Oh, Tonight

I'm having a great week. Today I started reading William Gibson's Neuromancer and, well, things are looking up.

In a very coincidental way, I've been priming myself for this book all week. Monday I had lunch with Davers and we talked about art, culture, Internet, and the catharsis of expression. You know, Davers things. And yesterday, me and Higgy traded witticisms and insight over the process of creating writing.

So-- of course-- today I was sucked into the book that defined cyberspace and inspired a generation of nerds to build a world of their own creation. Tomorrow, I'll probably get visited my Morpheus.

I become entranced by something dark and familiar when I read about cyberpunk power brokering and bleak cityscapes that offer nothing but anonymity. It's the same feeling I get when my old mainstay, Turn on the Bright Lights, kicks through my car stereo at night. The feeling escapes words but it's definitively me. It's nighttime. It's gritty but not vulgar. Carefree but not cruel.

Say what you will about memory biases, but I swear: This feeling has welled up in me since I started listening to Interpol.

Oops. Gibson has totally borked my writing voice. I'm spending way too much time trying to thread together sentences that convey emotional whims with machine-like precision. Time to unjack from this terminal.

Note to self: Figure out how to update Blogger from Lynx.

On a More Positive Note!

I'm really excited to see how much attention The Social Network is garnering from critics in the run-up to the Academy Awards. When I saw the movie with my mom earlier this year, we both left the theater quite impressed with its performance on all the traditional moviemaking benchmarks: Reznor's brilliant but not overbearing soundtrack, the cinematography and Sorkin's trademark wit sharpened by the lens of incredible acting.

More importantly, though, I left the theater feeling downright capable of doing something magnificent on my own. I felt empowered. Not over-empowered, like I could be the next boy billionaire. More like... I dunno. Like I might one day have an idea that could touch a lot of peoples' lives. And that felt good.

Hollywood (and art as a whole) has a social responsibility to warn us-- within reason-- of the dangers and tradeoffs that accompany wealth, fame, and an unchecked hunger for power. But they also have a responsibility to inspire us. The Social Network did both, and I think that's really, really cool.

The first

My Friday nights used to kick off with a heist. I remember me and a few of my friends, jacked-up on the hardest stimulants we could pilfer, racing down Back Beach Road toward our destination: A calculated, well-planned assault on a fine art warehouse. Or, you know, the middle school equivalent of fine art.

Video games.

Checking video stores on Friday nights for the latest and greatest PlayStation games sure felt like a heist. We would rush the door and file through the magnetic anti-theft pillars, scoffing like they were some advanced motion-detection system we'd hacked moments earlier. From there, we would all split up and take separate routes to our respective console's section of the store. And after a few moments, a victorious shout.

"They've got the new Metal Gear!" Or "Dude, the new Bond game!"

That was the thrill, perhaps more so than the games themselves. We would give proud, condescending glances to anyone who passed us as we were leaving. Don't bother, we thought. You snooze, you loose. And one confused parent would drive in silence as the car of over-caffeinated kids poured over the game's instruction manual and speculated about how good the "graphics" were.

I was always a fan of the party games, like Super Smash Bros. or GoldenEye, because by their very nature they avoided the situation I came here to talk about: Being the first. Everyone is equally inexperienced starting off a new party game. And no one person's skills come into focus. It's great.

But with single-player games, someone has to be the first to try it out in front of everyone else. Certainly not me. I would always find an excuse not to be the first to play the game when we all got home: It's your console, man. Your mom drove us. You didn't get to play first last time. Nah, I hate 3rd person stealth shooters.

I would literally say whatever it took to avoid being humiliated by the first five minutes of a new game. The last thing a middle-schooler with zero confidence and zero athletic skills wants to hear is that he really sucks at gaming, too. So I would let the bravest among my friends have the first pass at guiding Solid Snake through Shadow Moses.

Eventually the first player would die in some stupid way and one of us would make some snarky, immature comment about them sucking. You know, the way middle school friends treat each other. And then the question would be posed: Who's next? Oh, not me. That shit looks hard. Better let the other expert take the reigns instead.

I was 12 and already defeating myself at every minor opportunity to succeed. Even something as stupid and trivial as a video game.

There would always come a point, either later that night or the next day or maybe a few months down the road, when I would angrily think to myself "why am I not as good at Metal Gear as my friends?" Well, because I didn't have the practice. That didn't dawn on me back then, and I would shift into another unproductive mindset thinking that I'm just not as naturally skilled as my friends.

Those negative mindsets have stuck with me to this day, albeit surfacing in more adult situations. What's the point in apologizing? I can't ever make it up to them. I can't humiliate myself by talking to her. I'm not interesting. I can't do this, I can't do that.

And those thoughts and situations inevitably lead to sitting back, watching my friends excel and wondering if I'm just not as good at life as them. Wondering why people can program faster and more elegantly than me. Wondering why my brain feels so un-pliable and unreceptive to the prospect of new experiences.

Well, you may not ever be the best at the game, but dammit, you gotta play to get better. If you take this fact for granted, and you're thinking "well duh, Kyle," then at least consider for a second that it's not easy for everyone to place confidence in themselves, especially when defeating yourself has been a ten-year habit.

I wish I'd have learned this lesson when video games and a few derisive middle school insults were at stake, rather than my human soul. But I'm tryin', dammit. I figure that humiliating myself by trying is a lot better than humiliating myself by not trying.

Efficiency

Efficiency. Doing things in the shortest amount of time with the fewest resources has always been an obsession of mine. It's why I went into engineering. It's why I get such a kick out of helping businesses work efficiently with well-designed software solutions. It's why I've Google Maps'd, tested and re-tested the hell out of every route and shortcuts to and from work.

I may not be 100% efficient 100% of the time, but dammit, there's an untold elegance in getting a jobs done simply and quickly. And I'm quirky about it.

I caught this article in the latest issue of Wired about the IOI: The International Olympiad in Informatics. The kids are savants on a level that is both foreign and frightening to me. But my god-- is there anything more beautiful than 22 lines of Pascal tearing through a multi-dimensional dataset? I posit not.

Reading through the article, you'll notice that the USA doesn't excel at the IOI in a way you might expect the birthplace of the Internet, personal computer and Furby to excel. Perhaps our performance is a criticism of this country's math and science education standards. Maybe we need to start teaching programming at a younger age. But I doubt it. After all, do you think China and Belarus really have better math and science programs than the United States?

Eh. Actually, maybe they do :-/ But no. The quality of education isn't necessarily the issue.

I just don't think American culture, as a whole, appreciates efficiency the way other nations of the world have learned, out of necessity, to appreciate it. The America I see every day cares about jobs done right and gives bonus points for efficiency. The rest of the world demands efficiency out of necessity. Lack of food. Lack of space. Lack of labor. Lack of technology.

I'm not saying the best coders in the world grew up poor and hungry. Hardly. What I'm saying is this: When you have a deep, personal connection to the realities of scarcity-- maybe in your neighborhood, maybe in your own home-- you begin to make efficiency a part of everything you do. And that sort of edge can really make all the difference, whether you're in a high school coding competition or vying for a promotion in your company.

Something to think about.

I need a more efficient way to find good new music. Any of you Belarusian kids out there wanna design me the next Pandora, so I can get my electro on?