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)

First link: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/family-and-relationships/30-chick-flicks-in-30-days-how-did-he-do-it/article1490137/

• Extra info: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/nick-waters-30-chick-flicks/article1490132/

It seemed like a good idea, only who would I watch them with? Bah. But wait!

Second link: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/work/how-to-grow-your-brain-it-takes-more-than-just-math-puzzles/article1539814/

Revise the plan, then: watch each movie once on mute, and try to understand what’s going on. Then watch a second time with sound. Master body language in 30 days! Grow your brain!

        I look at my work schedule, and think geez, I have no time. Then I look at my tumblr and think man, I have more than enough time. It’ll be nice not having a piece of paper to tell me how much stuff I can’t do for the next month.

        That being said, I have my AP english exam in a little over two weeks. No meeting about that today, because our teacher got food poisoning :( Sad, but we read A Modest Proposal for our “exam,” which was fun because I read it as a kid and loved it. While I was debating the economics of breeding children as livestock, others didn’t seem to understand because they probably only read three sentences before giving up and skipping half the words.

        As far as that exam goes, wow, I am so unprepared. Why? Well, I don’t have an essay ready to go for every potential topic they could ever pull out of their asses. I’m not really a deeper meaning kind of person, and I can’t read a book and go “oh hey a tree got struck by lightning, THAT SYMBOLIZES A CATASTROPHIC BREAK IN THEIR RELATIONSHIP HOW BRILLIANT.” I mean, really? Yeah, I get it, but I don’t know that’s going to happen yet! By the time it does happen, I don’t remember the tree in the first place! I could probably put together a decent essay about a tragic hero, or a character that’s a foil for another character, and other things like that where you can see it without having to read a five hundred page book twice in the same sitting.

        I’ll probably sit down with the list of essay topics they’ve given over the last 40 years and jot down ideas for each, so I have a general idea. No, I’m not fucking kidding. That’s a bare minimum of effort for this, and if I’m lucky might help me scrape out a decent mark D: It’s not like I’ll fail, judging by the failed essays we read, but… How well can I honestly do writing an essay, with a time limit, on a random subject?

        @vael: Episodes 13-16 of Baccano! were added to the DVD release after it aired on TV, but I dunno, I’m not sure it would have felt as complete without those episodes. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s perfect and nothing could be better, but complete is a good word for it. Complete in its incompleteness, I guess. The way it manages its characters is what I want for my story when it gets finished in the far off future, but replace immortality with killed-somebody-and-got-a-new-identity.

        Speaking of Baccano!, I dunno when it’ll be localized, but the same studio is doing an anime of another series of light novels by the same guy called Durarara!! Obviously, it is superior thanks to the extra exclamation mark. Aside from that, it’s on episode 14/24 in Japan, but they’re going to add extra episodes for its DVD release too. It has a black man who runs a sushi shop (this is really weird for Japan), a butler who throws vending machines, and a female headless horsemen who rides a motorcycle instead of a horse. Sound exciting yet?

        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!

PERSONAL POST REDUX

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.