The lows are low, but the highs are home

1st January 2012

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2011 recap

I went through my archive and picked out the posts that I think are most essential to my life in 2011, and the complete list is below. They’re all tagged recap, alongside the posts from 2010. I wouldn’t say they’re the most well-written, or the most interesting, of my posts from 2011. I wouldn’t even say they’re worth your time to go back and read. It’s just a bunch of bullshit I wrote about myself, really. But if someone wanted the quick version of my life in 2011, this would be it. You can probably extrapolate from what I wrote about not being perfectly efficient in my work to the fact that I haven’t been writing as much. I don’t have much to say about these posts that I haven’t already said in my 2011 In Review post (last item on the list), so go read that. Otherwise, I stand by what I wrote as a representation of me at that point in time.

• My name in shining lights (in which I become part of the Language and Brain Lab)
• I’m STILL not good at managing my time/forcing myself to work
• In which a banquet forced me to confront my introversion
• In the meantime, take these pills
• Morality of used games (is buying a game used as bad as downloading it? probably)
• You have [3] games remaining (where I reveal my quest to finish every Final Fantasy game - current status: 50% finished with FF VI)
• Username Origin Stories
• Old Friend, New Roommate (I’m still happy about the decision, for the same reasons I mention here)
• Improve the world, and be happy! (in which I become satisfied with my life)
• Catherine & Me
• Catherine Pt 2: Love Should Be Selfless
• The Catherine & Cheating Saga, Pt 3
• How I Got My Android Phone (it was a big deal to me, jeez)
• Not Antisocial, Just Shy
• Hey Matt, Whatcha Up To (but mainly the anxiety stuff)
• Too Busy Planning for Later, To Think About Right Now
• 2011 in review

Oh, one thing that might be notable: there’s a lot of stuff I wanted to write about this year, but felt like I didn’t have the time. Looking through my archive, a pretty common theme is “I did have a better post, but take this for now” or “I’ve got great stuff coming, just you wait!!!” and none of it ever materialized. That sucks, but it is what it is. Again, I’m not totally sure it’ll get better. But I’ve got at least a dozen drafts waiting in the wings, and hopefully I’ll put the finishing touches on some of those. I may write a post about my plans for 2012, but whether or not I post it will depend on how boring it is. If it’s not up in a few days, then 2012 is probably just going to be more of the same.

31st December 2011

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2011 in review: I got edumacated

A little story about the title of this post: I took LING 3002, Phonetics I, this semester. It wasn’t necessarily my cup of tea, but that doesn’t mean it was a bad class. There was a lot of data and practical application involved, and I’m at the point where I’ve been thinking about the phonetics of British English thanks to Xenoblade. I can even develop analyses that provide the right results without giving any of the right answers! In particular, we had one assignment involving “Homeric infixation” where I (at least, I think I did) provided a more-or-less correct analysis based on consonant and vowel clusters rather than stress patterns. So here’s to my continuing edumacation!

        If you look at my archive, there’s a pretty sharp decline in the frequency of my posts over time. At the very beginning, mid-2010, I was doing 20-30 posts per month. That was my last year of high school, and around the time when I’d stopped working at the local convenience store to focus on school. My first semester of university was more or less the same, but then second semester it was down to 10-15 posts per month. Around the same throughout the summer. I’ve practically disappeared this semester, though - I’ve got about 30 posts total from September through to the end of December. The reason for this is pretty obvious - university. I still haven’t really figured out a proper balance to get the most out of my work and my play, and “work” time is still being inflated by procrastination. The work gets done, and my grades haven’t gone down, either. But I’ve been getting more and more distant as I supposedly spend all of my time “working” and then have no dedicated relaxation periods or time for socializing.

        I’m not happy about that, but there’s a pretty obvious pattern - work gets done a lot faster when I’m motivated to do it. When it came to lab work, programming assignments, and studying for my intro to cognitive science class - I was there at all times and totally focused. But it was a challenge with my other classes. That’s probably bad. I’d say being able to do things you don’t enjoy and just generally be dedicated is good. On the other hand, I’m probably going to wind up doing more work that I enjoy as time goes on, not less. Either way, I’m planning to work on it.

        So while I’ve been stumbling in every other area of my life, school is going pretty well. Working at the Language and Brain Lab has been fantastic, and I’m working on a short write-up of what I’ve learned. I think you’ll be allowed to see that when it’s ready. Along with some promo photos of me looking snazzy! Aside from that, the seemingly disparate areas of my degree have started to connect in important ways. I’m starting to feel fairly competent in a number of domains - cognitive science as a whole, linguistics, and programming too (though maybe not computer science, I’m definitely lacking when it comes to algorithms).

        In reference to an article I read earlier this year, it feels like I’m getting an education, not just a degree. For all the people I knew in high school who agonized over where they wanted to go and would be willing to fork over ridiculous sums of money to go to a “better school”, you’d think the degree is all that matters. But if they don’t capitalize on the opportunities available, the way I’m doing at Carleton, no amount of money will help. While I had a brief crisis when I first read that article in April this year, I think it says a lot about how I’ve changed over the year that it now makes me feel better. Including books for two semesters and everything else, I’m probably totalling $7,000 per year of university. Four years for the degree, and I’m really not sure I could get the equivalent elsewhere.

        The only catch to all of this is that I’m probably failing horribly at a number of promises I once made. I said that I would live for the people in my life and find meaning in them, yet I’m mostly focused on myself. I promised I’d always be there for the people I care about, but now I expect them to come to me. I’ve said a lot of things I probably thought were trivial at the time, but I’ve now forgotten them so thoroughly I can only say I’m likely not staying true to my word. This kind of follows on from spending too much time “working,” but that doesn’t make it alright.

        I’ve upset people occasionally, sometimes severely so, but I think what’s worse is all the things I didn’t do. I don’t know if that’s going to change in the future. That’s probably what’s really important here. But I have no guarantees. So while it doesn’t really mean anything, know that I am truly sorry. I sincerely wish I’d been better in a dozen ways, and that I had taken the time to reach out instead of withdrawing. I’m no longer sure that doing too little is better than doing too much. For the people who still read all of this, you know who you are. To the people who cared enough to start reading, but decided to stop - I’m sorry about that, too.

        So here’s to 2011. I learned a lot, and I played a lot of Final Fantasy. Looking forward to 2012 and the downfall of Kefka. 

Tagged: personalrecap

28th December 2011

Text reblogged from The Great Crate with 639,128 notes

Please read: Due to a high amount of unused blogs on Tumblr, we are deleting every blog that does not reblog this by January first. People have been asking for taken URL’s and this is what we are doing.

thegreatcrate:

xsarahjoy:

DAMMIT, STAFF. 

Lol just gonna reblog this on all my saved urls.

 well, id hate to be the person that didnt see this.

only reblogging since Staff is the source.

::reblogs::

Here, let me just put “staff.tumblr.com” as the content source and make it TOTALLY LEGIT.

Considering this post isn’t on the staff tumblr going back to August, and since it sounds like a TOTALLY AWESOME CHAIN E-MAIL YOU SHOULD FORWARD TO ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS in the first place…

Reblog this post or you will die in seven days!

[totally true, don’t make me warn you again]

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In response to the (unrelated) bottom half of vael’s almost instantaneous post along the same lines: I wouldn’t say inherent, because I certainly don’t think it’s genetic. “Inherent” in the sense that it’s a part of a given culture’s values (or a subsection of it), sure. You could make an argument for it being truly inherent based on the common development of patriarchies, but you could also argue a lot of silly thing based on inconclusive “evidence” and without any cause-and-effect connection. Plz to be showing me *at least* some correlations between genes only in men and their objectification of women (or genes in either gender that correlate with objectification of the other gender/people in general). Then we’ll talk about “inherent.”

If I’m just arguing about semantics here, it’s to illustrate an important difference between the potential meanings. I genuinely think it’s important to point out the problems with “every person who is X that I’ve met is like Y, therefore all X must be Y”. It’s a fatally flawed argument from the start, considering the sample is almost never representative. I also think cultural influence is a very likely confound for a lot of these sweeping generalizations, so that’s a second reason to make the point.

So… If I am being a jerk, those are my reason. Which is entirely tangential to the topic at hand but I felt like it was an important point to make.

(Source: staff)

26th December 2011

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Now available: TMI

[or at least, a more severe case of TMI than this tumblr already has]

I have this thing about keeping track of what I’ve seen/read/played/listened to. It helps to find new things I might like, too - Last.fm is a prime example. It keeps track of music I play, then puts together a list of similar stuff. For my own benefit, I’ve started using a site that does similar recommendations for anime and manga, and another for books in general. Conveniently, this also lets me share this information with anyone who cares to know what I’m interested in. And if you don’t, that’s ok too! You don’t have to keep track of every book I’ve ever read. But maybe you’d like to know what books I haven’t read and might like to read, so now you can do that. Then you’ll be able to shower me with gifts that won’t make me say “oh, you didn’t have to get me anything!”

I’m linking to them on my main tumblr page now, but I’ll put some links below as well. I guess there’s sort of a creepy aspect to having all this information available, but I’m not terribly worried. I figure that if someone arrives at my tumblr from any of my other profiles, they’re volunteering to sift through far more information about me than they really need. We probably already have some interests in common anyway, and this lets me share more information about that thing. So let’s talk about Dune, or the Malazan Book of the Fallen series, or whatever article I read the other day through Read It Later. Seriously! I’d much rather talk about my favourite nerdy stuff than my latest assignments or whatever else.

• AnimePlanet profile: Tracks anime and manga, from stuff I’ve watched to stuff I want to watch. Yes, I watched all 220 episodes of the original run of Naruto in junior high (but I never started on Shippuuden!). Along with 130 episodes of Bleach. Apparently, I’ve spent two weeks straight on ridiculous shonen anime.
• Goodreads profile: Books! I’ve got four different “shelves”: What I’m currently reading, what I’ve read, what I own and plan to read, and what I’d like to read but don’t own yet. I’ll probably never rate most of the books listed there, because I read them so long ago. I’m undecided on whether I’m going to rate things at all, honestly, but I thought I’d start with some 5-star ratings for a few series I really enjoy.
• Last.fm profile: It’s been set up for a while, and I posted about it before, but I may as well link to it. It’s mainly meant to be a catalogue of all the different music I like, since I usually listen to my entire library on random, making the listening frequencies useless. But you can also see that I’ve listened to nothing but the soundtrack to Nier for the past few weeks. I’ll be writing about that soon, but let’s just say there’s a reason I had never <3’d any songs on my profile before.
• Read It Later archive: An RSS feed of articles I’ve read recently. Yes, it’s inelegant and nowhere near as useful as the other services. But I’ve moved away from posting things I thought were interesting in favour of just talking to people about things I know they’d be interested in (which doesn’t mean I think nobody else is interested, but maybe you would be and I never knew!). In reality, it’s going to be fairly useless - nobody’s going to keep track of all the junk I read just to find the occasional gem. There’s way too much information with no organization or context. But it takes zero effort for me to promote, since I’m already using the service (which I highly recommend), and you never know.

Also, I’m considering changing the layout of my tumblr page to ideally give a better first impression. I’m pretty sure no more than two or three people every actually see it, and one of those people is me when I want to access my tagged posts. So uh… Yeah. If you didn’t know, my main tumblr page has a tag cloud on the left side! Which is useful if you don’t share all of my interests.

Tagged: linksanimebooksmusic

25th December 2011

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BCN Christmas Loot Mk II

BLAST FROM THE PAST

This year, my brother and I are with my dad for Christmas. My mom went home to spend Christmas with her family, but before she left we did half-a-Christmas. So my gifts from her, my grandparents, and one or two “from Santa”:

• A pre-order for the limited edition of FF XIII-2 (once bitten, twice excited about the changes they’re making)
• An IOU for a copy of Valkyria Chronicles 2 for PSP
• How to Do Things with Videogames, by Ian Bogost (kindle)
• Reality is Broken, by Jane McGonigal (kindle)
• Punished by Rewards, by Alfie Kohn (kindle)
• The Googlization of Everything (and why we should worry), by Siva Vaidhyanathan (kindle)
• The Blade Itself, by Joe Abercrombie (kindle, First Law #1)
• Newsgames: Journalism at Play, by Ian Bogost (kindle)

Oh, and I picked out the Game of Thrones board game as a gift for my brother and we’ve had a lot of fun with it. Enough that I’d consider it partially a gift for me, which is the good thing about doing your own gift shopping. If you’ve got a group of people willing to sit down and play a really political game for 3+ hours, I’d definitely recommend it. Imagine Risk if there were no dice rolls, and manipulating people is a far better strategy than outright destroying them. You tell them you’ll guard their back as long as it suits you, and when it doesn’t…. well.

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For our second Christmas, which was on the proper date, I mainly got more books, but physical ones this time:

• Valkyria Chronicles 2, for real
• A Theory of Fun for Game Design, by Raph Koster
• The Golden City, by John Twelve Hawks (Fourth Realm trilogy #3)
• Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation, by Michael Zielenziger
• Before They Are Hanged, by Joe Abercrombie (First Law #2)
• Last Argument of Kings, by Joe Abercrombie (First Law #3)

My personal gift to my brother was Penny Arcade: Gamers vs Evil, another double-gift. We played it before going to bed, and I had fun with it. I can’t say how it compares to other deckbuilding games, but turns are very quick once you get used to it and the cards interact with each other in some pretty interesting ways. For example, I won the last game we played using the Carl  hero, from the Automata strips. His ability makes the most expensive types of cards - Boss Loot - cheaper by one. There’s another card, Broodax In Disguise (not for the faint of heart - it’s an alien wearing a person’s body), that has a value of 1 when you play it, OR a value of 3 if you intend to put those points towards buying Boss Loot.

Whenever I failed to have enough to buy a Boss Loot, I bought more Broodax. Eventually, I got hands that - out of six cards - three of them are Broodax in Disguise.

Needless to say, I acquired a good chunk of phat lootz, which won me the game.

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Honourable mention goes to a couple of gifts I could only get shipped to the US, so my aunt brought them to my mother while she was visiting. So when she gets home, I’ll get two gifts that you may find very strange: a shell replacement for my DS Lite (a few hours of tinkering, which may ruin the machine!) and a bundle of empty cases for PSP games. Anyway, I’m weird like that. Both of those things were pretty cheap, and I’ll be happy to have them. I can replace the sticker-covered cases from PSP games I bought used, and if all goes well, be the owner of a non-broken red and black DS. Woo.

(also, does anyone still say woot? I have the strangest desire to start saying it, just because)

Tagged: booksgamingBCN CHRISTMAS LOOT