The lows are low, but the highs are home

Some assorted stuff today. Again, I would have finally typed up my prom post, but I un-gave up on getting the other pictures I was missing because my english teacher said she’d want a copy of the picture I got with her, so that will come SOME DAY MAYBE OR MAYBE I SHOULD JUST MAKE A POST WITH WHAT I’VE GOT, I DON’T KNOW. I guess if I don’t do it tomorrow, it’ll be so late as to be useless. Two weeks late is a bit much. I’ve already got today’s post planned out, so oh well!

First is an interview with Polar Bear Club, which is cool because they discuss how they’ve been helped by the advertising power of the internet, rather than hurt by music piracy, but the real highlight for me is this story:

Your new album is coming out on Red Leader Records this month. Where did the name “Sometimes Things Just Disappear” come from?

We were in the studio and having a really tough time coming up with a memorable/cool/meaningful name that we could all agree on. Actually, pretty much the only thing we EVER agree on is that Taco Bell rules. So we were well in the midst of a competition amongst ourselves that we affectionately dubbed the “Taco Bell Challenge,” during which we all tried to eat one of every single item on the menu over the course over our studio time. As you could probably guess, no one finished and we were all pretty miserable for having tried. But one of the days when some of the guys went to order some tacos, they had a really huge order and were a little short on money, and they had a pretty awkward encounter with a really slick 17 year-old manager guy in a suit who turned out to be one of the best individuals any of us have ever encountered. Our old bass player, Greg, was trying to order his Mexican Pizza and was surprised at the price, and told the manager he was short…to which our hero replied, “you know what? Sometimes things just disappear…” and proceeded to take out a mysterious card and swipe it, giving Greg all of his food for free. Manager dude…if you read this, we love you, and sorry if this gets you fired.

I wish I could be slick 17-year old manager guy who’s comfortable enough with his job that he can do whatever the hell he wants. I do not wish to fail to have that job, however, and so I won’t go looking for it.

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        Next up is an article about how pirating books hurts the industry. In the middle, when she mentions what happens when a publishing house loses money, that scares me. Not having money means they can’t continue to make money, which basically means bad things in the future unless they get really lucky, and I don’t want that to happen to any of the series, authors, or publishers I really like.

        Then the part about the money she actually makes scares me, because it makes me terrified about the prospect of ever living off of my writing, which I never honestly planned to do, but it was nice to think I had the option! She says she “wrote rough drafts, then did edits (in one case, grueling edits), copy edits, and final pass edits. I wrote back copy and front copy, and acknowledgements and dedications. I maintained a website, I blogged, I did copious interviews, I ran contests, I travelled and spoke at whatever convention would have me. I Tweeted, and Facebooked, and paid for a launch party, swag, and postage for review copies and bookplates.” For $25,000. Three books, if you have never in your entire life read a book, is a lot of writing. Many authors I read release at most a book every year, though perhaps theirs are much longer than hers, and perhaps as well their niche is a much stronger one.

        I can’t imagine I would magically become a Steven Erikson or a Robert J. Sawyer overnight, and from some of the other things I read the day I found this about how brutal it is being an author who doesn’t sell hundreds of thousands of copies (have I posted that stuff? I don’t even know, man) I find myself no longer considering writing novels as a career. Writing as part of a greater project, where my work is part of a whole and I’ll still get paid relatively well if nobody buys the product, is still an option, but you can’t just stumble onto those jobs and unfortunately my chance to be Anthony Burch has already passed.

        Then there’s how getting paid an advance actually works. “For keep in mind that an advance is just that: an advance on royalties. So I won’t make another penny on my first three novels until I pay back my advance.” Got that? You get paid with a loan. Then, some day, if you become rich and famous, you get some actual money of your own. Until then, you will sweat blood and books for your masters. However, the internet, as shown by the Polar Bear Club interview, offers many wonderful opportunities for alternative means of success. Perhaps I could sell e-books of my novel to generous strangers until I make enough money to print them off out of my own pocket and make something of a profit. Perhaps I could give my books away and ask for donations. Maybe a major change to the publishing industry is looming on the horizon, waiting to be unleashed the day I get the freedom to write for a living. Who knows?

        The ordeal involved to become a famous author only gets worse, according to the rest of the post, but it’s all there if you want to read it. The main subject is, vaguely, piracy, and so my responses to what she’s said follows.

        I’m one of those people that will go into their local bookstore and actually look for books to buy. I’ve spent many hundreds of dollars on books, and I don’t regret any of it. I don’t expect much for my $15-30. I want, essentially, 2-4 hours worth of entertainment. It’s what I paid for. Generally, I get more than that. That’s awesome. I often buy random books and continue to read everything that author writes until I accidentally forget they exist. I bought The Sleeper Awakes by H.G. Wells because a couple of songs I have reference it, even though Project Gutenberg has it for free. In the future, I plan to read through the “1001 books to read before you die” and, if I can, own many of them. I also plan to have a somewhat impressive collection of books with which to intimidate future acquaintances.

        I have, however, pirated two series of books. One is the Haruhi Suzumiya books, only a few of which are translated officially, and I get the impression they’re not amazing anyway? I’d have a hard time tracking them down and a harder time reading them in public because they’re all fluffy looking. So I suffer through a terribly translated .pdf and it’s ok because I don’t know if I’d get $10-15 worth of neat out of them. The other thing I’ve downloaded is all of the Discworld books, all 30-something of them, and like the Haruhi books they’re pretty short and stuff. They’d probably run me like $10 each - nearly $400 - for like 100-200 pages each I think? Maybe 300, I don’t know.

        But I can get a trilogy of Drizz’t books for $30, which is easily 1000+ pages - i.e. a fair bit more value. If I were buying books, Discworld would be at the very bottom of my list. Like all the music I’ve pirated, I likely would never have paid any money for those things. I don’t need them, and in fact I haven’t read through any of the books I’ve downloaded. I don’t have an ebook reader, and I have a hard time sitting down to read a 200 page .pdf file in front of my monitor. So the fact that I downloaded those books just shows a slight interest on my part, and if it turns out that I’m wrong, and these books are books I would be proud to own and display - I will gladly go out and buy them, no matter how hard they are to find.

Despite the cool things you can do with bombing people and showing them awesome and interesting sites using DP cards and Portals, I think Missions and puzzles are probably the greatest part of The Nethernet.

        Here’s the basic set-up: a Mission is created by any player, usually a Pathmaker, who has something to show or teach people. It’s created by linking a number of Lightposts together, and I don’t believe there’s a maximum limit… You leave a message about the page connected to the Lightpost, explaining briefly why you brought them there. You click a button to go to the next post, or back to see one you just visited. You can stash puzzle crates to make people research the site you’ve led them to, and later (level 7 as a Pathmaker) you can create Puzzle Posts that require the player to answer a question correctly in order to proceed through the mission. I don’t think you should overuse them, but you can use them to highlight an important point. Out of a ten-part mission, make the last a Puzzle Post and ask something to check if they really paid attention.

        You can teach someone how to play a game, or their class, correctly - show them the game’s homepage, then the game’s page for that class, then maybe a post/guide on gamefaqs and some youtube videos of high-level PvP with helpful notes in it. You can show someone your top ten ultra-deathcore bands, although those missions never did very well because the people who made them were just advertising their favourite bands rather than trying to make an awesome mission.

        You could also tell a story with a Mission. Write up a story, use the Lightposts to guide them from page to page - don’t give them the option to change pages on the site, and don’t name it page1.html and page2.html. Add puzzle posts to make a point, add puzzle crates so they research interesting things you’ve mentioned.

        Some people will roleplay their Nethernet characters, and there’s a lot of cool things you can do with that too. You can be a vacant minded Seer, gleefully hopping through portals at the first site of a glowing blue vortex. Or you can be a righteous Vigilante, out for revenge. Maybe you’re a wise Pathmaker, eager to share your knowledge with others. I had an idea once where I’d make a number of puppet accounts and stage a big story on The Nethernet’s forums and through the game itself. I was going to make cryptic posts and riddles with various accounts, and use puzzle crates and more to lead (or confuse) people. I didn’t have the time back then, though, so maybe some day soon…

        Here’s the introduction mission for the game, to give you an idea of how to create a decent mission. Careful about switching tabs or taking Portals or otherwise losing track of the mission, because unfortunately the game isn’t perfect about picking up on these things… There are a number of missions created as part of a contest to teach the game to newer players showing the dos and don'ts of different classes, and those are also good to give you an idea of what you can do with the game.

        Remember the metaphorical reason behind using Lightposts for missions: you’re lighting a path through the dark reaches of the internet, illuminating a safe path to guide and enlighten.

        Edit: Start from here for a cool chain of Portals that recites the poem about the Jabberwocky from Alice in Wonderland.

Alright, so my speech is roughly ready, homework is all caught up, and now I’m ready to tumblr. This may be long, but I’ll try not to go overboard. One interesting link right now, more over the next few days or something. Then random thoughts.

http://mjroseblog.typepad.com/buzz_balls_hype/2007/03/titles_the_reso.html
http://mjroseblog.typepad.com/buzz_balls_hype/2007/03/titles_part_2_a.html

        Above links are about the importance of titles. In summary, because honestly there’s only the one interesting part in the entire article: a title must have resonance with the audience in order to work. There are two kinds of resonance: automatic, which evokes something already relevant to the audience. Can be hit or miss, but when it does resonate with someone, it will tell them instantly something about the book and draw them to it. A strong one for me is the song Hollow Place by Polar Bear Club, which has such intense imagery for me that it sends shivers down my spine every time I hear the chorus and I ran home to look up the lyrics immediately after I heard it while driving home from school.

        Come to think of it, I guess album, band, and song names rely almost solely on automatic resonance. The main exception would be concept albums, like The Power of the Dragonflame. Complete crap for a title, until you know what the power of the dragonflame refers to.

        The second kind of resonance is acquired, so you don’t truly appreciate it until after you’ve read the book. These are risky, because they don’t grab you right away, and only become instantly memorable after you’ve made it through several hundred pages of quality literature. When you have something that doesn’t need to fall directly into a specific genre to succeed, you can take more liberties with your titles because people won’t necessarily want the book to be completely explicit with its title (ie Aliens/Predator works better than “Scary Monsters Kill People!”). Acquired resonance is what gets people talking about the book, because it’s clever and deep and etc.

        A good example for this one would be the book Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson. When I bought it, I thought eh, kind of a fluffy name, doesn’t seem to mean anything though… So I expected elves and gardens and unicorns on the moon. Then you learn about Moon’s Spawn, a giant floating rock that houses the dying remnants of the Tiste Andii, who live forever but can no longer procreate, so they just wallow in their misery and apathy forever basically. They’re extremely melancholy by nature, as they come from this beautiful, amazing world with no light, and they screwed up and got stuck in a crappy world full of bleh and brightness. Only the amazing tough ones can overcome their apathy and go out to do things, and every single one you see in the books is a major badass. When you see them from a human point of view, they’re intensely tragic because, in reality, they have no reason to be so utterly sad. When you see them from the point of view of another Tiste Andii, it just gets worse, because they connect with eachother on such a deep level of empathy that they know there’s nothing they can do to help. It’s brutal.

        Not all of that happens in Gardens of the Moon, but after you’ve read the book and as you continue the series, it just takes on such a huge meaning and becomes the perfect title, even if it doesn’t immediately grab your attention. I know I haven’t mentioned the gardens themselves, but just imagine what kind of a garden you’d get on a big, floating pile of rocks inhabited by perpetually depressed immortals and their giant ravens who feed on magical energy. They aren’t happy gardens.

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        Slightly unrelated topic: why don’t women use electric razors? I’m not exactly pro at shaving normally, because I get impatient after a while and rush it, but my skin gets pretty irritated for a few days after I shave and occasionally I’ll nick myself. My dad was home for the weekend, and I borrowed his fancy electric razor, and it was wonderful. I got a closer shave than normal (except on the curve of my chin, but a few millimetres there hardly matters), it took a fraction of the time, it was better for my skin, my skin felt better afterwards (shaving cream makes me feel weird for a few days) and there were basically no downsides. Is it because nobody has ever tried to sell them one? So they’re a manly man product, and not a useful product all around? When you see a commercial for some fancy razor, it’s always a tough looking guy with some girl rubbing up against him and appreciating his perfect skin.

        I’ve never shaved my legs, so maybe I’m just ignorant of the tools and technique required that electric razors couldn’t provide, but it’s worth thinking about. You’d think an industry built around telling people they need your products, or else they aren’t beautiful, would be able to better exploit its customers.

I was having a hard time writing this speech, because I just couldn’t find the right way to start it off on a high note. It wasn’t until I was listening to music and trying to procrastinate one night that I found the perfect quote to get everybody’s attention. It comes from the song Light of Local Eyes by Polar Bear Club, and while I won’t sing it for you, Micah might if you ask him nicely. It’s meant to be about a small town, but I think the principle fits just as well for a high school like Three Oaks. “We lived life out of this place, we wore its map on our faces, to say the least, we left our trace, burned off the tips of our laces, when this city shined, from the light of local eyes.” Looking back right now, after prom and all the memories you have of the last three years, it’s easy to say how awesome high school was and how it’s been the happiest three years of your life. Like the town in Light of Local Eyes, we’ve left our mark here and made Three Oaks a part of our lives and it’s shining from the light of our eyes. When we’ve seen more of the world, that light’s going to fade. When you go off to UPEI, or Dalhousie, or University of Ottawa, the so-called “best years of your life” may not seem so great in comparison. You’re going to study or work in whatever field you actually enjoy, instead of having to take physics and social studies simply for the credits. When all you want to do is act or make movies, it’s almost a waste of time, because you’ll never use any of those things. Over the course of the next few years, you’ll start doing something that hardly feels like work, compared to the pointless busywork in your obligatory high school courses. You’d probably keep doing it even if you didn’t get paid. That’s when you’ll start to realize how silly it sounds to say you had fun checking your significant figures or memorizing that the volume of a cone is a third of pi-r-squared-h. When you find a job doing what you really love to do, you’ll get more out of it than anything else you might have done, no matter the salary.

            Despite the many false starts I initially had trying to write this speech, I find that words are my most natural talent. It’s up to us to use our talents as fully as possible, whether you’re good at art or cheering people up. I’ve always found that the right words at the right time can make all the difference, and I do my best to find them when the time comes. One of the more memorable opportunities I’ve had came when a friend of mine, Spencer, posted a link on facebook to a news story about a school in the States that had cancelled its prom because of a lesbian couple who planned to attend. I replied with a link to a story about a teacher at an all-girls Catholic school in Vancouver who was fired for being a lesbian. A shared friend of ours posted that they were right to fire her, as she would have a bad influence on the students. This happened a few days after we studied logical fallacies in English, so I decided to practice my debating skills with him. He claimed that he had science and other undeniable facts to back up his position, yet strangely he didn’t provide any examples. When I pointed out various flaws in his logic, he relented, and admitted that he had been prejudiced and never really tried to see things from an objective point of view. He agreed to be more tolerant in the future, and I found it very satisfying to find a practical use for something I learned in class. This just proves that anyone can make a positive difference if they make the best of their abilities.

            I know all too well that many of us often doubt our abilities, and I’d be lying if I said I’d never once worried that I’m not good enough, or that I couldn’t handle all the things life was throwing at me. It wasn’t until I was half finished that I thought I could actually write and give a speech. I’m no motivational speaker, and I just didn’t have time to practice as much as I would have liked. Yet here I am, with a speech written and mostly memorized, pretty nervous but mainly glad that it’s nearly over. Deep down, I know that I can do anything after I calm down and get to work. I know just as well that the same thing goes for all of you. So if there’s anything I’d liked to tell you, it’s to find and hold onto that same confidence, no matter what you’re doing next year, or even ten years from now. Don’t underestimate yourself, because you’ll rise to the occasion if you work hard enough. There’s no limit to your potential, and anyone who embraces life’s challenges will grow as a person, and as an intellectual. Failure comes only from a lack of effort, not a lack of ability. There’s no such thing as “not being smart enough.” If you believe the only difference between an A and a B+ is hard work, you’ll always get the results you’re looking for.

            We may not see it right now, but our teachers and classmates have had a huge influence on us over the past few years. When I met up with a friend after UPEI finished their classes, he told me I was starting to sound like Mr. Gallant, so I must have taken calculus as well as advanced math. He says it happens to everyone Mr. Gallant teaches all year, but personally… I have absolutely no idea what he’s talking about. Aside from making jokes about interrupting turtles and spiders doing push-ups against a mirror, we’ve learned a lot more than just facts and formulas from our classes here at Three Oaks. Some of those things were part of the curriculum – we were supposed to learn to think outside of the box, but some of us thought a bit too far outside of the box. Other things we’ve learned in class taught us about ourselves – for example, I’ve learned that I’m not exactly careful enough to be a physicist or an engineer. You’ll thank me later when your car’s brakes accelerate you at negative five meters-per-second-squared instead of positive five meters-per-second-squared. I can’t speak for every single one of you, but I’m sure each of you can think of a similar experience. I’d be pretty surprised if you could spend a full semester – or two – with someone like Mrs. Keough, Mrs. McQuaid, or Ms. Barrett without learning anything about yourself. We’re all busy trying to figure out who – and what – we want to be, and it’s people like them who spend as much time guiding us through that as they do teaching.

            In Light of Local Eyes, there’s a section that goes “I sat down and thought, what of here makes me proud? Proud to not dismiss this place, and hold it all, from gold to gray.”  Graduation is the perfect opportunity to look at the last few years and see the things that actually made your time here great. The things that make you proud to have been here and that you’ll cherish even as the golden light from our eyes fades to gray. Three Oaks was just the place where it happened, not the reason it happened. Your teachers and friends, and the memories you made together, are the things you should remember fondly. The best part is that even though you’ve finished high school, and you can never get that back, the friends you’ve made will never fade away. Some of them might be going with you to university; others may be staying here, or moving a dozen hours away. Realistically, there’s no longer any difference. No matter where we are next year, we’ll be able to keep in touch… for better or for worse.

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Yeah so there we go. It’s not done yet. Subject to improvements from the recommendations of you lovely folk. Still have to read it out to time it, as well as test it for awkwardness/wordiness. Still, feels good to have it “done.”

edit: first update done, may possibly change the facebook paragraph to be vaguer

My valedictorian speech is almost done. I just need to finish my current paragraph about how anyone who really tries can succeed and conclude it decently, and we’re good to go. I’ll post it up if/when I get it done tomorrow, because it won’t be perfect, and I’d totally appreciate help looking for things you wouldn’t say in a casual conversation. Things you wouldn’t say colloquially, which is not nearly common enough to be colloquial. I don’t use if I can avoid it.

        It’s been making me think, though. Finally, with two weeks left of school, I’m actually confident. I know exactly what I need to do: finish this speech, prepare my razzle-dazzle for my propaganda presentation on monday, and study. Certainty and predictability are very good for me. When I know what needs to be done, I can plan for it. If I knew that x amount of research could fill y amount of words, and would take z hours to write, I could pump out papers and projects like you wouldn’t believe. It’s the uncertainty that kills me, that makes me panic and stress out until I’m nearly done, and then when I’m done I get stressed about the things yet to come. With two weeks left, I’m now safe from that, because I’ve worked at it, and done so early. I’d probably be done already if it wasn’t for this damn moving thing. Not nearly enough space for us at my mom’s friend’s house, but oh well.

        Going to university is predictable. I’m afraid of the stress and the misery that will likely come with it, but I’m far too stubborn to lay down and die. As much as I might want to, I’m sorry to say that I probably couldn’t give up, no matter how bad it gets. I’ve made it this far, anyway, and I’ve managed to swim by trying not to drown. Once you learn, you don’t usually forget. I told Ms. Barrett that she’d taught me how to study and do research properly, which is true, and I know I’d make my way through whether it took four years or fourteen.

        The question remains as to why I would do that, though. What do I gain? A good salary, of course, but… what else?

        Not going to university, however, leads directly to that uncertainty I fear so much more than unhappiness. I don’t know how to make myself a life, I don’t know any of the things you need to be a responsible adult. Well, I can fend for myself as far as sustenance goes. I don’t know. I’d keep going, but my rambling has been interrupted, and I need to vacate the vicinity so someone can sleep here. Will continue later if I’m still feeling vulnerable, maybe.

Lessee… Link dump first. Found a group of people doing music reviews on Destructoid and found some stuff, thus:

http://www.myspace.com/periphery

http://www.metalsucks.net/2010/05/11/periphery-mastermind-misha-bulb-mansoor-talks-the-future-of-the-music-industry/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Corrigan

        First link is obvious, and I think I like them. I’m not sure. I think they’ll go into the same category as Lostprophet’s first album - something I like to listen to, but that I can’t in good conscience call “good” or tell people to listen to.

        Second link is an interview with their main man, who recorded the album in his apartment, which doesn’t show at all in the music. Then he takes it to the record labels and says “hey, I’ve got this here album, want to distribute it for me? no? fine, I’ll find someone else” and ends up signing five different record deals without any bullshit attached. Seems like a pretty smart guy, though he does say that “all of this is affecting the music industry in ways we can’t even predict because of all the ripples that it causes.” What an empty sentence.

        Last time I read a useless sentence like that was reading an article about Tim Hortons basically getting screwed out of a bunch of money by some wonderfully opportunistic businessmen. “‘We consider the uncertainties surrounding this announcement to be a negative development,’ Peter Sklar, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets, said in a report Friday.”

        We consider the uncertainties to be a negative development? Thank you. Your eloquence astounds me.

        Third link: Someone, somewhere on the internet, recommended this. I skipped through the first volume or issue or whatever and could not understand why. On every given page was something that made me depressed. One features our sad, middle-aged protagonist going to the grocery store in the middle of summer with a heavy coat, and teenagers accost him saying it’s “too warm for that fucking shit!” He feebly replies “but it gets cold in the grocery store…”

        Anyway, back to my post, which consists of things I completely forgot from my last post. The other thing making life horrible was a cold I got from my grandmother, who sounded like she was dying for three days then got better just as I started getting sick. But then I got better last night! Exercise and plenty of fluids seem to have cured me.

        Now this part is kinda weird. Thursday night, when I managed to fall asleep by accident in between blowing my nose and breathing through my mouth, I had a dream that I was hanging out with a handful of french immersion people. We all pretty much know eachother from different classes over the years. Many of us are in french immersion because we have smart parents who push us to be smart and have opportunities and stuff, and so we’re in all the science courses and advanced english and etc. So these are the people with lockers beside mine, who talk to me about our teachers/homework/whatever, who are freaking out about their grades and scholarships and spending $20k a year on some local bullshit “elite” university, all that stuff. As far as I’m concerned, they can have all the scholarships I’m busy not snapping up because I’ve already got plenty of money.

        So I’m hanging out with these people I’m not really friends with, but that I’ve always kinda known, and I’m acting like I usually do to make sure people like me because that just makes life easy for everyone. We’re walking around and hanging out and stuff, and that was cool I think except it was like a fast-forward music-less montage. Near the end of the dream, we’re at an intersection that basically leads to nowhere, except a really, really, long road that kinda leads back to my place, or a different long road that circles around town and has an ice cream place on it. We’re waiting for a few cars to go by, and this really attractive, outgoing girl turns around and says “you know, Matt, you’re pretty fake.”

        How exactly she would notice that during our brief conversations at our lockers and whatever happened during the dream was completely beyond me, and so it took me entirely by surprise. Normally I’d agree, because clearly I wasn’t being myself since that might not go over as well, but it surprised me so much that I kinda stammered and said that I’d better head home and went up the long road home, while they went off the other way for reasons unknown. If we wanted to guess, the dairy bar would be a good reason. Then I wake up.

        Remember how I said it was kinda weird? Yesterday in calculus, a friend was telling me that he was going to go see The Undertaker this weekend, and I asked him what year he thought it was as a joke, and he told me The Undertaker was undefeated at something or another three times in a row or something, so I laughed and told him it’s all fake and planned out anyway. The bell rings, we get up to go, and what does he come back with?

        “You’re fake!”

Things to do:

• May 17th: Calculus homework (a few questions), chemistry homework (a few questions + some notes to take)
• May 21st: Typed summary of our 20 minute presentation (as if we’d actually stick to a script, or ever manage to write one 20 minutes long… honestly, I could talk about this for 20 minutes, but I can’t write it all out)
• May 22nd: Prom
• May 31st: Presentation about propaganda in the People’s Republic of China, move out of my house and live who knows where for a month. Packing everything up goes before here, somewhere.
• June 1st: Surprise awesome things for our english teacher, if anyone has the time to do something awesome for her
• June 2nd: Mock valedictorian speech to serve as our english exam
• June 14th: Calculus exam. Studying goes before here, somewhere.
• June 15th: Chemistry exam. Studying goes before here, somewhere.

Net effect on me: fear that time is running out, feelings of inadequacy, panic, stress, etc. So, basically, the usual.

Who’s up for another four (or more) years of this? Anyone?

Iron Man 2 was everything Transformers 2 wasn’t. It was good. Robert Downey Jr. makes a wonderful Tony Stark.

Go and see it, if you were thinking about it. It’s worth it.

I’ve mentioned my english teacher, Ms. Barrett, a number of times here already, and I guess after doing the AP exam is as good a time as any to write about her. At the start of the year, when I wasn’t taking english seriously, my marks were pretty bad and I got super discouraged about my skills as a writer. Now that I’ve learned more about writing and my marks are better, I’m a lot more confident and kinda inspired by the fact that I can get 80-90% on a university level grading scale.

        I’ve got a lot of admiration for Ms. Barrett, or whatever you want to call the grown up version of kids who have a crush on their teachers in first grade. I only really know one person in our class, and I’m usually the one helping him, so I’ve got nobody to check over my stuff and validate my effort except for her. When it comes to class discussions and everybody is just throwing their ideas out there and I don’t want to interrupt anybody, I end up just telling her things directly and if it’s insightful she’ll repeat it to the class, or if I missed the point she’ll correct me. Which really goes against the idea of a class discussion, but I feel really awkward when I’m surrounded by people and they’re all looking at me and stuff.

        It’s like, I don’t want to stare at my desk and mumble and be obviously aloof, but I can’t just stare off into the distance because then people think I’m staring at them. Given that I’m not close to anybody in the class, that’s weird.

        To get back to my original point about her, rather than english class in general, she’s really casual with us, rather than just being a teacher. Let’s see… Last week, we spent an entire class telling her where we were going for university and getting her to guess what she thought we’d do for a living. Yesterday, we spent half the class talking about her life in high school and trying to guess the name of the guy she liked when she went here. By the time she decided we should get back to work, she couldn’t remember how we even managed to start talking about that stuff in the first place.

        When we went in for our AP exam this morning, she left us all cards, although I’m not sure if everyone had something different on theirs because nobody wanted to share theirs. At a guess, I’d say she did write each of us our own personal notes, but here’s what mine said:

        “Matt,

        You are in good hands - your own! Do you best, because you are brilliant. Take your time and show how much you know. All the best today; you don’t need luck.”

        I was super touched. I think I did pretty well on the multiple choice, but the essays were a bit iffy. I wrote the third one in about 20 minutes, and the rest probably aren’t wonderful either. Passable, but not going to win any awards. Apparently, I can’t say any more than that, because I’m under a legally binding agreement to never tell anyone anything about the test, or else they’ll nullify it XD We weren’t supposed to tell Ms. Barrett anything either, but she came in with pizza for us when we were finished, and of course we spent half an hour talking about it with her. She also bought us cookies and pop and stuff to drink during our ten minute break, as well as supplying us with pens, sharpened pencils, and water bottles.

        The problem with AP english vs other AP subjects is that there’s no set curriculum. In AP biology, they know they only covered about 10% of the material, so their teacher told them they’re going to fail. With us, the goal is to know some stuff well enough to be prepared for anything. Anyone can write an essay in two weeks, but it takes skill to sit down and pop one out in forty minutes.  Unfortunately, you can’t study for that. You can do practice tests, and you can think about strategies to do better, but that’s about it.

        Yeah so I had to leave in the middle of making this, and I forgot everything else I meant to write. Five hours away can do that. I did remember my original motivation to make this post, however, and so we have another story!

        It was one of Ms. Barrett’s fancy dress-up days, so she was all decked out in heels and a dress and all that good stuff. She doesn’t need to make a good impression on us, though, so she’ll just take off her high heels and go barefoot because who cares? So we’re taking notes and she’s just explaining stuff, then the principal comes to ask her something and she’s like uh oh I don’t have time to grab my shoes! So she’s standing in the hallway barefoot having a chat with her boss, then she comes back in and tells us how embarrassing it is to have your boss catch you with no shoes on.

        Kinda tired now so that story doesn’t seem as funny anymore. It was great at the time though.

        I’m going to bed.

Grandmother: We can make macaroni casserole with this sauce here.

Me: Nope, that’s salsa. You’d want to use something more like this.

*I grab a can of spaghetti sauce*

Her: Oh, ok.

*she grabs a handful of raw hamburger with her bare hands, and I know she won’t be washing them*

Me: Actually, I think I’ll microwave one of these things of rice, since I don’t need to save them for work anymore.

Excessive cursing reduces the meaning of a sentence for both the speaker and the listener.

Translated from my Sociology book. This section seems like it’ll be pretty lame, despite the incredibly interesting possibilities available for discussing linguistics in the context of socialization and culture.

So anyway, I’ve gotten all my supplies for thursday.

• 2 L of cranberry juice
• Vector protein bar things
• Milk chocolate
• Gum

Ideally, these things should keep me awake/focused/able to remember things. Now I just need to sleep well and not freak out. I got an 8 on my free response answer, which is like a 90-95% mark in university, which is very good. Didn’t do as well on the other two (6 on a poorly organized essay about some religious allegory poem, 7 on a decently done essay about a girl on a farm looking at cows), but I know what I did wrong so I’ll avoid it on the real exam.

In other news, I’m kinda re-considering this whole university thing. I dunno. I’d like to be happy, and I don’t know if I’ll be happy there.

In other other news, just as a plan was being concocted to kidnap me and get me incredibly drunk at some party after prom, plans have been made expressly to keep me safe from that. Hooray!

Apparently the AP exam is harder than most of what you’ll see during your entire undergraduate degree. This is wonderful news, because I believe I’m quite prepared for it and will likely keep the good habits I’ve gained forever.

At first they would say it’s a bit tougher than first year university, so of course you’re super worried about second year… And now it comes out that they really make you earn those credits. Wonderful.

Still, I’ll probably refer back to it a lot when I’m writing up a summary of my presentation for Sociology class. Look for that sometime early June or so.

In other news, looks like I’m spending the banquet part (and likely the dance part, too) with women (friends of my friend) and their dates, rather than dudes (friends) and their dates. They may be upset about that, but eh. I also have an excuse not to go to their party and get drunk afterwards, so that’s a bonus.

Well, it seems like the university thing worked out… Not entirely sure yet. I won’t really know until they send me something, a letter, an e-mail, anything, and thus far they haven’t done much of that. Hmm.

Excellent, I’m in!

I’ll post their music later, rather than do another so soon, but I’ll tell the story anyway. I ordered a shirt and a cd from Stand Out Riot, for $20 after shipping. Wednesday, I opened a package from england and found:

• Their album, Carnival Militia
• The shirt I ordered
• A Carnival Militia poster
• Four stickers
• Two pins
• A Carnival Militia bottle opener
• A hand-written note thanking me for buying their stuff

So lol that was cool. I told a friend about it and he got me to order the same for him. All because one of their friends put their album online. Just goes to show you what the internet is good for.

Well shit, fuck, goddamn, bugger me with a bloody spear, etc. All of those wonderful things.

Pay very close attention for a second. I may not be able to go to university next year, at all. Why?

I FORGOT TO HIT THE SUBMIT BUTTON WHEN I ACCEPTED THEIR OFFER

It says acceptance is allowed after the expiry of the offer, and… ok, I think I may have accepted the offer properly this time. I know it calls for caution when you’re determining, potentially, the rest of your life, but seriously?

What kind of a fucking idiot forgets to hit the fucking submit button? Someone too stupid for post-secondary education, I’d say.

Although I have another offer to University of Ottawa, where apparently a girl from my english class is going next year, I don’t really want to go there or do that program. That one expires in two days, but I don’t even know that I’d take it if I had to.

You know what sucks? Bad habits you managed to pick up without ever really noticing or thinking about them. When there’s a lull in the conversation, or the conversation reminded me of something, I’ll announce how people ought to feel about what I’m about to say. Usually in the form of “it was x… last night I was reading/watching/talking to/etc.” or whatever the case may be. If it’s funny, I’ll say “oh, yeah, it was kinda funny… last night I was…” If it’s something interesting I read, like this here article about how to properly praise your children, I’ll say “it was interesting, I was reading this article about…” It was only when I said exactly that during a “group discussion” we were having in english that I realized that a) I do it all the time and b) it makes absolutely no sense except as a way to let everyone know I’m about to speak.

        So, if I can keep that in mind, I’ll stop doing it. Hopefully. I don’t hesitate too much when I speak anymore, so hopefully I can keep weeding out things like that when I pay attention to them.

        As far as today’s english class goes, it was pretty cool. We put the desks in a circle again (which makes it hard for me to stare aimlessly at things because there are people in every direction, but it’s still cool I guess because usually you just sit in your rows and the teachers stand up front and talk) and discussed what we were doing next year and why. I guess there are school-specific scholarships and stuff she had to recommend us for, which is awesome on its own. The best part was that afterwards, we got her to guess what she thought we’d all be doing by our ten year reunion. Some of the chatty girls were a bit pissed that she was vague with their predictions (yeah, I think Jill would make a good teacher… or teacher-y thing) but screw them. I couldn’t stand up and pick out a career for everyone in the class, and neither could they.

        She said I’d be the smart guy behind the scenes who writes the speeches for the prime minister. Who knows? I’ve considered it once or twice, because I can convince people and sound smart if I want to, but politics is a miserable career and I’d hate doing it. It’d be “easy” to get some kind of government intern job in Ottawa though, and likely that’s what I’m going to be doing during the summers because apparently relaxing for two months is wrong.

        If I were going to go for a career I might not enjoy, I’d likely go for math/science something anyway. At least I enjoy figuring out interesting physics/math problems, as much as I hate sitting down to do twenty of them for homework. It’s not even that I can’t cut it doing hardcore science/math. I learn the stuff by heart and then lose 20% on stupid mistakes. I could find the perfect balance between Earth’s gravity and the Moon’s gravity with my eyes closed and my hands tied behind my back, but on a test/exam I can’t seem to remember to, say, square the period or write the resistance for Resistor #5 in the #5 box. Then again, my marks in calculus are awesome, and my teacher for that class is a great guy. Our physics teacher, on the other hand…

I know it hasn’t been very long since my last music post, but To Walk Among Them by Hacride is too big to upload to tumblr, so it’s alright! Right? I had planned on making a post about them based on what I’d heard, but I just finished listening to this fifteen minute song of theirs that DOESN’T have eight minutes of silence in the middle, and I liked it, so now I’m posting it. The thing is that this isn’t Dream Theater or some progressive metal band, the kind of guys you’d expect a fifteen minute song from. They’re a metal band, and I enjoy them the same way I enjoy Lamb of God, and so without further ado, here’s To Walk Among Them on youtube in two parts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3byW_8gYzk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfJ4d551YLM&feature=watch_response

The lyrics aren’t amazing and out of this world, but the entire album’s lyrics are pretty good and worth contemplating, so here they are:

http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/hacride/lazarus.html#1

After finishing Wake in three days and ordering its sequel, I’m back to Synthetic Worlds again. At least until Watch gets here. Let me summarize, once again: this is an amazing book, and I’d love to see Synthetic Worlds 2.0. If you have ever in your life used the internet for social interaction, played a video game, been interested in economics, sociology, psychology, technology, or even if you’ve done NONE of those things, you will enjoy this book. Seriously, this is some intense delving into the subject of MMOs.

        Here’s the amazing thing about Synthetic Worlds: it was written when WoW only had five hundred thousand subscribers. The global total of MMO players was ten million, less than the estimate thrown around by those WoW ads! This is six years ago, people. Two-thousand-and-four. I haven’t gotten to the part where he talks about the future yet, but I can guarantee some of the stuff he predicts has come to pass.

        Here’s another thing: it was written before the Wii was called the Revolution, when gaming was something mainstream but not necessarily a household activity. Digital distribution was only beginning to pick up Steam (oh, come on, there was no way I could resist that) and the average person likely didn’t play video games on any kind of regular basis. Maybe some… oh, wow, this is even before Guitar Hero. Maybe they might have played some Mario Kart, some Mario Party? I mean, we’re talking your grandmother and her dog here.

        There’s a lot of data in there just to say that no, people playing MMOs aren’t sweaty teenage nerds living in their mom’s basement, many of them ARE the fathers/moms of regular kids. The average age was, off the top of my head, something like 29? Many were married, most had good jobs. The results were divided between those who considered themselves “residents” of their chosen game, and that they “visited” Earth much the same way a casual player would “visit” Azeroth or Norrath. Many considered themselves to be addicted, but there was surprisingly little difference between the two groups in terms of time spent playing. The author questions whether “playing those silly video games” more than other people counts as an addiction by default, and suggests that addictions are the things that have a negative effect on our life when we aren’t doing them, such as drinking or drugs.

        He also gets into why exactly someone would get deeply involved with these games at all. Why would you want to live on Earth, where you’ve got a crappy office job and will never amount to anything? Why not live in Azeroth, where you’re the leader of a guild and everyone loves you? There’s a bit of psychology thrown in there, too, about how we get immersed and how it’s actually harder to suspend our belief when we play an MMO than it is to suspend our DISbelief. When there are 50 people around you, equally involved in slaying some giant dragon, it’s hard to step back and go “no wait, this dragon is a worthless pile of code and actually means nothing because it doesn’t really exist.”

        The idea of emotional immersion rather than physical immersion isn’t exactly new, but this gets into WHY your brain wants to believe you can cast Magic Missile rather than “waaah this game had no immersion” or “blah blah the characters were so realistic and I was so immersed and I cried blah blah blah” crap. There’s a history of virtual reality, the goggles and giant suit and no fun kind, compared to the fun, interesting, made to be enjoyable rather than a tech demo kind of synthetic realities engineered specifically for the benefit of the player.

        Wake had interesting ideas and it was really cool and awesome to read, but that was a novel. Synthetic Worlds is 300-something pages of statistics and sciencey examination of things that are likely near and dear to you, and in a word, it is wonderful.

I’ll add the comment I liked from the editorials section of today’s newspaper tomorrow afternoon or something, but for now, a handful of links:

Muslims, Christians Challenge Ontario’s More Explicit Sex-Ed

McGuinty Backs Down On Frank Sex-Ed

Sex Curriculum Is About Tolerance, Not Mechanics

Kids, Let’s Talk About Sex A Lot

        First of all: bluh I could never be a parent, not until they give out degrees for parenting, and honestly I think a six-year undergrad + masters program requirement for having kids might solve a lot of our problems

        Second of all, kids with access to computers (i.e. nearly all of them) can easily find porn and information about sex online long before they’re even physically interested in it. I know I did, because all the cool kids online were doing it, although they were old enough to have sex drives. I did spend a lot more time online than the average kid would, so of course I had more opportunity to do it, but even still it’s not exactly difficult.

        When kids already have access to things infinitely more “damaging” than proper education about tolerance and safe sex - there are enough guys as it is who expect sex to be like porn - I don’t see why any logical human being would object to this. Of course, it isn’t the logical ones who got the curriculum pulled, but they’re being harmed by the influence of an incredibly vocal and incredibly biased part of the population, and that’s a shame.

“Teaching a 9-year old that gender identity comes naturally will save future ostracism, angst, bullying, and self-hate. Teaching a 12-year old about masturbation and intercourse will help clear taboos and misinformation associated with those forbidden unknowns.

As a family physician, I am faced daily with a plethora of fears and disastrous events emanating from ignorance, religious, and sanctioned practices. The gamut runs from forced marriages to imported cousins, female circumcision, premature ejaculation, total fear of any sexual practice and guilt-ridden obsessive thoughts. These are manifested by generalized anxiety disorders, depression and suicidal tendencies.

Parents should have the responsibility to educate children about sexual matters, but let’s be honest, how many do? Is it still healthy to have "educated” young men and women believing that each time they masturbate, they’re violating their religion and depleting their “reserves” so any slip is followed by the worst self-hate and guilt? Some parents and religious leaders still teach that semen comes from the spinal cord.

Proper nomenclature and removing taboos shouldn’t affect childhood innocence. Six-year-olds will still learn how to tie their shoes and play with Barbies, but they will know they have a penis instead of a wee-wee and a vagina instead of a coochie.“

"Is it ironic that the religious right is fighting hard to prevent sexual orientation education in the public system, since the entire purpose of public education is the prevention of unscientific policy. Despite overwhelming expert opinion that gay kids begin displaying gender variance years before puberty - I was 4 - and that attempts to eradicate undesirable orientations can lead to catastrophic harm for developing adolescents, many religious communities still insist such feelings can be "corrected.”

Yet, schools still teach lesbian, gay, bisexual/pansexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues only in the context of sex-ed programming, thereby reinforcing the widespread myth that being gay is only about sexual taste.

Religious conservatives’ right to restrict their children’s acces to medical opinion is no more of a “family value” than my parents’ right to protect my safety. Where were religious conservatives’ “family values” when their kids were beating me up?“

Two books I’ve started recently that I highly recommend: Synthetic Worlds by Edward Castranova, and Wake by Robert J. Sawyer. To summarize the rest of this post: buy these books.

        edit: oh dude the second book hardcover for $10 from Amazon.com, please don’t kick me out for being from Canada right before checkout *shakes fist at book industry*

        Castranova is the writer for Terra Nova (link only because he mentions Blizzard making two million dollars the day their shiny pony came out) and an economist. The fact that he’s an economist matters because Synthetic Worlds deals with the practical stuff involved with online games. Economics, immersion, psychological things that make us associate ourselves with our avatars, consequences of a world where the majority of the population spends most of its time in another world, legal things we’ve never had to deal with before… I’m only a couple of chapters in, and it’s very interesting and well worth reading. It’s got a really nice black cover, though, and I hate getting fingerprints all over it >.>

        Second book is a science fiction novel by, shock and dismay, a Canadian author! If you can’t think of a book you’ve read by a Canadian author, you would be no different from the vast majority of Canadians. Robert J. Sawyer is, according to wikipedia, relatively popular outside of Canada. He’s got an American tv show based on one of his books (Flashforward) and he also wrote a trilogy about the dinosaurs being abducted by aliens and taken to another planet, where they create a human-esque society. Unfortunately, the covers are so goddamn horrid that you could never read them in public.

        The book of his that I’m reading (and loving) right now is the first of a trilogy called Wake, and it’s about a blind teenager. She’s recently moved to Canada because her dad got a job working for some company or another that may be imaginary, but is funded by Research In Motion, who definitely do exist. She gets an e-mail from a Japanese researcher who says he could give her sight, and it doesn’t work, but somehow lets her see the internet. Or something. I’m only just getting to that part.

        Meanwhile, the internet is forming its own consciousness and making some connection with another being. China cuts off its internet from the rest of the world to cover up a mass execution, creepily enough to stave off a potential H5N1 pandemic (this was written pre-Swine Flu, I think o.0) and the internet itself recoils in pain. It isn’t aware so much of its existence before, but of the sense that things are no longer right, and slowly develops a sense of self and of others through its contact with the other being. The being may be a hacker from China who breaks through their security, and his connection seems to break when the internet stops concentrating and loses track of him, but the being may also be a monkey. Or it may be Caitlin herself, as she tries to figure out what she’s seeing that definitely isn’t her room. Who knows! Even if I did, I wouldn’t spoil it!

        Speaking of RIM, everything has a name in this book: her dad has a BlackBerry, she has an iPod, she uses JAWS, she has a LiveJournal, she edits a Wikipedia entry about her dad to remove a section about how her “disability” was a “burden” to him… I’m not sure how I feel about that. I’m half-expecting her to give a speech about her Tampax™ tampons. It’s realistic - really, how could you refer to Wikipedia or LiveJournal without mentioning any names? “A free online encyclopedia” or “online journal” would just be clunky. Still.

        It’s the most “modern” book I’ve read, and it’s kinda strange. I was just reading a newspaper article about how to “become a better writer:” don’t let your character drink “a beer,” make it a Pabst! He doesn’t just look at the tv in the bar, he looks at the Samsung HD yadda yadda. This is the joke made real.

        Some of that stuff is what I really love about it, though. Attention to detail is nice. For example, those LJ entries are taken directly from the book. Another thing is that the main character is, regardless of everything else, a blind teenage girl. It’s not just a little thing that pops up here and there and everyone triumphs over adversity la-dee-da. It’s like, her dad is a super practical, devoid of sentiment, kind of guy, and he turns off the lights when he leaves her room because she doesn’t need them. Or she tries to guess at people’s body language based on their voice alone, or their height based on where their voice is coming from. It makes her pretty human.

        Anyway, here’s the website for the series, and the newest book just came out recently. I noticed the first book not long after it first came out, and it seemed really interesting, but not interesting enough to buy as a hardcover. Then the second came out, and the first came out as a paperback, so I snatched it. I’ll probably buy the hardcover of the second.

        (I’m so proud of my hyperlinks, I will try to use them less but the last couple of days I’ve been collecting stuff to post about at work then unloading it all here afterwards, so I have to fit them in somehow)

        So, I had a brilliant idea for a story I started writing back in september, which I haven’t posted here yet because right now there’s not much to it. When I first started writing it, I wanted to do something really different, and after reading a bit of Lockpick Pornography (warning: contains phone sex within first couple of paragraphs, who knows what the rest is like) by Joey Comeau (of A Softer World fame), I realized that there is probably nothing weird I can write to get to people.

        Solution? Write it differently. In my head, I had a lot of backstory for the characters I was writing, but a story riddled with flashbacks becomes tough to read after a while. Switching points of view and time and etc. are hard even for good writers, and with no clear idea how to handle that, I was just going to use it as a guide to write the present stuff.

        Doing nothing in sociology class seems like fertile ground for whatever part of the brain makes stories happen, because this is the second time this week. I don’t remember the train of thought, but I started thinking I could go back to the story I started in september where a guy goes crazy and kills his girlfriend. In my head, I had an idea for how they met and how their relationship got to where it was, but I never had that in the story. I figured I could add a prologue to show how they met, and maybe a little bit of their relationship later.

        So, alright, we’ve got a prologue to establish the relationship between the first pair of victim and killer. Why not do it for all of them? Prologue I, Chapter 1, Prologue II, Chapter 2, etc. Might slow down later on, when everybody’s made their entrance. Maybe I could do flashbacks to antagonist stuff there, which is probably the best word because I don’t want to have “villains” or “bad guys,” just guys who are trying to stop the other dudes.

        Then I thought about the relationship between the pairs. There’d be some hint in the chapters, but I could do another little scene showing their connection to eachother, and maybe hinting at why this is all happening in the first place. The only thing is that might be a bit much, so I dunno. Prologue I, Chapter 1, Intermission i, Prologue II, Chapter 2, Intermission ii…

        I had another idea, but I totally forgot. I will probably add those prologues, but the intermissions are questionable. The idea only stretches so far before it gets annoying. It’s one thing to number your chapters only with prime numbers, and another to have three (or more if I can think of other reasons) types of chapters. It would help me write smaller ideas more often while I’m inspired, and it could go online instead of being published and looking totally out of place… That and keep me from getting in over my head by trying to imitate writing styles infinitely better than my own.

        Good thing I started studying early and could probably write while I’m at work!

You know, public education does kinda suck. There just isn’t enough time or enough students interested in the subjects to cover interesting things in depth. It’s all about getting nice numbers on your report cards. Thanks to decent study habits this semester (in comparison to the last few semesters, anyway) I’m doing pretty good and might be able to haul my average up from 84% to ~90% which is worth an automatic $2000.

        See that? That right there is public education at work.

        Anyway, in french immersion here, you do a french language course first semester each year then a social studies course second semester. In grade twelve, the second semester course is sociology. We’ve got a nice big textbook, but I find there’s hardly any information about the most interesting stuff because the curriculum is god :/ The most interesting concepts get only the briefest mention.

        While reviewing the notes I made to study for my tests, the tests themselves, and summarizing them yet again to get it all lodged in my long term memory, I found one of those interesting concepts we barely looked at in class. A little line about how social institutions - religions, schools, communities (yes, that also applies to online communities like forums, and even more so to MMO’s - but that’s a topic for when I finish Synthetic Worlds) - are created by people, but as they grow and develop start to influence the people who belong to it. The idea should seem pretty logical just by giving religion as an example, because the original incarnation of Christianity was likely very different from the one that we know today. As more people entered the church, the religion changed, and it in turn changed the people who would join in the future. That’s interesting enough on its own.

        What really got me thinking was how it applies even on a smaller scale, to individual relationships. A relationship is much like an institution, in the way its dynamics change how you act or perceive others, but that’s pseudo-intellectual swaggering on my part and of absolutely no real interest unless you’re doing a study on the dynamics of human interaction. Back to the interesting part, people create relationships with eachother, on purpose, by association with others, or out of necessity. As we get closer to the people we meet and the relationships grows and changes, we become different people, often better people if we’ve made good connections. Through our contact with diverse and interesting individuals, we become greater than ourselves, which then influences the relationships we make and how we act towards the people we already know.

        Most of my development as a person has come from that, though at a younger age it came mainly from myself, which I’ll talk about when I get around to comparing my life to that “Depression’s Upside” article. I can trace who I was and who I became by looking at the relationships I’ve made throughout my life, and when it comes to milestones in my life, most of them revolve around who I knew and where I spent my time. I’d like to think my presence in some of the communities and groups of my youth helped others the same way they helped me collectively, but I doubt it. Likely they were older and less impressionable, not to mention I avoided drawing attention to myself. Well, except on the forums of NewAge3, where I tried fairly hard to make a name for myself as a master debater and badass pseudo-intellectual. I never made any lasting connections there, though, and that’s probably why I never moved beyond the level of “familiar name” to “guy everybody pays attention to.”

        As far as individuals go… Max and I plumbed the depths of the internet (gaming, too) together, and my early history of online usernames can be traced back to him (Hunter/Assasin, Hobby/MasterAssasin, Nohbody/Lunacy). That’d be about age 7-11 or so. I found NewAge3 in fourth grade, and I remember playing soccer and trying to tell him about how cool it was - I stabbed a guy in the toe for a thousand damage! - only to have him hate it for being text-based. I quit on and off over the years and as the game was reset, but I got pretty heavily into the forums from 8th-10th grade and spent many hours arguing on there while maintaining an MSN conversation or two. The other important thing there is the start of my interest in browser-based games, which is important in a lot of ways depending on the game.

        Around that time same time (10-11), I also started playing Magic: the Gathering and met some pretty cool dudes there, most notably Sebastian who happened to ride my bus when I got to junior high. Loners half by choice and half by necessity, because nobody wanted to sit with us (joke’s on them, they sat three in a seat while we were comfortable with a seat to ourselves), our twice daily conversations about interests few of our (or at least my) friends shared became probably the closest friendship I have with a guy. I remember tentatively mentioning webcomics, but never by name - wouldn’t want to come off as a huge nerd, after all - only to find out he reads it, too, and discuss our favourite recurring jokes in the ones we shared. Good old 8-Bit Theater. Always up for a five hour rambling MSN conversation or a weekend long hanging-outing, his influence on me is equal parts maturity/trying to impress an older person and silly internet things/video games.

        Of course, the big one is obviously Brittany, the only girl I’ve ever managed to maintain a friendship with (average lifespan of my friendships with girls is about two weeks, they lose interest after that), which began in eighth grade. It started off silly, but ended up being the most serious part of my life, and for a long time my routine was simply to come home and hop on MSN all night. Usually we’d stay up later than we should, then I’d get up early and hope to catch her online before she went to catch her bus. Repeat the process for years, barring the odd couple of months here and there where things weren’t great and we likely only spoke to eachother to be rude, if at all. I couldn’t even begin to describe the ways I’ve changed and the things I’ve learned about myself, about life, about other people… Suffice to say there’s no way I’d be who I am today if it wasn’t for that plot to find another guy’s e-mail address without making it obvious that she liked him.

        The shortest relationship to change me as a person, without a doubt, would be one Mr. Vael Victus. Here’s one way that browser-based games affected my life - brought me to MonBre a little over a year ago. There were, I don’t know, maybe 12 users or less when I first joined? Vael was pretty discouraged and was considering giving up on MonBre at the time, and some wild impulse to help someone and give my life a purpose again made me write a big post trying to convince him not to give up. I’ll be brutally honest, I was depressed and lonely, and I wanted a part of that satisfaction of making a difference and being integral to someone else’s life that I got from being with Britt. It made me feel good to help out with MonBre. Again on that same random impulse, I sent Vael a message telling him to add me on MSN, and ending up making a new xfire account simply to talk to him. Our conversations are mainly characterized, for me anyway, by that familiar black window. Without the bright and inviting colours of MSN, talking on xfire somehow feels more formal to me XD I resist the urge to be super correct about my grammar like I used to be, though, because that was a significant change in my life at the time when I got comfortable enough with people and used MSN enough to get a little lazy with my spelling and grammar.

        Outside of MonBre, talking to Vael about life and philosophy has simply made me a better person, in the same way that working at a successful relationship with Britt made me a better person through conversation alone. I’m even more open, accepting, and easy-going than I used to be, which is weird because I never lacked those things before, but there’s some subtle difference I can’t quite identify. Honestly, I’m pretty glad I followed those random impulses. By that same token, I think I’ll be pretty glad I followed the random impulse to propose meeting Vael this summer, ‘cause that’s just something awesome a lot of people wouldn’t do, much like my help with MonBre was supposed to be.

        This post created entirely as a shout out to the people mentioned above as well as an invitation to others to look at their own relationships in the same light. Conveniently also to cheer me up, and hopefully them, too.

Let’s see, schedule of events today: volunteer from 8-3, work 4-10.

Schedule for tomorrow: volunteer 8-1, work 3-10.

Schedule for sunday: work 3-8.

No stories this week, folks.

@Lily: I don’t think the quiz was flawed, because that was all pretty accurate. I just found it interesting that rather than summing everything up and categorizing everyone, they give you a big block of traits.

We were doing personality tests in my sociology class this morning, and one essentially assigned you a single word to describe you. Which word depended on how introverted/extroverted you were and how mentally stable you were. It made a lot of people say “hey, that word doesn’t describe me,” or insist that they’re stable even though the test said otherwise.

It’s just a way to increase the test’s “accuracy” and sway people’s opinion of the results. Rather than one generalization they disagree with, they see one little piece that doesn’t fit and pass on to the rest. The inaccurate traits don’t bother them much, while the good ones are so accurate it’s scary. I wouldn’t really call it bias, but that’s not a terrible way of putting it.