the same. Crysis in relation to Far Cry is very much like AoE 2 versus 1. Certainly some aspects of the design have been improved, but along the way the developers seemed to lose sight of what we all found so charming in the original. Where Crysis is essentially a punishing benchmark for the PC hardware elite, it looked to me as though FC2 was shaping up to be a little more innovative, a little less stale. I was (the operative word) looking forward to the ability to roam 50-odd square kilometers of map at my leisure, to experimenting with different approaches to combat, and to interacting with the various in-game factions.

Well, what really separates Far Cry from its successor in my mind is that I cannot, in good conscience, buy FC2. Even on Steam it is saddled with a 3-computer 5-time semi-refundable secuROM-based DRM solution. Let's break this down, shall we? Even if I buy the game on a platform with tough, integrated DRM, a platform that requires me to be connected to the internet, a platform that knows my name, a platform that TRACKS MY GAME-PLAYING HABITS...UbiSoft still doesn't think their IP is safe enough. For the record, if I'm going to go into the kind of trouble it must take to crack a Steam game, do they really think I'll stop there? SecuROM, like every other kind of DRM, has attracted the usual posse of gamer-hackers and pirate-hackers who for reasons ranging from legitimate (secuROM is notorious for butchering system performance and flat-out not working, or so I hear) to the morally ambiguous (they do it for the lulz) to the nefarious (read: piratical). So, what they are asking me to do is to potentially devalue the money I spent on the kind of kick-ass hardware one uses to play current games by chaining me to a stupid activation system that doesn't seem to offer any more practical security than Steam already does (you know, locks and honest folk and that...). Oh, but it DOES limit how much I can use their game. To me, this represents the height of irony. Game developers are going out of their way to create the potential for what they call “emergent gameplay”, they are trying to give the player more control over the interactive experience. At the same time, game publishers are working round-the-clock to limit the number of times you can install the games that YOU pay to use with YOUR money, and piracy continues unabated. In fact, piracy was marketed as ACTIVISM when Spore was released with unreasonable activation limits. “Make Spore the most pirated game in history,” was the rallying cry “show EA that this DRM shit does not fly with gamers”. I didn't pirate Spore, though. I can't say that after seeing gameplay past the cell stage that I really felt I even wanted to play it. Everywhere you see people variously toasting and lamenting the so-called decline of the PC as a platform for games. Everywhere you see developers blaming piracy, but I don't think for a moment that we should be so naïve. Games are getting bigger, prettier, louder....but shorter and costlier, in general. This has been a recognized pattern long before people started whining about piracy as they have in recent months. If you read the newsposts on Penny Arcade (I only read it for the articles, I swear!), you'll see that Tycho always says the same thing about PC gaming: people – not counting the small but vocal minority of hardware aficionados, ie. Yours truly – just want to play. They don't want to worry about the kind of issues that will necessarily cause problems on a platform so variable and diverse as the PC. Consoles are cheap, their games tend to sell better than PC titles, and for the most part they are idiot-proof. While the move towards hard drives and firmware updates and downloadable content may complicate the gaming console experience, I doubt that the “insert disc and play” functionality is going to go anywhere. Well, at least until game cartriges make their inevitable return to prominence, but even so maintenance will still be as simple as “blow on the contacts”. Truly, what would make the most sense for people who want a thriving market for games with the kind of complexity and indie content that only PC gaming can provide as present, the 90% of gamers who don't have a hard-on for their hardware should just buy Macs, thereby creating enough of a market to make development worthwhile. Macs, with their (generally) standardized hardware, could then move into direct competition with gaming consoles, and proceed to beat the stuffing right out of them. The power of Steve Jobs to make relatively unremarkable products look like Yaweh's own gadget collection, combined with the kind of market share that would allow Apple to exert serious power over hardware manufacturers (hell, they somehow have Intel half in their pocket already!) would combine to form a super-gaming entity that could somehow convince consumers to pay three times as much for a piece of hardware with identical capabilities and upgrade options to a gaming console. Of course, Apple's record of having pretty strict control over media (the plan not to allow third-party iPhone apps, anyone) might antagonize indie developers for a while, I think that the larger problem would be in the long term. The few of us who love to tinker with hardware would just suck it up and hack MacOS onto a gaming PC...but the supply of hardware would eventually dry up. The mac platform would, due to its homogeneous nature, be a potential coup for DRM, which could be encoded into ALL HARDWARE.

Where I'm going with this is that PC gaming would have to sacrifice the strengths of our platform in order to achieve mainstream success. It would lead to a momentary renaissance of gaming, but we would be effectively signing away our last vestiges of control over digital content in the process. The other extreme is the abandonment of DRM, making the PC attractive as a platform through an unofficial “try-before-you-buy” culture (for the honest folk, at least). The lifting of DRM restrictions would create a lot of good will in gamers, and it might even lead to a momentary jump in sales...but big-budget games would inevitably disappear from PC, which would become a sort of starting point for would-be game developers, releasing freeware and shareware content in a bid to land spots at a major label.

The reason I'm not going to buy Far Cry 2 is because I am following the third path, which I believe has the potential to lead us toward victory in our fight to remain a viable, free environment for gaming. Of course, it is marked as a “top seller” on Steam, so the fight may already be lost, but I object to the DRM enough that this won't change my decision. If gamers don't buy games that come with unreasonable terms of use (ie. The retail version of Bioshock at launch), game companies WON'T MAKE MONEY. When they decide to treat their customers like vermin. Pirating games may feel good, but it's not the answer. I contemplated buying FC2 and then pirating a version with the DRM removed, but UbiSoft would only see my money if I did that. They would not see the gamer, fighting to preserve his favourite hobby by any means necessary. They would only learn that they can get away with bullying us, and everyone who went to school knows that if you don't let the bully use you for his or her personal entertainment, if you refuse to react to their provocations, they will (hopefully) stop trying. If you continue to react, they'll only come back more and more often.

So if you're listening UbiSoft, you just LOST A SALE of Far Cry 2. I sincerely hope it's not the only one you lose.

In the interests of striking an emotional balance in this post, I shall now shift gears entirely.

To be succinct, I've got love on my mind. Stop. Did you click the link before continuing? If not, open it in a new tab and keep going. It is thematically consistent with what I am going to say, and it will also make the experience of reading this blog 100% more FUNKY.

DDR players who own Supernova 2 are excused now, although they're likely to have reached for their dance mat upon hearing the first strains of music after clicking the link.

Now that we're all groovin', I can continue. This thanksgiving marked for me an entire year of being single, possibly barring an incredibly mishandled affair around the holidays. You know who you are and in retrospect I'm really really really sorry, even though I'm pretty sure you're not holding a grudge. One year of being single has taught me that, well, I don't really like being single. It has also taught me that I don't hate being single either. If I were surrounded by happy relationships, or incredible-yet-too-intimidating prospects, I think I might be a wreck, but neither is the case. Being single is totally stable, and relatively functional. The impending visit of my Ex-girlfriend does, however, have me in a bit of a rush. I'd love to have a date for next weekend, not only for purposes of escaping the house, but as a show of strength, a defensive maneuver of sorts. Unfortunately, dating someone for those reasons is a violation of the second formulation of the categorical imperative – the long way of saying I am uncomfortable with using people. Relationships being organic as they are develop at uncertain rates, and with a week's notice I really don't have the highest of hopes. It's not as though I haven't been considering the issue since much earlier in the year, it's that I have yet to really find an individual of the female persuasion with whom I have the right kind of rapport, ie. The kind I can talk to naturally, without watching my words to make sure I'm not geeking out too hard. As you probably know, this would already be PRETTY RARE even if I wasn't beset with a terminal case of shy.

So boo-hoo, I don't really talk to girls. At least I don't pop my collars.

What I have at the moment are prospects, but nothing more. In each case there are too many unknowns to allow for a solid plan. Missing first year university here has been academically painless (although I think I'd be better off having taken FYP, that's another story), but it has the unfortunate side effect of alienating me from the social dynamics which have sprung up. All I know is that if people like my housemates they tend to be ok with me. This would be awesome if girls visited this place more than once or twice in EVER. The only other constant that I have become aware of is that if I meet someone at Dal, chances are it turns out they're a King's student anyhow. Some have voiced an opinion to the effect that this just goes to show that I attend the wrong school. I guess at least that when I meet girls at Dal my housemates will invariably know something about her.

Fifty bucks says that no matter who she is, it's always:

“Oh, her. She's dating a guy in my tutorial”

(or something to this effect)

• Loud!

PS. My heartache is over and indeed I can live without you.

PPS. Have you listened to Holy Fuck? That shit is bangin'!

PPPS. Maybe I should just take the hint* and get a haircut?

*assumption that there was a hint to be had? ASSUMED!

Holding out for a Hero

Fellow Haligonian and eminently more successful blogger La Canadienne has, with her latest post, caused something of a stir in the perpetually reverberating catacomb that is my mind. You see, I started to wonder: who would I consider my JG*? Who would I give anything to meet, to – dare I think it – speak to? Is there someone whose career or success I aspire to emulate? Possibilities start trickling in: Werner Von Braun, Burt Rutan, Richard Feynman, Freeman Dyson, Frank Herbert, Joe Strummer... death has done away with over half of these already. Randall Munroe, Joss Whedon, the cast of Firefly/Serenity/Farscape/Battlestar Galactica/Red Dwarf...all of these are at least alive, but I'm not sure I aspire to be very much like any of these people. I'm not certain I could tell them anything that I appreciate about their work that they haven't already heard from any number of screaming fans at conventions. I'm sure they'd appreciate the sentiment all the same, but I don't know if I would gain anything besides geek cred from any of these encounters.

As for those members of my first group who have yet to shuffle off this mortal coil, my concern is that I'm not enough of a scientist, mathematician or engineer to gain from the meeting. I could jabber excitedly about Dyson spheres or SpaceShip One for hours on end, of course, but I could not talk with them about these concepts on a level remotely approaching theirs. Of course I can never know something as well as the man or woman who created it, but I certainly never will if I can't talk through the math on a graduate level! Speaking of men OR women, how about some individual women for this list? Imogen Heap? Gorgeous, but I haven't the musical inclination to elevate such a meeting above heroine-worship. Elizabeth May? Now we're getting somewhere: I can talk politics, I can talk environmentalism, and leader of a federal party is certainly the kind of success I can imagine wanting to emulate. That being said, she's not as iconic as, say, Rachel Carson. Also on my list of unfortunately deceased women I would have liked to meet are Nellie McClung, Helen of Troy, Hedy Lamarr, and Queen Elizabeth I. Really, though, I'd just like to know what those women were like, I'm not sure if there would be enough common ground (or, in the case of Helen of Troy, there might not even be a woman to begin with!) to make a meeting worthwhile.

Notorious figures in game development, ie. Gabe Newell and Ken Levine might be cool choices, but – as you will hear them and others say repeatedly – game development is really a team effort, so if you're only allowed to meet one part of the team, you're not really getting the whole picture. Not that I wouldn't enjoy meeting either of these two; I'd love to ask Gabe Newell about where he thinks gaming and digital distribution are going, and I have a pretty endless litany of questions about Bioshock that I'd love answered. Even so, my lack of coding knowledge could certainly put me on the disadvantage here, just as it would with Dyson or Rutan.

What I think the problem is with my process here is that I'm thinking about famous, or at the very least notorious people. These people are, or were, in the spotlight for reasons of extreme proficiency, competence, and vision. Speaking of vision, I think I'd like to meet Adam Smith, John Locke, and Karl Marx. These people interact (or interacted) with others who were likewise extraordinary. I think that I would be underqualified to meet these people, in a sense. I would be approaching them as inferior-to-superior, not as anything so proper as student-to-instructor. Goodness, I can barely hold my own against my housemates in most debates! The other factor is that since I'm at present very uncertain of what I desire for my future, I can't really narrow my focus to people I would like to follow in the footsteps of, so to speak. While I don't think I would limit my choices like that, I'm working on the assumption that this is about a hypothetical one-time wish sort of deal. I want to choose the person to whom I will have the absolute most to converse about, and the absolute most to gain from and share with. Of course, there's never a perfect person like this. I doubt there ever will be.

...ok, so David Bowie is perfect, but remember that part where I'm not musically inclined?

So, instead of calling it quits, I have a new idea. If anyone I don't already know is reading this, and thinks that they might gain something by meeting me (or that I could gain something by meeting them), leave me a comment, let me know. My blog email should be listed on my profile page if you want to send a private message. Of course, meeting people from the internet is pretty much one of the worst ideas ever, even if they're not actually CRAZY STAKER KILLING MACHINES, so the idea isn't to just give out my address and phone number to anyone who decides that it would be great fun to, say, kill me. If I remember to check my blogger email, there is a decided likelihood of email correspondence, though.

I think that in our haste to hoist the “greatest” up on our shoulders, we are in danger of missing the value in the rest of us in the crowd. Here begins my little experiment to see if I can't find some of that value.

Loud!

*JG = Jian Ghomeshi, of CBC's "Q"

PS. La Canadienne, I downloaded some Holy Fuck to see what it was all about, and I'm pretty sure (will reassess when it's not 3AM) I am enjoying the holy fuck out of it :P

man, now I'm sad for missing their show!

I search for traps!

Yesterday, I got over a minor hurdle. Nothing life-changing but hey, this is a blog; trivial stuff like this is pretty much the name of the game (however much I have tried to avoid it, for the most part). So, what did I do? I GM-ed a one-shot RPG. For the (likely few, but you never know) confused members of the audience, no I did not destroy an American-made car with ex-Soviet antitank weaponry, or anything like that. People who know what I'm talking about just skip the rest of this paragraph to save time. GM = Game Master, a more generic term for the Dungeon Master of Dungeons and Dragons fame/infamy. Effectively the narrator and puppetmaster of all characters not directly controlled by the players, the GM is tasked with turning graph paper and polyhedral dice into interactive fiction. In this case, however, the game was a lot faster and looser than I have described thus far. This is where “one-shot” comes in; a one-shot Role Playing Game (RPG) is the tabletop gaming equivalent of a one-night stand. A one-shot RPG is spur-of-the-moment, it is not a bastion of great originality, and well, ok so you don't usually wake up in bed with a stranger when you play one-shot RPGs, but you get the idea: they're fast, fun, then over & done.

I had refrained from GM-ing a campaign in the past for the simple reason that I wasn't sure I would be any good at it. Pen and paper games are vastly open-ended compared to their computerized brethren, and the GM needs to be able to keep up with as many options as he or she is giving his or her players – nominally lots. The GM has to improvise dialogue, make up setting information if the players ask unanticipated questions (or make up everything if you're doing what we did and built a world as we went). This requires a skillset probably not all that different from improvisational theatre, and goodness knows I am not known for a strong acting aptitude! I lack the inclination to play characters, on stage or in life, and hence I see myself as having something of a limited dramatic range – a serious boon for a GM. Yesterday, though, I decided that I'd take the plunge and see what happened.

Turns out that fun happened. It wasn't perfect, but I was constrained by both a time limit, and by my choice of roleplaying system. A perennial favourite of ours for one-shot campaigns is Risus, a simple humour-focused game in which characters are built entirely of cliches. While simple to the point of elegance, Risus is in need of a more interesting action resolution system. I'm always sort of dissatisfied with the “roll dice to accomplish an action” model for RPGs, because you'll take your freshly-created badass into the game, and you'll miss. You'll fail to knock down the odd door, you'll fall down a flight of slippery stairs...sure you may be a wimpy level one, but who wants to go into a campaign with that kind of mindset about a character? No, you're a fucking monster badass space-ranger, no matter what the rulebook says! This is where I like the (also flawed) Wushu model, called the Principle of Narrative Truth (PoNT). What the players say happened happened just like they said. Of course, certain things are not allowed (players and the GM all have veto power in case a player gets out of line), but what the dice tell you is never “you fell on your ass lol”, but instead just how much closer to solving the conflict at hand based on your actions. So you can do epic flying leap-cuts to dice your foes, or make that ridiculously improbable death sta—I mean generic space battlestation trench run without fear of getting impaled on your own sword or proton torpedoes when you roll a 1. What CAN happen if you “fail” the roll are complications. Sure you chopped those demons to bits, but now the bits are all scurrying after you, each having formed into a miniature-scale demon of its own. Maybe that exhaust port was a red herring? Maybe that battlestation blows up, and you're face to face with an imperial battlefleet? But no matter what you roll, your character is still a proper badass. If and when I do run further one-shot campaigns, I believe I will likely employ the PoNT/ Veto system for narration, with a corresponding rewrite of the dice results table. If you're wondering why I wouldn't just go whole-hog and use Wushu, it's because the number of dice you roll under said rules is based on how much detail you describe in your actions, leading to gameplay slower than retarded glaciers. That being said, detail will be encouraged in any system using the PoNT, but mechanically rewarding excessive detail with invincibility...not so cool.

If you're wondering, the game we played involved a pair of rebels attempting to overthrow a pan-galactic hybrid of monarchy and anarchy using a stolen prototype stealth ship and an awful lot of advanced nanotechnology. Player characters included a sociopathic deposed nobleman, a psychopathic mad scientist, and later a wandering space minstrel (who entered too close to the end of the session/game to be leveraged for anything sufficiently awesome, but that's just another thing to improve upon next time).

The moral of the story is, sometimes you should just do stuff and you won't suck at it. Really!

-Loud!

Tragic Post-Script: Even though you're never supposed to continue a one-shot campaign, I now have all kinds of sweet ideas for where the narrative could have gone!

EDIT: There is another reason why I prefer Wushu's method to that of Risus which I forgot to cover in the original post. Determining the difficulty of an action where the dice separate success and failure feels too abstract to me. An easy action for one character could prove very difficult to another based on skillset, personality, etc. The issue is, those variables are supposed to be encoded in the characters themselves, leaving the poor GM to figure out an objective difficulty of an action, which is absolutely fine in a prepared campaign, but a little much when I have to keep the action moving and make up the world simultaneously. Rolling degrees of success streamlines the process, although I'm not certain we're out of the woods yet. The thing about Risus is that it's very likely someone will have a particular attribute which they can only roll one die. Primary attributes tend to be more like 4 dice. Since 5 is the target number in basic Risus for an easy action, you can see that one die isn't really all that useful. In the same way, no matter how cool an action the player concocts based on the little trait that could, it's not going to get them very far when they can only roll as high as 6 on a scale that goes up to about 30 (5 dice in an attribute is not generally given to starting heroes, but it will happen eventually). Perhaps one-die traits could be treated as drawbacks, with 2, or even 3 dice representing the proficiency of an average individual. 3-18 on a scale of 1-30 is about perfect for most actions, with the most common rolls being 10 and 11. Certainly, this system would allow for somewhat less variety in character proficiency, but the idea of a one-shot campaign is to have fun. Any game that can be sabotaged by a round of bad luck (I'm looking at you, Munchkin) is too much of a risk to justify the time investment when you're looking for a quick laugh and a silly narrative in which you stomp all kinds of intergalactic ass with your massive laser space boots.

"Girls are pretty / Girls are nice / Take your chances / Roll the dice"

Snake Eyes.

Fuck.

-Loud

Annihilated Ammeters, Broken Beakers, Crushed Crucibles

It's one of those glorious near-autumn days, the sort which ought to last for weeks. It's one of those superb edge-of-summer moments, in which the leaves are falling but the mercury isn't. It's that very instant in which the heart - not the brain - becomes the seat of awareness, and it aches with the beauty of the world. This is the very essence of life, condensed beyond belief yet in no way wanting for detail.

I was there, in the University Quad. And all I could think about was how absolutely shitty a Chem lab can make one feel. Missing the first one (having transferred into the course a little late) was bad enough, but now the weight of everything I am expected to have weighs heavily on my shoulders. It wouldn't be so bad if I had a fucking clue as to where I might be able to procure any of it! In an ideal world, I love Chemistry. The prof in his classroom sheds much-sought-after light on important questions, such as "what is the basic nature of matter?", and "what reactions allow life to function as it does?", which span the realms of science and metaphysics. The grandeur of life is so much more appreciable when one understands that life, however briefly, defies entropy. No reaction does, of course, and when the sun burns out, all will be lost...but for our brief span on this Earth, our very presence screams "I should not be, yet I AM!". Perhaps we will discover, in time, that life is a natural state of things, and that we all play our part in grinding down the Universe into homogenous dust. Indeed, it is likely we do. Still, the easiest path would be for the Earth to become a lifeless rock, as Mars has. This being not the case makes us - for the moment - something special.

TAs, on the other hand, don't so much illuminate as turn the FBI-surplus interrogation lamp to 11, and help you answer questions like "why aren't you prepared?", and "how did you add the silver nitrate if you hadn't calculated how much was needed yet?". The answer to the latter is that I didn't, the other TA came by while I was number-crunching away - the only sanctuary I had available - and threw our experiment together on the hot plate (at least, that's what I saw out of the corner of my eye...). TA's discuss within earshot of you how to give you a mark less than zero for pre-labs, etc. The best a TA can say is not "why, you were late to this class. Here, have a list of stuff you need", but "I'm giving you a 1 on your pre-lab because you had something scribbled on a piece of paper". Thanks a fucking load, buddy. I'm completely disoriented, I have no lab notebook, nor the lab procedures, and you're acting like I've been here from day 1 and I'm an incompetent!

Fortunately for my TAs, I've come to a realization which will spare them the trouble.

When people ask me about my science marks (hell, about any marks), I change the subject. A cousin of mine criticized my schedule for being "too light on the math and science". To be honest, I haven't the heart to tell them that I've given up on the both of them. I'm not taking Chemistry because I'm particularly facinated by it, I'm taking it because I had a dream once, and I've not been able to let go. For years, I knew what I wanted to be: I was going to be an Aerospace Engineer. I was going to be the next Burt Rutan, I was going to follow in the footsteps of Von Braun. I was gonna build fuckin' SPACESHIPS, and I was going to be the chief engineer on a Star-Trek-Style-Riverboat-Fantasy-In-Space. I never really asked myself if I thought it was possible, I even held onto it as my Math and Science marks fell with every successive year. The clues were hidden all along: I've never been good at logic puzzles, you might as well give me the Gordian Knot and no sword as pass me a Su Doku, and I've never acutally solved a rubik's cube. I've never done any model rocketry, and I'm about as mechanically inclined as a slime mould. I'm so bad at Science, in fact, that I DID NOT PLACE in the Aventis Biotech Challenge. I did research on Ginseng and U87MG glioblastomas, and I don't even know if the judges placed us higher than a group whose project name was "Hot Potato" (which, incidentally, came off as less scientific than a potato clock)! If people like me ever got to designing and building spaceships, the Astronaut fatality rate would begin to resemble that of Los Angeles.

I'm a rational Atheist, and for all that, Science still hates me. What gives?

So, please don't ask me about all those spaceships I'll never build, or all those chemical equilibria that I'll never solve. Ask me about what I want for the future, now that I think I'm ready to let go of the past. I'll never stop loving science: Its rational inquiery, the steady improvement of human life through technology, not to mention the best world view there is...but I can't go back. It was an abusive relationship, and it ends here

I am LOUD

I am NOT a Scientist

Not Anymore