December Topic!

Welcome to December, everyone!

First of all, apologies to the four voters who were interested in reading what we had to say about the trades and manual labour. I know in my case I was just way too busy to write anything, but I can't speak for my fellow bloggers.

Anyway, the November poll closed with the following breakdown of votes:

• 0 votes: colours, siblings, high school graduation, monarchy, ancestry/genealogy
• 1 vote: travel, writing, coworkers
• 2 votes: chairs

So the topic for this month is chairs.

Contributors: You can interpret this topic any way you want, and you can write as many posts about it as you want (within reason, obviously, not like 200 posts over the course of the month, but I don't think any of us have that kind of time on our hands). When you write your post, make sure you tag it with the topic and your name/blog identifier, so that if any potential readers like you and hate the rest of us, they can find your posts easily.

Everyone: There is a poll for the January topic in the sidebar, and you can vote until the last day of this month. Whichever topic gets the most votes gets written about next month.

High school graduation, siblings, ancestry/genealogy, and monarchy all got kicked off of the poll this month. If you really want to see what we have to say about that, you'll have to suggest the topic again.

Comment on this post or the topic ideas post if there's anything you'd like to see added to the poll in December.

If you give an engineer a gingerbread cookie ...

I was at first a little surprised by the request for a piece on gingerbread houses. The leaves were still changing colours, and the air was warm with the residual heat of summer. Gingerbread and the Christmas season appeared so distant that the request seemed to be incongruous with the current weather conditions. Then two weeks ago came – Winter Wonderland! So, now I am in the right frame of mind to address the subject of gingerbreading.

I tend to get a little carried away with things, and gingerbread is no exception. My fascination with creating buildings in miniature from edibles began
at an early age. I remember a book my mother read one Christmas about a little girl in Germany who wanted a gingerbread ship she saw in a shop window fromSt. Nicholas (spoiler: she got it). This opened my mind to the idea that a gingerbread house needn’t be four walls and a roof, or even a house at all. My head would fill up with a dozen ideas each year I saw the gingerbread house displays at the Festival of Trees.

So far I have made Notre-Dame Cathedral, Cologne Cathedral, a Victorian Mansion, and now (in development) a carousel that will operate, God willing. To quantify how carried away I can get, it took one week to design the mansion, three full days baking 87 pieces, two full days decorating, and close to $70 in candy. For my next house, I will be downsizing I can assure you – as the War Amps say, never again.


Last year I wrote a set of instructions with a pattern for the Victorian Mansion gingerbread house as a donated item for a silent action. Follow this link to the instructions (http://miletus.deviantart.com/gallery/40537107#/d5ldg3a). This guide provides a wealth of information about gingerbread construction, including recipes for the most structurally sound gingerbread and royal icing, many tips and suggestions I have found in my experience, and of course building directions and patterns.


Since there is lots of good information in the instructions, I won’t be touching any of that in this post. Rather, since we are all engineers, I will be focusing on the design process and considerations when creating your own gingerbread design.

Using computer software can really help in planning out your design concept, modeling it, tweaking elements, and ultimately creating a pattern. I would however suggest starting with pencil and paper to sketch out a basic idea of what you want to make.

Sketches of layout/plan and the different faces/elevations of will help guide you in creating a digital version of your design. Once you have a decent idea of what you want, I recommend using a program like PowerPoint to draw out the plan and elevations of the design. It doesn’t matter what the dimensions are – you will be able to change and scale all that later. Just get all the lines down first.

Next you will want to make a separate PowerPoint file and change the page dimensions using the page setup to make the page very big (36” x 50” for example). This should give you enough space to play around and represent your pattern in real dimensions. In your first file, select all of the objects and group them into one object. With both files open, select this from the first file, copy it, and paste into the new one. Now you will scale the group to the size you actually want to build in gingerbread. The scale is determined by your preference, but is ultimately limited by the constraints of the area of the base you will construct upon and the largest size of baking sheet at your disposal (your largest pieces cannot be bigger than your baking sheet). Check the width, length, and height of the entire structure to see if it seems reasonable (take out a ruler to help you visualize).

Once you are happy with the size you have scaled your plans to, check the dimensions of your smallest pieces to ensure they are not unreasonably small. Generally, no piece should be narrower than an inch (the taper of any triangular pieces excepted). You can go narrower than this if the piece is relatively short and you watch the piece during baking like a hawk so that it does not burn. Small pieces should always be baked together on the same sheet so that they are all done about the same time. Working with small pieces can also be frustrating – they are hard to handle and are especially prone to breaking. If using such pieces, bake more (2-5) than you need in order to replace any pieces that will inevitably break. About 3/8” is the narrowest I have ever gotten away with.

Now it is time to represent your structure in the pieces that will make it up so that you have piece-cutting templates. Follow this link to my pattern (http://miletus.deviantart.com/gallery/40537107#/d5ko94k) . Using the dimensions of your plans, reproduce the shapes of the panels with autoshapes. This is most easily accomplished by tracing new autoshapes directly over the plans and them moving them to somewhere else on the page. This method can only be used directly for shapes where panel is in the plane of the page. For example, if you have a North, South, East, and West wall, these will be in the plane of the elevations you drew. But if you have a sloping roof, you will need to use the dimensions from the plan (overhead) as well as an elevation. To draw sloping pieces, draw all of the horizontal edges (those that do not slope) using the plan as a guide. Then, draw all of the sloping lines using the dimensions of elevations (side views) that illustrate this sloping roof. Alternatively, if you are fine with trigonometry, bust out that calculator and start working out angles. You need to keep in mind that baked pieces have about 1/4” thickness, and this needs to be accounted for where pieces meet (e.g. if a box is to be 5” x 4” in plan and 3” tall, the long sides can be 5” x 3” while the shorter sides should be 3-1/2” x 3”).

Since it can be difficult to mentally visualize the entire structure and all the pieces it will require, I recommend making a cardboard mockup for complex designs. If you made an error in the dimensions or missed a piece that is needed, this will become obvious when making such a model.

An alternative to drawing plans and elevations in PowerPoint and building a cardboard model is 3D modeling with something like the free software Google (Trimble) SketchUp (link to download Google SketchUp here). Using SketchUp, you can draw out flat pieces, extrude them by 1/4" to give them thickness, and move or rotate as needed. You will be able to get a very good feel for how your creation comes together. Any aspects of your design that you may have overlooked in the 2D world will become very apparent in the 3D model. This can save you the frustration of when half way through building you realize that you missed part of the roofline in your design. Follow this link to download of my 3D model (http://miletus.deviantart.com/gallery/40537107#/d5ko8mv).

Like drawing in PowerPoint or other drawing programs, dimensions in your 3D model are not important at the start. Once you are happy with the way your model looks, use the scaling feature to expand or reduce your model to suit the dimensions of your base (the upper threshold is that no piece can be larger than your largest baking sheet). As before, check the dimensions of your smallest pieces to ensure they are not unreasonably small. Now, take down the dimensions of the pieces and draw them out in PowerPoint. By left clicking on a line or autoshape and choosing the “Size and Position…” option, you can enter the exact dimensions of the piece.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether your dimensions are tidy (eg. 4-1/2”) or not (eg. 4.39864”). Since you will be making a pattern electronically and using this pattern directly on your gingerbread as a tracing/cutting template, dimensions are not important.

Depending on the structure, you may need to consider using internal supports to add stability to your design or support edges of certain roof elements. For instance, the cone roof of the tower of the mansion needed a few triangles of gingerbread inside to support the roof panels during construction. The tower walls themselves needed octagonal pieces at the top and bottom to keep the narrow pieces in the proper arrangement during construction. Such constructability and stability concerns are more readily apparent if you try to make a mockup model first.

Now that you have a pattern for all of the pieces drawn up in PowerPoint, group the objects for each piece. Open another PowerPoint file, this one with Letter sized slides. Copy and paste the templates from the large file into the smaller file, arranging them to fit on the Letter size pages (you can move and rotate them, but do not scale them). For any pieces that are larger than a single page 1) double check that this piece does not exceed the dimensions of your largest baking sheet, 2) put the template on two pages – you will be able to join the pieces with tape later. Put a text box with a unique number on each piece, and possibly with a short description and/or an arrow depicting the orientation (e.g. which direction is up). These markings will help you identify which pieces are what as well as tell you which side is the top and bottom of the template. Follow this link to my pattern (http://miletus.deviantart.com/gallery/40537107#/d5ko6pk).

Finally, print the Letter size PowerPoint file using an inkjet printer (Do not use a toner laser printer). After cutting out your templates, brush canola oil onto each piece until the paper is imbued and turns translucent. Wipe off the templates with a paper towel to remove the oil. Now the pieces are ready to be placed directly on the gingerbread and traced around with a knife (the oil prevents the paper from sticking to the gingerbread). If a toner printed pattern is used, the oil will end up dissolving the toner, either making a mess or causing the toner to disappear. Instead of using toner printed patterns directly, trace around the paper patterns onto wax paper and use the wax paper templates instead.



Armed with your design, now you need only build it. Follow the directions in the Victorian Mansion instructions I gave to fill in the gap between design and fruition.

If you are concerned about the intellectual property of your design, you probably shouldn't post it online for all to see. I'm not sure if this is an uncanny coincidence, or the sincerest form of flattery, but I noticed this photo below on the Saskatoon Festival of Trees site this year. Hmmm...



Unfortunately, I won't be entering a design with the Festival of Trees this year. I am much to busy with my art courses to attempt such a time consuming project before the end of November this year. However, I may be able to take a stab at the carousel over the holiday. Hopefully I have been able to encourage others to try their hands at making their very own gingerbread design. Happy building!

November Topic!

Happy All Saints' Day, everyone!

The October poll closed with the following breakdown of votes:

• 0 votes: siblings, high school graduation, monarchy, reunions, ancestry/genealogy, chairs
• 1 vote: -
• 2 votes: writing, colours
• 3 votes: travel
• 4 votes: manual labour/skilled trades

So the topic for this month is (in what I consider a somewhat hilarious last minute upset) manual labour/skilled trades. Obviously these aren't quite the same thing, but they are pretty closely linked.

Contributors: You can interpret this topic any way you want, and you can write as many posts about it as you want (within reason, obviously, not like 200 posts over the course of the month, but I don't think any of us have that kind of time on our hands). When you write your post, make sure you tag it with the topic and your name/blog identifier, so that if any potential readers like you and hate the rest of us, they can find your posts easily.

Everyone: There is a poll for the December topic in the sidebar, and you can vote until the last day of this month. Whichever topic gets the most votes gets written about next month.

"Reunions" got kicked off of the poll this month. If you really want to see what we have to say about that, you'll have to suggest the topic again.

Comment on this post or the topic ideas post if there's anything you'd like to see added to the poll in December.

101 Things in 1001 Days

Superfluous Backstory

Early in the summer of 2006 I went through what I'll call a bad breakup for simplicity's sake. The following month I lost a friend to cancer. I spent the summer in rough shape at a job that I hated, and suffice it to say that by the time school started again at the beginning of September I wasn't exactly ready for it.

I don't remember exactly when I found the Day Zero Project, but whenever that was, I was apparently ready to start climbing out of the pit I'd found myself in and start setting goals for a brighter time in my life. I dropped two classes to finish the university term in one piece, met a new boy, and made a list of 101 things that I wanted to have done by my 23rd birthday in September 2009.

The Project

The Day Zero Project website looked a lot different when I first found it. At the time there was an About page and a list of people's 101 Things in 1001 Days blogs.

That's all you really need, though. The project is exactly what it sounds like: you give yourself a list of 101 things to accomplish over the course of 1001 days. Why 1001 days? Well, it's longer than a year (it's 2.7406 years), so you have plenty of time to set up something like a trip overseas or to win NaNoWriMo. It's also shorter (hopefully) than some hypothetical "before I die" point in time that will allow you to put things off indefinitely. The idea being, as far as I'm concerned, that if you really want to do something, you can put the plan in motion within two and three quarter years, or at least be more mindful of accomplishing it at some later date when you're working your way through other goals.

The goals should be realistic but also stretching, so for example nothing like "skydive from the edge of space" but also nothing like "blink at least twice per day."

Tips!

Since I started my first list at the end of December 2006, I've worked my way through two of them and started on a third this June, which I'll wrap up in March 2015. Over the course of that time I've learned a bit about how to actually successfully accomplish what's on the list. Mostly I'll try to use examples of stuff that has been or currently is on one of my own lists. The following tips are in no particular order.

• Set definitive goals.
  This one is surprisingly easy to get wrong. A couple of my lists have included things like "#29 - Write a poem every week." or "#28 - Floss." While these are probably good things to aim for (I don't write poetry anymore), they're also really hard to track over the course of 2.75 years. It's way better to set goals that can be crossed off after under half a dozen actions or so. For example, I still have "#22 - Read at least five books dealing with Canadian history." but I've gotten rid of a lot of other stuff that isn't just one single discrete activity. There are still a few things that are a little too abstract, but I'm getting better at not doing this.
  
  
• Keep the list handy and visible.
  This one is also kind of tough. After a lot of trial and error (I don't even remember where I kept the first list, so obviously it wasn't anywhere prominent), I finally feel like I have a good system for keeping my list somewhere where I can see it. I've been using Toodledo to keep track of all my to do lists for the last few months and it's been extremely useful. All of my current 101 things are listed in Toodledo, and I also have an item to review my 101 in 1001 list that recurs every month. Plus, I set up a blog that only I can see where I keep track of the different items as I complete them.
  
  
• It's ok to change your mind.
  When I made my first list, I was still pretty close to/struggling with the faith I grew up in (Roman Catholicism, for anyone who wasn't previously aware). So I had a few things like "#35 - Go to confession." I always hated going to confession, so that was definitely a stretching goal for me. But the fact is that by the time I got to the end of those 1001 days I didn't really care to maintain that faith anymore. Similarly I finally gave up "#20 - Make a zine." because I figured out that if I really wanted to make one I would've done it already. In some ways this can kind of feel like failure, but I like to look at it as a sign of progress and change.
  

Final Thoughts
While the 101 Things in 1001 Days method/project has treated me fairly well over the years, I think that my current list is going to be my last, mainly because 101 things is a lot of things. Half the time I feel like I end up including things on my list just to fill it out rather than because they're things that I really do want to do.

At the same time, though, I feel like a set of mediumish-sized, mediumish-term goals is a really good thing to have. I may instead try a list of 71 Things in 71 Fortnights, or something like that. About the same length of time, but a smaller number of items. That way I'd still be pushing myself toward things that I want that are outside of my normal set of actions/behaviours/whatever, but I could be a bit choosier about what those things are.

If any of you try this out, let me know how you fare!

Writing Essays, or On the Power of the Shitty First Draft

Hi everyone! The topic I'm covering for this month's skill-share is essay writing. Since this is a pretty big topic to discuss in one post, I'm thinking more specifically I'll talk about getting to the actual writing part of the process.

Writing essays is hard. I'm sure that anyone who's tried writing essays has found themselves sitting in front of a blank document, cursor blinking accusingly as the minutes pass and YouTube gets more and more appealing. I still do this, and I've written a lot of essays in my time. (And watched a good number of depressingly procrastinatory YouTube videos).

So what helps make writing essays less stressful? Less intimidatingly, overwhelmingly blank page-y? Well, it turns out that NaNoWriMo has gotten something right in their concept of the "shitty first draft" - once you get *something* on the page, even if it's god-awful, you can then improve it. It's difficult to edit thin air into an assignment.

There's a lot of advice out there for writing essays, and countless writing guides will tell you that outlining helps in the writing process. This is certainly true for some people, but I know others who swear by simply sitting down to write whatever comes out of their brains, and then tackling that mass of roiling words, attempting to wrangle the glob into something intelligible. In this way, I think that it's useful for everyone to approach writing an essay as something that doesn't have to be perfect when you start.

Whether you're writing a detailed outline or starting from scratch, the first draft should be bad. I mean, if it's got some good ideas in it, that's fine. But your first draft isn't the place for using the backspace key excessively - you should be putting words on the page, not taking them off of it! Instead of searching for the perfect word, use the one that comes to mind first. Often, once you've tried to turn off the voice in your head questioning your choice, you'll find that the first word that comes to mind *is* the right one. And if it isn't, so what? You can go back and change it, but at least the basic concept will be there to work with.

So I offer this piece of advice: no matter how solidified your ideas are, when you start writing, do it as a  very tentative part of the process. Don't edit as you go, don't overthink it, and don't expect to be able to hand it in the next day (unless you're an insanely quick and skillful editor!).

I found that my essay writing skills were very much improved by the practice of writing for NaNoWriMo, even though the things I was writing for that novel had absolutely nothing to do with my schoolwork. The practice of putting down words - any words that could possibly work - to page helped immensely in shutting off the voice inside my head that criticized as I wrote.

Here's to the shitty first draft! The giver of a point from which to start, the shabby placeholder, and the reassuring piece of work to say "yes, I can get something done" when you're doubting your abilities and your deadline is rapidly approaching. Whether you outline like Tolkien, or fly by the seat of your writerly pants, expect your first draft to be just that - the first of several.

Cosplay 101 and why I love it.

I am by no means an expert when it comes to cosplay, but it is definitely one of my passions.  I have always been a fan of dressing up, and/or playing a character.  At the same time I consider myself a builder and/or a maker.  I am always building something, or thinking about how to build something.  I am also a pretty shy guy.  With such a combination cosplay is a great way for me to put my creative side to work, and to go outside of my comfort zone, all whilst having a good time!

Cosplay - The building and displaying of wearable art! ~ Dictionary of Me
Or from wikipedia - Cosplay (コスプレ kosupure?), short for "costume play",[1] is a type of performance art in which participants don costumes and accessories to represent a specific character or idea.

The thing I really love about cosplay is that it can be so many different things to so many people, and that it combines so many skills and passions.  Some people do it to play a character, others to show off something they made, and others to be goofy, or make a statement.  It can be a thrown together build, or something that someone worked on for months or even years.  I love it all.  (Except people who just buy costumes, or insert 'sexy' in front of any other word and make that their costume)  Cosplay is about art and creation, and I love seeing what people make, and how they make it.  Just like a home cooked meal, a homemade costume is always better.

I have only been into cosplay for the last few years... or have I?  Looking back on it, I have been dressing up my entire life.  My parents were awesome about costumes when I was growing up.  My mom would sew costumes for my brother and me; anything from cowboys, to start trek, even the headless horseman one year.  My dad always helped getting us outfitted with props too.  We still have a set of wooden swords and shields back at home, which he built so my brother and I could be knights.  So, I was blessed to grow up in an environment where building and wearing awesome costumes was the thing to do.

While it used to be that Halloween was the big dress-up event of the year, I am now a year round cosplayer.  It is one of my main hobbies, and takes up much of my free time.  It is a great hobby, as it combines so many of my other hobbies: drawing, designing, building, and painting are all things I like to do, that can all be part of making a great costume.

As I have gotten more and more into cosplay I have done a lot of research and development (including many unfinished projects).  I figure you can break all costumes down into roughly 3 groups: clothing, armour, and props.  Here is a brief summary of some of the materials and methods that are used, and what they are used for.  This is by no means a complete list.  Possibilities really are endless; I am constantly learning new and unique methods from people all over the world (yay internets).  

First up is clothing.  Almost every costume is going to have some sort of clothing article, and some are all fabric.  I have very rudimentary sewing skills, and as such I generally have to use existing clothes to make my costumes.  Thrift stores are often a good resource for finding cheap clothes.  You can also find lots of useful clothing pieces online, with prices from very affordable to very pricey.  If you can sew, it really opens up what you can do.  If you are sewing your own clothes, you can easily modify existing patterns, and add/remove necessary details.  Or maybe you know someone who can sew; work with them to create that fancy dress, or sharp looking uniform.

I have always had a passion for armour, and much of my costuming effort goes towards building armour.  There are so many ways to build armour, from actual real armour to completely fake armour (that looks real!).  There are numerous groups that still make real armour out of metal, leather, and wood.  Most costume armour is fake however.  There are many ways of building armour using cheaper and lighter materials than steel.  The three main categories that I see most often are thermo-forming plastic, pepakura, and scratchbuilding.

Thermo-forming plastic is basically using heat and often vacuum pressure to form various types of plastic into a desired shape.  In it’s simplest form, someone could use a heat gun (or even a hair dryer) to heat plastic and bend it into a desired shape.  Getting more complicated you could use (or build and then use) a vac-form table.  Such a device can heat a large sheet of plastic, and form it over a mould using a vacuum.  This is how people make storm trooper armour.   It is also how the movie makers made storm trooper armour, and it is a common manufacturing method for all sorts of products.  This method yields lightweight armour that can be easily duplicated.

Pepakura is the Japanese word for papercraft.  This method uses computer software (called Pepakura) to flatten 3D models into 2D shapes that can be printed out from any home printer.  The flat patterns can be cut out and assembled into a 3D object in the real world.  Paper armour is not going to be very strong, so a healthy coat of resin is added to the model.  Once the model is hardened with resin, filler materials like Bondo, can be added to the model.  The filler is used to help smooth out models and add details.  This method will yield a unique set of armour, and allows the builder to shape it to whatever level of detail they desire.  It is a popular method, as models for the armour are often readily available straight from video games, or from 3d designers on the web.  It is the closest thing to a Lego set for building armour; you get the instructions, and just have to build it.

Scratch-building is a pretty broad category.  When scratch-building, people can use almost any material to build armour.  You can sculpt a model from clay or foam and build a mould, then cast it.  You can cut up cardboard boxes and foam floor mats and piece it all together.  You can build a pepakura model, then use a vac-form table to make endless copies.  This method allows you to make exactly what you want, and it can be as simple, or as complicated as you like.

Props are just an extension of the costume, and will use the same methods.  Props can be anything from a giant sword, or fancy gun, to goggles, pouches, belts and tools.  They are the finishing pieces that can help define your character.  The things that can really make a costume are the details, and props are often those details.  Other details come out in the paint and trim work.  A flat paint job is pretty boring, but highlights, grime and battle damage give your costume an authentic look.

As I have learned more methods and techniques for building costumes, my projects have improved, and my ambitions have grown.  I started with costumes like Mal Reynolds from Firefly.  This was a completely found costume, where I simply bought everything I needed and pieced it together.  Then I went onto being Doctor Horrible.  Much of this costume was pieced together from items I bought as well, though I did modify the boots, and goggles to fit the costume.  Then I got really ambitious and built some armour from scratch.  The armour is a space marine scout from Warhammer 40K.  For this costume I built pretty much everything.  The coveralls I already owned, along with the boots and goggles.  But I built the armour, and weapon, and have added little bits to it over the years.  In other builds I have learned how to build moulds and cast objects.  Jeff and I made Steam Fleet badges for a group of us.  These badges were some of the little details that really made our costumes.  I have learned many new things whilst building costumes, and many of these skills are useful outside of costuming as well.  My costuming experiences have also taken me to cool places and events from the Calgary Comic Expo to DragonCon in Atlanta.

Cosplay is a great hobby for anyone, as it utilises so many other skill sets; there is something in it for everyone.  If anyone ever has questions about an ‘impossible’ costume, feel free to ask me about it, as I would love to help make it real!

Well this is really long, so I will limit the pictures.

How to talk to your first stranger

At the request of Cat, I will be writing about talking to strangers. She figures that I might know a thing or two based on my thousands of kilometers of hitchhiking. She may figure right, who knows-- after you try out the tips in the post, let me know!

I haven't thought much about this topic in the past, although it is an interesting topic. My post won't be that theoretical; it will be rooted in practical experience. I'll leave it up to you to bring the theories.

I think it's important to realize that when going into a conversation that you and the stranger share a common interest and that you can shape the conversation to find and discuss that interest. Here's an example relating to a potential conversation I might have about sports, a topic that I don't think much about:

Stranger: Hey man, what's up?

Scott: Not a lot, how about you?

Stranger: Good.

*potential for end of conversation or awkward pause or recovery*

Scott: How's your day going today?

Stranger: Oh, it was alright, except the Pats [blah blah sports things].

Scott: Oh that sucks. I'm not a huge sports fan myself, except I:

 - saw that movie Moneyball and it was pretty interesting. I use statistics like that in my job and I think it's really cool how different industries are using technology and statistics to radically redefine themselves

 - went to my first Jays game a month or two ago. I'd never been to one before, and was surprised at the franchise's use of social media / how cheap and accessible to the public a game was / how expensive booze at the game was / how it was funny how hotdog prices went up linearly with how close to the stadium they were / etc

- was getting hcore into biking while I was in New Zealand. Upped my trips from ~20km to up to 50-60km. It's crazy that the limiting factor is your gooch / how big of a role that nutrition plays / how one's mind wanders when you're doing something for several hours / etc.

Two things of note here. Firstly, They start talking about sports, and then I take that topic and relate it to something I'm interested in that's tangentially related to the topic that they brought up. We're now talking about something fun and interesting: statistics, how technology is changing society, accessibility to public events, how old institutions have to change themselves to remain current, or an amusing anecdote related to my experiences. Neat! In this way I'm having a good conversation about something I'm interested about, and they might be having a conversation about something they're interested about. Sports might be the subject, but I'm getting something completely different out of the conversation.

TIP 1: Take what they're talking about, find a relation to something you're interested in, and change the conversation to something that you're interested in talking about.

Second item of note from Example 1. Notice my recovery after Stranger's response to "Not a lot, how about you?". "How's your day going today?" This is an extremely useful sentence. I'm going to say it twice more so you remember it. "How's your day going today?" "How's your day going today?" Anyone who you're talking to is coming from somewhere and they're feeling an emotion relating to their experiences that day. After someone answers that small talk question, take what they've said and ask a question about that. Distill until you're finding something interesting about that person. Here are some other power questions that you can use as a launching point to something interesting:

TIP 2: Use "small talk" / power questions to find something authentic the person is feeling or thinking about and then explore that feeling / thought. Here are some power questions:

- How's your day going?

- What are you up to today?

Sometimes, your small talk questions might lead you to something that you know nothing about. If you're interested, great! If not, great! Here are two such possibilities:

Stranger: ... and that's why my favourite show is Big Brother.

Scott: I don't know too much about Big Brother. Have you seen that fake reality show, The Joe Schmo Show? /  I don't know too much about Big Brother. ... What are you up to today?

Stranger: ... so Newfoundland should separate. 

Scott: I don't know too much about the situations leading NFLD to join Canada. Why should they separate?

I've italicized the important feature in these examples. Acknowledging to the other person that you don't know anything about what they're talking about is huge. You can either let them know that you're interested and to tell you more, or tell them that you don't know much and then change the subject. In any case, don't talk about something you don't know anything about.

TIP 3: Tell the person you don't know what they're talking about. Change the subject if it isn't interesting, or encourage them to tell you more.

That's all I got for you. Here are some other quick tips:

TIP 4: If you don't want to talk to someone, don't. Your life is too short to expose yourself to hate speech or boring speech. 

TIP 5: Pauses in conversations are okay, especially when you have a long time with the other person, such as a road trip. It's only awkward if you feel awkward. I love pauses in conversations -- gives me a chance to recollect my thoughts.

TIP 6: Seriously Cat + everyone else, read this book already. Fantastic read about how to communicate positively and effectively with others.

TIP 7: Don't worry if you put your foot in your mouth. There is a finite amount of ways you can do it, and after each you'll get better and won't do it the same way again :)

Hopefully these were helpful! If you only remember one, say "How's your day going?" in an awkward pause and you'll be good!

October!

It's October!

As I mentioned last month, we are doing something a bit different this month, and writing some instructive posts based on each other's requests.

Presuming all of us get around to posting, topics will be as follows:

• Catherine - Essay/paper writing
• David - Costume building
• Jeff - Gingerbread houses
• Megan - 101 things in 1001 days
• Scott - Talking to strangers

Contributors: You can interpret your topic any way you want, and you can write about anything else you'd like to share as well (within reason, obviously, not like 200 posts over the course of the month, but I don't think any of us have that kind of time on our hands). Make sure you tag your post with your name/blog identifier, so that if any potential readers like you and hate the rest of us, they can find your posts easily.

Everyone: There is a poll for the November topic in the sidebar, and you can vote until the last day of this month. Whichever topic gets the most votes gets written about next month.

Some of the topics have been languishing on the poll for months but continuously getting a vote or two that prevent them from being discarded. In the interest of keeping things fresh, I'm going to say that three months without votes, period, will get a topic kicked off of the poll (topics currently in danger of that are writing, reunions, travel, and manual labour/skilled trades).

Comment on this post or the topic ideas post if there's anything you'd like to see added to the poll.

Meloncholy

I remember the first time that I actually cared about sports.

For years I thought that football was the embodiment of the most primal elements of our human identity: brute force and fighting for dominance. The opening scene of 2001 A Space Odyssey would come to mind. I wanted nothing to do with it. But that all changed in the days leading up to my first visit to Edmonton's Commonwealth Stadium. That is, my aversion to football changed. I still think that it seems prehistoric, but now I embrace it - I am a human after all.

Prior to July 2007 I had never been to a football game. Ever. I had occasionally wandered by the TV as my dad sat transfixed by the last minutes of the Grey Cup unfolding, holding out hope for a turnaround until the very end. We'd lose. We always seemed to lose. Poor Riders. My dad had to scratch his head to remember the last time they had won the Cup.

When a few coworkers at the ATCO Gas office made plans to go to the July 20th Riders vs Eskimos (home) game, I was a little hesitant. Ultimately I gave in, figuring it would be a good bonding experience with my office friends from my internship posting. My boss was a Riders fan (originally a Saskatonian), as was another coop student from the U of S. A few days before the game, I started getting a bit excited at the thought of cheering on our underdog team amidst a sea of infidel Eskimo fans. Someone had to.

I'm not sure exactly what sparked it, but I really wanted to make a watermelon helmet. Perhaps I thought I may as well have some fun with it, even if the game didn't do anything for me. I spent a good twenty minutes at Safeway trying to find a watermelon big enough to fit my noggin. That night I set away at carving my helmet, referencing images and the team logo on the net to get it just right. It was a perfect fit, and I was pumped.

My enthusiasm changed when I remembered that I would have to wear this thing in public. Fortunately, one of my coworkers was also making a melon helmet, so I wouldn't be alone (I love how he put pineapple spines in a ridge along the top - pretty bad ass). Helmets donned, we boarded the LRT, and what a surprise we saw: the subway was crowded with Riders fans. A father with a little girl pointed our way and speaking to his daughter said "Now there's some real Riders fans." I'd never felt so proud.

We had cheaped out on tickets and were seated at the third highest row in the stadium. Our seats had a spectacular view of the entire field - and the crowd. I had heard that Riders fans were the most energetic and loyal in the country, but I had not appreciated how true that was until that day. The stand opposite us was a veritable green ocean, Riders fans outnumbering Eskimos by 2:1. All manner of grab could be seen on the 13th man and woman: green and white afro wigs, flags on 5 m poles, and Pilsner box hats galore (one was shaped like a combine!). There was also a few fellow melon heads. There were so many Rider supporters in the stands that the city actually ran out of green and white face paint - seriously, it was in the news. It felt like a home game (or at least what I could assume a home game would be like. Oddly enough, that July 20th game had the highest attendance of any game in the entire season (46,704), eclipsed only by the SK vs BC playoff finals (54,712) and the Grey Cup itself (52,230).

We got off to a great start. By the beginning of the third quarter we were leading 20 to 1. In jubilation, Rider Nation hijacked the Edmonton chant "Let's Go Eskimos", drowning it out with "Go Home Eskimos". A valiant fan wearing nothing but green and white paint from the waist up streaked across the field, making it almost all the way to the end zone before being tackled by three security guards. The crowd cheered as he was dragged away. The fanatic frenzy of the game sent raw emotions of excitement, empowerment, and courage welling up in me - I now understood what was meant by Rider Pride.

Then everything went to pieces. With less than two minutes left on the clock, the Eskies had recovered to a score of 21, while we had made no additional gains. Though we were ultimately defeated, I could appreciate the spirit of unshakable faith that my father would exhibit during every televised game - no matter how rough it got, they were the Rough Riders, and they were our team. Have-not province, have-not team, but both ours.

While we left the stadium with our pride intact, someone walking beside me asked if they could see my helmet. "Go right ahead! Keep it!" I generously offered. As I turned away I heard the heart-wrenching sound of melon rind rupturing on pavement. It had not occurred to me that the guy might not be a Rider kinsmen, but a soulless Eskimo fan. But I still had my pride - they couldn't break that over asphalt.

On October 26th, we had our revenge. Even though the fall chill had frozen my extremities, the heat of that next football battle kept me warm. We trounced the EE 36 to 29 and it was glorious - the first Rider victory I witnessed in the flesh. Everyone was saying how good the season was going, that we might have a good chance at the Grey Cup. Almost a month to the day later, I was glued to the TV, cheering on every pass, every field goal, every touchdown at the game that meant everything. When the clock stopped to seal our triumph, I shouted from my balcony onto the street "Riders win Grey Cup!" It was a moment of great celebration: sometime in my life, I got to see the Riders win the Cup. It was almost like seeing Halley's comet.

But something happened over the next six years. Even though the Riders were on the rise and were making in back to the Grey Cup with some regularity, something was different. The feeling was akin to beating that difficult final level of a video game: YES!!! … but now what?

What happened? Why was the spark gone? Was it because we actually won the Grey Cup? Was our glorious victory ultimately a silent defeat on a different field? Can I possibly ask any more rhetorical questions? 

Dave's earlier post "Fanatics" delves into this with much better insight than I could hope to articulate. Thanks for that brilliant post - it gave me the inspiration for this one (memories of a different time). It is this change in the mood of the fans that you noticed that is reason for my melancholy.

In an attempt to end on a lighter note, here is a picture of me with a pumpkin on my head! (yes, it's real one).

In retrospect, 2007 was a good year for me carving out fruit/vegetables and sticking them on my head :)

One hundred and eighty!

I've been struggling with writing a post this month partly because I've been working out of town and haven't had a lot of time to draft a post over my lunch hours, which is what I typically do. It's also because the main reason that I suggested this topic back in May was a desire to complain about While the Men Watch, which I'm still annoyed by but can't bring myself to care about anymore.

So instead I'm forced to get sloppy again. Let's have a quick chat about one of the lesser known professional sports: darts.

Now, I don't really follow darts or anything like that, but I did randomly watch the 2010 Premier League finals with my brother, and that basically put the sport at the very top of my list of obscure entertainments.

I feel like I've been leaning pretty heavily on embedded videos in my posts, but please watch this one:

A few things I'd like to draw your attention to in this video:

• Yes, Phil "The Power" Taylor is wearing a shirt with his own face on the back of it.
  
• As you may have guessed, the so-called "nine-dart finish" is basically a perfect score in darts.
  
• That being said, the object of the game overall is to work down from 501 points to zero.
  
• OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONE HUNDRED AND EEEEEEEEEIIIIIIIIGHTY!!!!!

Suffice it to say, I hope, that my brother and I spent a very entertaining evening watching this.

I have no real lesson or philosophy that I'm presenting here. Mainly I guess it's just interesting and/or incredibly amusing to be reminded of pro sports outside of the big three or four that everyone tends to think of when they encounter the term.

Hat Trick, More like Limerick

'Bout professional sports I know naught,
I think there's a ball to be caught?
Crowd's eyes growing wider
While cheering 'go Riders!'
But for me it does diddly squat.

Fanatics!

I have never really been a big pro sports fan.  Like many things in my life I enjoy doing it rather than watching someone else do it.  I have never been in to hockey, basketball, golf, or baseball.  I have been a football fan for most of my life though.  I do enjoy playing all these sports, but the time commitment required to be a fan is pretty daunting.

My main sports these days would be CFL football (Go Riders!) and NASCAR.  That being said I am a pretty poor fan.  I find it hard to find the time to watch all the games and races.  And I only follow one team, and one race series.  There are people who follow all the games/races/matches of multiple sports.  Plus they follow stats, rankings and fantasy leagues.  This all adds up to a huge amount of time.  But that is okay.  Some people geek out about sports, and some geek out about other stuff.  I usually go with other stuff.  But, as I mentioned I am a Rider fan too.

I grew up as a rider fan, as my parents (especially Mom) are fans.  I have great memories of going to games in the summer, and cheering along with Gainer (the mascot), or bundling up in every scrap of clothing I own to cheer on the team in Playoff games in October or November.  I remember doing yard work while listening to games on the radio (before we had televised games).  Even when games were tense, or we didn't win, it was a fun experience.  I grew up through the years when our team sucked.  When making the playoffs was a miracle, when finishing not in last place was awesome!  But times have changed for our Riders.

Saskatchewan fans got the label of best fans in the CFL for sticking with out team through all those bad years.  No matter how they did, the fans supported them.  But in the recent decade the team and organization has improved.  They made it to three Grey Cup games in four years, and won one of them (should have been two, but that is another story).  They have been underdogs, and defending champions, and there have been some really great moments.  But, I find that this success has changed the mood of our fans.

Sask. fans still claim to be the best in the league, but there seems to be so much more negativity these days.  This year our team has struggled, but for the most part they have played well, even if all the games weren't wins.  But instead of people enjoying the games and excitement, they seem focused on whether we won or lost, and are quick to judge and throw blame around.  Everyone seems obsessed with winning the season, and winning the Grey Cup.  That is a good goal to have, but it shouldn't be the only one.  We should still be able to enjoy the game, win or lose.  But more and more people just end up angry, and/or disappointed.

Another example of this is the NHL playoffs.  Every year people get really invested in their team, and most of the people end up being let down and angry, when their team blows it in game 7.  It gets to the point where people riot.  They steal and wreck shit over the outcome of a game.  It is crazy that people can affected so deeply by a game.

But, I guess the word fan comes from the word fanatic, so maybe it is entirely appropriate for these people.  If that is the case I think I am more of a spectator of sports than a fan.  A spectator can simply watch the game, and enjoy the highlights (for both teams).  Most of the players share a sense of friendly competition, so why can't the fans?

Cyborgs

I don't have anything to talk about re: professional sports aside from what I said last month. So, I'm going to write about cyborgs instead.

To you readers who woefully did not have a nerdy childhood, teenhood, or adulthood, a cyborg is a conglomerate of a human and a machine. Robocop is a pretty classical treatment of a cyborg.

The classical definition of a cyborg is typically a machine fused to a human. I think a more contemporary definition of a cyborg might allow this human to detach their machine parts. This definition, when treated loosy-goosily, might imply that the use of any tool would cyborgacize oneself.

Perhaps it comes down to the individual's perception of the machine or tool that they're using regarding whether they're a person using a tool or whether they're a cyborg and the tool is a part of them. For the sake of argument, let's assume that if an individual feels closer to their identity when they're using their tool than when they're not that they are exhibiting cyborgly behaviour.

Here are a few tools that I feel more like myself when using:

1) Glasses
My prescription is -6,000,000 ± 5,999,995, which, in layhuman terms, means that I'm more likely to end up at a Robin's Donuts than work if I left the house in the morning without them. The world feels more normal when it's in focus. Thanks glasses.

2) Bike
I was recently biking with someone who I had known fairly well for a very long time. They commented that they were surprised with the grace with which I handled myself while on a bike. I'll be the first (or, second I guess) to say that I'm not the most graceful human alive while walking. I definitely feel more comfortable on a bike while transporting myself as opposed to walking. And, as it turns out, apparently I'm much better and more graceful when transporting myself via bike. Thanks bike!

3) Cell Phone
It feels weird when I'm out and about, think about something I want to ask / tell someone, and not have the ability to send a thought to someone else via text/email. Similarly, I feel disconnected when I know others don't have this link to me. I'm not sure whether the cyborg component in this example is the phone or whether its the connectivity to the internet that causes this sensation.

4) Computer
A majority of my job is on my laptop. I use this same laptop at home. In other words, I interact with this computer a lot. Recently, I decided to use a second monitor for one particular task. When I was interacting with my laptop on the other monitor, I felt really weird. I felt exactly like when you clasp your hands together, then invert them, have someone touch them, and then your fingers feel as if they're on the wrong arm. If you don't know what I'm talking about, too bad, I actually couldn't find any pix or vidz to illustrate what I mean. Anyway, it was totally cray. I felt a different sensation (or rather, a sensation I was accustomed to was absent) when using the second monitor. I've developed a sensation to using a (my?) laptop. Super weird.

It's weird to think that I feel like I'm living closer to my identity when using this machines as compared to when I'm not. I'm not too worried about this -- I think it's pretty an interesting observation about the sensations that I'm accustomed to and makes me who I am.

I'm a cyborg, guys. PS: Sorry sports fans.

September Topic!

It's September!

The August poll closed with the following breakdown of votes:

• 0 votes: siblings, writing, monarchy, reunions, travel, ancestry/genealogy, manual labour/skilled trades
• 1 vote: high school graduation
• 2 votes: -
• 3 votes: professional sports

So the topic for this month is professional sports. Go Riders!

Contributors: You can interpret this topic any way you want, and you can write as many posts about it as you want (within reason, obviously, not like 200 posts over the course of the month, but I don't think any of us have that kind of time on our hands). When you write your post, make sure you tag it with the topic and your name/blog identifier, so that if any potential readers like you and hate the rest of us, they can find your posts easily.

Everyone: We'll be doing something a bit different for October so there won't be a poll this month.

Comment on this post or the topic ideas post if there's anything you'd like to see added to the poll in October.

So many games, so little time

Well I have to say that gaming is a big part of my life.  Mostly video games, but I dabble in other types as well.  And one constant in my life is that I never have enough time for all the gaming that I would like to do.  I didn't even have time to write a proper post about gaming this month (though I really wanted too).  But at the moment I am very busy with field work, which includes long, long days, and not being at home.  As such, I cannot game or write about gaming.

That being the case I will revert to a bit of a bullet list of things I wanted to touch on.

Halo changed everything.  Not just for me, but for the medium, I think.

Gaming is a valid artform.

The gaming industry and where it is headed.  Big developers and corporations are required for large, and in depth technical games.  But will the "impersonal corporations" hurt games? Can games continue to be good art when developed simply as a product to make money?

And lastly, I need more friends who are into gaming, for co-op experiences.

I really would have liked to write more about this topic, as it is near and dear to me, but stupid "real" life has gotten in the way.  So this last minute vomit of words will have to do.

PS - this was written in my approximately half hour of free time I get while in the field these days.  So I apologize if it makes no sense at all.  My mind is numb.

Watching Starcraft 2 videos on YouTube made me into a man

It's true, gentle readers. Before I started watching Starcraft 2 videos on YouTube, I was not a man. More appropriately, my experience has allowed me to understand why many men who are not me are interested in things that are conservatively considered manly (and boring). Namely, watching sports and cars. Gross.

To bring you up to speed, Starcraft 2 is an online sci-fi strategy game where players choose one of three races to duke it out. The first was an incredible success and the second has been designed to facilitate the burgeoning genre of "E-Sports". Some of the top gamers make a lot of money. Some companies that you've heard of sponsor the Major League Gaming championship. 

So Starcraft 2 is big, especially in South Korea. I dabbled in the first, but I was never huge into it. When the second came out, I decided I would play it a bit. Single player was fun. I turned next to multiplayer, and got slaughtered. I don't really have the time to get good at Starcraft 2, so that was that, I uninstalled it. I later learned that top SC2 players will have an APM (actions per minute) of upwards of 200. What! I can't do anything 200 times per minute.

I heard that commentated SC2 videos were online and I figured I would check it out. I found one such caster, HuskyStarcraft, who the kids seemed to like. Turns out over 600,000 kids are subscribed to him at the time of writing). He comments on SC2 videos for a living through his YouTube channel and at competitions. Neat! It turns out that I quite enjoy watching games from time to time. The game prioritizes multitasking and organization rather than strength and agility.

I was watching a tournament game and one of the players had a keyboard with all the keys removed except for those that he used to play the game. A lot of the top players are on teams and live in player dorms. People fly from all over the world to compete in tournaments. South Korea is the world's SC2 leader. The best Zerg player in the world right now is Stephano, a young man from France. This is an interesting world. 

It hit me when I realized I was regularly watching SC2 videos and convincing people to watch them. I follow these just like normal mens watch sports. I get it now! I feel towards an e-sport what others feel towards prefixless sports! 

I've been pretty excited since my realization and I've considered other things in my life that parallel typical man interests. I'm really into biking and can totally justifying tons of money on a bike and its components. I know what different oils to put on my bike chain for different weather, how different tires affect winter performance, and what different puncture points on a flat tire mean. Dude, I could totally be talking about a camaro here if I had a mullet. 

There's an interesting book I read recently: it's called We Are All Weird. One of the gists of it is that in this day and age we have the means to be as weird as we want. If there is something to geek out about, someone will geek out about it. I hope that once this attitude becomes more prevalent that there will be more acceptance to fringe interests / less bullying / happier world. I'm not sure whether this has changed throughout my life, or whether it's just a growing up thing, but I feel like people are generally more tolerant towards weirdness these days. 

Watching Starcraft 2 videos on YouTube in your boxers is probably still weird though.

Here's an interesting Husky video to get you started:

These Are A Few Of My Favourite Games

So I literally just finished playing Journey. My brother recommended it to me months ago but I just finally got around to buying it last weekend, and let me tell you, it is a beautiful, affecting game. A new addition to my list of favourites for sure. And with that in mind, I figured I'd share that list with you as my post for the month.

#1 - Megamania for the Atari 2600

My introduction to gaming was a bit different than that of most kids born in the mid-80s. I never had a Sega Genesis or an SNES; my family didn't have a modern console until we got a PlayStation. What we did have, though, was a relic from before I was born, the Atari 2600. (My original plan for my post this month was to haul the thing out and take some pictures of it, but I ran out of time.) In case you're not familiar with the Atari, this is the system with the joystick and single red button on the controller. It's pre-NES.

And while I loved most of the games that we had for the Atari, Megamania was by far my favourite. The gameplay is along the same lines as stuff like Space Invaders and Asteroid, and I was basically a pro at it. There isn't a whole lot more to say about this kind of game, though, so let's move on.

#2 - Super Mario Kart for the SNES

We'll skip the NES because to be honest the only games I ever really played on that console were Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt, which are obvious classics that everyone has played and no one needs to hear anything more about.

Mario Kart is kind of the same way, but I suppose it's more notable for me because I fell in love with it over the course of a few days spent with my family in a cabin at a lake about an hour and a half north of Edmonton. It was February and almost too cold to be outside most of the time, so the other older kids and I spent a lot of time playing Mario Kart and Donkey Kong Country. While not exactly my introduction to multiplayer gaming (the Atari had a few options that weren't just turn-based, but I rarely played them), this marked the first time that I understood video games could be something played together, not just played by one person and observed by everyone else.

Also it was just a great game.

#3 - Portal for the PlayStation 3

I'm skipping over the original PlayStation and the Xbox because while I loved a few games on that console for sure (primarily platformers), none of them really changed my perspective of what a game could be. (If I'm not mentioning a console at all it's because it's pretty much off my radar completely.)

And then there was Portal. Somehow I found out it was a puzzle game, decided I had to play it, and pretty much haven't been able to shut up about it ever since. In case you've been living under a rock and don't know how this game works, it's like so: you have a gun that shoots both ends of one portal, and you use it to navigate your way through test chambers.

For me this game was also a revelation of interactive storytelling. It's a great example of how games can have stories as interesting as the ones in movies and books, and how amazing that can be if the medium is really exploited.

#4 - Minecraft for PC (or in my case Mac)

I hope I'm not mistaken in saying that Minecraft is the purest sandbox available in gaming right now. In a nutshell, you mine and you craft. This is basically electronic Lego and it pushes all of my buttons: collaboration, construction, exploration.

That's all for now, though.

What are your favourite games?

Ness Vs. Unassuming Local Guy

Video games. I've spent countless hours over the years playing Super Nintendo games, saving up for an N64 with my brothers (money kept in an old plastic container), staring at the tiny dot matrix screens on original Game Boys, and, more recently, borrowing time at my brother's computer to play PC games. But I'd be lying if I said I liked all games equally. My first video game love was Earthbound, and it will always hold a very special place in my heart.

Earthbound is, to put it lightly, weird. The main character is a little kid, the locations are varied (mole caverns, small town in the grips of an insane cult that worships the colour blue, land before time -ish area featuring gigantic dinosaurs), and the enemies are hilarious. You fight things like "Big Pile of Puke," a "Manly Fish," and "Cute Li'l UFO." Your weapons can include frying pans and baseball bats.  The goal of the game is to stop an evil alien from taking over the world.

The first diary I ever kept included painfully detailed accounts of playing Earthbound - there's a page where I list what areas there are (this is directly before a one-page story written from the perspective of an anthropomorphic dolphin), and I wrote almost daily about where I was in the game and what was happening. Clearly something about this game really clicked with 11-year-old me, but I've also really enjoyed all the times I've re-played it. I recommend it to anyone who's interested in RPGs.

And the music is great - last year I, along with the Bath Haus Klezmer Band, tried covering this song. Enjoy!

August Topic!

It's August!

The July poll closed with the following breakdown of votes:

• 0 votes: high school graduation, reunions, travel, professional sports, manual labour/skilled trades
• 1 vote: ancestry/genealogy
• 2 votes: siblings, writing, monarchy
• 3 votes: -
• 4 votes: video games

So the topic for this month is video games. I promise I'll try to avoid making my post just a million screenshots of my Minecraft server.

Contributors: You can interpret this topic any way you want, and you can write as many posts about it as you want (within reason, obviously, not like 200 posts over the course of the month, but I don't think any of us have that kind of time on our hands). When you write your post, make sure you tag it with the topic and your name/blog identifier, so that if any potential readers like you and hate the rest of us, they can find your posts easily.

Everyone: There is a poll for the September topic in the sidebar, and you can vote until the last day of this month. Whichever topic gets the most votes gets written about next month. If a topic gets no votes for three consecutive months, it gets moved off of the poll to make room for other potential topics (unless there aren't any). Comment on this post or the topic ideas post if there's anything you'd like to see added to the poll.

The importance of choosing appropriate RPG stats

Second last but not second least!

Aging is an interesting beast. It took me awhile to disconnect my feelings with that of society's, but I  have recently realized that I quite enjoy growing older. Obviously, there are lame things like my body falling apart after exertion that was previously fine (What bro? You want to party two nights in a row? Who does that?), but all in all, I've decided that growing older is great.

One thing that I enjoy is being able to better understand people. I find that as I grow older and talk and listen to more people, I'm better able to read people and understand what they're feeling and thinking. Looking back at myself when I was 5 or 10 years younger, I feel like my understanding of people, emotions, and thoughts were so naive. I'm really excited to extend this thinking for the future -- by the time I'm 50, will my ability to read people have increased in a similar rate as the past five years? Or, will society and people have changed so much so that my reading skills are outdated? Does this skill require considerable upkeep? Judging from how my people skills drop off after working at home without talking to another soul over a blizzardy few days, the answer is yes!

Similarly, I enjoy looking at my experiences over the last five years. I've lived in 5 cities in 3 countries, had a bunch of amazing experiences, and my fair share of negative and traumatic ones too. I feel like through experiencing these events that I'm much able to connect and feel empathy to a wider range of people and experiences. I really enjoy feeling connected to people and I'm excited to experience more things as I grow older that will help make more connections with more people.

I was relating something similar to this blog post to my friend Henry and he responded with "Scott, of course you like growing older. If life was an RPG, you would put all your stats in Wisdom and Charisma [, the skills that you have increased by growing older]." Henry knows me quite well and was indeed correct, as whenever I play an RPG, that is exactly what I do!  Perhaps my enjoyment with aging comes from identifying what attributes of life I enjoy and nourishing those attributes. I don't think I explicitly identified these attributes, I feel like I intuited them and perhaps got lucky. I have really enjoyed my progress over the past five years, and perhaps this enjoyment has made me optimistic about aging!

What makes a grown-up?

I kind of can't believe that I didn't think of this earlier in relation to this month's topic, but I follow a pretty cool blog called Adulting that's basically about becoming a together type of person. It's not so much about aging as it is about growing up, but I really like it and maybe you'd like to check it out!

Anyway, yesterday's post there made me think about a comment I wanted to make on Dave's post on "Thinking about Batman" except that I couldn't figure out how to phrase it.

The gist of it is basically this: that it's not eating balanced meals every night and going to the symphony instead of bar shows that makes you an adult, it's being a good, respectful, reliable person.

With grey hair.

Twitter on Aging

I just saw this in my twitter feed, and thought it seemed relevant to the blog's topic for this month :)

(though I should point out that I never really had a crush on Xander, as I was more of an Oz girl).

God willing and the creek don't rise

Full disclosure: I have grey hair!

Or rather I should say that I've started getting grey hair, and "started" should be read as "found the first one at least four years ago," although that makes no sense grammatically. Given that I'm 25 right now, you can do the math on this one yourselves. But seriously, what the hell? Luckily it's still (I think) not noticeable in the rest of my hair, but every time I see it again I have a quiet conniption* about what I'm going to do when it is noticeable, since I really dislike the thought of dying my hair to cover up the grey as a vanity thing, but I also really dislike the idea of being a greying twenty-something, because I already have enough trouble getting dates as it is.

That's not really what I want to talk about, though.

I've had an overly healthy sense of my own mortality pretty much ever since I can remember. I'm not sure where it comes from, but I'll throw out a few wild guesses about it having something to do with how the food I eat can kill me** and Rescue 911 being my favourite show when I was 5 years old.

But while I'm always busy contemplating how I'm going to die suddenly and horribly, I'm opposed to maxims about living every day like it's your last. I can tell you right now that if I knew I was going to die tomorrow, I wouldn't be at work, I'd be busy having an orgy while under the influence of as many hard drugs as possible. And maybe I'd have dinner or something with my family. Not exactly a lifestyle that can be maintained over the course of a potentially long life.

I'm not about to tell anyone else how to live, but for me personally I think this means that the most responsible approach is a balance between seizing the day and playing the long game, which is to say that it's important to me to be happy right now but also recognize that, if average life expectancy is 80 years, I still have over two times as many years as I've already lived ahead of me i.e. a pretty incomprehensibly huge amount of time. So, one day, I'll actually be old, not this current old where I'm getting grey hair and my metabolism is slowing down a little bit. It's really important to me to keep that in mind when I'm thinking about my quality of life, and what I want the big picture of my life to look like.

And as nervous as I am to lose my (relative, at this point) youth, I'm really excited to still have all that experience ahead of me. I realize that this is a bit of a cliche, but life's surprises are pretty much my favourite thing. I'm not going to be a jackass and say that I love the bad surprises, too, because that's not true. What I mean is that I think the unexpectedness of it all makes it less daunting to think that I might live another, Jesus Christ, fifty or sixty years. Those years aren't all going to be the same. I mean, I'm not exactly adventurous and I can safely make certain assumptions about things like my job and and where I'll be living a year from now, but people can pop up in your life unexpectedly and mess up everything, or relationships with people you've known for a long time can change, and then things end up differently than what you expected.

It's not just about people, either, it's about things like self-knowledge and learning, too. The passing of time means learning new things and refining my perspective on the world. I'm the one constant in my life, the only person I have to put up with no matter what, so it really helps to know that so far the older I get, the better I become as person (if I say so myself *collar tug*).

What I'm clumsily trying to get at is that aging is the trade-off for experience, and if we're lucky we all have a lot more life ahead of us than we're really able to conceptualize after only a quarter century, most of which was spent on the progression from baby to child to angsty teen. I feel like there's a sense of hurry in one's 20s, because life after 30 doesn't look as bright and shiny. Really though, there's all this time***, and I sometimes wish people would calm down and realize that. Our society values youth because it's so sparkly, and the intensity of experience seems to fade as you get older e.g. how things that are awesome!!! or terrible :( :( :( when you're a teenager become completely trivial in hindsight. I think this can be as insidious as a lot of the gender role messaging that people get.

In conclusion, life is short and long, and don't be in such a hurry to cram everything into your young, beautiful years, because you have lots more to go and you'll need to occupy them somehow.


* My use of the word "conniption" may also suggest that I have bigger fish to fry when it comes to how old I appear.
** I have anaphylaxis to peanuts and tree nuts.
*** "for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse"? Yep, I am that terrible.

Thinking about Batman

I was going through my folder of funny pictures I find on the internet, and came across a comic from XKCD that pretty much sums up my thoughts on aging.

I often feel this way.  I spend much of my days doing "grown-up" activities, but my mind is often somewhere else completely.  I spend lots of time thinking about my hobbies.  I have numerous hobbies, some which are far nerdier than others, but most of them make me feel like a big kid.  Being an engineer at the same time makes me feel a little like I have split-personalities.  One is the serious engineer, working in the serious workplace, where everything is serious.  The other is the kid with his head in the clouds trying to figure out how to build the biggest thing ever built... even if that thing exists only in minecraft.

There might have been a grander point to this post but I lost it... I was thinking about Batman.

This Too Shall Pass

Perception of age is a strange beast. When I was 6, I remember pledging to my mother that I wouldn’t need birthday parties once I turned 10, because then I’d be “too old” for them. Of course, once my 10^th birthday rolled around, I adamantly pushed for having a birthday party, despite my younger self’s notions of maturity. At 6, though, I was absolutely convinced that 10 was an important, even momentous age, at which I’d blossom into a slightly smaller version of an adult, probably writing novels and sipping lemonade in my spare time. Birthday parties? Childish! “Leave me to my craft,” I’d say, hunched over a notebook while rocking back and forth in a chair on the porch.

A Portrait of the Blogger as an Idiot Child

Similarly, when I think back to where I thought I’d be at 25 – once I could conceptualize numbers that high –I was also pretty confident that I’d have achieved Great Things (TM). This isn’t to say that I haven’t accomplished anything; I have, but it occurs to me now that I’ve spent the bulk of my life thinking of age in terms of achievements naturally unlocked by the passing of time. Just like a health regeneration rate in a video game, age (or how I thought of it) was a passive counter ticking up and up and up. Rather than life being, well, work, it seemed to be a half-effortless progression into jobs, marriages, children, and whatnot. Part of the struggle in my aging has been to undo this weird idea I’ve had and to build a new, more realistic model of age for myself.

Whether it’s good or bad, I now think of age most often in terms of comparison to fictional characters. Buffy was 22 when the series ended, so I had to shift to the world of Spaced for my (lackadaisical) mid-twenties inspiration. I may be coming up on a gap – needing a new show or book to parallel – with the latter half of my twenties. The comforting thing about this model is that fictional characters are just as clueless as we are, but we can observe them from a space where we know that their problems are going to work out all right (though Joss Whedon kills off a few too many people for his works to be deeply reassuring). As silly as it might seem, I’m soothed by looking at fictional characters because I know that there are so many different ways that they live, achieve, grow, and change. It’s a little like breaking out of the linear “level up or else” way I’d thought of age before.

Penny: Role Model for the Ages

Aging, especially for women, is often something we talk about with dread. (I would really like it if there were an equivalent female term for ‘silver foxes’ – ‘silver vixens?’). Wrinkles, disease, persistent spinster or bachelorhood, ‘dead-end’ jobs, and emotional crises come hand in hand with the ever-encroaching territory of continued existence, at least by typical standards. But whenever you can find a person who’s your age, and handling life in an admirable way, even if they’re fictional, it’s a relief –reassurance that the cultural ideas we have about aging aren’t an inescapable prison.

Of course, the joke about adulthood really does seem to be that you never feel like an adult, at least not fully. It’s all some weird trick of the light where you look at a picture of yourself from ten years ago and think “wow, I thought I knew what I was doing then, but I sure as hell didn’t!” and the same thing will happen in another ten years with a different photo. Constantly shifting self-awareness (or lack thereof!) as a dominant emotional state – it’s kind of terrifying, and kind of calming. It’s a reminder that, in the words of that old saying, “this too shall pass.” Since that applies to the good and the bad, it helps to quell anxieties and to temper euphoria. And I’ll keep on celebrating my birthday until I damn well please. 

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