Why Leave NY

I’ve been asked why I would want to leave New York on a number of occasions. I’d like to talk a little bit about the issues I have. Before I begin though, I wanted to mention that New York City will always have a special place in my heart. From the city itself to the friends and family I am leaving behind, there are a lot of things about this place that I am going to miss dearly. I hope to be back as often as I can so that I don’t die from missing the place so much.

Now that the sentimental crap is out of the way, let’s talk about some of the reasons why I found a new home, all of these are game development related as you might guess. When I first came to New York, I was intrigued by the Indie scene. I thought I would enjoy being another developer who’s just trying to make cool games. What I learned, though, is that at this point in my life, I don’t actually want to be Indie. I’m still young and have a hell of a lot to learn before I can effectively do that.

So, since New York is mostly an Indie scene, we have the other issue of this place feeling really small. There are a lot of people in New York just trying to break into the industry. It’s great but also depressing at the same time. I seldom meet people who actually work in the industry. I’m happy to talk to aspiring developers who do Indie stuff at home and want help breaking in, but there comes a point where you ask, “Why are there so many of you and so few of us?” Well the answer is obvious. These are people who started on the east coast, and the tiny industry in New York can’t afford to hire them, so they sit in limbo hoping for a job. I was one of them for six months and believe me it sucks.

I don’t mean to seem snobby, saying that I’d rather be around people with game developer jobs and not just people hoping to get into the industry. There is just something to meeting people who have fifteen years of experience and have stories and tales of how they solved that one ridiculous problem that no one ever even thought about. Like I said, I love meeting the new people busting their hump trying to get into the industry, they are a group of people who inspire me to do things on my own outside of work, so if I could have both worlds that would be fantastic. Unfortunately, those worlds are split by three thousand miles of land.

Along the lines of the size of the game industry in New York, you will notice that there really aren’t a lot of game development houses that make anything sizeable. Now, I’m not talking about wanting New York to be the AAA game development scene. Actually, I would hate that. That’s not what New York is about, and it will never be what New York is about. What I mean is the games that are interesting and do well on marketplaces like Steam and Xbox Live and not just Facebook or whatever flash service the company decided to create, like most New York companies do.

New York is a great place to live and meet people and hang out with friends and family, but it’s just not what I’m looking for in terms of game development. I will be back as often as I can and welcome everyone to come visit me. You will always have a place to stay.

Clean Energy

I recently got into an argument with a conservative over clean energy and the different ways of producing it. The conservative sided with fossil fuels, as conservatives tend to do, while I, being the clean energy investor that I am, argued against the reasons not to switch to solar and wind power. The conservative, we’ll call him William or Bill for short, argued that there are too many areas that don’t receive enough sun to warrant the use of solar power. He also argued that the windmills used in wind power generation cause irreparable damage to the landscape, as erosion patterns are altered by the sea and trees must be cut down for windmills placed on land.

I will begin by talking about Bill’s solar power issue. It’s very true that certain areas will never receive enough sun to really make solar power viable. Seattle, for example, is the greyest city I’ve ever been to. The sun only comes out for four months of the year. There is no way you’re going to put a solar power plant down and hope to sustain the whole city indefinitely. In cases like those, there needs to be a combination of different clean energy generating technologies. Seattle is a great area of wind and hydro power because of the Puget Sound. I also propose another solution: Build a 30,000 foot tall solar generator that collects sun above the clouds. You’d never need to worry about weather conditions again.

Tackling Bill’s second argument of wind power ruining the landscape, I accept that it is a problem. But like many other problems, it can be solved. If we just gave up on something just because it has a problem, we wouldn’t have put a human on the moon. I admit that I don’t necessarily have a readily available solution to the problem, but I also am not a civil engineer. So, while it’s true that we shouldn’t ignore the drawbacks of wind power, we can’t simply drop the idea because of a few problems. In the spirit of this post though, I’d like to propose another solution: Build flying windmills that hover above the land and sea. This solves both needing to cut down trees and the erosion changes. This will also allow us to move the wind mills to higher wind concentrations.

In conclusion, I disagree with Bill saying that clean energy is not a valid solution. Bill also argued for the use of natural gas, since it is relatively cleaner than oil and coal. I won’t get into why continuing to use fossil fuels is silly, so I will leave it at that. What I will say though, is that there are better solutions to the energy problem and we have to trust our engineers to come up with them.

Big Bang On Religion

There has been recent news about Stephen Hawking making the claim that it was not God’s doing that created the Big Bang. He believes that since gravity exists, it is a perfectly good cause for the creation of the universe from nothing. Now, I’m not going to sit here and try and argue against one of the most prominent astrophysicists of our time, but I can’t say that he’s necessarily right.

First, I’d like to remark on those of faith who would say that the universe necessarily had to be created by someone of a greater power. If it is your faith that this be true, then that is perfectly fine in my book. I personally am skeptical of either answer. It’s really impossible to prove, so believing either side is still a matter of faith.

What I wanted to talk about, though, is the idea of infinity. Those of faith believe God is infinite in time, space, and knowledge. When asked how this could be possible, the response is usually that God is a mystery that we can’t even begin to comprehend, and should we come close to understanding, how head’s would explode like a watermelon strapped with C4. Why, then, is it impossible to accept that the universe could possibly be infinite in time. If it’s ok to accept that nothing created God, then why isn’t it acceptable that nothing created the universe? It’s an insanely incomprehensible concept either way, but this is the reason why I would accept both sides of the argument.

Aside from that, there was commentary about the Stephen Hawking statement that said that it was a dangerous statement to make. The commentator claimed that Hawking was forcing people to make a choice between religion and science, in which case most people would pick religion. That statement really rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t see it as forcing a choice at all. There is always a compromise to be made between the two. The compromise has over the years shifted drastically toward the side of science, but there is still plenty of give and take to be had. One of my coworkers made a good comment on this when we were discussing it. He said that religion and science don’t necessarily even exist in the same realm. They are tools to explain different things and don’t actually intersect a lot of the time.

Digital Marketing

We’ve reached an interesting age as far as marketing and sales. When you are sold or given something in person, we are very accustomed to turning things down. We say, “No thank you,” and walk away without another thought. We might even vehemently be against being sold something that we don’t want; throwing a fit that someone could be bold enough to try to sell you something. Think about all the offers a place like Gamestop makes you when you go to buy something and you’ll realize how annoyed you were after the fifth offer.

Now that’s something that’s been going on since the beginning of society. Think back to the bustling markets where salesmen would bark their wares at people. The interesting new age we’re in is in digital marketing and sales. We’ve started to actually flip which side of the coin we’re on. We start saying yes to things just to get a process over with or to make something go away. Installers are a great example of this. It’s practically an epidemic of useless packaged software. Everything is defaulted to saying yes so unsuspecting users end up with an exorbitant amount of programs or features that they would never need or even use.

There’s something about humans that makes them buy things they don’t actually need. That’s why there were men shouting in markets in the first place. They were hoping to sell something to someone who didn’t actually need it. It’s not to say that they weren’t successful, but right now, the chance of success if growing. People are growing accustomed to saying yes, and it’s somewhat frightening.

It gets worse. Companies are now collecting our credit card information and saving them for future purchases. We’ve reached a point where unsuspecting individuals accidentally say yes to pay money for something they might think is just another random piece of free software. You might be thinking that they get what they deserve if they’re not paying attention. The point is that it’s hardly even their fault these days. People get bombarded with information that it can sometimes be hard to pay attention to everything.

Society Regresses

In Ancient Rome, they held gladiatorial events at the Coliseum. Murder was a commonplace event that the crowd cheered for. In this day and age, we like to think that we’ve become more civilized since then. Yet, on a daily basis we see death and destruction. What’s worse is the fact that if the culprits aren’t brought to justice and their ultimate demise, there are those among us that are not satisfied. Have we really come that far from the days of the Coliseum?

A suicide bomber reigned down terror in a tribal region in Pakistan killing over fourty. Some will claim that those in the region are nothing but uncivilized animals. “They know nothing but killing,” I hear. I make the claim that we are no different. Police officer accidentally shoots a suspect in the back, killing him. I am not here to defend this officer. He pulled a gun, claiming that he thought it was a tazer. How you could make this mistake is absolutely beyond me.

Put on trial, he was convicted of accidental manslaughter. The spectators at the Coliseum were quite unhappy with this judgment. They call for the thumbs down for Caesar. The crowd, those who consider themselves the enlightened few in California, started rioting over the fact that the officer was not given a harsher conviction. A society that claims to value life regresses to Hammurabi’s code, calling that we take an eye for an eye or else we shall destroy the cities we live in. The livelihoods of business owners completely destroyed is somehow a valid response to officer’s sentence. We still have a long way to go before we can consider ourselves civilized.

Patriotic Competition

President Obama made his first speech to the nation from the Oval Office this week and his closing remarks made me think. He discussed that lawmakers must push for energy reform the in the US and inaction will cost us, and the environment, more in the long term than it could possibly in the short term. Obviously, it’s going to be tough and it could end up being just hot air, but it really struck a chord with me. Given the US’s constant desire to be the best, I feel like the US could lead in clean energy if we push hard enough.

However, this feeling of pride in the US’s desire to be the best was recently challenged. It was the attempt of others to show that my pride in my birthplace is not just pointless, but actually counter-productive. I was told that we should be trying to worry about it globally, making sure everyone is advancing rather than just our home country.

While there is some truth to this, the fact that my pride of my homeland was challenged bothered me and I wondered why. Not only did I wonder why I was bothered, I wondered why I had pride for where I was fortunate enough to be born, since it was just random luck to be born here. Then I realized that being proud of anything is the same concept. Everything in this world is random chance. The world is chaotic in nature, therefore everything you could possibly be proud of came about by random chance. If you’re an artist and you’re proud of it, then you’re proud that your brain was randomly wired a certain way.

Now that I was assured that being proud of my fortune wasn’t actually silly, I wondered what exactly I’m proud of. I realized that, more than anything else, I’m proud of what this country was founded on and what this country means to the world. I wouldn’t be alive if this country wasn’t what it is. My family comes from literdally two ends of the planet and yet they came together here because they felt the US was a better life than what they had. I am part of a country with an enormous immigrant population and a large amount of immigrants their families have gone on to do amazing things in this country because of the resources and the ability to be great if you work hard. I am proud of that.

Tangent Space At A Quick Pace

It is amazing when you finally have all the pieces of a puzzle click right into place. This is a post for the techies; all the other kids can follow along if you want. Kiyome and I have been working on some graphics research lately. The latest concept we’ve been tackling is normal maps. Just like there is more than one way to slap a misbehaving husband, there is more than one way to implement a normal map. You can either slap him in the arm, which is somewhat effective and may more may not get him to stop whatever he’s doing, or you can slap him right across the face and leave a big red imprint, effectively shutting him up for a while. For normal maps, you can either have your map be in object space, that is the reference frame based on the object’s orientation, or you can have the normal map be in tangent space, which is the frame based on the surface of the object.

We chose to go with slapping the husband straight across the face. This method is somewhat involved in the fact that you have to understand what the tangent space really means and what it means to transform vectors into tangent space. When I set off to do this, I went in armed with a very brief, maybe twenty minute introduction into tangent spaces from two years ago. For those of you who are still wondering, yes this does mean I went in without really knowing what I was wondering.

Simply applying the sample code we found produced results that had the sort of normal map effect on it, however there were major errors. First of all the light looked like it was in the totally wrong direction, but even weirder is the fact that the light was bounces off of spots on the tortoise that didn’t make any sense.

Our first thought was that the normal texture must’ve been wrong. We went into Photoshop and together inspected the properties of the normal map. We attempted altering the color components of the normal map in vein. This is where that note about not understanding what I’m doing comes into play. I will explain later why altering the texture makes no sense and has barely any effect.

So after some tweaking and coming up with ideas to debug the shader, the program that does the drawing, I realized that our light vector, the vector from the vertex, a point on the surface, to the light source, was being transformed in the reverse order from the other transforms in the shader. When I reversed it, it seemed to produce far better results. At first I thought it might have actually been correct.

I moved on and added in a feature to move the light around the model to see how the light acts as is goes across. Unfortunately, the light was moving in a very weird direction with respect to how the light moved without the normal map. This of course set off red flags leading me to believe that we were still wrong. It got worse when I realized that the light was actually still highlighting areas that it shouldn’t.

I decided to try toying with values in the pixel shader, this is the shader that does the per pixel calculations onto the screen. I’d like to make a brief note. In the pixel shader, the normal and light vectors are in tangent space. So then I started thinking about what it means to alter a value in tangent space and I realized that it’s impossible to alter a single component to produce a meaningful effect for the entire model because this is tangent space. This is the reason why it didn’t make any sense to alter the normal map, since the normal map is tangent space vectors. You see, in world space, the space whose reference frame is the same for all objects in the world, a normal vector can go in any direction, and changing something like the X component will tweak the component across the entire model in the same way. However, in tangent space, most normals are actually in the Z direction. Negating the X component usually has no effect, but also it is completely dependent on where on the model that particular tangent space is.

So then things started really clicking. What it meant to transform from world space into tangent space in particular was a really important piece of math that I needed to understand. The reason why the light vector operation was reversed was because the tangent space matrix was a matrix that goes from object space to tangent space. Since the light vector was in world space, I needed to transform the light vector by the inverse of the tangent space matrix.

So the light vector was now correct as far as the math is concerned, but I was still not getting proper results. So I decided to take a look at the tangent space matrix. The matrix is composed of the Tangent, BiNormal, and Normal. The Normal is a vector sticking straight out from the point on the surface. The Tangent is a vector perpendicular to the Normal, and is tangents the surface. And the BiNormal is the vector perpendicular to those two. These three vectors create a space.

There is a necessary operation here though. These three vectors come into the vertex shader, the drawing program that handles the points on the model that create the overall shape of the model, in object space. It is the job of the vertex shader to transform these three vectors into world space. You might think to just apply the world matrix transform to these vectors but there’s a final piece of understanding that I knew but didn’t apply until now.

You see, when you transform the surface of a model from object space to world space you use a world matrix to orient, scale, and move the surface. However, the tangent space of the surface cannot be transformed the same way. There is a theorem and proof that shows this better than I could ever explain so either trust my words or go look it up.

Even though I had known this, my false notion that you didn’t necessarily need to apply this came from the fact that I had been learning a lot of HLSL, high level shader language, programming from DirectX samples, and DirectX samples don’t seem to ever follow this rule. What the reason is I will never know, but that doesn’t really matter all that much. Once I applied this bit of knowledge to my own shader and transformed the basis of the tangent space by the the transpose of the world matrix, everything finally came into place. The light was finally moving across the model properly. The higher detail was apparent in the model, and there were no strange artifacts due to things being lit improperly.

Sick of Oil Slicks

I’d like to take some time now to vent some rage at the oil industry. Hopefully by now, everyone knows what’s going on in the Gulf of Mexico. I’ve started to wonder if they have heard of Murphy’s Law. The explosion was just one of the ramifications of the lack of precautionary measures. What makes matters worse is they seemed to have thought nothing could ever go wrong. They never even considered what might happen if a rig sank and broke the pipe? Oh right, they only thought as far as the preventer clamping down. There was no question about what happens if the preventer doesn’t work. No researchers working on backup plans. That’s right, that would cost money, and those CEOs need more boats. Well I hope those boats are made to drive through oil slicks.

Another interesting thing is the fact that BP, British Petroleum for those of you who are wondering, has this many truckloads of cash to throw at the problem. They are sinking millions upon millions of dollars into dispersants, technology, boats, fines, etc. In my mind, this is one of the few positives that came out of this whole thing. The oil industry opened its eyes to the fact that they’re not indestructible, and they have to invest in preventative measures. Fortunately for everyone else, BP is a catastrophe guinea pig and is forcefully on the forefront of testing solutions. Unfortunately for everyone though, BP doesn’t actually have any scientists to run these tests, or so it seems.

Look, their crazy dome idea didn’t work because the temperature and pressure at that depth caused icing and other problems with caused a clog. I feel like if there was anyone who knew anything about physics or the ocean would be able to call this out. What are the meetings for these solutions like? Have you heard what they’re trying now? As of this writing, Monday, May 17, 2010, the latest idea I heard they’re trying is to shove tire pieces and, wait for it, golf balls. Yes, you read right. Tire parts and golf balls to plug the pipes while they work on their cementing solution. Again, science seems to be a missing element here. Last night I read they were able to stick a tube into the pipe to start siphoning oil, so that’ll slow down the spill a bit, but something tells me that’s not going to work out that fantastically.

To piss me off even more, the CEO of BP was discussing the spill and ramifications. He noted that his job was on the line in this. I’d certainly hope he is forced to leave after this catastrophic blunder. Honestly, I’d like to see him sent to prison. That’s a bit extreme, I know, but this could have been prevented. It’s ridiculous that so many things could fail in order to cause an unstoppable spill. So I say put the man in the stockade at the beach. Cover him in bread or something so the seagulls attack him. Post it on YouTube, show the world what wildlife revenge is like.

Military Troops

I used to naively think that most soldiers fought for money and country and didn’t really care about the missions they were sent on. I’m not sure why I thought that really. I guess I’ve seen too much propaganda about kids being pulled into the military from poor neighborhoods where people can’t really afford college. It is incredibly evident that those men and women on the ground are more interested in making a difference in the grander scheme of things.

I guess some of my thoughts came from the differences between World War II and the Vietnam War and the similarities between the Vietnam War and the War in Afghanistan and Iraq. In WWII, soldiers joined because they were fighting a concrete enemy that was threatening to take over the world. In the Pacific theatre, marines prevented Japanese takeover of Australia and liberated the island nations that Japan laid claim to when the empire expanded. In Europe, army forces liberated most of Europe from German rule. Soldiers were greeted with cheering crowds and were constantly reminded that what they were doing was achieving tangible results.

In Vietnam, it was unfortunately a very different story. Soldiers were surrounded by people who most certainly did not want them there. It was impossible to know who was an enemy and who was a friendly face. Tangible results were completely non-existent. If soldiers had gone there thinking they were making a difference, this idea was most certainly lost very quickly. I saw a documentary last night about the massacre at My Lin. There were hundreds of non-combatants that were slaughtered. Anything that moved was hunted down and shot. It happened because the soldiers were completely furious and in hunt of enemy forces. They thought they finally found an enemy strong hold. They were ordered to shoot anything that moved. One of the soldiers explained, “If anything moves, shoot it. If it is a building, burn it. If it grew, destroy it. If it was alive, kill it.” It ended up being a peaceful village, full of women and children, that was completely wiped out. These things aren’t done by soldiers who felt they were there to help the people or to make a difference. These atrocities are done by soldiers who only want to get the mission done and get out.

The reason why I thought this mindset would continue is the fact that there are similarities between Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam. The thing is though that while a lot of people didn’t really want Americans there, there is still a lot of good that those soldiers are doing. I read a story in time magazine about Captain Ellis trying to rebuild a school in a town not far from Kandahar. The Canadians had built the school, but Taliban forces had driven them out, broken all the windows of the school and placed mines and IEDs across it so that no one could even step foot in it. And the difference here is incredibly apparent when the villagers appreciate seeing their children being able to learn how to read and write. They were appreciative of the soldiers’ efforts to rebuild the school. It’s a reminder of a long time ago when a soldier’s purpose in the grand scheme of things was actually apparent. I’m reminded of how beautiful it is that these men and women serve and I am very appreciative of it.

Thanks Guys.

A Forgotten Argument

Back in 2008, we had debates about our choices for president. One side argued the wisdom and the “take no shit from no one” attitude of the old maverick. The other side argued for hope and change from the young and vibrant liberal. Something I remember arguing about in particular was the fact that Obama was young and inexperienced, while John McCain had been in the political scene for quite some time. The issue was the fact that Obama would have to learn on the job and we can’t afford to wait for someone to learn on the job when it comes to the presidency.

My argument was that it was far worse having another four years with a bad or even mediocre president. I felt that, while Obama would be incredibly inexperienced at first, he would soon get acquainted and manage to do a lot with his presidency. I knew that Obama would take some time to adjust to the position. What’s funny is I actually had forgotten this last year. I was really disillusioned with what the president had been able to accomplish in his first year of office.

I had forgotten that I was supposed to be giving him time to learn. And now it seems as though he figured things out and is ready to get things done. Bill Maher said it best when he said Obama “found his mojo.” Getting health care through was like some strange video game level up. He realized what he had to do to get things done and now has congress finally looking like it does something all day. They can’t even decide what laws they want to update. Should they work on financial reform? Should they work on immigration? Should they work on a climate bill? I don’t remember a time when what to work on was actually a contentious issue. It actually made certain congressmen to stray from support of a bill simply because they were upset that they were working on something else first. Of course, I look at this as the most immature move ever, but I’ll let those babies be babies.

So, Obama’s finally back on my good side. That “hopy changy thing” sounds like it’s back on track. By the way Sarah Palin, you weren’t only mocking Obama with that snide remark. You were mocking millions of people who voted for him. This is why we hate you. If anyone thinks Obama is going to need to be worried about winning the people over in 2012 is living in a fantasy. Unless he does something horribly wrong and not just philosophically wrong, as the ultra conservatives feel he is the devil, he will have no trouble winning another term.

Grad School

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about graduate school to continue my education in the field of computer science, but I’ve started to think about the uses of such a degree. A program I would enjoy would have a number of electives in the field of computer graphics for me to choose from, since this is the only subject matter in academic computer science that actually interests me. The trouble I have though is the fact that getting into a good program would be difficult given my grades, and then I’d have to pay for the program once I got in.

The benefit, of course, would be future careers in computer graphics doing research for big companies. However, every company I have ever looked into always valued experience as much as a degree. Why, then, am I going to waste a year and a boat load of cash just for a title and a piece of paper? Part of me is fond of the idea of the title of course, but it’s really unjustifiable. If I can throw down a full portfolio of graphics demos, then I will most definitely have the necessary experience to end up wherever I want. I’ll just have to work hard to learn what I need to learn on my own and produce these demos.

Intuition

Intuition is a term that one of my college math professors would use often while teaching. He would say he was attempting to get us to develop an intuition about a certain theorem or set of problems that we were solving. When you have this intuition, you start to more instinctually know how to solve problems rather than thinking out what the best path to take is and why. I’ve come to see how important this intuition really is and also how strange it is that we as humans can really develop such intuition about such complex things.

Intuition comes largely with experience. When you’ve dealt with a particular subject enough times, you can start relating different versions of it back to what you’ve seen. This relation gives you the ability to take what seems like educated guesses. However, because of your experience, your guess can very likely be a very good answer to a problem. It’s that realization that really gives me confidence in something because it makes me realize that what might have felt like a guess wasn’t really a guess at all.

The other thing about intuition is that different people develop it at different speeds and are limited in how far their intuition can be developed in different fields. For instance, in my math classes, a couple of them were very difficult for me. Discrete geometry was one of the hardest classes I’ve ever taken. My ability to develop intuition about anything I was being taught was simply not there. I struggled through every test, not really ever quite understanding the material. Now, I could have studied hard and developed that intuition, but time constraints and willpower put a damper on that plan. On the other hand, there were students in the class who just immediately picked up the material and said, “I understand this, I can solve all of these problems easily.” Whether they had to do a lot of work to reach that point, I can only stipulate, but the point is they reached it and I couldn’t.

Do I feel envious at all? Not in the least, simply because I know I can develop a stronger intuition about other things faster so I will focus on those more. I ended up doing alright in the class, but it was an uphill struggle the whole time. It makes me realize just how tough a master’s program is going to be for me. There is master’s level work that I have done for my bachelor’s degree, but there is going to be the really tough stuff that I am going to have to really buckle down and study hard for. The thing is though that I wouldn’t be on such a tight schedule for whatever game I was working on at DigiPen, so I would have time to devote to classes. The idea that I will have both the will to work hard and the time to study for classes gives me confidence that I would do well in a graduate program.

Not Enough Hours In A Day

It’s been some time since I’ve gotten inspiration to write, so I’ve been holding off on any sort of nonsensical rambling. However, in the spirit of continuing to develop my craft, I really do have to write every day. So here comes some nonsensical rambling. I’m listening to Jacques Brel singing some crazy French folk music. It’s the vastest library of French music I’ve ever had. It’s such a rough language; I wonder sometimes why it’s so popular. I’ve been considering putting some kind of language learning tool on this laptop so that I can take some time away from writing to learn a foreign language. Speaking of rough languages, perhaps I might learn German.

Another option I’m considering is putting DirectX on this laptop and doing some graphics research. The difficult part is the fact that I’d need a ton of material installed on the laptop since I don’t have the internet to look anything up. Another issue is the fact that this is a netbook and not an actual computer that can compute things. I’ll be able to do some lighting and things, but anything that requires intensive algorithms will chug like crazy. It’ll probably be fine for what I want to do at first and then once I get far enough along I’ll just do something else for a while and move the research onto a computer.

There really aren’t enough hours in a day. I’ve been saying that like crazy lately. I just have no time to be bored. I always have something that I should be doing or working on. I’ve got a plan for the project that I’ve been having trouble finishing, so at least now I have the goal completely laid out. I’m hoping many of the things in my estimates will be shorter than what I’ve figured they’d take. There are just a number of things that I am afraid of, and those things get massive estimates so that I remind myself to be wary of it before saying how soon I can get something done.

Estimates are a very important part of a production process. There are people who might shrug it off as something that you can just pull out of nowhere and move on and never look back. The point of it is to establish that you are going to do something within a period of time and you are bound to this estimate so that you push yourself to get it done within your estimate. You can also see how productive you are being if you make your estimates or miss them. This allows you to assess the issues as to why you missed your estimate. Some questions you might ask are, “Did something get in my way? Was I distracted and not being as productive as I could be? Was this task simply more complex than I originally anticipated? What happened to make me miss my mark?” Ask these questions and reassess so that the next project’s estimate is closer to being spot on. Eventually you won’t make any of those mistakes and you will be able to really nail down a project timeline.

Humbled

Too often, I get called out for being totally full of myself. It’s absolutely true. I will walk into a room and immediately announce that I am in fact better than you. But the thing is that when I do that, I am usually dedicated to proving it at any chance that I can get. It’s the competitive drive that does actually force me to improve my skills. The interesting thing is that I was never this competitive of a person. I think what started it really was the fact that I discovered the things that I’m good at, and the sense of trusting in my own skills was fostered by my peers. Granted, the peers that fostered that notion probably pushed it too far, and that’s where you get that my current mindset.

I’ve come to realize though that I really need to start toning it down. I might be a bit bold to think of myself as someone who belongs in a leadership position, kind of an odd catch 22 you might say, but a leader must really be incredibly humble and foster that sense of pride in other people. Confidence is a major factor in one’s ability. You need skills and you need to develop those skills, but without confidence, I’ve seen that people can just sit back and say, “I can’t do it, so why bother?” That’s a horrible way to look at anything. Another factor in this is obviously passion. If you have no passion, then you can never answer the question, “Why bother?” Let’s assume that a person is passionate about something though. Then the next step is to never underestimate your own abilities and keep trying until it finally clicks.

All of our brains are made totally differently, so it might take a little bit of extra effort in some areas but other areas will come easier once your brain gets accustomed to that way of thinking. My brain has really easy paths for thinking of big systems in simple terms and solving architectural problems in simple yet elegant ways. When it comes to physics though, I could never and will never be able to understand torque. If I ever had a passion for physics, I would attack that problem until it died, but I don’t, so I’ll leave that area to the people who do it well, but that doesn’t mean I should give up on games or even give on physics. I just know it’ll be more difficult to do if I ever had to do it, but I’m never afraid of needing to force myself to learn something new.

This has been a weird post but there are lessons to take away from this. There’s nothing wrong with being a little confident and competitive. However, there comes a point when you have to now transpose your confidence onto someone else and take a step back. You actually have to start doing this before you think you need to, so that the people around you are willing to follow your leadership. You can’t ever ignore the need for passion but on top of passion you have to be dedicated, or you may actually even lose the passion you had. It’s odd but they are different things. Finally, even if you are faced with adversity, you must prevail and eat whatever comes at you. Doing this will force you to be better and help you with everything

Work Habits

I’ve been having trouble coming up with things to write about lately, and I just realized what the reason is. It’s not hard to get topics when you actually do something other than code. So let’s talk about my schedule and why I’m not exposed to any elements that create blog topics. I get up in the morning, take a shower, and hop on the train. Once I get to work, I settle down and start coding. I take my lunch and then continue coding. Around 6:30, I get out and hop on the train back home, which I get to around 7:30. I spend the next hour or two relaxing and getting my brain out of my day job and get some food. This is the only period of time I have to get input useful to my blog, which is really difficult since I tend to watch TV or play a video game at this point. I then settle down in my room and get to coding again. I code until my 1 am cutoff time and get to sleep.

If I don’t get to sleep at 1 am, the rest of my week is completely useless. I can’t get anywhere near the production level I had with my 1 am cutoff time and end up having to go to sleep early to recuperate from the lack of sleep, which makes me lose even more production time. Sticking to the cycle though, I’ve been in a pretty comfortable roll. I’m actually gearing up to get even more focused and I’m hoping to be able to cut my unwinding time down so that I have more time to work on my nightly project.

Even the nightly work itself I feel isn’t focused enough. I need to do some better planning of the whole program and then settle down to get each task done. There is too much of the question, “What should I do next?” There just needs to be a big list of tasks and check them off one at a time. While I was at DigiPen there were a lot of talks on how people work differently and have different needs. I am of the camp where I absolutely need a list and I need the satisfaction of moving things from the list of things needed to be done to the list of things that have been done.

Tonight is going to be my first night job meeting in a while. I think this is a perfect opportunity to really lay out what’s left to be done on the project. It’s going to get kind of technical so my partner might find trouble getting into some of the discussion that would be better suited for a programmer, but just having someone to bounce words off of will help. That’s really what non-programmers are there for sometimes. You might just need to say things out loud to someone to figure things out. I always joke that I should get a rubber duck, but I actually probably should. I also need a chess timer to time how long I take to do each task.

One thing I did for Winter Wars that really worked well was the really refined breakdown of tasks and estimating how long it would take to do each individual task. Because I refined the tasks so much, I was really able to figure out exactly how long sections of the program would take just by adding up all of the estimations in that section. I was then able to look at how long things took overall and see where I could improve not only my focus and organization, but also my time estimates. If something didn’t take as long as I estimated, I would ask the question, “Why?” This cycle is what is really missing from my current project and hopefully starting today I can remedy that.

Back To Work

Oh no, I left my headphones attached to my computer! I need a backup set of headphones just for the train so that I don’t forget them ever. “Why were they attached to your computer,” you might ask. Well, I finally started getting myself in gear. I hadn’t had enough sleep in a long time and two nights ago I decided it was time to get back into the cycle I had for Winter Wars. It’s the 1 AM cutoff time that is so crucial to my sleep cycle. The horrible thing I discovered is my sleep cycle has been so horribly broken for so long that I ended waking up an hour and a half before my alarm was supposed to go off. I was so well rested that I actually thought I was late for work for some very odd reason. After checking the time I realized I needed to get back to sleep. Waking up with my alarm though, I was somewhere in the REM cycle and felt like utter crap.

It’s great to be back in a groove. I tend to do this from time to time. I stare at something for a while and really feel no urge to work on it. Then when I realize I can work on another aspect of it, and I actually end of starting this other aspect, I get totally motivated again. It’s kind of odd how sometimes what you’re working on as a subject can really change how fast you can get it done. It may have nothing to do with the skill or time required to actually do the work, motivation is everything.

This project should really have been finished a couple of months ago, but I was really not feeling any kind of motivation. I just didn’t see a reason for pushing myself. It all just seemed like no matter how hard I tried it was all very inconsequential. What I realized lately is that simply giving up is not an option. I revert to that kind of guy every once in a while. He was around until around sophomore year of DigiPen. It’s a side of me that I don’t think I can get rid of forever, but I can certainly suppress it. You have to realize that my whole life has been a struggle for motivation. It’s only relatively recently that I have found the ways, and the will, to push myself to get things done.

Two Worlds

It’s odd to think but I am actually part of two different crowds of people. You have the developers who are the workhorses of the video game industry. We all have this shared interest in solving problems and creating a fun experience. It’s a tightly knit community and everyone kind of understands the situation everyone else is in. A lot of us get pushed around by management and publishers so there is sort of camaraderie there. Everyone is interested in learning from everyone else. If you don’t believe me, look at that incredibly expensive conference they put on filled with like a hundred lectures and panels. That’s the Game Developers Conference for anyone who’s wondering.

And then there’s this other awesome group of people that I feel I am a part of. They’re the intersection set of gamers and penny arcade fans, with a fair amount of people extending out into the union as well. You see it every year at PAX, but I’ve never really felt a part of the community until PAX East 2010. The experience hasn’t really changed that much, but there is something about the fact that every year this group of friendly people comes together to celebrate being a gamer and/or a penny arcade fan. I just kind of finally realized that I was certainly a part of this thing.

Dragons on a Train

So, I’m sitting on the train, minding my own business, when all of a sudden this damn dragon walked on breathing fire everywhere. I needed to get to work, so I wasn’t all too happy about a burning train car delaying my commute. People were running and flailing like the pansies that you’d expect so I knew I was the only one who can do something about it. I got out my sword and shield and faced the smoking creature. Our eyes met and we both knew there will be a showdown. The thing about dragons that you have to remember is that they’re not afraid of anything. They’ve spent so long being called mythical that they’ve lost the will to live. They just crash around breaking stuff hoping someone will kill them.

I took a step forward, waiting for a fiery retaliation. At this point, I was really glad that I remembered to bring my tall shield because I would normally have not nearly enough cover against the foul beast. You’d think I would’ve hoped to have a brought a gun, but killing a dragon with a gun is the least chivalrous thing you can do. And besides, who am I? Indiana Jones?

I advanced slowly; the dragon starts to smoke in rage. Without any hesitation, noticing an innocent bystander getting a bit too close, it took an arm clean off of the person and started eating it. I had little time to shake off the horror of the person on the floor screaming in pain at the fact that he was now missing an arm. It was time for the dragon to die. I lunged forward, shield first, trying to drive the lizard straight through the heart. Unfortunately, the dragon managed to bat my sword away before I could piece those tough scales. The dragon let out a horrible roar that filled the whole station.

That’s when I took notice of more dragons on the train and in the station. It was the first time there had been so many dragons in one place. At the time, dragons weren’t really known to be family or team oriented, but I guess we had to expect they’d eventually want to be killed in waves as to finally exterminate the dragon race. Now you might be wondering why the dragon would bat my sword away if its goal was actually suicide. You have to remember that getting stabbed really hurts, so they want to avoid that bit. They are really conflicted in their goals.

It was still chewing on that persons arm. It was kind of surprising to me that the dragon actually didn’t cook the arm before eating it. You’d think a fire breathing animal would take advantage of this fact and cook their meals before eating them but I guess dragons like their raw meat. I was really getting upset at this point since I really needed to get to work. The dragon noticed my obviously sad expression and started feeling bad. One thing you might not have known about dragons, because they’re depressed to the point of suicide, they don’t want anyone else to feel as horrible as they do. They’re softies for people who are really sad. Angry or scared they don’t care much, but you show them some emotion and they will either leave you alone or become your best friend.

Luckily for me, a train had come into the station across the platform, so the train nodded at me and walked over to terrorize the other train, arm and all. Usually the trains stay in the station of they’re all messed up, but I imagine the conductor was far too happy to be alive to stay anywhere near the fire breathers. With a light doorbell sound, the doors close and we start moving out of the station. The last sight I saw was the dragon turning back and waving goodbye with the person’s arm.

First Post, Not Really

This post will mark the announcement of the blog to the general public. I wanted to get a few posts in before showing a larger audience, just to make sure I wasn’t announcing something that was going to end up being empty. I’ve fallen into the habit of writing every day on the train and I’m really enjoying it. Topics have been rather varied so far just because I write about whatever I’m thinking at the moment that I open my netbook. There are times when I remember a topic from the day before that I felt strongly about, so I’ll write about that. The formatting of the posts have been improving as I’ve been writing, which is probably another good thing about waiting until I had a decent amount of posts to start showing a wide audience. I’ve shown a few people to get some feedback; I apologize if you weren’t picked for the beta test, but that probably means I’m just a bad friend.

Enough about me, let’s talk about you. Who is this blog actually targeted at? The topics are so varied that it’s hard to really say. I think it’s just anyone who’s curious about what I have to say and find my writing style amusing. I’ve been told that the way I write reads well and is pretty funny at times. I mean there are things that aren’t even really meant to be a joke at the time, but then when I look back I realize how funny those things can be.

Alright, let’s talk about Nurse Jackie since the train is plastered with her ads. What is this shit? Someone said we needed a female version of house, so we’ll use a nurse instead of a doctor because it’s a woman. Honestly this seems to be the first time a woman is the lead in a series about medicine, and she has to be a nurse? There have been female doctor leads of course who have been shown to be incredibly smart, but there’s a difference between Dr. Cutty and House. House is very clearly the better doctor and the leading role. I haven’t seen Jackie, but I imagine there will be a few times where she upstages the doctors, but that’s not really the point is it?

It’s funny to think about the fact that I really don’t watch much television anymore. People ask me to watch things so that they have someone to talk to about it. Television is oddly some kind of multi-user experience, even though most people watch it in solitary. I also find it funny to see how much television other people actually watch. I don’t even know what it means to have that kind of time where I can just sit around watching TV and catch up on all the shows that I’ve missed. Really I don’t have any time for shows with commercials because I refuse to sit there and be advertised at. Whenever I watch one of the many house marathons, I realize just how powerful and terrible commercials really are. You end up seeing the same set of commercials over and over again because the show is usually sponsored by a particular company with an excessive amount of advertising money and has a particular audience it is targeting.

Marketing is an awful and awfully useful science. No one really likes their marketing team because they will degrade your product and do things that are maybe shady or may not show your product in the greatest light by moral or mature standards, but they are there to get people interested in your product. Marketing is an odd field in the sense that everyone needs it, but at the same time it needs everyone else. A marketer is nothing unless it has something to market, but once that desperate inventor has something to show off, the marketer can have the upper hand because now that the inventor has invested their life into something, they won’t let it go.

This about where I kind of just cut the post off abruptly because I’m nearing my stop and I don’t really know how to close out a post. Since this is the first publically announced post, I will do things a bit differently just this once. I guess I’ll thank everyone for reading this post and taking an interest in my blog. I hope you’ll continue to follow my, as you can tell, completely random thoughts on my train ride to work.

Gamer Rant

There is a direction that games are going in lately that I really don’t find amusing. We were heading closer and closer to a completely immersive experience. Suddenly, over the last couple of years, designers decided that games would be a better experience if we reintroduced elements of the 80’s arcade era into everything. Obviously, this is not the direction of immersion, but the direction of mindless game elements. Games used to be about skill and mastery where developing abilities by playing a game was rewarded.

Now players just train wreck their way through an entirely too easy game of nonsense minigames applied to affect a grander scheme of things. It’s a horrible trend toward these experiences that aren’t even games anymore. It’s like playing a game of tag where everyone walks while you run. Yes there are elements of a game still there, but what is the point? Do people play games to escape the fact that they’re the fat kid who can’t keep up with all the other kids?

That’s the real issue here. I don’t know why I didn’t start off in this direction. This whole thing is about profits and getting as many sales as possible. The majority of people on this earth are actually untalented pricks. That’s why we have so many completely useless degrees; so many people work two fast food jobs for a living. The goal of the publisher is the maximize sales and appeal to these crowds of completely unskilled individuals. The way we do it is by idiot-proofing games and giving the fat kid a jet pack. Players want to feel empowered because in real life the only power they have is over how much salt they pour over those golden fries.

It’s some bizarre chain of events that is driving games into TELEVISION! Games are becoming these mind numbing experiences that offer nothing to the player in terms of mental nourishment. Players go from game to game, addicted to the idea of a new high impact experience, not even really caring about the game they’re playing. Developers add these millions of dollars worth of content to a game in order to attract a larger audience, but if the audience can’t see the content, then it’s useless. So publishers force them to remove any semblance of balance and good game design in favor or something a player can just plow through and move on.

There’s no replayability because it’s bad business for publishers. If a publisher can extend its reach enough and constantly offer a new game for more money on a regular basis, then why should they worry about whether or not a player would play any of their games more than once? As long as the player enjoys the experience once, then there’s no reason to make sure they don’t realize that they’re not even playing a game anymore.

Developer Rant

One of my coworkers asked me how I could possibly devote so much time into something, like building a game engine from scratch, and not want to continue working on it. It made me laugh because I hadn’t really even given that fact much thought. My initial response was that I do these things for my enjoyment and advancement; I’m not at all disappointed that I’m not continuing to use what I worked so hard to create. Thinking about it now, the reasons for dropping it are really why I don’t feel so bad about leaving the engine behind. While the architecture was fine, there were a number of mistakes I’ve made that would require me to rebuild the entire thing for speed and portability. The other reason is my disillusionment with the market I was attempting to sell to.

Things with even a remote amount of quality are shot down, while games that are about absolutely nothing sell like hotcakes. I understand that the game that I made wasn’t a significant advancement in design or graphics, but it was some mindless fun and it looked fantastic. I truly felt I had done something that was better than some of the highest selling products on that particular market. Unfortunately, I was sorely mistaken and still have not seen a dime from that massive time investment.

I probably did some chicken counting, and that probably didn’t help my disillusionment. In my optimism, I really find it hard to avoid doing that. However, it is my optimism that gives me the strength to do the things I’m able to do. Whenever I’m faced with a problem to solve, I hardly ever see something as insurmountable just because of the optimistic way I look at the problem. It’s a major motivator and helps me learn and grow, since I never walk away from a problem until I’ve found a solution, even if that solution is to work around the problem.

Healthcare or Healthscare?

Alright let’s get down to some business. The Democrats celebrated a “victory” last night when the House of Representatives barely passed the largely Senate version of the healthcare reconciliation bill. Not a single republican voted for the bill, so all the benefits and repercussions of the bill can be directly pinned on the democrats. The main response that you get from this bill in the conservative camp, and this is what I consider the sane conservative camp, is that all the ways that we expect to pay for this bill will fall through, but not only that, the ways that wouldn’t fall through are just taxes on people and businesses. An interesting, even though optimistic, thought that comes to mind is “What if this bill actually saves more money and cuts the deficit more than expected?” I doubt anyone would actually say that, and the reasons are probably pretty solid to lean toward the conservative prediction, but I still find the possibility amusing. If it came true, it would be like winning the World Series, if the World Series happened only once every fifty years.

There was an argument about how big a business has to be to no longer be considered a small business because of the provisions in the bill that help small businesses. It seems to be the exact same argument against heavily taxing the highest tax brackets. A reminder to those who forgot, if we increase the tax on higher brackets, particularly those making over $250k a year, then no one will want to make more than $250k a year. They apply the same argument to small business. You are considered a small business if you have fifty or fewer employees, therefore business owners will never higher that fifty-first employee and we will get a stagnation of business. The counter to this argument is that most businesses actually fit this criterion, just like most people fit the criterion of making less than $250k a year. And furthermore, just like most people would strive to go from making $30k to making $250k, most entrepreneurs would still want to start a small business, and then take that business from hiring five to 7 people and expand it to fifty.

Do you have any idea how big a business has to be to accommodate fifty employees? It seems like a small number in the grand scheme of things, but you have to think about all the office space you need to comfortably fit all those people. You also have to consider how much money the company has to be making to afford to pay all these people. And the fact that most businesses actually have fewer than fifty employees means that when a business has to decide between increasing to sixty employees and taking the tax increase or remaining at fifty, that ten employees won’t amount to much. Honestly, I find it hard to believe that a business with fifty employees would stay at fifty forever, even if they have the opportunity to expand to maybe seventy. In my limited experience and insight, I have seen that businesses generally don’t expand that slowly. They pick up a big investment and expand a significant amount, hiring a team of people to be a part of this expansion. There will, of course, be those businesses with fifty employees that desperately need that one specialist and will have to make some tough choices, but I feel that’s far too rare to really be a significant problem.

Shaved Heads and Shameless Hilarity

The event was rather incredible. They were shaving heads for a very long time. The website said the count of shavees was around seventy-two. The food was good and you really can’t have anything wrong with a fridge full of free iced cream. As my former roommate Alex would say, I do always think with my stomach. After some time of waiting around, my teammates’ family had to go, so we pushed to the front of the line. It took a while to shave my head just because there was such an incredible amount of hair. The barber wasn’t really even done when the organizer of the event told him it was good enough and shoved me off the chair. I kind of feel like the back of my head could use a little bit more but that’s fine. I wasn’t there to get perfect haircut.

The weirdest thing is going to be watching my hair grow back in. I’m going to have to get a haircut fairly soon or I’ll be faced with a truly mop top since everything will grow back in at the same time. I’ve been considering documenting the process but it would require remembering to take a picture every morning after I take a shower. It’ll be weird to watch the beard grow in and disappear in intervals. It’d seem like the milliseconds on a clock. I will have to take a few pictures a day. Another interesting idea is taking a picture using the camera on this laptop. I could take it on the train every morning right when I get on. I’d just have to hope there’s no one sitting around me that’d be upset by the fact that I might be taking a picture of them.

After the event, I went uptown to meet up with my cousin Mario. It was the first time we ever hung out outside of a family party. He had apparently been drinking since three in the afternoon. When I left him it was midnight and he was still drinking. I was pretty happy that I managed to get home at two in the morning. I was really dreading getting home any later than that since I had to get up for work at about eight-thirty in the morning. I forgot to set my alarm later than I had the day before and ended getting woken up at seven-thirty having no clue what so ever what was going on. I did end up realizing it was only seven-thirty and set my alarm for an hour later.

San Francisco Musings

On the train listening to John Denver; he channels the voices of angels in the heavens. GDC was certainly a wonderful week. I think I enjoyed myself even more because I went in with no expectations what so ever. Did I think I was going to hike the hill in Berkeley or check out Alcatraz? No chance, but was that only the beginning of a great week? Most definitely.

There’s a funny story about that hike. Alex, my partner in crime, and I had gotten off the trail and were making our way through a fairly unused path to this paved road that we felt would’ve taken us down if we hadn’t come back the way we went up. We’re climbing through what we expect is rather poisonous brush. The final leg before hitting the road becomes practically vertical. We take separate paths and are making our way up downed trees and brush and thorny leaves. We finally make it to the top and meet this jogger and SVU owner who are both laughing. The jogger jokes about the fact that they expected zombies to pop out of the brush. She only heard loud rattling and had no idea what was there. Did I expect to ever be mistaken for a zombie? No chance. Even funnier was the fact that I dressed up as a zombie for the last Halloween.

It was a busy week after that, filled with lunches and dinners and drinking with friends that I haven’t seen in a long time. The first day of lectures was great. If there is anything to be taken from GDC, it’s inspiration to try and work on the latest and greatest technology available. Recent advancements can always motivate you.

I just remembered a dream from last night but I have no idea what it is. I remember it being something to do with my basement and looking for things. For some reason, someone gave all of their stuff up for grabs. I knew where a couple of caches were and already know I was going to miss the main cache so I went straight for the second one. I remember getting some things that I wanted but I still wasn’t too satisfied. So I went for the primary cache to see what I could get. The person there had said they had gone through it and got everything they wanted but to my surprise there were still piles of stuff left over that I wanted to sort through to see if there was anything in particular that I’d like. I want to say that all these things were toys but I’m not really sure. What’s interesting is the fact that this strategy is my usual one. I tend to take the road less traveled to get where I want if the main road seems too congested.

John Denver just told me that he’d really like to grow old. It’s unfortunate that he didn’t get the chance to do so, but it made me think about it. My immediate reaction is that once I’ve reached a certain age, perhaps my midlife crisis, I won’t want to go back to being young; I would actually just want to be old at that point. And I thought about what it would take for me to feel that content with my life that I’d be fine with being old when I’ve only hit my 40s. My goal is really to impact the industry that I’m in. I know that I’m smart enough to make a difference, but I might fall into a trap of the unsung hero; there are many of them. An important thing to note is the fact that those who go down in a blaze of gunfire, and get all the glory that goes with it, do so on their own terms. They aren’t cogs in a wheel at a massive corporation. However, it is also important to note that those who do things on their own terms can just as easily end up in a life of supreme mediocrity and may actually end up being pushed around because they couldn’t prove that their own terms were worth investing in.

Plane Ride to San Franciso

I’m on the plane on my way to San Francisco. This should be a really fun trip. I worry about my dad since he’ll be home alone, but I think he’ll be fine. I’m watching House while I write this, waiting on commercials to end. Really horrible system they have here, whenever there’s an announcement they run them through your headphones at the loudest volume that they could possibly blast information. I have to throw my headphones across the cabin whenever they have something to say. It really put me in the mood to tell them to shut the fuck up. Every time they wanted to tell me about something they were offering, there is no way I’d want it, just because my ears were exploding.

That’s pretty great, captain just made an announcement through a really interesting portion of the show. Hey apparently movies have been cutting in and out, so free movies today. They have up in the air showing. That movie is pretty excellent, but I think I’ll wait before watching it. It might be the first DVD I buy since 300. I kind of regret buying 300; that movie is kind of unwatchable. When I first saw it in theatres, I was really entertained by the pure manliness of it. It’s exactly the same effect I got when I first played gears of war. However, the main issue is that entertainment is not sustainable at all. The idea of “replayability” is nonexistent. Without substance, the audience won’t really be able to connect with your work. They might feel happy, laugh, or be generally entertained at different periods of time, but without substance it makes it very difficult for the audience to reconnect once they are already expecting everything that made them happy, laugh, or be generally entertained. Everything is lost.

E-Harmony commercial makes me life. To think that being compatible makes a relationship is silly. To think that anything makes a relationship is silly. I was once told by a good friend of mine that two people should inherently have common interests, otherwise you are just taking turns doing what the other person enjoys. Now, I’ll agree that this is a failing or failed relationship. However, just because someone hasn’t experienced something extensively yet doesn’t mean they wouldn’t fully enjoy it and find that they might even have a passion for it bigger than the person who introduced it to them. I find it really annoying when this happens, of course. It’s annoyingly cutesy and I hate seeing. But if I’m going to be honest about it, it’s actually a beautiful thing and I’d love a relationship where I can open someone up to new experiences and I could be opened up to new experiences myself.

Ah, as I suspected. They’re gypsies. This is an excellent episode. Love it.

Something just occurred to me. New experiences only last a relatively short period of time. Eventually you will either run out of time to keep trying new things, or you’ll run out of things you’re interested in trying. If you don’t connect on a really deep level before new experiences run out, the relationship will run thin very quickly. And it’s kind of dangerous to base a relationship on trying new things. It’s not much different than a relationship based on sex in a dangerous place or something equally as short term as that. There is an argument for starting at a point where both people share a lot of passions, but I guess my original thought is still valid. Just because you aren’t starting out with all of the same interests doesn’t mean that you can’t develop common interests. Furthermore if you do share all of the same interests, there isn’t enough room for disagreement. You will probably have a lot of the same views and have little room for debate.
I find avid agreement to be one of the most annoying things in the world and I’m serious about that one. It’s not that agreeing on something is particularly bad. For example, I think we can all agree that I am tall, dark, and handsome. It saves time and puts people at ease with each other. When there is nothing but disagreement, people start to get a little on edge. There needs to be a bit of a balance, as does everything.

It brings us back to what started this segment. eHarmony’s point would be finding someone who is your balance. Someone you can harmonize with. I sometimes wonder how their search algorithms work. It’s entirely possible that they are able to find someone who is your balance, but I highly doubt it. One particular implementation that I might use is to simply take a set amount of shared traits, and a set amount of traits that may or may not relate but conflict in some way, and put them together. If eHarmony ever used this method for finding matches, I would find the irony to be absolutely beautiful. I think people who are desperate enough would find a relationship with someone who they match with only partially quite fulfilling.
Oh my god, House just took a 25 foot tapeworm out of a girl who couldn’t feel pain. That is so gross and hilarious.

I’m seeing these iPhone commercials. These new ones that show all the apps you could use. It really shows off all the uses of an iPhone. It’s amazing how hit or miss apple’s ideas can be. When the iPod came out, people went crazy over them. They were really easy to use and everyone was happy with them. They then came out with a bunch of spinoffs. None of them took hold as something everyone needed to switch to. Then the iPhone comes out and people freak the fuck out. Everyone has to get their hands on one. And the next thing is the iPad and no one wants anything to do with it. People are upset, but what I wonder is what the next step after the iPad is. It may be the next step or the step after, but I’m sure apple with throw something else down that everyone would be willing to kill someone for. Perhaps it might be something as thin as paper that can solidify with the touch of a button. It’s an idea that’s been going around but I would put money on apple being the first one to offer it to mainstream.

God, I love who this show is targeted it. There are so many commercials for women. Tampax. Vagisil. Whatever that new birth control apparatus called Mirena that goes in the uterus and lasts for five years. These are really awful commercials to have to sit through.

“What did you go to school in France?” is a great response to a doctor ranting about how Iraq is filled with uranium from using depleted munitions.

I never took the opportunity of a night flight to gaze out the window of the beauties that are the stars. I don’t really know why; these are the best opportunities to see them. Floating above the clouds, there is nothing to get in the way of those bright lights. Everyone has different reasons for wanting to go to space but I think there is at least a small desire for everyone. I sometimes wonder whether the deep would be just as interesting with all the fascinating creatures that are able to survive that depth. They are different worlds though. The lights of the heavens are wonderful. Nothing compares to actually seeing them too. The way the light moves through space doesn’t come through in photos or in digital form. There’s something about the way it stretches on forever no matter direction you look. Once that’s compressed to 2D, you don’t get that effect.

Revolution Through Taxation

I saw a bumper sticker today that read, “The man who can get you believe absurdities, can get you commit atrocities.” It was a quote by Voltaire, who’s name I recognized but couldn’t figure out from where. My dad asked if I knew who he was and pointed out that he was a French revolutionary during the bloody revolution. My dad was remarking on how horrible it must’ve been that they were dragging nobles out of their homes and castles and either hanging or decapitating them. I then remarked on the fact that they were angry and he responded by saying, “Of course, they were starving and the nobles were living great lives.”
This all got me thinking a little bit. A fair warning, I was hoping this blog would turn somewhat political from time to time and I think now is a good time for it. We are currently not living in that much different of a philosophical situation. There are people starving, and there is nobility that live lavish lives. Those who own the yachts and the mansions are the ones who really control this country. If you have the money to lobby someone enough, you will get them to vote in your direction.
During his campaign, President Obama made the fatal mistake of proclaiming that we need to “share the wealth.” For a short time, he was laid down on a cross and hung high for this incredibly liberal, almost communist idea. But what’s interesting is the audience he was talking to was clearly not the common man. He was talking to that top 5% of people who own most of the wealth in this country. And if you think about it, while he said that we should share the wealth, what I feel he should’ve said was that we should share the power. Suddenly this incredibly liberal, almost communist, idea becomes an incredibly conservative, revolutionary idea. Some believe that taxing the wealthy is such a deterrent that people would be highly against becoming wealthy. Not only is this absolutely ridiculous, it’s harmful to try and get people to agree with this. Taxing the wealthy isn’t a way to keep the wealthy poor necessarily; it’s a way to insure that the wealthy aren’t able to control the country.
You might say that taxation is not the way to keep the wealthy from gaining too much power, but the things that could be subsidized with the money is another benefit to taxing the wealthy. It means more people getting a higher education. It means more people who don’t have to lose their entire paycheck to healthcare costs. It means more people who don’t necessarily have to join the military because it’s the only thing they feel they can do with their lives. A lot of people feel that what Michael Moore said about military recruiting is complete bullshit but I feel like there is most likely some truth to this.

I guess I really shouldn’t shut this laptop down ever. It takes at least a stop to boot up. I was thinking about writing a story this morning, something that has a bit of my strength in the sensory words, but I’m thinking it’ll be too cheesy and won’t come off right. I guess I should just start writing and see where it takes me. It’s interesting to actually write down my thought process. When I bought this laptop, I knew it’d be really weird and my thoughts wouldn’t chain as well as they do from free thought, but I think the flow will be fine once I get used to the process. It’s just an extension to my brain, a sort of organization of my thoughts. Writing in a laptop is so much nicer than writing on paper. I feel like just the motion of hitting keys is far less straining on the hand than holding a pen or pencil and writing. You can also fit way more onto one page, its way cleaner, and in my case far more legible. I’m not sure where my handwriting went wrong. I think the issue is I just got so bored with school and homework that I started rushing everything that was given to me just to get it out of the way. I’m also pretty sure that I stopped doing some assignments that including handwriting just because I was too bored with it. It really wasn’t until DigiPen that I cared at all about assignments. There have been times and subjects that actually interested me, but it didn’t happen often. Obviously, one thing that got me in the game was math in the 7th and 8th grade. We dropped the insanely useless arithmetic and started getting heavy into algebra and things related to algebra. Considering my math minor is basically an algebra minor, you might see why I started doing homework again. From that point on my math grades massively improved and I kept up the work through to now. Now there is only one other class that I can think of that actually got me to do assignments for it. It was sophomore year French class at St Francis Prep with Madame O. What the O stands for, I have no idea anymore. I started off that year on a bad foot. I really hated French because of the previous year’s teacher and didn’t want anything to do with the homework. Now, I would pick and choose what assignments I got done, I just didn’t care, but after a few times of coming up empty, she looked at me and just said something along the lines of, “What’s going on? Why aren’t you doing these assignments? You have to keep up in my class.” I guess at that point I kind of felt bad. I realized I had been refusing to do the assignments out of spite from my previous teacher. So, I started getting things done for that class on a regular basis, and it is because of that, and the fact that she was actually a pretty good teacher, that I remember the French that I do. Of course the next year we went back to having the teacher from the first year, and my interest in French took another nose dive. Nowadays, I’d say French is kind of cool, but I don’t really have any interest in continuing my studies. If I were to learn a language it’d be German. It’ll be interesting to learn the other half of where the English language comes from. I already know a decent amount of Spanish so getting that other side would be cool. The great thing is I have a laptop now so I can download some kind of German learning program. I obviously wouldn’t be able to do the pronunciations, but if I found myself interested enough, I could do those when I got home. Jackson heights. This is such a long ride, but I don’t really wish I were paying rent right now. If I were paying rent, this netbook would-

I just got booted out of my seat by someone who needed it more than I did. I just learned not to sit anywhere near the end of a train car. What’s funny is that’s never happened to me before, but the day I get a laptop and would find it really uncomfortable to do whatever I’m doing standing up, it happens. I’m not typing standing up right now; I agree when people say that anyone who does is retarded. I was thinking about starting a blog with this writing and calling it Train Thoughts. I’ll have to check on blogspot to see if the name is available.

So, I’m on my way home, standing near the entrance tunnel to the station and I noticed someone attempting to catch a glimpse into the tunnel to see if the train was coming, but then he’d mosey on back to the wall and lean again. This person had no reason what so ever to look into the tunnel. The train wasn’t going to come any faster. I doubt he was going to get all that excited if he noticed a train was coming. It’s not something that completely uncommon either. We want to know when things are near all the time. I’ve thought whether or not I would do the same, but I don’t think I would. I know I used to, but lately, and by that I mean within the last five or six years, I’ve become less dependent on knowing whether something is about to happen or not. Instead, I like to use my imagination to think about what might happen. It sometimes leads to the issue of counting chickens before they hatch, but I have become quite an optimist. That last bit happened at DigiPen when I realized that I’m awesome. It’s an optimism that can certainly get lost from time to time, but always finds its way back, again, once I realize that I’m awesome. Certain people have realized that a way to cheer me up is to remind me of this fact, which is pretty funny and a note to all of you out there. Now, you may be thinking, man this kid needs a slice of humble pie, but I disagree. While I recognize my basic talents, I understand that I am far from what I can be, and every day of my life is spent either making myself better or taking a break from making myself better. I hardly ever really feel a day passing. I only know I’ve been doing something for too long because the light outside disappears (or comes back) or I’m too tired to efficiently think. Days follow this pattern. Days turn to months. And months turn into… well I haven’t been at this for that long so I won’t say years just yet. I’m hoping that I can eventually slow things down and take a long break. The interesting thing is, in my field, you never really fall into a mastery of something to the point where you don’t have to learn very much anymore. If you focus on one thing long enough to master it, that just means there’s something else developing that you’re not keeping up with. I guess that’s why industry vets generally specialize in something and get paid a lot of money to do that one thing. Programming is a profession unlike many others. I guess it’s like being a general handyman. It’s a bit more complex though. We can build our own tools, like a handyman building a drill, but we are still limited by the computer hardware. The only analogy I can think of is maybe a handyman can’t get the part to make his drill able to penetrate solid steel and one day, some part manufacturer offers this part. It’s something along those lines but not quite.