NYC

It's hard to sum up my feelings about going to NYC. I mean, that's a real world-class city.

I'm from Vancouver. A city that constantly, if embarassingly self-consciously, proclaims itself to be just that. Last time I checked, though, I don't see people walking around NYC with "I HEART VANCOUVER" shirts on absentmindedly. Yesterday, in Vancouver, I saw two NY shirts (they were kinda well-worn and had all the tourist feel of a Nike jumpsuit). No director is shooting in NYC trying to recreate the picture-perfect Kitsilano scene. I suspect there's a dance club in upper Manhattan that has a higher GDP than all of the Lower Mainland.

There's a enormousness about NYC. Movies and books and the collective memory of much of Western Civilization are put in the backdrop of, are created in, are stamped out in the streets of that city. Midnight Cowboy, An Affair to Remember, The Godfather, Wall Street, The French Connection, Guys and Dolls, Independence Day. It's this fountain of zeitgeist, if I may resurrect a buzz word from '02 that has all the freshness of a Pompeii compost heap.

The bustle rustle, the bumble tub grinding tumble of it all. I never thought one could be intimidated by a city. It's just people isn't it? People, sewer system, a city bureaucracy, the police, the justice system, transit, by-laws, parks, sky scrapers, tenement buildings, concrete, cement, glass. But I am.

I've never really believed in the idea of city loyalty. It's part and parcel of the idea that you can take credit for shit you have had no hand in doing anything about. Like being proud you're tall, or your parents are from a certain part of the world. It's silly.

But I can see how one can feel proud about NYC. Like how one, I suppose, can feel proud about Canada. I'm not entirely sure how this is different from city loyalty. Where people from this city hate people from that city or blahblahblah 'TASTES GREAT!! LESS FILLING!!" merry-go-round of idiocy.

I suppose you can admire it. You can admire what a city stands for, what it's given birth to. What culture and personality it fosters. I suppose there's nothing silly about that.

NYC, to me, a West Coast bumpkin, is so many things and everything. Mostly things that aren't West Coast. When I think of the Hippie Annex (California, Oregon, Washington, BC), I think, laid-back, slow, relaxed, live-and-let live, work just enough to enjoy life, organic, coffee multinationals. Fast-talking, fast-moving, striving, dog-eat-dog, no-time-fore-chit-chat-let-alone-to-breathe, Dangerous Streets, grifting, authentic. Also, you know, Crime. With a capital C. The sort you make grungy, lo-fi tragic documentaries about. It's a burden of a city, I suppose, that is filmed so often and, I'm sure, so often inaccurately.

And here I am plunging headlong into it. A city, which the internet tells me, has almost a third the population of my entire beloved Canada.

What's it gonna be like? How am I gonna even experience through this filter of movies books shows? Will I be able to keep myself from craning my head back, shading my eyes, and muttering, 'That's one tall building'?

I hope I'm ready for world-class.

Adventure

So, it's begun. Sometime while partaking in my hobby I'm mildly ashamed about, I formed a bit of a bond with the people I was playing with. Folks from Metafilter, which seeems, in retrospect, to be the last sort of people I'd cleave to. Not that they are dull, at Metafilter, but they are so full of snark and invective and trenchant analysis as to why that thing you like sucks, it makes it a unlikely source of friendship.

But I have.

Sure, there have been hiccups, and the invaraible flare up of forum drama, but all internet hang outs get those. It's a question of whether the place is left standing afterwards. And it's stuck. Fortunately, miraculously.

Bright, funny, interesting people playing video games and getting angry over strange things like K:D ratios and Team Stacking and things that, granted, likely have analogues in say, a bowling league.

So, it's been three years or so. Playing, chatting, forum drama, jokes, in-jokes, in-in-jokes, baked goods exchanges, Secret Santas, meetups.

And now we are having the Mother of All Meetups. Forty or so of us, descending upon NYC. To play games, drink, eat food that'll cut our lifespan by not insignificant amount.

Yeah, I'm going to Meet People From The Internet.

I've done this before, but locally. After all, the thinking I go through is, "Hey, I'm a people from the internet!". I haven't been disappointed or scared or stuffed into a medium sized cooler smelling suspiciously of chloroform. Which, I"m sure, shocks those less nerdy.

But it all makes sense, you see. It's not that I just met them over the internet. I played with them, suffered trials and tribulations, which, while not say, the scale of the Dresden Fire Bombing or even the hardships make your local SWAT gel, aren't nothing.

We already know so much about each other. Not just personal details, which can be lied about, admittedly. We know some more interesting things. How each other responds to pressure, to failure, to success, to unfairness, to goddman totally overpowered/underpowered updates to our game du jour.

It's damned exciting. Connecting the voice and still pictures to the real, live, breathing mass of fellow nerdery. To meet one's tribe, one's people. Adventure.

Pacino On Flotilla

Another post I made for the Full Glass, Empty Clip gaming blog. This has to do with the indie game Flotilla, which is a turn-based strategy space combat sand box exploration game. With no goddamn save feature.

It’s a rough galaxy out there.

You go out there, every day.

You flank and open fire and strategize because the galaxy isn’t doing you any favours. You tear at your hair, at the bulkheads, you claw your way past the militant penguins and the looming space hulks because that’s what you do.

And the Galaxy tries to shove back?

It tries to take from you what is your right?

You shove back. Maybe you get another ship, maybe your flotilla gets bigger.

You keep growing.

And you know you’ll kill for that flotilla, for every upgrade you’ve fought for, for every new ship that you’ve won.

Because that’s what you do. The Galaxy isn’t going to be explored by itself. It’s up to you, and your crew.

That’s it. That’s what the Galaxy expects from you, and, damnit, that’s what you expect from you.

Now, maybe I’m too jaded, too old, too damn tired to think differently. I’ve spent too long out in that galaxy fighting the good fight, the right fight. But you shouldn’t have to do all this in one go.

What are we? Robots? Animals? I say we are not. I say we are not that thing which can continue on for hours upon hours. We are flesh and blood. We have laundry to do, and kids to mind, and all the little things that make up a life. The little things that go on between conquests. That’s life, gentlemen, that’s living.

You remember that don’t you?

At the end of the day the Galaxy doesn’t care for your life your place in it. It’s only hungry for your ships, and for everything you’ve worked so hard at for the past 40 minutes. But you can’t give it to them. Not after all the sweat and blood it’s extracted from you, step by step, fight by fight, tooth and nail and fist and bone.

And we shouldn’t have to give it all up. Should we? Because our time is fractured. It’s cut up and divided and pulled, stretched out across the day. We shouldn’t, we can’t.

We need a save feature.

Andy Rooney On Teams and Fortresses

I'm blogging over at this gaming blog some of my MeFi friends setup. Specifically, some of my MeFi friends who formed Mefightclub, which is kinda the gaming arm of Metafilter, I suppose. This article has to do with Team Fortress 2, so, if you're not a PC gamer, and not hip with all the incarnations of Team Fortress, you can skip this post.

I don’t know what’s happening to gaming these days. In my day you had a fortress, you had a team, and you just went at it. It was like tag or flag football, the bedrock of any small town community. I know community isn’t in vogue these days. It’s one for one and all for none, it seems. I watch the television and it’s not more about team sports, its about the individual stars. A trophy for this, a medal for that.

It seems to me that nowadays, our fortress team games are obsessed with personal milestones. What sort of whacky combination of numbers have to be achieved today, I wonder. When I was younger, you just worried about how many times you fragged, and how many times you got fragged, and that was that. Now there are silly hats and punny little titles given to any number of strange number crunching.

Lately I’ve been wondering if it doesn’t have to do a little bit with things. What I mean is, too many people are in a rush to get things, get into the city, say, pick up a newer version of a pair of pants that have been perfectly fine these past five years. It’s not that I wouldn’t do it myself, if was a little bit younger, a little less wise, but it’s a shame all the same.

And seemingly, the company that, to be honest, makes me think more often of plumbing supplies than video gaming, has attached their weird and wonderful number crunching to getting more things. What’s wrong with a rocket launcher, I ask? Now you want a rocket launcher that does more splash damage, or less splash damage, maybe heats up your car on a cold morning.

It might be a bit much, I wonder.

But things move on, sure as taxes, or your toast getting inedibly dry after an endless conversation with a coworker you don’t like too much. I’m not one to complain about things. But it seems to me that the Team Fortress of today is a little too friendly, maybe, a little less fortressy. I don’t think we ever needed hats to really enjoy the game. We sure don’t need more things.

At least, I’d like to think so.

Look Vs Is

Idea courtesy of a Mysteriouuus Straaanger with a surprising amount of Ben Gay in his medicine cabinet and a voracious appetite for Reader's Digest "Humor In Uniform".


What He Looks Like : A former Airborne Ranger for the 501st who operates a heavy machinery leasing company while doing heli-rescue work on his spare time.
What He Is : A man who's spent more time in his barcalounger than he has commuting, sleeping and eating. Combined

What He Looks Like : The in-house emotions counsellor at HP.
What He Is : Chronically distant technophobe who has a powerful fear of barber shops and small talk.

What She Looks Like : An army field nurse who has seen more action than a platoon of Foreign Legionnaires.
What She Is : A fundamentalist Mennonite who insists on affecting a Dutch accent.

What She Looks Like : State fair runner-up for "Best Baked Dish Using Rutabaga", 1982.
What She Is : Vice-President for a private para-military outfit that operates mostly in Tangiers.

What She Looks Like : Thirty four year Bogata timeshare tele-rep.
What She Is : Thirty three year Bogata timeshare tele-rep.

What He Looks Like : Primary field researcher for the E. Bola vaccine.
What He Is : Rabid collector of 'WKRP In Cincinnati' memorabilia, Dunkin Donuts Branch manager.

What She Looks Like :President, four years running, of the "Whalebone Supported 18th Century Women's Wear Appreciation Society", New Hampshire Chapter. Office manager of a Fortune 5000 company nearing retirement.
What She Is : Ethnogeographer specializing in cannibalistic cultures, South East Asia.

What He Looks Like : Intelligence agent, operating out of a rather ignored nation-state that sprouted from the former Soviet Bloc. For hire services include assassination, seduction of baronesses, counter-insurgency guerilla warfare, demolitions, light massage.
What He Is : Ostrich farmer.

Art & Crap

There's a fantastic book out there that I've been meaning to get, Art & Fear. It has great anecdotes and advice about making art, or Art. I have a few nonfiction books to work through, so I'm not overly concerned about getting it just yet, but the book certainly comes to mind now and again. Mainly when I'm writing stories.

It came right to the fore when I was slogging through the 30 Days Project. Hell, or hell-like. Certainly reminiscent of brimstone and repurposed Pan imagery, anyways. Because, as you'll notice, through my thirty posts (15,000+ words(!!!)), and to be fair, through almost every other participants thirty posts, there are nearly no comments. Which, I assumed, was one of the draws of the 30 Day Project. Get feedback, support, community of artists, etc.

Poor naive me of thirty plus days ago.

The whole process helped me with come up with a revelation I call "Art & Crap". Which is tangentially related to the bits of Art & Fear I've read that really rung true to me.

Art & Crap goes like this:
1) No one cares about your crap.*
2) Those who care about your crap will only care enough to tell you how crap you crap is.
3) People will genuinely care about your crap when it's too late.
4) Only you can give a crap about your crap.

Which is kinda related to this. A most excellent comment about the whole creative endeavour by one of my mostest favouritest web comics, Subnormality (the comic is easier to read when you think of it more as a blog with pictures, as opposed to a webcomic).

This rule of mine, that I made up and I'm sure is just a poor rendition of a better observation by a more learned mind is immensely helpful to me now. Waiting or hoping for feedback from people in order to keep you doing your work is the quickest way to drink or an alarming bill at the nearest transgendered clown and pony brothel.

And yet, don't you know, it's something I tend to fall in sometimes. But thankfully I have a little series of pat rules to get me out of it. They may not be entirely true, but true enough for my purposes, anyways.


*friends and family don't count, they pretty much have to either feign interest or develop a rare and temporary vision impairment.

30 Days Project

This June I'll be participating in the 30 Days Project. Create something new every day, for 30 days. I suspect it was first set up with visual and audio artists in mind: sculpture, painting, music, etc. Art forms that have a relatively high barrier to entry.

Not writing.¹

It was added later, a sort of nod to us lesser creative types. Which, I suppose I should qualify. There's just so many of us, that, on average, our quality has to be lesser, only stands to reason. You can't throw in 6,291 blogs about Iron Man & Hulk slash fic with the odd brilliant pieces and hope to come out with a positive whole number on an arbitrary scale of quality.

So, feeling like a bit of an imposter and in intruder, I'll attempt to write at least 500 words of fiction a day. About what theme, I'm not sure. Maybe just a smattering of different things.

This is a fair warning (and perhaps another bit of pressure upon myself to not abandon it), that the next 30 days in June will be FICTION FICTION FICTION!! A writing genre I was doing with utmost earnestness, but, sadly, with not a small variation of quality. More misses than hits, in retrospect, which likely lead to my sputtering stop.

So, if you don't like my fiction bits, maybe wait until July to tune in.

You've been warned.


¹(Anyone who has a keyboard and is filled with the delusion that people will read their writing voluntarily can, and invariably, will write. First it was Geocities, then mySpace, then that all got pulled into thing called 'blogs' because 'personal website' was a bit too much to remember, then twitter. If there's a platform, and a theoretical readership, there will be people who'll call themselves scribes or wordsmith or some other tiresome phrase and hack away. I am, sadly, one of those people. )