Category: Rants

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I’m Bad At Blogging

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See, I’m bad at this.

It’s been over a month since I blogged last, and part of that is due to a narrowed focus in my life overall. A few weeks ago I found that my attention was beginning to wander, into something extremely goofy: I decided that I wanted to build a poker table with hole-cameras and create a setup that allowed me to film some of my home poker games. The intent was to create a show that I could toss up on YouTube.

I became temporarily obsessed. For at least a full week, the idea was in every waking moment of thought for me. The research I put into the possibility was staggering. Every day I’d spend time searching forums, reading up on cameras, working out a budget, checking into editing and card-display software, and trying to figure out how my house would be laid out to accommodate it. I even went so far as to buy a video camera to test its functions – which is actually what snapped me out of the obsession.

I had set up this video camera in my poker room and let it film, trying to gauge its quality and the length of time it could record. While I was watching the video, something in my brain snapped me back to reality. I don’t fucking have time for this! was the revelation I finally came to. I barely had time to do the things already on my plate, including finishing my fucking novel (or: “the whole reason I quit my job”), much less add something else as work-intensive as producing, editing, and publishing and amateur poker show.

After my brief bout with insanity I decided to figure out what the important tasks in my life were and narrow the field. I cut out a lot of chaff, and I refocused myself to four broad categories: my book, my house, my podcasts, and poker. If it doesn’t fall into one of these categories, I can’t justify focusing on it – and I completely forgot about my blog.

My book is the clear priority. The text is finished and I’m on to revisions now. I have a copy-editor friend who offered to do an editing pass on it for me, and I need to get the second draft done before I send it off to him. Prior to this renewed focus I wasn’t concentrating on the book hardly at all, and I realized just how fucking nuts that was. The book is the life.

My house is roughly equal priority, and mostly just includes doing chores. That was the deal, right? I’m able to leave my day job to concentrate on my writing as long as I’m willing to take on the vast majority of the housework, since my wife will now be the family breadwinner. In addition to the daily tasks, we are remodeling one room and re-arranging the house layout, so there’s a lot of work to be done there and it all needs to be finished rather quickly.

My podcasts are important to me, even though they don’t provide any real income or benefit. One of them – After The Fact – is ending after almost four years, and I want it to go out with a bang. The other – Trade Secrets – will be my new ongoing focus. I have more fun preparing for and recording Trade Secrets than I do with most other things in my life. It’s one of the greatest crews of people I’ve ever worked with, and our conversations are insanely fun.

If you’ve read my blog before you understand the position of poker in my life. Focusing on it is something I was lacking for a while, and it was beginning to show in my results. I’d been on a several week long losing streak that had begun to shake my confidence. That was unacceptable – especially right now – because I’m about to go compete in a couple of events at the World Series of Poker. Once I drew poker back into my crosshairs, my performance turned around and I’ve started getting that confidence back.

Everything else – at least from a “work” perspective – is of less importance. I’ll do my best to still fire a blog post up more often than every five weeks. During my trip to Vegas for the WSOP I’ll be blogging regularly and even posting some video blogs, but those will be primarily poker-focused. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep it up once I get back.

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ATFP Ep 72 Is Gone

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After much searching and attempts at file recovery, about 65% of what we recorded for our After The Fact Strider episode is just gone. We have no idea what happened to it or how it got deleted, but it’s no longer with us in this world.

We could just scrap it and say it’s gone forever, but we’re not gonna do that. Instead, the upcoming “I Love Turtles!!” episode is going to become episode 72, and we’re going to re-record a new Strider episode for number 73. Hopefully that will help make up for all the delays recently and make sure that those of you who’ve been with us from the beginning don’t get shafted out of one of the final ten episodes of the show.

As always, if you have questions or comments for us to use on the show you can hit us up on Facebook (facebook.com/afterthefactpodcast), Twitter (@AfterTheFactPod), or e-mail us at afterthefact@geekerific.com and we’ll use your questions and comments on the show. The Turtles ep records this Sunday, April 21st, so get us your questions by then!

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Just Google It.

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“There’s no such thing as a dumb question.”

The phrase above is meant to teach kids that asking is better than not asking because – at worst – you’ll learn something new. That’s how I was raised. As an adult, this axiom still holds true, except that what I’ve been learning is that people are assholes.

Lately, I’ve been encountering the Google effect when asking questions, especially in any online forum or social media. Someone mentions something I’ve never heard of and when I ask what it is, I get the online equivalent of a scrunchy-faced scoff. Apparently, the advent of ubiquitous online information and search engines means that no human being ever has to answer a simple fucking question anymore, and people who ask them without hitting up Google first are lazy, incompetent assholes. It’s the modern day equivalent of the schoolyard taunt “Go look it up!”.

It keeps getting worse. The more I try to engage people, the more flak I get for not looking shit up first. The problem is that if I Googled everything I ever saw in social media and never asked a question, I’d never directly interact with anyone. Twitter has been called the “place where everyone talks and no one listens”, and it’s now becoming the place where no one wants to listen. I’m just gonna whip my shit out there and expect you to know. You don’t know what I’m talking about? Go fucking Google it, asshole.

For the first time recently I was linked to a website called “Let Me Google That For You”, where the whole idea is given a snotty twist. It probably takes more effort to create a LMGTFY link than it would to just answer the fucking question in the first place, but people have now been given an engine with which to be douchekits to question-askers rather than simply engage them politely.

I like asking questions. I enjoy hearing people’s answers, especially about things they love that I might not know about. Listening to people’s slant on the information they dole out helps me to learn more about them from how they talk about the things they feel strongly about. Questions drive conversation. But as time goes on, people seem to want conversation less and less, and rather only want to commiserate with like-minded people who already know.

Is answering a simple question really that hard? Have we become so hopelessly inured to the ubiquity of online information that we can’t be bothered by someone wanting to hear our own answers, our own viewpoints? How does anyone pass along knowledge of the things they love to people who don’t know about them anymore? Isn’t that part of the point of social media?

I guess not. It’s the place where everyone shouts into the abyss. The place where, for want of as simple answer, several people I once followed lost me as a follower or an online “friend” because they couldn’t be bothered. When I ask a question and get a snarky “Google it” type response just remember: I’m not the one being the dick.

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Two Topics, One Post

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I read a lot online. I tend to gravitate toward book blogs and video game sites, which makes sense with my background. Me recent perusals have brought up two wildly different topics, and I’ve decided to just write about both of them.

ON BOOKS

Recurring articles pop up all the time in the book-o-sphere, and one that always catches my eye are bloggers and industry folk discussing their “journey” with eBooks. See, many of them were staunch opponents to eBooks. On one end of the spectrum there are folks who didn’t want to support eBooks because they thought it to be the demise of their favorite industry and/or pastime. On the other end are the more hipster-ish arguments claiming that the feel or smell of a physical book is integral to the reading experience.

First, let me say that both of these arguments are bullshit. The publishing game is changing, yes, but the idea that upheaval in the modern book industry would result in the death of prose as an artform is ludicrous. Any arguments regarding the book as a physical object being an inseparable core aspect of the reading experience is equally silly: it is the words on the page that keep you reading, and I defy anyone to tell me with a straight face that when they are immersed in a story they still pay attention to how the pages smell.

On the other hand, I agree that the early days of eBooks were pretty rough. Reading a book off of an LCD screen – especially an older one with a lower refresh-rate – was physically painful for me, causing me tons of eye strain and headaches. Upon the invention and refinement of ePaper, though, all of those barriers go away.

I was thinking about writing an article about my “journey” into eBooks, but it really boils down to this: ePaper is awesome, eBooks rock, and the moment that had the ability to rid myself of stacks and stacks of books and replace them with a single device that could, ostensibly, hold every book I’d ever want to read presented itself I jumped in with both feet. I’m sold.

ON VIDEO GAMES

The big hubbub today centers around EA’s release of the new SimCity title, a game they showed at last year’s E3. In a surprise to exactly no one, EA’s been having all kinds of troubles maintaining the persistent, always-on internet connection required to play the game. Players have reported everything from 5+ hour downloads to the loss of hours of gameplay due to a server hiccup to the complete inability to connect at all.

I remember watching the demo for this title during E3 and being really excited for it. I used to play a ton of SimCity on an old Mac Classic, spending hours and hours using cheat codes to get extra money while having natural disasters turned off, then building up a giant metropolis only to turn natural disasters back on and watch the whole thing sink into what amounted to an apocalypse.

When they announced that the game required a persistent internet connection, though, I immediately scratched it off of my want list. The entire concept that if my internet connection goes down I suddenly lose access to games that I’ve either purchased in physical form or downloaded to a local device is appalling to me. It has, and always will be, a deal-breaker.

I really wish I could be a fly on the wall in meetings where executives discuss the reasoning behind requiring an internet connection to play single-player games. Video game industry folk try to sell us this idea as an anti-piracy measure, but I believe that’s more smokescreen than anything else. Executive-level folks like to make a big deal out of piracy, but it has considerably less effect on a company’s bottom line than many would lead us to believe.

In reality it’s more of a way for them to collect data on their players and target all of us with advertising. Plus, with the video game industry about to enter a major era of flux, game companies are panicking because they have no idea what gamers want anymore. Many of them believe that collecting this sort of data will help them figure out what the next big thing will be before it gets here. What they don’t realize is that with game development cycles that last 3+ years, the fickle nature of the industry will have changed between development and release, so all you can do is cross your fingers and hope.

In the meantime, the larger companies like EA and Blizzard are instituting this asinine always-on DRM that will end up losing them way more customers than piracy ever would. How about trying a different tactic: make good games, and make them as easy to obtain and play as humanly possible, for a decent price. Could it truly be that simple? Seems pretty basic to me.

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Play A New Game Every Once In A While

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Even though I’m lying here, sick as a dog, living off of Robotussin and cough drops, this subject has bothered me long enough that I had to sit up and write about it.

I’m always amazed at people’s reluctance to try new things. This is primarily a reaction to my experience with games and poker. I’ve been playing board games for most of my life in some form, and I’ve always been interested in playing something new. I’ll give damned near any game you put in front of me a try, if for no other reason than to understand why I don’t want to play it.

I’ve met a ton of people over the years who are stuck in some kind of rut when it comes to board games. They’ve found the one or few that they like, and fuck all the rest. Even if something new comes out that’s right up their alley, they blanch at the whole idea of putting the effort out to learn something new, especially if they feel as though they’ve “solved” the game they’re familiar with.

This is especially true with poker. After Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker in 2003, the world saw an explosion in poker interest, centered primarily around No-Limit Hold ‘Em, the game that’s played in the WSOP Main Event. Everyone and their brother, sister, cousin, neighbor, mistress, gigolo, mild acquaintance, and most-hated-enemy learned how to play Hold ‘Em. In the years that followed, the combination of home games and online poker kept spurring this interest in Hold ‘Em and everyone just kept playing, whether they were good at the game or not.

What about other poker games? Poker, in it’s current form, has been around for a couple hundred years, but No Limit Hold ‘Em was only invented in the early ’50’s. 5-Card Draw, 7-Card Stud, and their variants predate Hold ‘Em by a long shot. Since Hold ‘Em’s introduction, variants on the community-card theme – Omaha, Tahoe, Pineapple and the like – have exploded as well. There are a ton of poker variants, and most of them are pretty damned fun. Just look at the WSOP schedule this year: there are 8 or 10 different games being spread, and even more if you count betting variations like Limit, Pot-Limit, and No Limit.

But I’ll be bug-fuckered if I can figure out a way to get home-game players to play anything but No Limit Hold ‘Em.

I was introduced to poker in 2004 via Hold ‘Em, just like most people. I played in a home game that ran for several years, and when it fell apart I started running my own home game, which has been running with varying degrees of success for a number of years now. Even though I started on Hold ‘Em, the whole concept of poker is what drew me in, and my appetite to learn the other games has never really been quenched. I’m absolutely fascinated by the fact that someone designed a deck of 52 cards that a) hasn’t appreciably changed since it’s initial creation and b) has spawned countless variants not only of poker, but of a ton of other games that can be played with that very same deck.

Apparently, many do not share that same level of enthusiasm. There is a small, core band of players in my poker group that will play whatever game is put in front of us. Getting anyone outside that group to play anything but Hold ‘Em is like herding cats. All the other poker games seem to hold this stigma that they’re for “more experienced” players, or people just aren’t willing to learn them because they’re afraid to move away from the game they already know. This cenophobia just baffles me.

The most common excuse I hear is “I’ll just lose my money.”

Wait… Didn’t you do the exact same thing to learn Hold ‘Em in the first place? At some point, every one of the millions of Hold ‘Em players out there were newbs, myself included, and we were just lighting our money on fire by playing it at all. This is especially funny coming from the people who routinely lose even playing Hold ‘Em. Clearly you’re not in this thing for the money, so why should spending a few bucks on a new game bother you? And yet, not one of these people who’re afraid of Omaha or Stud or Lowball has been able to sufficiently explain to me how learning one of these new games would be any different from the experience they had learning Hold ‘Em.

I mean, I really love Hold ‘Em, but with as much enjoyment as I get out of it, it can get a little tiresome after a while. Break out of your shell! Do something new! Don’t be a chicken-shit! Play a new game every once in a while.

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We Survived V-Day

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Look at that. We all lived through Valentine’s Day.

According to a ton of people in my social media feeds, Valentine’s Day sits in a range somewhere between “annoying corporate holiday” and “candy heart murder-suicide pact day”. V-Day has always carried a stigma for the average adult male: it’s either the day you go try to get laid or the day you fuck everything up and will never get laid again. Somewhere along the line, though, it became this hated thing, perceived not as a day to celebrate love but a day for those in relationships to throw their connectedness in the face of all of their untethered friends.

I’ll admit: Valentine’s day is pretty superfluous. If you’re in even a semi-committed relationship, you don’t need a holiday – or any outside force, for that matter – to reinforce that bond. Well, you shouldn’t, at least. Your relationship with your significant other is a very personal thing, and isn’t something that most people (at least that I know) need or want to celebrate on an international level. We want our celebrations to be just for us – the times that our relationship not only takes precedence over the rest of the world, but does so to the exclusion of all others.

So, yeah. Valentine’s Day is somewhat artificial. But when did it become the target of vitriol? When I was growing up there was always some bitter sap on the sidelines with their fuck-this-lovey-dovey-crap attitude, but somehow this cheesy, unimportant holiday has become THE ESTABLISHMENT, and single people turn into a raging anti-establishment mob for a few days.

I’ll let all you single people know a little secret about Valentine’s Day: most of us in relationships don’t give a shit about it. Yeah, we’ll use it as a random excuse to buy flowers or go out to a movie or have a date night – all things that we do in plenty of other situations – but it’s not us that’s throwing anything in anyone’s face. Truly committed, happy couples think that Valentine’s Day is pretty silly and arbitrary, just like you single folk do.

The percentage of people who go googly over this holiday is (almost certainly) pretty (probably) small (hopefully). The real pressure of Valentine’s Day lands squarely on the shoulders of newly-committed guys whose relationships haven’t developed enough to have their own milestones, and thus V-Day becomes girlfriends’ litmus test for their boyfriends’ devotion. And let me tell ya: that is a shitty place to be.

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Just Have Some F**king Fun

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When I was a game tester, I spent a lot of time talking with other geeks about movies. “A lot of time”, in this case, means well over 30 hours a week. It was a constant subject amongst a group of (sort-of-but-not-really) like-minded nerds, and something that never failed to generate lenghty debates and more than a few heated arguments. It was a sure fire way to ward off boredom during a 12-hour shift banging polygons together or checking every word of text in the latest Pokemon iteration.

I learned, over the course of these many “discussions”, that people are fucking idiots. In general, yes, but especially when it comes to movies and entertainment. It is genuinely offensive to the alpha nerd in the wild for another of his genus to have a differing opinion. Hey, jackass: I like different things than you. And I’m pretty sure that has ZERO effect on your ability to like and dislike the things that you do. So why, exactly, does one feel the burning need to leap out of their tiny cubicle two rows over, storm up to me at my own veal pen, and go on a tirade about how I’m a mouth-breathing moron for even hinting that I like The Chronicles of Riddick, and that I shouldn’t be allowed in the workforce until I’ve learned better judgment?

Yeah, that actually happened.

On another occasion, we were discussing our favorite zombie movies. I found out the hard way that there was a Romero Zealot at the table when I engaged in the following conversation:

Me: I really liked the remake of Dawn of the Dead. I thought it-
RZ: That movie is garbage.
Me: …
RZ: Zombies that run? Come on, that’s bullshit.
Me: Bullshit? Why?
RZ: It’s completely unrealistic!
Me: …
RZ: ::defiant stare::
Me: And the dead rising from their graves to consume living flesh is what? Documentary filmmaking?
RZ: Fast moving zombies are crap.
Me: I liked them fine in 28 Days Later.
RZ: Those aren’t zombies.
Me: What?
RZ: They’re not zombies.
Me: Um… Sure they are. They’re mindless, flesh-eating predators in the shells of once-living humans.
RZ: Not zombies.
Me: Yes, they are.
RZ: No, they’re not.
Me: …
RZ: Not zombies.

I got up and walked away without another word. I haven’t spoken to that douche-nozzle since, and that was 7 years ago.

It’s conversations like these that point me right at people who have forgotten how to JUST HAVE SOME FUCKING FUN. Who gives a flying baboon’s taint if Constantine was a shitty adaptation of Hellblazer? Why the shit do you care if Antonio Banderas plays an Arab? And why on God’s giant spinning disco fuckball should anyone care that A Knight’s Tale has a classic rock soundtrack!?!

What’s worse is lauding one piece of cheesy fun while panning another. Did you think Cutthroat Island was stupid, but enjoyed Pirates of the Caribbean? Watch them back to back and tell me how truly different they are. Plus, the undead pirates have a fucking dance number. Did you like The Mummy and hate Van Helsing? They’re the same damn movie.

You know what these movies are? FUN. Romps, if you will. Why the hell is “turn your brain off” used as a derisive term to describe movies? Maybe I actually want to do that every so often. Not every piece of entertainment needs to be thought provoking or intelligent. Sometimes it’s just escapism. You know, for enjoyment. And that is 100% okay.

So let it be okay. Turn your brain off every so often. ON PURPOSE. Don’t be a zealot about any subject, because you close yourself off to interpretations that might just entertain you. And don’t get up in someone’s face about liking something different from you. If we all liked the same shit this place would be really bland.

Engage in the escapism that’s being offered instead of dimestore-analyzing all of the merriment out of your whole goddamn life and maybe, instead of constantly arguing with the people who are supposed to be your contemporaries, you might actually find a smile on your face every so often.

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Useless Multitasking

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Over the last year or so, I’ve discovered that I’ve become incapable of certain types of multitasking. I phrase it that way because I don’t feel like it was always this way.

The thing that triggered me to notice is my wife’s ability to play handheld video games and watch a movie or a TV show at the same time. She can solve 4 puzzles in Picross 3D in record time and immediately tell you the entire plot of the episode of Supernatural that was playing while she was doing it.

I used to be able to do exactly that. I was even able to put something on I’d never seen before and play a brand new game and follow both of them just fine. Now, though, my brain has to sacrifice one or the other. I either turn into the world’s worst gamer (a title I’m not far off from owning anyway), or I’m that annoying guy who’s constantly asking what the fuck just happened on the the TV. We’ve tried to play board games or card games while watching TV, and I spend half the time asking for a recap of whatever it was she just did in the game.

Now look, I’m not entirely sure this is any kind of marketable skill, but damned if I don’t miss it. I got a lot of leisurely activity crammed into a couple hours with that skill, and now I feel like an asylum inmate doped up on meds, staring vacantly at the boob tube. It’s even starting to creep into other parts of my life. I absolutely can not, for example, listen to any music with lyrics while I’m writing. My creative brain just completely shuts down the moment I hear Dave Grohl’s voice. Well, maybe that’s not unique to me, but you get the point.

This, like any other odd and useless skill, makes me feel old to have lost it. Like a parent who scoffs at a video game controller or can’t program a VCR.

Fuck, I just made a VCR reference.

My point made, I guess I’m going to bed. At 9pm.

Get off my lawn.

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PAXCast Day 2: Sad Clown

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There’s no good way to put this: the day 2 PAXCast may be lost to us. Upon returning from the recording last night, Luke found that the file would not copy from the storage media, and eventually discovered that the recording had become corrupted. After a mad dash of hacks and file recovery programs the final result is an unplayable, unrecognizable pile of 1’s and 0’s.

We’ll continue to see if we can recover the lost data, but at this point Geekerific listeners may just never get to hear Luke’s description of a nerd absolutely rocking More Than A Feeling on the Rock Band stage, Dwayne’s description of a hyper-spastic League of Legends fan, or Eddie equating a body-inappropriate cosplayer to a pickup full of sheep.

We deeply apologize, everyone. In all honesty, this hurts us more than it hurts you. We’ll see you Sunday night for PAXCast Day 3!

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Lateness Update: Luke’s An Idiot

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As you surely know, both After The Fact and Trade Secrets have been delayed for quite some time. There have been many reasons for this round of delays, but this latest delay can be traced to one simple problem: Luke’s an idiot.

You see, Luke is off galavanting around Europe on vacation right now. During his vacation, he’d said he’d cut out some time to get both shows edited and posted. Now, we find out, that Luke forgot some of the critical components to the shows, and thus can’t finish the edits while he’s over there. Moron.

Which means that there will be one more week of delays, but no more. The most recent episodes of After The Fact and Trade Secrets will be posted during the week of August 6-10 – no more excuses, no more delays. We will make every effort going forward for both shows to get back on schedule and come out in a timely, bi-weekly fashion.

We sincerely apologize to all of our listeners for the problems recently, and we appreciate your support and listenership.