Militant Soccer Moms

When was it that olive-drab became the color of choice for minivans in America? I ask only because I’ve seen no less than three dozen of these things (most of them Fords, which may or may not be important) in the last few days and I’m at a loss to explain it. Maybe people are going for the military look to show their support for the troops in Iraq? Of course, if that were the case it might make more sense to have a hummer in olive, but then all of the ones I see around here are in bright fruity colors that have no business on a vehicle originally intended for combat theaters. So, minivans in camo, hummers in yellow…would someone stop the world, please? I’d like to get off and clear my head for a bit.

In other completely unrelated news Jeff dug up and old Wired article that I found truly fascinating. It deals with Autism (and the closely-related Asperger’s Syndrome) and the startling rise of cases being discovered in the Santa Clara area (a.k.a. Silicon Valley) and the rest of the developed world. If you have even a passing interest in psychology or neuroscience you’d do well to give this a read. I found it truly fascinating and it raised a few interesting questions about the effects of our increasing knowledge of genetics on the future of human evolution.

//_Norm out

Just Remembering…

Things I’ve Learned At Work

• If you leave work at any time between 4:00pm and 6:00pm you will arrive home at 6:30. This has been tested; it is a law of physics.
• Never, under any circumstances, work harder than is absolutely necessary. If you do you’ll just end up getting ahead of schedule, which is bad because your boss will always look at this situation and see that you do not have enough to do (rather than realizing that you’re a good worker) and give you even more. You will not be able to finish this and you will be blamed when the project falls behind.
• Do not check your e-mail after 3:00pm on a Friday. If you do you will lose plausible deniability and will have no choice but to come in and work on Saturday. They’re also gonna need you to come in on…Sunday, mmmkay?
• The surest way to make the ambient outside temperature jump from a comfortable 75 degrees to a blistering 95 degrees is to have the air conditioner inside your test vehicle break. Since you now have no choice but to roll down all the windows (or broil yourself, which I suppose is a second option) the humidity will also jump to anywhere between 40 and 90 percent. The exact amount depends on how many Fortune Spheres you had the foresight to collect.
• You know that book you bought? Donate it to your local library; you will never get a chance to read it.

//_Norm out

Streptococcal Is Spelled Like It Sounds

I’m fairly proud of my immune system, as previous posts may have highlighted, but there is a down side to not getting sick very often. The problem is that when I finally do take ill it’s something strong enough to place me rather solidly on my ass. I don’t actually know what virulent strain of bacteria or jungle-incubated virus has penetrated my defenses but I suspect that it’s some sort of strep infection, the one ailment to which my body seems to regularly succumb. My immune system, on the other hand, is none too pleased with the situation and is enthusiastically raising my body temperature and attacking my muscle fibers in an attempt to annihilate the invaders. The whole situation is reminiscent of sand-blasting a saltine cracker.

My incapacitation couldn’t have come at a less opportune time. I’ve got a ton of testing I need to cover here at work (my boss is on assignment elsewhere so I have to take care of all of it) and the Soul Calibur regional tournament is on Sunday, which is of course a subject for a post all by itself. My plan for now is to tough it out the rest of today (as I did yesterday) and then dope myself up with NyQuil and sleep. If I still don’t feel better tomorrow then I’ll probably break down and see a doctor. Or maybe replace the muffler on my car. One of those two.

//_Norm out

Insidious Or Awesome? You Decide

I’m in Ohio right now, which is arguably the more interesting and/or important of the things I could tell you about right now but I decided I’d rather talk about this radio station I found on the way into Columbus. See, I (like many others) have grown weary and jaded of music on the radio in general as it tends to be overplayed, generic, manufactured crap. One of the few exceptions to this back in Detroit is 89X, a station I listen to quite frequently. When it’s signal finally faded to un-listenable levels I switching in the car-kit for my CD player only to find out that my car’s tape deck no longer like tapes. I considered feeding it my foot as an alternative but I didn’t want to let off of the accelerator long enough to do it properly.

Anyway, in desperation I started scanning around looking for something moderately listenable and found something that shocked me to my core. In the exact spot of the FM band that I normally listen to (88.7) was a station that played nothing but amazing music that I had (get this) never heard before. If I had to classify the genre I’d call it something like alternative gothic punk-rock, which may or may not have helped you picture it in your mind. For real world examples, think Evanescence and Lacuna Coil. This litany of awesomeness went on for over an hour with hardly a commercial break and continued to supply songs I had never heard, not even once. I was astounded.

Eventually, they got around to playing that god-awful Hoobastank song that the local radio stations in Detroit have destroyed even further by playing every twelve seconds, and event which served to confirm that I had not, in fact, crossed into some sort of music Twighlight Zone. Closely following this acceptable flub (I’ll give them one) they played one of the best songs I’ve heard in years, by an artist I can’t remember but I was sure I’d heard before. Something nagged at me, though, about that song…something I remembered but couldn’t quite put my finger on.

It became obvious a few minutes later.

After two hours of relatively standard inane DJ chatter (the 89X DJs are much better) I was suddenly treated to “on the street” testimony from teens who had found God (that’s capital G God). I thought that was a bit odd, but hey, maybe it’s a local church’s paid advertisement, right? Wrong. Then the DJ starts telling me about how important God is in his life and how I really need to find him and let him into my heart.

Woah! All this time I’d be listening to Christian Rock! I had absolutely no idea that any religion had produced music this awesome. I mean, sure, I’ve enjoyed DC Talk and Jars of Clay for many years, but they’re pretty much generic soft rock and heavy on the Jesus references. This stuff was much harder and had managed to go on four hours without a single obvious reference to higher powers. In hindsight it was fairly obvious, but at the moment I was totally floored.

And so the question arises: why isn’t this extensively advertised? It’s not like it did anything to change my agnosticism, but if I’d known about it back in the day it might have made religion seem a little less mired in antiquity and, at the very least, held my attention for a few more years. As it stands now, I want to know about it anyway because the music is great. After all, Evanescence is some sort of Christian group and they totally rock, so I suppose, why shouldn’t the rest of them?

//_Norm out

Ohio Is Nothing But Corn

At this moment I remain in Ohio despite my best efforts to the contrary. It seems as though my bondage will be released sometime tomorrow around noon, which is good because I really need to be back in Detroit in time for the tourney warm-ups and practice session that afternoon. Yes kids, the Michigan Regional leg of The V Games is finally upon us and, I must confess, I am not even remotely ready. This is partly my fault, as I’ve gotten heavily involved in FFX, FFX-2 and Ico in the recent months but mostly the fault of my employer. Between work and classes (and the homework for those classes) I haven’t touched a game of Soul Calibur since the Nerdlan back in mid May. Combine this with a depressing lack of local talent to challenge myself and you have a rather impotent Talim player on your hands.

However, I am not despairing. I will play hard and spend as much time as I can Friday and Saturday playing against the people who will be in the Sunday tournament. There’s always a chance, particularly since I’ve learned that two of the best Michigan SC2 players are in Chicago this weekend for that regional match because they have schedule conflicts with the Detroit one. The one, the only Bryan has pledged to be on hand to make good use of Pat’s camera at the event and, assuming we get permission, tape my matches. This is both so I can one day toss them up here for you all to see and also so that I can send it in with my game reviews for that contributing writer thing I mentioned a few weeks ago. They want videos of you playing your favorite game and showing how hardcore you are, and I figured that there aren’t many things more hardcore than videogame tournaments…for gamers, that is.

//_Norm out

Owned

As you may have surmised from the title of this post, last weekend’s tournament didn’t go very well. There are numerous reasons for this, most of which will sound whiny and pathetic, but I feel like I need to defend myself a little bit.

Obviously, the fact that my job and classes have kept me from playing SC2 more than a handful of times since I returned to America was a major factor, but more important was my lack of real tourney experience and luck. There isn’t much I can do about the luck factor…the seeding for the tournament tree was random and I ended up facing the guy who would go on to win the tourney in the second round. This was bad enough, but the problem was compounded by the fact that he played as Berserker, a character who was previously illegal in SC2 tournaments. I had no experience against him, and the fight was so incredibly one-sided that there’s really no point in discussing it. In the end, I left the fight with badly shaken confidence that was a major contributor to my third-round loss against Surge, a guy I’d beaten twice in practice. I’ll post the video of the second loss soon for any of you who may be interested.

Is that it? Maybe not, actually, as several people have encouraged me to travel to Indianapolis this weekend (and Louisville the next) to compete in those two regional tournaments. According to the man in charge of the tourney (who is a very cool guy, I might add) both of these venues are similar to Detroit; a relatively small number of competitors who aren’t Rob the Destroyer, which is always a plus. If and when I go I’ll of course let you know the results.

//_Norm out

Moving Along Slowly

After weeks (or, more accurately, months) of delays due almost entirely to my own lack of motivation and effort the visual re-design of this site is nearly ready to go live. You can navigate here if you want to keep a voyeuristic eye on the final evolution of the style…it’s fully functional and all posts and comments dynamically update with the same content you’ll find here. Once I finalize a few minor points (finishing the text-adjustment script, creating the new header graphic, fixing the gaming search error, removing the paragraph tags from the linkups) I’ll apply the new template to the entire site.

I’ve got the video from last weekend’s tourney rendered but I can’t seem to post it from my C++ classroom; I’ll do my best to get it up by midnight tonight. The file is (unfortunately) in Windows Media format, not because I have any love for Microsoft but because it was the easiest to accomplish using the software I have on hand. You’ll need the latest version of Windows Media Player 9 to view the video, which should weight in around twenty megabytes.

Update

So, as I type this the video is currently uploading from the family computer. I say this to you because my family does not, in fact, have what you would call a real broadband connection and, thus, the video is 25% up and CuteFTP says it’s a good hour away from being complete. Since it is late and I am tired (and need to be at work on the morrow anyway) I’ll give you a link to where the video should be whenever it gets done. My only request: don’t bother to click on it unless it’s a least an hour after the timestamp of this post. Keep in mind that you’ll need the latest version of Windows Media Player (or something like Media Player Classic) to view this video.

I have already done a fairly elaborate and detailed anaylsis of this video myself, but I of course would love to here comments from the kaikan crew as well. Mitsu has already generously created a forum thread where such discussions can take place in a most expediant form. If you happen to read this before I finish you can rest assured I’ll be adding my own comments to it post-haste, which roughly translates to “whenever I get around to it.”

This Way Lies Madness

Apparently, despite years of trying to coach myself out of this habit, I am still almost completely incapable of simply ignoring ignorant statements. Because a vastly disproportional amount of America’s (and the world’s, for that matter) population can’t, in fact, tell their ass from a hole in the ground, most of us are constantly bombarded by stupid statements, usually about whatever the hot political topic is at the time.

Today, it was (surprise!) Iraq and how evil we Americans are for being there in the first place. Now, I’m not here to debate the moral and ethical quandary that the Iraq war has become (or perhaps always was). There are lots of strong opinions on that topic and I’m not certain I have the ability to successfully argue one side or the other and so I won’t try. The statement that roused my ire went something like this:

“There are a lot of really bad men in this world doing very bad things. Why aren’t we going after them?”

The statement itself is, in fact, a reasonable question: why aren’t we going after all the bad people in the world? Thus, on its own the statement is fairly acceptable. The problem, of course, is one of context. Since it was dropped in a conversation about the dubious morality of the Iraq war it was used as a reason why we should never have gone in there to begin with. After all, if you’ve let evil tyrants live in the past (or, worse, propped them up) you forever forfeit your ability to correct those mistakes in the future. Far be it that a country who is, admittedly, partially or entirely responsible for the unsavory atmosphere of our current world ever take steps to fix it.

It’s an interesting study in the paradoxical behavior of humans. Often we find ourselves so enamored with a particular point of view that we will reject all logic to defend it. Too rarely do we stop and ask ourselves: does anything I’m saying right now make sense? Clearly, the above statement has no basis in reality; the fact that you, in the past, made a mistake is rarely a reason why you should not correct it. In fact, if people fixed the stuff they screw up rather than leaving it for the next person who comes along I have a feeling the world as a whole would be much better off.