RedBeard’s Curious Life

Now that 2005 is over, I feel like documenting my year in gaming. As previously stated, I have a collection of unplayed games. Some are old, some new. For kicks, I put these in chronological order.

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So I had some expiring miles on an airline that I hadn’t flown for a while, and since I didn’t have enough for a free ticket, they sent me this offer where I could get a year’s worth of magazine subscriptions in exchange for some airmiles before they expire. There were 8 spaces for subscription codes, and I had more than enough miles to use them all.

And so I did, with selections like Wired, Time, Men’s Health, GQ, Forbes, and some other ones that I normally wouldn’t pay for. This of course is their entire ploy, to get you hooked on a “free subscription” and then try to wrangle a renewal out of you. In some cases, I got renewal requests before I’d even received any issues of the magazine. I also received solicitations for subscriptions to other magazines like The Economist, which I may in fact end up trying since many of these other magazines seem like such crap.

• Wired is decent, it has a nice mix of articles, but seems to focus a little more on form than I’m accustomed to, with many pages filled by glossy photos and fancy vector graphics.
• Time is an interesting read, but it arrives so often that I barely have time to read the captions of pictures, let alone full articles.
• Men’s Health seems to actually contain lots of decent information and health tips, but the mass of advice is different each issue, and it becomes difficult to remember what kind of vitamins are good, which exercises are recommended, etc. They also had a telemarketer call me trying to flog some new book they’re publishing and get me to “preview” it.
• Scientific American appears to be well-informed and timely, if a little dense and with sometimes confusing editing.
• GQ is just abysmal, I think the table of contents is on page 46 and is preceded almost exclusively by full-page fashion ads. The rest of the magazine isn’t much different – I feel like they should be paying me to read the thing. The content is also ridiculously politicized, with constant Bush-bashing that really just defaces otherwise informative content.
• The other magazines (Forbes, Money, OXM) I haven’t read more than a few pages into. They just don’t seem terribly interesting, with crap like “50 richest celebrities”, I mean who really cares? I’ll go buy a fucking Teen People if I wanted that shit.

In short, only about half the free subscriptions are worth what I paid for them.

I now have a stack of unread magazines about a foot high, which consumes valuable real estate. I have to either discard or store these magazines once I’ve read through them, and neither activity really makes it easy to find that tidbit of information that I found interesting. Computerized media seems like a much richer and cheaper delivery mechanism, but it’s unfortunately not very portable. Yay electronic paper?

I once told a girl that I see absolutely no satisfaction or practicality in studying purely theoretical subjects like advanced mathematics. Turns out she was a math major. Whoops.

I’ve been involved with the Genesis3D and Destiny3D communities for quite some time, and I feel quite attached to them. Unfortunately, I will have to part ways as a contributing member of those communities once my employment with Microsoft begins. As I feel the constant erosion and possible extinction of these communities, I feel as if some interesting tidbits of the digital world will be forever lost. For posterity and public enjoyment, I will attempt to recollect and tell the history of these engines and the communities around them. I’m not going to try justifying or embellishing any of this stuff, just reporting what I know.

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In preparation for my upcoming move, I’ve been sorting through the various containers around my room to classify items worth taking, leaving, donating, or trashing. In the process, I discovered some old photographs that I had long forgotten, including some that I believed to have been lost forever when Dad inadvertantly destroyed the negatives (aside: digital cameras really are so much better than those silly chemical exposures). I scanned in the photos, posted them to my website, and shared them with some of the high school friends that I still keep in touch with; they were pleased to share some reminiscence of times gone by, and generally expressed a concern that they’d forgotten about most of the people we knew and events we enjoyed.

This set me to thinking a bit about how I’ve been living my life as a constant exercise in comparison, which usually wound up concluding that life was better back in high school than it was more recently. Some say that the four years of high school are the best of your life – low responsibility, easy classes, lots of friends seen daily, fledgling romances. In comparison, college seems positively depressing – living alone, much harder classes, friends disappear when project deadlines loom, sexual activity sans attachment (for some). Perhaps I just don’t see much lustre in getting drunk and laid every night.

But perhaps I’ve just been rationalizing the depressing experience of college that was actually due to my own anxieties and shortcomings. After examining those photos, I can definitely say I’m in better physical condition now than I was before college, despite dropping almost all exercise regimen and sitting on my ass for most of the day. Yet I was more socially active in high school, perhaps because social activity was the only escape from the mundane, easy classes we were all forced into. Without the premise of forced proximity and similar experience, I’ve found it much more difficult to socialize with others. Some would call me shy, some would prescribe me anti-anxiety medication. I don’t know what normal social proclivity should be, does anyone really?

In any case, I think a more positive approach would be to consider my life experiences as fitting whatever I’ve been comfortable with, and simply accept the past for what it was. Reinventing myself is really too much work, since there’s really no guarantee of improving my situation. Hopefully I’ll be able to settle into some sort of groove that intersects the grooves of other people worth knowing.

My dad was apparently big into rock concerts as a youngster, but as a result of some encounters with gigantic speakers, he is now what you might refer to as “hearing impaired”. More recently, this has caused the immediate family a fair bit of consternation, as Dad tends to guess at what we’re saying when he can’t actually make out the words. Other times, he just plain doesn’t hear, such as yesterday when he closed the door after Mom and I stepped out to watch some fireworks. When I returned, I stood there ringing the doorbell constantly for over a minute, and eventually my brother answered, but Dad claimed complete ignorance of any doorbell-ringing at all.

Mom has resorted to calling him Deaf-o instead of Bob in an attempt to goad him into action, after urging him for quite some time to seek assistance, likely in the form of a hearing aid. So far, no dice. I think he imagines that getting a hearing aid will mark him as elderly, but perhaps he’ll realize at some point that it’s better to accept that image and be able to communicate.