update

Today I woke up and it was snowing but the snow was not sticking.

Overheard Halloween Quote of the Day

"Yeah, but it's true about the spiders, though."

the first two weeks of college life

Friday the 23rd of September

I move into my dorm. It is rather small, but all my stuff fits in there. I meet some of my cluster-mates.

Saturday the 24th of September

I wake up early and head out of the range of the football game traffic to get picked up by my parents and taken to Foolscap, a small science fiction convention that, this year, features both Harlan Ellison and Penny Arcade and thus, promises to be the swearingest science fiction convention ever. Before the convention begun, Harlan was bitten by a macaw and needed to get a tetanus shot. Gabe and Tycho kind of didn’t fit in, but were really entertaining in their own panels. Harlan was Harlan, a statement which makes sense if you know about him. I went with him and my parents out for dinner at Crossroads Mall, which was a pretty entertaining experience, but it’s kind of hard to explain why if you don’t know about Harlan Ellison. Perhaps the best explanation I can give is that he is exactly like his writing style. Bear in mind that his writing style is kind of like Ray Bradbury’s evil twin.

Sunday the 25th of September

I sort out the bus schedules and figure out how to get down to the Seattle Center for the Ravnica prerelease. I run into Jeremy Yuse, who once went to Maplewood and now works at Magic Arsenal. I pay money to roll dice and win an Atogatog. This is arguably better in some ways than winning a foil Serra Avatar last time. I played a round of draft, in which I managed to get passed(!) a Watery Grave. My Green-Black-Little Bit of Blue deck manages to do better than I expected, and I end up getting second place and taking away 4 boosters. Fun moments: playing Fists of Ironwood on my opponent’s creatures so I could get Saprolings; losing a game where I can’t play Hex because there’s only five creatures in play.

After that, I end up in the last flight of the regular Sealed Deck event, where I create a bizarre Blue-Black-Red contraption that also does way better than expected. I managed to half-deck somebody once with Tunnel Vision, just kind of randomly guessing what cards are in his deck. I win a lot more packs, which include a foil Sacred Foundry. That seems to be worth about sixty dollars right now. Oh my.

Monday the 26th of September

I take the bus down to Pacific Place to get a PS2. I haul it, along with a memory card, an extra controller, and We Love Katamari back to my dorm and set it up. I roll stuff into balls.

I also find out that my cluster-mates are half football players and half guys from Mercer Island with Asian girlfriends.

Tuesday the 27th of September

I meet up with my mom and we go buy textbooks. She brings another shelf, a few of my clothes, and, inexplicably, a pack of dried squid. I set up the shelf. I walk around in search of stores that sell things and end up all the way in Montlake. I take the bus back. I call Erin a lot trying to get in contact with her.

Wednesday the 28th of September

My classes begin with programming at 9:30. After that, I walk up and down University Way NE twice trying to find a store that the Internet claimed sold Magic cards but the Internet lied. I find a comic book store that also sells a lot of RPGs and I find a place to play Magic on Friday nights, though. I go back to my Chinese history class. History may be written by the winners, but Chinese history is written by middle-aged white guys. Good lecturer, though. I finally get in touch with Erin. I also run into Maura Harrison and we have dinner.

Thursday the 29th of September

I finally get in contact with Lisa Akiyama and we end up having both lunch and dinner together. I have the first day of my art class. Over the past week, I’ve managed to run into pretty much everyone I know who’s going here. I make plans with Erin to go up to Bellingham over the weekend.

Friday the 30th of September

I get very lonely. I seem to have missed all my cluster-mates when they went out to see Serenity. I play Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes almost all the way through, until the loneliness eats at my heart from the inside. I end up calling Lisa about nine times but I can’t get in contact with her. I eat a very sad dinner alone and then I decide to stop feeling sorry for myself, so I go down to play some Magic. It’s good to be able to talk with people for like ten minutes about all the possibilities that Doubling Season brings.

“This means that Spike decks are now viable!”
“Screw Spikes! I’m going to build a Thallid deck!”

Saturday the 31st of September

I take the bus back home, eat some lunch, and head up to Bellingham, listening to Neko Case on the way up. After some confusion, I manage to meet up with everybody else at the mall. Good times are had. I drive back, taking everybody else who’s going to Lynnwood with me. We discuss our immense loneliness and inability to meet people.

Sunday the 1st of October

I hang around the house with my family. I use the car to go shopping for PS2 games; I end up with Final Fantasy X, Onimusha 2, and Ninja Gaiden Black (which is for Xbox). I am driven back up to my dorm room after dinner.

I feel better.

Monday the 2nd of October

In my programming class, I manage to meet someone (by virtue of my increasingly awesome handbag): a somewhat nerdy and somewhat cute Chinese girl. We arrange to meet up for lunch. She shows up about twenty minutes late, so it’s a good thing I waited. I also end up being late to class by spending too much time at lunch.

Tuesday the 3rd of October

While getting lunch with my cluster-mates, I run into Maura Harrison studying. She is readily identifiable from behind by virtue of her raven-black hair and constant drinking of Diet Coke. We try to meet up for dinner but are stymied when she changes her schedule such that she has class then.

Wednesday the 4th of October

I meet up with Jessica (the Chinese girl) for lunch again and meet a couple other (Chinese) people that she’s met. Lost has pretty much the best plot twist ever on it. I complete my first ever computer program during the commercial breaks.

Thursday the 5th of October

I take a guess at Amber’s email address and it works, putting us into contact for the first time in about a month. I write out the bulk of this piece while compiling music for the I Really Miss You Mix Tape. This tape will be the saddest thing ever, like an anti-tank missile made out of pure sorrow.

Friday the 6th of October

I discover that I am the king (or at least prince) of Ravnica draft. At approximately 1:00 in the morning, I post this.

drilling

There is drilling going on outside today - to what end, I don't know.

I feel certain that it is drilling its way into my mind. It broke through the crust of my subconscious and into my dreams this morning.

I dreamt that I was some kind of stealth witch (?) and my mission was to destroy the drill. There was a bookstore involved.

keitai

I nearly missed being invited to Mallory’s birthday party because I’m not on MySpace. Everybody else was invited in advance through this fancy Internet friends network and I was hastily invited at the last minute by a call of Mitch’s cell phone. I am told this is one of the reasons why I should get a MySpace. I don’t see how it wouldn’t be simpler to just get my phone number. Or my e-mail address. Or leave me a comment here – surely there must be a few readers who know that they can just click on the comments link and respond with whatever words they think look good strung together.

MySpace is just the latest in a long line of faddish Internet communities. As Dragon Ball Z declines in popularity to Pokemon and then to Yu-Gi-Oh, so too does LiveJournal fall to Xanga and Xanga now to MySpace. What happens to these orphaned pages as they are abandoned in the owner’s transition to the next 12-to-20-something Internet fashion trend? First come the vultures: a few who examine links, thoughts, and photographs, but finding them to be dead with no sign of resurrection forthcoming, soon turn their attentions to other things. Eventually, the site or the host will die, and all the archived data returns to the ether it was born from.

Will that happen to this site when it dies? How long until the infrequent updates turn to no updates at all? My page will stand as an unobserved monument in a forgotten cemetery, one only ever visited by a few. But it will not fall to rot; it will remain pristine as the day it was first carved until finally the winds of deletion clear it entirely, changing it from existent to nonexistent in barely a moment.

It is the nature of the Internet that such things are gone never to be found again unless one knows the arcane keywords that will dredge them up from Google, but I recall distinctly a story on BoingBoing about a video card forum (or such) that had been hijacked by various lonely people and had eventually turned into a place for them to talk about their loneliness. It is the whim of the God of Internets that such things occur: an obscure back corner of the Web picked up on by a few like-minded people eventually turns into a community and then receives a boost from the largest linkblog ever. Contrast, here, this page, where the visitors are few and they never leave a sign.

I am writing for an audience of ghosts, and you wonder why I never update? What do ghosts enjoy hearing about? Does it bring the spectral hordes delight if I discuss Magic: the Gathering? Or video games? Or perhaps if I shout my personal life out to total strangers, maybe someone will respond?

I suppose that’s what disturbs me so much about the Internet, is that people do respond. Friendships are made across continents between people who’ve never even seen each other’s face. It’s like a global masquerade ball, an intricate waltz where the dancers constantly change their masks. Anonymity changes people, and not always for the better. It allows us reveal aspects of ourselves that we wouldn’t share with ordinary society. It then brings us together with people who share the same desires and creates an insular community where these desires may be cultivated – you need only look at the numerous furry and fetish communities for proof of that. Read Something Awful and you see the dark side of the Internet. Yes, it connects, and it disseminates information, but few of those connections are meaningful, and little of that information is useful.

Weekend Web is a feature that exists solely to expose the truth of human nature as revealed on Internet forums. Video games, of course, attract mindless emotion and poor spelling like nothing else, as anyone who’s ever played CounterStrike can attest. Teenagers are fun too. Global communications networks seem like a wonderful thing until you realize that what’s being said has no value and, as an added bonus, is totally incomprehensible.

I was recently in the company of a girl a couple years younger than me. She had a cell phone. Naturally, she would continually receive calls from her friends. The demand of the modern world is “connectivity at all times.” The Internet, the phone network – it’s all mobile now. You can take it with you wherever you go, so that you can contact other people whenever you want, and they will want to contact you in return. In Japan, cellular connectivity has become a kind of subculture. It’s called keitai. On the subways, on the street, you connect to the world with your cell phone, you carve out your little niche of territory by taking your friends with you. The exchange of information has become so very easy.

Communication has finally surpassed information. The number of ways that exist to say things outpace the number of things there are to say. We begin to text-message gossip to each other, cloaked in an arcane language of acronyms and abbreviations. The Internet has forever devalued the art of writing, as it strips language of subtlety and meaning. Youth of the modern age are impatient. They want things to be fast. I grew up on MS-DOS, and spent much of my adolescence in front of video game load screens. Computers have taught me patience. When I first used the Internet, DSL was only a dream and 128k was blazingly fast. Images you had to wait to load, and movies were a long wait for little payoff. But the rest of my generation, who started out on newer hardware, have become accustomed to getting things now, to fast, simple, personal transmissions.

There are extreme futures towards which we are headed. They are dark ones. The Internet will be replaced with a new connection protocol, one which can be monitored, regulated, and controlled. Uplinks will be implanted into us directly. We will have 100% connectivity, 100% information. But we will have lost our capacity to determine what is important. That will be determined by whatever sounded the most important on the newscasts. It will be determined by what your friends say. You’ve never seen them in person, but you talk with them all of the time. All of the time.
Keitai is the most paranoia-inducing thing in the world. Cell phones allow you to be tracked anywhere, whether or not they are turned on. People can find you and talk to you whenever they want. Theoretically, the information is confidential, but (corporations/the government/insert paranoid agency here) can always make a deal that you can’t find out about. But it’s not them that I’m concerned about. It’s the fact that face-to-face social contact is being supplemented and often replaced with digital translations of normal communication. We move daily towards the point where we are just people in invisible boxes speaking to each other over tin cans and wire, preferring the safe distance and sheltering communities of shared interests that the Internet provides over the often awkward and uncertain proposition of making physical friends the old-fashioned way.

i got all excited when i saw that last comment

...and then i checked it out.

Forthcoming: why I hate cell phones and the Internet!

lessons learned from travelling in europe

Belgian Magic players are teh suck. I have this from a Czech girl who lives in Belgium. All her Belgian Magic-playing friends are too weak. All her Czech Magic-playing friends are too strong.

Irn-Bru, available only in Scotland, is possibly one of the best sodas ever. It's like cough syrup mixed with bubble gum. In a good way! Now if only they made a pink ear medicine flavor...