Through the Computer Screen

            There are too many social networking sites.  That’s an easy statement to throw out, but in a way it’s true.  There are enough social networks that I have a hard time now explaining which sites are social networks, and which ones just have social networking aspects.  Pandora, for instance, is internet radio as we all know, but you can be “friends” or something with other users on it.  Or maybe you “follow” people.  I can’t really keep track any more.  So I’m writing this piece in part as advice to those who feel lost, as well as a manifesto of how I define my internet self. 

            To start off with, I think I have to define my internet self.  The easy summary is that my internet self, let’s call him CloudBuck, is not me.  And I don’t want him to define me.  I feel like that perception is getting out of control.  Most often, yes, what you do on the internet says something about you and will influence how people see you in real life.  It is not real life, however.  For example, I recently had my Twitter and Facebook hacked or otherwise used without my knowledge.  Said person posted slander about me, in a way that there was little I could do.  The first instance on the ‘Book was when I had my birthday changed.  This was especially annoying because people I didn’t know very well were wishing me happy birthday all day and I couldn’t change it.  And so “Push Notifications” were showing up on my phone all day.  Another thing that was posted later, might have been inappropriate, but I didn’t care enough to delete it.

            And yet there are certain things I want my social network personas to say about me.  Most of them are simply utilitarian now, but on my Twitter, for instance, I try to balance my humorous or insightful observations with simple Facebookesque status updates.  These sites are a powerful tool, but I think they should be used only insofar as they are helping Real You, whether you’re actually networking, knowledge-gaining, socializing or just venting.

            The plethora of networks that I use and have used in the past twelve months is indeed nauseating.  There are several that I do regularly, others on occasion, others I quit and still others I know about and haven’t started yet.  But could at any time.  One I would like to discuss as an example of an “SN” that wasn’t doing anything for me is Foursquare.  I could first point out that it was a pretty good idea until sites like Facebook and Yelped started doing essentially the same things.  But the problems I have with it run deeper.  It felt a lot like a game, which is what a social network shouldn’t be.  The coupons you were supposed to get places were never worth it, you could make up your own places, and it overall just felt like a pissing contest.  I don’t care if you’re the “Mayor” of your best friend’s house!!!  But it got you extra points, so why not?  That was another drawback, that by this whole points system, it actually encouraged you to be friends with fewer people. You get points for being the first of your friends at a location or the friend who’s been there the most- and you only got ranked against your friends!  That feels like the antithesis of a social network.  An anti-social network.  And it would take unnecessary time out of my life having to find internet and check in everywhere I go.

            I like my social networks to interfere in my life as little as possible.  Don’t let me know every little thing that’s going on, but allow me to communicate future events, past events, and current events in an efficient manner.  I had a funny exchange with a buddy of mine on FB where we were poking fun at our friendgirl’s boyfriend who we hadn’t met with inside jokes he probably didn’t get.  But he soon posted, absolutely hit the mark with his response and it had me rolling.  That’s what an SN should do.

            A final thought- besides just sending word of new cool things around the web at record speed, these sites are often their own referenda.  If a site is good, people are going to find out about it quickly through other sites.  And that gives me hope for my buddy who is working with Google, promoting Google+ (heard of it?).  The jury is still out, but if it’s good it will come into more widespread use.  For crying out loud, for a guy who invented the term “social network”, doesn’t Mark Zuckerberg seem like the most anti-social guy ever?

Extending the Olive Branch

Yes, my Packers lost the other weekend.  I’m upset, I’m going to let this one hurt for a little bit- but I’m not going to go around telling people, “I knew they would do this to me, why did I get attached?”  Not only is that not the Packer way, there’s no way that could ever be the Packer tradition.  If you didn’t notice, our team wins. Not Yankees capacity, but as my buddy has convinced me, they’re the St. Louis Cardinals of Football.  (They have a comparable amount of championships, they’re an overlooked Midwestern city that bleeds for their team, etc…)

            What this loss does for me (did I mention I was at Lambeau?) is get me ready for the next big win.  It might not even be the Super Bowl to which I’m looking forward, but if and when we have another playoff win, this Lambeau/Giants Playoff Mini-Jinx will be over and it will be pandemonium. 

            Not all teams’ fanbases are sure they have this to look forward to, however.  Some have not had that big win for a while, or have just had playoff wins lead to bigger playoff losses.  Some have had juggernaut teams with inexplicable collapses, coaches who unwittingly destroy their teams’ chances, veterans who choke in the clutch, role players that become infamous for what they did wrong.  Year after year.  And yet the fans stick around.  I’m talking, of course, about the Minnesota Vikings and their fans.

            And our team (yes, I own part of them now) should take some of the blame.  We did probably ask Brett at just the wrong time (for a tenth time) if he was sure he didn’t want to un-retire, and so went ahead with the lottery-pick QB who’d been sitting on our bench for three years (and would later lead us to a Super Bowl win), and so forgot to leave his spot open when he did say, six months after his first announcement, that he wanted to un-retire.  And then we shouldn’t have put in the poison-pill clause when we sent him to the Jets, and made him trick them into releasing him after that season with the promise that he was for sure retiring this time, but then put it into his head that a certain divisional rival of ours might need a QB.  And then to top it all off, we made him have one of the best seasons of his career, but then cap it off with a crushing pick thrown in the waning moments of regulation of the NFC championship game.  Sorry about all that.

            In all honesty, I would have said I told you so to all of you about that, but that would be like saying I could have foreseen all the misfortune to come.  Randy Moss coming back, dissing Tinucci’s, then leaving.  The stadium roof collapsing, Favre having a sub-par year, and then your arch-rival winning the Super Bowl.  I can’t think of a much bigger fall-off from one year to the next for any team in recent memory.  But that might just be the Curse of Favre…

            With all this being said, the Viqueens (see what I did there?) have had some of the worst fortune of any team in any sport ever.  SI, in their first “Overrated/Underrated” Issue named the Vikes the Underrated Hopeless Obsession.  They don’t get as much national media attention, but lately they've been gaining notoriety very quickly.  One of the main characters on the hit CBS show How I Met Your Mother is a big Vikings fan from Minnesota, and the team has been involved in several storylines throughout the course of the series.  But this is happening with good reason.  The only other sport that seems to have as prominent of Curses or Jinxes is baseball, and their group has been thinning of late.  The Rangers may be establishing themselves as one, but it’s probably only a matter of a few seasons for them.  And in the past ten years, there have been four world champs who won for either the first time ever, or the first time in fifty or more years.  So the Vikings will soon be alone atop the pantheon of sports jinxes.  Hey, it’s better than nothing.

            What makes the idea of a Curse so fascinating in football is their system of revenue sharing and parity.  In theory it makes it so that every team has an equal shot to win.  In theory.  But despite this, and raucous and die-hard fans, the Vikings have not only managed to not win the big game, but also get very close and break your heart.  Should we go over them?  Ninety-eight: Gary Anderson; Oh-Nine: Favre and AP; Eighty-Seven: Anthony Carter; the Giants blowout; the Hail Mary Game; the Choke in Arizona.  Not to mention four Super Bowls- one of which they were huge favorites in.  But that’s what makes the dry spells interesting.  It’s not the Cubs or Lions, who are just pathetic year after year.  I honestly think that in some ways you guys are lucky.  Whenever that big win comes, you guys will have pandemonium.  Remember Sawx in Oh Four?  That was nothing.  This state will be the happiest place on earth for two years.  At that future (possibly completely theoretical) time, I am going into my room and not coming out for… a while.

Playing by Myself

After hiding behind a dumpster, escaping down a sidestreet and getting to the main drag into the Vatican, I found myself safe and back with my friends.  One of them got a water bottle hurled in her direction and then the idiot driver started to hold up traffic in the Vatican while staring me down.  I would later get chewed out by Kip, our trip’s assistant lead, probably with good reason.

Why would I even do this, you’re asking?  Maybe you’re not asking.  Maybe you know me and you don’t need to ask, or have come to expect stuff like that.  But most- make that some of the things I do have an explanation.  During one of the first years up at Many Point Scout Camp, one of the older scouts made up this game called Car Touch.  The main idea was to touch passing cars.  Since these were all dirt roads and there were usually a lot of people walking along them, this wasn’t such a bad idea.  But the idea was still to be discrete about it.  You still didn’t want people to know you were touching their car.  I held on to this ritual throughout most of the rest of my growing up, and I still do it on occasion.  Sometimes I give myself arbitrary points based on the quality of the touch.  But I don’t really care if anyone else is playing with me.  I imagine some people somewhere are, and that’s enough.

The incident I just described probably should have quelled my desire to play this game, though, right?  Well, it didn’t.  Playing the game now reminds me of that story, and about that whole month overseas, which was one of the most fun times of my life and I think even a turning point, or a coming-of-age period for me.  And I think there’s even more to it than that.

I’ve realized this game helps me to understand that cars themselves don’t hurt people, it’s the people carelessly driving and the people carelessly walking that endanger us all.  We are all just people, moving from one point to another, and we all have to watch out for each other.  While some are taking a different form of transportation, it doesn’t mean that at a later point the pedestrian and the driver won’t be in the opposite situations.  Was it dumb to assume that people in a foreign country would take kindly to my harmless game?  Probably.  But at least in America, I know that I can walk close enough to the car, even when it’s moving, to touch it, so it must not be inherently dangerous.  It thereby helps me to understand what a safe distance from the car is, which is good for both when I’m walking and when I’m driving- in the latter case, knowing what a safe distance from the pedestrians is.  I never want to touch cars that are going too fast, just like I never want to assume that pedestrians are going to see me driving and/or try to avoid me.

Working Title

I hate judging books by their cover- no, that’s not true.  I love judging books by their cover.  What else are you supposed to judge a book by, other than its cover?  All you can know about a book without actually reading the thing is what’s on the cover.  This includes the cover design, artwork and synopsis.  You don’t want the synopsis to say too much- oftentimes I learn too much about the plot and never want to get further into it.  Like when that Mission: Impossible 4 trailer came out and it had Tom Cruise talking to Jeremy Renner about how Renner’s character “is not what he appears”.  Sorry, no matter what happens after that moment in the movie, I really don’t care.  If the plot of the movie is that bad that they don’t care about revealing what appears to be a huge spoiler, then I don’t care to watch it.  It’s just become, unabashedly, a big-budget, special effects laden, money-grabbing Tom Cruise vehicle.

So there’s definitely an art to how you sell your piece of entertainment.  And it usually involves bordering on subtlety.

But this leads me back to how I judge books.  I usually judge them first by their title.  If I find the title interesting, I’ll probably read the synopsis, and so on.  But I’ve become wary of a group of bestselling books which I don’t respect the titles of.  Stieg Larrson’s trilogy of The Girl… novels kinda get my goat, not with any respective title of theirs, but with where I thought the theme of the titles was going.  The first one is of course called The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  What he seems to be implying with this first title is that the next novels are going to be named after some other aspect about her- say: The Girl with the Piercing Eyes or The Girl with the Spiky Hair.  It really wouldn’t have to be anything deep, at least in the literal sense.  But it would have been deep figuratively, because it didn’t tell me anything except that there was probably more to her than that.

But where he does go with these ideas is completely ineffective in enticing a reader such as myself to want to read more.  My first thought at why this could be was that maybe he was thrown by the success of the first book, so the titles were thrown together somewhat haphazardly and that’s why they didn’t have the expected overarching direction.  But then I remembered that he’s actually dead now.  And I don’t think these books enjoyed any commercial success outside of Sweden humously (is that the opposite of posthumously?).  What he does do in calling the next books The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest and The Girl who Played with Fire, respectively, is that he tells us something in the title about what it is she’s going to do.  I don’t think that’s a very good strategy, because as I’ve always found in title or headline writing, the old adage holds true- less is more.  All that should ever be referred to in the title, I feel, is the main character (or characters), and the situation they’re put in. 

I do feel as though I can draw from at least one or two examples of good titles, even speaking as someone who hasn’t read all of these books.  The Bourne Trilogy has a good series of titles, insofar as the titles themselves tell you almost nothing about the plot of the book.  Take The Bourne Identity- there’s a guy named Bourne and he has an identity.  Or something.  But regardless, my interest is peaked.  (Just thinking about that series, it makes me angry that the second movie ends so far into the third one. Gah!)  And in the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy, Douglas Adams names each book after something the reader heard in the first one, and the titles themselves may not have anything whatsoever to do with the characters, plot, or circumstances of the particular novel.  But you still want to read them.

Looking Around My Room

I want to overanalyze a couple things here.  This being one of the first times I have sat down to just write, without a pre-set idea, I’m going to take this opportunity to just look around my room and describe the various decorations I have bestowed on it.

Firstly, there are two posters.  They are both from my old room back at my parents place, or as I’m not ready to completely forego calling that ‘home’ in some fashion, The Old Homestead.  The first one is a poster of a Plymouth Prowler, a car which I’m not sure they make anymore, in part because I’m not sure if Plymouth even exists anymore.  It’s a pretty cool-looking car, painted yellow in my poster, which, for cars, was and still is the new red.  This poster could have been a foreshadowing of me buying for my first car a make that is no longer in business, the Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme.  The only observation I have on the poster itself and how it applies to me is that I don’t have a real affinity for cars, new or old- I think I just like things that are backswept.  I played with Legos a lot as a kid, and all the space ships I made had to be backswept. When I was trying to choose a favorite food, for instance, I think I went with pizza over hot dogs for that reason.  And for a while I thought humans were poorly designed because they walked upright and therefore weren’t very aerodynamic.

But that brings me to my second poster.  It’s also of a vehicle that is streamlined, out-of-date and 100% American.  The F-14 Tomcat.  It’s a relic of the just-past-the-Cold-War Era, where we probably still weren’t so sure about Russia and what they might do.  The ironic thing about this one in comparison to the poster of the Prowler, is that by my standards it would not have been streamlined enough for me.  It has two tailfins and has wings that can spread out or fold back.  In all honesty, it’s pretty slick.  But the plane probably cost a little more to build than the Prowler, and I definitely know, or at least knew a lot more about fighter planes back in the day than cars. Top Gun was definitely one of my favorite movies in my younger days, and I know that Maverick flew an F-16 Fighting Falcon, a plane that I definitely wish I had a poster of.  This obsession with fighter planes is probably either a result of, or a cause of being a conservative, and to an extent a war hawk.

There’s really only one more thing that almost purely serves the role of a decoration in my room right now.  In my sophomore year of high school I was in a sculpture class.  I had always considered myself creative and I wanted to see how it transferred to visual art.  For the most part the class went pretty well.  I tried hard in it, as I did in the rest of my classes, and I liked most of the projects a fair amount.  There was origami, some more two-dimensional things, and I remember we built a chair.  But when she asked us to sculpt a head out of clay, I was very hesitant.  It took a long time, as I recall, and there were several hiccups along the way.  Our teacher went from saying hair was not necessary to We should try to do it.  (I didn’t, but I still liked it.)  And when I was hollowing out the inside of the sculpture, I almost went all the way through it, but still managed to save it.  The end result was a B grade, but I think I was more satisfied with it than any other art project I’d done before or since.

The other purpose it serves however, is allowing me something of my own to toss around and potentially break, though I still haven’t yet.

Something Else I've Noticed...

[Editor’s Note: This columnist often tends to write about certain made-up laws, theories, innovations or effects as if they are full-proof and have been vigorously researched and verified.  Please note that he has not found any evidence to support these theories, nor does he intend to.]
             The Christmas Eve Effect, or as I have been wanting to call it, the Christmas Eve-MOA Effect, is named after the first time my brother and I went to the Mall on the last day of shopping before that holiday the majority of us Americans refer to when we say ‘Happy Holidays’.  Of course everyone told us- Are you kidding? It’s going to be so crazy down there!

To our surprise, it wasn’t.  In fact, there were probably fewer people than usual when we go to the Mall.  But as we realized, there was a perfectly logical explanation for it- so many people were afraid that the Mall was going to be packed, that all those people were noticeably absent.  Granted, there are several other reasons for not going to there on C-Eve.  There are many fewer sales, less stock of the products many people want, and probably many employees who just aren’t happy to be there.  But the lack of hustle-and-bustle more than makes up for that.

(I’ve really realized that it is indeed the thought that counts.  I know that I am about the seven millionth person to say that, but I truly think more people could save more money just by thinking more about what their loved ones would actually want.  Imagine how that simple philosophy could help the economy if everyone did just get to know their loved ones more.  Or follow the Games by James Method™.  Just read the last paragraph here.)

I’m not necessarily encouraging always going to the Mall that late in the shopping season, as I usually do, but I merely wanted to shed some light on how not all supposedly super-busy things are going to be that bad.  Another example: this past summer, the Greater Los Angeles area was all prepared for an even they were calling Carmageddon.  I-405, their major freeway, was undergoing major construction, down to one lane each way through most of the metro.  But as it was recapped to yours truly via Twitter and the B.S. Report podcast, it didn’t turn out to be much of anything, mostly due to everyone living in fear of driving at all on that weekend.

To go out on a huge limb here, I predict that this is exactly how the whole Social Security fiasco is going to play out.  As SS was always just intended to be a safety net, NOT A RETIREMENT PLAN, that’s what people will end up treating it as again.  Maybe they will invest, get confidence in the economy, and have their nest eggs saved up for when they do retire.  Or maybe they (and when I say they, I definitely am referring to my generation) will postpone or get rid of retirement completely. Hey, people are living longer and looser, so that could catch on.  I just think that with as much as the prognosticators are frantic about it, Social Security might not become as big of a deal as they are worried it will.  But I’m no economist.

A couple caveats for this theory, though.  People don’t tend to follow this trend when they have either already paid for something, or they plan to.  You won’t want to waste a lot of gas on a freeway, but money is a much more tangible measurement of loss.  Example: The line for Pirates of the Caribbean 3 was wrapped all the way around the Rosedale Mall.  It was filled with people who had paid for their tickets, so there was no way they were going anywhere.  Also, this theory only holds as long as the masses don’t find out.  Therefore, the activity/event can go on a wavy sine-graph of usage, simply because of how busy people perceive its usage.  So don’t let word get out when you do find the Effect at work!

My Lastest Friend-quation

“I am insane,” I told Mike, as he walked into class. “Lemme show you why.”

We then proceeded to have a ten minute tutorial and subsequent discussion about the new “Friend-quation” I came up with while at work.  I thought it was appropriate to discuss with him, as one of the situations this applies to involved him.  And by the time we were done-

“You are insane,” Mike agreed.

The idea for the equation came from me remembering three similar situations I remembered I had run into within about the past two months.  This particular situation, however, is probably somewhat common among people my age, too, who have formed a different group of friends in college, or at work than those they knew in high school.  And yet, as you will come to see, this doesn’t necessarily even have to involve a close group of friends.  All you really need are acquaintances.

So what do you do when you are with one group of your current friends and you encounter someone at a place that you haven’t seen for a while?  That’s where my equation comes in.  This equation quantifies, in a very loose sense, all the factors that go into how much time you actually spend with the friends you haven’t seen for a while over the friends you do.  This is not to say that you even have to leave those friends you were hanging out with. But if they have other friends in the area, this might be a good opportunity for them to go catch up with them, while you catch up on the good old times with your new friends.

We have to create a few variables in order for this to apply.  The first one is pretty basic: how long has it been since you’ve seen them.  The number I came up with I call Life Units.  It is about three years, which seems to me about the time, at least in, let’s say, the ages between 18 and 34, how long it will take the average person to move on to a new phase in their lives.  You go to College for four years, you might have the same job right after that for two- maybe you get married, have kids.  The time in between each of those new phases, based on complete hunches absolutely no statistical evidence, has been calculated to about three years.  But of course, if there are any oldsters reading this for some reason, let’s say that number increases to ten years by the time you’re fifty.

The next variable tries to answer the question, How much better friends with these guys are you than the people you’re hanging out with?  In many cases the answer might be: you’re not.  But the domain of this function is going to have to be pretty small.  Let’s call it “10 less than or equal to ‘x’ less than or equal to 40.”  If these are people you would spend less than ten minutes talking to, the equation almost doesn’t apply.  If it’s more than 40- well, why aren’t you just completely ditching your new friends to hang with your old friends for the night?  So never mind- if you could just quantify your friendship with these old friends into a number between 1 and 3 (included), I think that will suffice.  If you are just as good a friends with the other people, but you still want to hang out with the people who “friend-prised” you, I don’t know how to calculate that.

Let’s just leave it at that.  Basically, add these two numbers, multiply by ten and that’s about how long you should be able to spend with these old friends without feeling guilty that you left your new friends.  In the rough outline of this friend-quation, there were other factors that I could not turn into numbers.  Factors such as, Is there anyone in New Group you just met who you do not care to hang out with- the “Detractors”, or Is this a bigger surprise to see them here than it would be elsewhere?  As I was thinking about this, however, I’m reminded of this character from Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy sequel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.  This smart old dude teaches his younger companions that while he can do complex equations in his head regarding smart stuff like rocket science, they are doing many equations (which apparently he can’t do) every time they catch a ball.  They just come naturally.  I can catch a ball. But sometimes I’m interested in the equations it takes to catch one, too.  And sometimes I like to make equations to explain other things that in many ways should come naturally.

Still not convinced I’m insane.  Try here.