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Two Boxing Haikus
1.
OneTwoOneTwoHook
BodyHeadBodyHook pause
Defend for your life.
2.
Padded leather helm
prevents subcranial bruise
but not excuses.
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Do.Until.True.: 10/30 : several reasons why god, in addition to clumsiness, may have been why I spilled alcohol on you that other night →
First off, whogets house redat a dive bar? I almostnever do.Next, it was one daytoo late for a sweaterthat dense, let aloneone so creamyoff white.Third, the first timewe made love was the first timeI saw a human teleport. Youreyes inhaled a… -
Weighing The Planets: Are Women's Rights Really an Issue of "Culture"? →
Let me start by saying that I woke up and read this article, to the detriment of my morning:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/15/world/middleeast/muslim-brotherhoods-words-on-women-stir-liberal-fears.html?hp&_r=0
I have an endless amount of respect for the women who are able to stay in these…
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George Stoney (7/1/16-7/12/12) →
It’s impossibly strange to learn of George’s death through a random Wikipedia search, especially because I’m pretty sure Wikipedia was straight up his alley. I met George when I was in high school. My dad had taken me to the annual meeting of the ACM, which was in Boston that year. He worked with George when the ACM was actually the CAM (Center for Alternative Media) and produced a few films with him. Dad took me to meet George at the McCormick and Shmicks in town. George was thrilled by the promise of the Internet as a democratic medium, and also for the promise of games as a popular medium of expression. He was undoubtedly a huge influence on the modern media ecosystem, and as a mentor to media advocates in his time, he was a major influence on my life. May he inspire many more to come. Rest in peace.
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Welp…looks like I found my next writing exercise…
WHO JOINS ME!!!I decide to join you
As the last frames of the crudely drawn animation enter my eyes, they trigger pickle-scented electrical sparks that transmit up the nerves from my retina to my brain.
i decide to join you
The atoms of my body shift and reconfigure themselves, physically forming into a raygun. A German man in lederhosen, A leather-bound copy of Being and Nothingness. A Big Mac.
i decide to join you
You are standing on the stage of an infinitely large lecture hall. I am the only one there. I raise my hand. You quack in response. Your jacket is woven from strands of spring water. It melts to the floor, forming a hot tub. We climb in and have a few Painkillers.
i decide to join you
The hot tub becomes a rocket ship and takes off into the sky. We orbit the world twice before exploding into four million brightly colored stars. The stars are Painkillers. You quack in response.
I decide to join you.
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How Wise People Die →
My father was a urogynecologist for over 20 years. He helped countless women, many of whom were elderly. While he rarely dealt with matters of life and death, the balance between length and quality of life was something always on his mind. He would often tell me how he would prefer to live 1 year of a full life than 20 years trapped within some sort of uncomfortable treatment.
He was diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer just over 3 years ago. When discussing treatments, he was offered a choice between traditional chemo- and radiotherapy regimen, and a promising experimental therapy that would require traveling to another state every other week. The experimental therapy had a much higher chance of curing the disease (or at least prolonging his life beyond the standard 5 year mark), but he opted for the chemotherapy. Over the next year and a half, he traveled with his wife, delivered meals to the elderly in the car of his dreams, watched his oldest son graduate from college, and watched his youngest fall in love. In the end, he died at home, surrounded by family.
But still, I attribute little of the very full life he lived while fighting cancer to the fact that he was a physician. Certainly, he was economically able to enjoy some of it because he was a doctor, but I don’t believe his decision to pursue a less aggressive and life altering treatment was influenced by being a doctor. I think being conscious of the good things he had in life and knowing the real value of those things is what gave him the Wisdom to make that decision. That’s not something being a doctor teaches you.
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Brief Interruptions: On the Weirdness of Time →
Last Friday afternoon, I went to see The Clock at the Museum of Modern Art. I had first heard of this piece when it won an award at the 2011 Venice Biennale, and I’ve been excited to see it ever since. It screened at Lincoln Center this past summer, but I was so busy moving and building…
Another neat little conflict to ponder: you can only really experience this piece in a museum, but the fact that it’s in a museum limits your ability to fully experience it (since museums are rarely open for all 24 hours of the day).
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New Year, New Habits
Happy 2013 everyone! I hope everyone’s holiday season was as fun and rejuvenating as my own.
2012 was a year of changes for me. I left my job at Zynga East after working there for 2 years, and I left Baltimore entirely. I decided to really start my career in educational games, and was fortunate enough to be offered a position at MindSnacks out here in San Francisco. Another big change was the fact that I was even able to let myself move out to San Francisco after many years of “not being a San Francisco person” (whether or not I’ve made the transition to “being a San Francisco person” has yet to be seen). In 2012, I also became something I never thought I could be: MindSnacks’s de facto producer. Being an engineer by education, I never thought I’d be able to manage people or a development effort, but I learned a lot about myself by stepping up and giving it a try. Fortunately, I’ve been (at least relatively) successful at that role in the end.
Finally, 2012 brought two great joyful pastimes into my life. Learning to box has been a godsend for me, emotionally and physically. I started training in Baltimore at the beginning of this year, and eventually joined a gym out here in San Francisco. The bonds I’ve formed with my trainers and classmates are incredible, and the act of boxing itself has taught me more about myself than I’d ever have imagined. Also in 2012, I began learning how to brew my own beer. It seems silly to mention it on the same level as boxing, because to my mind, they’re almost opposites: boxing makes me fitter, while beer gets me drunk; boxing is fast and violent, while brewing is slow and methodical. But what brewing has allowed me to do is satisfy my creative joneses in an afternoon, instead of the several months it takes to develop a game. It also allows me to create something physical, which part of me needs in order to call myself “creative”. And it’s sparked a sudden interest in bio-chemistry, which I would have never imagined.
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One of the talks I saw at GDC two weeks ago included a clip of this song, and it’s been stuck in my head since then. It’ll be in the background while I meditate on what I’ve experienced in these past two weeks.
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Those Icky Nasty Game Things
A friend of mine (who happens to be an avid reader of The New Yorker) shared this article with me today: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/09/100809fa_fact_baker
I found this section particularly funny:
Here’s what it’s about. It’s about killing and it’s about dying. Also it’s about collecting firearms. And it’s modern warfare, which means it’s set in places like Afghanistan. Assassin’s Creed II is set in Renaissance Florence and Venice. The game has moments of real loveliness. But mostly, it’s death, death, death—and fistfights, and the accumulation of wealth by acts of thuggery.
I mostly found it funny because I imagined it being exclaimed to me by a young, very upscale New Yorker in increasingly desperate and exasperated tones. (I also imagined his next words would be along the lines of “It was so *icky*!”)
But now to the point I’d like to make: While I’m very glad to see that video games are now being considered legitimate fodder for “traditional” editorial media, it greatly upsets me that they’re still being brought up in the context of their violent content. True, many mainstream games contain an elevated level of violent content, but they all utilize that violence as a way to propel a story. Many of them even use violence to drive home a point or an idea.
This is all pretty much old news for the majority of game enthusiasts I know, but not for everyone else. Thus, my frustration isn’t in that these “traditional” publications only discuss the violence in video games. It is in the fact that they do not discuss how video games use violence as a means to promote a concept or story. I wish that would change, and I hope it does soon. After all, it’s not like video games are not the only entertainment media in which violence plays a key role.
