Shorthand for Nothing

When I make my grand return to Boston, I’m going to start taking some measures to help me along with my daily blogging. I haven’t finalized plans yet but you’re probably looking at four posts weekly here and three on Dreamers, et cetera. Features here will include Bad Ideas, where I will talk about bad ideas, and Manifestos, where I will talk about things that I like. The remaining two days will probably be more free-form. I also have plans for Dreamers. I might devote a day a week to a serial, which are always fun but I never get around to committing to them.

Really the idea here is to be sure I keep both blogs maintained on a frequent basis and to give me a consistent idea base so I don’t have to do things like ‘think’ for most of my posts, because seriously, who does that?

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So I basically spent all of today playing Dwarf Fortress. You get a team of dwarves, and go out to the wilderness to build a fortress. It is sort of like Stronghold or Sim City combined with Nethack. It’s incredibly addictive, also. And presumably gets increasingly complicated! You should go check it out. There is fightin’, and tradin’, and economy buildin’, and I don’t know, it’s just generically fun. This half-assed post is brought to you by addictive little games that take up all of my time, forever, the end.

Seriously though, what is with these economy-building games that makes them so absurdly fun? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME?

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Last night I watched Savage Planet, a sci-fi original movie. The premise of the movie was something like this: Earth is too polluted to be sustainable, so they are going to some other planet via teleporter so they can fix earth, or something. Unfortunately the new planet is this horrifying deathworld what will kill everything, ever.

They convey the fact that the planet is a horrifying deathworld by pitting our expedition team against a pack of giant, hyperintelligent, malicious bears. There is some betrayal, lots of gratuitous cheesy blood, decapitations, disembowelments, and badly written romance subplots. If you like bad movies, this is a movie you definitely need to check out.

Like most sci-fi original movies, it features some things that were done right. Some of the acting is decent, though certainly not stellar. The sets and props are much better looking than your average B-movie sets and props.

But everything is predictable. Characters die when they get isolated, either by going off alone or by tripping over something. The exception to this is when the isolated characters are not being followed by the camera. The bears are apparently attracted to cameras. The intrigue within the party was either predictable or contrived, and where it was contrived, even the writers seemed to recognize that it was a weak premise–the characters soon forgot about it when the traitor apologized, with only a few token nods to that end.

But yeah, man. Bears will eat you. That’s what I learned here. Science Expedition vs. the Bears? THE BEARS WIN.

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Safely in Seattle. It was a longer day than I’d planned (a flight got bumped earlier due to weather that didn’t happen in Chicago), but it was successful all around. I finished reading Neverwhere, landed a few minutes early, and jumped on a Metro bus up to SoDo, where I saw a vaguely familiar landmark and decided I’d walk into town. I wandered my way to the Hurricane Cafe for a bowl of chili, and finally took the 26 back to Cydonia, which will serve as my base of operations in the meanwhile.

The flight to Seattle featured the most beautiful sunset over the mountains I have ever seen, which came right after I started feeling incredibly restless and worrying about everything and nothing. It was calming. Oh, and apparently it’s my birthday tomorrow. You should do something about that.

(Meanwhile: over 200 unread items on Google Reader.)

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Today I’m flying to Seattle for a week for my birthday (which is the 15th). I have been gone since September, and I’ve definitely missed it. It’s the first city I really consider my home, and in many ways it still is. It’s where I get my identity. I’m looking forward to spending my birthday in my old haunts, drinking coffee in a city where coffee is a lifestyle, acting like I’ve been here the whole time.

I’m not regretting moving to Boston by any stretch of the imagination. The people here are wonderful, and I feel like if there is a place I will do well, it’s here. But it’s not home. I still feel like I’m visiting. I’m learning the tangle of streets and the public transit systems fairly well, I know the lingo, but, as a man on the streets of Seattle once told me, this place is like Mecca. It’s a city of travelers. Brilliant people, people with bright futures–but a home to none of them. We aren’t from this city.

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I’ve had rsmason.net here for a while but the friend who was previously hosting it for me had something of an unreliable server so it was mostly just sitting and wasting space. This year I’m working on productivity and developing my web presence and portfolio, as I previously stated, so I’m working on the page here. So, welcome!

I’m working on adding new pages and sections to flesh it out–I will probably have to find a new theme. In the meanwhile let me know if you have any problems with the new site or any suggestions on a better theme, or if you want to make a theme for me et cetera.

In the meanwhile thanks for reading. In case you were curious, I have not been slacking on my post-a-day. It’s still going strong at Dreamers Often Lie. I’m actually getting things done! Are you amazed? I’m amazed.

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I really should have written this when it was still relevant, but here it goes.

A number of conservatives make no secret about blaming Barack Obama’s victory in the election on media bias. John McCain’s campaign got only negative coverage, where Obama only got positive coverage. I’m not going to dispute their claim, though I disagree with it. Let’s assume it’s true: the press was exceptionally positive towards Obama and exceptionally negative towards McCain. What could this mean/why could this be? The way I see it, there are four options:

• Barack Obama is legitimately better candidate than John McCain, and the media is merely reflecting the realities of the situation.
• Barack Obama is roughly on par with John McCain in terms of his ability to lead the country or win votes, but he ran a better, cleaner campaign.
• Barack Obama is roughly on par with John McCain in terms of his ability to lead the country or win votes, but the media liked him better so he was given a free pass and remained positive in the public perception.
• Barack Obama is a worse candidate than John McCain, but a vast media conspiracy concealed these obvious truths, and tricked the American public into voting for him.

I tend to favor one of the first two options. Though I will acknowledge that Obama was something of a media darling during the summer months, he had already weathered some pretty unpleasant media scandals during the primaries. And let’s face it: he has a compelling narrative.

Obama had people fired up about him irrespective of the media. He had massive support on the internet, and a terrifyingly efficient grassroots political machine.

Those who are inclined to favor the latter two options, I have two words for you: John Kerry. There is no way the media gave Bush more favorable attention than McCain in this election. He was pretty universally reviled at the time.

But even besides that, look at the record turnouts among young voters. If the media is biased, it has always been biased. Something about Barack Obama’s campaign made him popular among a generation of people that is largely disaffected with politics.

And he definitely ran a better campaign to reach these people. He brought technology into politics, in a prominent way. There were internet-based campaigns, and stories written about how internet-based politics were the way of the future. People received updates on text messages. His transition website uses some very web 2.0 technologies. John McCain was not a bad candidate, but his campaign, especially in comparison to that of Barack Obama, made him unelectable. It ruined his brand. It made him look like a bad candidate. He did it to himself, and the electorate responded.

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On January 5, I tried miraculin for the first time. Good times were had by all but on the whole I found myself slightly unimpressed. While PBR definitely took on a sweeter, vaguely cream soda-like quality, it still tasted like PBR. Guinness was impressive but I was getting more coffee than chocolate flavor–not bad, but my first urge was to want to add sugar. Candies seemed largely unaffected, but the kick was absent from both sour and hot–which did make them more palatable, to be fair.

I have two theories, since this seemed to be a common theme. One, I did not successfully coat the entire tongue–and I imagine the back and sides are important to the full experience. Two, I drank beverages too quickly after consumption. I imagine it needs time to sit, or something.

Lemons were definitely a great success. The juice especially was one of the most delicious things I had ever tasted. But as far as the evening went, I’m not sure I really felt like the miraculin really defined it. I enjoyed the Ethiopian food we had before a lot more.

I can’t really complain, though. The company was, as always, superb.

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“Mistakes aren’t always regrets.” “I’d rather die terrified than live forever.” “Let’s do it and never look back.”

I talk about adventures a lot–like road trips with no map and no itinerary, just you and a car and three thousand miles of freeway to explore. Or just driving around randomly on country roads, and stopping to explore creepy abandoned houses. I want to go exploring. I want to make mistakes. I want to be terrified. And I want to come home after and tell stories about it. I wish I’d been arrested when the police stopped us in Minnesota. I wish I’d spent a cold night in a cell, furious that our trip had been ruined, upset that I was locked up so far from home. All it would have taken was a bit of cheek.

But I’m a pragmatist. When my friends start talking about things which will end badly I’m the first to say this is a bad idea. I think I’m afraid that mistakes will become a virtue, that we’ll start making decisions simply because it will end badly and there will be a story later. The mistakes I love are the stories of failures, the stories of taking risks and then suffering for it. They don’t have to end in disaster. But they might. I can’t wait to find out.

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It’s been a few days since the New Year. People are trickling back into town. Things are beginning to happen again. Twitter is abuzz with return trips. People are discussing things that have to be done before the year starts up again.

I’m not sure I’d ever really noticed this before, perhaps because I was taking a vacation of my own in previous years, but the world just stands still during December. People are visiting family, taking time off work and school. Then, in January, things just kind of start happening again. Everyone gears up to go back to work or school, the endless parties stop happening, and life, such as it is, picks up again.

And even (or especially) those who aren’t doing anything terribly special, you can tell the holidays are here. There’s just this month-long lull. I sometimes wonder if the reason I like the new year isn’t just that it’s the signal that it’s okay to start doing things.

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