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Over the years, people got taller, and spikes became a common thing to see in the game, but no moreso than crappy shots that sent the ball flying sideways, or other random behavior caused by unskilled volleyball players. But it was a lot of fun. One year I went to Destin with my friend Gerald and we ran into some people playing volleyball. They needed a couple of extra players, so we joined in. Right away I started with my volleyball repertoire: wild shots, jumping up in the air for no reason, and diving at the ball when I didn't really have to. Hey, it's fun. These people were dicks. "You've watched too much TV," one of the tanned, bleach-haired dicks said to me. He proceeded to spike the ball. The game continued, and I noticed a disturbing pattern. One guy would pop the ball into the air, and the other would spike it. Repeat. That was it. What was previously a fun and whimsical game had been refined to the mechanical precision of one strategy: spike the fucking ball. I have never played Volleyball again. I can't even stand to watch it. Volleyball now exemplifies to me the dangers of getting too good at a fun game. Once you get too good at a game, it ceases to be a game and becomes something else. I guess that's what a competitive sport is, but to me it can really take the fun out of a game. That's not to say that there is no value in being good at volleyball, or tennis, or raquetball etc., it's just that as a player, there is this definite line you cross. On one side of the line is a particular kind of fun. A whimsical happy-go-lucky goof where everybody is having a good time and no one really knows what they're doing. You can shit talk all you want, but everyone knows they suck. On the other side of this line is serious competition, and an entirely different kind of fun. Shit talking on this side of the line can get mean. Losing feels a whole lot worse because you actually care. And, most importantly, for everyone to enjoy themselves, you can really only play against other badass players. Scrubs and experts generally can't play together. Once PC games started going online, I reached this point with many of them. Once you play a lot of LAN Starcraft and are a master of Zerg rushes, Zealot rushes, Firebat rushes et al., it isn't really possible for you to have a good casual game of Starcraft with a noob. When you play a noob, you're doing one of two things: You're either completely destroying him, or you're letting him live and being condescending. It isn't really possible to do anything in between. I reached this point with Street Fighter as well. Unless someone has spent years playing it, there's no real point in me playing against them. A good Street Fighter player can beat a noob with one button and a broken controller. What makes me think about all of this crap is Scrabble. Tracey and I have been playing Scrabble now for a little over a year. We play fairly often, and have gotten pretty good. "I didn't realize there was really any technique to Scrabble," Brent said to me when I mentioned the Voleyball Effect in reference to Scrabble. Hoo boy. The noob who plays Scrabble is just happy to make a word. If they can make a word every turn, they're happy. Their strategy consists of making the highest scoring word they can with the letters they have. When you progress beyond noob level, being able to make words is almost a non-issue. Attention shifts to not just making a word, but taking advantage of triple letter, double word, and triple word scores. You begin to play defensively, not "setting up" your opponent for a big triple word score. When both players are at similar skill levels, the board can become cramped, with both players refusing to set up that big triple word score. This is about the skill level at which Tracey and I currently play. But there is a whole world of Scrabble-tude beyond this. All good players memorize every legal two letter word. These can be powerful tools in actually getting points for 4 or more words in a single turn. But there is more than this. Memorizing obscure three and four letter words with J, Q, X, and Z. Memorizing words that you can make with Q when you don't have a U. Did you know that QAID is one of the most commonly used words in tournament Scrabble? But there's still more. The good players go beyond triple word score into Bingos (using all seven of your letters at once for a 50 point bonus). There are certain letter combinations that have a mathematically higher probability to produce Bingos, and good players use mnemonics to memorize them, and thus increase their odds of Bingos. Tournament players average 2 Bingos per game, with 4 not being at all uncommon. And here in front of me lies the line. Do I keep playing fun, whimsical, drunken Scrabble with Tracey, or do I do the vocabulary version of spiking the ball? Do I bring us to the next level of play, thereby making us unbearable opponents to all but the psychotic elite of the Scrabble playing world? Or do I just keep it a casual fun game that we can play with our friends? This, my friends, is the Volleyball Effect. Permalink to this post. |
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John: "Blah blah I'm so smart and awesome and great blah blah...Did you see Jennifer Tilly's zoobies in that new movie?" Dude: "Man, Jennifer Tilly isn't hot at all, I wouldn't do her in a million years." What? Just who in the hell are you, dude? Are you a millionaire with a dick dipped in gold, a body like a chiseled statue, and a face like Brad Pitt? Just how in the crap did you get so picky, and why doesn't it translate to your dumpy, saggy breasted, bitchy girlfriend? Are you Shallow Hal? Have you ever noticed that when you hear a new word, suddenly you hear it everywhere? A similar thing happened to me when I coined the "Hollywood Hot" term for this hotness-delusion. I started noticing it more and more. I became less willing to shrug off my friends when they would claim that they'd never have sex with Anjelina Jolie "because she's a bitch." Listen, my friend, I don't like her either, but the woman is so hot I'd eat a bucket of whale shit to smack her boobs around. Disclaimer: I am engaged so of course I would not smack anyone else's boobs around. I honestly don't know the cause of this mass delusion. All I can figure is that we have spent our entire lives exposed to this unbelievable level of physical beauty on the movie and TV screens, and this has shaped what we consider normal. We live our lives comparing everything to Jennifer Aniston, Lindsay Lohan, and Shakira, never understanding that these women represent the very pinnacle of hotness. In our deluded minds, these women are normal, and we can pick and choose from this pool. In reality, men will pretty much sleep with anything. Chubby, poorly dressed girls can become quite the hot commodity at closing time. If Jennifer Tilly, Tina Fey, or Amy Poehler were one of your friends' sisters, I'm pretty sure they'd be fuel for your masturbatory fire well into the next decade. The Internet seems to magnify this problem. As an example, allow me to refer your to this random thread. I went to Fark and just picked a random "boobies" thread. They're all like this. The Random Internet Guy who is too good for Mariah Carey or Jessica Simpson. It is quite amazing indeed. Permalink to this post. |
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So the next day I found myself on a plane en route to an undisclosed location, where I was to use my software to keep track of costs associated with the cleanup of a chemical spill. There would be no low-pressure Thanksgiving weekend for me. It was quite an exhausting week. It was cold, it was rainy, I was outside, and I was on my feet for 12 hours at a time. A lot went on, but it isn't exactly the sort of thing I can blog about due to the sensitive nature of the business. Honestly, though, I'm so burnt out from the past few months since Katrina that I can barely muster up the energy to write anything at all. Now that I am back I am sorting through all of the data I collected last week, and have to modify my software to accurately report the costs of the spill. I am using this new code as an opportunity to experiment with Ajax techniques. One thing I have noticed is that my Ajax code is getting very messy and difficult to manage. This generally happens when I begin implementation in a completely new paradigm. It takes quite a bit of time before I get my "groove" and produce clean, modular code. My first ASP and PHP projects were pretty much clusterfucks. In other news, I now officially live in Ponchatoula. I bought a little place not too far from the Tangipahoa River, and am going to sell my house in New Orleans. Part of me is sad at this turn of events, but part of me is excited to close that chapter of my life and begin a new one. When I was younger I was very involved in outdoor activities. I loved archery, hiking, camping and the like, and I was actually very depressed about moving back to New Orleans when I was 16. I wanted to stay out in Arkansas...the dense city did not interest me. But we did move, and I acclimated to city life. Eventually, I adopted a lifestyle of city wandering, drinking, and general debauchery. My new adventures were on Lower Decatur and the like. Now I'm back in the boonies. There won't be any drinking till 4 AM and stumbling back to my Marigny house. It's time to buy a pirogue, do some fishing, and maybe even buy a pickup truck. But I will not listen to Country Music. Permalink to this post. |
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Except you won't. You are now a citizen of Bumfuck Egypt, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, or whatever other place you are that is not New Orleans. You get up, eat, work, shit, shower, and shave and all the while live the lie that somehow your life will go back to what it was. On the weekends you might drive the 1.5 hours to your old haunts and see your old drinking buddies, but you're all living in the same hazy illusion. I got a different feel for the destruction depending on which way I took into New Orleans. Coming in from the Causeway, the first thing I saw was that big building right off of the bridge. It wasn't really that bad, most of the broken windows were covered with boards. Going further south, though, I saw the Galleria. It looked like a bomb hit it. Coming from I-55 to I-10 was rough. I saw quaint little coon-ass houses finally underwater. The swampwater lapped at the train tracks like ocean waves at high tide. Once I got to Metairie it was surreal. I saw the entire front wall ripped off of a self-storage building. Papers, furniture, and memories from hundreds of people were strewn all over the ground. Every single one of these people would be devastated. Every person I knew - every one - was fucked by this hurricane. Thousands and thousands of people I do not know were fucked worse...all of these people with whom I used to share a city. Coming in over the newly repaired I-10 twinspan from Slidell was by far the worst. The first time was at night. I drove through total blackness seemingly forever. What was once a lit up city was now just miles of nothingness. There were no people with generators trying to fix their lives. There were no companies trying to restore life to this area. New Orleans East was a graveyard. The 9th Ward was pretty much the same. When I pulled off of the I-10, none of the streetlights were on. Makeshift stop signs dotted the intersections. It wasn't until I got almost to Royal Street by my house that I saw any sign of activity. My neighborhood, thankfully, was fine. My chunk of the Marigny, and most of the Quarter was pretty much as I had left it. Well, except for stinky refrigerators everywhere. The dead dark stillness of New Orleans East was pretty bad at night, but I didn't really get the full impact until I saw it during the day. Not one house, not one building, not one car was untouched. For miles and miles everything I saw was a blasted out hellhole. After a while, you get tired of pointing out waterlines, at Oh-Shitting over yet another caved in shopping mall. After a while the novelty wears off and you become numb. The place you have called home, the place you longed for when you were away, is now and forever changed. And it is not a dream. Permalink to this post. |
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I remember back in the good old BBS days I used to be a board fiend. I loved to argue and debate and call people douchebags. The common term for a heated argument on a forum is a "flame war". When I used to play Ultima Online several years ago, my love for board flaming saw a rebirth. I became a member of tons of boards where people discussed the different aspects of the game. I signed up for ezboard, stratics etc. etc. and had a blast flaming all of the mages who posted. I can remember posting a big inflammatory post about mages being cheap, and getting the shakes waiting for the inevitable flame war to start. My friend Brent and I still joke about this when a flame war erupts, and we call it the "Mages are Cheap Shakes." I still get them any time some sort of Internet altercation flares up. Recently, a link to one of my entries was posted on some board, and the wrath of the Random Internet Guy was unleashed. So, I get the old Mages are Cheap Shakes and post a little response, since I still had my old UO ezboard account. Right away Brent reminded me that there's no way to win. You see, Random Internet Guy has nothing to defend. He is nobody, nothing, a random critical voice. Meanwhile I have about 600 pages of fodder for people to criticize. Immediately you get the same standby that you heard 10 years ago in the BBS days: IRL attacks (In Real Life you are a fat loser who can't get laid), or as they are known in logic: the Ad Hominem attack. These really incense me, because I have yet to meet the person who had the balls to try this kind of crap to my face. And when it happens on the internet, you're just impotent. There isn't a human being there to throttle. You end up feeling like Jay in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back where he ranted "You are the ones who are the ball-lickers..." Of course, there's no way to make Random Internet Guy eat your shit, and then shit the shit, and then eat the shit that is composed of the shit that he just ate, so he is able to talk to you in a way that no human being ever would in person. But it is worse than that. A few years ago I came to a horrible realization: You can never really win an argument unless the other person is willing to concede. I realized this one day when a good friend of mine was trying to convert me to Christianity. I pointed out to him that his obsession with money and capitalism was at odds with Christ, as evidenced in the quote "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." (Linguistic arguments about Hebrew notwithstanding, we were arguing on the meaning in English) I think that the preceding english sentence is pretty damn clear. I don't see any room for interpretation. It is making a statement on the rich, and how they got rich, and that very few people who manage to get rich will end up in heaven. My friend and I argued about this sentence for almost an hour. It was then that I realized arguing is usually pointless. If two educated people can argue about the meaning of one simple english sentence for that long, what hope is there for two people with different political opinions arguing complex social subjects? This problem is exascerbated because neither side wants to admit when they're wrong, so they're more willing to bend their interpretation of the meanings of sentences. Everything ultimately breaks down to an epistemological problem. This problem is magnified on the internet. People can mix and match their ad-homimem attacks with straw men and every other logical fallacy they want, and calling them out is virtually impossible. If you dare point out a particular occurrence (such as the straw man characterization of my Prodigy post as "waaah. I'm not as great as mommy and daddy said I was and these mean people on the internet aren't praising me!"), then you open yourself up to an exhaustive spelling, grammar, and semantic check of everything you have written. And you can be rest assured that it will be thickly laced with sarcasm and one liners. I learned this lesson years ago. When you argue on the Internet you are pissing in the wind. People will still call you a loser. People will still think you are wrong. People will still say you're a fat ugly douchebag who can't get laid. There ain't a damn thing you can do about it, but for some reason, every once in a while, I still feel the need to respond to Random Internet Guy. Permalink to this post. |
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