Drew's secret xanga has a post with a lot of thoughts on the stupid things we do in high school in pursuit of whatever the hell it was we thought we were pursuing. But it ends on a good note: had he not gone through all of that, he wouldn't know one person whom he considers a really valuable friend.
That reminded me of some thoughts that had been bouncing around my head lately. There are only a handful of people that I really consider people I look up to. The vast majority of my friends and peers are my equals, in my mind; no better, no worse. But every now and again I'll get myself into a dire situation and ask, "What would [insert name of friend or family member here] do?" And that gives me some direction as to the kind of person I want to be.
So, role-models-who-shan't-be-named-but-few-of-you-are-my-readers-anyway, thanks. And ya know what? I miss the vast majority of you because I don't see most of you often enough. Either you're in Austin, or New York, or just across Fort Worth but way too busy to see me, but it's occurred to me that I've been missing out on you guys for some time now, so I'm setting out to fix that.
Hey look, it's a new WindowsXP theme from Microsoft. After 2+ years of running this OS, we finally get *one* new theme, as promised.
This is the theme they're calling Royale, and it's included stock in the newest build of Windows Media Center Edition. I installed it and I'm liking it quite a bit so far. I think the two-tone taskbar is a little off-putting, but overall it's nice to have an updated look and feel. Check it out.
Check the usual place for a photo update. There's a small compilation album from my first year at UT, including friends, football, dorm characters, and even snow.
The event, not the movie. Ya know, the tragedy, the 6,000 people dying in apocalyptic inferno thing. [This is not a political rant.]
I have to give credit to Michael Moore, for what it’s worth. I didn’t feel a thing when Mr. Kellam, the Oakridge assistant principal, assembled the student body to explain that a terrorist flew a plane into the World Trade Center, collapsing a 110-plus-story building. I was truly a desensitized, ignorant teenager: the Counter-Strike radio popped into my head, cueing the “Terrorists Win” sound that I’d heard thousands of times before and thousands more times since. I still didn’t feel anything except stupid when my father reminded me that I had forgotten about my cousin Kelly, who lives in New York – and was even in Manhattan that morning. I felt nothing but a desensitized shock when I saw pictures later that day on the Internet of the poor, poor people who jumped from the top floors and the roof of both towers. There isn’t an English word that describes the true sadness of that - I want now to blend my languages and make a word like “sad-ísimo.” I finally felt something when Moore, ironically, was censored by the MPAA and the footage of the planes hitting the towers was reduced to a black, pictureless chaos while people screamed. When the picture returned, a woman had no other reaction to something she had never even considered fathoming in her life – except to fall to her knees and break down crying.
This movie was the first thing that made me able to really put myself in a New Yorker’s shoes. The first plane struck, and the world stopped turning. People dropped what they were doing and looked to the sky in shock of the pure unpredictability of it all. Then the second plane struck and the world – the everyone-dropped-everything world that had existed for all of 45 minutes – was turned upside-down once more when the second plane hit. Suddenly, it was the first time that any native American had experienced true chaos. Where do you run to? Even if you can pick a place, who knows? A plane might hit it. Every reassurance you were ever given, from significant others to your home, suddenly no longer had its promise of security. They might be gone before you can get to them ever again. Every second of your life was now as unpredictable as when we were dumb animals just searching for nothing except survival.
This is a kind of chaos that our generation, in this country, was raised never to expect. What’s more, we couldn’t even expect it if we thought about it abstractly: the contiguous States had never been attacked, excepting the War of 1812 (which, in my humble opinion, doesn’t even count since the British weren’t fully convinced we were broken up with them yet).
But Fahrenheit didn’t keep me thinking on its own. I also had the influence of Everclear.
The band, not the alcohol.
In the last week, I finally loaded up their newest album, “Slow Motion Daydream,” which came out last year. I’ve always liked these guys, old and new styles alike. I’ve found a lot more emotional pull in their newer music. Lots attribute that to the band’s poppier edge after the turn of the century, but I still have a great (and sometimes even greater) admiration for the work and expressiveness of Art Alexakis.
The point of this change of topic? Chances are I’m looking way too closely into things, but the song “Science Fiction” has me positively captivated. I’ll save the analysis for another day, but I love the simplicity of the melody, the instrumental minimalism, and Alexakis’s familiar vocal style. So like I do with a lot of music, I looked deeper into the album. The lyrics to “Science Fiction,” while ringing true with Everclear’s post-pop-revolution deeply buried optimism, I also found a surprising amount of response-to-tragedy wordage. The words, when read in that context, had a lot in common with John Mayer’s “Covered in Rain,” a song which Mayer himself has said was written specifically in response to 9/11. Surprised, I kept looking into the album. The cover was a skyline in black-and-white. It’s not a NYC-sans-WTC skyline, but that was the very first thing that I thought of the minute I saw the cover.
So now, thanks to Hollywood and the LA record industry, I was able to comprehend a fraction of the chaos and the weight of emotion that New Yorkers felt roughly three years ago. Good job, blakerson.
Let’s go back to that chaos for a minute. What had set America apart from most other countries in the world in the idyllic youth of Gen-Y was the distinct lack of it. Look at what we saw on the news every night: from Iraq to Sarajevo to Bosnia to Kosovo, we saw people who spent every day of their lives in this kind of chaos. It wasn’t shocking; it was expected. But it was across the world from us, and just on the evening news. Excepting a very small number of people, Dan Rather’s report wasn’t able to put us in the shoes of a former Yugoslav. We didn’t really comprehend it.
On September 12th, the world cried out, “We are all Americans.” We appreciated the sympathy we once had, but the remaining 5.7 billion non-Americans made one slight mistake. It wasn’t that they were all Americans, suddenly. The truth was that the Americans had become people of the rest of the world. American dominance, the assumption upon which Gen-Y built our outlook of our world, was shattered.
Well, now America had something to aim itself for: rebuild the idyllic luxury of untouchable world domination. Over the last year, my political views have become a little stronger, and somewhere in the mix – maybe it was earlier tonight in the shower, even – I realized that my family wasn’t lying when they said they raised me expecting me to work to make the world a better place.
Back to Kelly, the oft-forgot cousin. She’s a freelancer for the Times and a teacher at Columbia’s Journalism School. Having shed light on the mysteries of a real-estate-related murder and a diamond-theft racket in the City, she’s made the family very proud. She’s making the world a better place.
It was in the shower tonight that I realized that my political beliefs and current events have left me with something to fight for, a way to make the world a better place and leave myself with a sense of accomplishment, if successful. Especially so if Bush gets four more years. Journalism, I realized, would be a fine way to go about that. Well-respected journalists have a much more subtle sort of power than a politician would, but the perk is that the constituency that a writer responds to isn’t concentrated in a specific geographic boundary. And journalism school sure beats the hell out of law school.
It’s no mistake that I started at UT as a journalism major (little-known fact, but true). It’s no mistake that I was working as an amateur writer in high school and started getting awards for it during my first semester at college. And maybe it’s freak chance that Columbia (the top-notch American journalism school) takes 50% non-journalism-majors for grad school and my own cousin is a teacher there, and I have amazing mentors from my eighth-grade English teacher to coworkers from my last summer job. Mistake or not, it’s impossible to deny that I just might have a future in journalism, and as reluctant as I was to accept that as a college freshman, it still might be true nevertheless. With everything that I’ve been given, I think I’m going to start being afraid of letting down this family of mine that set me up so well and set their expectations so high. It would truly make me happy to be the real blakerson.
The one who people think is destined to make his family proud, not the slacker who loses his life to video games.
It’s kind of like how the song “Science Fiction” suddenly ends on a happy note. Kind of like how New York City dedicated itself to getting its people back on their feet. To paraphrase Alexakis: it might be like a bad b-movie, and maybe you can’t believe what you’re seeing on television, but it’s sometimes hard to remember that life is always getting better.
abby: blake!
Auto response from blake: The big evil clown is away from my computer right now.
abby: omg, you wouldn't believe what happened
abby: i filled out the personality test and everything
abby: and got my results back, and everything was ok
abby: but TODAY SOMEONE FROM MATCH.COM WINKED AT ME
abby: and blake, he was like 48 years old.....
abby: hence, i have unsubscribed myself from match.com, and strongly advise you to do the same.
abby: *shiver*
This is a transcript of a speech given by Cory Doctorow of the EFF on Digital Rights Management, or DRM. If you have downloaded an MP3, used iTunes, Winamp, VLC, or any DVD player (software or hardware) in your life, this article is relevant to you.
It's an argument against Microsoft not to so heavily pursue DRM in the form of a) music copying and b) the shady-sounding Palladium "trusted computing" technologies that are expected in the next release of Windows.
I gave in today and made a profile to avoid doing my 5 minutes of homework. It's not publicly viewable or anything, but I was interested in their little tests after a second-degree blog friend (one linked from Emily) posted her results of the kind of people the computer thought she found most/least attractive - and it was right, according to her. So after answering many many questions and a thousand mouse clicks, here's what we've found:
1% of women are very attracted to my personality.
I am average in how I run my life (spontaneously or very planned) and average in the balance between head and heart. I'm more shy and introverted than average.
Only 7% of men share my habits, beliefs, and values.
You're looking for a woman who's smart, insightful, and has an insatiable curiosity about life. The two of you could share a very interesting and exciting intellectual connection. Getting closer emotionally takes time, since she's an independent and sometimes shy person by nature. But she's worth the effort to get to know! Your best strategy is to see her "in action" when you go out with friends but still find quiet time with her to talk. You'll discover she's a good conversationalist, especially if you get her talking about books, current events, or any of her many interests and hobbies.
She has her eye on the future and has big goals and dreams for what she wants out of life. She doesn't get overly emotional during disagreements and would rather talk things out calmly and rationally. She understands the importance of feeling safe and secure in a relationship and often reminds you of her commitment and how she feels.
9% of women fit my type.
Her tendency to get a little jealous won't bother you too much and at times may even be flattering. When she says something that comes across a little harsh or insensitive, you typically can overlook it because you know she didn't mean to hurt your feelings.
I have more of a sex drive than my ideal girl, but she'll be a little more adventurous.
This girl I find very attractive:
This girl is Not My Type:
Unique Tastes In Women: You are open to seeing a variety of women as attractive. Sure, women with "movie star" good looks catch your eye, but you are often equally wowed by more normal "cute" women. You are not one to judge people based on their looks. In fact, you're genuinely drawn to women that others might dismiss. Maybe it's because you don't buy into society's checklist for "mainstream" attractiveness. Instead, you notice unique features like a cute nose, beautiful eyes, or a cute butt, that make some women special in your eyes. For you, attraction is about the total package.
Your choices show a consistent interest in a wide variety of Asian women. These women really stood out to you as being very appealing.
Your choices did not show a strong interest in Black women of African descent. The majority of your interests were in other races.
Your choices show a definite interest in Hispanic and Latino women. Their appeal to you depends on a variety of features that you find particularly attractive.
You seemed especially interested in women with brown eyes.
By your choices, you've shown that you're open to women who wear glasses.
You preferred women to have nice average-sized lips; not too thin and not too full. Even though thicker lips are more popular, you were not especially drawn to them. Perhaps it's because you like very natural-looking women, without a lot of makeup.
Although you liked women with a variety of hair styles, you seemed to have a special interest in women with straight hair. Wavy and curly hair is nice, but you'd rather run your fingers through luxurious straight hair.
You liked women with a variety of hair cuts, but you gave special attention to women with long hair. You seem to really appreciate women with beautiful hair.
Wow, this stuff is fun. I guess I was right about my type.
Doom3 looks like it might just make an August 3rd release date. Not only did two retailers get that date on the same day (probably from Activision), but Quakecon has been keeping too quiet for nothing to be going on. They've (as of now) scheduled absolutely no tournaments, which is absolutely unheard of since they started running big-money competitions. If anyone has an "in" with id, it's the Quakecon staff - so expect a surprise Doom3 tournament.
But that's not even important. The real day will be for Half-Life2. Gotta love stuff like this:
Meanwhile, look at the Valve studio dry-erase board here. In order to make such a complex teaser, look at what's been cut from the game recently (we can only pray for a Director's Cut release later on).
I'm going on the record saying this now, so in 6 months I can link everyone to this post and say "I told you so, fuckers:"
Within 30 days of Election Day, gasoline prices will fall catastrophically, and it will be because the Bush administration made it that way to help him in the election. Any causes for the price drop that they give you will be lies.
My ticket affair is surprisingly over already. Here's the lowdown:
1. My ticket ended up costing me $200. That's steep, yes, but it sounds damn good when you were expecting to pay $300. That's $100 that I didn't think I'd have.
2. Turns out I got deferred adjudication after all. 31 over would've been too fast. Lucky me.
So, the moral of the story is it's OK to go 30 over in Euless I won't be too poor to do anything for the rest of the summer; I'll just have to get to where we're going a little more slowly.
For the last few days, I've felt oddly compelled to play some Halo. I think I figured out why, though.
Halo is the first console game that's getting big competitive attention. It's been a WCG tournament game for a year or two, and will be again this year when the tournament makes the US its home for the first time ever.
What does this mean? Halo 2 is going to be even bigger. With full Xbox Live support, the game is going to have a *huge* online following, and there will be a more consistent, less laggy, better organized community. This could lead to online qualifiers for national (or even international) tournaments, and this is something I want to get in on, especially considering Blanton's proximity to so many talented players.
So I'm hoping to practice just a little this summer and maybe get my skills up a little more in preparation for Halo2, when the slate gets wiped clean with new maps and weapons. Anyone up for a game?
More interestingly, I didn't know what the Player's Run was when I saw the decals on Sunday. As I stepped closer to the car, I got a reminder: it's the national race for really rich dudes who all help each other get out of jail and things like that. Today, I did some researching, and it's really damn intriguing. Well, last year's run got a lot of attention, so this year it's turned into a safer marketing blitz sort of celebrity-status event. You have to apply with your car and explain why it's unique, and if it's interesting enough, they'll let you in with an additional driver for just under $12,000 for a weeklong journey.
Where it's been rumored that the cops were against the drivers in previous years (which led to roadblocks and drivers spending the night in jail), this year had every day starting with a "Police Escort," presumably leading them to the highways where they can tear all the ass they want. Every night is an event for rich people: photo ops, car babes, and VIP parties that culminate in nights spent in five-star hotels. So, it's not really a race so much as a traveling party tour that lets the "entrants" live the high life for a week.
If you split $12,000 and another $2,000 for food and gas, then $7,000 is a steal for a "vacation" like that (that's vacation money that can be saved up without *too* much time if you're good at penny-pinching). Then again, you realistically have to own a quarter-million-dollar car to even be considered (Porsches and M3s and even MINIs run as well, but most are tuned pretty damn well to be able to roll with the Ferraris, S7s and Lambos that are standard fare for the trip).
But let's consider the economics of it. $5,000 or more to take myself to BMW's M Driving School and the woman to a car clinic out in South Carolina, or drop another $2k to take an M3 across the country with a trusted co-driver and party like 99% of the population only imagines? I'll take out a loan for the extra money, dammit.
So I've spent my boring evening touching up and cleaning up my secondary site over on files.s.o.
-All photo albums now have their own spiffy gallery pages, thanks to a neat little freeware toy called JAlbum.
-Main files page now matches the new template you see here
-I went ahead and 'un-hid' the Halloween album so it's publicly viewable for everyone who wasn't there to see our 6th Street antics.
By the time you see this, a permanent link to f.s.o should be in the sidebar.
So yesterday was an Auto-X at the Texas Motor Speedway for the SCCA Texas Region. Over 200 cars ran, and the event lasted all damn day after starting runs at 11am. We were excited that it was to be on the "TMS Road Course," and it turned out to just be on a tarmac still with cones instead of a parking lot.
Sights of interest:
-1st car to run, a Mustang, spun out on the first turn, announcer warned the crowd that tires were still cold for everyone.
-4th car to run, a modded Camaro SS, spun out badly at the same point, and slammed into a barrier. One guy working the corner almost got killed, but he jumped over the barrier just in time. From there, the admins changed the course to slow down the slalom, and restarted.
-Lots of F-Mod cars (essentially homebrew Formula-style cars) were running, and the locally famous UT Arlington SAE car set the track record at just over 45 seconds. G and H-class cars (such as Graham's Integra) were doing about 60 second laps, so that's a sign of how fast that stuff was.
-A seriously-modded Pinto was racing and breaking 60 seconds on his laps, to the amazement of newbies everywhere.
-A beautiful Imola Red M3 spun out on its first run :(
-A silver Ferrari Challenge Stradale, barely home from the 2004 Player's Run, appeared and ran (don't know what times it had, but the course didn't challenge the car at all). The PR decals were still on, and perhaps we'll see #26 in the galleries and DVD in the coming weeks.
Together, Alex, Drew, Graham and I collected about 30 minutes of footage on a pair of camcorders, so hopefully we'll get some autocross videos online once everyone can get their video-editing on.
*does short happy dance in celebration of the return of his own profile pic*
In other news, my first race experience in a while will be tomorrow when we get the a-town car guys together to go out to Texas Motor Speedway for a special autocross on the road course. I'm very very sad that my car won't be racing, but alas.
Today was an Oakridge party. 99 times out of 100 I'll avoid an Oakridge party at all costs, but this one was different. It was the final choir party of all time. Mr. Ice, my thoroughly awesome high school director, made this previous year his last and called it quits after 25 years teaching for Oakridge since the school opened back in '79. This party was a gathering of all his favorite alumni from over the years - an invite-only affair. He only invited like 3 faculty members and I saw just that many: Mrs. Jones (who absolutely everyone from Oakridge knows), a retired English teacher and a coach who doubled as an IT admin.
But Mr. Ice certainly picked the right place to throw his party. The family of a really good singer who was a freshman when I was a senior has a multi-million dollar house in Hampden Woods (think Aroon's part of town, but even more upscale, if that's possible). And whoa. I knew I went to school with rich kids, but damn. There was a valet service, so I even got to bust out the valet key sitting in my wallet and hand it over to them.
Now, I'll make no bones about it, I'm quite a bit young at 19 to be driving a BMW. At this party, however, that was the norm. Some of the first people I ran into were my little adopted freshmen from my senior year, two girls named Ashley and Jenny. One had turned 16, and the other was enjoying her 15th birthday. The 16-year-old owns a G35 and the 15-year-old is already in possession of an automatic RX-8. Insanely rich kids.
A lot of people turned up for this party; it was kind of like a quickie run down memory lane for my whole high school choir career. I was the only one from my class who showed (although my co-president, Claire, hopefully showed up earlier than I had and just left early), but several friends from the class above me were in attendance. Dane, crazy old Dane, had gotten several gigs off-Broadway in New York and was set to leave tomorrow. Katy, who had always found the weirdest, most awkward times to hit on me, was engaged. The ever-outgoing Monica, who I had seen the night before, was there for a little while to say hi, and I at last met the interesting characters who were her parents. She too is headed to New York to keep pursuing her acting career. They weren't far off from what I had imagined. And what made me really happy was Lucy! Lucy was a chick who adopted me as a freshman when I was a senior, and I always had thought she turned out to be really cool. Four years later, we finally exchange IM names so we can keep tabs on one another. But being the boy who's freshly home from college, I found myself being interviewed mostly by parents of my choirmates:
"Yes, I'm at UT ... I'm in Plan II ... yeah, nobody knows what it is ... thinking about Spanish and Japanese ... oh sure, I'll call your brother-in-law if I find myself stranded near [Baja/Tokyo/Mallorca] in the midst of my immersion ..."
But, this being a house party full of millionaires, those parents threw a couple surprises my way. When I mentioned to one couple that I'm intrigued by doing translation for Nintendo, the father offered to put me in touch with a higher-up at Electronic Arts about translating American games into Japanese. I instantly thought of my mom's family friend, who is a higher-up at EA, and in the same department at this guy. When telling my mom about it, she suspected that this family knew her friend's boss. Just one more connection into the industry - and that's always a happy occasion.
All in all, two hours in the house had opened a lot of doors for my life: a new friendship with an old friend and a possible future career in my ideal industry is a lot of luck for one day. On the way out, I was repulsed with myself for carrying the scent of some 30 perfumes. I instantly hopped in the shower when I got home to wash that off, and with it I washed off the shame and embarrassment: I had just then realized that not only did I forget to pick up dog treats on the way home, but I forgot to tip the valet too.
Maybe this whole rich and famous thing isn't for me. But that type of people certainly can be interesting.
I've had a strong craving for a while now for some good music to add to my collection. I went on a small rampage this weekend and picked up 4 or 5 albums, most of which are pretty good stuff, but one stands out in particular:
DJ Cam, Liquid Hip Hop
Fans of old DJ Cam might feel out of place here - it's not as trippy as as his early stuff, like his landmark Loa Project Vol. 2. This album, as given away by the name, is much more toward the hip-hop end of the trip-hop spectrum. On the other hand, it's not straightforward hip-hop like The Beat Assassinated was. It's got plenty of hiphop loops for sure, but the guest verses are relaxed and the other tracks are highly sampled, resulting in a DJ Krush-like sound that's peppy but mellow. Go grab it.
So Alex and I have been killing time with various amigos playing lots of Gran Turismo, but beyond that there's practically nothing going on. Tonight though, I got into a mood that reminded me of last summer and how different things were then.
Looking back on the entries from exactly a year ago, I have to ask: what the hell happened? I went to UT orientation, had the time of my friggin' life, and then college life was so drastically different. Living in Jester and eating crappy food may seem lame in comparison to the honors dorms and the much-better Kinsolving cafeteria, but they just lack a certain survivalist charm. In orientation, I scrounged what I could, forcing myself to make it last somehow while I trudged across campus through the rain on the way to a bureaucracy office or the next social event. That crappy bunch of living conditions gave me the biggest adrenaline high of my life.
So I spent a year in the place that gave me the first adrenaline high. And after a few weeks, it just became life as usual. The strangeness must've worn off after a week. I hardly missed home at all, but there was no adrenaline rush like there had been back in June. I got used to living with Tim, the routine of classes, I got to know my friends a little better, and after no time at all it just became life as always. I was comfortable. I guess that kept my morale high so I wouldn't start screwing up in my classes, but that's gotta change.
Not the grades part, but the comfortable-ness. That said, I'm pretty damn happy about a lot of things that did happen in frosh year. I'm sitting here, home some 3 weeks from college, and I really miss a lot of things: the Drag, impromptu Halo games, the whole Blanton crowd (every last one of them engineers), Michelle, being in the same town as Kris, and, yeah, even really really bad local rock concerts that damage my ears so badly I can hear ringing at night in my room when I go to sleep here at home.
Meanwhile, home life is OK. But not great. It's awesome playing tennis and GT with Alex and I hope that keeps up, but there's none of the variety of last summer, as if there was any even then. The giant SSB gatherings aren't the same with all these young guys replacing our generation of smashers, there's no CS competitions every weekend - it's all just people chilling.
And in truth, I suppose it fits. It's summer, it's supposed to go slow and everyone's supposed to be laid-back. But until I can manage to slow down, I'm kinda bored.
Apparently the pro-video-game faction was wrong. First the GTA-inspired hijacking sprees, and now somebody had to get all old-school and go Blast Corps on his poor town with a bulldozer.
Or anyone else wanting to build an upgrade for Quakecon, for that matter:
Tom's Hardware has a guide for building a very suitable gaming pc for under $1000. That's from scratch. So if you've already got some parts that carry over, then that's even less money to spend. They have some great recommendations on parts that have all been tested, work well, and are cheap. Just because I feel like talking hardware for a bit, here's some specs:
Athlon XP 2600+
Biostar Nforce2 Ultra mobo
2x256 Kingston PC3200 DDR (dual-channel)
CoolerMaster Aero7
2x80GB WD 8MB cache drives
Gigabyte Radeon 9600XT 128
Samsung Combo DVDROM/CDRW
Enermax Case (mid-tower, 350W, windows and fans)
Logitech Cordless Comfort Duo (MX700 and natural-style keyboard)
Viewsonic 19" monitor (the article cheats and got a used one, but they assumed $150 for a new or good used monitor)
That's a *complete* system for $960, by Tom's estimates. Take out the case, kb/mouse, burner, and monitor and you're talking $620 for a hardware overhaul on the inside and you're getting an extremely capable overclocker in the process (good cooler, 333MHz CPU, 400 memory). So, kids, those of you wanting to potentially rock the Doom3/CS2 boat at Quakecon, get crackin'.
A tall-ish American boy. Speaks three languages. An adrenaline junkie who hates rollercoasters, but loves to talk about turbos. Video game expert and aspiring performer currently working the karaoke circuit. Currently trying to find his heart, which seems to have been left in Tokyo. Graduate student in San Diego.
