The Skewed View

The Joys of Old

2012-02-14T21:48:00.010-05:00

I had a conversation this week with a colleague of mine about video games. Yes, when we're not discussing grant applications or research interests or our latest findings, we revert back to our original and authentic selves: college students.

We were sitting down to a cup of coffee at Starbucks and talking about what kinds of games we play. I said that I had gone back to my PC game collection - my roots, so to speak - and was playing through Fallout 3 again. He asked me what I thought of the first two games and I admitted, sheepishly, that I had never played them.

I touched a nerve.

He plopped his coffee cup down and, nearly bursting at the seams, exclaimed, "what do you mean you never played Fallout or Fallout 2? How does Fallout 3 mean anything to you!? The Enclave, the Brotherhood of Steel! These are just... just... things to you! You don't understand just how utterly terrifying the Brotherhood actually is! They're just a bunch of cool guys wearing powered armor! How can you understand the meaning of anything in Fallout 3?! How do you even know yourself?!"

Then came the ultimatum. I mentioned that Good Old Games had Fallout 1 and 2 for $5.99 each. He put down his coffee and implored in an earnest tone: "Go! For Heaven's sake! Go! Buy them! Right now! What are you waiting for? Stop playing Fallout 3 and play the first two games! You'll never understand anything if you don't. Those games are classics!"

The word stuck in my head: Classics. You don't typically think of video games as something that possesses a pedigree, a lineage; a history. But we've reached a point now where there really are classics in this medium of entertainment. And it got me to thinking: what is it about old games that draw us back? Clearly there's a market for them. Nearly every console has older games available for purchase. Entire companies, ones like Good Old Games, are built around the idea that we'll come back to the games we grew up with.

The odd thing is this: if you put me down in front of an old game I never played back when it was new, I feel no real connection to it. It's just an odd collection of bad graphics, clunky controls I never learned, and a story line I don't know. I'm enjoying Fallout 1 and 2 immensely - it's cuing me in on so many of Fallout 3's idiosyncrasies, but I don't think I'm experiencing the same emotional reaction that my friend did - because I never played them when they were new. They feel old. Now, before you bury my blog in hate mail - I don't mean that in a bad way. They run like a classic car - they're great for what they represent and for all they contributed; but they are old.

But half of my computer games - some 70 titles - are just that: Old. Really old! My game collection spans the early 1990s right up to the present. My oldest game is, I kid you not, The Oregon Trail, from 1991. The most recent? Rise of Flight, released in 2010.

I sat down today to my favorite "old" game: Red Baron 3D. Curiously, I don't really remember when I bought most of my newer games. Call of Duty 2, World In Conflict, BioShock... these titles are a blur. I have them, I know I purchased them at some point, but I can't recall when. But I do know, exactly, when I bought Red Baron 3D. It was October of 1998 and I didn't buy it - my mother did - because I was fifteen years old. And it wasn't Red Baron 3D, it was called Red Baron II.

And I played that game non-stop for the next eight years. The following January, in 1999, when we finally got dial-up Internet at our house, I journeyed online and found forums where other players talked about the latest modifications for the game. I downloaded them all. And in the Red Baron community, there was no shortage of things to download. New sound effects, new terrain, new planes, paint schemes, flight models, the list went on and on. I learned much of the computer know-how I have today from installing, tweaking, breaking, and fixing multiple installs of the game.

That was ever so long ago, though.

But not today. Sitting at my computer I fired up this classic flight sim and journeyed back to my younger days. And for twenty minutes, I was utterly enthralled. You might wonder how such an old game can enthrall anyone these days. Just look at these graphics; they're hardly eye-catching. In fact, the game is downright ugly by today's standards. Red Baron II wasn't a particularly pretty game in 1998, and time has not been terribly kind to the old gal. Sure, there were a litany of graphical improvements made by the community, but it's never going to fool anyone into believing it's a modern game.

And I have modern games on my computer. Over Flanders Fields and Rise of Flight are two gorgeous World War I simulators. And yet, this "old gal" of a game (as we called it back in the day) kept me hooked for twenty minutes.

Why?

Because old games - just like favorite old books, music albums, and movies - are more than just art, they are transformative. They take us back to a time and place that no longer exists. And I'm not talking about the Western Front either. I'm talking about being fifteen years old again; sitting in my parents' loft on a school night, and trying to squeeze in one more mission before being ordered to go to bed. It's a similar feeling when I read Hemmingway's A Farewell to Arms. When I read through the pages of that literary classic I'm no longer sitting on my couch; in my mind it's suddenly a crisp, sunlit Saturday afternoon in October, oh so many years ago. Red Baron 3D, just like my favorite books, reminds me of being a kid.

It was a happy, wonderful, twenty minutes. My to-do list disappeared. I no longer had a mountain of grading to do. I no longer had a thousand pages to read before tomorrow. I no longer had an iPhone that kept buzzing at me... I'm just back there, playing this wonderful game that held me in its grip for so many years. I'm no longer about to turn thirty; In my mind I'm fifteen, it's the fall of 1998, and I'm a high school kid who is so utterly entranced with a game set in World War I that it will, ultimately, propel me to make the study of the conflict my life's work. Only I don't know any of that yet. I don't know what it is to pay bills, manage a budget, take out loans, worry about your health, survive two near-fatal car accidents, or suffer all of the slings and arrows of the last decade. I'm just... happy... and all I care about is my next mission in this fantastic game.

And that fervent tone in my friend's voice told me that he's had that same experience too - countless times. Only his game was Fallout and its sequel. Mine was an ugly, dusty, completely fantastic old flight simulator that's nearly fourteen years old now. I have a hunch that if you polled Grubbs and Blake, you'd hear about games like Morrowind and Ocarina of Time. And I have no doubt that when they sit down to play these "classic" games, they have the same experience. They aren't working, or married, or burdened with the stresses of adult life - they're fifteen and sixteen years old again; sitting in their favorite chair, in front of their favorite computer, or next to their beloved Nintendo 64; utterly lost in something that was, at the time, completely magical.

Call it sad. Call it pathetic. Call it the perpetuation of the man child. I don't buy that argument for a second. Because truthfully, we all have these experiences. Whether it's climbing back behind the wheel of a car you drove in high school, revisiting a family vacation spot, or hearing a meaningful song on the radio that stops you in your tracks, you've had that experience too.

Ours just happens to be digital.

Formula One 2012: A New Era of Ugly

2012-02-04T17:18:00.005-05:00

It appears that Blake over at The Right Wing was on the same wavelength as me this morning. He's already written his post on the new generation of Formula One machines and the jarringly ugly aesthetics they will bring to the grid next month.

Now, before I throw this year's new F1 contenders under the bus (and, believe me, they'd fit), I should clarify that these new and hideous designs are the result of heavy-handed regulation. The F1 aerodynamicists and engineers who have spent hundreds of hours at their digital design boards did not set out with the intent of making the most grotesque generation of racing machines the world has ever known. The FIA - the governing body of F1 - dictates the areas of the car which are allowed to be developed and which are not. Rather than specify a shape, they specify an area of coverage. Think of a Formula One car as a three-dimensional box. Within that box are areas which are off limits and areas which you can shape to your hearts content. Over the years, however, the FIA has constrained those areas more and more in an effort to control speed and performance.

Why? Because F1 engineers are the best in the world. They can do things with a car that shouldn't be physically possible. Cars that generate enough downforce that they could be driven upside down? Cars that can corner at such a violent rate of speed that the driver experiences fighter pilot levels of g-force? Cars that can accelerate up to 150 mph and brake back to 0, all in under ten seconds? Why yes, yes you can. And the FIA, in the name of safety, wants to keep things from getting out of hand.

But the consequences of such increasingly restrictive rules have bequeathed the world a cavalcade of ugly. I give you the 2012 contenders from Caterham, Ferrari, and Force India. I warn you - the goggles will do nothing.

Truthfully, I haven't had the misfortune of staring at a nose like that in over a decade... But I digress. These cars are simply the most jaw-droppingly ugly machines I've ever seen. I understand that F1 goes through generational shifts. The cars of the 1960s were cigar shaped, wingless, nervous death traps with cross-ply tyres and featured the driver sitting on the gas tanks. The cars of the 1970s weren't the prettiest things either (then again, in the 70s, what was?). And the 1980s featured turbo charged behemouths that would just as easily haunt your dreams as fuel your passions. But this? These aren't even scary - they're just ugly. They are powered by wheezy V8 engines - a far cry from the era of V10s and V12s that tore through the air. They perform at a lower ability than their predecessors from the 2004 season. Simply put, they are both underhwelming and unpleasant to look at.

I'm sorry, but is a thirteen year old boy really going to slap one of these up on his bedroom wall? Cars are supposed to be incredible. They are supposed to inspire and excite. As James May so rightly put it, the Lamborghini Countach of the 1980s was tantamount to pornography. Just look at it!

Or this: The McLaren F1 from the 1990s; a car so menacing, so unearthly fast that your pulse quickened just by catching a glimpse of it.

Now, I understand that these are road cars. So I give you this - a little bit of footage of what F1 used to look and sound like not so long ago, in 1997. Look at these cars! They are low slung, menacing, beautifully designed machines. They all look striking and strikingly different. They all attack the problem of going faster from different approaches and they all look good doing it. The curves, the lines, and angles, all look inspiring. And the sounds! Just listen!

Flash forward to the present where we are given a generation of F1 cars that are not only slower, but look like glorified Zamboni's with wings. And, truthfully, that statement is becoming insulting... to Zamboni's everywhere.

F1 is at a crossroads. It is leaving its European roots behind. A sport which used to fly away to races on different continents only three times a year now spends half of the season on the other side of the world from where the sport began. The historic venues of F1: tracks like Spa, Monza, Imola, Hockenheim, the Nurburgring, Magny Cours, and the A1 Ring are fading fast. Of that list, Spa and Monza are the only two that make yearly appeareances. The others have either been put on a semi-annual rotation or cut altogether in favor of tracks in the Middle East, Malaysia, China, and India. The sport is now global, but has it not also lost some of its soul?

The cars are no longer really the cutting edge of motorsport, either. Formula One of the 1990s was the pinnacle of Motorsport. The newest technologies created for the car cut their teeth in F1. Paddle shifting, traction control, electronic stability control - all of the toys that come on your Lexus and your Mercedes-Benz were born and baptized in Formula One. Not so any more. In the name of cost restrictions (an ironic idea for a sport that spends hundreds of millions of dollars flying to far-flung locales every fortnight), F1 cars no longer have the kinds of advances you'd find on a mid-range road car. F1 seems confused; torn between the public relations pressures of being "green" in this era of global warming and being the necessarily messy edge of Motorsport development. That confusion shows in this generation of F1 machines; their very design is now endemic of a sport that seems to be losing its identity and its spirit of innovation.

For every box nose, flat profile, and lackluster corner of these new machines, one can see a great sport struggling to understand its purpose, and remember what it used to represent. A sport which yearns for freedom - for drivers to say what they think, designers to push the envelope, for the greatest machines in the world to race on the greatest tracks in the world - now finds itself restrained by its governing body; the chains that bind it growing tighter with every new season. Perhaps a look at the sport's past through the eyes of its greatest driver might help.

Did you feel that? That was the hairs on the back of your neck standing up. That was the feeling of goosebumps crawling across your skin. That was the feeling of being awed by something remarkable.

And that is what Formula One so desperately needs to bring back.

The Great Blogger Conversation

2012-01-31T13:22:00.003-05:00

Blake's 30th birthday came and went earlier this week. So, first things first: Happy Birthday my friend! From all accounts, Blake - the resident writer and creator of The Right Wing - had a great night out. And as the evening wound down we caught up on the phone for a few hours. After all, Blake - along with nearly every other friend I have from college - is back in Georgia while I'm away at UT. We discussed the usual, life, politics, formula one, and writing. Interestingly enough, we talked about my two Lenovo posts and expressed our surprise at two things: one, that the posts actually worked and two, that we actually have an audience!

We looked at our Blogger stats and found that The Skewed View had recently passed 10,000 hits. Mind you, these stats started tracking back in March of last year when Skewed was resurrected from the grave. I can only imagine how many views it had before it met its untimely demise in December of 2008. Blake's efforts over at The Right Wing have not gone unnoticed either, racking up several thousand views as well (I can't remember the exact number Blake, so I went with a general and vague measurement). We were amazed. People actually read what we write! It was also inspiring to know that, at least on some level, our work was noticed, and it has re-fired our motivation to keep creating new content.

We also discovered something else. As the evening wore on, we wound up going back through our old material and reading each other's posts out loud; talking about what worked and what didn't, but mostly just laughing our collective asses off at the truly bizarre, off the wall things we wrote. Dig back through the Skewed archives and you'll find some truly bizarre creations. Fred's posts alone account for some of the most vibrant, off-color, and offensive material here. Then there's the innumerable posts that culminate with this famous picture of what I kept calling an Ostrich (which is actually an Emu that I have now named Ostrich the Emu as a way of covering up my mistake all those years).

Thanks Ostrich. It also was impossible not to notice something else: the change in tone over the years. We were younger back then - in our early to mid twenties - and we were so much less cautious about what we wrote. It was as if we never gave a second-thought to the fact that anything we published here would live on the Internet for anyone to come by and read. We were writing without a net, and it shows. Some of the things we said are jaw-droppingly provocative. Referring to drivers as walking Darwin Awards, talking about rounding up and executing stupid people, flaming anyone who ticked us off, and speaking with a confidence we didn't rightly possess in the first place - but seemed to pull off well anyway. Like Wile E. Coyote, we ever looked down, and the material kept floating. By the end of the night, after reading countless posts where we threw around language like just so much live ammunition, we couldn't help but wonder if it was possible to get it back. To un-remember our audience and write for ourselves again in this most public of venues.

Skewed turns six this July. It's remarkable to imagine that a blog designed to keep me busy for a few weeks back in the summer of 2006 has spawned hundreds of posts (we're nearing 400 of them... again...). We'll keep on writing and hopefully, both Blake and I will be able to remember what it was like to let loose and fling our ideas and our language around with a little more reckless abandon - the kind we used to use back when we started this journey.

In the meantime, thanks for staying with us all of these years. I think we'll be here for a long time to come.

PS: Fred says hi...

The Skewed Historian

2012-01-30T21:10:00.001-05:00

Time for a shameless plug. As part of a graduate seminar project, we were asked to start a blog. I know, it's adorable, isn't it? So, as a way of directing a little more foot traffic to my new academic endeavor, I'll leave this here: as part of a "spin off" of sorts for The Skewed View, I now present - temporarily at least - The Skewed Historian!

In all seriousness, The Skewed Historian will tackle the more challenging questions of what it means to teach history in the 21st century. What do we expect from our students? What do we cover? What gets left out of a survey class? How do we find meaningful ways to provide our students with the knowledge they require and a skill set to make use of it? The list goes on and on. So go here if these questions perk your interest: rennieatutk.wordpress.com. Over the coming weeks you'll see more posts added as we attempt to solve these problems and more. Hope you enjoy.

We'll be back with our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.

It's Deja Vu All Over Again

2012-01-30T08:00:00.006-05:00

This just in: video chat tools like Apple's Facetime is not a replacement for genuine for real human interaction - especially for children. Thank you, Captain Obvious. This little gem comes to us from CNN, who reported this morning that a recent study of children ages eight to twelve show that a propensity for multitasking creates socially stunted people. And by multitasking, I mean the unending, ADD addled cycle of checking text messages, Facebook, email, and back to text messages again; the kind of behavior that makes anyone over thirty want to hit someone with a blunt object. Of course, this begs the question: why in the hell are eight year old kids texting and checking Facebook? Do kids even play anymore? Do they go outside? Doesn't a kid deserve the right to just sit in the yard and play with a stick? Do kids even play with sticks anymore? Why are we engineering children to be little adults before they've even learned how to ride their bicycles?

But that's a whole different rant for a different post. Back to those socially awkward, annoying little text-a-holics and why their digital toys are screwing them up for life...

Mind you, five minutes spent with an average high schooler would have told me this much. But now there's a study to confirm it; just in case you had any doubt that the shuffling masses of pod people bumping into you at the mall as they stare blankly at their glowing rectangular addictions wasn't already a hint. The study confirms that girls in the aforementioned age bracket of eight to twelve who spent their time multitasking were less socially adept later in life. That, indeed, they were socially stunted: unable to carry themselves in conversation without high levels of anxiety and didn't understand what was considered polite and not (you know, like texting every five minutes while in the middle of a conversation with the real person standing in front of them). In short, multitasking and a lack of genuine human interaction is - at least according to this incredibly brief summary of a study on CNN's website - creating a generation of hyper-active, mal-contented pod people.

It seems like we've been here before.

And indeed, we have. Stretch back, way back, in the Skewed archives and you'll find our second post was on just such a phenomenon. Has It Really Come To This was a piece I wrote about a twenty-four year old woman who spent more of her social life online than off. Yes, even way back in 2006 (surely not! no one was alive then!) people like this twenty-four year old business woman (who would now be thirty), checked in on Facebook, had dates on Match.com, checked her Dodgeball messages, and plugged into a litany of other (likely now defunct) social networking tools to keep in touch - without ever touching someone in the first place.

I had this to say on the matter back then: It's disturbing, to be honest. A 24 year old woman, (my age) - young, successful, and obviously a university student at some point, prefers the social interaction of "poking" "winking" or "pinging" over actually sitting down and having a cup of coffee with someone? Mind you, I have no fault with her, to each their own, but have human beings become so socially uncomfortable that they would rather have a machine do it for them? We're quickly evolving into a world filled with automated spam, self check-out lines, ATM's, and a host of "networking" sites to fill the void left by a complete lack of human contact during our days.

And it still is. I'm a firm believer that the greatest gift you can give someone is your time, your attention, and most importantly, your present-ness. Picking up the phone to call someone, meeting them for coffee, spending time with them - these are the things that make human interaction genuine, real, and rewarding. Facebook pokes, text messages, and the lot are the filler for the good stuff. And the problem is, most people are living off of the filler.

What makes today's story so much more disturbing than that New York Times article from six years ago is this: the twenty-four year old knew and remembered what life was like before the digital age. She knew that this wasn't exactly "normal" but it was the new thing, and she embraced it. The eight to twelve year old kids mentioned in today's article do not, and will never know of a time when this wasn't "normal." For the generation born since 1990, the Internet is like electricity and running water. The concept of Googling something is second nature. Facebook, text messaging, blogs... these things are as naturally occurring as the air they breathe. It is simply unfathomable to them that this can be perceived as anything other than normal. We (meaning the older generations) are the freaks - not them.

History provides some comfort in the knowledge that nearly every generation experiences this. I have no doubt in my mind that the generation born prior to the ubiquity of electricity were perpetually mystified and slightly afraid of it. In fact, Benjamin Harrison was the first president to have electricity in the White House - but both he and his wife were too afraid of electrocution to touch the light switches. Humanity will learn to grow and adapt around these new tools. Humanity always has. We've been here before. Indoor plumbing, the printing press, the automobile, the telephone, the airplane, the desktop computer. In many ways, this is nothing new.

But while we may have encountered transformative technologies before, no other innovation before it has allowed human beings to interact so vividly without actually interacting. And we are, by our very nature, social creatures. This new toolbox of technologies fundamentally alters human behavior. So the question remains, and it is an unnerving one: Will we harness these new tools - as we have in the past - to improve our lives and better express our inherently social human nature? Or will this new, utterly transformational paradigm rewire our internal programming forever?

Only time will tell. Meanwhile, be prepared to have a lot more teenie-boppers running into you at the mall because they simply cannot look up from their phones.

Damn kids...

One Little Picture

2012-01-29T01:32:00.006-05:00

It's amazing what one little picture can do. The image on the left denotes, in the simplest terms possible, the power of disruptors on society. Disruptors are anything that upset the norm; the status quo, and fundamentally change things. I saw this image on Facebook last week, and after giving it a good chuckle, I felt like sharing it over on my wall; or timeline, or whatever the hell Facebook calls it these days.

And oh boy, did it ever get a reaction. Dozens of irate, passionate, even angry comments began filling the space below my post. People I didn't even know and weren't friends with started commenting and flinging charged rhetoric back and forth on my page. By the way, I had no idea that such a thing could even happen but there they were, the angry denizens of the internet previously unknown to me were calling my post stupid, silly, and over simplified.

What makes this even more curious to me is that this was the silliest, lowest common denominator thing I've posted in ages. In the past week I had shared videos of flight simulations, links to photo galleries of Berlin following World War II, and comments on some good music. And yet, in this sea of semi-intellectual wares, it was the digital fart joke of the Internet that suddenly had people flocking to my page to raise a stink.

So what made this photo so inflammatory? Obviously, the unabashed bluntness of the message is going to raise more than a few eyebrows. But there is more going on here than meets the eye. After all, we see inflammatory things on the Internet all the time, and yet, this image drew a heated response. Perhaps it isn't even the men themselves, but what they represent and what they disrupt, that puts us all so ill at-ease, raises our blood pressure, and allows us to act like oh so many digital jackasses on someone's unsuspecting Facebook profile.

First we have Julian Assange, mysterious founder and chief architect of WikiLeaks - a website devoted to divulging information, at all costs. Indeed, he is the oft-maligned breaker of corporate and government secrets and is frequently reviled in the press as a sort of Batman villain - with the requisite hairstyle to boot. He caught an incredible amount of flak a few years ago following the WikiLeaks' release of U.S. Military and Diplomatic cables regarding the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The press subsequently crucified him - implying the release of such information endangered U.S. service personnel. Ever since, he's been a proverbial lightning rod for debates over privacy on the internet and what is considered secret and not. He is a disruptor of the highest order - upending everything from Fortune 500 corporations to nothing less than the United States armed forces - and pissing off a lot of people in the process.

Then we have Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg, of course, is the creator and founder of Facebook - the largest social networking website on earth and one of the most trafficked sites on the Internet. The site is also a veritable treasure trove of personal information - people's birthdays, favorite books, movies, television shows, music artists. More than that, Facebook now tells us where people are, where they eat, shop, sleep, vacation, who they date, who they marry, who they divorce, their kids... the list goes on and on. To say that Zuckerberg has been a lightening rod in the debate over privacy would also be an understatement. Facebook's muddled privacy policies and over-engineered implementation have caught the ire of everyone from the EFF to the mainstream media. His often curt demeanor and difficult speaking style has left him labeled as a social miscreant - a fact made no better by the release of a feature film entitled The Social Network, which cemented these impressions in the minds of the public. He is a disruptor of the highest order - upending the existing paradigm of what the Internet is, altering human social interaction, attracting lots of interest (not to mention revenue) from Fortune 500 corporations - and pissing off a lot of people in the process.

Yet, it is the perception and subsequent judgement of these two giants of the Internet Privacy Revolution that seem to spark so much controversy. And, truthfully, Assange and Zuckerberg operate from two wildly different paradigms. Assange seeks transparency at all costs - even if they come with a body count. He fervently believes that the era of government secrets is - or should be - over. As President Woodrow Wilson argued for transparency in diplomatic communications - the result of the collisional train-wreck which proceeded the First World War, Assange now seeks to drive this desire to its logical end - complete and total transparency. If the United States government is doing something that needs to be kept under wraps, then the United States government probably shouldn't be doing it in the first place. That same measure of transparency applies to everything from your local university to Fortune 500 companies to the IMF and the WTO. And, as goes without saying, such a policy of transparency tends to go over poorly with people in power. As such, Assange has, either foolishly or courageously, made himself a martyr over this issue. He will ultimately live and die by the new standards he has unleashed upon the world.

Zuckerberg, if judged by his company's actions, is a completely different animal. He seeks transparency on the part of the user, but not the company. Facebook regularly rolls out new "features" without feedback from its customer base. The company frequently caught flak for resetting their users privacy settings without their knowledge or permission. And Zuckerberg is not out to create a free and transparent society - he's out to map the social graph of humanity - and get insanely rich in the process. The results of Facebook are nearly as disruptive as Assange's WikiLeaks releases - albeit on a completely different and far more subtle level. We live in a society now transformed. Smartphones now come with little blue Facebook buttons hard wired on their shiny plastic cases. Every website on the net is now linked to Facebook. Internet start ups desperately seek Facebook recognition the way their predecessors desperately sought Google's recognition a decade ago. Facebook is also unusually ambitious. It seeks far more than to merely link people - it seeks to be the portal to the Internet and, ultimately, the Internet itself. It's a far more subtle approach than the sledgehammer effect of a WikiLeaks press release, but its no less disruptive to the net and society as a whole. And with half a billion users and counting, Facebook's sheer girth will alter the paradigm of privacy in ways we can't even fully appreciate yet.

But back to that one little picture. Even without these men present in the flesh, their mere iconography, accompanied by two oversimplified captions of their intent and their subsequent place in society, was enough to fire off a flame war the likes of which I haven't seen in years.

So why this picture?

Because these two men and, more importantly, what they represent, make people uncomfortable. We, as human beings, do not like transparency. We cringe at the thought of everyone knowing everything about our lives - our dark secrets, the websites we visit when no one else is around, the spouses we cheat on, the tax documents we fudge, the red lights we run... the litany of grimy, less-than-upstanding things we do. The mere thought of these details becoming public knowledge is unsettling. Its the sort of life-baggage that keeps people up at night. Extrapolate that unease to business and government secrets and it becomes a far greater fear. We also don't like admitting our complicit surrender of so much personal information to a young, gawky kid in his twenties who just happens to run one of the biggest websites on earth. In short, both Julian Assange and Mark Zuckerberg remind us, painfully even, that our understanding of privacy in the twenty first century no longer applies. The old paradigm is dead. Information is no longer safe or sacred. It can be surrendered or stolen, given or liberated, and ultimately, it is no longer truly ours to control, if it ever was.

They might represent two vastly different paradigms, but they ultimately become two sides of the same disruptive coin. The question now is, which side do you find more palatable? Because, if it hasn't already been made clear, neither Assange nor Zuckerberg, nor the ideas they represent, are going anywhere anytime soon.

Lenovo Hell: A Good Outcome

2012-01-28T12:48:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, I wrote an irate blog post about my Lenovo ThinkPad Edge. I bought my laptop for work. If you haven't seen me mention it in about a hundred other posts, I'm a graduate student - now working at the University of Tennessee. This laptop needs to be my work horse for the next five years. Hopefully, it will travel with me to Germany and other parts of Europe and the United States while I research the questions I hope to answer in my time here. In short, it needs to be bullet proof. No hiccups, no hardware issues, no problems. It needs to work on time, every time.

And as you saw in my aforementioned post, my $800 ThinkPad did everything but. It featured a faulty keyboard which produced a few too many f's for my liking. I called tech support, sent the laptop off, had it returned, experienced the same nagging keyboard issue, was told it would cost an additional $800 to repair the problems and, as I reached the furthermost end of my rope, I wrote about it here on Skewed. I also tweeted links to the post, emailed Lenovo's customer support center, and posted one irate post after another on their Facebook page - which was receiving some high traffic due to their presence at CES.

Interestingly enough, it was the blog post here that got their attention. As you can see at the end of my post entitled Lenovo Hell, a Lenovo customer service representative named Mark Hopkins read my post and asked to contact me more directly in an attempt to put right the litany of things that had gone horribly, horribly wrong. From Mark I moved on to Lenovo's corporate headquarters in North Carolina where - I am happy to say - I sent my laptop in for repairs by Lenovo's top-tier technicians. The ThinkPad was gone for about a week and - I am even happier to report - is in good working order.

Such good working order, in fact, that I'm writing this post from my laptop. Lenovo replaced the damaged system board (the cause of the additional $800 charge) and my keyboard at no charge. Mind you, the laptop was under warranty the entire time - a fact that was the bone of my contention for much of this ordeal. So far, I am delighted to say, the laptop is finally functioning as it should have from the beginning.

I've learned some lessons throughout this process. After all, life is a learning experience - the greatest of them all - and you should always take good notes. First, if you receive a product that gives you even the slightest hint of being defective, don't try to fix it - send it back right away. I made the mistake of trying to make things right that should have been right from the beginning. Rather than call Lenovo the minute I typed my name and Roberrt appeared on the screen, I tried to repair things on my own. Had I just called at that moment, I would have spared myself months of grief and hours of phone calls - at least, I'd like to think so.

Second, and this is perhaps the biggest take away from this experience. Don't settle - and if you're in a situation where you cannot get satisfaction through the channels made available to you, create your own. Blogging - which for me was becoming a fading art from - had found new resonance in my life. This hobby of mine, which began six years ago as a way to keep busy while healing up from dental surgery, served as my mouthpiece to scream to anyone passing by that I was mistreated by a company and I wanted help. I didn't ask for a million dollars, I didn't yell about suing Lenovo, I just wanted my laptop to work. And, amazingly, in an Internet filled with hundreds of billions of pages, Mark found my blog and contacted me.

Blogging works. Even if your audience is a few dozen people. Keep writing. Twitter and Facebook have their places - they serve as quick updates, but they are so large these days that your voice is quickly drowned out in the crowd noise. 140 characters and a status update are not enough to get the word out. It might work for overthrowing oppressive Middle Eastern regimes, but in this case, it was the blog post that did the trick.

My Lenovo Hell Post had over 1200 views by the end of the week it was posted. That's simply unheard of for my blog. It meant I got the word out. Where phone calls, emails, tweets, and Facebook messages failed, The Skewed View worked. Not bad for a blog that features a mis-identified emu named Ostrich, a Sherpa named Akbar, and an alter-ego named Fred (don't tell him I said that!)

My thanks to Lenovo's good guys - people like Mark who find a way to put things right through what has to be a gigantic mountain of bureaucratic red tape. Your emails and the follow up of your staff back in North Carolina restored my hope that some people out there still care, and still work hard every day to put things right.

The Skewed View: Get Off My Lawn Edition

2012-01-09T14:44:00.008-05:00

2012 witnesses the 30th year that I have roamed around this spinning rock among my fellow bipeds.
And as a way of starting off the new year right, I bequeath you, unsuspecting Internet, with my thoughts on 2012. Let's get started, shall we?

Video Games Used To Be Hard

I know, this is hardly earth shattering. We're not inventing a longer lasting light bulb or curing cancer here, people, this is a blog that features a guy named Fred and an Emu named Ostrich - so go with me here. But it's true, video games, once upon at time, used to be difficult. Old Nintendo games, the ones that were released in the 80's, were brutally difficult affairs. Simply utter the word "Contra" to someone born around 1980 and you'll see the nervous ticks creep across their face. Contra was so difficult that most of us caved in, used the famous cheat code ( ↑↑↓↓←→←→BA ) and hacked our way through one of the most challenging video games ever made. Nintendo games were so hard that the United States received a different version of Super Mario Brothers 2 from the rest of the planet. Why? Because it was so jaw-droppingly, unmercifully hard that Nintendo felt gamers in the United States would hate it. So what did we get instead? A game called Doki Doki Panic, dressed up to look like Mario.

Let me tell you, those days are long gone. And you don't even need to go back to the Reagan years to figure that out. Simply journey back to your Sony PlayStation and play a few races in Gran Turismo 2. Besides the incredibly dated graphics, I was stuck by just how difficult the game still was, all these years later. I play racing games - lots of them. F1 2010, every Gran Turismo title ever made, Forza 3, rFactor, GTR 2, the Geoff Crammond Grand Prix series - the list goes on and on. And yet, Gran Turismo 2 was still incredibly challenging.

Compare that with one of the "latest and greatest" titles: Forza 3 - billed as one of the most photo realistic, complex, and accurate racing "sims" ever made. Which is true. Forza has gorgeous graphics, incredible vehicle modeling, and some of the most complex physics ever brought to a console racer. But Forza 3 also featured another little gimmick - a rewind button. It sits, quietly, mapped to your select key on your Xbox 360 controller. What does it do? Well, say you just stuffed your prized Ferrari 360 Modena into a tyre barrier. Hit the handy little "rewind" button and watch as the game - in full Matrix fashion - magically reverses time by thirty seconds and your totaled Ferrari is made whole again. Sounds great, right? And it is. The problem is this: it's impossible not to use it! Why? Because it's there. And no matter how high you ramp up the difficulty of the game, you can always rewind. Simply put, why wouldn't you? As a gamer, you want to win, and you'll use any means available to you. Why would you want to finish last with a trashed car when you can hit a little button, back up the race, un-do your mistake, and cruise to victory?

"Rewind" the clock thirteen years, however, back to Gran Turismo 2 - and you'll suddenly remember that racing used to be hard. Brake too late into a corner and spin off? Well, you'd better start catching up. There is no undo button in Gran Turismo 2. And that makes it a harder, and much more rewarding game.

The same applies to nearly every game I've seen in the last few years. They all have magical "undo" features now. Call of Duty 2 moved us away from health packs (which forced you to play intelligently) to the mystical regenerative health feature (get shot up? Hide behind some cover for a few seconds and watch as you heal yourself up). Madden NFL 09 came with a rewind feature. Don't like the interception you just threw? Pretend it never happened! Over and over again! Even the Battlefield series - which prized itself on being a damn difficult shooter, removed the ability to go prone because it made it too hard to take out a sniper who was lying down. Because, these days, you don't want to make a game too hard, or else, people might not play it.

And even if you "lose" in a game now, you don't really lose anything. Blow it in Super Mario Brothers? You get to start back in World 1-1 and do it all over again. Die in Call of Duty: Black Ops? Wait 15 seconds... and start right back where you were.

I am discovering, time and again, with every new game I play, that the older games were better. Perhaps not graphically, but they were a lot more challenging. And wasn't that the point? The challenge of beating a hard game? Of winning a difficult race? Of getting your squad safely through a mission? Those days are gone now - replaced with rewinds, undos, and more DLC packs than you can shake a stick at.

And speaking of DLC...

Modern Game Consoles Suck

They just do. Why? Because My Xbox 360 can morph into something completely different at any moment and do so without warning. You wake up one morning and feel like playing some Grand Theft Auto (after all, what better way to start the day than to run over a few hookers?) and before you even start your game, your Dashboard needs an update. You wait five minutes and all of the sudden, everything is different. "Look!" your Xbox exclaims, "isn't this great!? Now you can watch YouTube videos on your Xbox! (providing they meet the copyright restrictions for broadcasting videos on a new device - valid only with activation, some charges may apply)." "Look!" it yells again, "Now you can watch Hulu Plus! Isn't that awesome!?" All you wanted to do was run over some hookers and have your morning cup of Joe. And now you're stuck dealing with this crap...

Old consoles were better.

Why? Because in the days before they were tethered to the mother-ship, you'd pop in your game, you'd turn the console on and... you played your game! Shocking, I know. And there were no DLC's that you paid another $15 for, there were no Microsoft Points, there were no patches. Game makers had to get it right the first time and give you good value for money. Why? Because if they didn't, they got trashed in the press and people didn't buy their game. What a concept. Now, you pay more money for a game than ever before ($60 instead of the old price point of $50) and for the price of admission, you get a half-baked, half-completed game that won't actually be fully functional until the first wave of patches are released a few weeks later. Want to see how the story ends? Oh, that's not included in the actual game, but don't worry, there's an extra, exclusive, deluxe, limited edition, genuine imitation-leather wrapped, special, downloadable content package that can be yours for only another $20! Isn't that great?

No. It sucks.

So now you pay more for a game that has half of the content and a fraction of the hours of play that their older counterparts came with. And, on top of dropping $60 a game, you also pay $60 a year for the privilege of enjoying this "service." But that's okay because now you can post a status updates to Facebook from your Xbox.

Joy.

Because if there was anything I ever wanted to do while playing video games, it was update Facebook. And speaking of the Blue Specter...

Facebook Really IS Pointless

I've tried to rationalize it. I've tried to argue that Facebook was a better mousetrap. But it's not. It's a colossal waste of time that serves the narcissistic urges of self-obsessed people. Does it allow you to connect with folks you might have never heard from again from your long distant past? Yes. Is that a good thing? Well, that depends. If it's your long lost sixth grade English teacher, that's great. If it's a creepy ex-boyfriend trying to "catch up" with you while you're sitting on the couch next to your husband... perhaps not.

And besides the creepy perks Facebook offers, it's also just pointless. It just is. We spend hours a week checking in, posting about having a really great Ruben sandwich and poking our third grade classmates and whining about a TV show. And honestly, I just don't care anymore. Your life is not that damn interesting. I'm sorry if that offends you, but it's not. Getting BOGO towels at Belk is not a compelling status update.

And Facebook used to feel compelling. It used to have a raison d'etre. But now, I feel like it's little more than a fire hydrant accidentally left on - a flood of status updates that are impossible to keep up with (because there are so damn many of them) and too many damn people all yelling for attention. And truthfully, I'm willing to let some of them go. Now before you gasp in shock, it's okay. It's natural. My third grade classmate who I haven't spoken to since I left Miami in 1991 probably doesn't have very much in common with me anymore. And that's how it's supposed to be. But thanks to Facebook, anyone can look me up and drop me a line... and usually, I really don't care. I'd rather have a small, close-nit group of genuine friends than an army of zombie followers and digital hangers on from my long dead past. I don't need to keep looking at your stream of status updates - which reads like just so many text messages these days.

Besides, if I wanted to see this many pointless text messages, I'd just pick up my phone. Oh, and one last thing...

I Still Hate Text Messaging

Why, in the name of all that is Holy in this world, does this technology dominate our lives like few others? For those of you playing the home game, you're right, I've written about this before. I wrote up my social hierarchy in 2007, before texting became so damn pervasive. And I didn't care for it even then...

You've elected to send me a broken, disjointed, cluster of letters via my phone, and I have to actually pay money for the social disservice you've just extended me. Human "beings" who resolve social situations through text messaging will one day find themselves roasting in the seventh ring of Dante's Hell. It's the all time, gutless, and socially heinous method of communication known to man. You'd be better off communicating with me via telegram - at least you could pay someone to read the telegram to me. Anyone who texts while driving should be shot. Anyone who texts as a way of resolving an argument should be shot. And anyone who feels the need to text me with broken English, no grammar, or the ever nauseating "lol" at the end of every sentence should not only be shot repeatedly in the groin, but lathered in marinade and placed in a large potato sack with a half dozen rabid wolverines. If you haven't gathered by now, texting me in the social situations I've outlined will get you on my bad list in a hurry. And as many will attest, once you're on the list, you don't get off.

Why? Why in the name of God, is it so damn difficult to just give me a call? Seriously, in the hour and a half we would spend typing out a series of texts, you could call me and in ten minutes, find out everything you need to know, and make the plans you wanted to at the start of this whole three-ring-circus. Asking me "what's up?" by text message will get you ignored in a hurry. If you really gave a damn, you would call me. But since you can't be bothered to ring me up, I can't be bothered to peck at my iPhone like a hungry bird biting at a worm through a pane of glass. Stop wasting my time. There are but a few situations where a text message is useful. The rest of the time it's rubbish.

Why? Because the argument I made five years ago still holds true today. If you want to get a hold of me, call me. If you are in a situation where you can't call me (like, say, sitting in class...) then you should probably wait to contact me anyway (like say, when you're out of class and not texting on your phone in front of your professor, you idiot). I know, waiting an extra twenty minutes to pick up the phone and pester the shit out of me about grabbing coffee on Thursday is a real trial of human endurance in this instant-gratification world we live in. And, by the way, if I'm in a position where I can't easily answer my phone, I probably can't sit for three minutes and peck out a response to your text message, either. If we're friends, we're friends. Call me up, and I'll have all the time in the world to talk to you. If texting me is a way for you to feel like you're still being my buddy while putting forth as little effort as humanly possible, then it might be time for you to find another friend.

So there you go - my thoughts on how things will continue sliding downhill in 2012. Will things get better? Probably not. Will I unplug? Only time will tell. I have a feeling that I might make a lot of unpopular decisions this year - like say, killing Facebook for good and finally separating the wheat from the chaff in my social life. That said, 2012 should be about living the life you feel is best, and not the one dominated by "the wisdom of the crowd." Why? Because crowds are stupid. Don't believe me? Fine. I'll give you two words that will prove, without a shred of doubt, the overwhelming, staggering scale of crowd stupidity...

Justin Bieber.

Lenovo Hell

2012-01-06T17:31:00.009-05:00

This is an open letter to the Lenovo company.

I was a new ThinkPad customer. I am a graduate student in a PhD program at the University of Tennessee. I have, believe it or not, been a desktop computer user my entire life. My first laptop purchase was a ThinkPad Edge E520 system, which I bought from your website back in September. This laptop needs to - and I felt would - serve me for the next five years of my career. Mind you, as a graduate student, I live off of student loans, so I don't exactly have thousands of dollars to throw around. I chose your product because of its reputation for solid build quality, high standards, and long life. Sadly, I have to say that I have never been more disappointed with a product or my subsequent interactions with your appalling customer service. I am writing this letter as a final recourse to the company for help in the matter.

What follows is a summary of my Lenovo Experience:

My laptop arrived by UPS and within an hour of use, I discovered the keyboard had an apparent defect. While entering text, the pressing of the "F" key would enter two or three "F"'s on the screen. The same problem cropped up with other letters: i, r, t, and o. Having built, serviced, and worked on computers nearly my entire life, I felt that some simple troubleshooting within the operating system or the computer's drivers would correct the problem. Mind you, I teach three courses and I am taking three more as a student during my semester, so I didn't exactly have a lot of free time to tinker with a machine that should have worked out of the box. After a few weeks of working around the nagging keyboard issue, I called customer support to return a defective product that I paid nearly $800 for.

As it turns out, I called on day 31 out of my 30 day return window. When I asked if there was anything he could do to help me simply return the laptop and refund my purchase costs, the customer service representative said, as they have all said since, "my hands are tied." I have heard this same statement from Lenovo customer service representatives so often that I can only conclude that this phrase is on their customer support script. My only recourse was to send the laptop back to a repair depot for further examination.

Had I bought a MacBook - which I am beginning to regret not doing in the first place - I could have simply walked my computer into the store and had it serviced on site. But, I duly shipped my ThinkPad Edge back for repairs and waited to hear from the repair center. The depot called me a week and a half later to tell me that yes, the keyboard was defective and that they would replace the keyboard at no charge.

However...

The customer service representative informed me that the system board was also damaged and because a USB port was bent, I would be charged an additional $800 to repair the system. Mind you, I had already paid $800 to buy the laptop new. And the laptop comes with a one year warranty covering any defects - which is clearly what the system has. Citing the USB port as "customer induced damage," Lenovo told me that replacing the system board was no longer covered under the warranty - hence the additional $800 charge. How the USB port was damaged, I don't know. The system had sat in my closet until I had enough free time to sit on hold for a few hours and deal with the Lenovo web of terrible customer service once more - so how the system board was damaged by me, surpasses understanding. It might, however, have something to do with the fact that it was shipped in a cardboard box across the country - just a thought.

But Lenovo, in typical fashion, placed the onus on the customer. If the system board is damaged, I must have done it. No further questions were asked - only a charge given. I called the depot and - as you might imagine - I refused the $800 charge and asked that the keyboard be replaced, which it was. The work order sheet claimed the problem was fixed and tested and was subsequently sent back.

I unpacked the laptop last night and what did I find?

The keyboard still doesn't work.

So I called back today - on my final day off before another hectic semester of teaching and taking classes begins. I need my computer to work and for the second semester in a row, it won't. I was transferred no less than six times before I even reached a customer service representative in the United States. While she was kind, she transferred me to a repair technician who - in addition to hardly being understandable on the phone - refused to offer me any assistance other than to send the laptop back once more and dispute the charge. There was no promise that the charge would be waived. The fact that the machine had this issue from day one was not accounted for, and there was no attempt made to try and give decent customer service.

And here the ball was dropped yet again. You have a first time buyer who has been stuck with a lemon for the better part of four months. I have done everything you have asked. I was one day beyond the return date and you refused to go out of your way - even a little - to help me. I've sent the machine back. You failed to fix the problem. And now, in addition to not helping me, you insist that I pay another $800 to get the machine back to the working order it was never in to begin with. Let me state this clearly: the laptop never worked. The keyboard was always defective.

And because of this, you're asking me to pay for my laptop twice. Do you understand how farcical this is? My only option - at this point - is to either pay you another $800 to fix an $800 laptop, or live the next five years stuck with a lemon and wishing I had finally bought a Mac.

I understand that you are a giant, multi-national corporation with highly lucrative contracts with the State Department, the Department of Defense, and Fortune 500 Companies. I understand that my one voice, my one order, and my terrible experience with your company is less than a drop in the bucket for you. But I am writing this to let as many people as possible know the terrible way you have treated me as a customer. Your product was defective, yes, but not nearly as defective as the utterly atrocious, broken, disjointed, and disconnected disaster that you call a customer service center. I was routed to three different continents and the only concern shown by 99% of your representatives was that the problem wasn't theirs for too long.

Simply put: no one cared. And it showed.

As a way of making my voice heard a little more loudly, I am re-posting this open letter to Lenovo on their Facebook wall, on my Facebook wall, and I will Tweet a link to the blog post to everyone I know. I have used the channels Lenovo has provided me - I have climbed every rung of their customer service ladder only to be told time and again that their "hands are tied" and that there's "nothing else they can do."

Rule number one in customer service is this: there is always more you can do. And because you haven't, you left me no choice but to publicly voice my displeasure at the atrocious way you have treated me as a customer.

What I'm doing here is not without precedent - Jeff Jarvis, a highly respected professor of journalism at CUNY and the author of What Would Google Do, wrote an open letter to Michael Dell, the chairman of one of your competitors, following a similar experience with their customer support in 2005. Dell listened, and so did his company. The question now is: will you?

I am not an upstart. I am a tech enthusiast and have been my entire life. I bought your product because of its reputation and have been left questioning my judgment ever since. All I ask is that my laptop work properly - the laptop that I paid over a month's salary for. Is there anything you can do to help me?

Sincerely:
Robert Rennie
Graduate Teaching Assistant
The University of Tennessee: Knoxville

Inauthentic

2012-01-02T00:11:00.010-05:00

"Your internal life is what you sing from. It's your everyday thoughts and feelings. It's how you relate to the world, and how you allow the world to relate to you."

"Being present, means we feel those around us, and seek to have them feel us. Be sure not to take the people around you for granted. And it's not as easy as it sounds."

"The poetry of your life will be in the way you live it. Not with what you have, but what you do with what you have. Part of being present is confronting the proverbial fork in the road consciously aware that you have a choice. And that every choice determines what you will experience. Every choice is a test of your insight, your intelligence, your feelings and, ultimately, your courage. Sometimes our dream, our song, requires us to make impractical decisions. And as you make these decisions, its important to realize that you will shape your life to your dream, and the nature of life is internal."

Wynton Marsalis' commencement address at Northwestern University from 2009 opens our post for today. If you haven't had a chance to hear Wynton's speech, go here now and take fifteen minutes to absorb some incredibly profound thoughts on life, love, and happiness. I think you'll find that it will be an insightful and well spent quarter of an hour.

I thought of Wynton's words most of last night. It was New Year's Eve; resplendent in anticipation for the dawning of 2012. People were out, making merry and celebrating the end of one year and the fresh start of another. And yet, on this most human of nights, there seemed to be a remarkable disconnect amongst the members of the human race. For a night that should be made authentic, I witnessed more inauthenticness than I have seen in quite some time.

I was out at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina. My girlfriend looked stunning in her long black evening gown. We had champagne, watched the stars, sat by a roaring fire, and, at a minute to midnight, found ourselves dancing happily together as we waited for the moment to arrive. Everyone counted in unison, and, at the stroke of midnight, we all cheered. A chorus of "Happy New Year!" and the subsequent cheers and applause filled the room. The crowd continued dancing, and we happily joined along. And yet, in this moment filled with joy, I glanced over my girlfriend's shoulder to the older couple dancing just beside us and saw a startling sight.

They appeared married - in their early fifties. The wife had her arms draped over her husband's shoulders. And there, nestled in her hands, which were hanging just behind her husband's neck, was her Blackberry. The glow of the cell phone screen bathed the bald spot on the back of his head in a pale blue light. She stood, mindlessly shuffling as they danced, and tilted her head to one side to see the text message she was pecking out. She kept this up for a few more songs until, finally, she gave up the phone and focused glumly on her husband, who seemed quite irritated by the entire affair. She spent the rest of the time we saw her staring at the ceiling and likely frustrated that she couldn't whip out her phone to send back an immediate response.

Then came the events of this evening, New Year's night. We stopped in for a cup of coffee at Waffle House after watching one of the most excruciating movies we had ever seen: In Time. Don't ask how we wound up watching this dreadful film. Let's just say that our first choice, the laughable Puss in Boots was sold out and I panicked and made a bad life choice. We wanted coffee to discuss just how bad the movie was. As we sat there, sharing the same side of the booth and drinking our coffee, we noticed the couple sitting directly in front of us. Once again, the fiance - I'm assuming he was based on the size of the rock on his date's hand - was bored and within a few minutes of sitting down whipped out his phone and started messing around. Now, since he was sitting with his back to us, I could easily watch the screen on his phone. Rather than talk to his fiancee, he chose to mindlessly shuffle through text messages; asking how people were and what they were up to (as if it mattered). The fiancee, in response (or perhaps as a simple learned behavior) replied in kind with her pink-clad iPhone 4. And within five minutes of entering the restaurant, they sat, completely zonked out, checking Facebook, texting other people, and completely ignoring the other person's company.

I really don't care what people say about money. And at the risk of sounding anything like that terrible, terrible movie, there is no greater commodity than time. The time you invest in anything is non-refundable. From the two horrific hours spent watching that movie to the dreadful couples texting on their phones to the twenty minutes I'm spending right now to type out this post at midnight - time is something you never get back. The hour you choose to invest in one thing is an hour that you can never use for anything else. And when you are with someone you love, the greatest gift you can give them is your time and more importantly, your present-ness. Being present means that you are consciously aware of how you are spending your time and who you are giving it to. It's why Jazz is the greatest of all musical genres. Jazz is the only music that forces the band members to communicate in present tense. They must listen to each other, communicate and negotiate with one another. Ultimately, for the music to swing, they must get along. There are no re-do's. There is no script. You are playing in real time. You have to be present to play. And you have to play well to be present. The people we witnessed over the last two days have been anything but. They were zombies, zonked out by the electronic toys in their hands.

Which brings me to this thought. When did we become so inauthentic as people? From Facebook to Twitter to texting to any of the other less-than-stellar uses of our time online. We are more disconnected from the people who matter most, those that we love and care about, than ever before. Rather than meet up with a friend for a cup of coffee to catch up on life, we scan their Facebook profiles for any changes - inconsistencies - from the last time we digitally rifled through their lives. Mothers check up on daughters, ex-boyfriends and girlfriends scope out the lives of people they should have lost contact with long ago, random strangers stop by and peruse lives of people they don't even know. We sit together but we might as well be miles apart, as we stare into our little rectangular boxes. We no longer discuss, we no longer share, and as a result, we no longer connect.

Tools like Facebook don't truly connect people. They create stunted, mal-adjusted social lives that allow people who should be dropped from life to cling on like zombies. We waste hours a week on these things - texting back and forth in meaningless, mindless conversations that offer no substance and only serve to waste the one thing we can't take for granted: time. Time that cannot be used for anything else once it's spent. Imagine what could be done with the untold hours as week you would suddenly have back.

It also muddies the waters of who is a true friend and who isn't - especially now that the definition has been broadened to include anyone we add on a social networking website. We have so many of them now that we have to categorize them - placing them in "circles." We sit with the people who matter most - those we would be utterly lost without - and interrupt their thoughts, and intrude on their time by answering the siren call of our cell phones every time they buzz on our tables. It is the uninvited third-wheel in digital form. Rather than taking time to connect, to really know who someone is, we stunt the conversation by replying to inane texts like "bored... what u doin?"

The result is as depressing as it is unsurprising: a society full of dullards - mindlessly "connecting" with people that they have no actual business in connecting with. We no longer really know each other - our lives obscured by our digital doings that fall under the jurisdiction of "our business." As a consequence, we're further apart from each other than ever before. Friends become daily status updates - the need to share our lives no longer necessary now that the internet takes care of it for us. Texts interrupt our concentration; yanking our minds out of a good book, a quiet dinner, a romantic night out.

The digital optimists will say that we are creating a more transparent society which will be better as a result. I see a terrible side-effect of all this transparency: a society of narcissistic, disconnected pod people - drowning out their existences, their "being in time," with the digital candy that numbs them to the ups and downs of life. Why listen to the sounds of the world around you when your iPod can tune it out? Why make time for people when a quick, disjointed, grammatically fractured text message or a Facebook poke (the digital equivalent of nudging someone with a stick to make sure they are live, and little else) will do the work for you? Why write, think, say, or do anything original or meaningful? Just stay numb. After all, if you're numb, you'll never get hurt. But, you'll also never truly live.

Now I don't mean that with the flippant sentiment of "you must drop acid, leap from the tallest building, and throw your car into incoming traffic to feel alive." But if you're going to take the time to be a friend, be a friend. Call people. Grab lunch. Ask genuine questions. Find out how they really are, and not what they pose their life to be online. Because, if someone is a true friend, they are a friend, period. If there was no internet, they would still be there for you, and not what they likely are, a digital hanger-on. Be present in your life; connect, give, and care for those around you. And don't waste your time on those who don't do the same for you.

Because if nothing else in 2012 matters, make sure you at least discover what really matters most.

Ho Ho Ho...

2011-12-24T17:50:00.000-05:00

Let me see if I have this straight...

...it's the holidays. I'm on break, relaxing, and re-energizing myself before the start of another semester.

...I'm working on my PhD so I can be a college professor and spend my life educating young minds for a fraction of the salary I could make doing just about anything else.

...I do it because I love education and I want to make a positive impact on my society and help improve my country.

...And the Federal Government, in its infinite wisdom, decides to inform my University, who then informed me, that I will no longer qualify for Subsidized Stafford Loans, which I use to help pay for my education.

Really?

This brilliant move was part of the 2011 Budget Control Act passed by the US Congress. For those of you who don't know, students have two loan options, a subsidized and an unsubsidized Stafford Loan. Both need to be paid back by the borrower. The only upside to the subsidized option is that it does not accrue interest while I'm in school. It's helpful, considering that I will take on tens of thousands of dollars in debt so I can pursue my life's passion of teaching. But, because I'm a graduate or professional student, I will no longer qualify.

Thanks guys. I've been busting my ass for the last three years managing my finances intelligently so that I would be a responsible borrower and never exceed my subsidized limits. I'm trying to help you out. Not to mention that, in return for your investment, you will get decades of teaching and labor on my behalf for pennies on the dollar. But no, now you want me to work for decades and pay you interest. It's as if you don't even want me to get my degree. It's as if you'd rather all of us in our twenties just give up, go to Wal-Mart, and accept our place in the world (ie: grateful for any job in this economy). I'm sorry - I've worked for nine years to reach this point, and those loans kept me afloat while I worked towards my degree. I'm not running off to the Bahamas on vacation with my loan money. I live on food stamps and drive a car with almost 100,000 miles on it. It's not enough that my graduate student status excludes me from the Pell Grant, which, if I was an undergrad, I would qualify for in full because of the poverty I live in.

But now you brilliant people in Washington have decided that loaning me a few thousand dollars a year was contributing to the trillions of dollars you've wasted over the last decade. And rather than cutting your expenses on ridiculous things like the Santa-Tracker or the dozens of new designs for the penny (which costs us how many millions of dollars each year?) you took the slack out of our hides, again.

After all, who needs education? As our children grow less educated, you'll just keep dropping the standards to make them look smarter than they are. And when I have students on my doorstep at the university level asking me what a thesis statement is, I'll tell them not to worry, the applications for Wal-Mart and McDonald's are waiting on the other side. Just keep the economy going by being the good, mindless consumers you've been programmed to be. Buy more things, keep your mouth shut, and keep voting for the status quo. After all, we're already economically bankrupt and in terminal decline - just keep the illusion going for a little while longer - until we all hit the ground.

And who needs a country that thinks anymore? Clearly we don't. Intellectualism in the United States is dead. After all, what was the last great, groundbreaking innovation to come out of America in the last decade? The KFC Cheesy Bacon Bowl?

So thanks for making a difficult job harder than it already was. You've saved a few million dollars - which for you is a drop in the ocean - and in return you've short-changed millions of students the chance to further their education and give back to their families, their neighbors - their fellow citizens. Good work.

To any elected official who might read this: I will not be voting for you in November. If you're in power, I'm voting for someone else. You had your chance, and you blew it.

And to anyone who actually voted this train wreck of a bill through the House and Senate, I have this to say to you:

Feature Creep

2011-12-16T20:01:00.002-05:00

I am now convinced that, much like those who were born in 1900, my generation - those born around 1980 - will inhabit a world that bears absolutely no resemblance to the one we grew up in by the time we grow old. From the rise of the internet to utter ubiquity to the tectonic shifts in the Geo-political landscape from the Cold War to the New World Order of China and India as leading economic superpowers; the world we leave will not be anything like the one we entered. Those of us nearing or already passing thirty will likely look back on the 1990s as the best decade of our lives, from a macro perspective at any rate. Things just "made sense;" a monicker used by every generation when they reach a point where the world they live in is not the one they remember, or even like.

And yes, oddly enough, that same feeling is creeping its way into social networking - one of the most hated terms in my vocabulary. It seems that the end of 2011 will bear witness to the ever so slowly rising voices of discontent with websites like Facebook. Fellow 80s babies are looking around, finding that they no longer like the digital waters in which they swim and are, occasionally at least, getting out of the pool.

One example is found over at the fantastic blog: A Broad Margin of Leisure. Fellow history PhD and blogger, Leslie Anne Reed, made a great argument for leaving Facebook altogether. In short, she contends that Facebook made her a less social creature rather than a social butterfly. Why write an email to your best friend if you can simply see an hour-by-hour update on their lives every single day? Why call a friend you haven't kept in touch with in over a year when you can simply pull up their profile, and in thirty seconds, deduce that they've broken up with their boyfriend, moved to a new town, and started a new job? In other words, what is there to say anymore that you can't glean off of a webpage?

And how inauthentic is that?

If that isn't enough to make you reconsider your Facebook account, the new Timeline feature certainly will. Yes, we've seen this a dozen times over the last half-dozen years. Facebook decides that they need to keep things interesting in order to keep you on their site. In order to do so, they invent a new feature that you, the user, will absolutely love - and you will have no choice but to love it - because on Facebook, there is no such thing as opt-out.

So what is the new Timeline feature? Well, it replaces your entire profile page. Rather than having a wall for people to write on, a link to your information, your photographs and so on, you now have this:

This is the timeline. It renders your profile utterly unrecognizable from what it once was. Now this should just seem like yet another example of Facebook Feature Creep (the notion that when tech companies run out of actual innovations, they invent them to look, well, innovative). But here's the disturbing bit: Look at the upper right corner of my timeline and you'll see a list of dates going to back to, you guessed it, my birth.

So Facebook's thesis, which was to connect people and enhance social interactions, has changed to documenting our lives from birth to, yes, death. Notice under my name, where it lists Status, Photo, Place, there is a new addition: Life Event. Click that one and the options get creepy in a hurry. You have Home & Living which includes such life events as "Moved," "New Roommate," and "New Vehicle." That's right, you're now playing The Sims for real. The Travel & Experiences category is particularly disturbing. Options abound like: "Tattoo or Piercing," "Changed Beliefs," "First Word, Kiss, Other." So, rather than keeping your religious beliefs to yourself, you can now announce to the world the moment when you found God or decided He didn't exist after all. I'm sure future employers will also be thrilled to find out when you got a certain part of your lower body pierced as well. Keep it classy Facebook.

But the worst, most disturbing offender of all comes under Family & Relationships. Yes, you can now document, to the moment, when your relationships begin and end. Thus, Carrie from Sex and the City's Timeline - if she were real - would be a continual string of relationships beginning and ending. Then there are the options to list a new child, a new family member, a new pet, and - here's the clincher - the loss of a loved one. So, in addition to taking all of the marketing information on 200 million Americans (the estimated number of us on Facebook now - that's nearly 2 in every 3 Americans for those of you keeping score at home), Facebook will now documents the birth, lives, relationships, poor life decisions, marriages, divorces, and deaths of its users.

Think this one through a bit, I beg you. Twenty years from now, when the older generation of Facebook users start to die off, you'll have a blue and white mausoleum documenting their deaths that you can visit any time. If you don't think this is disturbing, or at the very least a bit socially perverse, then you need your head examined.

And if this becomes the new normal, I want out of the gene pool, stat.

Sliding Scale

2011-12-16T13:13:00.010-05:00

Yesterday, with my newly found free time firmly in hand, I stopped by a favorite used bookstore near my apartment. It's a treasure trove of goodness; a giant warehouse filled with books of every kind, along with music, movies, and yes, old video games. I love to drop by and sadly, I only made the trip once this semester. But yesterday afternoon I decided to get myself a treat - a little something for surviving the semester, if nothing else. So with five bucks in hand I walked in and started to look around. And in twenty minutes of walking up and down the aisles, I couldn't help but notice a few things about the crowd in this very full book store.

My first stop was the book section - the academic in me is showing, I know - but I wanted to take a look around and see if there were any good World War I titles to be had at a good price. On an interesting side note, the World War I section occupied exactly one column of shelf space while the World War II section occupied eight. Anyone else see anything wrong with this picture? At any rate, there was little to be had for the price of five dollars. So I looked around the rest of the history section, then literature, and then... I remembered that I'm a student at the University of Tennessee and, as such, I can check out any one of close to three million books anytime I want to... so it was time to go look at music.

The music section was a mixed bag and again, too rich for my five bucks. So I walked the length of the gigantic store to the other end. Yes. To the video games. And what a treasure trove they had! Atari 2600, NES, Nintendo 64, PlayStation 1 and 2, Xbox, and Xbox 360 games. All resplendent in their gaming glory. It was quite the selection too - obscure titles for the PlayStation 1 like Battle Stations, Nintendo 64 glory like GoldenEye and Perfect Dark, PS2 games like Time Splitters. And this doesn't even touch on the gigantic pile of Sega Dreamcast (yes, Dreamcast) games and the stack of shrink wrapped Nintendo GameBoy cartridges. It was quite a sight to see.

But then again, so where the people.

This will likely sound like the ramblings of another intellectually superior, arrogant, academic. But I couldn't help but notice a seismic shift in the crowd from the book section to the gaming corner. The book section saw a cross section of humanity - grandmothers, college students, family men, office workers, laborers... nearly everyone. All of them picking up various books, thumbing through the pages, and adding them to the stacks in their shopping baskets. Tucked away in the history section were the real book lovers; looking through the writings of Tacitus; carefully leafing through the pages as if they were selecting a fine wine. These were the kind of people that would have made Walter Benjamin proud. They also tended to be unable to buy just one book and were perpetually torn between multiple tomes. Of course, their love of good reading won out and they eventually gave in and heaped their selections into their carts - content to part with a few extra dollars for the beautiful books they now possessed.

The gaming section, however... well, that was a different animal entirely. There were the usual suspects - the young teenagers practically jumping over each other to get to the used Xbox 360 games - after all, that's the latest and greatest. And there were the young kids looking for a used Sponge Bob Squarepants game for their hand-me-down PlayStation 2's. This is all well and good... but then there was the other crowd. How does one describe these people? Well, I'd call them thirty-somethings with children in tow, who were still living like it was 1999. I saw a good half-dozen examples of large, out of shape, smelly men wearing clothes that came right out of the Clinton-Era - complaining about the selection of PlayStation 2 games (these games are about ten to twelve years old now and surely harkening back to the glory days of their former owners). All while a small gaggle of children cried, rolled in the floor, and generally looked miserable to be there. The kids, mind you, were between 3 and 6 years old - hardly gamers in their own right. The fathers seemed utterly oblivious that they had not only reproduced, but the consequences of that action needed their attention - stat.

"Oh Son! I played SOCOM for ****ing weeks man! We owned everyone!" The neanderthal with the backwards Detroit Tigers baseball cap says to his exhausted wife while their kids throw a temper tantrum three feet behind them. "Damn... they don't have Burnout here..." he mumbles as he keeps rifling through the stacks. Mind you, he's not carefully looking like the geeks back in the book section. His heavy ham-fisted claws keep plowing their way through the plastic boxes and cracking open CD cases to inspect the wares within. Meanwhile, Junior is still miserable, crying about wanting to home and Dad can't hear anything other than the sound of his own voice. The wife snaps at the kids to get up every thirty seconds and it seems clear that the husband has her there for policing duties only. This trip is for him and him alone.

It was as if the man shut out everything - the wife, the kids, the work a day blues, all of it - by standing in front of those games. He sunk into his head, retreated from reality, and even for a fleeting moment, felt like he was young and carefree again. I'm sure, on the inside of his brain - wracked by years of alcohol and substance abuse - it was a glorious, warm, remembrance of all that was. From the outside, however, the guy just looked like a tool. Twenty minutes passed. Yes, twenty - I started keeping time on the train wreck while I rummaged around nearby.

By now, a second batch joined them - another large, tattooed, bearded man wearing a Jesse James hat and a huge (even for his shoulders), red button down shirt - untucked of course. He had a young kid with him and, in an apparent act of parental kindness, had the little guy pick out a video game. Only Dad was in a hurry - presumably to pick up a bottle of Jack or Colt 45 to down while Junior played Grand Theft Auto in the den that night. To this guy's credit, he wouldn't allow his kid to get the most violent game in history, but that's about where his interest stopped. "No, you're not getting Grand Theft Auto... can't you get a Crash Bandicoot game?" But here's the thing: He never kneeled down with his kid and looked through the games with him. He never hugged his kid. Hell, he barely touched him except to smack the kid's hand away from something he couldn't have. And more and more of these low-end examples of the evolutionary flow chart kept flocking to the game section; bumping their way through the crowd and pretending they were 19 years again.

And thus I saw the end of the chain; the final progression. The chubby kid who lined up at Blockbuster Video back in the 1990's stood - or rather, slouched - before me in the dusty corner of a used book store. And rather than grow up, he grew inward. Sure, they did the "grown up thing" for a while - they got a job - somewhere - they married - hopefully - and clearly they reproduced - they had "families" - at least in body count. And yet, at their core, they are still nothing more than a blubbering 13 year old kid salivating over the latest digital offerings without an original thought in their thick, empty heads. While their bodies have grown up and grown older, their minds haven't moved a day beyond the sixth grade. Their interests are primeval only - gaming, sleeping, drinking, and... well, other activities.

Now, look, I have no problem with reliving your glory days. Hell, I have an entire vintage game collection to prove just that. But if I had a family - complete with a gaggle of kids - I would imagine my priorities would have shifted to the little children behind me and I'd be less focused on the $5.95 copy of Mortal Kombat sitting on a dusty shelf in the corner of a used book store, all while pretending that the last eleven years never happened and that it's really 1999 again and everything's fine. Everything is not fine. If you have any doubts about that, just look behind you.

It was yet another moment where I, as a "gamer," had to step back and look at what my medium has done. Indeed, what my favorite past time as a kid has wrought. Because, for every intelligent, well read, flight sim fan that likes to relive what it would be like to fly over the Western Front, or pilot an F16 over North Korea, there are twenty people like the ones in that book store. I can't help but wonder if any similar phenomenon happened during the rise of the novel. Somehow, I think not. I couldn't help but feel ever so slightly ashamed of my hobby once I saw the group of people most folks would associate me with if they ever heard that I even played video games. In other words, its people like the lumbering alpha males back there that give this past time such a bad rap.

So, what did I get for my $5? I doubled up, actually, and picked up a copy of Gran Turismo 2 and a fantastically violent game called Road Rash.

Hey, we can't be intellectuals all the time! I kid... but still, the blurry pixleated fun I had last night on my PlayStation 1 was still worlds ahead of any game of Call of Duty I've played in the last six months.

C'est la vie...

Gaming Gone Stupid

2011-12-09T19:25:00.002-05:00

So a long, challenging, and largely sleep-deprived semester is drawing to an end. And, believe it or not, after writing, writing, and writing, I'm adding a post to Skewed for fun. Why? Well, Fred's asleep on the couch and Ostrich the Emu is no where to be seen, so it looks like it's my turn at the computer. As you can tell by today's title, you're in for some geeky content. Fear not, however, this should appeal to a slightly broader audience than usual (more than the usual four people, you know who you are).

The question I pose today is this: What happened to gaming? When did it become so incredibly stupid? Granted, it's never been exactly the most intellectually stimulating exercise. You're never going to get Robert Frost out of Super Mario Brothers. But gaming, when done right, has a certain charm. It can tell us stories - or at least, it has the capability to tell us stories that no other medium can. Want to know what it's like to climb into the cockpit of a World War I plane and fly a patrol over the Western Front of World War I? Few other mediums can put you so squarely in the middle of that story like the video game. Want to get lost in a far away world for a few hours? Again, gaming does that well. Gaming has the capacity to immerse you in a completely different world for hours on end. And for those turning up their noses right now - a novel is perfectly capable of doing the same thing. It's all a question of what medium entices your senses at a particular moment.

Or, should I say, gaming used to do these things. I have to be honest, after the latest update to my Xbox 360 which morphed my $300 game console into a social media machine, I'm beginning to wonder why I play on the low end of this hobby anymore.

At this juncture, a little video example would go a long way. Let's take the most popular genre of game - the First Person Shooter - and compare what we have now to what used to be a historically rich genre that attempted to give you an idea of what your grandparents went through during the most catastrophic war in history.

So, what do we have here? An American tank column moving through the ruins of a bombed out European city in World War II. The Germans counter attack and you see that war is brutal, ugly, and not particularly pleasant. It's historically accurate and teaches you a little bit about the war - at the very least that it involved the Germans and at least the Americans in Europe at some point. There, see? There's some tacitly positive things to take away from this game. And what do we have now?

Ah yes, the lowest common denominator. Gun porn. Rampant testosterone fueled, homophobic rage. War isn't bad, it F*&^ing Rocks! Yay! War! Wahoo! Probably fitting for a country that's been at war for over a decade and yet shows absolutely no sign of remembering that fact (minus the deficit, the crumbling schools, the rising healthcare and education costs, the collapsing infrastructure... oh, never mind. I'm sure it'll be fine). Simply put, this is what gaming is now - at least for the mainstream, low rent audience that it caters to so shamelessly these days. It's hard to believe these two games even come from the same planet, let alone the same franchise. Of course, the latter of the two games has sold more copies than the Bible and every kid and his mother now knows what the term noob means. It's embarrassing.

It didn't used to be like this. A scant fifteen years ago - I know, a damn lifetime and a half for the technology world - gaming was at least borderline intelligent. Think of it as Flowers for Algernon before the decline. There was a brief moment, in the late 1990s, when it was brilliant, engaging, and smart - once again proving that everything was better in the 90s. I'll even take a relatively low-end example of what could be done back then. I present you a little known PlayStation game called Return Fire.

Okay, so the graphics are serviceable at best and it's a shooting game with tanks, and helicopters, and guns, and stuff. Even the goal is simple - it's literally a game of capture the flag. But what's that I hear in the background? Do you hear it? Oh, that's right boys and girls, a little genre of music you've never heard of: Classical! How about a little Wagner in with your PlayStation goodness? Have you seen a video game from today that includes the freaking Ride of the Valkyries in the soundtrack? I think not.

And another example: there was a time in history when flight simulations were something that made money. And, terrifyingly enough, they were sufficiently accurate to teach you a viable skill set. I can only imagine how many pilots - both commercial and combat - wound up getting interested in the field by something they played at home. Yes, Virginia, not only is there a Santa Claus, but he can also give you electronic, interactive gifts that can spark your imagination and even, Heaven forbid, spark a career. I give you: Wings of Glory...

Sure its pixilated goo. And the voice acting is terrible, but it plops your butt (or at least your butt in 1994) right down in the middle of World War I, a conflict so obscure in the United States that most people have hardly heard of it, let alone know anything about it. Then there's European Air War:

Again, want to fly planes? Want to learn a little history on the way? Then come over, put your butt down in front of your computer, and learn a little something Timmy. What does European Air War teach you? Well EAW simulated the European campaign for the US 8th Air Force. And, get this, it included history videos in the game! That's right, when June 1944 rolled around, you were treated to a video of Eisenhower's speech followed by a briefing on what the 8th Air Force did prior to the invasion. Remarkable! What does little Timmy learn today?

Kill everything. And note closely the hundred dollar bills that fly out of your opponents if you this them in a vulnerable position. That's called a Money Shot. That's right, a Money Shot... I would explain why exactly, that term is so terrible but this is a family blog... So we've gone from history, classical music, and at the very least, some bare bones learning to... breeding a generation of socially maladjusted, hyper active kids wracked by attention deficit disorder, and teaching them that the highest aspiration one can reach involves an M4 assault rifle with an ACOG scope and a massive kill streak - thus creating just what I'm sure the Department of Defense would love more of: barely educated, psychotic, infinitely trainable, cold-blooded killers who are barely socialized and would probably be best served by remaining caged when not in use. Thanks Call of Duty.

How the hell did it come to this? How did gaming devolve from inviting your friends over for a pizza, sitting on the couch, having a good time, sharing each others company, and catching up while playing a game of GoldenEye 64, to putting on your plastic headset like you're a five year old, waiting for your Xbox 360 to download yet another Dashboard update, then waiting for your game to download the latest patches (because it was already a broken mess when you bought it) and then running around shooting 12 year old kids who forgot to take their Ritalin, all while listening to some drunk frat boys screaming homophobic hate speech at you from the other side of the country? And, lest we forget, you pay $60 a year for this"service" and $60 a pop for a half-finished game that will be updated fifty times until the publisher decides you've had enough fun playing online and pulls the plug on half the game's functionality after a few years (I'm looking at you EA Sports)?

When did this become okay? When did we decide that we were fine with going along with this? Because, after spending time with my old PlayStation games, and spending some serious time on the computer flying over the Western Front again, I don't think it is. For the first time ever, Grubbs and I did not take part in the latest shooter release and you know what? The world hasn't ended. We're not any poorer for not having Modern Warfare 3 or Battlefield 3 in our hands. It's clear to me now, we're no longer part of the mainstream - if we ever were. And for the Xbox 360 - a console which, six years ago, was marketed as the hardcore gaming platform of choice - one that would never be watered down and would provide only the highest quality entertainment available - the muddled, confused, social media machine that now features "apps" and "beacons" is barely recognizable to the device I bought in 2007. It would be like coming home to my PlayStation 1 in 1995 and watching it cross dressing in my Mom's bedroom. It's just not right. And the best part is, because these things are now perpetually tethered to the Microsoft Mothership, they can keep changing it as often as they want. And now, with the introduction of "Cloud Saving" the inexorable flow of taking the games and content we purchased with our hard earned money out of our hands and making it a subscription service, continues.

For the first time since I picked up a game controller marked Atari, I'm seriously wondering why I'm even humoring this hobby anymore. If you need me, I'll be back on my PC wondering how it all went so terribly wrong.

Body Says No

2011-11-28T15:14:00.004-05:00

Sleep deprivation is a nemesis to all of us in this modern-day, constantly-connected, non-stop, 5-hour-energy-drink, all-too-many-hyphens-filled-world. When we're younger, sleep deprivation is something of a badge of honor - easy to earn and easy to shake off. You can pull an all-nighter in college, sleep the next morning until noon, and you're good to go, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as ever. Hell, if you're someone like Carl, you can sleep, on average, between four and five hours a night and you can run all day without breaking a sweat. Then again, no one likes Carl...

That said, this routine of burning the wick at both ends comes to an abrupt halt sometime around your mid-twenties. I'm not sure when, exactly - after all, all of our bodies are different and we all react differently to stress and age. For me, it was sometime around 28. I stayed out late, had a great time, and felt like I had been run over by a bus the next morning.

Of course, I'm in graduate school now, and have been for a while. And in grad school sleep deprivation becomes the best friend you never wanted to have. It follows you around during the semester, lurking behind you in the distance, always waiting to run you over (sort of like Sunny the Tragic Clown in The Sims). And, unlike your undergraduate days of pulling an all-nighter only to sleep it off the next day, the schedule of a graduate student provides precious little breathing room. Get behind by one day and you're making it up for the rest of the week. Get behind by a week? Let's just say that life becomes particularly unpleasant in a hurry; death starts to look like a viable option.

In any given week, you have a set amount of work that you must accomplish, a set amount that you should accomplish, and then any extra things you think you can accomplish while you're at it. Some weeks are better than others. Some weeks are simply there to destroy your will to live. And there will come a point in each semester when you discover that you have too much that you must accomplish. If you haven't managed your time intelligently, you'll be staring down a few all-nighters before you know what happened. And an all-nighter at this level is an unpleasant business. Unlike your undergrad days when you could sleep in class the next morning, being a grad student requires you to actually be a fully (or mostly) functioning human being, capable of thought, memory, critical analysis, and cognition. And if you get behind on your sleep, everything starts to fall apart.

Remembering assignments, keeping track of your work, staying up to date with your reading, finding time to do your research, and oh yes, having a life with your loved ones and finding some downtime for yourself; it all quickly goes to bits. You're left with a few options, and none of them are particularly good. You can pull an all-nighter or two and get caught up. The downside is that you'll be drooling on yourself by Wednesday. You can try to cat-nap here and there as you desperately plow through the work you need to do. Of course then you'll be neither full rested nor fully caught up on your tasks. And, lastly, you can always admit defeat.

Take a look at any collection of graduate students at a large university and you'll find the answer most people pick - the all-nighter.

Only now your body doesn't recover like it used to. Your thoughts are cloudy, your memory is hazy at best, your limbs feel rubbery, your head feels like it weighs eight-hundred pounds when you try and pry yourself off of your pillows, and the effort needed to survive a week of work suddenly seems more than you can muster. Ever wonder why so many graduate students bring their own coffee makers to campus? It's not just to save money - it's a lifeline.

And alas, there's the other downside. Your body, in addition to building up an intolerance for being awake, will also quickly acquire a high tolerance for caffeine. Yes, much like an alcoholic, a drug addict, or one of those poor saps who claim an addiction to pornography, you'll need ever-higher quantities of your daily fix just to see you through. Pretty soon you're downing coffee at such an alarming rate that even the louse, the heroin addict, and the guy who compulsively watches clips involving goats, circus clowns midgets, and a cheese grater, will collectively sit back and take notice. Sure, you keep upping your doses - black coffee, espresso shots, gnashing cocoa beans between your teeth... anything you can throw down the back of your throat to keep you going. But eventually, as you feel your esophagus and your stomach lining start to disintegrate, you'll come to the grim realization that there is no humanly-digestible dose that will do the trick.

Leaving you with one option and one option only: Manage your f*@&ing time better! And that, quite possibly, is the most terrifying choice of all.

Thanksgiving Rage

2011-11-25T12:03:00.000-05:00

Nothing says Thanksgiving like mid-night shopping, head colds, pepper spray, random acts of violence, and roid-raging football players stomping on their opponent's arms. That's all coming up in this edition of the 2011 Thanksgiving Wrap-up, right here on Skewed.

Unfortunately for yours truly, I'm sick on Thanksgiving. I should have known something was amiss yesterday when I had almost no appetite on the greatest feasting day of the American Calendar Year. Yes, sadly I'm down with a horrendously sore throat, a case of the sniffles, and occasionally debilitating dizziness. All good fun when you have 120 papers to grade before Monday.

But that's not the topic of today's post. No sir! As I sit in my old bed, back home in Georgia, I shall spin you a yarn of a psychotic woman who were determined to beat out the bitch next to her for that half-off, off-white, knock-off cashmere sweater. And boy have they gone to new extremes to move up in line. Gone are the days of simple pushing and shoving, or deploying the use of fake vomit or the occasional stink bomb. No sir, we have weaponized Black Friday. Prepare to: Shop or Die!

The mayhem began on Thanksgiving night when a woman at a Los Angeles-area Wal-Mart decided that she didn't particularly like her place in line. So, she took matters into own hands. Whipping out her personal defense can of pepper spray, she went all UC-Davis on the people in line ahead of her (too soon?). She single-handedly hosed no less than fifteen people - including children - to get ahead in line.

The L.A. Police Department said the woman was engaging in "competitive shopping." You have to ask yourself, when did buying things become a contact sport? Oh sure, I remember the crazy news stories from the 1980s of parents knocking each other senseless to get a Cabbage Patch doll and yes, I recall the heady days of the 1990s when Tickle Me Elmo caused fatalities and permanent scarring. But you have to ask yourself - what kind of person stands in line at Wal-Mart on Thanksgiving night, looks around, and says "this is bullshit! I'm not waiting this long!" And rather than going home like a sane person, decides to start taking people out? If the poster-child of the dysfunction of Communism in the Soviet Union was the 70-ton tractor and the breadlines in winter, then the poster-child of the last proverbial wheel of American society coming off the wagon must be a large, angry, woman in spandex pants, with crazy hair and make up, macing the daylights out of her fellow citizens to move up in line. And the best part? She hasn't been caught yet! That's right, she pepper-sprayed twenty plus people, then calmly shopped, payed for her things, and slipped out of the ensuing fracas, sight unseen.

But she was not the lone loonie of the night. No sir. As of 11 this morning, there have been reports of violence, scuffles, open fist fights, and oh yes, shootings. After all, when you combine a country with this many firearms, this low of a collective IQ, and this many people regulating their wound-up personalities with the help of prescription pharmaceuticals, you know a peaceful holiday like Thanksgiving is going to get very interesting in a hurry. Yet again, the incident struck at a Wal-Mart, this time in San Francisco. The victim is in critical but stable condition after being shot when a group of people demanded he hand over his purchases and he refused. Talk about a door-buster sale! (I'm sorry.) And finally another shopper, this time a 55 year old woman, was shot in South Carolina - where you would expect this kind of crap to happen in the first place. As the news reports, there have been, thankfully, no fatalities.

And you know we've reached a new level of insanity in this country when reporting that no fatalities have resulted from the passing of another Thanksgiving is considered a mark of success.

Lastly, the violence yesterday didn't just happen in the streets, it also happened on the football field. A player for the Detroit Lions named Ndamukong Suh (yes, pronounced Sue... you may begin making all of the Johnny Cash jokes your heart desires) grabbed the head of a Green Bay Packer and slammed him repeatedly against the ground - holding the player's helmet by his ear-hole. Then, after standing up, Suh stomped on the player's arm with his cleats. Suh, who was actually indignant afterwards, claimed his was trying to "regain his balance." He said afterwards that he was "trying to get away from the situation. I know what I did and the man upstairs knows what I did." I know that when I lose my balance, as I have frequently today from my wonky sinuses, that I begin stomping on the nearest person. It helps me. It centers me. It's like Yoga for the psychotically violent.

So what have we learned this weekend - which is only just getting started? Grading papers when you're sick is even less fun than grading papers when you're healthy. Thanksgiving in this country has become a warped, perverted holiday now summoned with a clarion call to shop and kill anyone who gets between you and that discounted Rachel Ray cookware. Some football players, like Aaron Rogers, are intelligent, collected, calm competitors who play smart, and others are barely sane, frothing at the mouth, violent animals who would likely need psychiatric care (and a padded cell) if not for the National Football League.

And finally, if you're going to go mid-night shopping on Black Friday, stay the hell away from Wal-Mart!

Stop SOPA Now!

2011-11-19T16:49:00.002-05:00

This is one of the most important bills to move through the House and Senate in years. If you haven't heard of it (and why would you? They don't want you to know), it's called SOPA. It hands the Federal Government a nearly-blank check to shut down websites run by law-abiding American citizens in a direct violation of their First Amendment rights. As usual, the bill is sweeping in the powers granted to the government and its enforcement agencies. If you happen to link to something that is considered copyright infringement, the government can ban your site, fine you monetarily, and yes, even take you to criminal court and put you in jail. If you think this is a bit much - and so do companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, eBay, and Amazon, then contact your Congressman and tell them that if they vote in favor of this law, they will not receive your vote next November. For more information, go here and read up on SOPA for yourself. Then, go to americancensorship.org and make your voice heard.

Where Is "Our Guy?"

2011-11-18T18:28:00.004-05:00

Skewed has always been a non-political blog. I say that with all sincerity. "Political Blogs" in my definition, have an ax to grind. And a quick search of the internet will yield all of the grinding you want (both political and otherwise... pass the eye-bleach). Skewed, however, has attacked stupidity and complacency and willful ignorance in society, and I'd like to think that's what we're about to do today. Join us, won't you?

In times of great crisis in American History, we've always seemed to have had a knack for producing exactly the right leaders at exactly the right time. The American Revolution had George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. The American Civil War had Abraham Lincoln. The gigantic, unchecked growth of trusts and the entry of the United States onto the global stage at the turn of the last century was led by Theodore Roosevelt. And of course, his cousin Franklin saw the country (or at least inspired and led it) through the Great Depression and the Second World War.

My question is this: We're facing dire times. And if you don't think we are, you need your head examined. As Thomas Friedman says, if you jump off an eighty story building, you'll feel like you're flying for the first seventy-nine floors. The world economy is teetering on the edge of disaster, there is more political and social volatility in the world than at anytime since the end of World War II, and the United States is in danger of falling behind the rest of the world in economic, educational, and technological innovation. In short, the next five years will likely determine the course of the next twenty. If ever there was a time for another great American leader to take the stage, this is it. So, where is he?

No, seriously, where is he? Because I haven't seen him yet. And he should be arriving any time now. In fact, our guy is late, very late, to this particular historical party. And I use the term "guy" in the colloquial, Brooklyn style of speech. "Our guy" could very well be a woman, and, frankly, I'd welcome it. I think it'd be a refreshing change of pace. Because, really, we need them. Right now. And I haven't seen any signs that any of the guys we currently have, is, or will be, our guy. The Republicans are currently vetting their field of incompetent weevils. And if you think any of these people, from Mitt Romney to Herman Cain and his 9-9-9 nonsense, to Michelle Bachmann, are inspiring leaders, you were probably inspired by your high school principal. I've even heard people say that Herman Cain is an interesting guy because he speaks his mind. Is this the collective bar we've now set? That a candidate in possession a mostly functioning frontal lobe that he makes the occasional use of is considered grounds for electing him to the Office of the Presidency? I'm sorry, but that's not good enough. Most of these candidates look like they were held back a grade in High School. I don't mind voting for Republicans. I mind voting for stupid Republicans.

And that's to say nothing of the guy I voted for in 2008. Yes, I voted for President Obama. And yes, I hold out the slightest glimmer of hope that in the next few months, he will finally get it, remember what it was that inspired so many millions of people to vote for him in the first place, and actually get on with it. My complaint with President Obama isn't that I don't agree with some of his policies. And while I'm on this tangent, let me just say that Americans harbor a grossly misguided notion that we should agree wholesale with a candidate in order to support him. You make your choice and accept the fact that you will disagree with them on some things. It's a fact of life.

My problem also hasn't been the fact that President Obama has tried some things that have failed. All presidents fail. Some more spectacularly than others. My problem is that, most of the time, I have no idea what President Obama stands for. He wants to revive the economy. Good. So do I. How? Because it seems that every few months he attempts a new plan, never fully explains it (remember that Bully Pulpit, Mr. President?), and then wonders why more people aren't supporting him.

The most frustrating facet of this clearly intelligent man, is that half of the time we're directed to the White House Website for details. Look, you aren't Publisher's Clearinghouse, Mr. President, you are the President. There are no shortage of cameras and microphones around the White House, so what are you waiting for? Where are my stump speeches? Where are my national addresses? Where are my fireside chats? Franklin Roosevelt, someone you claim to admire so much, failed on a host of issues during his time in office. But he gave the American people hope. His chats were heard by millions, and even in times of untold, backbreaking economic misery, he gave them hope. Obama is tantalizingly close to being a great president, but he all to often goes into his head rather than in front of the people to make his case. Obama should be angry. When Congress detonates one of his good ideas, he needs to get out there and say so. Instead, we're greeted time and again with another wall of silence punctuated by mild frustration during a news conference. If he can't find a way to right the ship, and soon, we'll be left with our original question...

Where is our guy? Because the longer this drags on, the more I'm convinced we haven't found him. We're vetting CEO's of pizza restaurants and receiving Twitter updates from the Executive Branch of Government. Where is our guy? Why have my parents' generation of leaders failed us so deeply? Where was our guy on 9/11? Where was the leader we needed to stand up, find his nerve and say "we need to band together, now. We need to strike back, now. But more than strike, we must revolutionize our economy and put our people back to work to fundamentally rebuild our nation's energy system so that we no longer need the people who are so determined to kill us." Where was he? Why, instead, did we get "if you want to beat the terrorists, go shopping." Thank you President Bush, I'll remember that. Because I have no doubt that that's what my grandparents did during World War II.

I'm sad to say it, but it's true. If our guy doesn't show up soon - whoever he is - wherever he is - we're finished. Winston Churchill once said that Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all of the others. I'm convinced that Democracy only saves itself in moments of peril by great leadership at the top. And right now, we're unbelievably deficient in leadership. No one wants to take a risk. No one wants to say the things that need saying. No one wants to do anything that might piss off their donors.

And the best part is, no one seems to give a shit anymore. No one. The American people certainly don't. As long as they can buy their next iPhone, watch the next episode of The Biggest Loser, buy the next SUV, and sit on their fat, stupid, lazy asses and feel like they're taking part in government without actually doing anything, we're done. There is no "us" anymore. There is only "me, me, me" and "mine, mine, mine." From my semi-professionally trained viewpoint on history, we are in terminal decline. And anyone who argues otherwise is deluding themselves. When students in class can't even explain why the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor or what the significance of World War II was - the war that essentially gave them the country they're currently enjoying - we're in a lot of trouble. No one seems to remember what it was that made America work during times of trial. It was the collective pulling together, the desire to roll up our sleeves and get dirty, the courage to make tough choices, sacrifice, and do what was necessary for the country to succeed. Sacrifice. Funny how that word never ever appears in any political speech you hear.

Certainly not anymore. Now it's "tell those poor people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps." How, exactly, does one do that when there are no bootstraps left? When there are no jobs for them go to - save a dead-end door greeter position at Wal-Mart that pays nothing and where they will work for the rest of their impoverished lives. How does one get out of backbreaking poverty when the only thing they've done to deserve it is having the misfortune of being born into it? How does the country improve education when we seem content to throw tens of millions of dollars into college football, but not classes. How does the United States keep up with China and India and half of the rest of the world that's already leap-frogging us every day, when we're happy to cut education spending, increase class sizes into the stratosphere, pay teachers nothing, and then wonder why our students fall further and further behind the rest of the world.

How do we save ourselves?

The answer is this: We Don't. So fine. Let the country go to hell. Clearly, no one gives a damn. Let education fall by the wayside and then hand it over to the corporations to fix - after all, we no longer want educated citizens in this country, we just want trained workers to fill cubicles. We'll be a second-rate country before you know it. And the best part is, the vast majority of Americans simply won't give a damn. They're just comfortable enough not to notice that the country around them is dying. I hate to break it to you, but the American Century is over.

Unless our guy shows up.

And he'd better hurry, because we're running out of time.

Too Soon?

2011-11-06T18:16:00.004-05:00

In a word: Yes!

Look, I understand that we all love Christmas (and if you don't love it, you're clearly waging a war on it and we don't appreciate it). I also understand that the month long gap between Halloween and Thanksgiving is simply an unbearable rift in time when there is nothing to celebrate - or to put it more accurately in American consumer culture - nothing to buy. But this whole "let's hock Christmas decorations next to our blood splattered Jason masks" thing needs to stop. Now, this is nothing new. I've been saying this for years (see here, and here). But this year, my Yuletide Shock Troop experience was hastened when, on the morning after Halloween, I walked to Starbucks for my morning cup of mocha.

And this is what greeted me. Mine was even more Christmasy than this little example culled from a quick Google Image Search. My mocha was resplendent in nutcrackers, and dolls, and snowflakes, and stuff.

Don't get me wrong. I love Starbucks. Moreover, I need Starbucks. Their overpriced, highly addictive, stimulant riddled coffees keep me lucid and borderline functioning during my week while slowly draining my bank account of its precious funds. But seriously, the day after Halloween? The day after Halloween. Really? I can sort of let the simultaneous sale of Christmas wrapping paper and pumpkins go. But it's the morning after for God's sake! When did you switch out the cups - midnight? There are still kids hung over from candy binges, and college kids hung over from... other kinds of binges. It's not Christmas yet. It's not Thanksgiving yet. Hell, it's not even Veterans Day yet!

Christmas is a wonderful time of the year - or at least it used to be - you know, back before it occupied one-fourth of the calendar year. Every year it keeps getting bigger, stronger, and takes up more space - like some freakish, pine-scented, mutant science experiment. Pretty soon the lab guards are going to have to shoot it before it gets out of control and begins strangling social workers and killing innocent bystanders.

Is it too much to ask to let the other holidays breathe for a bit? Can we not look forward to Thanksgiving like we used to? After all, it's a holiday based entirely on good food and when you're literally a starving grad student, there is no finer day of the year. Is there no such thing as delayed gratification anymore? Or as my grandparents would have put it: basic human patience? I know that when you're five years old the gap between Halloween and Christmas feels like a lifetime. But I can't imagine it does anymore. Not for little Timmy and Susie, at least. Because they're collectively bitch-slapped by Santa's Christmas Sale Mittens before they have a chance to eat their last Gummy Sponge-bob Squarepants.

So please, to the commercial world so drunk on Capitalist excess that it will literally make out with anyone in the room - give it a break. I know no one will listen - no one ever does. But is it so much to ask that I get a few weeks of peace in between the holidays I used to love so much? You know, before every company on earth came along and turned my favorite time of the year into one giant fire sale of fail.

The Day After Halloween: Yeah, a little like that...

Insanely Great

2011-10-09T12:13:00.005-04:00

"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

We continue our thread on Steve Jobs today by asking another question: What keeps us from being great?

Jobs, like all of us, was known for his occasionally prickly demeanor. As Leo Laporte noted, Jobs once walked into a meeting at Apple and when a fellow Apple employee inquired about his weekend, Jobs asked if the level of conversation in the room could be raised.

We all have our faults. But Jobs was also a genius and a visionary. His critics, following the news of his death, were quick to point out that Jobs did not invent anything and, as a consequence, he did not measure up to the likes of Thomas Edison. Edison, however, did not invent most of his great ideas either. But both men fundamentally altered our world. Thus, the two are more alike than we might initially think when comparing a twenty-first century, silicon and aluminum visionary like Jobs with his twentieth-century, iron and carbon counterpart. In other words, Jobs overcame his failings as a human being to achieve greatness.

So why can't we?

What holds us back? Is it our fear of failure? Is it the perception that we are limited physically, logistically, or financially? Do we surround ourselves with people who hold us back rather than push us forward?

I think Jobs' quote is the best way to live your life. And the passing of Jobs - a man whose death shocked us all, despite being ill with pancreatic cancer for several years - reminds us yet again that no matter how brilliant we are, we are all mortal. We are all doing to die. And, as Jobs said, no one wants to die. Even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there.

So, if we know this, if we understand death as our final, shared destination, why on earth do we live our lives so half-heartedly? Why do we utterly waste so much of our time? Why do we not chase after our dreams? Why do we settle for second best? After all, any Mac user would tell you that the reason they are a Mac user is precisely because their product is the best. It has the best display, the nicest keyboard, the most rugged design, and so on. So why not live our lives that way? Why not strive to be the best version of ourselves? If you hate your job, find something new. If something or someone is making you unhappy, change it. Find a way to pursue what you really want to do with your life. Be a perfectionist. Don't settle.

Another favorite quote of mine from Jobs is this:

"When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

I think all of us - particularly my friends who are approaching the end of their 20's - need to step back, assess where we really want to go in this life, and consider what we can do to get there. If something is holding you back, throw it off. As Jobs said, you are already naked, there is no reason not to follow your heart.

My wake up call also came early in life, at 17. Only, instead of reading a quote, I had a two-ton mini-van crash into my Mazda Miata, head on, at a traffic light. Suddenly, my life changed. I stumbled out of the car, finally collapsing on a sidewalk. After a few minutes of shock, I looked at my body and realized I was badly hurt. My left hand was numb, I couldn't hear anything, my legs were burned - skin hung off of my right thigh - I had burn marks on my t-shirt, and I was covered in blood from a broken nose. The rest of the day was spent on a backboard, in pain, crying and wondering if I was hurt in places I couldn't see.

I realized I could die. While most teenagers - and even kids in their early twenties - ran around being stupid, and found new and exciting ways to endanger their health, their lives, and the lives of others - I started to reassess my life. I knew, early on, that I could and would, eventually, die. I knew that I was very much time limited and I had to decide quickly what I wanted my life to be about. After all, I never saw the mini-van coming. You never know how long you have.

For me, my life is about teaching and improving the lives of others. Educating, researching questions that perplex me, and reaching out and connecting with people. I want to make a positive impact on as many human beings as I can in the time I have. My path has allowed me to meet some pretty incredible people, and help a few along the way. It is a journey I have spent the last nine years working towards, and nothing will stop me from reaching my goal.

I write this today, to ask you - whoever you are - be it a friend or a random passer by - what is your goal? You will die one day. And today, you are one day closer to it than you were yesterday. Are you really happy? Are you living the life you want? If you aren't, why aren't you changing it? You are running out of time.

I believe people are inherently good. They are trained otherwise by unhealthy people or institutions. Those who believe they are bad need to learn otherwise. They aren't bad. They just think they are. And your mind is either what propels you forward, or imprisons you forever. We are all flawed. But it's how we rise above it that makes all of the difference.

Steve Jobs changed the world with his life.

What will you do with yours?

Steve Jobs

2011-10-05T23:05:00.006-04:00

In the spirit of transparency, let me say this: I've never owned a Mac.

But I've always secretly wanted to.

I do own an iPod. I now own an iPhone. And, save a few hundred dollars in price which I would now gladly give up, I would have owned a MacBook. And with a faulty keyboard that cannot type properly, I'd like to have one right now.

Today's post was going to be very, very different. 2011 has been a tiring, stressful, difficult year filled with tremendous ups and downs, and terrible loss. This post was originally entitled "Michael Schumacher." I came home this afternoon - tired and feeling down, and felt that the proper motivation was to look at the seven-times world champion. At the time, Schumacher - my childhood hero - seemed like the perfect embodiment for what I wanted to accomplish over the next five years. Schumacher was an uncompromising champion. Either Michael was going to win, or people were going to get run over. He was, and largely remains, a relentless machine. He trains like no one else, he focuses like no one else, and for a number of years, he knocked out victory after victory like no one else in the sport ever did. There is something admirable in his ruthless ambition - something that, after the last few weeks, I felt the need to embody in order to survive. In order to succeed.

Then this evening, while talking to friends on the phone, I glanced up at the New York Times website and saw it: Steve Jobs, Apple's Visionary, Dies at 56.

The post changed.

I don't want to be a little more like Michael Schumacher this time around. I'd rather be a little more like Steve Jobs.

Schumacher won. A lot. And Jobs changed the world. Frequently.

"I want to make a ding in the universe." This sums up Steve's sentiment about the world and his place in it. And boy did he ever make a impact. The Apple computer, the Macintosh, the iMac, the iPod, iPhone, iPad. How many innovations, how many designs have we touched, interacted with, been changed by, all because of one man inspiring others?

Now granted, the man was far from perfect. None of us are. We all have our imperfections, our weaknesses, our ugly sides. But Jobs, for all of his arrogance, was also a brilliant visionary. And, interestingly enough, this modern day Edison; our digital Gutenberg, our twenty-first century Picasso, made great products, not to make a lot of money, and not to beat out everyone else on a benchmark test, but to improve lives. And how many of us tonight learned about the man's passing on a device he played an integral role in creating? He changed how we view the world. He changed how we use computers. He changed how we buy and listen to music. He changed how we watch movies when he helped get Pixar off the ground. And how many people's lives were made better for it?

Not bad for a life, is it?

And tonight, as I sit in a quiet apartment with my work stacked around me and a cup of hot chocolate on my desk, I can't help but think of the poster on the right. It's an old ad from 1997 - when I was in high school - it seems like a lifetime ago. Or rather, several lifetimes ago. So many great figures in our society today seek to brag about profit margins or give their stock a bump so their shareholders stay happy. Jobs, I genuinely think, wanted to change the world for the better.

And yes, like I said, he was flawed. But this doesn't detract from the man. We are all flawed. We all have our demons to sort. But as I sit in the warm glow of lamplight and consider how best to do my work, I can't help but feel inspired by the man. I feel fortunate that I was able to see someone like him create, innovate, and improve the world during my lifetime; to witness a man that, in such a short time, changed the world ever so much for the better.

My question now isn't just how can I succeed, but how can I make my own world better? How can I improve the lives of those around me? What could I do better? Because, as he said in his 2005 address to Stanford: "Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

Or, to put it another way: You are ____ years old. Your dream is to____________.

Leave your mark.

The Old Office

2011-09-30T21:58:00.002-04:00

Rooms are funny things. They serve as space for things, for our belongings, for our activities, for our thoughts. And yet, for reasons beyond understanding, they seem to hold these things long after the moments they served have passed. I came home to Georgia yesterday, for the first time in over six months - by far the longest stint I had spent away from a house I lived in for nearly ten years. I sit here tonight, laptop in hand, grading spread out across my desk, and I cannot help but remember everything that happened in here.

We moved here in October of 2001. I was nineteen years old, not in school, and spending my time as an aimless kid at home. Over the next five years, this room - my office, which housed my computer, my racing posters, and my books - got me from a long year of community college to successfully finishing my Bachelors' Degree in History at North Georgia College & State University. This room witnessed long afternoons of studying, late night returns from campus, and even longer late-night writing sessions as I desperately tried to finish my Honors Thesis in the waning months of 2006. I packed up and left home in August of 2009 and I've spent the past three years in two different apartments of wildly varying quality.

The old room looks nothing like it did all those years ago. The walls are bare, my things are gone - all residing in Knoxville - and on most days, it simply sits dormant; housing leftover things that no one really uses. It is a reminder of all that was, of what used to be; of what will never be again. As I stepped back in my house - where the furniture is almost inevitably in a different location than it was the last time I was home - the old sights, sounds, and smells greeted me. Home really does smell like home - you carry it with you in some far off, tucked away reserve of your brain and you recall it instantly the moment you return. I carried in my bags - heavy with work - and sat them in my bedroom, then walked across the hall to my old office - where I spent hours working, and hours hiding away reading, writing fiction, or playing games to escape the stresses of life. It was like revisiting an old friend - and noticing they looked older for the first time.

I couldn't help but think of how far I've come in the years since I lived here. Of how much I've done, how much I've managed to accomplish - from community college to PhD student at a large research university in nine years. Part of the thanks, at least, goes to the space this room gave me, and the time I spent here. And as I sit here tonight, I can almost see it - the old desktop computer, the stacks of books on German history, the scattered notes, the piles of empty coke cans and the stacks of empty coffee cups - the sights of my final semester of college before it all ended. It was a wonderful time in my life. It was a brief, beautiful moment, when things made sense, when I carried myself with an absolute sense of certainty, when I had fun, when I was happy...

It was a moment that, on nights like this, I sorely miss. I wish there was a way to bottle up the air in this room and take it back with me to Knoxville.

Keyboard Ffffaults

2011-09-26T13:53:00.000-04:00

I finally did it. After years of dedication to the desktop PC, I finally bought a laptop. I did my research, looked at my limited budget as a graduate student, and settled on a Lenovo ThinkPad Edge. I thought, after all, that ThinkPads were revered as the gold standard of laptop construction back in the day. After all, the State Department, the Department of Defense, and Fortune 500 companies all issue their people ThinkPads. There are stories of ThinkPads being melted, frozen, or drowned and still booting later. So how bad could they be?

Answer: very, very bad.

Why?

My keyboard doesn't work. Or, to phrase that a little differently, it works too well. Apparently, my keyboard feels that whenever I type the letter F, I actually want two, or three, or even four of the things. After all, reaching to center and hitting F can be a laborious task - so why not reward my hard finger work with giving me several of them at a time? My answer is that I don't need them, and it takes a lot more work to hit backspace three or four times every few words just to get a sentence out.

And here's the thing. It's an $800 laptop. Eight hundred dollars. There are certain features on a laptop that need to work, regardless of the price. I would think, short of the monitor failing altogether or the laptop electrocuting you every time you log on, the keyboard functioning properly is kind of important. After all, you usually use one of these things to do work on - and work requires typing - and typing requires a keyboard that works. Novel concept, I know.

So after jumping through Lenovo's litany of hoops - and this just in, Lenovo really, really, really doesn't want you to actually bother them about the product they sold you once they sold it to you - I settled for sending it in for repairs. Of course my hard disk is going to get wiped before it heads out my door - I don't want some stranger looking at my research, my family photographs, and rifling through my music collection. To be honest, I really just wanted to return it and get my money back. But to do so, I had to return it within 21 days of the laptop shipping and of course, we were on day 22 at the time. And no, the Stalinist Chinese customer support folks didn't want to play ball.

So the laptop goes off for repairs in a few days - so I can finally type the word of instead of off or offf or offfff every time I turn around. And if you don't think that a glitchy keyboard won't screw up your typing speed, just try hitting backspace every third or fourth keystroke. It will ruin your mojo in a hurry.

Conclusion of the day: I should have gotten a Mac.

Geekfest '11

2011-09-25T11:52:00.003-04:00

An Ode To Flight Sims.

Yes, this is perhaps, the nerdiest post I've ever written. Which, considering that I've blogged about Facebook, graduate school, video games, and which internet browser is the best, is saying something. Flight Simmers are a special bunch, as the video below will no doubt prove.

The truth is, flight sims are the genre of gaming that pulled me from my 8-bit Nintendo days and into the world of PC Gaming. I haven't really left since.

It started in 1993 with a game called F-117A Stealth Fighter. It was ugly, it was simple, but it was fantastic. I flew countless missions in my Nighthawk, bombing everything from Baghdad (which was more fun back before we did it for real) to Libya (again, more fun before... well, you know) and the Balkans (oh right, there too...). Come to think of it, that game had a horrific ability to predict the future.

But it was Wings of Glory that did the trick. The game came to me on a demo CD included in a copy of PC Games Magazine. Suddenly I was transported from the steel era of jet fighters to the wood and canvas world of the Great War. I had never seen machines like these. Brightly colored, amazing shapes, engines coughed, sputtered, and spun. The clatter of machine gun fire, the creaking of wood, the sound of tearing canvas. It was utterly mesmerizing. The demo included one mission only: destroy three German observation balloons and any enemy planes that you encounter along the way. I probably flew that one sortie 600 times. I played and replayed until I wore out my machine. It sparked my interest in World War I. From that one mission I started reading about the Great War. Trip after trip to the library - returning home each time with another pile of books. It was a sign of things to come.

Flash forward three years later to October of 1998. Life was good back then: I was in marching band, TV featured great shows like Whose Line Is It Anyway, and Sierra/Dynamix released a game called Red Baron II. And if Wings of Glory started my interest in World War I history, Red Baron II threw me into the deep end - and I loved it. I've frequently told my parents that Red Baron II represented the best $20 they ever spent. From Red Baron II I read more about World War I than ever before. I became a history major years later in college which led to research and graduate school and on and on... In short, I'm making a career out of my interest in World War I... all sparked by a $20 flight sim.

Suddenly, instead of flying a single mission in a single type of British plane, I could fly at any point in the war - from 1915, when air combat begins, to the bitter end of 1918. I could also fly for any side: French, British, American, German. And a litany of new planes appeared: Albatroses, Fokkers, DH2's, SE5's, Sopwith Camels, the list goes on. The missions were also dynamic - the fancy flight sim way of saying: completely random. Gaming became something completely new and I was addicted like never before.

Instead of worrying about beating the big bad boss at the end of some level, or getting your character to level up enough to progress the story line, gaming became about something entirely different: survival. Rather than beating the boss, the sheer satisfaction of safely setting your scout on the ground after a long, harrowing patrol felt like the biggest victory imaginable.

And that, ultimately, is what makes this type of game so addicting. They offer complete and total immersion. While you might get lost in a game like Fallout 3 for a few minutes or an hour, flying a combat air patrol - whether it's over the Western Front, the DMZ in Korea, or escorting bombers into Berlin in your P-51 Mustang, is an all consuming process. It has to be. Lose concentration for a minute and you could wind up off course, out of fuel, or worse.

Instead of just worrying about your character or how many lives you have left - you have to constantly run through a stream of questions: Where are we? How far over the enemy lines are we now? Where are my wingmen? What's their condition? Where are the enemy? How much flak is ahead of us? How much fuel and ammunition do I have left? When did I last check my six-o'clock? And you have to cycle through these questions without stopping. By the time you reach the end of the list, it's time to start again from the top. Planning requires a lot of thought too. How is the weather? How much cloud cover is there this morning and what altitude is it at? Should we fly over the lines here - where the enemy are prepping for an offensive and are likely stockpiling their flak guns - or here, further south, where they are more lightly concentrated? How many wingmen do I take up with me? Which ones do I pick? Because, in a good flight sim, pilot fatigue is also simulated. Take up your best pilot too many times and you'll wear him down. The list goes on and on. That's where the joy is in this type of game.

Dog fighting - the actual act of engaging in aerial combat - demands even more attention - and the questions come so much faster. What is your speed? What's the the location of your enemy? Should you turn-fight or hit-and-run? How many of them are there? How many friendly planes are in the fight? Twisting, turning, climbing, diving, all culminating in that moment, when you put your sights through your enemy and pull the trigger. After all those hours of planning, all of those hours of flight - often bordering on tedium - the adrenaline rush is like nothing else in gaming. It is an all encompassing style of game that pulls you in from take off to touch down. Interestingly enough: it is those types of moments that are the most memorable. Call me crazy - and I am - but I can still recall details of missions I flew twelve years go. Why? Because they required so much thought, so much more investment than a game of Call of Duty or Unreal Tournament, that I remember them.

If F117A Stealth Fighter got me into flight sims and Wings of Glory hooked me on World War I sims, then Red Baron II was the raw heroin that's left me entranced ever since. Night after night in high school, when I should have been sleeping or working on homework, I was flying. My pilots died left and right - flying combat patrols day after day in World War I was incredibly dangerous work. At the height of the conflict, the average life span of a pilot was 17 hours in the air. I was usually lucky to last that long. For week after week, month after month, and eventually, year after year, I sent my pilots up - each one benefiting from the accumulated hours I had racked up at the controls until at long last, I finally guided a pilot to the end of the war. He had 117 kills, a Victorian Cross, multiple awards, and was maimed - I'd hate to think of what he lost. He was also the only pilot from my Red Baron II days to actually survive, and it took nearly seven years of playing to finally find success without cheating. Not a great mortality rate, to be sure.

Is it nerdy? Certainly. But I'd also like to think that this style of game requires a little more intelligence than your usual first person shooter - where camping and spawning are the name of the game. The crowd flight sims attract are usually a more intelligent bunch, as well. They share their stories on message boards - from real life dramas to missions from last night. They are supportive like few other communities and they come from all over the globe. Germans, Brits, Frenchmen, Americans, Australians, all congregating around a virtual watering hole, telling stories of amazing dogfights, and learning about history, flight, and this hobby that they are so passionate about. They have no problem looking up information, doing research on questions, and making sure their particular sim is the most historically accurate one around. Flight sims allow us to relive history. For example:

And the best part is this: my latest round of flight sims represents a new golden age of gaming. I have not one, but two World War I sims (my favorite genre): Over Flanders Fields and Rise of Flight. World War II is well represented with IL2-1946 and spans both the Eastern, Western, and Pacific Fronts. Falcon 4.0, the all-time most difficult flight simulation ever, still resides on my hard drive next to Strike Fighters, giving me all of the jet combat I need. It is a full library of flight. To be honest, flight simming has kept me sane during some of the hardest moments in life. When stress, loss, and the worries of life became overwhelming, taking my scout up for a patrol over the Western Front was the cure I needed. Ironically enough, even car crashes - of which I've had two - became "good landings." Why? Because I walked away from them - and any landing you walk away from is a good landing. Sure, you might say it's a geeky way of handling stress, or even checking out, and it is. But it's healthier than a lot of other options.

At least, until my latest pilot bites the dust. Again. Here's to the hobby that never ends.

Facebook Panic

2011-09-23T10:25:00.001-04:00

I'm beginning to think that, without Facebook, Skewed would have half the number of posts currently housed in the archives. The irony to this is that these posts have all essentially been about the same thing: Facebook introduces a new 'feature,' people feel as if their privacy has been invaded and raise a stink, people eventually complain enough that they get it out of their system, and finally, the people keep using Facebook anyway.

This is one of those posts.

So earlier this week, Facebook rolled out the ultimate meta-feature. It is a scrolling update of every action taken by everyone you know. It displays this data in real time and places it next to your news feed. You know, the news feed: the long scroll of data that tells you what all of your friends have been doing over the last several hours.

So, just so we're all on the same page: Facebook now displays what your friends are doing next to what your friends have done. Make sense? Yeah, it doesn't to me either.

And the people are up in arms! Again! There are groups protesting the live news feed (displayed next to the news feed that was already there). There are a litany of status updates reading: "please hover your mouse over me and select subscribe and then uncheck 'comments and likes.'" Others, more impassioned no doubt, state that doing so will be a sign of true friendship and respect. All of this raises one, alarming question:

Has everyone lost their minds?

You're on Facebook! I hate to break to you little Susie Q, but your privacy left you years ago. You post your name, your birth date, where you work, who you're married to, you post pictures of your freaking sonograms and then pepper your wall with photos of your other kids and you're honestly telling me, sincerely no less, that you're concerned about your privacy?

Forgive me while I stand in a corner and laugh hysterically for a few moments.

I'm better now.

This has to be a joke. A way for middle class, yuppie, bored suburban housewives, and paranoid college kids who wear tinfoil hats, and crazy alien hunters who believe that the truth really is out there (and it's really, really not) to find something to bitch and moan about while ignoring a litany of actual problems that they're too terrified to do anything about: like rising deficit spending, a tanking economy, a collapsing education system... Nope, we've got to raise a stink about a live news feed next to our old news feed. If ever there was a first-world problem to gripe about.

And just so I make this point clear: There is already a news feed! Everything you comment on, everything you like, all of that good stuff? Yeah, we've been able to see that for a long, long time. Since about 2005 actually. And yet, the fact that Facebook now informs me of something you did, the moment you did it, instead of an hour later, well, they've gone too far now, haven't they?

And the best part is, Facebook will just keep going. You really think this new feature is going anywhere? Has Facebook ever, ever removed a new feature once it went live? No! Never! And don't give me any of your self-righteous, self-aggrandizing "I'll just quit Facebook!" crap. Yeah, I've heard that one before. And you know what, you still haven't quit. And even if you did, a few thousand people will join in the time it takes you to delete your account.

The sad, cold reality is this: Your privacy is gone. Your privacy has been gone. It left the moment you joined a social networking website that charged nothing for its services and asked you to enter in every single solitary thing you like (otherwise known as marketing data). It's been gone since you photo-logged your pregnancy from conception to birth. It's been gone since you posted every single school you ever attended since third grade. It's been gone since you posted your wedding photos. It's gone. It's not coming back. And if you think only your friends can see your information, you are out of your minds. Where do you think all of your information goes? On your friends' computers? No, it goes on Facebook's servers. You know, just like Google logs all of your search terms, and tracks what websites you visit (you sick, sick freak).

We live in a society that is becoming increasingly transparent. Some think this is good, others don't. It's a debate that we will be having for a long time to come. But rather than argue over the minutia of a social networking website rolling out a mini-feature, perhaps we should extend the debate to other things that actually matter. Like, for instance, should a society be spending so much of its time posting inane details of their daily, boring, pointless existences on a website for others to read?

But I suppose that will be a discussion for another day. Enjoy the freak-out everyone!

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

2011-09-22T00:13:00.000-04:00

Skewed has been in existence, off and on, for nearly five years - although, if you count the time the blog was live, we're approaching our third year online. Complicated counting methods aside, the ol' blog has put up some rather interesting statistics. Back in 2006, when I started Skewed, Blogger had no way of tracking page views, audience size, or really any statistics that would let me know how well the blog was doing. Short of adding on an old-fashioned page counter out of a dusty old Geocities website, there wasn't much else I could do. I wrote my random, often sub-standard posts, and hoped someone would look at them. Back then, if my friends at North Georgia read the blog, I was over the moon.

Well, what a difference some five years makes! Blogger now provides me with a full breakdown of page visits, origin of page views, most-read posts, etc. So, for you, my dear readers, here is a sampling of my sample data. Try not to get too much on you - I'm not sure where it's been.

Overall, Skewed attracts the size audience I would have expected - that is to say, my friends and some outside wanderers-by. On average, each post receives about 40-50 views. Oddly enough, the post with the greatest number of hits is Rise of Nations, from earlier this year. After doing some digging, I found that the reason why the post attracted such a large audience - some 3,202 views as of this evening - was the photo included in the post. Apparently, for reasons I don't fully understand, the picture appears high on Google's search results for images of Rise of Nations. And, for reasons surpassing understanding, there are a large number of people looking up images of an eight year old real time strategy game and choosing to click the picture I hosted. Go figure. The post has about 3,123 more views than anything else I've ever written.

Mind you, Skewed was offline - or as I like to say, on hiatus - for a little over two years and any stats generated from the 2006-2008 era don't exist. I would love to know how the old gal did during her heyday. C'est la vie...

My traffic sources also leave me scratching my head. Not surprisingly, Kristine's blog draws a pretty decent size crowd that is kind enough to drop by Skewed for a visit. It's nice to know that my elaborate posts on gaming and formula one aren't enough to completely scare off the knitting scene and I love them for sticking with me through all of the geek bravado that appears so frequently. That said, Kristine is not my number one traffic source. She comes in second to some random website called "Jobs for Smart People" where Skewed is, for reasons beyond me, listed as an active link.

Then there's my audience, and here is where the real surprise comes in. As expected, the largest crowd is here in the United States. Second, interestingly enough, is the United Kingdom with 458 page views. Third is Germany, with 251 views. Next is Canada with 232 and Brazil with 230. Ready for some odd ones? Next is India with 106 views, followed by Hungary with 84, Italy with 75, Indonesia with 58. Dead last is France, with 55. Somehow, I'm a bigger hit with the Germans and the Indians than I am the French. Go figure.

So people in India and Indonesia have looked at Skewed. Why, I'll never know, but nonetheless, it's pretty cool to know that we attracted - or at least attracted some accidental clicks - from folks well and truly on the other side of the world.

For the true geeks, here is the breakdown of what is being used to look at Skewed. Firefox comes in first place with 37% of my page views. Chrome is second at 32%. Third is Internet Explorer with 22%. Then Safari with 5%. Opera with 2%. Mobile Safari, Mobile, Iron, SeaMonkey (really, SeaMonkey?) and Version - all with less than 1%. As for Operating System? Well we've got those stats too! Windows is the leader - not surprisingly - with a huge margin of 90%. Mac is holding at 5% followed by Linux, Android, iPad, iPhone, Other Unix, BlackBerry, Nokia, and iPod all with less than 1%.

I'll keep an eye on the stats as Skewed progresses into the second chapter of its decently long life. Who knows where the next click will come from? All I can say is, Fred had better watch his mouth in the future - we're not longer just offending people in our own country!

The Best Of You

2011-09-15T00:46:00.003-04:00

There is a legendary scene in the first season of The West Wing. In it, President Bartlett, played by Martin Sheen, is faced with a moment of introspection and unpleasant truth. Leo McGarry, played by the late John Spencer, informs the president that his approval ratings are dropping like a stone, and that the view of the press is that Leo brings Bartlett to the political safe ground. The result is that Bartlett is now the victim of the growing perception that he is a do-nothing president. Leo confronts him: explaining that it is Bartlett who is the problem, not his trusted adviser.

Finally seeing the reality Bartlett says: "I don't want to feel like this anymore." Leo replies, "you don't have to."

"I don't want to go to sleep like this anymore." Again, Leo reminds the president, "you don't have to." Bartlett realizes he's ready to speak. That speaking - being brave, outspoken, honest - is more important than saving his own political skin. Leo's strategy is then scrawled out on a legal pad: Let Bartlett Be Bartlett.

In another cinematic classic, Tom Hanks, as book entrepreneur Joe Fox in You've Got Mail, writes to his anonymous love interest, played by Meg Ryan, after meeting her in a coffee shop - realizing that his online love is actually his real life antagonist - and discusses his tendency to show his bad side.

"Do you ever feel you've become the worst version of yourself? That a Pandora's box of all the secret, hateful parts - your arrogance, your spite, your condescension - has sprung open? Someone upsets you and instead of smiling and moving on, you zing them? "Hello, it's Mr Nasty." I'm sure you have no idea what I'm talking about."

As a follow up to my last post about the human spirit shining through unremitting darkness, I cannot help but ask the question: Have we worked hard enough to become the best version of ourselves? If horrific events, moments of terrible, life and death trials, can reveal our best sides - our noblest iterations - shouldn't we strive for such virtues in our every day existences?

In other words: At what point do we move from trying to become the person we want to be and actually start being the person we want to be?

I have days, like this one, when I can almost see it - all of the things I want to become - out in front of me. A kinder, far more forgiving heart, a more patient teacher, a better friend and colleague; feeling less stressed about things that, in six months, will matter so little that I will, in all likelihood, not remember them. Getting more rest, eating better, taking better care of myself. Being a better "fill in the blank" to the people that matter most in my life. Just being better.

Perhaps its being 29 and knowing that in five short months - less than half a year - I will be 30. There will finally be no combination of math I can do to argue that my life is "just beginning." The cold, hard reality, like that facing our fictional President Bartlett, will be unpleasant but true none-the-less. I will be thirty. Anything I have yet to change will still need changing - I'll only have less time than I used to to get it right.

Four years ago, I wrote about turning 25 - I stated that there is a moment when you realize that you are no longer preparing for life, but rather, you are living it. If those words were true at 25, then by 30 they have solidified before my eyes. And as I said back then - as I dispensed little parcels of advice laden with grains of salt - that as I crested the horizon and saw 25 - we should all start living.

My advice now is this - we should all start living better. I can't explain why I have moments like this - when I so urgently want to tell as many people these things as I can. Maybe it's some residue from nearly being killed in a head-on collision at seventeen. Maybe it's something else. But start living better now. You never know how much time you have. So give people better than they deserve. Believe in the potential of people - and tell them. People have phenomenal capacity. Embrace each day. Don't "make the best of it" - rather, make it the best. Find a way to pull out even a small win from a losing day. Make someone smile. Hold a door for a stranger. Do something that gives someone else happiness and makes your own existence a little more worthwhile. Spend time with people who build you up and make you feel better than you think you're worth. If you find love, love with all of your heart. And if you get love in return, cherish the precious gift you've been given. Never take people for granted. Laugh. Eat well. Treat yourself well. Rest. Stretch. Find things that make you happy to be alive - whether large or small. And above all - push. Never get too complacent with your life. With any luck, these words help. After all, how many of us, in the coming years, want to look back at now and realize how much better we could have been? How much of an impact for good we could have made. And how desperately we want our time with our loved ones back.

I honestly believe that the thing holding most of us back from truly living, from finally being the people we so desperately wish to become, is fear. Like Bartlett's fear of losing re-election, we all fear rejection, pain, betrayal, heartache... the list goes on. And yet, that fear, that certainty that we will be stepped on, is the very thing that holds us back - we become defensive, needlessly callous, harsh, insulated. In doing so, we breed the same type of behavior in others. Those we love hold back when they constantly worry we'll step on them. Our colleagues might hold back if they feel, somehow, that we don't have the best of intentions. For those of us who teach, an attitude of pessimism - being convinced that our students will fall short of our expectations - breeds resentment, apathy, and a feeling of hopelessness.

As bizarre as it might be to picture - we might just, perhaps, be living in one giant Wile E. Coyote cartoon. Believe as if you are on solid ground, and you will be.

If we believe in the best of people. If we love openly, with trust. If we give our best. We might just get all of that back in return.

But if we give in to fear, cling to what we perceive as the safe road, and expect to be trampled, then we all start to fall.

What will you choose?

Ten Years Gone

2011-09-10T17:51:00.011-04:00

I have debated the necessity of writing this post for the last few weeks. The internet will be littered - choked -with blog posts, pictures, tweets, Facebook status updates, and a litany of other assorted memorials to the events that unfolded ten years ago tomorrow. Mine is yet another addition to a cacophony of digital noise - wholly unnecessary. If you want to read the writings of someone who was there, someone who was shaped directly by the events of 9/11, go read Jeff Jarvis' post on his experiences. Jeff is a remarkable professor of journalism at CUNY and his thoughts on the public and private spheres are groundbreaking and refreshing. I beseech you to go there and read before you do anything else. Then, if you want the definitive accounting of events, the fallout of 9/11 and where we have been over the last decade, go to the New York Times' website on the events. Both Jeff's personal account and the might of the Times' ability to collect, sort, and present the historical information in a meaningful and insightful way, will tell you nearly all you need to know. Everything that follows is merely secondary. It is as much for my own understanding as it is for your consumption.

I was nineteen years old on September 11, 2001. I was a year out of high school and I had spent the previous sixteen months doing very little; staying out with friends, sleeping late, playing tennis, video games, and generally wasting my time. I did not know what I wanted to do with my life and I seemed to have no motivation to find out anytime soon. On September 10th, I played tennis with my high school friend - an eighteen year old named Jordan - came home around 10PM, ate dinner, surfed the net until midnight, and went to bed.

9/11 began with my mother shaking me in bed: "Sweetheart, you need to wake up. Something is going on, I don't know what it is but you need to get up." I looked over my shoulder - I was lying facing away from my TV - and saw the North Tower of the World Trade Center on fire. "What the hell?" I grumbled as I pulled myself up out of my bed - my bare feet dangling off the side of the mattress. My mother tried to get me up to speed - of course everyone was confused, "They say a plane hit the Trade Center by accident... a small plane... a Cessna maybe?"

I had been obsessed with flight since I was a boy. I played every flight simulator I could get my hands on. Even half asleep, I knew that was wrong. "No... a Cessna wouldn't make a hole that big." By now my eyes were wide open, "Good God that's huge... how did it hit the building?" My stomach churned - I felt sick. At that point the camera pulled back and I could see the skyline. New York looked beautiful that day. I shook my head, not yet fully believing that I was in fact, awake and that this was all real. I muttered to myself, "visibility's got to be at least twenty miles... how do you not see the Trade Center? What the hell is going on?"

My mother, father, and I, congregated around the TV in the master bedroom. Dad sat up in bed, drinking his coffee, as we all watched the screen. I remember that we had NBC's coverage on. It happened in the middle of the Today Show. Katie Couric and Matt Lauer were trying to make sense of things. "This is just terrible." I kept hearing that phrase over and over again from the dumbstruck commentators on TV. Terrible indeed. Eyewitnesses kept calling in; frantic, static filled phone calls from people on the streets of New York, looking up at the burning Trade Center as the sound of sirens wailing in the background, echoed off the Manhattan skyscrapers.

Then it happened.

As the helicopter camera pulled back, a large jet plane blasted into view; traveling at some five hundred miles an hour, disappeared into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, and exploded. Glass, steel, fire and thick black smoke enveloped the South Tower. Everyone gasped. Then, silence. I remember someone in the room saying "Oh my God..." I think, perhaps, it was me. The reporters on TV were horrified. The TV studio at NBC, usually quiet with the exception of reporters talking, was suddenly filled with noise as stage hands and set people all cried out in horror. I stood, motionless, only shaking my head every few seconds in disbelief; my eyes welled up with tears; my feet planted to the floor as I felt my own legs grow weak.

The house phone rang.

It was Jordan. "Are you seeing this? What the hell is going on?!?" He was scared. We were all scared. The irony in this fear is that we all lived in Georgia - we were hundreds and hundreds of miles away from the events going on in New York. And yet, the choice of target, the World Trade Center - the two most recognizable buildings on earth - made it seem like it was happening in our back yard. I felt overwhelmed; the sound of fire engines screaming on TV, the sight of reporters grasping for words, flailing fruitlessly with the English language to attempt to describe simply indescribable events. It all flooded my ears, numbed my senses, and left me struggling to understand as a growing feeling of complete powerlessness enveloped me with each passing moment.

Then came the Pentagon. By now, we were all terrified and we all knew what was going on. This wasn't an accident - or even a series of accidents. Mind you, I never truly believed it was, but now it was confirmed; the worst was actually happening. The United States - the last sole remaining global superpower on earth - was under the most well organized, coordinated terrorist attack in modern history. People were suffering and dying, and it was all playing out on national television for millions of people to see.

I don't really remember the next block of time, as the Trade Center burned and the Pentagon burned and reporters scrambled with what eventually became false reports of car bombs and explosions around Washington, D.C. They did the best they could - how do you properly cover your country coming under attack and keep all of the facts straight? I felt sick inside, I felt angry, I felt scared. I felt a thousand questions flash through my mind - how many people had died? Who did this to us? This meant we were at war, right? It had to. When am I going to be drafted? Surely there would be a draft. This was Pearl Harbor, but worse. Pearl was a military installation. These were innocent civilians who died simply because they went to work this morning. How did this happen to us? How could this happen to us?

And then, as we kept watching and my mind kept racing - knowing that by now hundreds of New York City firefighters were struggling to get people out of the two smashed Trade Towers, the absolutely unthinkable happened. I remember seeing it. I remember not believing it. I still cannot look at it now without feeling sick. The tears well up every time and I simply cannot hold them back. The South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed.

It just collapsed.

I remember the NBC reporters struggling for words. I discovered later, that ABC's Peter Jennings and a reporter named Don Dahler gave the definitive account of the moment. Jennings, as the South Tower continued to burn, stated what we all thought "I have to say..." he began, "that looking at this... that the last time the United States came under this kind of attack... would have to be Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941." As he said those words, the South Tower imploded - 110 floors buckled, pancaked on top of each other, and obliterated an untold number of human lives in a matter of seconds. For a moment there was silence. Then Jennings, in shock, said "What are we looking at? What's going on at the Trade Center?" Another reporter muttered, "There seems to be a new plume of smoke." Jennings interrupted, "Don can you tell us what's happened?"

An emotional Don Dahler, nearly shouting, called out, "The building has collapsed!" Jennings, likely in complete disbelief even though the images were right in front of him, asked "you mean part of the building has collapsed?" Dahler replied instantly, "The whole building has collapsed!... there is panic on the streets, people are running towards Church Street..." Jennings replied, "My God. The southern…tower. Ten o’clock Eastern time this morning. Just collapsing…on… itself."

I remember all of us standing there, jaws open, tears in our eyes, completely dumbfounded at what we just saw. In the distance, picked up on some far flung microphones, the wailing of sirens from FDNY, NYPD, and Port Authority vehicles echoed hauntingly into the morning sky. I don't remember the next block of time between the first and second collapse, either. I do remember watching Aaron Brown on CNN, standing on some roof top, as the North Tower collapsed behind him. I still remember him saying, "My Lord... there are no words." John Miller, a reporter on ABC, would note at that moment that the emergency radio networks in New York, usually filled with determined calm even during the worst of events, was filled with people screaming code 10-13: MOS Requires Emergency Assistance.

There were two moments that day: the moment before the Towers came down, and after.

Every day since has been lived in the after.

I spent the next three days watching TV. As I watched, news morphed into the creature it is now: unending scrolling news tickers on the bottom of the screen became the norm. Reports on the Middle East were suddenly everywhere. We received an unending barrage of information on terrorism and death. Later, I remember pictures of people's loved ones appearing on TV. Pictures of mothers, fathers, brothers, husbands, wives, sisters, aunts and uncles, friends - pictures taken at work, at weddings, at family reunions. And the people filled the TV screens, crying, beseeching anyone for help; begging for their lost loved ones to call and let them know they were okay. Those faces - thousands of faces - were burned into our memories. So many people, so many lives, so many dreams, loves, potential... gone. Just gone.

I knew that, somehow, after 9/11, I was different; even though I wasn't there and didn't lose a single family member or friend in the attacks. Nothing felt right anymore. And it hasn't felt quite right ever since. I'm sure a psychologist would have a field day researching the psyche of people who witnessed a horrific terrorist attack on live television. Somehow, you feel like it happened to you, even though it didn't. Get a room of people my age together and we all recount the events the same way - slowly unraveling every step of our day - a far off stare, and sometimes tears in our eyes, mark the moment. We remember. We cannot help but remember; we have to fight not to relive it when we do. And we all remember gathering in the days that followed, wondering what would happen to us in the years to come.

As I wrote about the 90s a few weeks ago, I realized that I long for that decade not because of any material things - music or games - but because my generation still held a certain youthful optimism and naïveté about the world. All of that ended on 9/11. From then on I took the world, and my life much more seriously. I went to school, majored in history - likely so that I could better understand the events of 9/11 as much as I wanted to study German history - and worked each day to be a better human being. After seeing the enormous sacrifice, the loss, and the human compassion that came out of such tragic events, I felt that being a better man and making a positive impact on those around me, would be at least a small, tacit contribution to those who lost everything.

All of our lives were disrupted in ways we cannot even fully appreciate. In the ten years since, I've seen the United States bogged down in two wars. Classmates were wounded and killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. I saw Osama Bin Laden evade justice for nearly all of those ten years, only to finally be brought down in May. I saw the economy collapse, the budget deficit mushroom, and even the local universities I attended, take substantial blows. I was amazed at what suddenly passed for normal: water-boarding, torture, privacy invasion, TSA pat downs, taking off your shoes and belt every time you pass through an airport. Being unable to look at a tall building, or an airplane, without somehow connecting the two in the worst ways imaginable. I doubt anyone can look at the New York City skyline without remembering, without knowing instantly what's missing, and who's missing because of it.

And yet, the worst part of the last ten years seems to have been the forgetting. We're much less civil to each other now than we were before 9/11. We're colder. We're crueler. The warmth, human compassion, and the spirit that seemed present on 9/11 is gone now - faded out with all of the tattered 2 dollar American flags everyone stuck to their cars in the months after the attacks. Perhaps the tenth anniversary of September 11th will allow us to remember rather than relive, to reach back for our compassion, to find under the tarnish and debris of a decade of war and strife, the spirit of the human heart that was so apparent on a day filled with so much unremitting darkness. That is my hope for tomorrow.

How will you remember it?

Better In The '90s? Part III

2011-08-27T01:33:00.002-04:00

We have finally come to the end of our journey. This is the final, definitive look at the 1990s to answer the question: Was it really better back then? After all, generation after generation always looks back on the decade of their youth as the best of all possible times. For my parents its the 1950s and 1960s. And I have no doubt that for those born in the 1990s, the following decade is probably viewed fondly. So, was our decade really that much better, or are we simply awash in nostalgia - genetically timed to overcome us just in time to buy marketed products like the 20th Anniversary Special Deluxe Commemorative Edition of Nirvana's Nevermind?

In this post we'll look at what my basic day to day life was like back then, both good and bad, and see how it stacks up to the 2011 version.

I was born in the '80s, and I grew up in the '90s. I'm thankful I did. I grew up during a time of peace, prosperity, and the belief that life was going to get better as we grew up and got older. Cell phones, Facebook, the Web, and the constant, 24 hour non-stop interconnectedness that we endure today simply did not exist. Sure, some of the technology was there, but it hadn't gone completely widespread - or viral as we'd put it now - back then. I was eight when the decade began, and eighteen when it ended. I finished elementary, middle, and high school in that span of time. I drove my first car, had my first accident, tasted death, discovered love, and felt the energy, excitement, and anticipation of all that lay before me in life. What did I want to do? Be a vet? Fly jet fighters? Teach history? It was all out there, further down the road. All that mattered was today. What did I want to do today?

I endured boring high school classes and summer school; felt the frustration of not knowing how my life would turn out, felt the impatience of simply wanting to "get on with it" and get out there. I remember nights playing music in the stands at our football games; wearing my purple, white, and gold marching band uniform, belting out brash notes on my brass trumpet. I remember nights at the Huddle House and drinking coffee with my friends until midnight; discussing girls, cars, and what we were going to do when we got out of the small town we lived in. I remember coming home from band practice and watching Whose Line Is It Anyway. I remember sitting in my loft with my friends, taking turns flying Great War fighters on my computer while Monday Night Football blared from the TV down below us. I remember sharing CD's and talking about music. I remember beautifully empty summers, open weeks of simple free time - space - to breathe, be, and live. I spent my time on a bike, on long walks with my dog, on long drives through the country, or getting lost in my books or my flight sims.

My parents were younger. I was younger. My father wasn't recovering from cancer back then. I didn't know then the things I know now. Of course, I couldn't speak German back then and I didn't know anything about the work I now do. I had never taught a class. But I also didn't know - or at the very least, hadn't yet discovered - all of the disappointments, heartbreaks, and times of misery that awaited us. Back then, in the '90s, only the immediate - the now and tomorrow - mattered. There was a joy in living in the immediacy of the present. That mindset simply cannot exist now - in a world filled with bills, student loans, teaching schedules, and the ever more rapid passing of years - 27, 28, 29, 30...

Our economy still worked - or at least we believed it did. Jobs were plentiful, the budget was balanced, and a surging, oftentimes misplaced optimism, seemed to permeate the country. We were at peace, too. There were no troops in Afghanistan or Iraq. The World Trade Center still stood - resplendent in the dawn sunlight each morning on programs like the Today Show. It appeared in nearly every movie set in New York. You could look at it back then - Tower One and Tower Two - and simply think of them as the trademark buildings of the city. Smoke, fire, death, terror... these ideas simply were not attached to the images. Not yet at least. That would come in the next decade.

Simply put - life held a naive optimism and excitement; a pristine beauty that seems to have slowly and steadily faded in the years since. Yes, it was preciously naive. Danger, Recession, Death, Terrorism, War... we simply did not know these things yet.

We know them now. Some of us, myself included, have largely witnessed them from afar. Others from my generation have experienced them first hand. I know Gold Star mothers of sons born the same year I was. I know classmates that came back from Iraq and Afghanistan missing parts of themselves. And all of us - from the most optimistic professor down to my very own students - are all worried about where our future will take us. The shining optimism of that now long past decade is no longer there. It is a glittering relic of a past that simply no longer exists. We are scattered. We are scared. We are uncertain. And we're angry. We are no longer the children we once were. And, looking back on it now, we really were children.

And I can't help but think that each one of us, no matter where we are in life right now, has a night like this one: When we wish that we could go back - even for a few fleeting moments - and enjoy a life without the knowledge that the last decade has so unmercifully laid upon us. We're wiser now, and the load we bear is all the heavier for that wisdom. If only such wisdom could give us answers.

So. Was life better back in the '90s? Before we knew all that we know now?

Of course it was.

Better In The '90s? Part II

2011-08-24T21:20:00.001-04:00

It has been far too long since we began our look at the decade of the '90s and asked the all important question: Was it better back then? When we last investigated this question, we found a time of musical creativity that was both great and terrible; a land colored by flannel, rocked by grunge, populated by legendary albums and littered with music so bad it that could be played during a hostage crisis. Indeed, for every Soundgarden and Nirvana that the 90s gave us, it also bequeathed a big steaming pile of Color Me Badd. In short, it was the best of times and it was the worst of times.

But does this same mantra apply to the world of gaming and technology, lo those many years ago? After all, if you spent the '90s with a Nintendo 64 controller in your hand, playing GoldenEye 64 with your buddies for hours on end, you probably remember the past rather fondly. Indeed, before there was Call of Duty, there was just you, three of your closest friends, a couch, and a lot of yelling. So, was gaming better back then? Let's take a look.

The '90s, for me, was about a few critical moments in gaming. My discovery of PC gaming, opening up a Sony PlayStation for Christmas in 1995, and finally, at the close of the decade, acquiring a Nintendo 64 (ostensibly for my little brother, which I borrowed every night after he went to bed) and spending hours and hours with Mario Kart and GoldenEye.

Here's what I had to say about my '90s gaming days in an August 12, 2006 post on Skewed.

My first PC had stereo speakers, Windows 3.1, a Soundblaster 16 sound card, and it played Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM, Wings of Glory, Rebel Assault, and my first F1 Sim. Yes sir, nothing was better for an 11 year old than watching zomie carcasses explode into a pile of slimy guts in the middle of Hell. I'm sure that had no lasting affect on me... Alas that first Dell was a real pain to opearate. We had both the motherboard and the hard disk fail on the machine in its five year lifespan. DOS was also a beast - and I remember one Christmas evening that my poor father spent on the phone to some tech-support line, desperately trying to set up the IRQ settings on our Soundblaster in order to run the latest game. That first Dell, powered by the first Pentium chip (running at a blazing 60mhz), spawned my love affair with the PC. I spent (wasted) many beautiful summer afternoons glued to the tiny screen, blasting my way through Castle Wolfenstein or setting fastest laps in World Circuit. Too bad it was so buggy that it rarely worked.

In between my first and second computer (another period of only five years, that again, seems WAY longer), came the Sony PlayStation. That first Christmas morning in 1995, when I heard that famous start up sound (the one with the gorgeous low bass) and saw the rainbow colored PS logo, I knew I was in for a treat. My PS1 served me well indeed, from 1995 through 2002. It gave me Destruction Derby, Road Rash, Medal of Honor (plink!), and a host of other great games like Gran Turismo. The controller was far more complex than the old NES game pad. By 2000 it evolved to include two analog sticks, and the title Dual-Shock. It was awesome, and to this day, it's the best fitting, most comfortable controller I've ever used. Yes sir, that Playstation was all the gaming hardware you'd ever need.

Then 1998 rolled around. And, man, 98 was the year of the mother of all upgrades. The Dell Dimension XPS R400 (service tag G5JN1) was my baby. It served me for eight years, the longest service I've gotten out of any machine, including my cars. It was powered by the awesome Pentium II processor (running at 400 mhz - compared to 60), had an amazing Dolby Surround Sound set of Altec Lansing speakers - which I still use, and featured a HUGE 12GB hard drive. In short, it was all the machine I would ever need. If that wasn't awesome enough, the new Dell also featured the killer app, at least for me. While others were diving into Half Life, I was playing Sierra's other game, Red Baron II. To keep the story short, it spawned an addiction to biplanes and canvas aircraft which I have yet to kick - nearly a decade later. Of course it ran Windows 98, which remains my favorite OS of choice. Good ol G5JN1 was upgraded many times. I saved up $300 and bought a 3Dfx Voodoo 3000 series graphics card, increased my SDRAM from a puny 64MB to 192, and even installed a larger hard disk; increasing my space to 18GB. Everything it was designed to run, it ran well. Then sadly, time marched on and G5JN1 quickly turned into a paperweight as far as the rest of the world was concerned.

Gaming on that old Dell felt magical, for some reason. Perhaps it was the newness of it all. Maybe it was the simplicity of gaming in those days: you bought a game which came in a big box with a big color manual and you installed it on your hard drive and ran it. End of story. Patches existed but they were rare; usually only there to fix a few minute bugs that were missed right before release. Downloadable Content packages? Add-ons? No, these were simpler times. No fuss, no muss. Just install and go. And the quality of the games felt better than today - perhaps because game developers had no precious DLC system to fall back on to patch a half-baked product.

And for the first time, graphics moved into true 3D. Gone were the days of computer generated sprites - flat two-dimensional figures meant to simulate the real thing. Aircraft, people, objects, all were drawn in 3D and believe me, in the '90s, they looked gorgeous. And those games, those graphics, kept us playing into the late hours of the night. And the following mornings in High School were spent meeting early in the band room (after all, we were band geeks), and discussing what we had played the night before. It was a time to tell of adventures, of glory won, or lost. For me, those morning talks usually involved my flight sims - without a doubt, the most defining gaming moment for me in the decade. My poor friends stood patiently, eyes glazed, as I related in painful detail, the blow by blow account of a circling dogfight over the trenches, or a bombing run over Berlin.

If I had to pick one game I played more than any other in the 1990s, it was easily Red Baron II. An older DOS game, Wings of Glory, sparked my interest in all things World War I, and especially World War I dogfights. And if Wings of Glory was the spark, then Red Baron II was the giant bucket of gasoline dumped on the fire. I vividly remember sitting in the loft of our home, the smell of wood heavy in the air - the house was only a year or two old and the loft had gorgeous woodwork everywhere - and installing Red Baron II. I can still remember "missions" I "flew" - better known as games I played, in Red Baron II. Night after night, my poor parents were subjected to the drone of rotary engines, the booms of flak bursts, and their son talking about half-loops, barrel rolls, Immelmanns, snap-shooting, and deflection angles - all echoing down from above in their loft. I didn't just play Red Baron II, I completely lost myself in it. Oddly enough, it is the virtual memories of flying over the Western Front that are some of my warmest memories of the past.

My flight sims were my favorite games. European Air War, Falcon 4.0, MiG Alley, Red Baron II - all filled my days with hours and hours of play - learning flight dynamics, understanding the physics of flight, learning situational awareness in the air, and just having a damn good time. When my friends came over, they each took their hapless turn at the joystick, and within minutes were either shot down, or in the case of Red Baron II, spiraling to the ground after shearing their own wings off. I likely spent (or lost, depending on your point of view) hundreds and hundreds of hours to my flight sims. For me, there simply is no more immersive game than a combat flight simulator.

To even the playing field for my poor friends, I usually fired up the PlayStation and enjoyed some Medal of Honor. Medal of Honor was the first World War II first person shooter title with an eye towards historical accuracy. It was spawned as a result of the 1998 film, Saving Private Ryan. My best friends and I frequently took turns on Medal of Honor's multiplayer game mode - better known as a split-screen game with muddy graphics, sluggish controls, and small maps. And yet, back then, we lost hours to that game.

Then of course, came the N64 and the James Bond game GoldenEye 64. As a quick aside, the 64 stood for the graphical ability of the machine - 64 bit. Yes, it was a simpler time, back when you measured that sort of thing. Of course, the plus to GoldenEye over Medal of Honor was the fact that multiplayer could hold up to four people, instead of just two. The sophistication of the game play was significantly better as well. Proximity mines, large winding maps, and a smattering of game modes made GoldenEye 64 the game of the decade for most folks. And, truthfully, had I not been so flight-obsessed in the '90s, it would have been mine too.

Simply put, gaming just seemed better back then. Perhaps it was as much to do with our age as the technology that surrounded us. Computers were still reasonably new, the Internet even more so. Hopping online, playing a new game, or getting a free weekend to play a great new PlayStation or Nintendo game you picked up at the nearby rental store - it all seemed so exciting back then. We all felt so much more immersed in the games back then. Grubbs and I discussed this fact the other day. Neither of us seem to really "lose" ourselves in the games we play anymore. Everything is so high-budget, and geared for short attention spans that, frankly, there isn't much there to get lost in. My flight sims still manage to pull off that trick, but there are days when even a good game of Over Flanders Fields or Rise of Flight can't quite shake off all of the worries I have waiting for me in reality. I guess you have to call that growing up. And, to borrow a term from the decade in question: It sucks.

But I will always look back fondly on the decade that brought us GoldenEye 64, Mario Kart, Medal of Honor, Red Baron II, Windows 98, and our beloved 32 and 64 bit game consoles. It was a simpler time in so many ways, and our love of the games we grew up playing reflects that fact.

Tune in next time when we'll finally answer the question: Was life better in the '90s?

Dead To Me

2011-08-12T11:08:00.004-04:00


A Typical Call of Duty player.

Call of Duty died last night.

At least for me. It all finally stopped making any sense. The weapon kits, the idiotic arena style maps, the goofy perks, the retarded team mates that are just as likely to shoot you in the back out of boredom as they are to help you. All of it. I sat there, mid-match, on a map called Launch - which resembles a set-piece from a G.I. Joe movie - put my controller down, and turned it off.

I just don't care any more.

Allow some explanation. A quick search of Skewed will yield quite a few Call of Duty results from past years. In fact, hopping online, setting up firing positions, and flushing enemies out of their hiding spots was practically a hobby for Grubbs and I back in 2007. We were Call of Duty fanatics. I had played them all, starting with the classic World War II shooters that gave the series its notoriety in the first place. You might not believe it now, but Call of Duty was originally set around historically-based combat missions from the Second World War. The landings at D-Day? Easy Company's attack on German 88's? Routing the Desert Fox in North Africa? Fighting a determined and desperate enemy at Stalingrad? All of these historic moments in military history were the centerpieces of the series. And they were done respectfully. They gave you a visceral idea of what combat in World War II would have been like - and it did so in a way that made you grateful to the veterans who fought, and thankful that you weren't one of them.

Then came Modern Warfare and everything changed. After an immensely successful bid with Call of Duty 2 (which I still argue was the series peak) Infinity Ward - the company that makes the CoD series - moved to a modern theme. After all, in 2007, the United States was still deeply involved in two wars and a fight against terrorism. The subject matter was easy to find. And it was well done, for the most part. The end of Call of Duty 4, which saw you disabling already-launched nuclear weapons, was a bit-far fetched, but tolerable. Multiplayer, the hook that pulled people like Ryan, Grubbs, and I further into the series, was incredibly well done. No one had really created customizable classes. The maps were intricate, long, and required a mix of tactical thinking, strategic planning, covering fire, and good use of concealment. Long range sniping maps saw us laying claymore mines, setting up firing positions, and then hitting our targets. Short range maps saw the use of heavy fire-suppression weapons and the like. It required thought and it was incredibly fun.

But last night, as I played Black Ops, I couldn't help but see just how far the series had fallen. Maps were no longer strategic in any way. You cannot claymore your back trail, you cannot set up firing positions, you cannot use concealment effectively when the spawn point for the enemy flips and they literally appear right behind you. The weapons - which were a selection of real-world kit in Call of Duty 4 - is now a schizophrenic collection of generic assault rifles, cross-bows, ballistic knives, tomahawks, C4, and the kinds of gadgets you'd find at a James Bond garage sale - only not as cool. Maps no longer inspire thinking, they provoke twitch-reflexes. And that's because the game doesn't want you to think anymore. Just keep running! Shoot everything! Buy the next DLC map collection!

And don't even get me started on "emblems." Emblems started life as a noble idea by the developers to customize weapons. I'm sure they envisioned squad emblems that resembled military unit logos and the like. The best part is that they appear on your weapons. But, instead of the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne, what you get are badly drawn approximations of genitalia on the side of you AK47 Assault Rifle. All thanks to some teenager who has never seen the real thing. And sure enough, someone with yet another gag-reflex inducing logo shot me down. As I sat there, waiting for fifteen seconds to respawn again, I thought of all of the other fifteen second respawns I've sat through. They have to add up after a while, right? Four respawns equals a minute of waiting - of just sitting there, controller in hand, with nothing to do. I've been playing since 2007. That has to be a lot of minutes by now. How many books could I have read? How many more miles on my bike could I have pounded out? Hell, even if I kept gaming... how many other games could I have played by now?

Then I compared my Call of Duty hobby to my flight sim addiction. In a sim like Rise of Flight or Over Flanders Fields you embody the identity of a pilot you create. You are assigned missions. You have to plan them effectively. You must plot your route carefully, or else wind up in serious trouble. For example, if you fly over enemy flak positions, you can bet on getting riddled with shrapnel. Once you are in the air you have to fly in formation, keep an eye on your fellow wingmen, watch the skies for enemy aircraft, remember your line of retreat once you're over enemy lines, monitor your plane's mechanical well being - engine temperature, how much ammunition or fuel you have left. In short, a flight sim requires you to think from take off to debrief.

So last night, as I sat perched on the backside of a stair-well on Launch, I prepared to call in my airstrike. As I did so, a team mate who didn't much care for me hiding (they call that "camping" among several other incredibly derogatory terms), decided to shoot me in the back.

Off went the Xbox.

I walked twenty steps to my computer, fired up Over Flanders Fields, and returned to flying the skies of World War I.

And you know what? I finally started having fun again.

The Long Road Back

2011-08-04T09:49:00.007-04:00

...to Internet access.

So you have to ask yourself: how in the hell does someone not have internet access for a month in this day in age? Well, without a laptop, or a smartphone, and a with misplaced dedication to the robust, but completely unmovable desktop computer, I had few options for snagging an on-ramp to the information superhighway (does anyone use this term anymore? I thought not). Couple that with one of the longest, most frustrating, drawn out, exhausting, craptastic customer service experiences ever, and voila: one month, completely net free. I'm lucky I have any hair left on my head, for by now I've nearly pulled it all out.

How did I get myself into this mess, you ask? Good question. Allow me to explain.

At the end of June, as my boxes sat neatly stacked in Boone, the good people from my previous ISP dropped by. I saw them as they walked past my window; wire cutters and pliers in hand, and, a few seconds later, I heard the audible "snip, snip, cut" sound that meant all was about to go dark. That was June 28th.

Upon my relocation to Knoxville, I contacted AT&T to set up internet access. My other option, just so you know, was Comcast; hardly a choice between two titans of customer service. Mind you, when I set up my internet service in Boone, it took a grand total of about three days to get up and running. I assumed, wrongly, that would be the case this time.

Speaking of "cases" this is where our story begins to go all pear-shaped.

As it turns out, my AT&T internet required a working phone line - something I haven't dealt with since the days of DSL. And, by a twisted turn of bad luck, my particular apartment had never had AT&T phone service at any point in its history. A remarkable fact considering that my apartment complex has to be at least twenty years old and the surrounding apartments all appeared in AT&T's computer system - just not mine. The store rep typed and typed in vain, eventually looked up at me and said, "We're going to need to run an F-Case on your apartment... it will probably take about... let's see." A few days? A week? "About fifteen business days," was the reply. I should have known right then and there that this was going to be no easy task.

An F-Case, for those of you playing the home game, determines that your apartment has a working phone line.

That's it.

All they need to figure it is, does your apartment have a dial tone and are the lines healthy enough to support digital life? Fifteen business days is three weeks. And so the long, terrible wait began. Finally, on July 15th, I got the magic phone call from somewhere in East Timor. I had been approved! Hurray! Now I just needed my giant, ugly, proprietary AT&T modem that would cost me an arm and a leg. And UPS would deliver the package in a day or so. Perfect, I thought. Nothing would go wrong now.

Except UPS didn't have the correct apartment address.

And didn't deliver my package.

And failed to notify me that they even had the package in the first place.

And AT&T couldn't track it either, because they didn't have the tracking number for their own modem.

So, after a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on the part of the AT&T store service rep, we found it. And I had to drive to UPS to get it. Oh sure, I could have authorized a change of address form, but I figured they had already screwed things up enough. So, an hour's drive round trip later, I had my blessed modem. It took me about five minutes to hook everything up and I sat, eagerly awaiting access back to my email account, my Facebook, and a litany of icanhascheezburger pictures.

And I sat.

And sat.

And nothing happened.

My day, as it turned out, was about to be filled with service technicians. None of whom, had any clue as to what in the hell they were doing. First there was the U-Verse technician who tested my phone lines and determined that they didn't work. Then determined that the issue was outside of the apartment and, therefore, was no longer his problem.

"I'm confused," I said, resisting the urge to throw my cup of coffee at him, "You guys did an F-Case on my apartment. It took three weeks. Doesn't an F-Case test for a good phone signal?"

"It sure does."

"And I was approved. Right?"

"Yes, sir."

"Doesn't that mean I have a working phone signal and thus, should have internet access by now?" He muttered something about an "outdoor technician" that would be needed and promised me that he would be out the same day. He was. About three hours later a nondescript AT&T van sat parked outside of my apartment complex. Of course, like the first technician, the second technician only did enough work to make sure the problem was no longer his to deal with. Did he ever walk over to my apartment to see if the issue was resolved? Of course not! So, after he left, I plugged everything up, convinced, somehow, that it would work this time.

It didn't.

Mind you, by now, I had wasted the entire day screwing around with these people, trying to get access to a service that I had already paid for.

So yet another technician came out. Only this time, the man they sent had enough brains to realize that there was still a problem outside and enough sense to actually track the problem down. It was a refreshing change. Everyone else had been more concerned with something not being their problem than they were with actually fixing it and making the customer happy. Of course, this technician had only been on the job for three weeks, so AT&T hadn't completely screwed his mind up just yet. So, while this nameless technician knew the problem was outside of his jurisdiction, he followed the issue to the same box the second tech had fiddled with earlier in the day, and returned twenty minutes later to tell me what the problem was.

"I don't believe it." He said.

"What is it now?" I asked, completely exasperated.

"They hooked up the phone line to the wrong apartment."

Colorful obscenity followed.

I was waiting to hear it. Another technician. Another day. Hell, why not just push it back by another month? I mean, I only need to fill out my financial aid forms, register for classes, and contact professors. You know, nothing important. I don't see why internet access is so necessary in this day and age anyway?

And, I mean, Jesus, it's internet access - it's not like we just cracked the technology. Why is this so freaking hard for you people to figure out? These thoughts were going through my head when the nameless technician looked at me and asked, "How long have you been trying to get this hooked up?"

"From the start? Nearly twenty one days now." His reply was nearly the most beautiful thing I've ever heard.

"I'm going to go out to that box and fix it... this is ridiculous."

Just then, the clouds parted. Five minutes later, the lights on my big, ugly, overpriced AT&T U-Verse modem lit up bright green. Service granted!

And how long did the whole process take? From the time the lights went dark in Boone until they came on again in Knoxville? Well, I lost service on June 28th. It was restored on July 20th. Nearly a month.

And that's how I finally made it back here. So, welcome back to The Skewed View everybody!

Oh, one last thing. I got my first U-Verse bill in the mail yesterday.

And it's wrong.

Is The Internet Making Us Stupid?

2011-07-25T22:04:00.004-04:00

Perhaps this isn't quite the ideal way to word my question but it likely got your attention. But I couldn't help but notice some significant changes in my behavior during my month without access. And when I say without access, I don't mean I was dragging my laptop down to Starbucks for some free WiFi access. I mean no access. I was able to check my email three or four times using the campus library computers and that was about it.

So, what was different during my month away from instant access to the world's information? For one thing, I read much more. I've always been a closet reader. I love books, I love book collecting and the feel of a well worn, first edition anything in my hands is enough to make the hair on my arms stand up. But, I'm also a child of the video game generation. And when I have the choice between settling back on the couch and opening up a hard cover edition or clicking my mouse, the mouse usually wins. It's a sad commentary on those of us born in the 80s.

I also couldn't help but notice that once I had no access, my attention span for reading increased significantly. I was able to read without thinking about checking my email, or my Facebook page, or the news. It simply wasn't there. And with that constant distraction of "what's happening online?" removed from my thoughts, I was able to get lost in the pages of a good read for the first time in ages. The good reads in question just happened to be The Poetry of Robert Frost and A History of the Modern World. The words before me became more enjoyable; I felt like I had the time to take them in, savor them, and dig deeper into their meaning. Over the last twelve years - since I've had internet access - I've noticed a perceptible drop in my attention span while reading. I skim ahead, skip paragraphs, and generally gut what I'm reading - much the same way I read when I'm online. For the month of July, I felt like a proper reader - the kind that populated Universities a century ago, rather than a digital age fraud. But finally, this week, my internet access was finally working... and I haven't cracked a book in days.

Now, I know that my lack of reading is not the fault of the world wide web. Hell, without the internet, you wouldn't be here reading my ramblings. But, I cannot help but wonder if the sudden granting of access to all of the world's information hasn't made us all a bit... disconnected? Earlier this summer I toured the North Carolina Museum of Art with my girlfriend. Many of the paintings before me were ones I had read about in Art History class back in my freshman year of college. But to stand there, in person, and see them, changed everything. Suddenly, the Impressionists, who had been my favorite artists for years, didn't give me the same feeling of awe in person that I felt while reading about them. Instead, it was the sculptures of Rodin that kept me coming back. And while I still loved the paintings of Monet, it was the Dutch Baroque painters, with their starkly lit landscapes, seascapes, and portraits, that left me truly spellbound. One work in particular was so spectacularly lit, that you would be forgiven for thinking a bright spotlight was held just off to the right of the scene, which consisted of sailing ships being tossed about in a terrible storm.

My point to that little story is this: there is something about tangible activities that don't measure up to their replicated counterparts. Art, music, literature, theater, are all radically different in person. Convenient or not, nothing feels quite like sitting and reading a great book. The internet gives us everything instantly, but I can't help but feel that the trade offs are complacency and a short attention span. Rather than digging for information, we Google it. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't want to go back. The ability to pull up an author's name, the title of a book, or a date in history without leaving your desk is unbelievably useful. But I feel, after my month in exile, that an influx of tangible, beautiful experiences like reading a hardback book rather than the digital version of it, or researching something the old fashioned way by combing through a library late at night, or just branching out and having new adventures is just what the doctor ordered in our age of instant semi-gratification.

Give it a try. The results may surprise you.

Life In Knoxville

2011-07-25T11:53:00.002-04:00

It's 11:33 in the morning. I'm sitting down with my cereal, some orange juice, and my coffee is brewing out in the kitchen. Yep, it's the start of another lovely day. So where have I been for the last month? Well, I've been caught in the Purgatory of academia. I successfully finished my M.A. but wouldn't start my PhD program for some months; too short a period of time for anyone to hire me, and I didn't have enough money left to go on a vacation. Stockholm, anyone?

But I digress. I spent my time packing in the sweltering summer heat in an apartment that had no air conditioning. The highlight had to be the tours; the showing of my old place to potential new tenants while being asked if it got very hot here during the summer (no, I actually enjoy the past time of marinating in my own juices while parking my boxer-clad butt in front of a box fan) and if the roads were fine in the winter (if by fine you mean rubbing your Saint Christopher medal and running your car up a hill while praying to God that you neither plummet into the trees on your right or smash into the rock wall on your left as your Corolla's engine is left screaming for traction then no, it's fine. You'll love it.) So the packing came and went, and before I knew it the apartment was empty. My dad, who is nothing short of a hero in this story, came up from Georgia to help me move. Yes, we did it the poor graduate student way: A U-Haul van, a lot of straining, and two very sore backs. In four days, my dad and I, working by ourselves, boxed up one apartment, moved it, and completely unpacked it in my new place. It was remarkable how quickly we got it all done. Dad worked rings around me; not bad for a guy who has a bad back and needs a double hip replacement. When it was over I told him that next time, I'll take out more loans and pay someone else to do it. Dad promptly concurred.

And in so many ways I can say this: What an upgrade! I have air conditioning in the whole apartment! Everything I need, literally, is less then ten minutes away. Groceries? Two minutes away. Dinner out? Pick from about forty restaurants within five minutes drive time. And these are nice places too: P.F. Chang's? Steakhouses? Good pizza? A Dunkin Donuts and an iHop? Next door to each other? Yes, yes, and dear sweet Lord, yes. More biking trails than you could ride in a summer? Five minutes. Tennis courts, complete with wall for self-torture purposes? Five minutes, too. And campus? It's ten minutes away.

And all of this for a buck less than I paid for my old place.

So the last month has been spent in relative calm. Reading Robert Frost, T.S. Elliot, various history books, working on my German language skills, exercising, trying to lose weight (that M.A. thesis really packed it on), and otherwise, just settling in. Getting internet was a whole different kettle of fish, a kettle I'll be discussing next time. In the meantime, Knoxville is currently suffering it's worst heat wave in years. I can't tell, because it's 73 degrees in here.

And after two summers of sweating in Boone, 73 feels pretty good.

For Archimedes

2011-07-24T11:45:00.002-04:00

No, this isn't a dedication to the Greek mathematician, engineer, and physicist who lived from 287-212 BC.

This is for my cat.

I first met the little guy, a black and white tuxedo back in 1996, when I was fourteen years old. The '96 Summer Olympics in Atlanta had just wrapped up around the time he walked out of the woods surrounding our house in Georgia and into our lives. It was obvious that he wasn't a lost pet, he was a stray; a wayward cat looking for a home and he came looking at the right place. My mother is an avid cat fan. Truthfully, she loves animals, period, but has a special fondness for felines. While he didn't yet have his name, Archimedes, as he came to be known, played his cards and played them well. He purred, showed unusual amounts of affection for a male cat, and melted all of us with his big green eyes. Unlike most cats, particularly strays, he loved to be held and would often walk over and hop into your lap without even being invited. He came and went during the first few months we had him; getting into fights, bringing back dead mice, and generally being an outdoor cat. But, after a while, he moved inside, and rarely wanted to go back.

I often wondered why on earth he stayed with us. After all, his introduction to the household was anything but smooth. One of my earliest encounters with him occurred after I had come home from school. Seeing him perched on our deck, which sat a good twenty feet above ground, I came running towards him yelling "hey cat!" in typically immature teenage fashion. Archimedes looked at me, looked at the ground, looked back at me and decided that, yes, he'd take his chances with the ground. Over he went. I was horrified; convinced that I had killed my new friend. He landed not on his feet, but on his side, and disappeared off into the woods. Thankfully, he returned a few days later and was, miraculously, none the worse for wear. And there were a host of other rough moments for the little guy. Mom shut his tail in the door of her car. My autistic brother, who was always a little ham-fisted in his petting of animals, frequently bopped Archimedes in the head, affectionately, of course. And each time, Archimedes took it like a champ, wincing ever so slightly as he sat there to enjoy, or absorb, my brother's petting. Over the years he was stepped on, tripped over, dropped, and suffered all of the indignities of domestic life. Yet he always loved us, unquestioningly. If only people could do the same.

He certainly gave us some scares over the years too. Three times he disappeared from the house; not returning for a few days or even a week. I often wondered what sort of adventures he got himself into during his periods of absence. Each time he left, we worried and fretted that he was gone for good, none more so than mom. The two had an odd understanding between each other. She'd return home late at night from work and he would be waiting up for her; perched on the counter to meow and talk to her about everything that had gone on during the day. I swear that every act of mistreatment, every sign of malice from the family dog, every missed feeding, was reported diligently to my mother. He also had a sensitive stomach that was never quite cured. I wrote about his panache for upchucking at the worst possible moments right here on Skewed many years ago. You can read about it here. Over the years my mother developed a peculiar talent for detecting the earliest signs of a queasy cat. Often, right before disaster would strike, she would find him, grab him, and fling him into the kitchen - the one part of the house with linoleum floors - to make cleanup just that little bit easier. I'm sure the trip through the air, while fighting the urge to vomit, couldn't have been pleasant for Archimedes but, as I said, he took everything in stride.

The moments I enjoyed with him were the quiet ones. During my high school years, I frequently set up my late grandfather's train collection - a mammoth set of large scale model trains made in Germany called LGB. The task of doing so required a lot of crawling around on the floor. Archimedes would frequently follow me around, nuzzling on me as I crawled from corner to corner, connecting track and checking wires. Then, at night, when the work was done, I'd sit with him on the floor and drink egg nog while I ran the trains (to make sure they worked, of course) while he purred in my lap. Few things bring sleep faster than a warm and happy cat purring next to you. Archimedes also had a knack for knowing when one of us was sick. And during my many bouts with bronchitis over the years, he frequently hopped up on my bed, something he never did otherwise, to check on me. I woke up many mornings, feeling incredibly ill, only to find that he had kept me company through the night. Animals are remarkable creatures.

Of course, all of these memories stretch over fifteen years. And the pain of pet ownership is the knowledge that one day, it will all end. It's something you don't usually think about. And as Archimedes aged, he did so gracefully. He still sprinted from one end of the house to the other when I was home a few months ago. Somehow, we all equated sprinting with good health. If he was running, he was fine. Then, a few weeks ago, he stopped running. He started looking gaunt and tired. Eating, something he did with a considerable zeal - not to mention talent, as he once snatched a complete tuna fish sandwich from my plate while my back was turned and inhaled the whole of it before I caught him - no longer interested him. A few days ago, my mother took him to the vet. X-rays were made. The prognosis bad. Liver and kidney failure. Or, as I put it, God's built-in expiration date. Even if you manage to avoid all of the mortality pitfalls in life, your kidneys will get you in the end. And so, while I spent that hot summer day fighting to get internet access hooked up in my apartment in Knoxville, my mother sat quietly with her dear old friend in Georgia, and stroked him for the final time as he was put to rest. They buried him in the back yard under a crape myrtle overlooking the farm across the way. The phone call came last night, informing me that the little guy, as I always called him, was no longer with us. Fifteen years, or to put it another way, more than half of my lifetime, with Archimedes, had come to an end. I only wish I could have been there.

I'll cherish the memory of my final time with him. Some months ago, when I was back in Georgia for a few days, I poured my morning coffee and rather than watch TV with my father, I went and found Archimedes in our den. He was curled up in his chair, looking happily at me as the sun moved ever so slowly to warm him. I walked over and sat, gently, next to him. I spent nearly an hour there, in my pajamas with my coffee, and petted him. It was a great morning. I'm not terribly sure how to wrap a post like this. Skewed was always about satire but I find that, as the blog and I both age ever-so-slightly, it's becoming much more about life. Archimedes was one of our original pets. He outlived and outlasted the lot of them. Dogs, cats, birds, even fish came and went. Archimedes was always the constant that remained. And the years of joy he gave us was more than worth the loss we now feel. Thank you, my dear friend. You will be missed.

Archimedes reposing in the sunlight: his favorite pastime.

We're Back!

2011-07-23T14:40:00.000-04:00

Just a quick update after what turned out to be a long month of silence here at Skewed. I have relocated successfully to the fantastic city of Knoxville (more on that at another time) and I finally have internet access from my home (more on that another time as well). Updates will follow shortly. And, if I'm not mistaken, I still have my "Better In The 90's?" series to complete before the start of what will likely be a busy fall semester.

It's all about to get very interesting.

Moving

2011-06-30T09:57:00.001-04:00

Last night, I sat surrounded by boxes, a bottle of Seltzer water was on my desk, a half-eaten chocolate bar sat next to it, and on the other side of my table was my newly gifted copy of A History of the Modern World: Third Edition. This morning, I'm nursing a cup of coffee and enjoying the room I called my "office" for the last time. By tonight, even the computer will be in bits, all boxed and ready to go.

This is it. I'm moving.

In a few days, I will be in a new town, in a new apartment, on the verge of starting my PhD program. The long journey from my first semesters of college in 2002 has led me here, to this moment. I'm incredibly excited about the new opportunities that lay before me. But, in this moment of packing, when everything I own sits crated around me, I can't help but look back. And, frankly, I can't believe it came so quickly. I remember unpacking and moving in here two summers ago; sweating in this apartment with no air conditioning in 90 degree heat, and wondering how in the hell I was going to do it all. I spent my first weeks getting my legs under me, learning where things were, memorizing my new zip code. And now, I've blinked, gotten my masters degree, and now I'm heading out again. So much has happened in such a short space of time.

There were the terrible winters. Days of blinding snow and below zero temperatures. Days so bad that I wondered if I would even survive them. There were nights when I slid my car up my hill, hoping beyond hope that I would make it all the way to the top and not slide off into the trees. There were mornings spent walking to campus wearing flannel-lined blue jeans, boots, and the heaviest coat I've ever owned, and still feeling numb when I arrived. There were the hot summers; days filled with box fans, iced tea, and when all else failed, sticking my head in my freezer for a few minutes of relief. I've never completely decided which was worse. The winters were far more dangerous, the summers far more oppressive and miserable.

Then there was the work. There were papers, late night grading sessions, the endless trail of research, struggling to find a topic and then celebrating in joy once it was in front of me. The writing process took forever, lagged, and then finally came to an end after a 36 hour stretch of sleepless, determined work. I stood on my porch, drank a hot cup of tea, and watched the sun come up the morning I finally conquered my thesis. The next few weeks were a blur. Defense, honor ceremonies, graduation, congratulatory dinners, going away lunches, final goodbyes.

And now I sit. Done. It is staggering how quickly two years went and how different life is at the other end of the journey. There is no more future here, however: there are no more meetings, no more classes to lecture, no more courses to take, no lunches, no coffee meetings... nothing. Just boxes, sweat, a U-Haul truck, and a one way drive to the next stop, the next destination. There is joy, heartbreak, and a weary curiosity about it all. I'm looking forward to the next step, the next months, the next years. But, after it all, I can't help but ask myself how many more stops lie ahead.

A Postmodern Post

2011-06-18T11:46:00.000-04:00

And now, The Skewed View presents a postmodern post from Fred. Take it away, Fred!

The rabbit is a giraffe.

Here is a picture of a walrus:

Thank you and Gesundheit.

Better In The '90s? Part I

2011-06-13T11:58:00.009-04:00

We are now well and truly into the second decade of the new millennium. And as I move out of my twenties and look at the approaching horror of my thirties, I cannot help but ask: Was it better back then?

Back then of course, was, quite possibly, the best decade of them all: the 1990s. Yes, I'm showing my age, but I cannot help but think back to my times as a teenager in the decade of Clinton and wonder if life wasn't actually better. To test this hypothesis, Skewed is going to examine the 90s from several perspectives. Music, TV, Current Events and Daily Life, and Gaming and Technology. In short, all of the things that we were used to back then and compare them to today. Hopefully, by the end of our little experiment, we'll know if the 90s really were that much better, or if the human brain is simply wired to look back at one's youth in an ever more favorable light as time goes on.

Let's start with music, shall we?

The 90s witnessed some of the most diverse, groundbreaking, monumental music seen in twenty years. The death of the hair bands signaled the beginning of grunge. For every Poison, Ratt, and White Snake left dead on the side of the road, a Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Soundgarden took its place. Out went music about decadence, partying, and picking up women. In came music about teenage disillusion, anger, frustration, and a call for rebellion. I disliked it at the time, and yet, I've grown to love it as I've gotten older. Nirvana was the standard bearer, no doubt. Peal Jam was the artistically inclined, politically active grunge act.

But Soundgarden was my favorite. Soundgarden was the most musically diverse grunge act of them all. Songs like Fresh Tendrils, which featured time signature changes placed on the page like a shotgun blast, kept you guessing as you listened. And then of course there were the big hits: Black Hole Sun, The Day I Tried To Live, Rusty Cage. Soundgarden, with Chris Cornell's paint-peeling vocal ability, could thrash with the best of them, and yet still write some incredibly intricate songs.

Grunge, no doubt, defined the decade. There was Grunge, Post-Grunge, and the descendents of Grunge. Every band in the 90s wore flannel at some point. They all had long hair, they all looked scornfully at the camera in their music videos, and they all sang about the jadedness of life in the 90s. Oh, if only we know how good we really had it back then.

Then there were the mainstream bands I liked in the day. For me, the 1990s were defined by one album. And no, it isn't Nevermind. It was the Wallflowers: Bringing Down The Horse. Songs like One Headlight, Three Marlenas, and Invisible City defined the hope and despair of growing up in the 90s. The opening notes of One Headlight instantly transport me back to summers of nothingness; of open days and weeks of lounging around the house, playing video games, going for hikes with my dog, and otherwise, just being for a while. I hear Jakob Dylan's vocals and I remember a time when I didn't worry about anything. When things like life insurance, apartment rent, car payments, and cell phone minute plans never entered my mind. When life was about little more than getting your favorite girl to like you, hanging out with your friends, and ranting about whatever PlayStation game was the best that week. It harkens back to a simpler time.

So too with acts like Matchbox 20. Yes, I know I'll catch some hell for liking them, but they remind me of those times like few other bands do. And their songs are deservedly good, as well. Their radio hits were catchy, yes, but their other tracks had a level of depth that I don't think was ever really appreciated. My favorite is the oddly titled Back 2 Good, where Rob Thomas, in his Pre-Santana explosion days, sings of disillusion and heartbreak; of wondering if one can ever truly walk back to where they were before life, experience, and the shattering of dreams left them as the disaffected wreck the became.

Of course, my favorite Matchbox album came right at the end of the decade, in 2000. Songs like Bent, Bed of Lies, and Mad Season spoke to me and related the feelings of graduating high school, of witnessing your fellow classmates scatter to the wind - many of them marrying and settling down weeks after graduation - after all, this was a small-town high school. Of others disappearing abroad, or heading to college and med school. "I feel stupid, but I know it won't last for long." When haven't we felt that? "I started out clean, but I'm jaded. Just phoning it in." I think we've all been there too.

The great bands from the decade read like a who's who of modern rock. Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Jane's Addiction, Metallica, Green Day, Collective Soul, Matchbox Twenty, The Verve, The Verve Pipe, Ben Folds Five, The Cranberries, Counting Crows, Crash Test Dummies, Barenaked Ladies, The Offspring, Radiohead... the list goes on and on. Songs like The Freshman, and Bittersweet Symphony still resonate, nearly fifteen years after their release.

Indeed, if you aren't careful, music from the 90s may seem like all cream. Alas, how quickly we forget the chaff that was cut from the wheat. Because, as much as I hate to admit it, for every Pearl Jam out there, we had to endure a Milli Vanilli or a Color Me Badd. Allow me to take you for a not so pleasant walk down memory lane.

Milli Vanilli, the most famous, Grammy Award Winning band that never was. Rob and Fab, two models from Europe who couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, were the first truly manufactured acts in music history. In the days before auto-tune could save them, Rob and Fab were cover boys for a group of talented Motown style singers that weren't pretty enough to be a true boy band. So the real artists cut the tracks and left the two pretty boys to go out on tour and lip-sync the hell out of everything. Which was fine, until the tape got stuck. Oh, Milli Vanilli, if only you had existed today. You'd be fine. We could auto-tune your atrocious singing abilities and with Mp3 files, you'd never get stuck on loop mode. And that Grammy would likely still be yours.

And then there were the real winners of the "Worst Band of the 1990s" contest. Color Me Badd. Yes, so bad that they have to spell bad with two d's. With songs like "I Wanna Sex You Up," Color Me Badd was quite possibly the most annoyingly atrocious band of the decade. And, lest we forget, this was the decade that witnessed the Spice Girls and Hanson! And look at the outfits! Oy vey! Flared suit pants, hair so gelled that it became its own fire hazard. Bad lyrics, horrible singing, attempted rapping, overzealous use of cheap Casio keyboards, excessive utilization of synthesizers. The list of crimes committed by this "band" goes on and on. It was in their lyrics, however, that the members of Color Me Badd should have been tried for War Crimes. I'll give you but a snippit: "We can do it 'till we both wake up." What, exactly does that mean? You can make love until you wake up? Are you fornicating in your sleep? Are you so bad at making whoopee that your partner is actually unconscious until the end? Do you have a fetish for narcoleptics?

And this doesn't even touch on the boy band craze of the decade. As Dickens so eloquently puts it, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. For all of the great songs of the decade, there were the proverbial turds in the punchbowl. So...

Was music in the 1990s better? Let's compare with today, shall we? We now live in an age of overly fabricated, auto-tuned, lyrically brain dead, junk where acts like Lady Gaga are revered as ground breaking and artistic simply because she's an outspoken oddity. Radio all sounds the same, every band is a bland, uninteresting combination of teenage angst, out of tune singing, thrashing guitars, and boring lyrics. In other words, it sounds a lot like the 90s, a decade when a mountain of grunge copy cats rose with their fake flannel, their fake angst, and their fake thrash rock. A time when acts like Madonna, who was famous for being an outspoken oddity, were revered for being ground breaking and artistic. Fifteen years later, she just sounds dated. Me thinks Ms. Gaga will suffer a similar fate.

But everything old is new again. The old acts of the 90s are rising once more, with Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, and even Alice in Chains all reuniting - the last one is especially impressive considering that the lead singer has been dead for years. I still listen to my music from the 90s. Songs like One Week, by the Barenaked Ladies (pre-cocaine Steven Page at his best), Real World by Matchbox 20, Run by Collective Soul, all still speak to me today. They remind me of my true self, my authentic self; the version of me that held on to idealism and hope even as the real world, in all of its truly filthy, sloppy, unruliness bared its teeth. Then again, people older than me do the same thing with the music of the 80s or the 70s. I think its an innately human trait.

So was it better back then? I think it was. But then again, take anyone from any other generation, and they would likely offer a different perspective.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go listen to Bringing Down the Horse and remember summers from a simpler time while trying to find an apartment, plan a move, and wonder how in the hell I can afford it all...

Go. Watch. Now!

2011-06-11T08:30:00.004-04:00

Today is the big day. The 24 Hours of Le Mans. For any motorsport fan worth his salt, this is the biggest day of the calendar year. The day when fifty plus cars and over a hundred and fifty drivers take to 8.469 miles of French country roads and racing circuit to compete in the greatest race on earth. Through heat, rain, night, dawn, and afternoon sun, they will push the limits of their machines and their bodies. Exhaustion, concentration, elation, fatigue, sorrow, joy, all will be on display. It is the full color pallet of human emotion in all of its glory and grandeur. And you just can't help but feel yourself pulled in for the ride.

It's now 8:30 AM. Go tune into Speed TV if you're here in the United States to watch the pre-race coverage. The cars roll off at 3PM French time, or 9AM Eastern Standard Time. And when Speed steps away to cover the rest of racing this weekend (which is probably the only time Formula One is counted as "the rest of racing") be sure to log on to Speed's streaming online coverage as well as the fantastic commentary from the guys at Radio Le Mans.

This should be a great year. Audi is running their new R18 against the die hard racers at Peugeot. Corvette is looking to carve out success in a new class, and a host of new faces will take to the track. Don't miss out. After all, I've written a litany of posts about Le Mans, so you know where I'll be for the next 24 hours.

As Steve McQueen said: Racing is life. Everything else is just waiting.

In thirty minutes... the wait is over!

Not A Sport

2011-06-09T13:49:00.001-04:00

It's amazing what you come across on television while you're stuck at home, unemployed for a month.

In between the litany of bad reality TV shows, which are neither particularly "real" nor particularly good and whole networks devoted to selling me useless crap, I happened upon the Scripps National Spelling Bee Championships... on ESPN.

That's right, ESPN.

Now, let me clarify something. I don't have a problem with the National Spelling Bee. Well, I do, but we'll get to that in a minute. I do have a problem with it being broadcast on ESPN. Why? For the same reason I have a problem with the National Poker Championship being broadcast on ESPN. It's not a sport.

It's just not.

Sports require some sort of physical effort in order to be a sport, right? Baseball, Football, Basketball, Soccer, Tennis, Hockey, even La Crosse requires some level of athleticism in order to play. There's usually a goal, points to be kept, a purpose holding the whole thing together. How does ESPN classify spelling as a sport? Well, it's competitive... sort of. The players wear little cards around their necks with numbers... which is sort of like a jersey, I guess. Of course, the mental image of cattle being led to the slaughter is difficult to repress when you see a line of spellers all looking morose with their cards around their necks. So yes, perhaps, in the loosest definition possible, the National Spelling Bee is a sport. By that token, I would think that if you counted the effort needed to move cards across a table, the National Poker Championship counts as a sport, too. And thus, walking across a stage, exerting all of the strength needed to stand and spell a word at the same time, now enters the pantheon of sports.

And this wouldn't bother me so much, but the ESPN commentators - and yes, they have commentators for a spelling bee - try to elevate little Timmy's spelling of "Avuncular" to the level of Ali vs. Frazier. Which, by the way, it's not. And the commentary makes it art. Let me set the scene. A small, emaciated, pre-pubescent, socially awkward kid walks across the stage. The middle-aged, crew cut, William H. Macy look-alike moderator gives him the word and for the next ninety seconds, the camera shows us all of the excitement of someone thinking. Then, little Timmy, in his broken, squeaky voice, slowly spells the word out at the rate of about one letter every fifteen seconds. It's like watching paint dry, only without the fun. Jim, the ESPN color commentator, however, reads the moment like it's the Olympic games.

"Timmy nails it! Nice clutch move there to ask for the root origin of the word. Clearly, Spanish to French must have tipped him off. And lesser spellers would have used a double S' in the middle of the word. But clear thinking, calm delivery, and a steady hand won the day. A true pro from start to finish." Then they flash to the slow motion replay of Timmy walking off stage.

Really?

Look, ESPN, do me a favor. If you're going to devote four hours of airtime to this "sport," please, just cover it for what it is. Stop making it into the discus throw at the Summer Olympics or Lance Armstrong winning the Tour de France. Stop talking about how much of a pro these kids are - they don't even have driver's licenses yet. They aren't piloting a Formula One car at two hundred miles an hour, they aren't throwing a ninety mile an hour fastball, they are standing on a stage and spelling.

So, just to sum up...

This:

Does Not Equal This:

And speaking of the entrants, here is my issue with the National Spelling Bee. I admire the hell out of these kids. The fact that they can spell words that I have to double check on a regular basis is awesome in this age of instant search and brain dead students. I admire their pluck, their tenacity, and their intelligence. But I also worry. I am a firm believer of the credo "everything in moderation." I think that life, when well lived, is lived in balance. And, conversely, when you put too much stock into anything, you can find yourself... out of whack. I don't mind these kids reaching far and aiming high. I applaud it. But it should never become their singular purpose for being. Which, while watching the broadcast, seemed to be the case with more than just a few of them.

And the fact that the entirety of these kids' lives, likely from conception, have been about this moment; the moment when little Timmy steps up to the mic with a giant cardboard sign around his neck and spells the word epiphany, is troubling. Which, in a cruel twist of irony, an epiphany is exactly what he and his parents should be having at that very moment. If only the moderator would have used the word in a sentence: "If your parents are so obsessed with you spelling words for the grand sum of your childhood, perhaps they could do with an epiphany."

Or an afternoon of electroshock, just to get them back on track.

A Lamentation for Sony

2011-06-07T17:46:00.004-04:00

I'm currently working on a series of posts questioning whether the 1990s was the best decade ever. In future updates, I'll be looking at everything from music (Nirvana vs. Lady Gaga) and TV (Friends vs. Jersey Shore) to the economy and life in general. I'll also be touching on the most important topics of all: gaming and technology.

Why? Because I can. Because it's summer and I'm bored. Because I'm in denial about all of the work that's fast approaching. Because I'm an old man using my blog as the digital equivalent of sitting in my rocking chair and yelling at passing kids from my front porch. Pick one, I'm sure one of those reasons is bound to be true.

But I feel the need to spare a special thought for Sony's PlayStation. As you might have heard, the PS3, the current gen console from the once mighty gaming giant, has suffered a litany of bad press as a result of high pricing, the limited list of titles at launch, and now the persistant hacking of the PlayStation Network (Sony's rival to Microsoft's XBox Live) and their horrendous bungling of the whole affair. It hasn't been a great year for Sony and after reviewing the glory days of life fifteen years ago, I can't help but feel just a little bit sorry for them. Why? Because, there was a point in time when Sony actually knew what the hell it was doing, and was very good at it.

Ten years ago, in 2001, the PlayStation 2 was console gaming's juggernaut. With the Nintendo 64 fading and the first Xbox not yet clawing away at Sony's market supremacy, the PlayStation was nearly synonymous with gaming. In fact, the word "PlayStation" had as much brand recognition as McDonald's and Coca-Cola. And for good reason. The original PlayStation was reasonably priced for the time and it featured a library of entertaining, engaging, and well made games. In other words, Sony got it. Selling PlayStations, a Sony exec once said, was like selling razors. You don't sell the razors to make the money, you make the money by selling the blades. In the world of video games, the games themselves are the blades. And for the better part of a decade, Sony was the best blade seller around.

And truthfully, I had forgotten just how good the games were until I dug out my original PlayStation and my PS2 just the other day. Now, granted, in the modern world of HDMI gaming with its gorgeous, eye-popping 1080p resolutions, the shift back to standard def is jarring. Frankly, it looked downright blurry on my LCD TV for the first few minutes. Then my eyes adjusted, and I remembered how much fun these old games were. Believe it or not, kids, graphics really aren't everything.

Take, for example, Gran Turismo 3. Essentially a graphically improved version of GT2 with about a third of the cars, GT3 was, in my opinion, the last truly fun Gran Turismo title in the franchise. The menus are simple, clean cut, and elegant. There is no elevator jazz and fifteen second loading screens just to move from the main menu to the car selection screen. Everything in GT3 loads fast, sounds good, and runs quickly. The races are fun, not laborious. And even after all this time, the game is still challenging. For example, I discovered that once you take away the "Rewind" feature that I've grown used to in Forza 3 (Microsoft's answer to the greatest racing series of all time), the task of winning an event in Gran Turismo 3 is still enough of a challenge for even the most die-hard lounge-chair racer out there. In fact, playing the Arcade side of GT3 on Hard mode left me finishing second or third at best. And the best part of GT3? I didn't want to stop playing. The process of playing never felt like work (granted, I wasn't progressing through the license tests at the time). It just felt like... well, fun.

Which brings us back to the original PlayStation and two other great games among a virtual mountain of classic gaming. Medal of Honor and Metal Gear Solid. Again, I can't help but lament how much better it used to be. The first Medal of Honor, released lo these many years ago in 1999, was the first major shooter brought to the PlayStation. Borrowing elements from the incredibly successful GoldenEye 64 on Nintendo's console, Medal of Honor had the basics down: great storyline, beautiful artwork that played up the strengths of the 32 bit console, and great controls. In short, everything needed to make a game work. It was addictive to play and replay and to this day, it's my favorite in the series. Even multiplayer - which consisted of you and your friend duking it out in split-screen mode, was fantastic. Without Medal of Honor, I wonder if the Call of Duty series would have ever been born, let alone left to mutate into the Modern Warfare juggernaut we know and loathe today.

Metal Gear Solid was the first major game to incorporate cinematic story telling techniques into a video game - and that was just one of two firsts from the Konami classic. While it wasn't everyone's cup of tea - I wasn't a huge fan when the game was new - it proved to be a ground breaking title and the game that brought the stealth genre to the masses. As an agent named Solid Snake, your job was to infiltrate a base in Alaska and un-do a nefarious plot undertaken by your former colleagues. Unlike most games, both then and now, Snake was lightly armed at best. He relied almost solely on stealth. If you were discovered by the enemy soldiers patrolling nearby, you would likely wind up being shot and killed by the enemy soldiers patrolling nearby. Stealth, subterfuge, and a sometimes ridiculous cardboard box were the tools needed to survive. In other words, you had to think to win.

Of course, those days are long behind us. We now live in a world of high definition, perpetually connected devices that phone home to either Redmond or Tokyo and require you to download the latest firmware update before you play your next graphically enhanced, blockbuster video game that grossed more money than the last Jerry Bruckheimer movie. It's all about downloadable content, multiplayer support, and releasing the next sequel within twelve months. And that's better, right? It must be. Gaming is bigger now than it's ever been. It's a multi-billion dollar behemoth that's enslaved to the release cycle and quarterly profit margins.

But I'm not so sure it really is better. Because, as I sat on my couch playing through Gran Turismo 3 until nearly 4 in the morning, I couldn't help but enjoy the simplicity of it all: Pop the game in, sit back, and play. No online gaming, no software updates, no DLC needed to play the next track with the car I wanted. And best of all, no Xbox Live or PlayStation Network broadcasting to everyone that I know that I was gaming in the middle of the night. It was just me, a very well crafted game, a comfortable couch, and my PlayStation. And that was more than enough.

Lastly, we share some much needed audio/visual aids for this post, courtesy of the great Classic Game Room.

Homeward Bound

2011-05-27T09:37:00.003-04:00

There are times in life when going home is the cure for what ails you. After what can only be described as the most exhausting semester I've ever experienced, it's going to feel good to pack my bags, drive home, and spend a few days with friends and family. It's not going to be a perfect trip. There will be moments that I'm not looking forward to. Moments that haven't happened yet that I already wish I could change and make better, somehow.

But the best thing about home are my friends, and they are all back in Georgia. I've written about something I call the Dahlonega Cure-All before. When life doesn't turn out as you'd expect, when you feel down, when you wonder if anything can make you feel better, there waits my town of Dahlonega, Georgia. I've loved Dahlonega since I was a boy. My mother was a nursing student at North Georgia College & State University (class of '95). I've seen the campus since I was eleven years old and, over the years, I've been in every coffee shop, ice cream parlor, pub, and book store on the square. I could try and describe the things that make Dahlonega such an enchanting little corner of the earth, but I can't quite find the words. The people, the campus nestled into the heart of the town, the shops, the food, the good coffee, the lights at Christmas, Connie's, The Crimson Moon, the Holly Theater. It's yet another case of a town being greater than the sum of its parts. Individually, all of these little nooks and crannies are lovely in their own right, but they combine to make a town that I simply cannot get enough of.

From 2003 to 2006, I was a student at NGCSU and I still consider those three years to be the best of my life. Something tells me that, if you polled my friends, they would likely agree with me. To be sure, life was far from perfect even then, but there was something about driving Blood Mountain and rolling into Dahlonega around eight in the morning, with the sun glinting off of Price Memorial, and the sound of cadets sounding off that, somehow, put things right. I could have lived on that campus, if not for the now-extinct requirement that I join the Corps of Cadets. In a way, however, I'm thankful that I commuted. I enjoyed the best driving of my life on some of the most beautiful roads in the world, and that was before I even got to campus. Once there, each day was a new adventure.

My memories from that place could fill volumes. Sitting through great (and sometimes less-than-great but still memorable) classes with my friends. Having lunch with them in the Canteen. Sitting in the Keg and watching football on Sunday's with Grubbs when we should have been working. Joking in Dunlap Hall with Blake and horribly misspelling faux pas, which I will forever read as fopas. Standing outside until the wee hours of the morning with Grubbs, Allison and Kristine and talking about the class that ended three hours earlier. Having a pint of Guinness with Ryan and talking until midnight. These moments have all stayed with me over the years.

And yes, there was a fair share of embarrassing moments; of miniature disasters played out in slow motion, but I'll take those too. Those memories rest in me; they haunt me in the best way and they are the moments that make me thankful for my journey in life. For better or worse, they define me. Some say that high school is the best time of your life. And I know that everyone's mileage varies, but I'll take my college years any day of the week.

Call it sappy. Call it saccharin. Call it corny. I don't care. The friends I made during my time at North Georgia are the closest, most vital people in my life. When something great happens to me, I call them. When something terrible happens to me, I call them. We've stood together in triumph and comforted each other in tragedy. I simply wouldn't know what to do without them. I'm also long overdue to see many of them. And for that, I'm truly sorry. I'm going to fix that this weekend.

So it is that I pack my bags and leave Boone behind for a while. It's another wet summer day here, and I know the drive will be a soppy one. But this evening I'll be home again, visiting with my parents and their two new dogs. I'll sleep in my old bed tonight and then, over the weekend, I'll reconnect with the people who matter most in my life.

Guys, I'm coming home.

Points of Interest

2011-05-22T13:41:00.002-04:00

I love Sundays in the summertime. Formula One is on my television. The mornings dawn early, dew filled, and sweet smelling. I sleep well during the summer - free of the burden of my work. Time slows down, I can think, breathe, and enjoy being alive for a while.

I also write some of my more interesting posts on Sunday. Hopefully, today will be no exception. Following a great Spanish Grand Prix, I browsed the news in Google Reader and happened across two news items that got me thinking.

First is this little gem from Yahoo!. Lest we forget that Yahoo! is a pillar of hard-hitting news. This non-story story discusses the demographical data revealed by the relative clutter of someone's computer desktop. I'll repeat that, as it bears repeating. The amount of clutter you have on your computer reveals your age, education, and geographical location. I'm not sure what crackerjack mathematician thought this one up, but for the moment, we'll go with it. The article states that if you have a messy, unorganized, or as I'd like to put it, disastrous desktop, you are more likely to be highly educated. You also are more likely to live in the city, for reasons passing understanding. You are also more likely to be an entrepreneur and, not surprisingly, you are more likely to have a messy closet. Of course, the "study" was conducted via a web-based, unscientific survey of internet surfers who happened by. That's obviously reliable data if I've ever heard it. After all, the internet is the same place that brought you the 9/11 Truthers, and we all know how reasonable those folks are.

So, to summarize, a website conducted a completely ad hoc, meaningless survey of random slack-jawed web crawlers, and Yahoo! felt the need to report it as interesting news. I guess that just goes to show that the day after the apocalypse is usually a slow news day.

I'd like to say a few things about this desktop thing. First off, this is my desktop. As you can see, it's pretty neat. I have a Masters Degree in History and I'm starting a PhD program in a few months. Now, I do live in the countryside and I'm not a businessman, so perhaps those two facts cancel out my education. I don't know, I'm not a "scientist" like the good folks at Hunch.com - the people who brought you this fascinating bit of statistics. What might you learn about my desktop? Well, you might mistake me for a Fascist, which I'm not. If you guessed that I am, however, a bit of a flight sim junkie, you'd be right. I'm also a tech-head, I use a wide array of web browsers. and I have a longing for the old days - hence the Windows 98 era desktop icons. I like a clean, open desktop because I'm an anal retentive neat freak. And I'm clearly interested in history - particularly the parts where people start shooting at each other.

The next bit of news that caught my eye came from the good, balanced folks at Fox News. This story discusses the death of the game console. This is something I take rather seriously. Blake Snow, the author of the article, states that new systems like the On Live game console, which looks like the bastard child of an iPhone and USB hub, will replace "old" game consoles like the Xbox 360 of the Nintendo Wii. The On Live pulls all of its data down from the Internet. This means that you'll never buy a physical game disc, you'll just "purchase" your "game" online to play whenever you want and pay a monthly subscription fee for the privalge of not owning your games. This works great, at least until they decide that you've gotten your $50 worth out of your game, or they go bust, whichever comes first.

Imagine if this was how the defunct Sega Dreamcast worked ten years ago? One of the most beloved, extinct game consoles in history would be remembered only on Wikipedia. I'm sorry, and this might show my age, but I believe in buying physical things. I understand that I've given a good chunk of my net worth to iTunes in the past, but when I buy a game, I want a physical copy that I can use. My Nintendo Entertainment System still works - as long as you blow in the cartridges and wiggle them just right. My Sony PlayStation from 1995 still works. I run every game I've ever owned for the PC on my new machine (which, as we've seen is uncluttered, thus indicating my lack of education).

If this is the way of things, that gaming is going to become some sort of cloud-based, pay as you go form of entertainment, I want out. Adding to the pain of the article, comes this quote: "I actually think consoles are a thing of the past... why pay $50-60 for sequels of games on $300 machines when I can play newer experiences in a lot less time - for a lot less money - one devices I already use." The quote comes from an "avid gamer" named Mark Ormond. Mr. Ormond, by all logic, contends that gaming is just as good on a handheld iPhone as it is on one of those pricey consoles.

I don't like the trend of where this is all heading. Mainstream gaming, much like mainstream music, is becoming mindless, auto-tuned fluff with no substance. One of the first "games" I ever played on the PC was a flight sim, F117A Stealth Fighter. In it, you flew missions over hostile territory. You mapped out your mission, plotted your waypoints, set your aircraft's loadout of weapons and equipment, flew in real time, read instruments, and of course, engaged in combat. Compare this with Angry Birds, a game where you fling feathered projectiles at walls in an attempt to knock out pigs who stole your eggs. See what I mean? It's like playing through Sargent Peppers and then throwing on a Ke$ha "album," if you can even call it that.

I've also suffered from the effects of this mainstreaming of my favorite hobby. Ten years ago, I invested whole evenings in flying one mission in Il2 Sturmovik or Red Baron 3D. But now, in a world of Call of Duty Black Ops, where I can log on and start blasting targets in seconds, sitting for an hour, flying over waypoints, and engaging in combat for maybe a minute or two, seems much harder to do. Flying doesn't keep my interest like it used to. Especially not after several years of exposure to the crack-cocaine of fast kills, eye-popping graphics, and what amounts to a hyper-fast reward system. It's like listening to thrash metal for years and then trying to settle back and take in Kind of Blue. The Jazz is better - worlds better - your brain even knows that it's better, but because you've eaten so much junk food for so long, it takes a while for it to be palatable again.

So the inexorable decline of human potential continues. We'll all be cloud based soon - paying out the nose in easily digestible amounts for years to "own" something that we don't actually own at all. It's great business: make your customers pay to keep using your product. Imagine paying 50 cents for every glass of milk you poured from the gallon jug you just bought at the store. Sure, it seems reasonable, until you step back and realize, finally, that you've allowed yourself to get screwed by the market, and thanked them for the favor.

If you need me, I'll be dusting off my gaming PC and playing the games that are sitting on my bookshelf.

Preemptive Satire

2011-05-21T16:25:00.003-04:00

Today's post is rather short. It was to be about the end of the world. If you're curious, I've written quite a few of these posts since Skewed's founding in 2006. Just look here, here, here, and here. And I was working on one for the upcoming Rapture, due to happen today at exactly 6:00PM, Eastern Standard Time (which apparently, aligns perfectly with the 7,000 year anniversary of the Great Flood).

That said, I know when I've been out done. I'm also man enough to admit it when someone has clearly written a better version of the post I was about to embark on. So, to welcome back Grubbs to the world of blogging (Carl originally started blogging back in 2006, not long after Skewed took off), I'm directing you to his post about the happenings (or lack of there of) that today will bring (or not). So, go here, read Carl's post, and laugh hysterically at his historical review of all of the past human beings who were convinced beyond all doubt that the world was ending - and were left to stand around and wonder what went wrong when the hour passed.

Now, if the rapture does arrive in the next hour and forty minutes, I'll have some serious egg on my face. But, I'm holding fast to statistics, and betting that won't happen. I'll also, as a good Methodist, point out the book of Matthew, chapter 24, verse 36 which says: "But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of Heaven, but my Father only." I'm just saying...

With that, take it away Carl!

Oh, one last thing...

Better Than We Deserve

2011-05-19T03:30:00.003-04:00

In addition to satire and random posts about gaming and European motorsports, Skewed also touches on music. I've written posts on everything from Soundgraden to Schubert to Clapton. And tonight is no exception.

I discovered a phenomenal band called Elbow last summer. As an American, I adore British music, and I found this gem of a group through an episode of Top Gear. Their big hit, Grounds for Divorce, played on a segment where James May learned proper Finnish rally racing from Mika Hakkinen. The song featured bluesy guitars, and a rocking melody. I quickly searched the web to find out who created the song and I was led to Elbow.

The band has been around for a long time now - yes, they are in fact a 90's band, as are all of my favorites. I downloaded their album, The Seldom Seen Kid, and started listening to it non-stop for the next several months. Grounds for Divorce is a great song, but so is every other track on the album. From the soaring opening of Starlings to the immensely relate-able Bones of You, where Guy Garvey, Elbow's remarkable lead singer croons "I can work till I break, but I love the bones of you that I'll never escape," the entire album is filled with soaring and heart wrenching moments that move beyond mere music. Like a great hymn, they touch the soul. Once I heard they were working on yet another new album, I knew what my end of semester gift was going to be.

I finally picked up that gift, a full two weeks after the semester actually ended. Build a Rocket Boys! is their latest effort and it finally arrived in the mail tonight. I admire the band so much that when my Amazon account notified me that my package had been delivered, I drove down to my mailbox in my pajamas at eleven o'clock at night to get it. It hasn't left my ears since and it's after three in the morning.

One track reached out and grabbed me, although I love the entire album and I have no doubt that, much like my experience with Seldom Seen Kid, I'll have tracks that reach me and call to me time and again. They shift and evolve, meaning changing as I change with the album. But tonight, asleep in my bed only moments ago with my iPod still glued in my ears, I woke up to the track I'm including in this post. I'm not embarrassed to admit that as I listed to it, I was moved to tears. Great music does that. Whether it's Schubert's Quintet in C Major, or Eric Clapton's Tears in Heaven, amazing music is enough to move the emotion out of you, whether you want it to or not. The chorus of voices behind Guy's voice, Guy's lyrics, which hit all too close to home at the moment, and the emotion of the song literally woke me out of a dead sleep and bowled me over. It was cathartic, and reminded me that yet again, I'm hardly the only person on earth feeling what I feel at the moment.

If you haven't listened to this band, you absolutely must. They are the best of not only British music, but music, period. They are humble, remarkable craftsmen of songs that touch everyone. I came across a comment about them on Youtube that really sums them up well: If you were sixteen years old and were given elbow's catalogue of albums, you could probably relate to a third of tracks. And that would feed your heart and head enough to make them your favourite artists for life. You could grow up with them and understand life's encounters through their songs. If you find them later in life like I did, you quickly realize your life has been played out in song. And all you needed to do was listen. A sad, comfortable companion they are. I don't find them sad, however. I find them remarkably relate-able and uplifting. Frankly, it's better music than we deserve. So, tonight, as the hours melt towards dawn, I leave you with Open Arms. Goodnight.

Things I Don't Need To See

2011-05-18T23:15:00.000-04:00

Pass the bleach, please!

There are times when I blog for fun. There are times when I blog to throw out new ideas, spark conversation, or just share an entertaining moment from my life. Then there are posts like this one: the palate cleanser, if you will. The chance to clear the breech, discharge my brain of ideas, images, and memories I don't want to keep. This is definitely one of those times. I'd like to call this post "Things I Don't Need to See." And, as is the case of many of life's woes, I can thank Facebook for the inspiration of tonight's post.

The joy of Facebook is the ability to connect or reconnect with people you know from your life. Colleagues, college friends, high school classmates, and random and great people I've met along the way, all occupy a place on Facebook. And, as with anyone in their twenties who is friends with people from roughly the same age group, I'm witnessing a litany of them go through the process of getting married and starting a family. About three years ago, the rash, erm, outbreak, um... I mean... host of wonderful and beautiful weddings showcased themselves on Facebook's homepage. Little thumbnails of classmates and friends in wedding dresses dotted the virtual Facebook landscape. It was sweet, and a telling mark that we were passing through an epoch in our lives. Well, at least some of us were.

And, three years later, the next logical, terrifying step has manifested itself on my wall. Children. Now, before you jump on me about bashing kids, let me clarify my thoughts. I'm thrilled that you are happily married. I'm delighted that life has blessed you with kids. After all, someone has to have them. I'm also tickled to death that you post pictures of your young'uns on Facebook. That's great. But please, for the love of all that is good and Holy in this world; indeed, for the sake of me keeping my lunch down, please stop using pictures of your unborn kid's sonogram as your profile picture. I ask, because I care. And I care, because it's making me nauseous.

Here's the thing. Your fetus is not your Facebook profile. Your fetus is not operating your Facebook account. God willing, the only thing your fetus is poking is you. So why, in God's name, do I need to log in and see a blurry, blob-like creature with its face pressed up against the screen, looking back at me through the internet? It's like the Zompocalypse - only instead of wading into an army of the un-dead, I'm greeted by a floating sea of the un-born. And, frankly, I'm not sure which one disturbs me more.

Please save pictures like this for your actual Tamagotchi.

And here's another thing. I don't - I repeat, don't - need application updates from something called "The Progress of Your Fetus App." I can't even begin describe the horror I experienced when I logged into Facebook about a week ago and was greeted by a little, floating, cartoon fetus describing how far along it was. We're not raising Tamagotchi's anymore - even though I know most of you using this Godforsaken app did just that about fifteen years ago. I don't need to know how far along the little bugger is, and I don't need a cartoon rendering of it to further inform me of things I don't need to know.

Let's compromise, shall we? Make a photo album for all of the blurry, distorted, disturbing, and misshapen pictures of your little darling. I'm fine with that, in fact, I encourage it. Because doing so means that you can keep using the normal, fully developed, human-like photos of you that I've gotten used to. When I see a picture of a glob-like fetus looking back at me, I wonder if my friend has recently visited Chernobyl, or worse yet, happened to be a little too close to a power plant in Fukushima a month ago.

So please, put the fetus pictures where the belong, and keep them off of your profile. And then maybe, just maybe, I can log into Facebook without shrieking in fright and proclaiming, once again, that the goggles do nothing.

Ze Goggles: They Do Nothing!

Rise of Nations

2011-05-17T23:03:00.007-04:00

Yet another gaming past time here at Skewed is the classic strategy game: Rise of Nations. Rise of Nations was released in 2003 and it's been a favorite for Grubbs and I ever since.

Here's a quick breakdown of the game if you're not familiar with it. You start as a civilization, usually beginning in the Bronze Age and working through to the Information Age. Along the way you gather resources, research new technologies and ideas (everything from gunpowder to the theory of world government) and seek to conquer all who stand in your path.

Needless to say, the possibilities are endlessly entertaining.

Imagine progressing from the Medieval Age to the Gunpowder Age. It's rather satisfying to see your enemy, still on mounted horses, as your troops walk up and shoot them down using the first arquebusiers. A resounding bang from their shots ring out, the mounted cavalry goes down, and more often than not, a sadistic laugh comes from the player.

Grubbs and I, as expected, have developed an effective strategy for when we play. He handles the logistical side of things: resource gathering, age leaping, researching new technologies, all fall under his watchful eye. I serve as the field commander: sending out skirmish parties, breaking up trade routes, and then, ultimately, leading my army of death and destruction into the heart of our enemy's homeland: leveling and killing anything in my path.

We usually do quite well with this approach. The game typically concludes with a final climatic and immensely satisfying battle - one last, gigantically violent outburst as my tanks, bombers, infantry, and armored units level buildings, and decimate enemy forces. And, when I've had a particularly bad day, we even take out civilians. Hey, they were helping to build tanks for the enemy, of course they had to die.

Tonight, however, was quite a different story. We hadn't played in months, perhaps even a year. So we fired up Rise of Nations, logged onto the Game Spy network, swapped login passwords, and started a game - the way that proper, old school, grizzled, gamers did it back in the days before Xbox Live and matchmaking services. We were just shy of exchanging IP Addresses, and it was good times.

Except Carl upped the ante tonight. Rather than playing on our normal difficulty setting, he upped it to Hard. Now, this really doesn't sound like a big deal, and in the realm of reality, it isn't. But in Rise of Nations, Hard is HARD. We've heard stories of guys who beat Rise of Nations on Hard. And doing so against 7 other computer opponents is the equivalent of Grubbs' little sister beating Deep Blue in a game of chess. It's impossible. And so there we were, the plucky Americans facing off against the Russians in a Hard match. And wow, was it ugly.

Don't get me wrong, we more than held our own. Grubbs, as always, was whipping out resources, knocking out age leaps, and setting up the needed infrastructure to build a massive military force. I sent early skirmishers out about thirty minutes into the match to exploit the terrain my scouts already mapped. And that was precisely when trouble began. Usually my forces get a little head start on the enemy, and we can successfully attack a city before they can respond. Not tonight. Right as I reached our own border, there was a large Russian force already lying in wait. We were firmly in the Gunpowder Age, but they already had armored vehicles. It went downhill fast.

I kept cranking out army after army: dozens of troops, vehicles, and artillery pieces. And we nearly took one of their cities. I managed to reduce it and my infantry was in the midst of capturing it when the Russians counter attacked. They swung in behind me and dug in, and it wasn't pretty. Grubbs, by this point, had performed yet another age leap, giving us access to bigger tanks. This worked, for about thirty seconds, and then the Russians leapt ahead again. Ultimately, I knew where Carl was headed: The Information Age. And I knew why he wanted to get there so quickly: Nuclear Weapons.

Usually the nuke is our swan song, our close out hitter, the final kick to the enemy's groin before we turn out the lights. Only tonight, the nuke became a defensive weapon. And you just know things have gone pear shaped when a nuclear weapon becomes a tool for defense. You also know it's a bad night when my army is used to hold the enemy still long enough for Grubbs to drop an ICBM on them.

The match only grew more and more lopsided. I fought valiantly, throwing everything I had into the Russian onslaught. Our P-51 Mustangs did their damnedest, but there's not much to be done against SU-27 Flankers with laser guided missiles. And as much as my tanks tried to stop the Russians, there isn't much you can do when half of Russia shows up angry and armed with Katusha rocket trucks. Nuke after nuke dropped. We tried to knock out their Wonders (special buildings which give the builder unique advantages like increased attrition to attacking enemy troops). We tried to knock out their cities. We dropped more nukes on their army. And the godless commie bastards just kept coming, no matter what Grubbs and I did.

Grubbs rushing towards Nuclear Armageddon...

Finally we unlocked Artificial Intelligence, giving us the ability to generate units instantly. Unfortunately, so did they. I threw no less than three full armies at the Russians as they kept bombing us - this time equipped with F-22 Raptors and B-2 Spirit Bombers (damn copy-cats). Of course, in Rise of Nations, you can only launch so many nuclear missiles before Armageddon arrives and you destroy the world. And Carl was racing for the limit faster than that suicidal speed freak in Vanishing Point.

As yet another white flash lit across my monitor, I heard Allison, Grubbs wife, inquire about the countdown to Armageddon on his screen. I explained over the phone that it was the countdown to the end of the world: use too many nukes and it's all over. In true Grubbisan fashion, Carl chimed in and said, "Yeah, and I'm trying to get to that number as fast as I can. Nuclear Winter is a win at this point." I couldn't help but agree with him. In one last, desperate gasp, I pushed the remaining forces I had left - about eight guys with machine guns and a Humvee - into the mass of Russian troops, now numbering in the thousands, and waited.

Boom!

One last nuclear blast and it was all over. Was it a win? Well, it's all in how you look at it, I suppose. We played the computer on Hard - which means the computer could generate units, gather resources, scout the map, and launch an army in a matter of seconds, where as the two of us - mere mortals, mind you - had to point and click to do it all. The computer doesn't. So, holding the Russians to a stalemate on Hard, even if it meant Nuclear Winter, was a pretty good night.

Then again, we are sick, sick, people.

Forced Decompression

2011-05-16T19:13:00.002-04:00

And then there was silence. This time, it happened much sooner than even I expected.

I had been begging for a break - a respite - a chance to stop, breathe, reset my brain, and start again. Perhaps then I'd be ready to tackle the challenges that lie ahead this summer and fall. I knew the break was coming, too, at the end of the month. Just a few more weeks of work, and then I'd be all set. A month off, or at least as much "off" as you get when you're trying to find a new apartment, pack your belongings, move to a new city, and ready yourself to start a PhD program.

Only the break came today, and not at the end of the month. I've worked for the University for the last year, both as a graduate student and as a temporary student worker. As it turns out, my student status expired much more quickly than I thought it would. Even though my thesis is still awaiting a final signature from the graduate school, I turned into a pumpkin anyway.

*Poof*

Today, I woke up, had some coffee, and prepared to head off to work on campus, as I have for the last year. Except today, I had an email telling me that I was no longer classified as a student worker and thus, my serves would no longer be needed.

So I'm on break, officially.

And, much like five years ago, I still don't know what to do with myself. I fidget, I pace around, I wonder if I'm forgetting to do something. But no, I'm not. Because there is simply nothing to do. I'm done, at least for right now.

So what will I do with my new found time off? Well, sleep comes to mind. I miss my bed, I miss my rest, and I need to catch up on it now before the next four years taxes me into a sleep-deprived mess. I can cycle, catch up on my gaming, my reading (which happens to be Reality is Broken a book about the benefits of gaming on society), and just give my mind, my body, and my spirit some time to rest and heal. And for that, I'm glad. Sometimes, prayers are answered. I've been asking for a breather now for weeks. And it looks like I just got one.

Big Brother Is Watching

2011-05-14T11:23:00.001-04:00

Here's another fantastically creepy story you can add to the "Big Brother is Watching You" files.

A Wyoming couple recently discovered that their Dell Inspiron laptop was doing far more than giving them access to Facebook and Hulu. It turns out that their machine, which was rented from the Aaron's rental corporation, was actually spying on them. The company, according to this article from Ars Technica, regularly activated the webcam built into the Dell laptop to snap pictures of its owners while they used their computer. Everyone from mom and dad, to their young son and daughter, all had their pictures taken while they used the machine. But wait, there's more! (Did you expect anything less?) The laptop also had key-logging software installed. That's right kids, every point, click, and word typed were all stored for future use, or blackmail.

And how did the couple find out that Aaron's was doing this to them? Well, they made the mistake of paying their laptop off a month early. Aaron's, in good corporate fashion, screwed up on processing the payment, assumed the couple was late the next month, and sent a friendly customer service representative to their house. He then showed them pictures taken from the laptop to inform them that yes, Aaron's was aware that they were using their rented computer.

Comforting, isn't it? Not to mention classy. "We know you were using this laptop that you failed to pay for this month. How do we know? Well, 'here's a picture of your wife in her nightgown checking her email this morning."

I'd have a well-timed joke to insert here, but this is just too damn creepy to be funny. Worse yet, this is far from the first time that such a situation has crept up on an unsuspecting society. Last year, the Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania was busted for activating the webcams on their student-issued laptops to spy on unsuspecting children at home. That's right: at home. While the school board insisted that the ability to "spy" was used only in the case of stolen laptops, this was later proven to not be the case.

I have to agree with Steve Gibson, who co-hosts Security Now with Leo Laporte over on the TWiT network - why do these webcams not come equipped with physical shutters? It seems like a pretty basic concept. It's a camera, it could be operating at any time without the user knowing it. Would it not make sense to give the user an option to block the lens? Simply slap a plastic shutter on the damn thing, and voila, privacy is restored. It wouldn't cost anything to add, either. And while it may not be as aesthetically pleasing at Steve Jobs would like, but it would solve the problem in a hurry.

So it appears that, thirty years after the introduction of the personal computer to the masses, a wide disconnect still remains between the perception of technology and cold reality. People regularly surf the Internet completely unaware of how throughly they are being tracked from website to website. They post insanely personal information on websites like Facebook, largely unaware that, despite their best efforts to lock down their privacy settings (and this is assuming they belong to the one percent that's even aware of those settings), their information is still largely public. They assume that deleted files are deleted for good - completely oblivious that hard drives don't actually erase data, they merely remove them from the operating system's file directory. They assume too much, expect no malice from the devices they purchase, and are always surprised when something comes back to bite them in the ass. We have millions of people using devices with cameras, tracking software, and, the ability to log your physical location. Yet the large majority of users have no clue about the kinds of vulnerabilities they are opening themselves up to and more times than not, they never think to ask. Now, to add to that list, you'll have to wonder if the very company you're buying from isn't out to get you as well.

I've got news for you: Big brother really is watching you.

PS:

Dear Blogger...

2011-05-13T15:29:00.001-04:00

In the five years I have used your services, you have never let me down. I know you've had some server issues, and I feel your pain as well. That said, I cannot seem to find anything I wrote in the last 24 hours.

Could I have yesterday's post back? Please?

Sincerely,
The Skewed View

[Edit: Thank you Blogger! About an hour after I put this post up, yesterday's work re-appeared! Well done, guys!]

Racing Is Life...

2011-05-11T19:23:00.000-04:00

...everything else is just waiting.

I doubt Steve McQueen knew how legendary his line in the film, Le Mans, would be when he spoke those words some forty years ago. McQueen was the kind of actor who always had a knack for encapsulating big moments in small amounts of dialogue. In fact, if you watch Le Mans, you'll notice he only talks for about three minutes during the whole film. But when he did speak, he made it count.

I won't bore you with a long, rambling, hyperbole filled post about why the 24 Hours of Le Mans is the greatest race in the world, the history of the event or why you should watch it. As we approach another 24 Hours next month, I thought I'd share my thoughts from last year's race and distill the last remarkable 24 hours down into some life lessons that I took away from it.

1. Life is a race. It really is. I don't know if this is a human trait or an historian's curse, but I have an acute awareness of time. And we don't get much of it while we're here. This years Le Mans was a reflection of the human understanding about the lack of time we all have. How? Because the 24 Hours of Le Mans ran as a sprint race. It was as if no one told the drivers, when the flag dropped and the race began, that they had a whole day to jockey for position. Every driver, from the fastest Peugeot to the most middling Porsche 911 drove flat out, against the sun, against their opponents, the odds, and time itself. They made every fraction of a second count. If only we could find that kind of efficiency in our everyday lives - we'd wring every nanosecond out of the years we have.

2. Life is unpredictable. Just like the Circuit de La Sarthe itself, life winds its way organically through the world. Le Mans is no pre-planned oval, it is no cookie cutter road course, it is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Part of the circuit is built for racing, but the other 90% of Le Mans is winding roads snaking their way through the French countryside. The circuit, much like life, hands you the twists and turns as you find them. How you adapt is up to you. One thing is guaranteed, the journey will be unique.

3. Life is unpredictable. Did I mention life, like racing at Le Mans, is unpredictable? It's not just the track that's unpredictable, it's also everything else! It's the weather; heat, cold, and rain. It's the unexpected events of the day. A blown tire, a broken upright, a failed alternator. Life, like Le Mans, throws obstacles in your way. Be they little hurtles or overwhelming gauntlets, you never know what you'll encounter in those 24 hours. Will it rain? Will I survive the heat after being strapped in the car for three hours? How well can I drive at night when it's so dark that I have to steer the car from memory? What if the car in front of me crashes; can I avoid him? Le Mans, and life, are filled with thousands of questions. What separates you from the victims on the side of the circuit, is all down to how you react.

4. The race is long... and often with yourself. Audi lived this lesson today, having learned it years ago. Their opponents, a rather imposing convoy of four Peugeot 908's, effectively left them in the dust when the race began yesterday afternoon. With the 908's pulling away a few seconds every lap, Audi was left to run their own race. Each driver knew that somewhere out ahead of them, beyond the next series of corners, over the next hill and beyond, were their opponents. But catching them was nearly out of the question. How do you react?

5. Run your own race. As hard as it was for them to do, Audi dug in, remembered what their original plan was, and stuck to it. Even when it seemed like their plan wasn't working; when the Peugeot's had long since disappeared, Audi's boss, Dr. Wolfgang Ulrich, reminded the drivers to run their own race. Push the car, yes, but do so smartly. Don't take any stupid chances, don't go beyond your limits. You'll never make up the three seconds a lap Peugeot is putting on you. But stay within touching distance of them and see if an opportunity comes along. The patience required for this over 24 hours is immense, especially when exhaustion and a deepening feeling of hopelessness and panic sets in. Ultimately, you must...

6. Be patient. There are times when life, just like the 24 Hours, will not give you what you want when you want it. Only by sticking with your plan do you hope to win. Why? Because...

7. Pushing beyond your means is a surefire recipe for disaster. Peugeot learned this in short order. Feeling unsure of whether or not they could beat Audi, and forgetting that ultimately they should run their own race, Peugeot upped the power on their turbo-diesel engines, sending clouds of black soot into the air as their motors were pushed to the absolute limits of their ability. Even though they qualified on pole and filled the top four slots on the grid. Even though every odds maker within 100 miles of La Sarthe had their money on Peugeot, they pushed anyway. While they saved a few seconds on the track, and stayed ahead of their more patient adversaries, they ultimately paid the price. And what a terrible toll it was.

8. Learn from your mistakes. When the first Peugeot to retire with engine failure expired, smoldering on the side of the road, Peugeot should have immediately pulled up the car's telemetry and looked into what went wrong. After all, if all of their remaining runners had the same engines, perhaps it would behoove Peugeot to find out what caused their lead car to spit flames and shrapnel all over track at Indianapolis corner before retiring from the race. Sadly, Peugeot, now even more paranoid about maintaining their gap over Audi, put their heads down and pushed like hell. In a matter of ten hours, they would go from leading the 24 Hours of Le Mans and clinching a one-two-three finish, to losing all of their remaining cars - as each machine suffered the same horrible fate. Flames, oil, and metal spewing from the back of the car as its powerplant exploded into bits of shrapnel - leaving their pilots stranded - heads hanging, in tears at the side of the road.

9. Have faith. Audi kept theirs, even when all looked dark. How does a team do that? Years and years of lessons from Le Mans. You don't learn everything from your first outing. Much like life, the only way you master Le Mans - if you can ever truly master it at all - is to learn from every experience. Audi has done just that. They knew that while Peugeot looked untouchable, the plumes of fine black soot hanging in the air as the 908's blew by was a telling sign. Peugeot was pushing; they were running scared. Audi had faith in their drivers, their mechanics, their engineers, and their machines. At the end of the day, having faith - that deeply planted, secure knowledge that things are going to work out despite everything - paid off with Audi driving home in first, second, and third, and leaving four charred Peugeot 908's in their wake.

10. Life is beautiful. Ultimately, what makes Le Mans so magical is that, when looked at by those of us who get it, Le Mans is life distilled down to its most basic and amazing elements. Faith, trust, endurance, confidence, patience, celebration, and loss, all were on display brilliantly today - not just in the Audi camp, but everywhere. Every mechanic who struggled to stay awake at 4 in the morning showed these virtues. Every engineer out on the pit wall that fought sleep deprivation and worked their brains in overdrive to plan for any eventuality showed these virtues. The drivers who shared the same car, compromised with each other, worked together, and refused to let ego get the better of them (though some drivers failed to do just that), showed these virtues.The team managers, the corner workers, and yes, even those determined die-hard fanatics in the stand (or watching from thousands of miles away), all took part in the great human drama of life at Le Mans.

I'm not sure if Steve McQueen knew just how right he was. Racing really is life, and everything else - all of the detractions and distractions that keep us from truly living - is just waiting.

The Great White Hope

2011-05-10T19:24:00.004-04:00

As you might have noticed around here, I'm a bit of a fan of first person shooters. I prefer realistic combat games over firing laser rifles at aliens. And for the last several years now, I've moved through every game from the first Medal of Honor on the Sony Playstation to Call of Duty Black Ops and Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

And yea, fellow traveler of the world wide web, there is another great shooter on the horizion. For first, in the beginning, there was Battlefield 1942. And Battlefield 1942 begot Battlefield Vietnam. And Battlefield Vietnam begot Battlefield 2. And Battlefield 2 begot... well, you get it. There have been a lot of Battlefield games. I, admittedly, came to the series a bit late. My buddy Grubbs, however, has been a Battlefield player since the beginning. Needless to say, we're both rather excited over the prospect of a completely new, redesigned from the ground up, Battlefield experience.

As they say, war is delightful for those who have not experienced it.

And it occurred to us tonight that regardless of the game, Grubbs and I seem to progress through several stages of anticipation and disappointment when it comes to these games. Think of it as a gamer's version of the Five Stages of Mourning, although not that morose (unless we're talking about Medal of Honor: Rising Sun). Because, at the end of the day, we both have in our heads, the ideal shooter. One that balances realism with playability, graphical fidelity with large maps, vehicular combat with great sniping positions, good spawn zones, great mechanics, an excellent single player campaign with stellar AI, and near-infinite re-playability. We call this next game: The Great White Hope.

And right now, that Great White Hope is Battlefield 3.

As you can see, it looks fantastic. It's realistic, graphically stunning, well balanced... in short, everything we're hoping for. But, and there's always a "but" in these conversations, we're still in what we call "phase one" of acquiring a new game.

Phase One is this: Grubbs and I get wind of a new game coming out. The conversation usually goes something like this: "Hey, did you hear? There's a new Battlefield game in development." "Really?" "Yeah, looks pretty amazing, go look up the video on Youtube."

A while later, the conversation continues: "Dear God! Did you see that trailer? The way the soldiers stack up at the door, the way the guy had to slide you his anti-tank rocket? It didn't just appear, he actually pulled it off his back, and slid the thing across the floor. That was freaking amazing!" Think of phase one as early courtship. You're taken aback by your new squeeze's beauty, their charm, their attractiveness, and you have yet to find anything wrong with them.

Phase Two is what we call the "anticipation phase." Or as I'd like to call it, the "frothing at the mouth and re-watching the same Youtube video three-hundred times..." phase. As they say, the anticipation is always better than the reality - and that is never more true than in phase two. Mind you, the video the game company slaps up online is made of the most precious, hand-selected, prettiest clips of footage they can find. Of course it looks perfect, that's what they want you to think. Again, much like dating, think of phase two as the early outings when things go smashing well - almost too well.

Phase Three usually occurs right before release. It's the "tempering phase" - the chance for us to reel in expectations in order not to be so terribly hurt when the game crushes our expectations with the weight of realistic disappointment. The conversation here goes something like this: "I wonder if that "slide the rocket launcher to your buddy thing will happen in multiplayer?" "Probably not, how would you implement it?" "Yeah... damn..."

Phase Four is "release." The game is here, the months of anticipation are now well and truly behind you. Time to dig in! Like two kids in a candy store, or two grown men at a table full of delicious barbecue, we dive right in. Hours, days, weeks even, have passed without us noticing. We're too busy taking in the gorgeous graphics, the new weapons, the new maps, the new... well, everything. It's glorious! It's everything we've always wanted it to be! It's so good, a change of clothes is almost required! Again, much like dating.

And then...

The final, terrible phase, begins: "clinical assessment and criticism." Yes, once the honeymoon period is over, the latex gloves go on, the game is then asked to turn and cough, and we usually don't like what we find. It starts as a professional memorization of all of the game's maps. Every stairwell, sight line, window, vehicle drop zone, spawn point, command center, and M-Com station, is surgically mapped out, memorized, and optimized. Soon, within a few hours of play, we have a routine. We know who takes which stairwell, who covers what angle, what kit is run and when. In short, we go from loving the game to dissecting it. And then the cracks start to appear. Now, to Battlefield's credit, we rarely have found any significant cracks. Call of Duty, on the other hand, was a different story, as you've seen.

So right now, Grubbs and I are neck deep in Phase One. We're pouring over Game Informer articles, reading the latest gossip on IGN, watching that same damn trailer for the thousandth time, looking for any more clues, hints, or bits if information to be gleaned. Like sucking marrow from a bone, we're out to get everything we can.

When will phase two hit next? I'm not sure, we'll just see how the summer goes. So Battlefield 3, please, please, please, for the love of all that's good and Holy in this world, don't let us down!

After The Storm

2011-05-10T17:22:00.014-04:00

Stopping to take in the view. This has been a mantra of mine since I can remember. Five years ago, I wrote a post about it for Skewed entitled, "What a View." In it, I described the incredibly hectic, stressful final semester of college I was enduring at the time. Eighteen credit hours, a murderous French course which showed me no mercy, all combined with cramming frantically to take the GRE in time to send off my last minute graduate school applications which were all due the week of finals. Some things turned out well that semester. I graduated Cum Laude with Honors and successfully defended my Undergraduate Thesis. I completed the last of my Honors Program credits. I even passed the French class - barely. But I bombed the GRE, failed to get into graduate school, and spent the next two years in the woods, searching for a way back to my path, the one that points me in the direction that I want my life to go.

In that one moment in September I needed a break, so I pulled off Blood Mountain - the home of my daily commute - and took in the view at the Walasi-Yi Center. As I sat and absorbed my surroundings, complete with a cold Yoo-hoo in my hand, everything finally stopped. My brain, which had been filled with noise, fell quiet. The sound of the breeze and the sweet notes of the wind chimes which hung on the wall behind me brought me an overwhelming sense of peace. I knew I would make it. I knew things would get better. All thanks to the view.

Say what you want about taking in nature. For me, it's spiritual as well beautiful. I feel closer to God when I sit on a rock and take in the mountains around me. It reminds me that I'm small, and that's a good thing. As I said five years ago: "My problems shrank, my stress diminished, and I was reminded yet again how much bigger the world, the universe, God Himself is, compared to GRE tests and applications to graduate school."

After the semester I've had, I needed that view again. The problem is, I'm hundreds of miles away from my beloved Blood Mountain - and the semester was, frankly, horrendous. The stress I've endured in the past sixteen weeks has been an unprecedented Hell: from health problems like walking pneumonia, to the expected stress of finishing my thesis, to the highs and lows of PhD rejection letters which ended only with a last-minute victory, to completely unforeseen personal heartbreak and loss - in short, the kind of upheaval that I've never experienced before. It's been too much lately and I needed an escape.

Thankfully, I've discovered a new view - this time on the Blue Ridge Parkway. And while the road is not nearly as entertaining as Blood Mountain, it is incredibly beautiful. Yesterday, I felt like I was finally going to snap. In a surge of impulse, I grabbed my car keys, hopped in my Corolla, and sped off for the Thunderhill Overlook - about 30 minutes away.

As I drove, I listened to everyone's new favorite band, Mumford & Sons. Nearing the overlook, a bright burst of sun illuminated the parking lot, and my CD player started to play, "After the Storm." I pulled in, shut off the engine, and pocketed my keys. I opened my door, climbed out, and sat on the hood of my car, and drank an A&W Root Beer. I couldn't find a Yoo-hoo to save my life.

Everything stopped. Well, nearly everything. I'm beginning to wonder if the real stresses of life - those we endure with age - are simply too heavy to be quelled by a pretty view and a soft drink. If nothing else, I finally had some peace for the first time in months - save the muscle-shirted thirty-something who was yakking away on his cell phone with an all-too New Jersey accent. After a few minutes, even he departed - leaving me with my thoughts. We've all been through a hell of a year so far. I don't know anyone who has had an easy start to 2011. I'm no exception, nor am I the worst of the lot. But even my load has been hard to bear.

As I looked out at the mountains ahead of me, alone, I wondered for the first time in years how things are going to turn out for me. Because, for the first time in years, I have absolutely no idea. I stared, prayed, thought; did everything I could. And while I felt a bit calmer, I'm not sure I'm any closer to a resolution. My Root Beer tasted sweet, the breeze felt good on my skin, and I felt a small quantity of solace. Perhaps, as we grow older and life's blows grow heavier, a moment like that will have to do. Perhaps that's good enough. Finally, I turned and walked back to my car.

As I started the engine, the CD player turned on and continued the song I interrupted when I stopped. A raspy English accent greeted me: "There will come a time, you'll see. With no more tears. And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears..."

I headed back down the mountain, towards town, towards the next two months of summer before I move onto to my PhD program and all of the hectic joys and anxieties it will entail.

"Get over your hill and see, what you find there. With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair."

Let's hope he's right.