diss extracts: interlude 3 (part 2 of 2)

here's part two! if you have no idea what's going on, read part one first.

At first, I panic. The world seems to tilt on its axis under my feet and I find it hard to breathe. Reflexively, I use the moon to take a bearing and still firmly in the grip of terror, I start running. Remembering the pile of bones and the charred stone, I keep running. I run for nearly a mile and then, seeing nothing and hearing nothing, I come to a panting stop. Suddenly my back hurts where the rocks in my pack must have slammed against it over and over while I ran on, unaware. Scanning the area, I recognize the grasslands around me and the gentle slope of the ground to the north as it moves toward the edge of another, smaller lake. I am still far from home, but I'm headed in the right direction. At least there's no–

My thoughts and blood are frozen as a piercing shriek cuts the air. In its wake, I hear the rattle of bones. I know these bones too well: they live somehow without skin, without organs, powered only, it seems, by malice. I turn towards the sound and in the moonlight, silhouetted against the hills to the east, I see the skeleton, already nocking an arrow and drawing its bow. It's still too far away, I think to myself as rationality wars with terror for command over my thoughts. Sure enough, it fires an arrow – the twang of the bowstring mixing with a gleeful murder's hiss – and I watch it arc gracefully through the night sky before it thunks into the ground twenty feet in front of me.

Suddenly, a snarl from behind me yanks my attention away from the skeleton. So there are enemies on at least two sides of me, now. I need to get to high ground, ascertain the situation, and decide how to fight my way home. There is a rise to the southwest; I jog toward it, putting the skeleton at my back but moving at a pace that makes it certain it won't gain ground on me while my attention is diverted.

The zombie, of course, is waiting for me at the top of the rise. By the time I see him, I don't have time to check my momentum, so I dive and roll under his first swing, ending up behind him. He turns slowly, but it takes me a moment to shrug off my rucksack and yank my old sword from its scabbard. By the time I've drawn my weapon, he's shambling forward to rake his claws across my face. I don't let him, obviously. I take one step back to put myself out of his range and then I follow behind his swing with a descending cut of my sword, hacking off the offending limb.

Zombies cannot feel pain. Once I did not know this, and that ignorance nearly cost me my life. Now, though, when the zombie responds to losing his arm by immediately swinging the other one at my chest, I'm ready. Snapping my sword back up, I step inside this second swing and cut the arm off before it gets to me. It slaps wetly against my chest as it falls away, and I take a step back, putting distance between myself and the zombie's teeth, which are his last remaining weapon. He comes at me immediately, as I knew he would. As he does, I hear an arrow wizz by both of our heads, but there's no time to worry about that yet. Instead, I set my feet, grit my teeth, and let the zombie impale himself on my sword. Then I quickly plant my foot in his chest and kick, sliding my blade free as he crumples to the ground.

Thanks to the time I've wasted on this skirmish, there's no point in trying to develop a plan now. From atop the rise, I can see the countryside swarming with dark shapes in all directions, and the skeleton is almost on top of me. By the time I shoulder my rucksack and slide my sword back into its scabbard, it's already nocked and drawn another arrow, so I take off as fast as I can to the southwest, running in a zigzag pattern and hoping it's less of a distance to my house than I suspect.

The next two miles are a blur of desperation tinged with fear as I slowly become aware that I am being hunted, herded by a large group of skeletons who are – unfortunately – not nearly as stupid as their zombie allies. Over flat land, though, I can outrun them on foot, and as the light of torches comes into view slowly but certainly to the south, I actually begin to think that I'm going to make it home safely. Then, I top the final rise and see how thoroughly I've been outmaneuvered. Quite literally at the door of my house wait two enormous, red-eyed spiders and one of the grotesque, limbless, mottled-green creatures I've come to think of as “creepers”.

With who-knows-how-many skeletons closing in from behind me, I don't even have time to be scared. Leaving my pack on this time, I unlimber my bow and draw an arrow. The spiders have begun to move toward me, but seem torn between holding their position and attacking outright. I make the decision for them by burying my first arrow in the nearest one's hide. It hisses and comes at me, oozing a brown-black liquid from the wound. The creeper follows, deliberately, behind it. I simply wait, patiently putting a second arrow right next to the first and slowing the spider down a bit more. It is on top of me, however, before I can draw a third arrow. I drop the bow and draw my sword instead, slicing off the spider's first questing limb. It retreats back a few steps, and I do too. Behind the spider, the creeper is circling to my left, so I move to the right to keep it in view. This odd dance goes on for a few moments, the spider and I taking testing swings at one another while the creeper attempts to flank me. As I hack off a third spider leg, I begin to wonder what exactly is going on. Then a hiss from behind me makes my mistake painfully clear: in turning to keep from being flanked by the creeper, I allowed the second spider to come up behind me unnoticed. And now, I'm trapped and quite probably dead.

Seeing the creeper closing, though, I remember the charred corner of my house and the scattered pile of skeleton bones, and I know that I have one last chance. Going for the weakest enemy first, I charge the wounded spider, bringing my sword down in a two-handed, overhead blow that nearly cuts the thing in half. I try to pull my sword free as my enemy dies beneath me, but the rusty blade has been thoroughly mangled by this last, desperate blow and I realize after a moment that even if I manage to free my weapon, it will be worthless to me. This is unfortunate, but really doesn't change my quite-possibly-suicidal plan. The spider behind me hisses again – much too close this time – as I go for the only other thing I have that could be construed as a close-quarters weapon: my pickaxe.

I manage to raise it in a two-handed grip and take a step over the spider corpse at my feet, which seems to surprise the creeper who was lurching forward on its four mottled-green legs, perhaps sensing victory. Before it can recover, I swing the pickaxe laterally, scoring its hide and driving it back a step. I keep moving toward it, aggressively. As I bring the pickaxe up for another strike, the creeper begins to close again, hissing loudly. Throwing a look over my shoulder, I take a step back – against all of my instincts – and feel the spider's forelegs begin to close around my waist. With the creeper coming down on me from the front and the spider's hungry mouth lurching toward me from behind, I will myself to wait until the last possible second...and then I hurl myself aside as the creeper's hiss reaches its highest pitch.

The creeper explodes – as creepers are wont to do – and the explosion hits me in the chest, seeming to unhinge my bones from my muscles. I'm thrown across the front lawn of my house and I land in a bed of dirt, crushing a row of decorative flowers. The spider, closer to the center of the explosion, is completely vaporized. I try to stand, but the ground jumps down away from my feet and I stagger sideways. For a moment, I simply stand staring at my front door, struck dumb by the explosion. Then the sizzle of another arrow passing near to my head puts things into perspective. The skeletons that had been chasing me over the northern plains have finally caught up. I grab my rucksack and make a run for the door.

I fumble with the door lock, and as a result, I almost don't make it. But the skeletons are consistently poor shots and I finally hurl myself inside, locking the door behind me as they growl in frustration, fired arrows zikking off the stone walls of my home. The torches and the stone walls will keep them out for the night, and in the morning, if they aren't smart enough to disappear underground, the sun will melt them where they stand, leaving little sign of their passing except, perhaps, an incomplete pile of charred bones.

I pant heavily for a few minutes with my back against the door, knowing that the hisses and growls I hear outside will continue for most of the night and that, at some point, I'm simply going to have to just ignore them and go about my usual business of cooking and preparing the furnace for smelting another pile of iron ore.

Today, this world has shown me both of its faces: joy, in the exploration of a bounteous wilderness and in the feeling of hard work well done, and terror, in the persistent threat the night creatures pose to my life and all that I've built here. Ultimately, I am free to make my own life here, but it is a life that is earned, not given.

Survival is hardly a game, after all.

diss extracts: interlude 3 (part 1 of 2)

here's the first version of my third "interlude" section of the diss. as usual for the interludes, it's a nonfiction-y narrative thing that sets up the upcoming chapter. this particular one is from the perspective of the player's avatar in minecraft. this is the first half, second half is coming tomorrow. enjoy (i hope)! a few of my avid readers might catch a sly reference to an earlier nonfiction piece of mine, which was published posthumously in the element.

okay, not really posthumously. moving on...

The first rays of of the day's sunlight suffuse my bedroom, drawing me out of a deep sleep. I open my eyes slowly and for a moment I simply take in my surroundings. I am lying in my bed – rickety wooden bedframe, rough wool sheets – in a small, but solidly built room comprised of grey stone walls and a roof made of overlapping slate tiles. The bed takes up almost the entirety of one wall, while the opposite wall is lined with a series of shelves supporting nine chests made from polished wood. A few of the chests have been left open and old tools and worn-out clothes are barely visible beneath their lids. Near the bedroom door – a hinged, wooden affair that is currently closed and locked – a single, failing torch gutters, its wan light overwhelmed now by the warm glow of the rising sun. Outside the room's one window, a cow lumbers by, mooing. It's time to start the day.

I slide out of bed to a standing position. The floor beneath my feet is more hard stone, but it is cushioned and warmed somewhat by a layer of soft-colored rugs, weakly dyed a cloudy white. I pad over to the door, which yields with a creak, and then I proceed into the house's main hallway. Straight ahead of me is the door to a bathroom of sorts, where a porcelain washtub dominates an otherwise sparsely-filled space of roughly the same dimensions as the bedroom. To my left, the hall opens up into the house's main living area. Here, the rugs are a bit more vibrantly colored – a muted blue – and the walls are lined with earth-toned hangings that catch and soften the sunlight angling in through the windows. Against the far wall of the room, a furnace smolders dully, and beside it a few bars of shaped iron – last night's work – are cooling. On a wooden table near the furnace lay a crust of stale bread and an apple. I grab them and put them in the pocket of my trousers. They won't make for a spectacular breakfast, but I'm in a hurry to be on my way this morning and I don't want to take the time to make something else. I reach into another wooden chest that sits on the floor beside the table and pull out an old leather rucksack. Into it goes food for later: some smoked meat from the pantry and a skin of river water, along with a half-loaf of fresher bread. Back at the front door, I round up the usual equipment: pickaxe, handaxe, bow and arrow, and my notched, rusting sword. Then it's out into the world.

As I step outside, I check the two torches that hang below the house's eaves, framing the door. I fully intend to be back before dark, but it never hurts to be safe, and at night these torches will be visible from a long distance. With my back to the front door, I am facing south, and directly ahead the gentle plain on which my house rests continues for a hundred or so feet before terminating in a cliff; it's a fifty-foot drop into the lake that spreads to the horizon. To the east, the land thrusts up almost immediately into a hill that stands, at its highest point, nearly two hundred feet above my roof. As I do most mornings, I turn this way and begin to climb. On my way around the corner of the house, I pass the cow I saw earlier, and as I do he looks up from grazing, mooing again in what I suspect is a cow-greeting.

Climbing the hill is tough going, and, as usual, I don't bother walking all the way to the summit. Instead, I climb just high enough so that I can see out across the flatland to the west and north of my house until it butts up against the smaller, less spectacular hills in the distance. From this vantage, I can see the first sliver of the sun as it inches its way into the sky to the north, and as it does, its light spills out across the entirety of my work at surviving in this place. Waves of golden wheat sway in the wind to the west; they are arranged in precise rows, fed by narrow irrigation channels and protected from roving wildlife by a sturdy wooden fence. To the north is a similarly arranged but less impressive patch of wheat – I culled this one only a few days ago, and what few stalks remain are short and green yet. Along the edges of the lake to the south, papyrus shoots grow taller than a man, and cows and pigs dot the landscape in all directions, numerous enough that I've deemed fencing them in unnecessary. As I scan my environs contentedly, one particularly enterprising pig snorts at me from the hill's summit, startling me and then prompting me to wonder what in the world inspired him to make the journey all the way up there.

All is well this morning, I think to myself; yet, even as I do, my eyes are drawn to the foot of the hill below me, where a few human-sized bones rest in a pile and the corner of the house nearest them looks somehow burnt, blasted, the grey stone charred black. But now is not the time to dwell on such things. Now is a sunny summer morning, and there will be plenty of time for such darker concerns later. With some difficulty, I avert my eyes and turn away to face the day's demands.

There are only two tasks on today's agenda, but those two tasks could easily take me the remaining balance of daylight to complete: I need to find iron ore and wood. The iron ore will be used eventually for the forging of a new sword to replace the brittle, misshapen thing that currently hangs at my hip, and the wood will be shaped into more fenceposts to encircle the third, larger wheat field I am currently in the process of planting. Because of the flatness of the land immediately surrounding the house, it has been hard to keep the fields properly irrigated and the wheat in the first two fields hasn't been growing as fast as I'd like. Getting more seeds in the ground is easy; making sure that the resulting stalks aren't destroyed by any number of wild creatures is much more difficult and requires some forethought.

Fortunately, finding wood should only require a short walk. I've long since cleared the flatland below of trees whose wood went toward my earlier projects, and though I've replanted some saplings in their place, they haven't had nearly enough time to grow to any sort of size yet. So I strike out to the east, skirting the large hill and following a gentler ridge up and up until my house is lost to sight behind me. I've never been logging in this direction before and so I know it's only a matter of time before I come upon some suitable trees. Eventually, the ridge leads me up into the first foothills of the eastern mountains. On a clear morning like this one, I can often see these snow-dressed hinterlands from the top of the hill near my house. They loom in the far distance, gauzy-looking, like something out of a dream, tugging at my curiosity. But for now I have more pressing concerns.

From my current elevation, I can see that along the flanks of the foothills, the trees grow thick and large, and I will have my choice of trunks to cut. I spend much of the rest of the morning chopping down a few of the closer, smaller trees, stripping the the trunks to fencepost-sized poles, and eventually plowing through my nearly-forgotten breakfast. By the time I judge that I've cut enough wood, the sun is directly overhead. Rather than spending the rest of the day hauling logs back home on already-tired shoulders, though, I decide to leave the logs where they are until tomorrow and take a circuitous route back to the house while keeping an eye open for potential iron veins.

I head back down out of the hills and circle around the house to the north, where the land is rough and uneven. Here, rocks jut out of the dirt, forming odd-looking plinths. Occasionally, the ground under a bluff has given way completely, revealing a tunnel or shallow chasm that twists down and down into the stony guts of the world. These tunnels could lead anywhere, and if they ran deep enough they would almost certainly lead me to iron ore. But just looking into their depths from a distance fills me with foreboding – I don't yet need the ore that badly.

After an hour or so of walking through this strange land and another few bites of smoked meat, I am surprised to see a tunnel entrance bracketed by two of my old torches. I know that I haven't ranged far north of home recently, so this place must be one of the first caves I ever dug, lost to my memory in the confusion and darkness of those first days. Regardless, I know that if I've been here already, this particular cavern is at least relatively safe. Checking the position of the sun one last time, I light a fresh torch and disappear down the tunnel's throat.

The cavern opening leads into to a labyrinth of stone. Some of the tunnel's arteries are very clearly my own work – they are neatly head-height, squared-off, and run straight into the earth – while others are more angular, twisting, and disorienting – likely formed naturally by running water. I follow a number of these paths in succession, leaving more torches behind me as I go so that I can retrace my steps if necessary. The deeper the tunnels go, the greater my chances of finding iron ore become, and yet the crushing darkness at those depths is intimidating, and so I ultimately choose to stay just barely belowground. It is only purely by chance, then, that I find an iron vein in short order.

The hard work of chipping through the surrounding stone with my iron pickaxe prompts me to eat through the rest of my lunch as I work, and so by the time I've finally collected what I judge to be enough of the ore, I'm quite ready to be out from under the ground and en route to home and dinner. I follow the trail of torches back to the tunnel exit easily enough, but as I reach the surface, I'm struck by a sudden all-consuming fear. While I was underground, I must have lost track of the time! The sun is long gone, and it has been replaced by the apologetic silver light of a waning moon. It is night, and I am still miles from home.

Screenshot taken from Tom Francis's (PC Gamer) Minecraft travelogue, which I am citing heavily in my chapter.

re: your need to poop.

DEAR MEN,

WHEN YOU ENTER THE BATHROOM AND SEE THAT ALL THE STALLS ARE ALREADY OCCUPIED, YOU DO NOT NEED TO "WASH YOUR HANDS" METICULOUSLY BEFORE LEAVING. IT'S OBVIOUS THAT YOU WANTED TO POOP AND ONLY AFTER ENTERING THE BATHROOM DID YOU REALIZE THAT THERE WAS NO POOPING VENUE AVAILABLE. AND THAT'S FINE. BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME.

i'm writing a lot of diss stuff right now, so no time for real posts.



lol, pooping.

mysterious dungeons of desktop castles of dredmor (the roguelike)

i suppose that this is a review of sorts, but neither game i want to write about is officially finished, so titling it a  "review" in earnest seems a little unfair. of course, if you play indie games at all (which i do) pretty much every fucking game in the universe comes out nowadays in "alpha", "beta", "triad", "delta" and "half-cocked" stages for everyone to buy, and only 2 years later is it revealed that because the game is so not-mainstream it'll never actually be "finished", dude. because actually finishing is for The Man, or something.


so yeah. i want to write a little bit about some roguelikes i've been playing, how a game that forces you to constantly do basic math can still be fun, and how sometimes i get so fucking mad at video games i really just want to kill and eat somebody, anybody, to make the pain stop.


and now that i have scared the absolute SHIT out of you, here we go.


this is a tale of two roguelikes: mysterious castle and desktop dungeons (and, to a lesser extent, dungeons of dredmor). so maybe i should talk first about what the hell a roguelike is, in case you don't know. according to the internet, "The roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by randomization for replayability, permanent death, and turn-based movement. Most roguelikes feature ASCII graphics, with newer ones increasingly offering tile-based graphics. Games are typically dungeon crawls, with many monsters, items, and environmental features. Computer roguelikes usually employ the majority of the keyboard to facilitate interaction with items and the environment. The name of the genre comes from the 1980 game Rogue." according to game designers, however, a roguelike is "whatever the hell we want it to be because people tend to buy games with words like 'roguelike', 'procedurally-generated world' and 'permadeath' in the description this year".


if you're benedict cumberbatch's sherlock holmes, you can probably tell from the capitalization in the first quote that i pasted it in here from wikipedia, while you can probably tell from the lack of capitalization in the second quote that i made it the fuck up. but they're both completely true!


so. i got into roguelikes the way that i got into pretty much anything i've done that's been fun in the last two years except for high-speed sledding: minecraft. among many, many other things, i was drawn to minecraft because of the procedural generation of the gameworld, its stressing of freeform exploration, and the very heavy consequences of failure/death (there's no permadeath, but death is still a huge pain in the ass, unlike in most games nowadays). i hadn't really seen these qualities expressed in a game together before. they were new to me, and they were exciting. never-ending, randomized worlds? fuck yeah! with no map or totally prescriptive goals, so you can just wander but still feel a sense of accomplishment just by surviving? that's how i feel about real life, so YEAH! so when i started to see lots of other games with these buzzwords attached to them (unsurprisingly, shortly after minecraft blew up like a skyscraper-sized creeper), often for 2-3 bucks on steam, i started buying them by the virtual fistful. very quickly, though, this buying spree brought me to wonder if roguelikes were actually supposed to be fun, or if they were instead just some weird mutation of a "game" that you "play" for insanely sadomasochistic people who don't actually know what either of those words mean. 


take, for example, dungeons of dredmor (or, as i like to think of it, rageons of ragemor). this is billed as a "beginner's roguelike", so unlike something completely fucking nutballs like rogue or dwarf fortress, dungeons at least acknowledges that there might be a bridge between semi-autistic dungeon-crawl savants and your typical frat boy whose gaming literacy only extends to the best camping spots on the latest iteration of modern warfare's multiplayer maps. dredmor acknowledges this by tricking impressionable gamers with a pretty interface and an interesting presentation style and then it crushes their goddamn skull to a pulp by striking it again and again with a huge microwave while belting out lyrics to korpiklaani songs at the top of its lungs.


dredmor is not a bad game, per se, but it's a game that makes me question if i understand what "game" really means. so much time needs to be spent sorting equipment, digging through loot piles, and interpreting excruciatingly detailed minutiae just to get past the game's first few levels that i felt like i was hooking up an HDTV/DVR combo instead of playing a video game. even on the rare occasion that i succeeded in completing a level (and had paid enough attention to understanding why i succeeded), i was just exhausted afterward. this trailer makes it look both fun and easy, but it was neither of those things for me.

i was intrigued by the game's premise: that a turn-based affair with potentially endless dungeons, heavily randomized loot and a modicum of stat-based strategy could have such a small focus: that you didn't need to command armies and the fate of the multiverse every time you took a turn, that you didn't need to micromanage the grain watering rate and the education levy percentage every time of ever province in your entire civilization every time you took a turn, that turn-based gaming could be a bit more personal than in something like civilization. distilled in such a way, turn-based gaming with a touch of roguelike-ness could be a satisfying puzzle generator. fortunately, the makers of desktop dungeons were apparently thinking the exact same thing.


desktop dungeons has been my favorite go-to activity during writing breaks for something like six months now. for one thing, the game hits that perfect balance between "easy to play" and "difficult to master", and as such, every time the dev team tweaks something or adds something or removes something else, it makes the game (in a sense) completely new without forcing you to relearn the basic rules. also, it does something brilliant by taking the rogue formula and not only making it more accessible but confining play sessions into quick 20-minute dungeon runs. this deals brilliantly with a problem that many devs haven't seemed to notice yet: that procedural generation can easily come to just mean "really huge, boring levels". i've felt this even a bit from time to time in minecraft: you're a player playing a game, ultimately, taking time out from your actual life to get caught up in the game's world, but also to feel the sense of accomplishment you get from, you know, accomplishing something. in minecraft, that "something" is often as simple as finding a new cave, forging a new plate of armor, or just climbing a mountain and checking out the surrounding landscape. often, though, this new breed of procedurally-generated, "open-world" game seems to assume that exploration for the sense of exploration is enough. but it's not. and desktop dungeons realizes that, and shrinks each dungeon adventure down into almost a puzzle-like, single-level encounter that, at the end, you either win or lose. the overworld map and all the game's unlockables make certain that you never lose a sense of the game's scale, but the small levels make sure you're always getting the feedback that makes gaming fun.

mysterious castle, on the other hand, is like a not-quite terrible girlfriend when you're 16 years old: generally i'm unhappy around it, but it offers me something that i can't see to get anywhere else. in the metaphor this "something" would be sex, but in reality, i'm not entirely sure what it is about castle that's so absorbing. it is a game that was originally made for tablets, as is pretty obvious from the tablet-y (but still effective) interface. exploration is a bit more random in this game, but ultimately unsatisfying, because the game so badly wants to hold on to the roguelike aesthetic of "super-difficult, only for maniacs" that it sort of ruins itself. and with that, after about 2000 words, i've finally realized the thesis of all this shit that i'm writing. genre cross-pollination is well in good, in general and in games in particular. but i'm starting to think that making all games a little bit like roguelikes is not a great idea. the genre's qualities are very niche, and they're not something that transfers well. desktop dungeons works because it's a dungeon-crawling game with RPG elements, but it's self-imposed constraints (of scale, of time) make it more of an RPG/puzzle game than an RPG/roguelike. castles is troubling to me because it's actually really visually interesting, the battle system is efficient and intuitive, and fighting/looting is fun. with, say, a leveling mechanic, it would be a neat little RPG. instead, because it's interested in grafting roguelike elements onto its structure, it's something much less fun. every enemy encounter is a new terror: are you going to randomly meet enemies against which you can triumph? or are you going to meet enemies that slaughter you no matter what you do? either of these can happen at any time, without warning. and, because there's really no clear way to make your party stronger, faster, better armored, etc. (aside from random loot drops), there's never a real sense of progression. sure, i eventually got to the point where the absolutely easiest enemies in the game couldn't really effectively destroy me instantly because my new armor was too awesome. but then i just ran into a group of 20 of them instead of a group of 5 and they mutilated me. mysterious castles is like icewind dale if you took out the ability to level up and just threw the player in one of the game's dungeons randomly with no regard for how well-prepared they were. 

so basically, i think i'm perturbed by everything suddenly having to be roguelike because all that really seems to mean is "really difficult" and "devoid of ludic rewards". i'm no inexperienced or lazy gamer by any stretch of the imagination, and so while it's possible that i'm just bad at games like dredmor and castle, i think it's much more likely that they're just bad games. they might be good [insert something else], but i don't know what. 


that said, i keep coming back to castle for some reason. there's something about the graphical style and the battle system that makes me keep thinking that if i can just get strong enough characters, the difficulty will taper off and i'll be able to enjoy what would otherwise be a really excellent little RPG/dungeon crawl. but i'll probably just quit in rage again 20 minutes from now, braining myself with my own water bottle and screaming obscenities that haven't been invented yet.

two of my favorite diss-related images

i've been alternating between both of these as my desktop on my work computer for awhile now. they're both pretty interesting visual representations of a lot of the issues i'm writing about in my dissertation with regard to wilderness, civilization, and technology. plus, i took the first one myself. so there's that. the second one is made by someone else and superimposes a bit of minecraft landscape atop what i imagine is probably a 19th century landscape painting.

i've got another post in the pipe for later about roguelikes and why they generally (but not exclusively) enrage me as a genre of video game.

i'm a wheel

or at least i feel a bit like one.

i'm settled back into the writing nest at the moment, and have been for about 24 hours now, but this weekend turned out to be a pretty significant adventure (beyond even what i had expected).

way back when, in the days when i could imagine having free time, lindsey and i decided it would be fun to go see wilco a few times during their most recent west coast touring jaunt. two februaries ago, we took a weekend to catch them in both seattle and portland, and both shows were great, though at the time i lamented the fact that all wilco shows are more or less the same. of course, "the same" should be read "awesome", but i doubted the necessity of seeing back-to-back shows ever again. this time, though, one show was within a short driving distance of our friend john's apartment in portland and the other was a short distance from my own apartment, in spokane, and was taking place almost on my and lindsey's 3 year anniversary, at the spot where we'd met for the first time. it seemed imperative to go to both.

lindsey at the hult center.

we left town late friday morning, and did the usual pullman-to-portland commute, shooting down 395/82 and then through the columbia river gorge. we made a quick stop-off just outside of the city proper to pick up john (who was visiting a friend in eugene, where the show was taking place), and then it was on to the hult center. as always, wilco was stellar. the setlist was a bit obvious, and i was likely a bit crotchety from not having eaten since we'd stopped at burgerville in the dalles early that afternoon, but that was offset somewhat by the fact that we'd stumbled on to second-row tickets.


after the show, i'd assumed that after having been awake for a million hours and driven almost 9 of them, we'd just head back to portland and sleep. instead, (fortunately, as it turned out ) we got to meet up with john and his friend, and went in search of food and drink in post-midnight eugene. this led us to an excellent pizza/beer joint called (i think) cosmic pizza and reheated vegetarian slices paired with an excellent vanilla stout. from there, things became a bit of a haze featuring organic american spirits and a rather enthusiastic eugenean (?) who kept insisting that "the spirit of the 1890s is ALIVE!" and solicited smooches from all four of us (lindsey included) before disappearing into her apartment building. 

a pizza place with sriracha!

fortunately, john opted to drive back to portland, and so all i had to do for the next two hours was struggle to stay awake as the roadlights flashed by. i think we might have also listened to daft punk's discovery and kid a. upon arriving at john's apartment, i'm pretty sure i was asleep in less than five minutes. which was good, because there would be only a little rest for the wicked.

we woke up the next morning shortly after sunrise, but i was feeling pretty good. actual, legitimate sunrise in portland is such a rare thing that it's rather inspiring to experience. as such, i shook off my lethargy, forced lindsey to make me breakfast (women are for cooking!) and then settled in to work a bit on job applications and watch the city wake up.

it wasn't long before john woke up and gifted us with a second breakfast, and then we were off to bridal veil falls for a little (read: lot) of hiking.

lindsey being dwarfed by bridal veil falls.

our original plan for the day had involved a 2200 foot ascent to a place called devil's rest, over the course of a 3-or-so-mile hike, which we were then planning on retracing back to the parking lot. this hike would take us past some pretty amazing northwest coast basalt cliffs and accompanying waterfalls.

as might be expected, though, the lure of a entire day in which there was no school-related work to be done tempted us into a bit of laziness and we'd gotten on the road a lot later than we'd originally planned. as a result, we were only about two-thirds of the way to devil's rest before the sun began to go down in earnest. it became obvious we weren't going to make it up and back before dark, and hiking long distances over a dramatic elevation change in the dark sort of takes a trip out of "fun day hike" territory and straight into "possible survival scenario" territory. so we decided to turn around. and then we decided to run.

lindsey and becca in front of another waterfall.

 not for any necessary reason, mind you. we're just idiots. some of these idiots (read: me) were even wearing non-hiking shoes which were not happy about supporting my ankles in the least bit. as i type this, my toes are asking me "what were you thinking?!" over and over in the language of PAIN. nonetheless, breathlessly shambling down 1500 feet or so of altitude over 2 miles at a good jogging clip while jumping stones and exposed roots in near-darkness is a good way to make the best of a shortened hiking day.

upon our re-arrival in portland, we settled in for a typical john-style repast, featuring much more home-cooked food than could have been eaten by eight people, and store-bought vegan chicken wings from a portland restaurant called fire on the mountain that were quite possibly the best thing i have ever eaten in my entire life. for serious.

i don't remember much of the rest of that night, because the lack of sleep from the previous few days caught up with me in a huge way after dinner. i vaguely remember passing out (quite literally) from sleepiness shortly after the huge meal, and waking up briefly later that evening to say goodnight to everyone before dropping off again.

lindsey, john, and becca at a lookout point above bridal veil falls.

we woke up in the morning just before sunrise (due to an early bedtime) and got on the road by 10am, which opened up the whole day for an awesome, meandering drive along the north side of the columbia gorge on WA-14. this was amazing until about the time we reached the dalles bridge, when the road suddenly became covered by fog and stayed that way until we got to richland. eaten lunch at a great mexican restaurant in richland before finishing the drive back to pullman, though, put the perfect exclamation point on our first leg of the wilco-trip.

after an interlude of about 16 hours of frenetic work and worry and such, we left just before dinnertime on monday to get to spokane in time to eat and catch the second show. our dinner-location of choice was the fascinating (if you're an urban-spaces geek like me) steam plant grill in spokane, which had severely jacked up its prices since our last visit but still offered great food and an excellent vanilla bourbon stout. for the show proper, we were once again in the second row, which i know have found makes the show much easier to see, but less easy to hear. we had john stiratt's bass in our faces the entire night (not necessarily a bad thing), and the setlist was a lot more varied, and there was a seven-song encore.

by the end of the trip, i'd spent a little more time, money, and energy than i'd really planned for, but it was all worth it. after this, i'll likely be chaining myself to my writing desk for good until this dissertation is finished, so it was a nice send-off to freedom, and if wilco keeps up their habit of visiting the pacific northwest only once every two years, the memories will definitely make the wait for the next go-round more bearable.

mega(fuck)upload (of problems)

so this post stems from my reading this article, in which it is revealed that megaupload's legitimate (and illegitimate) user files are soon to be deleted. apparently the department of justice has already (in a frighteningly efficient move for our government) retrieved all the evidence it wants to use against megaupload's CEO/other people and so the rest is just going to be flushed.

as the story goes, this data is ultimately going to be deleted because megaupload has (presumably) megabandwidth bills, and with its assets frozen after the recent government takedown, it's unable to pay those bills any longer. makes sense, in a way: why should the megaupload's internet hosts continue to support their massive bandwidth if megaupload can't make their payments?

the subtext to this whole deal, of course, is that all of those files constitute evidence in the coming case between megaupload and the government, and it's a bit problematic that nobody's stepping in and saying "no, you can't just flush gigabytes of files down the drain in the middle of a case". in fact, one could make the case (as many have) that allowing these files to be destroyed constitutes a sort-of obstruction of justice on the part of the government. you could even make the case (as many have) that allowing these files to be destroyed is not terribly unlike burning down an entire neighborhood because you know there's a criminal in one house: from this perspective, those files are the owners' property, and since a lot of people store legit files on megaupload, their hard drive backups, photos of their wedding, etc. are being destroyed indirectly by the government despite the fact that they themselves did nothing wrong.

as i see it, there are big gaping problems with both of these arguments, but at the same time the government's lack of interest in acknowledging that not every single person even marginally associated with megaupload is a criminal is definitely troubling. it is a bit like, as one internet commenter put it, renting a garage on a storage company lot, and then finding out one day that your garage had been torched overnight because the owner of the establishment was laundering money through the business. maybe all you kept in that garage was some old furniture. maybe you had no idea the owner was a criminal. but now your shit's gone, and there doesn't really seem to be any recourse.

maybe this is another one of those new internet-changes-the-way-the-world-works things. after all, if the government's going to make a habit of shutting down online storage sites, the effect that those shutdowns have on the millions of people that use them is going to be immense. and probably something that, legally, the government is allowed to just totally overlook. imagine, if i can be hyperbolic for a moment, a situation in which the government suddenly decides "well, fuck, there sure is a lot of child porn being distributed over facebook. better shut 'er down!" and boom, out go the lights. it's an extreme example to be sure, but two assumptions that underlie it are, i believe, visible in the megaupload case as well: 1) that the "one bad egg ruins it for everybody" approach is justified in cases like these and 2) that it's okay to not be interested in hashing out exactly what "due process" might constitute in terms of determining guilt/potential punishment.

i'm absolutely certain that megaupload's CEO is guilty of whatever our government says he's guilty of, and i'm absolutely certain that the majority of users of megaupload used it to traffic in illegal content. but our law says you have to prove those things in court rather than just assuming that they're true and then acting according, and even if you do prove them, not every megaupload user was "in on it". once again, we've got prominent government offices acting just like they were regarding SOPA and PIPA: like old white guys who are too rich and too busy to bother learning about this newfangled technology, and the result is that they're reacting like megaupload was a physical business, located in a physical building, dealing in physical goods (read: one copy only) with physical customers. and that's just not the case.

but all the blabber isn't really what worries me. what really worries me is this sudden desire to pigeonhole all online storage as bad and infringing. because a lot of the stuff being shared on these sites is legal, and has been posted with the understanding that it will likely be there for awhile. not forever, of course, but take for example a music site called the midnight cafe. i've been following this site for years, as it generally posts a new live music recording every single day (or at least a few times a week) from a variety of different artists. these "bootlegs" are legal recordings, uploaded on the author's own time, just so that they can be freely available for anyone who wants easy access to them. recently, the site posted this, and then shortly after, this. there are a lot of music projects like this out there. another example is the phish spreadsheet, which is the work of one guy who spent a major chunk of his life tracking, tagging, and uploading every single phish show ever recorded into one well-organized spreadsheet (and again these are free, legal recordings) just improve ease of access and to provide a digital archive that could, in theory, last for damn near ever. now i know that most people aren't too keen on phish, but if you know anything about music, you know that they are mostly known for their live performances. this spreadsheet project is in a sense the culmination of thirty years' worth of taping and trading (nowadays done online and through torrents, but originally done for years and years using the mail and actual tapes), and yet if the site that hosts all of these shows is the next to go down, then it's all gone.

oh, not permanently, of course, as i'm sure there are backups of these sorts of things. but what's lost is the worldwide access to the music. i don't much care if someone's birthday photos are going to be lost when megaupload is purged. if you don't backup your personal files locally that's your own fault, as far as i'm concerned. but these sites are used as much more than a backup service for individuals. they're also the hubs of legal, vital online archives and similar communities. and, sure, if one site shuts down, another will always rise to fill its place, but how many times are people going to want to bother uploading 2000 individual phish shows if their hosting site gets taken down every six months?

i'm not sure what the solution to this problem is, but it's definitely more nuanced than the current department of justice/megaupload response looks to be.

how we once are

this semester, i'm team-teaching a 300-level undergrad course in 20th and 21st century literature with my dissertation director. while "team-teaching" might make it sound like we take turns tagging each other "in" during the class period or like there's a family double dare-esque exchange of flags or some other sort of physical comedy involved, it (unfortunately) actually just means that one week i teach the class, and the next week he teaches it. so pretty much every other week i get to sit in the back row of a sixty-student undergrad lit seminar and just observe the goings-on.

this course is basically the analogue of the KSU courses that i found so engrossing in, say, 2000 and 2001 that i decided to change my major to english (from computer science), therefore in large part making me the me that you know and anonymously read the blog of (and love) today. when the aforementioned diss director announced to the class today, in reference to eliot's the waste land something along the lines of "most of you will hate it, and that's fine, but a few of you might become obsessed with it", he was describing me a decade ago, when i had been in those students' place (the waste land wasn't necessarily my watershed text/epiphany moment as i didn't really have one, but i was pretty obsessed with it, and still am). my work was suddenly jumping out and grabbing me in a way that i didn't think work could.

so being a fly on the wall now is pretty fascinating, especially in that large of a class. i walk over to the classroom twice a week, bright and too-early in the morning, with just my pen and a pad of paper and the class text (no laptops allowed, so it's just like in the old days), and i sit there for an hour and a half and i listen as our entire class tries to tease meaning out of primary texts. somehow the earnestness of this has gotten lost for me in a lot of ways after years of reading and studying abstract critical theory...theory's important and enjoyable in its own right, for sure, but the higher up you get in english studies, context seems to outweigh text. so, it's fun to go back and just look at a poem, or a short story, and say (aware of, but otherwise removed slightly from all the -isms) "what does this do to you when you read it?" i mean, that's how i got here in the first place, through the appeal of answering that question, and then following the progression of questions that the answer raised in turn, and so on, and so forth.

during class, i often find myself wanting to raise my hand, just to have a conversation with these students who all seem so very invested in the idea that studying the text for the sake of studying the text is important. teaching literature to a roomful of english majors has a very satisfyingly reinforcing quality to it: nobody asks "well, why does it matter what this poem means?" or "who cares that eliot was writing right after the first world war?" it's a given that in that room, at that time, those questions matter. after what seems like a never-ending process of having to justify the worth of my field (generally) and my research (specifically) to everyone in the universe, it's sort of amazing to suddenly find myself in a room where sixty people have just decided to read, say, sassoon's war poetry and are ready to spend the next 90 minutes telling you what they fucking think, man.

that's not to say, of course, that it's unimportant to question the validity of english studies, etc. but at some point, self-critique becomes self-flagellation, and the innocence (in a professional sense, at least) of the students in this class is a nice contrast to that old cycle.

it makes me more aware than ever that i enjoy reading a lot and enjoy writing even more. i enjoy talking about both of those things with other people who do them, and i absolutely don't mind getting paid a barely-living wage to do so, if that's what it takes. i enjoy getting paid to fly to conferences and present my research, and it's sort of amazing that i've essentially gotten paid to have a year off to write a book, let alone the fact that i've gotten to go to school for free, more or less, for six years now in a beautiful part of the country and in a great department with great faculty (and staff). i'm here because i'm convinced it matters, even if it just matters to me, and i definitely consider myself lucky...sitting and watching classes like the one i was describing above just reminds me even more of the truth of that. so many grad students (and faculty) i've known over the years don't seem to feel this way about this job at all*. instead, they're hostile, exasperated, uninterested beyond what the job requires of them. it makes me wonder why they don't just do something else. this isn't a career for going through the motions. not when you have students like these.

*this isn't a passive-aggressive gesture at anyone in particular. it's just a general statement made from a bit over a decade of experience in various english departments.

"a meditation on feminism" or, "short skirt, long jacket"

"the idea of a vernacular gender was widely misunderstood in the antagonistic atmosphere of the 1980s, in the anger that repudiated four thousand years of male sovereignty. men and women are unlike because of their evolution, a matter not to be deplored but to be celebrated and fulfilled, with the caution that power over the other is not part of the difference. roles and duties are divided, but not to make inequality. a vernacular society, divided in many of its social and familial responsibilities and privileges, would be inappropriately dominated by either gender. men and women have different roles int he group, similar but different bodies and psyches, shared but also different satisfactions, desires, fears, and sorrows." 
-paul shepard, coming home to the pleistocene

so here's a thing that encapsulates that feeling that all guys occasionally get (or that for some seems to be a constantly-burning fuse of rage in the back of their caveman skulls): the fact that girls are different and that that is sometimes weird.

getting people to accept this is often a lot like trying to get white freshmen from the west side of washington to understand that yes, racism actually still exists, and no, they don't really "get it" because they live in a country and a culture where they are the majority (and no, once having a black friend long ago doesn't fix this). this lack of awareness isn't anyone's fault (except for when it's intentional, like in the case of the hypothetical cavemen referenced above who aren't actually hypothetical because i used to work with some of them), but more a cause of the "everyone's equal!" rhetoric that we superficially layer atop all of our discourse nowadays. now,"everyone's equal!" is a nice sentiment, of course, but the reality is more complex. some races (read: different melanges of cultures than the melange that makes up american white people, with different amounts of melanin in their skin) are different from others in significant ways. women are different from men in significant ways. to completely ignore this is to do violence to one's identity.

it matters to me that i am a man and not a woman. i didn't choose to be a man and i don't (in an abstract sense) prefer it to having gotten to be a woman. but, if someone were to tell me (as my students often do) that men and women are "equal"...well, that's kind of silly, because i'm aware of a lot of ways in which my biological/embodied experience of the world as a man is fundamentally different than that same level of experience is for a woman, and i know that that difference informs my thoughts/actions/what-have-you on less fundamental levels like how often i'm asked to help people move cabinetry or push cars out of snowbanks. telling me men and women are equal is sort of like telling a firefighter who finds meaning in his/her firefighting that "everyone can fight fires equally well!" you just hurt my feelings, man. seriously.

it's sort of like that. sort of.

[reheats cinnamon tea, sips.]

anyway, back to my fun story. so i was walking past valhalla (the horrifically trashy undergrad bar just on the legal side of the border between pullman city and campus proper) the other night, and there was a group of girls crossing in front of the building in front of me. they were clearly bar-hopping, but couldn't have been older than 21 or 22. despite the 20 degree temperatures and freezing wind, they were all dressed in short skirts and those wrap-things that pass for shirts these days (no long jackets were in sight, alas)*.

so, valhalla has recently renovated its top floor. this means that while you can still go drink and make out in its creepy, creepy basement if you so choose, you can also sit upstairs at a table and drink or eat cheeseburgers while you look out the gigantic front window at the sidewalk. well, these girls crossed directly in front of the window, pretty much every curve of each of them either visible or outlined by their clothes tightly enough that there wasn't anything really left to the imagination.

as they walked by, of course, the eyes of every single guy in the bar locked onto them and followed them for the length of the window. they weren't unaware of this, and as they finally passed from view, one of them remarked "ugh. i cannot believe how disgusting that was. i hate how every guy at the bar is always staring at my ass". then they proceeded down the street, turned right, and walked directly into the next bar down.

so basically the point of this post is for me to say: ladies, please explain this to me because it makes no fucking sense.

from my perspective as a guy, this is what i see:

first, i see women expressing disgust at the concept of the bar as a device for men to check them out and then choose their mates from the pool of women available. this disgust makes sense. bars are (generally) disgusting places, with people not on their best behavior. when it comes to men, young twentysomething ones are (generally) disgusting when it comes to their behavior around women. if i was a woman (and we've established that i am in fact, not), i would probably never go into any bar full of twentysomething men after, say, eight o'clock for this reason. but, i've "accepted" the fact that the dating M.O. for most kids nowadays is to go to the bar, get smashed, and try to make out with someone in the hopes that afterwards, when they've regained their inhibitions and their actual personalities, they'll somehow be compatible enough to function in a long-term, non-sex-centric relationship. and so...

second, these girls were obviously engaging in that exact same process, whilst criticizing the grossness of it. they didn't want to be ogled by the guys at valhalla...so why go into the next bar, where the same thing will happen while you are stationary targets for a goodly amount of time?

third, if you're not trying to draw sexual attention to yourself, why dress the way that you're dressed at all? this is sort of the crux, here. i'm forced to assume that maybe dressing scandalously is just a status symbol among young women nowadays? maybe you have to dress this way for your female peers to consider you cool, in the same way that guys apparently have to wear tank tops, basketball shorts and a backwards baseball cap for their brahs to think that they're cool. is that it? if that is in fact the case, isn't there some other "cool" way that women could dress amongst themselves that isn't so baldly sexual? i wonder about the side effects of young women essentially parlaying their sexuality into social currency among their "girlfriends" while seemingly assuming that that shift in intention should make that same sexuality suddenly invisible to guys. because it doesn't. obviously.

following this (possible) line of inquiry makes me sad. every single woman i've ever known (including the ones i've found extremely attractive) have had many other qualities that make them potentially "cool" to others besides how physically attractive they are or how revealingly they dress. i certainly don't promote my own sexuality in the way that i dress, and yet i have a lot of friends who respect me (some despite having seen me make a drunken asshole of myself while trying to impress girls at bars in lifetimes past) and at least one person who (for some reason) finds me attractive. so actually trying to get others to respect you without wearing short shorts can work. have we really reached a point where not just any sexuality but egregious, totally public sexuality is assumed to be the primary currency for negotiating social and sexual relationships for the majority of our young women?

i'd like to hear what people (and especially women) think, because i just don't get it. you know, on account of my penis and all.

*incidentally, both men's and women's refusal to dress practically for inclement weather is a whole other blog post entirely, dealing with an all-consuming rage that is fueled by my years of winter survival training and prizing of pragmatism over the desire to look "pretty" or "cool" for a large crowd of people who don't even know who you are...i can only hate one thing at once, sadly.

voulez-vous THE BUS?!

i've got a bunch of half-finished posts about smart things in my queue for today, but instead i'm just going to complain about my life because why else have a blog nobody reads?

i'm extremely tired today, and for once i don't even have a good excuse. i've just stopped sleeping, for some reason.

those of you non-existent readers who know me know that i used to have horrible, terrible insomnia problems. over the last few years, they've pretty much abated, quite possibly as a result of me finally taking the time to get a lot of my other emotional/mental shit together. but for a long time they were quite bad. i mean, i always have been and likely always will be a "night person", and if i continue working in higher education, my night-person-ness will likely continue to be exacerbated by the fact that will always have to take my work home with me and that work will always require the occasional late night. but. for most of my life between the ages of...oh, say fourteen to twenty-four i slept much less than eight hours a night every night, due to stress, overuse of caffeine and just generally being a total nutjob. once i got to wsu, it somehow got even worse because the insomnia collided with a suddenly massive workload. then, i was often working 12-16 hours a day for weeks at a time, but still only sleeping 3-4 hours a lot of the time.

anyway, the point is that it was bad. but, just like that year of college where you drink yourself into oblivion (everyone does that, right?), i didn't really realize how bad until i stopped sleeping again over the last few days. basically, having some time off from being crazy and then returning to it really put into perspective just how crazy i was.

the experience has been extra weird this time because my inability to sleep doesn't really seem to be caused by anything. i mean, i'm stressed over not having a job lined up for fall, and i'm stressed over needing to finish my dissertation, but i feel like those stresses are within normal levels. otherwise, i'm pretty normal-feeling in terms of my brains and my thinkings and my word stuff things go cant gonna be for now

last week, lindsey and i went sledding twice, right after the first and second big snowfalls that we had here in pullman. during the first night, i banged my legs up quite a bit, because right before we went out, the snow turned to rain for a few hours, which built up a thick crust of ice on top of the inches and inches of snow. the result was a sledding surface that was fast, but prone to breaking and catapulting you off the sled onto a sheet of ice with little ice-knives sticking out of it that made ice-holes in your body and caused you ice-pain. it hurt a bit, but i was fucking excited to sled and thought little of it. the next morning, i could barely move. anything. anywhere. so what did i do? go out sledding again the next night, of course. this was on softer snow, but i still added new bruises atop my bruises and was less than happy the next morning. later that same morning, i slipped on a patch of black ice and fell in the parking lot. and i mean fell, as in i saw my feet above my head before i hit the ground. this felt like it had probably broken every bone in my entire body, a feeling that persisted for at least 12 hours. 36 hours later, i still couldn't move my head to the right without pain, and sleeping started getting difficult. now that i think of it, that's probably where the problem started.

three nights ago, i couldn't get to sleep until about 5am, which was unfortunate because i had to get up for class at 7. this seemed a bit odd to me, considering that i should have fallen asleep quickly because i had only slept for about five hours the night before...but i didn't think too much of it. i was much more weirded out the next night when, on 2 hours of sleep i couldn't fall asleep by 6am. a bit confused and panicked, i jammed a ton of melatonin down my face and finally nodded off around 7. i got up at 10:30 or so to go to work, and it felt like it took the melatonin about 12 hours to get out of my system. nonetheless, i managed to spend a decent amount of the day at work, and i even Accomplished Things. then last night, somehow, i didn't fall asleep till 5 again, and i had to get up at 7 to teach.

throughout this entire process, i've been able to feel myself slowly becoming more and more impaired, sort of like getting drunk slowly over three days, but without the part where it's fun and you're screaming obscenities good-naturedly and riding a skateboard uphill backwards naked while on fire.

anyway, i'm not really sure why i spent a ton of time writing all of this. i guess it's a long way of saying that i've finally realizing how much of a difference actually sleeping a decent amount most nights a week makes in making me an emotionally functional, socially useful person. because i am totally not that right now.

also, if i never fall asleep again and die from exhaustion, this will be my pointless, pointless three-day memoir. it will be ALL THAT REMAINS OF MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH WORDS

oh, and also, this entire sleep-deprivation weirdness episode has played out while i've been reading mike doughty's new book the book of drugs, which is a memoir about...well, drugs. it's certainly supposed to be a sad book, mostly (i think), but there's something about lacking sleep that makes drugs (especially nicotine) seem charming. also, listening to lots of soul coughing when you're not even entirely sure that you would pass  that self-awareness "mirror test" is not a good idea. i feel like the music is making paint drip out of my hair follicles in all of the primary colors.

i should probably take a nap.

UPDATE: it has been suggested to me by various sources that my sleeplessness might have been caused by the sun. THE SUN! well, fuck the sun, then.

i cover a gillian welch song. in my office, using a shitty webcam. hooray!

here's what i got up to last night between writing breaks:


if you prefer, here's gillian welch herself doing a much better job of singing the song:


and just for shits and giggles, here's the tragically-cut-short ryan adams cover that led me to discover this song in the first place:


also, i found out today that if you type "phish" into youtube search and filter by "videos longer than 20 minutes", wonderful things happen.

things i heard today

this might become a regular feature, but even if it doesn't...whoo-hoo, today was a whopper for in-public oversharing:

1. [On the Hello Walk, 3:10pm] Girl 1: "I made out with Eric and Mike right after they both threw up...and then once I found out that they had thrown up, it made me throw up. Then I passed out until this morning!" Girl 2: "That's amazing! Awesome!"

2. [Outside Valhalla, 12:10am] Girl 1: "Hey, bitch!" Girl 2: "Yeah?" Girl 1: "Is my ass hanging out?!" Girl 2: "What?!" Girl 1: "Can you see my ass, is it hanging out?" Girl 2: "Umm..." Girl 1: "Is my fucking ass hanging out of my skirt, can you see the bottom part of my ass?!" Girl 2: [Looking] "No, I don't think so..."

3. [D Street, 12:15am] Girl 1: "Katherine! Kate! Kat! Slow down!" Girl 2: "Sorry I'm walking so fast, Mike's got coke at his house and I need to get some before he goes to bed!"

that's when i knew if i stopped running, i would die [/melodrama]

and that's not some emo-blog metaphor-y statement this time, oh no. it's literally how i felt an hour ago running a five mile loop from my office out along terre view and back.

i do this route pretty often, but i haven't done it recently because, well, it's winter and it gets windy out there, and i can't run in pants because it feels weird. running shorts + winter = bad. BUT...i haven't run much lately because i was home for break for three weeks and i've been slammed with work (and the accompanying stress) since i've been back. so today i came in to work a bit early so i could be sure to finish in time to run before i went home for dinner. i finished at 8pm. unfortunately at that point the animal-brain part of me that thinks mountain climbing in a snowstorm is "fun" took over and i decided i was not only going to run in shorts in weather that "feels like" 15 degrees, i was going to run FIVE FUCKING MILES.

fortunately, i'm in good enough shape at the moment that the physical exertion of running those miles was something i could pretty easily handle. however, exposing a lot of bare skin and a torso that had to power a really busy circulatory system to 15 degree temperatures for the forty-five minutes it took to run that far was a bit tricky.

ultimately, it was more of a mental challenge than a physical one (i.e. it's hard to keep up your morale when you're trying to run and shiver at the same time), and there were a few moments when i thought about turning around...but of course that was at the halfway point, which made things sort of hopeless either way, so i kept going.

note: i'm pretty well trained in winter survival, so i'm smart enough to not actually freeze to death, in case you were wondering that at this point.

on the home stretch, when i reentered the main part of campus by the football stadium, i passed a few large groups of students that were actually rooting for me, which was hilarious, considering the usual (and frequent) comments i get from students about being a "faggot" or a "faerie" or a "homo" (from men and women alike, oddly enough) when i'm running. the first group i passed (a group of girls) actually just shrieked in terror, one yelling "what's wrong with you?!" another yelling "how are you running?! it's so cold!" and another just yelling "fuuuuuuuck!" the next group was mixed-gender, and one of the girls yelled "DO IT!" at me in such a super-intense, drill-sergeant sort of way that i had no choice but to high-five her as i ran by, yelling "YEEEEAH!" in response.

it was a good time. oh, and i finished in 45:55, which is a super fast time for me, even when it's not bloody freezing.

the return of the king

by "return" i mean "a return to this blog", and by "king" i mean "me".

i've decided to revamp this blog and start using it again, partly because i found an acceptably uncomplicated way to simplify my once oh-so-crowded template and partly because i just got a new android phone and so it just makes sense to migrate everything more firmly to google. plus, blogger integrates with google+ nicely now, so that's fun.

i've left links to ye olde tumblr (the shortest-lived of all my blogs to date!) and my old livejournal (which is still active for some reason) above, in case you discover that you prefer old me to current me (i don't, but you're entitled to your opinion, of course). otherwise, prepare for some more pontificating on meaningless topics, inane babbling about important topics, and probably a little hand-wringing and discussions of personal issues that will probably make you feel a little awkward for having read them on the internet. because that's what i do.

since i posted a bathory video to celebrate the end of my tumblr, i'll post a fila brazilla video to celebrate the beginning of this one. because that totally makes sense. to me, at least. and, as you'll quickly learn, that's all that really matters around here.

change

so, i made a rather impulsive and hasty decision (treebeard would be discomfited) yesterday to switch my blogging platform to tumblr.  the interface is great, it's way easier to set up twitter and facebook forwarding, and hooking it up to my lazyblazers.com domain was super easy.  all things that blogger made unnecessarily difficult.  plus, now that i'm in the habit of making many short posts rather than many long posts, tumblr appeals to me...not having to navigate all the (admittedly nice) options and menus on blogger will make things easier and faster.

nonetheless, i made something ridiculous like 1,250 posts on this blog over a few years, and a lot of those words  and the thoughts and comments generated by them helped get me through a lot of tough times, so it's a bit sad to close the doors on the ol' blogger.  then there's the madden 2003 playoff coverage, which was just, like, whoa.

anyway, i'll be on blog.lazyblazers.com still, it'll just point to my tumblr blog now.  it's also (amazingly simply) set up to cross-post to facebook and twitter.  so if you follow me there, get ready to get frustrated and stop.

also, i'll be leaving this blog open in case i want to come back to it someday, so my little emo corner of the internet here will still be open for business.

confucius once said "only the wisest and stupidest of men ever change".  huh.

RIDESHARE - Phish 2000.05.23

I can't seem to get enough Phish lately, and the Phish shows indulge me by continually being awesome.  It's a vicious cycle.

I'm digging through a lot of solid '92-'93 stuff right now, but about a week ago I tumbled to a great '02 show and this amazing '00 one.

Phish 2000 shows, when they're good, hit that spot where it's almost like a 90s-era Phish live mixtape: you get some early 90s shredding, some mid-90s technique, some late-90s funk, and a few Farmhouse tracks jammed out in jaw-dropping ways that only seemed to happen before the hiatus.  This show is one of those.

"AC/DC Bag" sounds like it could have come straight from a '92 show, and it moves right into "Wilson", and then, just when you're settling into the groove, out comes "First Tube" to surprise and otherwise stimulate you.

Take, for instance, the "Weekapaug"-less "Mike's" that comes out of "Ya Mar" and goes into "Simple", then "It's Ice" before finishing up the run with "When the Circus Comes".  Not only are these segues effective, that combination of songs is just bizarre.  Just reading it makes me want to listen again.

Pretty much the entire second set is this way too...and the band jams throughout in a way that's fitting to the setlist...oftentimes you can almost hear them reaching to figure out a way to connect such interestingly disparate material.  And that's a good thing.  This weird mix doesn't work 100% of the time, but I'd rather listen to a show like this than a perfectly played but paint-by-numbers show any day.  I should eat this show.

RIDESHARE - Wilco 2004.11.13

This review is mega-short because, honestly, I listened to this like 2 weeks ago and after everything that's happened since then, I barely remember it.

Here's the setlist.

Most of the main set was standard 2004-era Ghost tracks, until the end which was a particularly stellar "Poor Places" > "Spiders" match-up.

Also of mention was the first encore's rare "Another Man's Done Gone" and "Candyfloss".

High quality show, but nothing revolutionary if you've already heard some 2004 SBDs.

RIDESHARE - Phish 06.11.1994

setlist here.

this is the only full show i've gotten to in the last couple of weeks, though i've gotten partially through a pair of fantastic phish shows (2000 and 2002, surprisingly) that i'll review as soon as i find the third disc of each and listen to it.

this show is one of the treasured june '94 phish run, arguably one of the finest months of live music ever done by anyone ever in the universe of history for all time.  infinitely.

while i didn't like this show as much as i did the 06.18.94 show, it could still be one of the not-best-ever-but-still-best parts of the best-ever month of 6/94.  make sense?  let's move on.

this setlist was definitely more interesting.  it starts off with some pretty standard rockers ("wilson", "chalkdust torture", and an amazing version of "you enjoy myself").  YEM segues into "rift", and then things really start to pick up.  as usual, "rift" live is a little spotty, but "down with disease" and "it's ice" are standouts of the first set.   "tela" is an interesting addition; a song i hadn't heard in awhile and that put a smile on my face.  but, you know, it's not really known for its jam pyrotechnics.  "stash" was a solid, if standard-to-great rocking jam to end the set on.

the "2001" > "antelope" opener was a great way to start the second set.  "flufflhead" is one of my favorites, and this was a pretty standard version.  the rest of the second set and the "suzy" encore is when things really started to take off and never really let up.

the selection of songs is the attraction here.  there's a great variety of songs in the setlist, but not really any terribly exploratory or strange jams to enjoy...most of the show is flat-out rock-jamming, so if that's your thing you'll love this show.  it goes without saying that this sort-of-criticism should be considered along with the fact that this is a june '94 show, which means that even if most of the show is straight-up rock, every single note is perfect, all the harmonies are spot-on, and every solo is perfect.  so, while i found the 6/18 show more interesting, this one is still better than 90 percent of any other live music (and any other phish) that you'll ever hear.

late saturday night polemic: singlism is stupid and should die in a fire

so, as i've been made increasingly aware by the internet, there's this thing called "singlism".  as many of its proponents point out, it's a stupid word.  as i am now going to point out in the most polemical fashion possible, it's also a stupid concept.

it is perhaps telling that in the most coherent and professionally-published piece on singlism i could find (through an admittedly quick google search), there is no concrete example, ever, of how people have been, or will in the future be discriminated against by the fact of their being single.  there's a lot of mumbo-jumbo about how people who are single are frowned upon in the workplace and in life because being single isn't "normal" or whatever, but beyond that i see no reason in any of the reason i've done thus far for organized, militant action on behalf of singles whose lives are judged so pointless in our relationship-obsessed culture that that culture goes out of its way to enact its bias against singles in real-world ways like paying them less (as women are paid less, on average than men) or giving their children lower-quality education (as is generally the case for minority children when compared to whites).

and there's where my first problem arises.  it's a purely rhetorical one, to be sure, but i'm still angry and want to rip the heads off of teddy bears: the idea that somehow singlism is on par in severity or in the necessity for social awareness with racism, sexism, or classism is just absolutely ridiculous and is a testament to how transparent those first three things are to most white, upper-middle class americans (generally the people agitating against singlism).  is there a set of culturally-reinforced assumptions made on behalf of single people by not-single people?  yes, of course.  is the practice of group A making up a set of then-culturally-reinforced assumptions about group B based on perceived difference as a way of group A self-reinforcing their already-assumed superiority a practice that's been going on for at least thousands of years, partially as a method of defining community?  yes, of course.  people in relationships are going to insist that being in a relationship is the norm, the same way that men who get to have better jobs over women are going to insist that it's just normal because to argue otherwise might be to put their own jobs in jeopardy.

i'm not completely insensitive to the singlist plea.  i've got a good amount of experience being single myself.  now you're thinking: "wow, the dude who insists on hard evidence from the internet is going to prove his point using personal anecdotes?"  yes.  shut up.

there was a period not long ago at all where i was single for about three years.  going into said period, i was pretty aware that it was likely to be a long single period (i.e. i wasn't really interested in dating, didn't think i would be for awhile, and didn't know of anyone that was beating my door down to get a ride in my motor-carriage).  as such, i tried to approach it constructively.  unlike, say, the last time i was single for an extended period of time, coming out of a long high school relationship that i, in my AWESOME high school naivety (is that a word?) thought was going to last forever.  the result was a decent near-year's worth of sullen depression until (of course, you guessed it) i met someone else and got to scurry back to the haven to dated-dom rather than deal with my issues.

anyway, the time was i was most recently single was rough, in a lot of ways.  especially the second year or so, which coincided with the time in which most of my friends moved from pullman and i, too socially awkward to really make any new friends, basically spent an entire year or so in my apartment watching movies and playing madden 2003.  eventually, though, i decided that four virtual super bowl rings were enough to secure my online legacy and i ventured back out into the world.

i guess my point is that i learned a lot through those years, both about making friends and about dating relationships.  i learned a lot about how i had viewed friendships and relationships before and how detrimental my own selfish need for that kind of contact made it so difficult for me to initiate in the first place.  interesting thought: if you don't desperately, creepily, intensely need every interaction you engage in to sustain your mental and spiritual health, those interactions get a lot easier, and more fun, and ultimately more fulfilling.

and i wouldn't have learned all that downward-facing-dog-bullshit had i remained in relationships.  i had to hit what my old self regarded as the bottom to realize that that bottom was really just a different type of life.  aside from the snarky label (which i'll get to in a minute), you could consider me a converted singlist.  by the end of my three-year exile into singleland, i was absolutely happy and content to be alone romantically.  which was about the time that i met someone and started a relationship that was functional and made me happier than i thought you were supposed to be in relationships (i don't think this was a coincidence).  it's cliche (or, as spellcheck suggests, "cloche") to say that you have set the bird free and see if it comes back on it's own, but that's exactly what happened.  the minute i stopped needing my life to be a certain way, the minute it became clear it was fine just the way it was.

so how does this tie back to singlism?  IT DOESNT

no, i'm just kidding.  it does.

"singlism" simultaneously expresses discontent and reinforces the idea that being in a relationship is a status symbol, neither of which actually helps anyone be any happier with their lot in life.

the first of my two complaints is pretty easy to grasp.  if you feel the need to express loudly and clearly how perfectly okay you are with being single, to the point of discriminating and/or trash talking people who are in relationships...clearly you're not actually okay with being single.  and this goes both ways, lest you think i'm choosing sides: if you really need to brag about how happy you and your SO are to everyone within hearing range, obviously things aren't going that well on some level.

the other complaint is a little more esoteric, but probably more important.  i guess the best way to say it is that "singlism", by its very existence as a term and as a way of expressing difference between two perceived-different social groups, simplifies much of the reality of both being single and being in a relationship.  it reinforces the idea that the main reason to be in a relationship is because you can be or because you should be - it doesn't matter if you're happy in the relationship, or who the other person is or what they're like or what they're name is...what matters is that you've got a date!  on the other side, it casts not-dating as rebellion against the status symbol of dating.  if you're not dating, it's not because you've got issues you're refusing to confront, or because maybe, simply, you just don't want to date.  no, you're special because you're standing up to the institution!  "singlism" just reinforces the idea that dating is the country club, and not-dating is wearing ripped-up jeans and ramones t-shirts...with the added "twist" of saying "hey, the ramones are fucking better than stupid golf anyway!"

if there turns out to be legitimate discrimination in any case (in a professional sense) because of someone's relationship status, then obviously that's bullshit and should be opposed.  but i don't see any of that here.  what i see is people who want to make a legitimate lifestyle choice a social statement.  suddenly, dating or not dating is on the same level with whether you choose to wear a tie to work or a t-shirt, whether you wear dress shoes or converse all-stars.  and that's not fair to the actual people you might actually be dating (or not dating), because the reality is that relationships are way more complicated than this stupid binary gives them credit for.  it's like reducing politics to two parties just so that everyone has to pick a side.  and we can all see how well that's working out...

but i suppose that's a rant for another late saturday night.

DUH-DUUUUUUUUUH!!!