confused nation: where you are tthhee ppaarrttyy: nerdy

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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.

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.

How I didn't spend my summer vacation

If you've been in mourning for the past few weeks because you figured I was eaten by rats, fear not: I've not fallen prey to rats or fleas or vampires or anything in the complex ecosystem thriving under my floorboards. Instead I was swallowed up by the summer and a very fire-and-forget lifestyle.

For the past few months now-- summer, essentially-- I've been neglecting my blog and instead Tweeting my life away in 140-character blurbs. Every day I wake up, drive to work, and spend every moment of my downtime following Tweets about Houston restaurants, Billy Mays, fonts, social media, open education, and local drink specials.Then I throw my own two cents in to the mix. And since I'm the social media guy at work, I spend a good amount of my "uptime" perusing Twitter and Facebook. It's a job most guys would kill to have.

...except I can feel the toll it's starting to take on my personality (and my brain). I was built to do and reflect, not to do and forget. Twitter and other tools of the so-call social revolution put so much emphasis on the "now" that it's easy to forget to stop and smell the roses. Whereas I used to pause and carefully consider the implications of the respective past few days in my semi-regular blog posts, Twitter allows me only 140 characters to state the bare minimum before moving on to the next big event in my life. Or your life. So many lives, so much information.

If this blog has served any purpose in the past eight years, it's at least been a good place to sort the wheat from the chaff.

I have honestly reached the limit of how much data I can consume and regurgitate and sort in one day. I go to bed feeling like the 1997 New York Stock Exchange is trading Microsoft in my head. And for all this processing and grief, what do I have to show for it? Nothing. I retain little or nothing more than the ability to gloat about hearing news first, whatever that news may have been.

I've got to push something useless out of my head before classes start back up. Gotta make room for senior year in there, somewhere.

Remembering myTunes

I've done a lot of wistful remenescing lately-- mainly because my matriculating class is graduatin' in like a week. They're all selfishly leaving me for a real world ripe with full-time, career-building opportunities while I finish up my BSEE and work part-time mining coal for wages that would upset Human Rights Watch. And while I cope (completely un-bitter, I promise) with the reality of spending one more year at Rice without the familiar faces I've known since my arrival in Houston, I can't help but think about the good ol' days...

myTunes Redux

The little piece of software pictured above, myTunes Redux, was one of the most influential facets of my freshman year. You know, besides the Seniors.

Allow me to weave a yarn: The tale of a ragtag bunch of incoming Rice University freshmen, all assigned to spend their first year in the dingiest digs offered on-campus. These kids were all trapped in Will Rice Long Hall and didn't (apparently) have much in common besides 4-point-ohs and arrogance galore. Sure: They broke the ice with grain alcohol and casual sex just like any collection of close-proximity teenagers, but real friendships started to blossom thanks to a little tool called myTunes.

myTunes allowed anyone with iTunes (Mac or PC) to share their music library across a local network (but not outside that local network). For Long Hall's purposes, that local network was Long Hall. One would simply select a user on the network, pick and choose which songs they wanted, and voila.

Music became a significant common thread along which these hallmates could establish friendships. Some users brought completely unheard genres to the table, such as Louie introducing the Hall to his collection of Houston/3rd Coast Rap. Others (such as myself) used myTunes to identify those with worthy tastes and immediately recognized that Andrew Flowers and Augusta Bartis were the coolest people in the world, ever. Whether used to share or used to judge, myTunes allowed for an expression of individuality that you couldn't find on early Facebook profiles or roommate selection forms.

...and they all lived happily ever after.

Since 2006, myTunes has been more or less defunct thanks to those bastards at Apple blocking network file-sharing in iTunes. Which is a pity, really. I can't imagine my freshman year without the advantage of swapping songs with friends and getting to know people through their respective tastes in music. Nowadays, Rice freshmen probably Tweetup after O-Week or something weird that will probably doom my entire generation forever.

That or Swine Flu in Houston.

Cold readings from comic strip characters

It all started innocently enough: I posted one of those weird Garfield googly-eyed comics to Cristina's Facebook wall two weeks ago, and she replied in turn with a customized Garfield-minus-Garfield.

But that was just the beginning. We then started to reach deep into our repository of morbid quotes from film and television and recklessly juxtaposed them against Sunday's finest comic strips. I've reproduced the results below, in good faith, because I know how much comic strip publishers love parody.

See if you can identify the different movies and shows we used. There's a handy little link under each comic in case you become tortured