I mostly wanted to post that thought but it’s been seven years since I came here to share short stories and I can’t overemphasize the impact this place had on my life. Quite a ride.
Month: February 2017
And so you are here: over 30 on Tumblr.
I mostly wanted to post that thought but it’s been seven years since I came here to share short stories and I can’t overemphasize the impact this place had on my life. Quite a ride.
Good old days
Mythbusters is one of my favorite television programs. It’s entertaining, informative, and I think what drew me to it season after season was its humanity. The people on-camera and supporting crew were engaging in semi-scripted experimentation and often let their emotions shine through. It’s a kind of reality television that isn’t cruel or mean, or just out to show the worst of humanity. It’s strange to realize this now, but this show was one of the elements that got me through a bad period back in 2008 and 2009. Its rough edges and acceptance of the possibility of failure just hit the right note.
I think it also gave me a goal. I wanted to work with a group of people like them. Creative, passionate, hard-working people who wanted to tell interesting and varied stories. I’d worked in video games since 2004, but every place I’d worked felt like isolated pockets of disciplines. Programmers in that corner, animators over there, designers over there. Game testing–my specialty–was especially isolated. When I first found myself at Double Fine back in 2013, it felt like I’d found a home. Every month presented new challenges, new chances, and new creative projects to focus on. I thought I’d stay as long as the company would have me. A promotion to a producer role wore me out to the point that I felt I had to leave, but I was fortunate enough to get a chance to return nine months later. This month is a year since my return and four years since I first arrived here. I once again find myself hoping I can work with this passionate bunch of people for a long, long time.
Mythbusters ended right around the time I returned to Double Fine in February 2016, which is located in the same area where the show was filmed. I could see M5, the primary workshop for the show, from my freeway commute to San Francisco. The truth is I didn’t watch the final season or glimpse at the final season shenanigans because I wanted to avoid the end. It’s only now, as I rewatch the entire series on the way to the finale, that I’m diving into details about the final season. This article in the San Francisco Chronicle reminded me that it’s important to remain aware of the positive experiences in life:
“I would tell people, ‘These are the good old days. Just know that.’ This will never happen before, and this is never, ever going to happen again.”
Good old days
Mythbusters is one of my favorite television programs. It’s entertaining, informative, and I think what drew me to it season after season was its humanity. The people on-camera and supporting crew were engaging in semi-scripted experimentation and often let their emotions shine through. It’s a kind of reality television that isn’t cruel or mean, or just out to show the worst of humanity. It’s strange to realize this now, but this show was one of the elements that got me through a bad period back in 2008 and 2009. Its rough edges and acceptance of the possibility of failure just hit the right note.
I think it also gave me a goal. I wanted to work with a group of people like them. Creative, passionate, hard-working people who wanted to tell interesting and varied stories. I’d worked in video games since 2004, but every place I’d worked felt like isolated pockets of disciplines. Programmers in that corner, animators over there, designers over there. Game testing–my specialty–was especially isolated. When I first found myself at Double Fine back in 2013, it felt like I’d found a home. Every month presented new challenges, new chances, and new creative projects to focus on. I thought I’d stay as long as the company would have me. A promotion to a producer role wore me out to the point that I felt I had to leave, but I was fortunate enough to get a chance to return nine months later. This month is a year since my return and four years since I first arrived here. I once again find myself hoping I can work with this passionate bunch of people for a long, long time.
Mythbusters ended right around the time I returned to Double Fine in February 2016, which is located in the same area where the show was filmed. I could see M5, the primary workshop for the show, from my freeway commute to San Francisco. The truth is I didn’t watch the final season or glimpse at the final season shenanigans because I wanted to avoid the end. It’s only now, as I rewatch the entire series on the way to the finale, that I’m diving into details about the final season. This article in the San Francisco Chronicle reminded me that it’s important to remain aware of the positive experiences in life:
“I would tell people, ‘These are the good old days. Just know that.’ This will never happen before, and this is never, ever going to happen again.”
Cold men destroy women,” my mother wrote me years later. “They woo them with something personable that they bring out for show, something annexed to their souls like a fake greenhouse, lead you in, and you think you see life and vitality and sun and greenness, and then when you love them, they lead you out into their real soul, a drafty, cavernous, empty ballroom, inexorably arched and vaulted and mocking you with its echoes—you hear all you have sacrificed, all you have given, landing with a loud clunk. They lock the greenhouse and you are as tiny as a figure in an architect’s drawing, a faceless splotch, a blur of stick limbs abandoned in some voluminous desert of stone.
Lorrie Moore, Self-Help (via road-twitch)
Cold men destroy women,” my mother wrote me years later. “They woo them with something personable that they bring out for show, something annexed to their souls like a fake greenhouse, lead you in, and you think you see life and vitality and sun and greenness, and then when you love them, they lead you out into their real soul, a drafty, cavernous, empty ballroom, inexorably arched and vaulted and mocking you with its echoes—you hear all you have sacrificed, all you have given, landing with a loud clunk. They lock the greenhouse and you are as tiny as a figure in an architect’s drawing, a faceless splotch, a blur of stick limbs abandoned in some voluminous desert of stone.
Lorrie Moore, Self-Help (via road-twitch)
These two maps show the exact same thing – results of the 2016 presidential election in the lower United States. The upper map seems dire to people like me, who believe Donald Trump is a bad person in general and a horrible person for this most important office in the world. It looks like almost the entire nation choose Trump over other candidates.
However, if you look at the lower map, things change a bit. Blue color is more present and although some places seem clearly red, others are more mixed. This is because circles, which represent counties, were scaled to total number of votes casted in a given county rather than geographical area of such county (as in the upper map).
Nevertheless, Donald Trump won, even though more people voted for Hillary Clinton. This is because of a very strange U.S. presidential election system, where there is an intermediate body between popular vote results and election results – the electoral college. In effect, even though difference in votes in key states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin was very slim, Trump got all electoral votes from those states. This electoral college system is also why third-party candidates rarely get much attention – people fear if they vote for a third party candidate, they risk the candidate they strongly oppose could win.
As a person living in Europe, I find it surprising that the Americans have not changed their system to be up with times. Even if they want the electoral college to stay, there is still a matter of second turn. In Poland and many other democracies, presidential elections are often unresolved in first turn because no candidate has gained more than 50% of all votes. A second turn is then called, in which two candidates who got most votes in first turn can compete.
It’s best to explain it on an example. Suppose you have 100 voters and three candidates. Candidate A got 32 votes, candidate B got 33 votes and candidate C got 35 votes. In the U.S., candidate C wins even though 65% of voters did not for this candidate! In Poland or France, since no candidate got 50%+1 of all votes, candidates B and C are invited to second turn. It might happen that candidates A and B had similar views and candidate C is someone like Trump. So in second turn, all candidate A voters casted their vote to candidate B and that candidate won with 65% of the vote. Clearly more democratic than the American system in my opinion.
These two maps show the exact same thing – results of the 2016 presidential election in the lower United States. The upper map seems dire to people like me, who believe Donald Trump is a bad person in general and a horrible person for this most important office in the world. It looks like almost the entire nation choose Trump over other candidates.
However, if you look at the lower map, things change a bit. Blue color is more present and although some places seem clearly red, others are more mixed. This is because circles, which represent counties, were scaled to total number of votes casted in a given county rather than geographical area of such county (as in the upper map).
Nevertheless, Donald Trump won, even though more people voted for Hillary Clinton. This is because of a very strange U.S. presidential election system, where there is an intermediate body between popular vote results and election results – the electoral college. In effect, even though difference in votes in key states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin was very slim, Trump got all electoral votes from those states. This electoral college system is also why third-party candidates rarely get much attention – people fear if they vote for a third party candidate, they risk the candidate they strongly oppose could win.
As a person living in Europe, I find it surprising that the Americans have not changed their system to be up with times. Even if they want the electoral college to stay, there is still a matter of second turn. In Poland and many other democracies, presidential elections are often unresolved in first turn because no candidate has gained more than 50% of all votes. A second turn is then called, in which two candidates who got most votes in first turn can compete.
It’s best to explain it on an example. Suppose you have 100 voters and three candidates. Candidate A got 32 votes, candidate B got 33 votes and candidate C got 35 votes. In the U.S., candidate C wins even though 65% of voters did not for this candidate! In Poland or France, since no candidate got 50%+1 of all votes, candidates B and C are invited to second turn. It might happen that candidates A and B had similar views and candidate C is someone like Trump. So in second turn, all candidate A voters casted their vote to candidate B and that candidate won with 65% of the vote. Clearly more democratic than the American system in my opinion.
Supreme Court nominee Gorsuch says Trump’s attacks on judiciary are ‘demoralizing’ – The Washington Post
I’ve noticed that Supreme Court justices have historically been salty as fuck when their positions have been challenged so not really surprised here, but yknow, in this day and age any sign of “hey, fuck you too, buddy,” is welcome.
Supreme Court nominee Gorsuch says Trump’s attacks on judiciary are ‘demoralizing’ – The Washington Post
I’ve noticed that Supreme Court justices have historically been salty as fuck when their positions have been challenged so not really surprised here, but yknow, in this day and age any sign of “hey, fuck you too, buddy,” is welcome.