Some Christmas Schmaltz

I had bitched for the past year or so about my smartphone's various inadequacies.  It was becoming increasingly unsatisfactory for my Human 2.0 needs.  Believe it or not, I have been using a so-called "smartphone" that CANNOT EVEN LOAD PICTURES OFF OF TWITTER RELIABLY.  How can I be an effective social media maven without even that most basic of capabilities?!  HOW CAN I SYNERGIZE?!?!  HOW IN THE FUCK AM I GOING TO COME UP WITH A SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY FOR MY PERSONAL BRAND?!???!?

A brief discussion occurred between my wife and I wherein we discussed the purchase of cellular telephones for Christmas.  We agreed that such a purchase was perhaps beyond our means due to having made the ridiculous decision to buy a home.  Money is tight right now, and paying a few hundred dollars for a thing that is mostly excellent at taking and sharing (and enlarging) pictures of your dick is frivolous.  And by the way, is it not insane that a three year old phone is considered a decrepit relic?

So, of course she buys me a new phone for Christmas, and of course, I don't do the same for her, because I thought we talked about this as a marital unit and came to a mutual accord.  Setting aside the hurtful betrayal of the situation, I was overjoyed.  At last, I could be an effective participant in the social armageddon wrought by smartphones!

I tinkered with it.  Twitter worked its dark magic magnificently.  I watched some of a wonderful collaborative Let's Play of Hammerwatch being done by Veriax, Pike, Ratbird Champion, and Malarky.  See how many names I'm dropping?  Look at how much pseudo-social digital interaction occurred right there!  IN MY HAND.

This morning, I wanted to take it with me to work, but I realized that my wife couldn't reach me on it yet.  I guess that's kind of important.  So I left it on the coffee table in my living room amongst the carcass of our Christmas before rushing out the door.

This afternoon, the table was cleaned off, and the phone wasn't there.  Katie must have just cleaned it up.  We're going camping tomorrow, so we started packing, and going over all of the necessary implements: tent, sleeping bags, a Tiger hand-held game, perfunctory books, elk urine, food?  Oh, a cell phone might be nice.  Cell phone.  Right.  That was on the coffee table.  Honey, did you grab the lovely new phone you purchased to celebrate to birth of our Savior?  Is it perhaps cutely displayed on the tree?  Oh, you didn't see it at all today?  I suppose I could have been mistaken.  Perhaps I left it in the bathroom.  I do enjoy a good morning shit accompanied by the Internet in my hands.  Given the choice, wouldn't you rather than not defecate with the entire fucking wealth of human knowledge in your hands?

Oh, it's not in the bathroom.  It's not under the couch, in the cushions, in a kitchen drawer, on the dresser, in the fireplace... We are now transitioning from a curious situation to a felony.  And then, a revelation: my wife left her keys in the side door last night.  We live in a slightly dodgy neighborhood, which I actually love.  It reminds me of the Portland I grew up in.  My neighbors and I truly look out for each other, because we're in this shit together.  Contrast this with that fucking miserable condo I lived in for three years where I can count on one hand the number of times I spoke with a neighbor.  I think a neighbor might have saw me in my underwear once; I sure wouldn't talk to me after that, either.

But back to the point.  The scenario began to unfold: a local ne'er-do-well may have espied the keys dangling from the door from the street after I had left at 5 AM (seriously, WTF) but before my wife awoke around 7.  Having a heart three sizes to small, he or she could certainly have grinched their way through the door and into the living room, wrapping their fuzzy green fingers around my newfound key to digital success.  The perfect crime.  No forced entry, little noise, an easily-concealed and high-value item, easily pawned on Craigslist; in fact, the dull-witted owner surely just got it for Christmas, and wouldn't have a serial number to provide to the police.

I have been extremely anxious the past few months, seeing as how I'm basically the only breadwinner right now, my job is ridiculous, I'm exhausted, and I'm just predisposed to fretting anyways.  The worst thought wasn't that my wife had allowed my phone to be stolen; what if they weren't looking for a mere phone?  Now the muscles in my neck tense and my jaw clenches while we drive to work to see if somehow I managed to take it with me (I didn't.)

Every option has been exhausted.  Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have to agree: we have been burgled by one crafty devil.  I consider the lecture I will deliver to my wife, trying to find the words to express not only my frustration, but also the abyssal depth of my fears, and how my intestines have practically braided themselves at the thought of what could have happened to her.

With money being tight, I didn't want to call a locksmith, but the local grocery store has no replacement lock cylinders.  Really, what was I even thinking there?  The house key was still on her chain.  Only a fucking nerd would think "oh, surely our suspect has made an imprint of the key, and is having a copy made forthwith to further purloin our abode!"

We have to go to the redwoods tomorrow.  I won't leave all of my things unsecure.  Why would I want to go hug a tree while some asshole is stealing my television, my art, my custom kitchen knife, my computer, with all of my priceless let's play videos?  Grumble grumble, I'm going to finish up the laundry.

The laundry.  The blessed laundry.

The damned phone would have smiled at me from the bottom of the washer barrel if it could have.  You stupid son of a bitch.  You ALWAYS check the laundry first when you're looking for anything pocket-sized (take that as you will).

I just had to laugh. I didn't do it for theatrical effect, I just had no other bodily response that seemed appropriate.

She could hear me down there, probably figuring that I had finally broken.  "What?"

"It was in the laundry."

"I thought you were mad at me."

"I can't believe this.  It's just a fucking phone."

"I know."

"They could have taken so much more than the phone."

At some point, I stopped writing.  I'm not talking about on here; that was on September 3rd of last year, which occurred because I wanted to write a thrilling trilogy about my love of Myth.  It ended up being two posts because there really wasn't anything to put in the third post other than "I got goatse'd by someone while in a Myth-related chat room at the age of 13, and that's clearly a big part of why I am the way I am."

I used to write borderline prolifically.  I had a blog that I updated at least weekly, and I used to jot down random lines when I was riding the train to or from work.  I even wrote World of Warcraft fan fiction.  God, seeing that on a screen, written by me... that hurts a little.

Let's be more precise: "some point" would be a few months after my Dad died.  While he was sick, I wrote a lot about the dying process, and about caregiving.  It was honest and good writing, but it took a lot out of me emotionally, so perhaps I just never regained the fundamental emotional well-being to write.  I'm more inclined to think that I came to believe that writing about anything else was unworthy, or maybe just that I had to do everything exceptionally well if it was to be done at all, because life is far too short to half-ass anything.

The result of this mentality is a sort of mental frenzy when I sit down to write.  My mind scrambles to say the EXACT right thing.  Not only must I compose it perfectly, but it must be some of the finest English prose yet to be written.  If it isn't, I am dishonoring the memory of my father.

This is an absolutely irrational way of thinking.  I'd like to change that.  I'd like to write freely like I used to, so I'm going to try to do exactly that here.  I've made similar resolutions like this in the past.  I have no idea if this will end any differently, but I've got to try, right?

Mythos, Part II

Why in God's name did I think I could make a three-part BLOGGING EPIC about my adolescent computer issues?  Even more astounding: I somehow thought that said epic would be INTERESTING.  The TL:DR headline version of the whole thing is "fat kid likes video games, doesn't have good computer, does stuff to get better computer."  It's not exactly the stuff of Pulitzer Prizes.  But I confess that I am a breathtakingly stupid man, and even worse, I'm also stubborn.  So I will continue to regale you about this odd chapter in my life.

And indeed, it was odd.  Not bad odd, just unusual.  The late 1990's were a very exciting time, primarily because of the vast amount of pornography becoming available to the average American home.  Yes, this was the heyday of Napster, Kazaa, Usenet, IRC, and all other manner of digital gloryholes where America's throbbing e-knob went to be e-polished.  But before any of these existed, there was an awesome program called Hotline which combined all of the features of the conveniently-named products above.  It was a client-server based piece of software that included forums, chat, instant messaging, and file sharing.

I managed to get a hold of Hotline somehow, probably off of one of the Mac Addict CDs my friend Chris used to get.  However it happened, Hotline was my gateway to the wild wild web (SEE WHAT I DID THERE).  And sure, many of the servers were full of various contraband files.  But it did have nice communities where people actually talked, traded legal files, and used the Internet for the higher purposes that Al Gore had in mind.

My server of choice was run by a guy named Erik the Red.  It was a low-key and friendly place with a few game demos and assorted shareware.  Erik was basically a good guy with some free server space.  Meanwhile, I was a whiny kid with no money and an abundance of free time, and a burning desire to play Myth.  I was surely whining on his server about having no money for this computer I wanted real bad when, to my surprise, he asked me what kind of work experience I had (being 12 years old, the answer was a resounding "NONE WHATSOEVER.)  Out of the goodness of his Viking heart, he gave me some text transcription work.  I was taking addresses off of a scanned mailing list and putting them into an Excel spreadsheet.  Yes, I was helping to modernize the nefarious business of direct-mail advertising.  But I wanted a computer real bad, so screw you!

Were this deal made with anyone other than Erik the Red, I would not have gotten paid.  But Erik was good to his word.  Not long after I'd completed the work, I got a check for a few hundred dollars.  We could easily afford a new computer now!

And what kind of computer did I choose?

Abusing my college-bound sister's education discount, we got the Apple Power Macintosh G3 All-in-One.  It had a blazing 233 mhz G3 processor, a whopping 32 megabytes of RAM, a vivid 15" monitor, and it weighed a hernia-inducing sixty pounds.  I loved everything about it.  I even loved how it smelled; it had a porous, translucent mesh on the top for heat dissipation, and I literally remember putting my face on it and huffing its fumes of plasticky, electronicky newness.

And on it, I played Myth.  And I was never the same.

Mythos, Part I

Every gamer has that one game.  It's the one that you looked forward to playing at the end of every single day.  You would race home, throw your backpack/suitcase/small child onto the couch, and you would immediately plug in.  You'd play to master every part of it.  You'd skip meals for it.  You'd play it until sunrise if you could, and if you couldn't, you'd make time.  You loved it, deeply and purely, maybe voraciously.  And then life happens, and however long it may take, you eventually drift away from it.

Myth was that one game for me.  I just finished my Myth: The Fallen Lords LP and while I like the overall result, it felt incomplete.  For all of their virtues, LP's aren't the best medium for long-winded accounts of how a game shaped a multi-year chunk of one's life.  Blogs are probably better suited to telling stories like that, and whaddya know!  I happen to have a blog right here!

I really mean it when I say that Myth shaped my life.  The pursuit and enjoyment of Myth drew me in all kinds of crazy directions that were mostly cool and entirely formative.  I actually learned life lessons from the whole ordeal, starting with actually getting the game itself.

For everyone out there that has that one game, you probably remember the first time you saw it played.  My first time with Myth was at a computer store that was obnoxiously named The Computer Store.  The underlining was a part of the name.  It was on all of their branding.  It was probably in the phonebook with an underlined The.  I think I even remember the employees rarely answering the phone with extra emphasis on "The."  It was the kind of obnoxious swagger that befitted a Mac-only store in the late 90's.  It actually still exists and has since been renamed "The Mac Store," no underlining, after someone apparently decided to concede that there are actually computers that aren't Macintoshes.

Nerdy brand loyalty aside, it was a really cool place in my adolescent eyes because it had a consistent supply of Mac games.  I didn't care that the carpets were usually dirty and the place smelled like warm plastic and sweat; I probably smelled much worse.  A more important feature to me was the counter with mammoth 21" CRT monitors hooked up to blazing-fast Macs.  The guys at the store were pretty cool about loading the display models up with games, including Myth.

Some bespectacled lummox was probably playing the game as I watched arcs of gore and fire dance across the screen.  I saw purple plumes burst from the Soulless as arrows pierced their ghostly forms.  Exploding Wights rippled the ground and coated it with their excreta.  Warriors charged into the breach, their shields clattering against the clumsy blows of a Thrall's axe.   It was like Braveheart, except with 100% less Mel Gibson and 861% more gratuitous blood.

Another cool thing about The Computer Store was their laissez-faire attitude about unattended juveniles playing games that would be considered totally inappropriate for them.  I probably got away with playing it for a good two or three minutes before I shied away, knowing that my Dad was probably not going to be too happy with me playing a game that was essentially an explosive meat grinder simulation.  But the damage was done.  I had to have it.

Unfortunately, I was still plodding along on a Performa 475.  We bought it in 1994 and it worked fine back then, but Apple had come out with PowerPC-based machines in that same year.  A lot of applications were only compatible with these new chips, including Myth, and our plucky little Performa used a 68k based chip that was getting pretty wheezy by the time 1997 rolled around.

Buying a new computer wasn't just a matter of whining until my parents cut a check.  We flat out didn't have the money to buy non-essentials for a lot of my childhood.  It wouldn't happen unless I suddenly discovered that I had a third kidney or that my farts contained trace amounts of gold dust (I only just learned this about six months ago).

I was despondent, but determined.

Where the Eff Have I Been?!

Read on for more uproarious puns!

A self-remonstration is probably in order for leaving this thing dormant for so long, so here goes: I AM TERRIBLE.  There.

I mentioned in my first post here that I find the act of blogging to be one of humanity's finest expressions of narcissism.  I tend to rank it pretty low on my sensationally interesting day-to-day task list.  It's somewhere between "writing my congressman" and "getting my butthole bleached."  So when I find myself in the rare predicament of having free time, I tend to gravitate towards more wholesome pursuits, like talking over video games that I play for the Internet.  In other words, I would rather be actually doing the hobby I enjoy rather than writing about it.

Let's also not forget that I do other things like working and sleeping.  In fact, let's never forget sleep.  Let's make that an ironclad rule.  Sleep is a luscious, wonderful thing.  I have been reintroduced to its virtues since I finally came off of graveyard shift in January.  I will never take sleep for granted again.  And when I talk about sleep, I mean that thing that people do in bed, at night, with their eyes closed, and they don't stop doing it until the sun rises. Your body might allow you to sleep during the day, but it's tricking you.  It's the decaf version of sleep.  It's like this video below, except substitute "sleep" in place of coffee:



I guess this is all an obnoxious way of saying "I've been busy," but it only accounts for about seven months of my absence.  After I found myself considering another trip to the anal bleaching salon, I realized that I might be served to engage in some kind of intellectual pursuit.  So I've been in school lately.  Nothing serious, just taking a class here and there, but it's still an obligation.  Last term, I took a community development class that I found useful, but I don't know if I really want to take my career in that direction.

This term, I'm actually in a computer science class.  I am not a programmer in any sense. The extent of my formal education in computer science was this ridiculous class I took in my sophomore year of high school where we sat in the computer lab, piddled around in Excel, burnt holes in CDs with butane lighters (they smell terrible), and threw random electronic detritus at each other (I think a monitor may have been thrown at some point).  Oh, and my teacher made what we'll call a sixteenth-hearted effort at teaching us Scheme.  I retained none of it.

It really pisses me off that I've only just now taken a crack at programming because I'm actually finding that I enjoy it.  Even more, I actually understand it so far.  I convinced myself back in high school that I just didn't have the brain for it when I actually just didn't act like a weird recluse.  I'm not saying that's what programmers are, but that I had this sense that you just had to be a certain type of person to actually program.  I was completely wrong, obviously.  Admittedly, I'm just starting out and making programs that make fun of the user's penis size and stuff, but it's proven to be stimulating.  I'm even giving serious consideration to actually getting a second degree, which would mean some interesting things for the channel I suppose.

That pretty much brings me to today, which finds me writing this thing and thinking about my channel.  I like how things are going with one small exception: I am completely irregular, in so many ways, but mainly in the sense that I really don't keep a schedule.  This can have some undesirable results.  I don't like those weeks-long spells of not putting up any content because I feel like I'm letting people down.

On the other hand, I don't want to be forcing myself to make with the laff-laff.  I don't want to end up resenting what's supposed to be an entertaining diversion for me.  Sometimes, I just don't have an urge to sit and do an LP; in other cases, I have to take care of other things.

I was hoping that this struggle with time would go away once I switched over to day shift, or that it would at least diminish.  I've found that I actually feel somehow less in control of my time lately.  School is a part of that I guess.  Still, I feel like my days are way more rushed and that time slips more easily through my fingers.  My LPs get pushed aside, though in favor of what, I'm not really sure.

This is all just a bunch of rambling, but sometimes I need to clean out the grease trap that is my mind before I start some kind of kitchen fire.  Maybe I'll post something less... navel-gazey later?  I hope so, I'm kind of liking this.

A Century in Review

A few weeks back, my stalwart colleague Influx posted a comment on my YouTube channel to congratulate me on reaching 100 subscribers.  It's encouraging to think that, somehow, I've fooled over 100 people into thinking that what I am doing is somehow watchable.  And thanks to our ten-digit hands, 100 is a good, round number and is thus a milestone.  Hence this post, and hence your current discomfort.

I didn't start making Let's Plays for the stats.  Preliminary exploration into the LP landscape showed a world that could be unwelcoming at times, being strewn with abandoned channels whose owners were unsatisfied by their own numerical progress.  Elsewhere, I'd read too many posts from folks bemoaning their slow acquisition of views, subs, likes, comments, pokes, hugs, anonymous caresses, fnurps, glorbs, and hickeys.  It seemed to me that an obsession with digital metrics of success would be a Bad Thing for me as a fresh-faced LPer.  So I decided not to worry about it.  It's been a good policy.

However, I will confess that I love data.  I am a gamer, after all.  High scores are awesome.  I generally love to observe trends, finding causal relationships in numbers that give me pseudo-valuable insights into my tiny world.  And I will absolutely confess that, in spite of the fact that I supposedly don't care about the stats, it's nice to see my views and subscriptions accelerating the further I pursue this silly little hobby.  I would probably feel differently if my numbers suddenly cratered or were non-existent to begin with.  But then I could conveniently revert to the whole "well, I'm too cool for the numbers" thing and be happy again.

After all, the act of LPing itself does make my little reptilian heart happy.  I guess the whole "why I make Let's Plays" thing would warrant a post of its own, but it's probably enough to say here that I like it, and I like it in ways that numbers can't really capture.  They are the intangible, experiential elements of gaming that everyone loves, like laughing my ass off when I manage to get some of my troops killed in Myth or when I split a ship in half in Silent Hunter 3.  What makes Let's Playing even better than just sitting and playing the games I love is that I get to actually share them with people and interact with them.  There's no statistic that captures the quality of the experiences I've had doing this.  Even though my channel is relatively small, I've become acquainted with people all over the globe.  It's pretty damn cool to find people with a common appreciation for what are often the underappreciated games that I play on my channel.  It's even better when I introduce someone to a new game and watching them become a rabid fan themselves.

You might argue that I'd get more of these experiences by being more numerically popular or whatever.  I guess it's possible.  But when I look at the LPers with thousands and thousands of subscriptions and millions and millions of views, I don't know that I see a lot of that interaction happening.  I'm grateful to be where I'm at and to be able to interact with the people I've met.

So I guess that this post is a thank you, in my own clumsy way, to all of the folks who are watching, enjoying, and sharing in what I do.  I'm not really keeping very good track of you, but I'm personally very grateful for the opportunity to pollute your minds with my mumbling digital idiocy.  Here's hoping I can get even worse!

Of Love Lost and Youth Wasted

Let me take you back to the heady days of 1997. Clinton was in office, and at the risk of beating a dead horse with a really stupid joke, he was, as they say, getting his weiner sucked. The dot-com boom was entering COCAINE-INDUCED DIGITAL FRENZY MODE, but like many young Americans, I had no idea that there was an internet beyond the confines of AOL keywords and chat rooms. Yes, for many years, I was a user of AOL. I am not proud of this fact, but nevertheless, it is a part of me. A non-malignant tumor, in all likelihood. 

Back then, there was a game on AOL called DragonRealms.  It actually still exists, albeit with far fewer users than it had at its peak. It was basically a MUD (multi-user dungeon, for the unsullied among you). It was nerdy as all get-out, and since I was a fat kid without fashion sense or a robust social network, I spent many adolescent evenings in the Crossing, hunting rats at the shipyard, skinning them with my cutlass, and selling them for pennies. I then graduated up to goblins and cougars, and boy, those were exciting times.

But what really separated DragonRealms from the massively-multiplayer games that we have now was that it was primarily a social game.  Even though the game's combat and crafting systems were brilliantly designed, levelling and "theorycrafting" both took a back seat to the game's content and story.  Another way to put it is that the players were people that knew how to read and enjoyed doing so. Most people that know how to read don't have a lot of friends. That's just a simple axiom that everyone can agree on. So, logically, these people who knew how to read would socialize with their fellow agoraphobes in the mystical land of Zoluren and its environs.

I had played the game in a very casual fashion as Charlo, the Dwarven Paladin. I was shitty at the game but I had fun. More importantly, I learned about life and love. It was in DR that I met Shetan Johar, an Elven Cleric who had cast a charm spell on my heart.  She had violet eyes, just like Elizabeth Taylor.  We laughed and chatted together in the Crossing, trading adolescent observations about good parenting, cinema, knock knock jokes, and some dreadfully misinformed notions about procreative processes. We grew very close, or at least as close as the indifferent 28800 baud bonds of AOL would allow.

 

One day, Shetan told me that her mother was going to cancel their AOL account. We were both heartbroken. We resolved to stay in contact via mail. After swearing to contact me, she said "I hope I see you again" and vanished into digital oblivion, never to return to DragonRealms.

To my astonishment, about a month after that incident, I received a letter from an unfamiliar address. Jubilation! A letter from my lost e-love! I opened the envelope to discover that she had calligraphied my real name on it with a blue pen (parts of it had white-out on it. Calligraphy is fucking hard, okay?) It smelled of air freshener and reunion.

Here, faithfully transcribed, is that letter in its entirety:

Charlo,

Hey, how ya doin'? I'm pissed at my mom but thats usual lately. I wish I could talk to you, I miss you so much. I'm in one of my foul moods, I think its withdrawl, ::laugh::. Anyways how are things up there? I'm trying to think of a way to get AOL back so I could talk to you again. I feel like I just gave up all my friends. I know I didn't but thats what it feels like. It would be so cool if I met you one day but I doubt that would ever happen. Do you think you might be able to call me sometime? If you can't thats ok but I'd really like to talk to you. I wish I could call you but with the state of mind my mom's in I doubt it, she keeps saying its a waste of money (she won't even let me pay for it). Either way I'll try to call you if you give me your number. Mail me a recent picture of you ok? ...or two or three. ::grin:: My dad's mad at me now ::sigh:: ....I'm not used to him being mad at me. He's mad 'cause I cut my hair without calling him first. I know I should have but I didn't think about it because I don't live with him and I only see him three times during the year....god I wish that was a good excuse. Anyways! I don't know how I got on that subject. I'm going to have to try to find some of my good pictures or take some new ones. I guess I should get new ones since I cut my har. ::shrug:: I dunno. Oh yeah I'm glad you have my necklace. It kinda made me feel special, that you wanted it I mean. Shelley kept asking what you were to me, I really didn't know what to tell her. I couldn't tell if you were being completly in character or OOC or what. Obviously I can't keep my mind on one topic. Oh well! I'm trying to think of somethin' else to say but I'm running out of ideas. Okay I'll describe myself so you'll have to do the same.

Like I said I have dark brown hair, which is now only about three inches past my shoulder (its so short!!!!), brown eyes, I'm 5'1", and 95lbs., and I usually have a tan. I don't wear glasses, I used to though, I don't smoke, drunk, do drugs etc. etc. I have a little white American Eskimo - dog, her names Sassy. I already told you that I sold the horse I had. That's what pic. I'll send you! One of me riding! My best side! ::grin:: Ummmm........I like riding, blading, arguing, talking to my friends, hanging w/my friends, ....I really like talking to you. Thats about it. I gotta go so I can sulk and try to change my moms mind ::grin:: Well I'll see ya.

Shannon Harris

2-19-97

P.S.

My phone # is XXX-XXX-XXXX call me if you can. Can you give me your #too? Alright thats it. G'bye.

I believe I mailed her back, and that she mailed me back one more time, but I don't know what happened to either letter. In the end, we weren't meant to be. Shetan, if you're out there, I'd just like to say thanks for the memories, and also that I hope you weren't a rapist, because if so, well played, good sir.