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.