Goals for 2012?

A long time ago on a tumblr far, far away a challenge was issued to create a post about goals for 2012. Bonus points if a summary of 2011 was written. I took it the other way and made the 2011 part primary, with the future goals as a bonus assignment. I didn’t get around to the 2012 post during the Christmas holiday, and then school happened, so that kept me away. School has stopped happening for a week, so now I’m catching up on a ton of stuff. I made a to-do list of things I wanted to accomplish between February 17th and February 27th, mostly school related, but there’s a few fun things as well. I’m happy to say that writing this post is the 14th item accomplished out of a total of 27! Although I’ve really just been taking care of the small annoying things, it’s nice to get them out of the way and be on the ball a bit more. At this point I’ve got a couple big projects to take care of, four items related to fixing up scripts for LBL, and a week-long studying project. Ideally, if I take care of this stuff now, it’ll put me in a really good situation for the rest of the semseter. So there’s my short-term goals for the next week.

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Goals for the year?

        For the rest of 2012, I have a bit more difficulty deciding what my goals are. The main problem is that I haven’t managed to dedicate a significant amount of time to anything but school for a few years now. It’s definitely my number one priority, and that’s a good thing, I guess. But I’ve always seen school as an obligation, something I do no matter what. I could just say that my goal is to keep my average where it’s been, or to do really well in a certain course. But it feels like saying “my goal for 2012 is to continue breathing, not starving, and not dying of dehydration.” It’s the absolute baseline of what I’d need to do throughout the year before even looking at other things. That’s why other goals I make tend to fall by the wayside. I’ve said a few times that I would like to find ways to do get everything done and still have some spare time, and as you can tell, that hasn’t happened yet. I suspect the answer to that problem isn’t going to be finding some amazing way to revolutionize my workflow. The biggest hindrance is probably the fact that I get so miserable I don’t even realize it, which does more to keep me from working than anything else. The cycle of “procrastinate in a subconscious attempt to find some kind of joy,” followed by “oh no I have no time I must work constantly” is really not optimal. If the first week of this semester and the last few days are any indication, I can do a lot more when I’m happy - and I can actually enjoy my work, too.

        So I figure the best thing I could probably do in 2012 is find some way to stay consistently happy. Problem is, I don’t know where to start. I don’t think the answer is to set aside time for my hobbies (playing games, reading, tweaking my computer, sometimes anime) because all of that stuff is solitary. Although working on some open-source programming projects and seeing actual results from my work might be a rewarding exception. In reality, I’m actually not sure I can distinguish between being lonely for real and just feeling guilty letting my relationships wither. Sometimes I think it’s the latter. Either way, I keep wondering if I might not be miserable if I had more close friends (which would involve talking to people sometimes, or maybe even hanging out with them - but that would be crazy). Or that it might be nice to not be single (even crazier). The fact that I find both of those things incredibly difficult makes them both fine contenders for ways I could improve in the long-term… I just don’t know if I’m willing to commit to either one. If I did say for sure that I would accomplish one or die trying, I would probably work at it. I might also just tell myself that I’ll work on it for a few hours and then chicken out. I need a real push to get it done, I guess.

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Trivial goals

        As for a trivial goal that I will definitely accomplish because it’d be impossible not to, I’m going to finish the last half of FF VI this year. I might even finish FF XIII-2 before Reading Week is over. With both of those things done, I can safely say I’ve finished the entire main Final Fantasy series. Depending on when I finish FF VI, I can see myself getting through Dark Souls as well. That, I would actually be proud of. It’s incredibly rewarding to make any progress at all in that game. If I’ve got extra time left in 2012 after that, I’d actually looking forward to playing Nier. I hear fantastic things about its narrative, despite a lot of serious flaws in the rest of the game. I’ll write more about that if it does turn out to be amazing, anyway, and if nothing else I’ll write about how its soundtrack blew my mind.

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Tune in next time

        Anyway, I’m going to have a few more posts coming up this week. First, about the current state of my computer customization. I had somebody summarize the reality of that situation pretty well: “If I have to explain why it’s awesome, you probably won’t think it’s awesome.” I’m excited, and you have to respect that. Second post is slightly more accessible - I’m planning to recommend some of my favourite software. Only slightly more accessible, but it’s something I can give to people when they say “what do you recommend for doing x?” Which has happened to me all of once. NEVERTHELESS, I INTEND TO WRITE THAT POST. You might get a super special post after that, depending how the rest of the week goes. So there’s something you can look forward to!

The benefits of outside perspectives

I’ve gotten some surprising compliments during the past week. Surprising in the sense that I personally don’t see myself the way they were describing me. Since I don’t see myself that way, I don’t talk about myself that way, either. A stranger reading my tumblr would probably think I’m a quivering, anxious wreck that never manages to get anything done. That’s a bit of an exaggeration from the reality, but since I prefer to chastise myself for my failures, failure becomes my public face. Although, the way I think about it, the negative posts are all waiting on a future post that declares my ultimate victory over the original problem. It may not appear today, or tomorrow, but it’ll come! Probably!

        The first set of compliments came from an extremely astute co-worker, when I mentioned that Robert Biddle initially assumed I was a graduate student. She said that wasn’t terribly surprising, given that I genuinely enjoy what I do and I’m dedicated to my work (unlike some people my age). Later, when I offered to put in a couple extra hours of work, she said she’d find someone else “because I work hard enough as it is.” Given that I’m taking five classes, running the lab’s current projects, and developing new projects on top of all that. Not to mention maintaining and updating older lab work and making it as “perfect” as I can.

        When you put it that way, it paints a much more flattering picture of me than the one I present. I’ve been disorganized for months now, but I’m still pulling in 90%+ grades on almost everything, as well as managing my work in the Language and Brain Lab. I genuinely think I could be doing more, but that’s just the (probably unhealthy) work ethic I’ve picked up over the last few years. I keep telling myself to do better so I don’t fall behind the difficulty curve, but so far I’m still ahead of the game. Obviously I’m doing something right. Not only that, but as far as tuition and various other costs go, I’m soon to be financially independent entirely because of my own hard work. It’s not like I’m raking in The Big Bucks, but it’s enough that I’ll likely graduate with zero debt. Looking at it a bit more objectively, I feel a lot better about what I’ve accomplished and where things are going from here. Which is a good feeling!

        She also noted that I carry myself like a grad student, as I’m comfortable in my own skin and bold enough to approach professors and ask to work with them. I actually had someone else recently tell me that that they think I’m outgoing, too, so apparently I can make a decent first impression. While it’s a kind thought, I don’t think I really agree with them. Truth be told, I mostly manage to seem “comfortable in my own skin” and outgoing by keeping myself distant (at least, emotionally) from people. Which sort of defeats the purpose, I think. Granted, Google’s definition of outgoing is “friendly and socially confident”. I can see how someone might think I’m outgoing, from that point of view (but I usually associate outgoing with extroversion). I’m perfectly happy to talk to people once a conversation’s been started, so there’s a slightly-qualified version of the friendly part. As for socially confident, that’s definitely just a matter of appearance. It’s not like I’m confident in my social skills, and starting conversations still freaks me out. I’m mainly just surprised that it’s not utterly apparent to everyone involved that I’m shy and frequently awkward.

        All that aside, I’m doing alright. Lots of work to do, just need to juggle it the right way. My difficult/time-consuming classes are at least interesting this semester (introduction to brain and behaviour, programming in C++). Sadly, I have one class that’s a bit of a mystery. Thus far, it’s been almost entirely review of other classes I’ve taken. The prof isn’t giving much in the way of hints about what the exams are going to be like, and he’s not a good enough teacher to consciously emphasize important topics. In fact, he regularly says (and I quote) “they told me not to do this in teacher school, but I do it anyway”. Yeah. So either the exams will be completely trivial, or I’ll be blindsided by questions about unimportant details nobody in their right mind would put on a test. The midterm is a week from tomorrow, and I expect it will be an exciting adventure - just like every other time we enter that classroom.

Summer job!

I have exciting news! The title probably spoiled it, but the news is this: I applied for a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council summer research grant with Dr. Robert Biddle as my supervisor and we were accepted! That means working full-time at Carleton for four months, starting in May. Also nice is the fact that the award is enough to cover my tuition and books for next year, assuming I keep my entrance scholarship (I will, if this semester goes as well as the last).

Here’s the story: I found out who the eligible supervisors were, looked up their research interests, and contacted a few. I saw “Games and Hypermedia” on the side of the HotSoft webpage and that was pretty much all I needed to hear. Although, I had seen Dr. Biddle’s name before on a pretty neat project involving security and some awesome hardware, which would also be fun to work on too. I wound up walking over to the lab, knocking on the door and asking to speak to Dr. Biddle. After talking for a while and providing a transcript, we did our respective paperwork and found out a week ago that we’d been successful!

I dropped by yesterday after officially accepting the award and got a bit more information on what I might be working on. The initial plan is that I’ll work with Elizabeth Stobert, a PhD candidate working at the lab, on experiments related to security and usability. Later on, I’ll probably take a more active role and possibly start a project of my own. All in all, it should be pretty awesome.

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On an unrelated note, I’ll also be working on a computational linguistics project with a linguist doing his PhD in cognitive science. He’ll bring the linguistics, I’ll bring the computational. This is probably the area I’ll have my eye on in the future, though usability testing is a fascinating field as well. If all goes well, I’ll soon have exciting news about that! If it doesn’t go well, the exciting news will just take longer.

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On the subject of research, I’ll be posting a little blurb soon with details about my work at the Language and Brain Lab during the fall. Plus some snazzy photos of me looking like I actually belong in a research lab. It’s a bit more esoteric than computer security and usability, but I think it’s genuinely awesome. Stay tuned, folks.

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.

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.

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.

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)