I wake up, it's Tuesday I think. I oblige my hunger as it beckons me upstairs into the kitchen, my bare feet tread gingerly upon the chilled tile floor. I look in the refrigerator and find nothing to eat. I begin to turn to the cabinet, although my gaze stops on a big pink box on the counter, nestled up between the refrigerator and the toaster.
"What is this?"
I read the label, "Granny B's Cookies." Oh no. I'm not even sure they even sell these outside of Utah. I try and recollect when I last had one, and find I can't. My mouth starts salivating, and I edge closer to the box to better see the delicious cookies contained within. For those unfamiliar with the Granny B Pink Sugar Cookie, let me elaborate; the Pink Sugar Cookie is essentially a disc of bleached white flour smothered in a half inch of pink frosting, topped with sprinkles. It looks like this. There are many hack versions of the cookie, although all of them are tough and crumbly by comparison. With some sort of black magic, the guys who designed the Granny B cookie managed to lock in the softness of the frosting and cookie, keeping them fresh and succulent for weeks on end. One would think such a simple little thing would be relatively innocuous, save for the frightening amount of sugar contained therein, although one look at the back of a package dispels that assumption instantly.
At first glance the figures seem harmless: 133 calories, 4 milligrams of cholesterol, 9 grams of sugar, etc. That is, of course, until you read that one cookie comprises four servings, then the figures seem a lot more daunting. Oh, but my primal urge to partake of the deliciousness contained within wrestles with my reason. The fact that this white and pink hockey puck spells certain carotid death is of no object, all I can think of is ripping away the packaging and delicately sinking my teeth into Granny B's awful creation; first into the rosy, undulating waves of frosting, and then into the sweet, soft cookie itself.
I consider the package for a moment. The label on the clear plastic barely covers the culinary pornography within. The design is reminiscent of a handkerchief my own grandma would have, and therein lies the trap. Even though this was coldly mass produced in a factory somewhere in the wastelands of Northern Utah, it is marketed to seem cozy, inviting, familiar; almost like partaking of your grandmother's cooking when visiting during a holiday. I've never seen doublethink implemented with such success. Not only has Granny B produced something that is completely hazardous to your health, but she's made it seem friendly and warm, of your own blood. She's sugarcoated a serpent.
I look at the picture of Granny B on the box. The same picture is featured on the company's website. Her hair is short, the bangs curled. Her lips, slathered with burgundy lipstick, form an inviting although somewhat terrifying smile. In each hand she presents a packaged cookie, and her eyes, gazing off over her glasses, invite me in. "I baked these just for you, Andy," they say, "Oh come on, don't be shy, eat them!"
Granny B, you twisted bitch, you're not inviting me in with that smile; you're smiling because you've won. You know your creations are like cookie heroin, you grin because you've gotten away with hooking thousands of innocent, hungry people on your horrendous product. I do not buy a Pink Sugar Cookie, I sign my soul away, and in your eyes I think I can see a faint glimmer of hellfire. I should just put the thing down and have a bagel, maybe a bowl of cereal, I can't let this thing manipulate me. But...
I open the package and bite down. It is devoured in a manner of minutes, and soon after my fingers start to shake a little from the sugar. I can still feel the little human inside of me shaking his head.
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Well, That Was Entirely Unexpected
In my second post on this blog I wrote about my efforts to see if the collective power of Reddit.com could be applied towards a more humanitarian goal. To make a short story even shorter: it was met with a lot of criticism and negativity and didn't really end up going anywhere. After this initial failure, I wanted to see if I could somehow present a charity or a cause in a more appealing manner to the trolls on Reddit, thereby actually accomplishing something, but my work got ahead of me, and I never really got around to it.
It seems, though, that my efforts gave the four guys who run Reddit some pause for thought, and just today I ran across this blog entry on the front page. The sweet sense of vindication that I got from this aside, I'll personally be donating once the winning charity is announced, and encourage you to do the same. It's great to see that someone out there not only has the will to enable some sort of good in the world, but has the clout to bring others to their cause as well.
It's been a good day :)
It seems, though, that my efforts gave the four guys who run Reddit some pause for thought, and just today I ran across this blog entry on the front page. The sweet sense of vindication that I got from this aside, I'll personally be donating once the winning charity is announced, and encourage you to do the same. It's great to see that someone out there not only has the will to enable some sort of good in the world, but has the clout to bring others to their cause as well.
It's been a good day :)
Sunday, December 16, 2007
For Just a Moment
Looking at listings for Datsun 300ZX's on eBay the other day, I came across a 1989 model. In the vehicle description the owner warns that there is some body damage, but it is, after all, an 18 year old car, so it is to be expected. This is true for every model of the Datsun Z. They're made of really thin steel, which is what gives them their speed. The thin steel, though, is very susceptible to rusting and denting, and so you'll rarely find an absolutely perfect car. Regardless, the owner's math irked me for a moment, and for some reason I thought to myself, "No you idiot, the car isn't 18 years old, I'M 18."
I am, in fact, 20.
I don't particularly miss 18; it was a great year, but 19 and what few months of 20 I've enjoyed have been great as well, in many ways a lot better. Why would I think that? It certainly gave me pause for thought.
I am, in fact, 20.
I don't particularly miss 18; it was a great year, but 19 and what few months of 20 I've enjoyed have been great as well, in many ways a lot better. Why would I think that? It certainly gave me pause for thought.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
In Defense of the Power Chord
I love a lot of musical genres, but so far as listening to music goes, I consider myself more of a metal head than anything else. Virtually every metal band in existence makes extensive use of the power chord (the root and the fifth) in their songs. Our friend the power chord, though, has a reputation as being overly simplistic and boring with the lay music connoisseur. It is the widely held belief that guitarists fall back on the power chord to provide substance for their music because they can't incorporate more complex chords into their playing. While this may be true in the context of more harmonically complex genres, such as jazz, the power chord in the context of heavy metal doesn't deserve this harsh treatment. As someone who considers himself at least moderately versed in music theory, I will try and present the power chord as a necessary aspect to metal music.
To begin, we must identify a couple things as inherently valuable in metal- one, speed is good; and two, the more distortion the better. The power chord is played on two adjacent strings; the root on the lower string, the fifth on the higher string. Staying on one string is obviously going to be more efficient in attaining maximum speed, given that the strumming hand isn't going to have to move as far to strike the string repeatedly. The closest alternative to one string is, of course, two, and so in that a power chord is easy to play quickly, it is a more viable option than a more complex chord. In addition- the more distortion I put on my amp, the more muddled anything more harmonically complex a power chord becomes. I can get away with playing a few triads in the upper register of the guitar when I've got the gain maxed out, but otherwise, to misquote the great Dane Cook, it sounds like a bag of asses. So, given that the power chord enables faster playing and more distortion without muddling, it is the obvious choice.
But don't let the mere necessity of the power chord lead you to the conclusion that metal is therefore an inherently inferior genre- the best bands are far from stupid. For one thing, why does a chord have to be played all at once? Many guitarists arpeggiate chords during solos, this guy provides a really good example from the intro to "Beyond the Dark Sun." The guys in Symphony X producing mind-bendingingly complex albums, and continually baffle me with their sometimes infuriatingly hard to follow time changes. Bands like Sonata Arctica and Nightwish have been incorporating full orchestras into their work as of late, and big, complex vocal arrangements are in vogue with a lot of power metal bands (Edguy, Blind Guardian, and Avantasia are all good examples). All of this, coupled with the extreme technical prowess of these and many other bands' instrumentalists, produces a genre that is, overall, very musically complex and undeserving of the simplicity which many write it off with.
There are always exceptions to this rule, especially in the increasingly depressing American metal scene, but most heavy metal bands are not composed of a bunch of idiots banging on their instruments. There is real thought that goes into the best stuff, and to label their work as undeserving or stupid is just criminal.
To begin, we must identify a couple things as inherently valuable in metal- one, speed is good; and two, the more distortion the better. The power chord is played on two adjacent strings; the root on the lower string, the fifth on the higher string. Staying on one string is obviously going to be more efficient in attaining maximum speed, given that the strumming hand isn't going to have to move as far to strike the string repeatedly. The closest alternative to one string is, of course, two, and so in that a power chord is easy to play quickly, it is a more viable option than a more complex chord. In addition- the more distortion I put on my amp, the more muddled anything more harmonically complex a power chord becomes. I can get away with playing a few triads in the upper register of the guitar when I've got the gain maxed out, but otherwise, to misquote the great Dane Cook, it sounds like a bag of asses. So, given that the power chord enables faster playing and more distortion without muddling, it is the obvious choice.
But don't let the mere necessity of the power chord lead you to the conclusion that metal is therefore an inherently inferior genre- the best bands are far from stupid. For one thing, why does a chord have to be played all at once? Many guitarists arpeggiate chords during solos, this guy provides a really good example from the intro to "Beyond the Dark Sun." The guys in Symphony X producing mind-bendingingly complex albums, and continually baffle me with their sometimes infuriatingly hard to follow time changes. Bands like Sonata Arctica and Nightwish have been incorporating full orchestras into their work as of late, and big, complex vocal arrangements are in vogue with a lot of power metal bands (Edguy, Blind Guardian, and Avantasia are all good examples). All of this, coupled with the extreme technical prowess of these and many other bands' instrumentalists, produces a genre that is, overall, very musically complex and undeserving of the simplicity which many write it off with.
There are always exceptions to this rule, especially in the increasingly depressing American metal scene, but most heavy metal bands are not composed of a bunch of idiots banging on their instruments. There is real thought that goes into the best stuff, and to label their work as undeserving or stupid is just criminal.
Friday, December 7, 2007
Solipsism and the Nature of Reality
The Opinion section of my school's newspaper makes for pretty good reading between classes on Thursdays. Today's edition had a really excellent article, entitled Having a One-track Mind in Education is Ineffective, written by Michael Faber, the Jewish chaplain on campus. I can definitely agree with him on a lot of the points made in the article, especially the fact that your perception of reality is influenced by your past experience of it, although I'm not sure about the conclusions he draws about reaching beyond our tainted perception of reality.
Granted, unless we are having our perceptions channeled into us by something other than reality, be it a god or the Matrix, or unless we're all completely insane and are making up our own perceptions (which may not be entirely far from the truth), then there must be some sort of objective basis to what is "real." And yet in a world where the mere act of observation can change a phenomenon, how can we expect to observe the real? Faber suggests that it is in fact possible to "discover that other domain of knowledge called ultimate truth," and while never explicitly stating it, I think the implication he's making is that one needs to understand the source of the universe (God) in order to understand the universe itself.
He curiously turns the essay back on itself after proposing what I thought would be a religious solution to the question of objectivity. He ends with the idea that "one must learn to look inward" to enjoy true reconciliation between the self and the world, as seeking satisfaction from outside yourself will not yield lasting gratification. Although if we only experience reality through the lens of the self, which has been almost entirely constructed by the very reality it observes, then turning back to the self to reconcile with reality seems like a futile, ever-cyclical exercise. Then again, perhaps his closing is an acknowledgement of that very futility- a recognition that this is all just a big, fancy version of whether the chicken or the egg came first.
All in all, a very provoking essay.
Granted, unless we are having our perceptions channeled into us by something other than reality, be it a god or the Matrix, or unless we're all completely insane and are making up our own perceptions (which may not be entirely far from the truth), then there must be some sort of objective basis to what is "real." And yet in a world where the mere act of observation can change a phenomenon, how can we expect to observe the real? Faber suggests that it is in fact possible to "discover that other domain of knowledge called ultimate truth," and while never explicitly stating it, I think the implication he's making is that one needs to understand the source of the universe (God) in order to understand the universe itself.
He curiously turns the essay back on itself after proposing what I thought would be a religious solution to the question of objectivity. He ends with the idea that "one must learn to look inward" to enjoy true reconciliation between the self and the world, as seeking satisfaction from outside yourself will not yield lasting gratification. Although if we only experience reality through the lens of the self, which has been almost entirely constructed by the very reality it observes, then turning back to the self to reconcile with reality seems like a futile, ever-cyclical exercise. Then again, perhaps his closing is an acknowledgement of that very futility- a recognition that this is all just a big, fancy version of whether the chicken or the egg came first.
All in all, a very provoking essay.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Sweet, Sweet Diplomacy
Over Thanksgiving I was staying at my friend Kyle's house in New Hampshire, and one of the nights during the week or so I was living on his couch his older brother invited us to one of his friend's houses to play something called Diplomacy. I'd never heard of the game before, but he described it as "Risk on crack" (still my favorite way to describe the Diplomacy experience), so Kyle and I happily obliged him. We sat down at the board, picked out powers (France, England, Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, or Turkey), and after all of the assembled players voted to declare an end to the game -seven nerve wracking hours later- I was absolutely addicted.
The premise behind Diplomacy is that there's no luck, only skill. There aren't any dice to roll, and to force a unit to retreat (or destroy it if it has nowhere else to go) you have to overpower it. Thus diplomacy with other players, which plays a minor role at best in a game of Risk, is the driving force of Diplomacy, as nobody would be able to make any reasonable headway trying to play on their own.
But of course, as in real life, there is no such thing as a binding agreement between players, and so one must always be on the lookout for a potential stab in the back. In the game in New Hampshire Kyle and I were playing Germany, and had teamed up with England to take out France, which was being played by a far more experienced and exceptionally deceitful player. I introduced the ultimately poisonous idea to Kyle when we came to a deadlock with France that 1) England is the most powerful country on the map, and 2) once we were done with France he was going to come after us. After a turn or two without any progress being made we decided to turn against England. What I didn't expect, though, was a DOUBLE back stab on the behalf of France after a few turns of wailing on England. By the time the game ended Kyle and I were running for our lives.
There are a handful of sites that organize games by email, and earlier in the week I got into a game. I'm playing France this time around. So far I seem to have an agreement worked out with England, who I understand is a much more experienced player. Given his experience and the fact that people seem to lose all sense of honor and trust while playing Diplomacy, I don't really trust him yet. We've got a DMZ set up in the English Channel, which will keep us separate until he moves onto the mainland, I intend to keep it for the time being. I haven't heard back from Germany yet, although at this point I've had much more correspondence with England, so I think a potential alliance with Germany is pretty much out of the question by this point. Italy has agreed to leave me alone so long as I leave him alone, and I'm too far away from the other powers to be negotiating with them just yet.
Turkey, however, contacted me yesterday with an offer to share information we pick up from the other countries. England revealed in earlier correspondence that Italy had contacted him as well with a similar request, so I'm guessing Turkey's trying to set up an intelligence network, himself being the prime beneficiary of said intelligence. I shared a little information with him regarding Italy, although I really, really want to use his own intelligence against him later in the game. I contacted Russia and Austria with this plan, and both agreed that this would be a good option to keep in the backs of our minds incase Turkey becomes a problem.
I am such a nerd...
A map of the game (everyone still in their starting positions).
The premise behind Diplomacy is that there's no luck, only skill. There aren't any dice to roll, and to force a unit to retreat (or destroy it if it has nowhere else to go) you have to overpower it. Thus diplomacy with other players, which plays a minor role at best in a game of Risk, is the driving force of Diplomacy, as nobody would be able to make any reasonable headway trying to play on their own.
But of course, as in real life, there is no such thing as a binding agreement between players, and so one must always be on the lookout for a potential stab in the back. In the game in New Hampshire Kyle and I were playing Germany, and had teamed up with England to take out France, which was being played by a far more experienced and exceptionally deceitful player. I introduced the ultimately poisonous idea to Kyle when we came to a deadlock with France that 1) England is the most powerful country on the map, and 2) once we were done with France he was going to come after us. After a turn or two without any progress being made we decided to turn against England. What I didn't expect, though, was a DOUBLE back stab on the behalf of France after a few turns of wailing on England. By the time the game ended Kyle and I were running for our lives.
There are a handful of sites that organize games by email, and earlier in the week I got into a game. I'm playing France this time around. So far I seem to have an agreement worked out with England, who I understand is a much more experienced player. Given his experience and the fact that people seem to lose all sense of honor and trust while playing Diplomacy, I don't really trust him yet. We've got a DMZ set up in the English Channel, which will keep us separate until he moves onto the mainland, I intend to keep it for the time being. I haven't heard back from Germany yet, although at this point I've had much more correspondence with England, so I think a potential alliance with Germany is pretty much out of the question by this point. Italy has agreed to leave me alone so long as I leave him alone, and I'm too far away from the other powers to be negotiating with them just yet.
Turkey, however, contacted me yesterday with an offer to share information we pick up from the other countries. England revealed in earlier correspondence that Italy had contacted him as well with a similar request, so I'm guessing Turkey's trying to set up an intelligence network, himself being the prime beneficiary of said intelligence. I shared a little information with him regarding Italy, although I really, really want to use his own intelligence against him later in the game. I contacted Russia and Austria with this plan, and both agreed that this would be a good option to keep in the backs of our minds incase Turkey becomes a problem.
I am such a nerd...
A map of the game (everyone still in their starting positions).
Sunday, December 2, 2007
The Reddit Experiment
I frequent Reddit.com a lot, it's a good way to kill some time at work, and people post some really interesting stuff. Anyway, one of the things Reddit as a community as really good at is voting en masse on internet polls. They're huge fans of Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, so whenever some poll or donation request comes around they always jump on it, amassing thousands of votes. A few weeks ago someone found a public Greenpeace poll for what the organization should name an adopted whale, Mister Splashey Pants being the name with the most votes after Reddit intervention. In another instance, a bunch of social networking sites including Reddit came to the rescue of an old lady who had saved for an Alaskan cruise for years, but ended up getting screwed by the cruise line after missing her flight.
These instances of group cooperation really struck me. I found the Mister Splashey Pants incident pretty amusing, and voted for the name myself. Initially it warmed my heart knowing that there are people out there who not only feel empathy, but actually assist an old lady who had her dream ripped from her by an unfeeling corporation. The cruise line story, though, eventually made me really angry. Granted, it's great that somebody was helped somehow, but in the grand scope of things there are causes with much more worth than Almentia McKan's. I expressed my displeasure with this in the comments thread of the story, and it was (expectedly) met with disdain and a lot of down-modding.
The following night before going to bed, it occurred to me that I should be walking the proverbial walk instead of just criticizing the apathy people treat important causes with. With this in mind, I posted this thread to see if the community could be persuaded to focus its efforts on something more socially viable. I didn't expect it to get far, and aside for The Hunger Site, I didn't have any ideas of my own for where we could focus Reddit's efforts. Surprisingly enough, the story managed to move to the front page of Reddit relatively quickly. What I didn't expect, though, was the mass of negative responses I received. They ranged from, "'...we've proven our power with Mister Splashey Pants...' Sorry, don't mean to laugh, it's just a little hard to take you seriously after that statement." to, "Let's wave the magic reddit wand - and poof bush and cheney to be gone." And, of course, I got a plentiful number of reiterations of Rule 44 from /b/'s Rules of the Internet, the most striking series of posts, though, was this one-
"There are many rules for the internet - but only four worth remembering:
Rule #1: Do not talk about /b/.
Rule #2: DO NOT talk about /b/.
Rule #34: There is porn of it, no exceptions.
Rule #44: The internet is not your personal army.
Rule #44 answers the question in the original post."
To which I replied,
"This is a brainstorm, not a directive. You'd follow these arbitrary rules to the end even if a little cooperation did something productive?"
Which he responded with,
"Yes.
If people were meant to be productive, we would have never invented the internet."
While I had a mixed success with this experiment, I realize now that outright attempts to "unjustly influence" the actions of the fiercely independent among Reddit isn't going to work. Stage two will have to be a little more subtle. If I want to actually bring people together in an attempt to accomplish something, it will have to be both intrinsically valuable and be presented in a way that will bypass people's aversions to being used as the means to an end, no matter how good or important I deem the end to be.
Stay tuned for more updates,
Andy
These instances of group cooperation really struck me. I found the Mister Splashey Pants incident pretty amusing, and voted for the name myself. Initially it warmed my heart knowing that there are people out there who not only feel empathy, but actually assist an old lady who had her dream ripped from her by an unfeeling corporation. The cruise line story, though, eventually made me really angry. Granted, it's great that somebody was helped somehow, but in the grand scope of things there are causes with much more worth than Almentia McKan's. I expressed my displeasure with this in the comments thread of the story, and it was (expectedly) met with disdain and a lot of down-modding.
The following night before going to bed, it occurred to me that I should be walking the proverbial walk instead of just criticizing the apathy people treat important causes with. With this in mind, I posted this thread to see if the community could be persuaded to focus its efforts on something more socially viable. I didn't expect it to get far, and aside for The Hunger Site, I didn't have any ideas of my own for where we could focus Reddit's efforts. Surprisingly enough, the story managed to move to the front page of Reddit relatively quickly. What I didn't expect, though, was the mass of negative responses I received. They ranged from, "'...we've proven our power with Mister Splashey Pants...' Sorry, don't mean to laugh, it's just a little hard to take you seriously after that statement." to, "Let's wave the magic reddit wand - and poof bush and cheney to be gone." And, of course, I got a plentiful number of reiterations of Rule 44 from /b/'s Rules of the Internet, the most striking series of posts, though, was this one-
"There are many rules for the internet - but only four worth remembering:
Rule #1: Do not talk about /b/.
Rule #2: DO NOT talk about /b/.
Rule #34: There is porn of it, no exceptions.
Rule #44: The internet is not your personal army.
Rule #44 answers the question in the original post."
To which I replied,
"This is a brainstorm, not a directive. You'd follow these arbitrary rules to the end even if a little cooperation did something productive?"
Which he responded with,
"Yes.
If people were meant to be productive, we would have never invented the internet."
While I had a mixed success with this experiment, I realize now that outright attempts to "unjustly influence" the actions of the fiercely independent among Reddit isn't going to work. Stage two will have to be a little more subtle. If I want to actually bring people together in an attempt to accomplish something, it will have to be both intrinsically valuable and be presented in a way that will bypass people's aversions to being used as the means to an end, no matter how good or important I deem the end to be.
Stay tuned for more updates,
Andy
Saturday, December 1, 2007
Statement of Purpose
I mostly write for myself. A lot of what I write is of a pretty personal nature, and as such is written more for my own benefit, so most of it goes unread by anyone else. When I was in junior high, though, I used to send out a big group email to all of my friends on a somewhat regular basis. The first in the series was just a diversion born of late night delirium while I was trying to get some homework done, but everyone loved it, so I continued with them. They were pretty poorly written, and they exist now only in my friends' inboxes (if they haven't been deleted already), but I enjoyed doing them- it gave me an opportunity to express myself. I wrote them for about two years, then stopped a little ways into my Sophomore year of High School. They enjoyed a brief resurrection in the summer before my Freshman year of college, but I haven't really written anything else like them since.
My friend Nate recently started a blog of his own, the purpose of which is to 1) get him writing about things he wants to write about (rather than papers and research projects), and 2) make public his thoughts on politics and the state of the world as a whole. It got me thinking about the old emails I used to send, and so I've decided to start doing them again, this time on a blog. I don't think the direction this blog is going to take will be nearly as precise as Nate's- I'm just looking to put my thoughts out there. Implicit in this goal is an assumption that I both write well and that people are interested in what I write, so I'll do my best to meet both of those challenges.
Thanks for reading,
Andy
My friend Nate recently started a blog of his own, the purpose of which is to 1) get him writing about things he wants to write about (rather than papers and research projects), and 2) make public his thoughts on politics and the state of the world as a whole. It got me thinking about the old emails I used to send, and so I've decided to start doing them again, this time on a blog. I don't think the direction this blog is going to take will be nearly as precise as Nate's- I'm just looking to put my thoughts out there. Implicit in this goal is an assumption that I both write well and that people are interested in what I write, so I'll do my best to meet both of those challenges.
Thanks for reading,
Andy
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