Maverick_Knight's Xanga

Monday, September 28, 2009

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:23:03 GMT

1. Sarah is officially in the Geek Squad now. Curb your moral condemnation, because the job isn't as morally questionable as what we're going to use the money on...

2. Going to get Lexapro. Again, curb your condemnation; yes, it's an admission of weakness, but at this point I'm willing to experiment with alternative forms of intrapsychic warfare. Willpower isn't enough.

3. I think I have Avoidant Personality Disorder. Don't believe me? Check the symptoms. No, I'm not copping out by assigning my problem a label and playing the victim; I know my problems are just habits I need to break. That doesn't diminish their strength.

4. Our house is now full of tenants. 4/7 of us are asian, and 5/7 are international students.

5. More construction going on, and once again our landlord is either inexperienced or unscrupulous, because it appears they're just fixing what the previous construction workers botched. Apparently the landlord didn't have their work inspected or aquire a permit for said renovations.

6. The end result of this is that the bathroom upstairs is out of order until Monday and if anybody flushes the toilet it'll flow right down into the middle of my room. My bathroom is now shared by 5 people for the time being.

7. The German guy next door is very outgoing, which is good for me. As part of the new student orientation week, the UW sailing club was taking people out onto Lake Washington, so we went down there and got out on the water. Might join that club, since it's something that I can do anytime, as opposed to other clubs which usually meet in the evenings (when I have classes.) I'll just have to study up on a ton of nautical stuff, but how cool would it be to be able to sail?

8. I've decided to take the path of atheism. For the time being. The German guy next door is a more-or-less-Born-Again Christian, so this could get very interesting. I'll have to decide how much reading up I want to do on this issue, and I'll have to learn to stand up for myself in it.

9. Rum sucks. Vodka puts me to sleep. Sangria tastes like cough syrup. None of the three achieved our desired effect: shutting down the overcritical part of me and getting me to loosen up. We are still awaiting something which will reveal my true self. Hopefully the Lexapro will succeed where alcohol failed.

10. I wonder what kind of imported German beer my neighbor can aquire...

Spoilers ahoy!

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 01:02:57 GMT

Well, the new Battlestar Galactica series has come to a close, and like most everyone else on the internet who's followed the show, I feel I must share my opinion of it. I've waited awhile to let the finale sink in, and I think my view on it has crystallized sufficiently enough to be called final.

I didn't like it. Here's why.

First, here are the parts that I sort of liked:

The battle. Oh come on, you knew I would list this first. It was obvious they were saving their budget for the Final Battle, and it was great stuff. It's hard to mess up this aspect of the show.
The music. Bear McCreary has, predictably, done great work. In fact, I think the music was always the best part of the series. I would highly recommend the soundtracks for the third and forth seasons.
The acting. It's been spotty in places, especially when Tricia Helfer tries to emote concern or Michael Trucco tries to emote surprise, but here it was solid all around. Trucco, in particular, has greatly impressed me in the past few episodes with his Hybrid impression.
They actually addressed all the characters, and led them to a resolution of some sort. We can debate whether things like Roslin's death could have been handled to be more effective, but at least it was there.

Things that were just okay:

Cavil's suicide. It made sense, in terms of his character, for him to die by his own hand, but it was anticlimactic and extremely sudden. I actually laughed a little at it.
The Opera House. I actually kind of like the concept of it being the Galactica itself, and it was handled well, with the dramatic reveal of the CIC. I had always thought that it would turn out to be an actual place from the past (probably on Kobol), which was important in some previous Cycle, or to the Cycle itself. It's not necessarily a let-down, but given the sheer amount of buildup they gave us for it, it could have been bigger.

And now, the rant.

The morals that Ronald Moore tried to bring out in the end seem to come completely out of nowhere. There is a major emphasis on "Technology needs Heart to guide it." The moral of the show, so far, has frequently been shown to be "you need Faith and Love in order to survive in the long run." A dominating plot arc for the entire show has been the cylons trying to figure out how to biologically reproduce. It has been shown (and hammered home repeatedly) that only a pairing between human and cylon, where love is present between the partners, can conceive a viable offspring. The "God Plotline" has made it abundantly clear that things will work out if you have faith in the supernatural. There has been no indication at all that technology needs to be given up, and yet in the last act that's exactly the moral we're being told. It is too sudden.
The Colonials' decision to give up said technology and mingle with the neanderthals is an astronomically illogical, poorly-thought-out idea, and flat-out contradicts the series' established tone and style. In the first season, when the survivors set out, we watched them tackle logical problems that a band of postapocalyptic survivors would face. They had to find water, food and fuel, organize themselves, establish a government and a balance of power, and so forth. But in the finale, when they head off into the wilderness, no consideration is given to any of the many, many things they will need to tackle. They need to watch out for predators, learn to forage for food, learn how to cultivate crops, build structures, even make fire. These people have lived their entire lives in a civilized environment, dependent on technology. They're a random sampling of survivors, so logically they should have as many wilderness survival skills as any random sampling off the street. Oh wait...
...some of them do know survival skills. Gaius does indeed come from a farming background, but that was with modern (or even futuristic) equipment. How well do you suppose that translates to farming with no equipment? And apparently Helo and Athena know how to hunt. Why haven't we heard about this before? Quite frankly, the writers pulled that one out of their asses. And Helo's got a bad leg now, so it's almost certain he will face a tough time in the wilds.
The decision to split up was done for purely dramatic purposes, and was an out-and-out bad plan. Even if they all lack wildernesss skills, they stand a better chance of survival if they stick together. All in all, Earth is depicted here as, well, a pastoral landscape, and an unusually hospitable one at that. I know a lot of people are going to make the connection to the Garden of Eden, saying that they were led to the Promised Land in the end, and that God prepared this place for them to live, but that explanation doesn't work. Roslin died after they reached Earth, meaning that it's not the Promised Land. The Promised Land is Adama's proposed cabin. Meaning that Earth is just Earth, and subject to normal laws of nature. That includes predators, sickness, accidents, and all manner of vagaries which were all ignored in the episode. This is the kind of logic break that I just can't overlook.
In another, somewhat less-egregious logic break, Racetrack's nukes. Her dead hand fell onto the Launch button just as her tumbling ship spun around to face the Colony. We have no indication that this was the work of God. It comes off as simply a fantastic coincidence. But wait, I hear you say, there are no coincidences when Divine Meddling is involved. Well I'm sorry, but there's nothing in the show to indicate that God caused that. Sorry.
Also, why the happy ending? The only major character to die was really Anders. Roslin's death was inevitable and we had been frequently reminded that it was coming, and Racetrack and Skulls were, let's face it, side characters. Tory died, which was a bit of a (welcome) surprise since I thought that Tyrol already knew or suspected that the others set up Cally's death. But Everybody else went their separate ways into the aforementioned pastorale. Quite frankly, I would have been perfectly satisfied if everybody died (except Hera for plot reasons.) There's a physics for this stuff, guys.
Starbuck just disappeared. They never addressed her nature or her resurrection. This particular mystery had been touted almost incessantly throughout season 4, which characters all around, including Starbuck herself, wondering just what she was and how she came back. Then, a few episodes ago, she came to grips with the fact that nobody could explain it, and she made peace with thte fact that she was an enigma. I thought that that worked fine as an ending to the plot arc, though I hoped that it would be revisited and properly answered later on. But they kept dangling that particular carrot before us, bringing the issue up again in Someone to Watch Over Me and often using clips of it in pre-episode recaps. It was clear they really wanted us to wonder about it. It had been suggested in several instances that she was an angel somehow, or possibly (and less plausibly) a cylon. But in the end they don't address this. It never even comes up. To me, this is inexcusable. You don't hook the audience with a mystery, offer some guesses and theories to keep it in our minds, and then completely drop it in the end.

I feel I should say a few words about the use of mysteries as plot hooks, and about Black Boxes as plot devices. It is perfectly acceptable to leave something open to speculation or interpretation, a Black Box in the plot which the audience is meant to open for themselves. It is quite another to leave a plot thread hanging without resolution. "Resolution" here does not mean "explanation," but rather fulfillment. It is clear that we were meant to speculate as to the nature of God in the series, his plan, the nature of the cycle, and Starbuck's true nature. But it's very difficult to pull off a Black Box, since the task is to fulfill the mystery in question, rather than answering and explaining it away. You have to give the audience just enough to go on, while still leaving some crucial things unexplained. What constitutes fulfillment is different for every viewer: for some, only a little bit of informatiton may be sufficient to keep them wondering and speculating; for others, more detail or attention might be needed to call their attention to it. I did not feel that they sufficiently addressed the issue of Starbuck's nature, and consequently it came off as just something they dropped out of laziness.

Now wait, I hear you say, laziness? Well, yeah, laziness. You could argue that there wasn't enough time to address it, but I would contest that. I felt that the last three episodes before the finale (Someone to Watch Over me, Islanded in a Stream of Stars, and Daybreak, Part I) were all paced far too slowly, and that both parts of the finale spent too much time on flashbacks which only amounted to fanservice. Come to think of it, that's all that the finale was: fanservice.

All in all, I felt that the finale was poorly-written but well-executed, if that makes sense. By going out with such a happy ending, I feel that they forced to ignore a lot of the harsh realism that's been the hallmark of the show...and, indeed, any semblance of realism at all. I will watch the extended cut on DVD, but I doubt it will change anything. It will probably only include padding scenes.

As I believe I've commented about before on this blog, I like it when the end of a story reveals a unified structure, giving new significance to everything that's come before and making me go back and reevaluate it all anew. That did not happen here. But it's not just that it doesn't fit my own tastes: so many of the important events of the show have now turned out to have little-to-no purpose in the grand scheme of things. Major plot arcs like Pegasus, New Caprica, the events of Razor, the freeing of the Centurions and, perhaps most seriously, Baltar's messiah status and ensuing religion, ended up being just stops or detours along the way, links in the chain of causal events which otherwise served no purpose in the unified scheme of the story, and sometimes not even that.

The show's writers have freely admitted that although they knew the ultimate end, they've been making this stuff up as they go. I was willing to go along with it during the series because, hey, we writers all make the story up as we go, to some greater or lesser degree. I was giving them the benefit of the doubt, withholding judgement until the end, to see if their plan worked. I began to doubt right around the New Caprica arc, when the cylons were revealed to be considerably less competent and imposing than we had been led to believe, then again in season 3 when we got to see the somewhat-underwhelming and slightly-silly interior of the basestars, then over and over as the entire nature of the cylons was essentially retconned beyond all reason. (REBAR? I should trademark that...) Now, in the end, as they've delved into fanservice for its own sake, tossing prior mysteries and logic out the window, I am forced to conclude that, although some aspects of the series have been great, most notably the acting, directing (usually) and music, the writing was not all that great. On a small scale, on the level of dialogue and character actions, it looks good. But there's more to it than that. There's large-scale plot construction too, what Eric Walker calls "deliberate artifice." The writers behind BSG were just that: writers. They could not be authors, though they tried.

Monday, February 23, 2009

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:15:18 GMT

On the subject of the Event Horizon of Nerdiness, it's subjective and varies with whatever we're talking about. I'd say that for MMORPGs like WoW, the Event Horizon is the point at which you do something like get married in-game, or spend more time in-game than you do at a job. With Warhammer, the painting of the figurines isn't necessarily the Event Horizon. After all, the figurines are blank when you buy them...it's just common sense that you'd want to paint them, if only to tell them apart on the table.

In other news, I was made aware yesterday of a job opportunity opening up, which would allow me to break into my chosen field, give me some great experience, and earn me some money. It's a 2-4 month contract position working at an entry/junior level, for a well-respected company. Naturally, I sprang for it as soon as I got the email yesterday, but it wasn't until today that I learned a little more about it.

It's in the Twin Cities.

I am completely baffled as to how a staffing agency in Minnesota got ahold of me for this. The only thing I can think of is that I submitted my resume to them shortly after I graduated, they kept it on file, and their database just now identified me as a match for a job opening. Amazing.

So now I'm looking into possibly moving home in March, working this contract position and building up some money and experience, paying rent on my room out here in SA even though I won't be living in it, and picking up my grad program where I left off in August. I really don't have anything to say here, beyond what you might expect. I'm disappointed that I won't be staying out here in SA, but on the other hand there's nothing really holding me here at the moment. I'm happy to be moving back home (good food, yay), but this means I'll have tetmporarily suspended my goal of living on my own. Of course, this is all if they decide to hire me, which isn't necessarily a given yet. I'll find out next week sometime, after the phone interview.

In other (other) news, I got ahold of a copy of this thing in electronic format. Don't ask how or why. I regret that I don't have a screen capable of displaying its pages at readable sizes.

Launch +53 days

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 01:58:03 GMT

I've decided that I don't care whether or not anybody reads these blogs. I'll just use them to jot down whatever is on my mind.

Has it really been 53 days since I moved into this place? 53 days in this single room? Hard to believe. How fast time slips by as you get older. I've done remarkably little with myself since I moved in. But hopefully things will be taking off soon.

It's hard not to just recap my life thus far, but I have to keep in mind that nobody is reading this anyway, so nobody needs to be filled in with backstory or anything. I'll just ramble on as if you know what I'm talking about.

Went into Games Workshop the other day to get some more information on the job openings they have available. I previously dropped by there once before, when trolling around the Alderwood Mall for jobs, but I didn't stay long enough to really look around. This time, the employees were occupied, and so I basically had to kill a little time.

It was....surreal.

Up in front of the store was a table where an employee was apparently demonstrating Warhammer 40,000 to some kids. Their dad was standing by looking on, and apparently this was just another fun outing with dad. Go eat at McDonalds, kill some orks, just another day... It struck me as absolutely hilarious that the employee was actually making Warhammer 40,000 - Warhammer 40,000 - seem like a game kids could play and enjoy.

Behind the kids' table were two desks (for lack of a better word) where guys were assembling/painting their models.

Behind these two was...another kids table! These kids were a little more serious though. They were just starting a game of Tau/Eldar vs. Tyranids, while a grunge-looking high-school guy looked on. I watched this for awhile, and had to stop myself from going "What are you doing? Don't send your Avatar out into an enemy melee army without support! This isn't a movie, he doesn't have Awesomeness Armor. Move up the damn Harlequins at least, geez." Or, "Dude, move your Kroot up. These are Tyranids, get a meat shield going!"

Up until now, I had been marvelling at all this. It's a culture which, as a "nerd", I ought to be familiar with, if not partly involved in, but it still struck me as quite the odd place. I could identify the models on the shelves, and the units on the tables, but I had never been tempted to collect and play with, let alone painstakingly paint, these things. It's a world I had never quite fallen into. I never crossed that event horizon of nerdiness. The scary thing is that now, as I strolled through this apparently-bustling store, I actually wanted to be a part of it. I knew how much disdain it would earn me from people on the outside, but here was a community that I could actually be a part of. Besides, they seemed nice, and I might even find some healthy competition among these players. I kept going.

Next to this was another table where some older players were engaged in some kind of urban scenario. I didn't see any armies on the table, so maybe it was the tail end of a 40k game.

In the very back was a larger table, where three even older players were playing what I assume was standard Warhammer. They were older, as in, older. They must have been veterans, so I didn't go back to see what they were doing. Instead, I wandered over to a rack of codexes and picked up the one for the Necrons. I was amazed that, through my Dawn of War background, I knew almost all of the units. Every time I turned a page, I wanted to grab the shoulder of the nearby model-painting guy and show him an Immortal, or a Grey Knight, or an xv88 Broadside Battlesuit and go "Hey, I know these guys!"

But all this aside, I was shocked at how Warhammer 40,000 is actually played. There is no grid, no hex, nothing on the playing area to denote distance or position. Instead, unit movement distance is measured in inches, and players move their units by literally pulling out a tape measure, measuring out so-and-so many inches, and just moving the piece accordingly. That's absurd! What's to stop someone from fudging it by a quarter of an inch and getting extra movement out of their units? And do determine line-of-sight, players literally get down behind their unit's piece and eyeball it. If they can see the enemy unit, they have line-of-sight.

Truly, a different world. How can such an imprecise system work? It's like ork technology...they believe that painting your vehicle red makes it go faster, and so vehicles painted red do go faster.

Gettin' riled up

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 21:53:42 GMT

We're reading a speech by Robert Horn, who developed the technique of information mapping. Information mapping is a system for presenting information in a highly structured, piecemeal manner which has been tested and developed to make the information in question as easy to assimilate as possible. Now, all this sounds great and all, but when he starts talking about how the paragraph is an ineffective unit of text, I get a little bit defensive. ("Hey, don't be dissin' the paragraph! Let's throw down, you and me! LET'S GO RIGHT NOW, COME ON! WALL OF TEXT ATTACK!" *lens flare, whoosing anime lines* And so forth.)

I've grown up with the paragraph. I work in paragraphs. He argues that the paragraph is an ill-defined thing (which I completely disagree with) and that they are too cluttered with extraneous writing (derp, that's the writer's fault). But I can't argue with the science, and if "information blocks" have been experimentally proven superior to the paragraph, then I guess I better move out of the way, because I'm a creature of paragraphs. Besides, it's just technical/expository writing, it's not like he's trying to uproot creative writing too.

On graphocentrism (or: Eat it, Chomsky)

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 19:59:52 GMT

For the first time in my college career, I am somewhat disturbed by what I'm being taught in my classes.

In my Information Design class, we covered the origins of writing and how it relates to speech. Historically, speech came first, of course, and since children learn to speak before they learn to write, it is usually thought that speech represents a more natural, "root" form of human language. Writing is thus thought of as subordinate to speech: words are but the graphic representations of phonemes and vocalizations.

I have to say, I'm not too happy with this. In fact, my instinct is to argue that it's not the case at all.

Up until about the 7th century AD, words didn't have spaces between them, and text was generally meant to be a direct representation of speech. People would read (those who could at all, that is) out loud, sounding out the words as they went. But when text began to have spaces between the words, people started reading silently. Never mind the reasons why. I would argue that this was the critical point wherein written language and oral language parted ways.

Oh, there is still a relationship between them - see the beginning of this sentence for an attention-getting marker held over from oral language. But I, for one, do not imagine text being spoken out as I pass my eyes over it. I sometimes notice things like alliteration and cadence, which call to mind how those words might sound if said aloud, but some of the most effective prose I've read was effective not because it was sonorous.

Cognitive scientists would tell you that a lot of people read this way, in terms of neurophysiology:

Text > Sounds > Language processing > Abstract Comprehension

I tend to omit the "Sounds" part of that progression as I read. On those occasions when I am really "in the zone", I go straight from the text to the language processing, skipping over that so fast that it hardly registers as a step, and perceive the meaning of the words abstractly. In expository or academic writing, I perceive things directly in clusters of ideas, joined by logical relationships. In fiction, I perceive things visually, reconstructing the story as it might look if it were playing out.

This tendency to imagine things visually is interesting, because it marks me as a true graphocentrist through and through. Graphocentrists view written language as being superior to oral language, and the eye/vision as superior to the mouth/speaking (or ear/hearing). This might be due to my natural inclination towards visual comprehension, or to my long training in reading, and someone else, raised in a different environment and possessing a different brain chemistry, might have an equal proficiency and preference for oral language.

But I can't just let it go that easily. Getting back to my initial point about the causal relationship between oral and written languages, I believe them to be mostly separate entities, joined not to each other, but to a third entity: the language itself. I think that, while both media attempt to express ideas in the medium of language, language is a separate thing, exising outside the ken of either the written word or spoken sound, residing in the cognititon of whatever person is generating the idea. Neither text nor sound is sufficient to perfectly convey the linguistic form of an idea. For example: text lacks the added bandwidth of prosody, rendering words connotatively sterile except in the hands of skilled writers. Conversely, speech is limited by its fleeting nature, meaning that truly elaborate constructions are very difficult, if not impossible, to both create and understand: ideas must be expressed in quanta fitted to the short-term acoustic memories of the speaker/listener involved. In essence, both media have to not only represent the idea, but the language as well.

...where was that train of thought going? I forget, but I do remember that they have good pizza at the student center.

I wonder if there's a paper in there somewhere.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 23:57:34 GMT

Huh. Guess that didn't go exactly as planned. I had intended to do a long writeup of my trip, and of my experiences getting a foothold in a new city, but I never got around to it. I can't be bothered to sit down and do it now, for reasons which I will make clear in future entries. In the meantime, here is a recap of the trip:

______________________________

We took two cars, and I followed my dad's minivan for most of the way. My sister was with us as well, to provide driving backup.

Driving to Fargo (about 240 miles) through freezing sleet, on tires with no tread left on them at all. Once they got caked with snow, my tires were basically completely smooth. I wondered why my car seemed to be sashaying all over the place whenever I got above 50 mph... Of course I got new tires in Fargo. I consider it a major accomplishment that I was actually able to pull off such a feat of skill.

Driving across North Dakota. I have never seen a more boring state in my life.

Going through the foothills of Montana. I had a couple of weird moments where my brain wondered why the ground was going up and down, and I kept mistaking hills at the peripherals of my vision for clusters of houses. Weird.

Realizing (as we were going through the Rockies and it began to rain and the temperature started to drop with nightfall) that the Accutane I took several months ago had a more detrimental effect on my night vision than I had initially thought. I couldn't see the van in front of me very well, chickened out, and demanded that we pull over and switch drivers.

Shortly after pulling over, we realized that Lookout Pass, just ahead, was being inundated with snow and would almost certainly be (ironically) impassable. We pulled over in a small town to stay the night. The guy at Subway told us that not only would the Pass be infeasible this time of year, but that it would have a fun layer of ice beneath the snow for several days, if not a week. At this point, it really looked like we would have to turn around and abort the mission. All that night, we were watching every weather information outlet we could access.

The next day, we decided to chance it. We made one last stop right before the ascent, wished each other "may the Force be with you", and headed over. We made it just fine, and got over the next pass as well. It snowed heavily the entire time, but those brand new tires got me through. Idaho passed quickly, and it looked like we would be able to get to SA in decent time after all. We never got to see the Rockies much at all. It was either dark, foggy, or snowing. All we could see of them were what looked like sheer walls of evergreens crowding the road.

When we hit Spokane, we got a taste of that Everwinter that Penny Arcade talked about. We figured that, being hearty Scandinavian-type Minnesotans, we wouldn't be deterred by a simple snowstorm, no matter how thick. The ice on the streets of Spokane has been chopped, with machines which must have looked like farming combines, leaving a surface so rough that I thought my windows would shatter as we bumped along across it. Just as we were leaving Spokane, however, the snow picked up again, and grew so dense that it was a wonder our cars were able to push through it. And I don't mean the accumulation on the road; I mean the stuff coming down, still in the air. We pulled over again, having made it barely 130 miles.

The hotel, of course, was packed with people who had just been waylaid in the snowstorm. The parking lot was covered with about a foot and a half of snow. The plow wouldn't be along for at least another two or three hours. This made for quite a fun time as first one, then another car would get stuck in the snow and would have to be shoveled out. I wish that our Minnesotan backgrounds would have better-prepared us for such situations, but we were just as much at a loss as anybody. Between several guests and the lobby staff, we eventually got our own cars situated and checked in before the place filled up. When we started carrying our luggage up to the room, they had brought out a bottle of Clorox bleach and were using that to melt the snow. One pair of my pants now has bright pink spots on it from where the bleach splashed me. I have never seen such a bizarre way of dealing with snow.

The central plains of Washington were just more midwest wasteland, but over the course of the day we got to track our progress by the inexorable approach of the mountains in the distance. If all went well - and the weather seemed to be behaving this time - we would reach SA by nightfall. There was one more pass we would need to navigate, in the Cascades this time, and we needed to get to at least that point by nightfall.

Washington has a bizarre geography. The very eastern portion of the state, apparently, gets tons of snow. The central plain is an arid basin, almost akin to the desert, lying in the rain shadow of the Cascades. The Cascades are, well, mountains. And then, partitioned off as if in its own little world, is the mediterranean Seattle area, sandwiched between the Cascades and the Pacific ocean. Then you have the Olympic peninsula, containing the Olympic Range (the wettest point in the contiguous 48 states). All in all, a uniquely varied set of climates.

As I said, we didn't get to see much of the Rockies, obscured as they were by various bad weather conditions. The Cascades, however, were totally awesome. That picture really doesn't do them justice at all. There was fresh snow on the trees, it was perfectly clear, and we got a fantastic view of everything. I wanted to get out at every turn in the road and just take pictures, but we would never have got there on time if I had.

______________________________

And that's how we finally arrived at Seattle. It took us four days. A tunnel admitted entrance to the city proper, and at the mouth an archway said, "Seattle - Gateway to the Pacific."

I was reminded of Bioshock: "All Good Things of the Earth Flow Into the City."

Launch -10 hours

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 01:31:51 GMT

Well damn, it now appears that weather will delay our departure. Of course, this raises some significant complications. I had four appointments made to check out possible housing options, all on Monday, and now those will most likely need to be rescheduled. That's not going to be fun, but since they were all able to schedule their appointments on Monday, shuffling them to another weekday most likely won't be a problem. What will be a problem is the quick turnover rate in the housing market over there. A delay of anything more than a day will make this entire batch of possibilities highly unstable. If we don't get on the road tomorrow as planned, I will need to look for a whole new batch of options on Craigslist.

And I hate Craigslist. Allow me to say a few words about that site, since it figured so prominently in my search for housing. The problem I have with it is that while it presents a great number of listings for any given subject, it is difficult to narrow down those results. You can use standard search operators, like "-house" or "apartment and studio", but those do little good since individual listings are not required to include any specific terms at all. For example, some posters include detailed, comprehensive information with their listings, while others say little more than "i have a room for rent. $450/month. call at *phone number*" It's impossible to effectively search such a mixed set of listings. When searching the rooms for rent section, the only criteria which Craigslist allows you to filter results by is rent cost. After narrowing it down to that price range, I had to basically comb through all the results by eyeballing, and them one by one for listings which looked promising. Then I had to email those posters and find out if the details were to my liking. Tedious. Contrast this with Roommates.com, the other site I used. Roommates.com requires you to specify all kinds of specific of details about yourself, your place, and the kind of roommate you're looking for. It's vastly more useful.

Honestly, I don't know why Craigslist is so popular. With a little more effort, they could easily include more search filters/crieria and make it far, far more useful.

Launch -12 hours

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 23:34:59 GMT

Everything is packed except for the incidental items we'll need tomorrow morning. Everything I own is packed into two cars. My mother is crying and we've been watching movies as a family all day. Mostly Hitchcock films that we got for Christmas, and a few others pertinent to the day. I am excited and afraid at the same time, a contradiction which I don't recall ever really feeling. When I moved into the dorm, I think I was just bewildered and a little excited to get out on my own. I wasn't going all that far to the dorm - just downtown - and I could easily drive home in less time than the average commute.

Those days in the dorm were good ones for me, despite the fact that I wasn't quite ready to live on my own quite yet. I have some good memories, and I learned a lot about taking care of myself. In the end, I just wasn't ready to reach out and socialize with the people on my hall, and when I got a single room I had enough of a mental breakdown that I had to move home. Nevertheless, I look back on those semesters fondly. I think I was in a better mindset then, but just couldn't sustain it. But if you asked me, "would you do whatever it took to get that back again?", I would probably say yes.

And I will do it again. I am too far along now to back out. I set all this in motion for a reason, and I will see it through to the end.

Launch -2 days

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 04:07:10 GMT

I love how these entries only get 1 or 2 views each. I am truly talking to myself here.

A major driving force for me in life is to produce things. To leave behind some artifact that indicates to those who will come after me that yes, there was in fact a life here. It's the fear of being forgotten and unknown which drives me. I see the great authors and thinkers of the past and say, "I want to be like them." People are still studying the works and lives of the great masters of literature and philosophy, and admiring them for their genius. I want to have that kind of longevity.

Of course, it's not a perfect immortality scheme. It's immortality, but of a bittersweet variety. On one hand, there are those who are remembered and appreciated only by cloistered academics, like John Milton or Immanuel Kant. Their immortality is assured, as long as their ideas and messages are in vogue with academics. Some, like Shakespeare, have spread their influence so far that no amount of unpopularity could really erase their memory. But of course, he might not even have been a real person, so who knows?

Then there are those who are remembered by the masses, or by those who monitor and chronicle their tastes. People like Stephen King and Tom Clancy will not be soon forgotten, simply because the idiot masses will keep buying their books.

Then there are those who claim to have forged genres. Isaac Asimov is a household name to anybody who's ever read SF, and King has done his fair share of icebreaking for his genre. This is despite the fact that many people will tell you that SF did not begin with Asimov, nor horror with King.

Then there are those lonely, unfortunate authors who had a good grip on greatness, but who, for reasons inexplicable, failed to consolidate their foothold into true immortality. Authors like James Branch Cabell, who are now enjoyed and appreciated by extremely small niche cults.

Then there are those whose greatness is subjective, who have been recognized by neither academicians nor the masses. Authors like Gene Wolfe, who for all I know may hold eminence in only my own mind.

So is this bid for immortality a worthy life goal? Or is it just chasing after the wind? Right now, it's too late to answer such questions.

Oh yeah, there's also a move going on around here, isn't there?