for the last few months, I've managed to keep my interest in Starcraft 2 pretty casual. I have a few friends who are still refusing to buy it because they "can't trust themselves with that game in the house." these are, of course, non-trivial concerns; a number of us went through some epic binges with the original Starcraft during college. nevertheless, that was college; I figured I'd be older and wiser now*... or at the very least, too busy to indulge in a horrendous, life-ruining video game binge. I've been pretty actively resisting taking the game too seriously. I was nonchalant about losing matches and refused to look into build orders or other "vetted" strategies of any kind. I didn't even play every night; sometimes I would even a whole week or more off (*gasp*) to do things like go outside and hang out with people in the real world.

all in all, I gloated about the fact that I was a fairly terrible player.

I should've known that it wouldn't last. this is something that began to nag at me-- being terrible. with some activities, I can handle not being awesome and I can definitely be fine with average. being bottom-rung terrible and watching peers put time in and get better and better; it would gnaw at my sense of nerdity. monday mornings, I began to whine to obsessed co-workers about a bad run of matches-- my casual weekend gaming was becoming less entertaining and more frustrating as I seemed to lose match after match. repeatedly they offered to examine my style of play, my strategies, etc. and repeatedly I rebuffed attempts to "formalize" my play and get better. a few more weeks, my frustration grew steadily, but so did my resistance to formally researching and memorizing build orders and other aspects of the game. my co-workers (perhaps out of being tired of hearing the same complaint week after week) suggested that I "casually check out" a blog by a high-level player. this sounded suspiciously like research to me, but on a slow facebook news day, I watched a few episodes.

my casual attitude is currently in serious jeopardy.

let me take a small digression. I love watching people geek out about things. making things and getting better strategically at games, writing, programming or even just hashing out great ideas. I love all of it. I especially love when the geeking involves a non-traditionally nerdy realm; cars, sports strategy, ufc, law / politics, cooking or formulating some complex theory of human behavior. I'm fascinated by the energy of creation. I'm particularly fascinated when the act of creation itself goes through a thorough refinement process. I may not always understand the details, but I love the sentiment. people who freak out about some incremental increase in status ("omg, I acquired a new [xyz]") is not particularly interesting, but whatever process or minutiae that makes you better at doing something or improves your understanding-- "optimization of complexity comprehension"-- I dig it tons. h summed it up when she called me "basically a strategy nerd."

sean "day [9]" plott warms my nerdy little heart.

day[9] is a top-ranked player and 11+ year veteran of Starcraft. his vblog / show, "the Day[9] Daily," offers commentary, strategy and bouts of hilarious, face-palming geekery. people who view themselves as "normal" tend to get dismissive if you use the words "strategy," "vblog" and "Starcraft" in too close of proximity to each other, but what day[9] does is truly fantastic. he is a surprisingly inspiring example of a nerd's pure love of an activity. more about this later.

a few weeks ago, I was inspired to start sketching again (with paragraphs and writing), so this may not turn out to be a fully formed post. I'm working on being okay with that. it's been a good long while since I've written anything longer than a few paragraphs here. as I spent more and more time away from this blog, a "comeback" became a larger and larger thing in my mind. it didn't matter that I probably lost every one of my regular readers over that stretch of time; I wanted to "say something", stand out from other blogs (especially as more and more people created mediocre blogs.) after about three years, I found myself where I had already been. that's one thing about a journey of a thousand miles that some people neglect; with one leg an imperceptible bit shorter than the other, ten thousands steps forward will bring you back to where you began.

so I'm trying to shift paradigms a little. rather than thinking about these next years as a grand journey I embark on, I'm just going to doodle more. and by more, I mean a ridiculous amount. in code, in writing, in random contract pursuits, whatever. for my writing habits, in particular, this is a pretty huge change. for the longest time, my writing style was inspired by that scene in Amadeus where Salieri looked over Mozart's manuscripts:

...they showed no corrections of any kind. Not one. He had simply written down music already finished in his head. Page after page of it as if he were just taking dictation. And music, finished as no music is ever finished. Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall.

I was inspired by the anecdote of Kerouac locking himself away and writing On the Road in three weeks on a giant roll of paper. the story goes that he got hepped up on benzedrine (or according to him, just coffee) and pounded everything out on this one giant roll of paper so that his inspired fervor wouldn't be interrupted by petty things like changing the paper in his typewriter. I imagined Douglas Adams as described in the Salmon of Doubt. he was the one who said, "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." sometimes, it would get to the point where his editor would sit in his living room with an unfinished manuscript while Adams bounded up and down his stairs typing and delivering one page of a story at a time. I thought of the rogue Hunter S. Thompson and how he preferred the typewriter because nervousness about making any mistakes gave him the edge he needed to concentrate on his writing.

much of the early writing on this site reflected these influences. during college, I took pride in being able to write 4 and 5 page essays by hand with few, if any, rewrites. by late college, I discovered that to complete longer assignments I only needed as many hours as pages due. eight page assignments were started exactly eight hours before they were due, etc. the longest stretch I attempted a 15 page semester project that was began in the library so I could start my research exactly 15 hours before I ran into the classroom to turn it in. I got an A and the paper was pretty good, but I think I reached some threshold. my fifth year, I tried to pull the same stunt with an article I wrote for the college newspaper. I think the caffeine and lack of sleep blew a brain gasket at about 4am the day the article was due. my editors dragged the article out of me kicking and whining (both the article and me) and sent me home to sleep for about 15 hours. I was never quite happy with it, but never finished fixing it for this site.

at the same time, the stories of genius taking dictation from God were beginning to crack. Mozart's greatest contributions came much later in his career, after much experimentation and many "on the fly" revisions. Kerouac's work underwent something like three years of revisions. I began to develop an appreciation for Beethoven's near obsessive-compulsive grinding and polishing of pieces into perfection. I was reading and re-reading Dweck's studies about mindset and Ericsson's (et. al) theories about the ten-thousand hour rule for "genius." even chess masters' alleged ability to see a bajillion moves in advance was broken down by cognitive science into somewhat mundane component parts. not to join the pop-culture reference bandwagon, but this was the inception of a new philosophy.

Today, my professor was telling us about this one case where state police towed and impounded this car, whose owner hadn't put coins in the meter. The court found such seizure to be unreasonable b/c the car owner came running out, as the car was being towed, and offered to pay not only the meter, but the cost of towing and inconvenience, as long as they just didn't take his car away. The reason? Apparently, he had a bag full of rubber penises in his trunk, which apparently is illegal in Texas to have.

Anyway, this story made me think of you. Well, you and one of the quotes on your page.

Hope all is going well for you...

Jess
[04/2005]

Raymundo
how you been? i'm in a very dark place...seriously, lots of clouds. there's a really cool coffee shop in walking distance. owned by a woodcarver, it's part art gallery part place to ingest caffeine while sitting on 60s? 70s? furniture of hues born of a color wheel that doesn't exist in college art courses (and perhaps with good reason). It's got a co-op vibe--when employee steps out for a smoke, customers take over barista responsibilities, which is ok bc there's no formal menu and Boss is an arthritic border collie, and she just don't give a shit. With dog hair on the couches and a fly in my steamed milk, i'm just waiting for the hint of a social cue to strip of my clothes and sip my java the way nature intended. i'll keep you posted on that front. anyway, this place naturally made me think of you. hope all is well.
Brien

being Chinese-American and mistaken for "Harold" on a regular basis, I have, as many would expect, sort of a soft spot for Panda Express. any time I'm in the mood to forget nostalgic notions of savory home-cooked meals, I can always trust in Panda Express to offer tender, delicious, bowel-convulsing cuisine that reminds me nothing of the comfort foods mom (or in my people's native tongue: "ma") used to slave away for hours in the hot kitchen to stuff our bratty, ungrateful mouths full of.

most people may not know this, but ironically (or "cleverly") "Panda Express" is actually a Chinese phrase. an allusion to exquisite tea houses and fine restaurants of the Qing dynasty, the phrase translates roughly to "Glorious House of Succulent Temptations and Unending Flatulence." even as I toured several in the area (side note: outstanding romantic evening out for the more adventurous of you lovebirds out there) these "Glorious Houses" indeed never failed to live up to their name. each place created a unique evocative atmosphere exactly like the one before it.

if I were to impart only one of the countless touching memories I amassed during these visits, I think it'd have to be one from College Avenue and University. I found a choice seat in the corner and had my book open to indicate that even though I was eating alone, I was still busy and therefore important. I had my gwailo-impressing chopsticks at the ready and the scents of orange- like- flavoring- on- chicken were already making my mouth water and my stomach nervous. as I sat with twitchy anticipation, not unlike a heroin addict, preparing myself for instants of delicious bounty and hours of regret, I paused for a moment. I found myself marveling in awe at the wall-hangings of Chinese calligraphy. words cannot describe the beauty and poignancy of a language that has characters that can mean either "tasty" or "gaseous" depending on the pronunciation. my joyous appreciation would later manifest itself in an extra-loud burp.