Pretty Important

So today I had my first bout of jury duty ever (and it was boring) and apparently I won’t have to go back for 8 years, which means I’ll be 27 by the time they ask for me again.

And I attended my brother’s middle school graduation, at which Michael Bloomberg reared his fabulous 67 year-old head with a bunch of other talkative people. The point is, I got nostalgic. Not for middle school (my brother attended the same school, actually), but for high school.

I want to see everybody again. Funny enough, 10 year high school reunion falls in my 27th year of life too. I wonder what I’ll be like then, really. Probably not much different.

Learning

On Sunday, May 3, I tuned to CSPAN at around 7:30PM for no particular reason, mostly because CSPAN is ‘real stuff’ and not media-written and it’s often more interesting than the ‘entertaining’ stuff.

For the last 30 minutes of the hour they were broadcasting the Wednesday Virgina Governor Democratic primary debates, and I felt kind of stupid for that because the candidates were promising things left and right. The entire affair felt extremely…flaccid? Just not a very good feeling. There wasn’t so much a debate as it was a good-natured ‘campaigning’ sort of thing: none of the candidates attacked each other outright, but there were a lot of attacks on Republicans and overall I didn’t get the impression that any of them would be particularly useful to Virginia.

Surprisingly, the hour-long segment afterwards completely healed everything over, and it was about one of the topics I usually find less than pleasant: China.

Evan Osnos, the Beijing Bureau Chief of the Chicago Tribune and a contributor to The New Yorker (he blogs about China there), was interviewed in this hour-long segment regarding life, politics, and economy in China. It’s very strange that it takes a white guy to make me feel better about China. I have Chinese blood and all that, but just talking to my mother and relatives, or hearing the people that call in to the Chinese radio talkshows to express their opinions, I have always gotten sour about China.

It’s absolutely fine to be proud of China. The country is a massive improvement over what it was 30 years ago, and understandably it’s a significant accomplishment and worthy of celebration. But my mother has gotten rather arrogant lately about the ‘betterness’ of China in comparison to America. Namely, off what she hears off the radio, she’s already concluded that the economy of China is better than the U.S. and that’s all that matters, and soon China will be bigger and better than the U.S., with only economy as the measuring stick. It doesn’t matter than she really doesn’t know the research and statistics and the context of each economy, or the analysis of multiple viewpoints, or know about the histories of various countries with booming economies that suffered a bit afterwards (JAPAN, THE NEIGHBOR).

This mentality exasperates me significantly, because all the gold and money spilling about in Chinese faces blinds them to the problems their government and political system, and makes the arrogance of people with views like my mother’s fairly grating due to the massive ignorance involved. The major problem stems from being in a foreign nation, with only one local radio station to understand, and one or two newspapers to read from, coupled with computer illiteracy and therefore no information searching on the internet.

But maybe it’s just my own internal issues, and the reason I paid Osnos more heed was because he presented a more thought-out view of China, with small details and examples. But even before him, I thought China would eventually evolve from its single party system (Wiki sez itz People’s Democratic Dictatorship, lol what an oxymoron), because you can’t have a population of China’s size controlled by a small group that continues on for decades in the current world. Not with the internet, and not with education. Hopefully, the changes will be non-bloody.

And the evolution? I think it’ll actually resemble the U.S.’s. Because this system is far from perfect, but slowly and surely we have progressed. For a nation less than 300 years old, we’ve come a ways, but there’s still a long stretch of future. I think what makes this government great, however, isn’t that it’s AMERICANFREEDOMJUSTICEbleh, but rather that it is a government that changes and reforms with time, and that is really a very important aspect of a government: flexibility.

However, I rage at the people in this nation, who had education and opportunities the Chinese didn’t, but follow every word of Rush Limbaugh. If people honestly believe his words should be the future, then I wonder about what kind of evolution of government it is.

In place

Starting train at 9:53, which isn’t too bad considering the ticket advertised it leaving at 9:50. It’s actually awesome, because the train is ON TIME. That said, I snagged a window seat with an outlet, so computer on. What amuses me is how I have no internet, but the Windows Update can still tell me I have new updates. Should probably look into how Microsoft does it.

Got to Albany at 3-ish, I think we’re running late? Train moved awfully slow at times, mostly due to passing trains and the likes. Can’t say the thought of navigating subways with luggage and computer at rush hour entertains me.

4:05 and the Hudson is pretty cheery. Can’t seem to nap for longer than an hour though.

I kept a sort-of scribble while on the road, though there’s not much to it. The train arrived 15 minutes early. Lack of an available track kept us out of the station until pretty much the appointed 6:25PM.

In any case, traveling was dull as usual, though I managed to read half of the driver’s manual coming back to NYC. The organization of the manual itself is terrible. I understand they want to be informative, but I bet a lot of people wondered if they had to memorize the initial four chapters which consisted of all the procedures and nothing about driving at all. The categorizing is everywhere, with brief interruptions of reminders and nebulous guiding to where to read more about specific topics.

That and getting a driver’s license in NY is apparently a pain in the ass.

More interesting events involved some observation on the subway. Back in high school, I saw a lot of people with Nintendo DS-es and last year I saw a lot of PSPs. This first ride for this year showed a lot of riders reading, from newspapers to magazines to books, or even short stories sold by a guy offering a copy on the train itself.

Home is good.

Moody

I’ve come to a much belated conclusion, and that is that I don’t post unless I am moody, in the bad sort of way.

It’s finals week, classes are over, projects are done, life is good. Was good anyway.

There’s actually no good reason for me to be moody. Just that, yesterday, I decided that I’m not cut out for life and I am never going to be good at competitive games. And despite the fact that I run around saying that I’m a terrible person, I honestly wish I could be more terrible because that would mean I would actually not care about other people’s feelings and not just put up a front of brouhaha.

In short, I make a huge mess of things that probably aren’t that messy.

Originally I thought that the action of rejecting other people (THE CONFESSION type of rejection) would get easier with practice (no seriously this is what I thought). Apparently it only gets worse each time.

It’s also much more bothering if it’s a friend.

At the very least, I’m really glad I’m going home, that it’s the end of the year and I have almost nothing left to worry about.

Bad

A while back a friend of mine teased me, saying that I was “no good at competitive games”. I objected at the time, but after some long and careful thought, I realized it was true.

I’m terrible at first person shooters and I don’t do well in real-time strategy games. I am a button masher when it comes to fighting games. I don’t think I’m particularly good at rhythm games, like Guitar Hero (barely even played) or Dance Dance Revolution. I’m bad at racing and I don’t play sports games. If you count party games (i.e. Mario Party), well that’s luck dependent, and I wouldn’t call myself good at them.

Today, during a discussion with someone who I had told the above to previously, I concluded the discussion with a, “I am bad at life”, and it clicked.

In an extremely sideways look at life, it can be called a “competitive game”, and that might be why I am so bad at it.

Only one way to get better. ( ﾟ Д ﾟ )

In any case, I’ve decided to separate my gaming musings from my more conceptual musings, because I feel the gaming stuff will get more technical with design details. Hence the creation of 0 Cognitive Bias, where I will detail my gaming habits better, and my game-related thoughts will also be found there.

Going through my old posts here, I’m sure the directions of both blogs will change over time, but for now, I’m going to look towards less in quantity and more in quality on this blog, and maybe the reverse in the other. I think I can find my motivations again if I take things slower and more carefully.

In review

So, bit by bit, from the original posts of this blog, I’ve been reading over my posts and moving them back into public space.

It’s very interesting to see how I’ve evolved over the past two years, and reading over my anime/game/whatever mumbles, I can see where my writing and argument sucked. I’m also thinking about parts where I may now disagree with myself, although I don’t think my viewpoints have changed very much (I still largely agree with myself, maybe that’s a bad thing).

Some posts are indeed being deleted, though not so much as massive removal of my crankiness as material I don’t believe belongs on a blog. Since time has passed, I can see more clearly: a blog is not Facebook or Twitter, it is not a place to update others on a status.

The U.S. House is pretty hilarious viewing, I have it on right now while going through my old posts and I’m hearing some very depressing stories about health care. What stung me the past couple of weeks is how I could only feel less sorry by going online and reading through some of the stories and news on the recession. It’s bizarre to draw strength from observation of others’ misfortunes, but that seems to be one of the things that I can’t help but do. In NYC, when I see the homeless on the subways, something clenches in my head, and I become a little more determined not to end up like that (this resulted in some terrible guilt during the return home for last Christmas, because there were so many, more than before, in the subways, and it was holiday season).

Which brings me to another guilt as of late—I’ve been looking at the workers at food places and for cleaning around here, and I notice that they are largely black.

Early on in the school year, my bathroom was being cleaned by two women who are familiar with the staff around here, so I guess they were longtime workers. However, lately the lady that comes to clean (she cleans differently, so I notice) is alone and is a new face. I wonder what she worked as before she came to work here.

One day, I will be blind enough that I can’t see squat and maybe then I’ll be a happier person.

In any case, I think I will be posting less frequently, but hopefully in doing so I’ll be capable of producing somewhat quality posts.