As with most posts, I wrote this in stages so there are temporal anachronisms all over. That excuse feels a little like the fools who take “I don tpye engrish too nice so dot complane,” as license to type whatever pidgin 1337speak they want. However, there aren’t ubiquitous context-checkers available to correct it and I can’t plan to not finish it until an indefinite future effectively, so I will leave them be. In fact, I wrote the next paragraph in November, but it is true yet again; funny how that works out, eh?

I have broken out of a cycle of interest with Zynga’s games in general. Hungry for more opportunities to waste my time, I made the unwise move back to Myspace rather than make a dummy account on Facebook. The expansion showed me that not all platforms are treated equal. In the end though, the uniform experience and demand overwhelmed me and I just stopped for a while. This became a shuffle with ennui as my dance partner until I could understand my ambivalence. Just what was so fun and what sort of fun was missing?

Yesterday, I figured it out by comparing it to what I liked about Newground’s games. Newgrounds is cousin to youtube and flickr, but archives user-donated Flash media. Some create games and some movies, which other users vote on to determine whether they survive. Directing my own flash movies remains on a marching horizon, so I opted to ‘level’ up via voting. A user’s vote weight is a product of hiser level and rank. Vote on any five submissions daily for level points. Vote on any number of submissions that haven’t been accepted yet for rank points. To be efficient, I voted on five or so new submissions to get the points for both before looking at the day’s headliners.

This and a couple other factors soured the experience. Specifically, I only accrued points if I had approved the candidate if it succeeded or ‘blammed’ it, if the community rejected it. This gave some pressure, not to vote about whether I felt a file was below average, but how other users would vote on it. This became pretty annoying if the people judging in the (generally) ten minute window are more permissive than I. On Youtube, no one cares if you submit a thirty second clip of your thumb. Here, it seemed like the point was to have better work and let people document their first tries on sites without voting systems (deviantart). I even penned a couple of reviews to castigate the very worst submissions. As an example, I dismissed die die fuckers die by saying “this is a ‘music video’ in that an asian song plays in the background while it scrolls a single image of a tikiesque skull at a snail’s pace. // Turn back any who read reviews before watching. // the preloader didn’t suck.” Eleven months later, I got a note that informed me that my review had been deleted because I hadn’t followed the guidelines. It was the sinning third message, because appearantly some ‘helpful’ moderator noticed a pattern in my reviews and deleted every sinning one. The only seemingly prohibited element is that I encouraged other people to blam the submission or not play it. The deletion swarm came at a convergence when I felt tired of trying to gamely predict whether ten year olds like crappy flash movies or not. I stopped visiting the site, which is foolish because its best submissions are top-notch.

So, in puzzling my ambivalence to Zynga’s games, I recalled a curious entry called “Upgrade Complete!” It came as a sequel in spirit to another called “Achievement Unlocked,” a metagame of maneuvering a small elephant around a static level trying to perform 100 admittedly arbitrary states. Upgrade complete has two elements. One is a simple starfighter game to earn money for the store. The store is the second and coequal element of the metagame. The author accomplished this by beginning with virtually nothing and forcing the user to buy and upgrade every element, from the title screen and menu buttons, to the game graphics and weapons. All of Zynga’s games utilize the passive elements of each to make pale clickstorm copies of ‘upgrade unlocked.’

Farmville commits this crime most obviously. Zynga’s other offerings – Mafia Wars, Vampire Wars, Dragon Wars, and Youville – hide the truth with various pairings but never surmount that core. Perhaps Facebook’s structure or market factors incentivize these forms. Others I tried, Tiny Adventures and Starfleet, support this idea. The point isn’t to belabor some perceived short-sightedness on the part of game designers. Their forums are full of whiners who ask for game-changing perks despite the injurious effect they would have on Zynga’s business model. I intend, with the preceding analysis and subsequent reviews, to warn potential players about the type of experience offered. For the longest time, I felt a varying ambivalence about the endeavor. Until I realized the superficial nature rationally rather than intuitively, I couldn’t decide whether I was wasting my time or having fun. Hopefully, I can save you some grief.

Youville

I did accuse Farmville, but Youville – on Myspace – tempts via a shorter review. I used to watch my sister play The Sims before my parents gave me my first laptop and we no longer had to share our family computer. She used it as a simple home designing program and rarely ventured into the mollycoddling proper. I recall trying that aspect but found the level of micromanagement beyond my patience. Youville attempts a substitute by cutting the biological foolishness and emphasizing more emotional activities: work, shopping, and pretending to interact with other people. The work consists of baking sweets at a ‘factory.’ Here, the clickstorm and scheduled return is a minigame to enable shopping and avatar abilities (like ‘the Egyptian’ or ‘anger). But, it makes the whole of Farmville’s world, so I’ll describe it in more depth below. Suffice that baking is a sequence of prep, choose your return time and profit margin, harvest and clean.

Zynga offers two types of interfaces: primarily graphic and primarily textual. Some artists are sitting pretty because – despite cartoony character design, for self-identification and cheaper scripting – the backgrounds are very nicely rendered. Mind, Youville sits with point and click adventure games rather than any sort of dynamically rendered environment. The furniture fails to stimulate me, but it isn’t too far from the quality on Maxim’s (original) offering. While Youville compares favorably, given the platform, besides working and buying stuff, I couldn’t find anything else of note. Sure, I can make some flippant gesture in front of some ten year-old’s avatar and gain xp, but why bother? Perhaps if I had more Myspace friends playing it, we could make a flashmob in the 50’s diner, but then what? Fifteen turns at the wheel left me cold. If you like buying clothes and furniture for yet another avatar in your army, go right on ahead. (I bet the Facebook version is even nicer?)

Myspace

Zynga obviously showers most of its attention on its Facebook franchises. Myspace doesn’t get short shrift, but has missed out on most of this year’s events. I suspect users on Tumblr and the iPhone can relate similar stories. Very likely, Facebook’s fan advertising prominence (status updates) created the difference. Sure, Myspace has announcements that perform similarly; but, this is a liminal feature. It is a small panel on the left side of the homepage and only to friends. Barring self-censors, Facebook shows updates center stage. Further, Myspace’s messaging system is individual oriented. Gifting on Facebook uses a CC system, so I can easily send sweet meat to twenty people at once. Myspace lets me queue the recipients, but requires I reaffirm the message twenty sinning times. They are less obvious on the latter because Myspace doesn’t offer a filter for just friends who play that game. I added a few ‘friends’ for both Mafia and Vampire Wars, so it’s annoying to click another ‘yes, really send a gift’ prompt, only to receive another informing me that soandso blocked messages from this app.

Zynga does offer some incentives to stave complaints from the limited attention, but these are not compelling enough to encourage me to log in. I tried these games on Myspace because I felt like I was running through Mafia Wars too quickly. Plus, it seemed like a chance to start over better, with full understanding of its incentive structure and the strategy I wanted to pursue. Unfortunately, these clickstorms have the replayability of a one day dvd.

Dragon Wars

That is true of all of them but Dragon Wars had pretenses that ‘should’ have elevated it. The frame work is a resprite of the other Wars’ interface. But, some quests distinguish themselves by actual rendered play. You control a (quake level) avatar that fights enemies hiding in the corners of the room. Unfortunately, the room is always the same. Buying weapons doesn’t improve performance. Levelling up skills doesn’t improve performance. Frankly, the only thing that changes is the number of enemies. We can just see a second room to the left that, when clicked, promises it will be released in the future. Strictly speaking, I could be wrong about the 3D subgame’s operation for the later levels. I could only access the first two because Dragon Wars needs more players. Of the sixteen quests I can see, only five don’t have a friend requirement. Sure, they are modest, the highest only required five friends. At this point though, I am not going to ‘make more friends’ just to unlock some pretty thumbnail sized pictures. Nevertheless, a review I read beforehand warned of no progression in the rendered section as well. Not worth it.

Farmville

I have kvetched enough about the clickstorm quality to describe its exemplar edition. Your avatar scurries about a diagonally oriented grid of your arrangement plowing, planting, and harvesting. My farm – deepened three times with a bare two tile widths each time – measures 12 x 12 because I utilize the most efficient grid anchored to the bottom corner. As that leaves a wasted gutter around the upper two corners, I have plenty of space for all the fauna accrued. If I laid a single crop across the whole grid (insanity), that would be three bouts of 144 clicks. Then my animals or trees mature on various schedules and require two bouts of clicks. One opens the menu to move, sell, rotate, or harvest which is the second click. Perhaps you may visit your ‘neighbor’s farms and fertilize five of their crops or plowed fields for more xp. (That is a misrepresentation, but close enough.) That is the whole game. There are achievement embellishments, but those come pretty easily if you just reconcile yourself with repetitive stress syndrome of clicking ninety quintillion times. I have, obviously, tired of the game. I can’t say I have stopped, because I want to test one last feature: mastery.

Mastery is the third most important sliding bar to fill that sources promise me will eventually feed into experience. Planting and plowing cost money but reap experience. Harvesting earns the profit and mastery. Supposedly, when I have harvested through three tiers of mastery, the mastery will become experience for harvesting. I have no clue why I still log on for that subzero gruel (mainly to see if it is true). Unfortunately, the mastery curve is so steep, it works against the leveling – which could be the goal of a nut busting company, but they could just be wildly incompetent.

Crops, flowers and foodstuffs alike, mature at one of ten rates: 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, & 16 hours or 1, 2, 3, & 4 days. At each level a new crop unlocks, so after roughly ten levels, you may receive a crop with a reproduced maturation date, but a slightly higher profit margin. If mastery was at all fair, I would be two tiers into, say, strawberries (4 hours) when blueberries unlock. That way, I must decide whether money or future experience is more important. The highest mastered crop – rice – is just short of the third tier. It became available at level seven. I am level twenty-nine. The ridiculous disparity is not from crop rotation. Only four our other crops have the next most mastery: just over one tier. If this incentive is taken seriously, I can play the game with the first few crops exclusively (not really, those are multidayers which are for dummies). That is rather ass-backward since the goal of accruing levels – by earning mastery xp – is to get different crops that should be significantly better. I don’t think I have ever encountered a game that set its players the conundrum of ignoring the upgrades unlocked or leveling ineffectively.

Of course, there is a faction that epitomizes the ‘casual gamer’ demographic. Appearantly, some of the youville gamers see all this farming as a minigame to unlock simfarm furniture. They don’t play the game as much as arrange their clutter into pretty designs. I’m not just referring to players who order hundreds of trees to simulate Central Park. I mean people who order hundreds of blue hay bales to simulate a river. Farming is a pain in the a-scaphoid, but arranging a simulated skyline blows my mind. On Mafia Wars, I can understand paying Zynga for skill points to buy energy and be able to do more missions, as those are the ‘fun’ part of the game. Spending money to buy lawn ornaments that I spend ten minutes lassoing into the right niche of my hay bale Christmas tree speaks of wasted talent. (Even if it goes to crooks, spiriting away fools’ money always helps the economy at large.) If you have the ‘ocd’ to meticulously clear away droopy flowers and replace them with new ones, I have some dusting for you to do. (The flower setting prompt warned that flowers only last 14 days. I thought, cool: I set them out, earn my achievement button and then they disappear in two weeks. No. They become droopy but never die, so I had to click all forty sinning pots twice to delete them.)

While I’m not on the subject, forget about that profit margin, it is only better by a tenth of a gold piece per hour. If you want to delve in despite my warnings, I highly recommend reading through that blog’s advice. The author wrangled a good table for seed profit per hour and experience per hour but not much else. His table for trees is a waste of time to study. He gave the harvest time and reward, but trees – unlike crops – offer a fraction of the price paid for the tree at each harvest. The correct focus is time until the tree is profitable. Obviously, any gifted tree is immediately profitable. Here follows my table of breakeven dates for purchasable trees:

ornamt	20 days
cherry	25 days
apples	34.8 days
oranges	42.5 days
plums	35 days
peaches	42.5 days
lemons	34.8 days
limes	50 days

With the exception of the Ornament tree, a limited Christmas offer, the more expensive and longer duration trees have a much slower profit margin. This stands as more evidence that zynga has a solid art department and their daycared children are in charge of deciding the difficulty curve.

Animals compound still slower profit times with double the wasted space. I didn’t bother to make a table because we can only buy three for coins. The rest demand legal tender or a perceptive friend. Recently, zynga did some remodeling so the above trees are being phased out as gifts and weird fruit takes the stage (cashews, starfruit). In fact, zynga must have realized their grind lost meaning at level 10 because they concurrently introduced a collectibles aspect. Various knick-knacks are paired with certain actions; so only shears are gifted, only a rusty faucet comes from plowing, and only a hoe comes from planting (or whatever). I paid little attention because in the time since I kvetched about the droopy flowers, I mastered rice. It indeed returns experience to harvest them and I do not care.

Perhaps you think, “Nicholas, you complain this whole time, but you are still playing, right?” No. I am sinning done with this one-trick pony. I have not accepted nor given gifts in three weeks, and that was out of weakness. I have not planted anything since early January. Fool that I am, I returned to harvest trees (because they involve fewer clicks) and broke the habit. I steadfastly do not recommend Farmville. I played it, essentially to write this post. I played it because I hoped that it would get better somehow. No, the game is just click ninety times to decide when you have to click ninety times to remove the pretty flowers, earn achievements and collections by grinding even harder. If you tire of that click one thousand times to make a picture from giant, hay pixels. Take hammer, apply directly to forehead.

If you ignore my suggestion, at least block off your avatar with four hay bales. It wastes a tremendous amount of time poorly pathfinding. It is so bad that zynga gifted everyone a ‘biscuit’ that sped the avatar up for a while. I imagine they offer more for cash. If you are one of the ten friends who still play this, don’t send me any gifts any more.

Rather than keep this hidden for several more weeks as I begin to displace lazy vacation weekdays with homework hours, I published this rogues gallery of shitty zynga games. I will publish my thoughts about the two I still play, Mafia and Vampire Wars, forthwith.

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I buy lots of foolish crap. It is a popular habit. Perhaps that is too harsh. I plan to buy foolish crap and sticking to a luxury budget generally saves me from sealing the deal. Plus, waiting for my budget to build up to an appreciable amount allows me to forget about buying stuff in general for long stretches.

However, that means that when I look at my lists of desired stuff, it looks pretty weird in retrospect. For example, I listed surgical paper masks. Those, annoyingly, only come in packs of fifty (for six dollars), so I didn’t buy any. Have I become overly asthmatic? No, but it was winter and sinning cold. I felt it deepest in the dark during the earliest hours I work, on my lips and face. A scarf is the traditional answer, but why go overkill with something that doesn’t fit comfortably in my pocket? Surgical masks satisfy that exact need perfectly. However, Orange County’s winter is almost over and they would sit unused until December or so.

Further, in one month and one week, Daylight Savings Time stomps on our biological clocks yet again. If I recall correctly, this one introduces more light into my morning so the temperature will seem to have risen. I could be wrong though. I remember ‘spring forward, fall back’ but spring isn’t a numerical operation, fool rhymer. In one week, I can give the dubious advice to start adding two minutes to each day so that when everyone else claws at their alarms with government mandated jetlag, you are totally ready. Sure, it requires increasing mental gymnastics but I already keep my watch five minutes ahead of most clocks, so it shouldn’t be too different.

Obviously, I have no intention of tricking myself so badly, but it reminds me of a pet idea to eliminate leap days entirely. Yes, leap days and Daylight Savings aren’t the same but both deal with trying to constantly adjust to the Earth’s varying daylight. Daylight savings supposedly matches our mornings to sunrise better. Leap days account for the accumulation of seconds outside the 24 hours on our watches. There are tons of calendar reforms, tons.

I admire most radical variants but recognize that I could never privately transition to Symmetry454 or the French Revolutionary calendar any more than I could learn Esperanto: for lack of partners. Most diverge from our (revised) Gregorian system to trumpet the import of the week. Presently, despite the boozy celebrations, New Years is just a day. It could be Friday, with a nice hangover Saturday. Or, it could be Tuesday and screw your hangover, the economy isn’t going to recover without hard work. Calender reforms usually have ‘intercalendar’ days. That means they exist, not only outside of every month (to keep them uniform) but aren’t any Day of the week either.

I think the best answer would adopt the same solution for the light itself. The buildup of ‘twenty four’ hours difference over four years is miniscule over any given day, but even that is out of step enough that – every seventy years or so – we need a double leap year. Prior to the invention of atomic clocks and digital clocks in general, rounding up was the best option. Frankly, it was the only option. As I noted, a ‘day’ is ever so slightly more than 24 sixty minute periods. An analog watchmaker would have a terrible time creating some mechanism for pocket and wrist watches that skipped enough second’s hand gear teeth to represent the particular day’s extra tenths of a second.

A digital watch hasn’t that problem. Despite all the Millenialist cowering over Y2K, digital clocks can easily adopt whatever time you like. With a little programming experience under my belt, I know it isn’t quite that easy. Nevertheless, you could have the clock program sense 24:00 and then pause (or not count the quartz crystal’s vibration or whatever). That duration is a const variable that we can update accurately. Has Greenland’s ice sheet melted? (That would shorten days by dispersing the mass and increase Earth’s angular velocity.) We decrease the leap microsecond. Are we importing minerals from the Apollo asteroids? We increase the break.

Of course, as with all communist fantasies, it requires a supermajority of the planet agree to switch to all digital clocks or see the buildup of a chronological differential. It would be annoying to fly to Tokyo and not only change the hour but the minutes too. Error creeps in.

Time zone differences remind me of another youthful daydream: an absolute GPS watch. Time zones are a useful fiction that timepiece would take to its ultimate implication. Imagine a watch that not only adjusted when you travelled across the country, it adjusted as you drove around. Time zones would be divided into 60 smaller slices each (or six at higher latitudes). That way, if you imitate the car commercial where the man drives forward to see the sun set again, the watch would adjust its minutes backwards automatically. Time travel for the proles.

Obviously, both are just nice thought experiments and terribly impractical. The latter makes coordination confusing unless in a future environment where even phone conversations can go through filters that alter the time I say into one that makes sense to my compatriot in San Fransisco.

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I’m having a dandy vacation from school for about one more week. It has stopped raining, so I can see North Tustin from my window, which is pretty cool. I must remember to check in a month because I have no idea whether that is normal. The clarity of the houses struck me more than anything else.

I complained on the Third of contracting the flu. I suffered a runny nose and coughing for perhaps ten days, when it subsided. Unfortunately, a few days later, my sinuses started leaking into my throat again and I have been coughing non-stop until this morning. I only have these opportunities to confront my Luddite aspect. I refuse all medicine for the flu because it is viral. Plus, if I take medicines to suppress my symptoms, how do I know when I don’t have any sinning symptoms to suppress any more? In the case of antihistamines, it is when my mucus becomes a cement that I cough out in pellets. This has happened before and I refuse to repeat the experience. I sympathize that my family had to listen to the grating discharge, but I am more comfortable coughing than feeling as though crusts are building up in my throat. Body horror is my weakness. Luckily, it’s probably over, so I won’t avoid certain activites that take longer than the twenty minutes between the bathroom breaks from drinking liters of water.

As noted in my last post, I have generally ignored my commitments with this pleasant unstructured day. While I am keeping daily notes, if I forget to for a while, the quality suffers. Nevertheless, I am working. Earlier this month, E2 announced a Science Fiction Quest. Serendipitously, I had been wondering about the relations a post-apocalyptic community might have with a nanotechnology-using repopulation effort. Haiti’s tectonic plate broke in half soon after and I saw a ‘contradiction’ to my favored answer. Because (certain types) of nanotechnology obviate labor in general, survivalists would have no place in the Singularity’s economy. They could try to be artists but how many of us read the Spartan poems about their horses and wives? The attitude obviously doesn’t carry presently because our social incentives encourage us to sympathize with the Haitians.

Perhaps it is unwise to offer my opinion as I am more antisocial than the clamor about me. Nevertheless, I am not the only one to regard continued aid with skepticism. Surely, you have heard the caution to restrict impulse charity to approved NGOs, for fear of scams and Haitian corruption. Specifically, I mean the money that the administration will inevitably offer to, essentially, rebuild the whole city of Port-Au-Prince. Just giving them truckloads of money ensures it won’t be done organically, though those in the green city movement salivate at the potential of Radical Change otherwise impossible for major cities. (Which, of course, are those that need it the most.)

One of the opinion pieces that I would have cited, if the Wall Street Journal hadn’t hid it behind its subscription wall, treated the physiological future of the Haitians. One of the Doctors without borders whose vlogs CNN airs noted that an inordinate number of victims are receiving amputations or diagnoses of spinal injury. Like as not, the ill lit corner of my mind adopts the mask of Eugenist and warns of endless demands for aid otherwise. Inevitably, in shouldering the burden of rebuilding, American diplomats may feel some responsibility to subsidize the disabled population as well. Yes, I am uncouth for pointing this out, but we should not. America doesn’t have the money to satisfy its self-image as world’s savior in arms or alms. Utopian egalitarianism will always fail until that Star Trek era of infinite matter & energy for all.

Despite the taste of my sneaker and the nice transition back to the story I should be writing instead of this, I must lament the lack of a Utilitarian Catalog. You recall that the Utilitarian will want to devote his\er efforts (after self-maintenance) to the greatest good for the greatest number within a reasonable future without incurring unreasonable suffering. To do that effectively, sh\he would need a catalog of all the world’s ills and victims, ranked. Sure, you could give to Unicef and be reasonably certain it will be spent on deserving suffering. However, a utilitarian ought not feel comfortable relying on Unicef’s limited scope. If you and I took its beneficiaries list, and then rhapsodized for an hour looking for the gaps (cleft lips, non-NAFTA South American farmers, Mongolian towns with a median age of sixty, child sex slaves in America, Afghani farmers below subsistence despite growing wheat, manatees carved up by speed boats, ect), we wouldn’t have scarped out a majority of Need’s iceberg. When the Starbucks barista asks for their pet heart-tugger, you should turn to the Catalog and see what it rates. When every website and newspaper and television show turned into a Haiti peddler, I knew that other charities would feel a level of impoverishment.

I like to think of myself as an Egoist, so I have no business telling people of other ethical faiths how to act more sincerely. Nevertheless, I would like it for my own use. At the moment, only one charity meets my standard of desert: Wikipedia. Still, it would be nice to know the objectively most efficient target should I expand to a second.

As far as the Catalog itself, obviously it couldn’t be a book. As utilitarians donate to number one, it would drop as diminishing returns set in and two came to the fore. Only a website has the flexibility needed but I haven’t found it out there yet. Perhaps the UN has something similar, but like UNICEF (oh, duh), it will not exhaustively document every need. While I see the objection that you needn’t get every poor person, actually, you do. The undocumented sufferer is likely the worst off. Further, the UN hasn’t the political luxury of ruthlessly rating the need of various supplicants with the rigor a utilitarian ought demand. I don’t think that the Haitians are going to stop working forever in fake traction beds. I just don’t think they have been number 1 in the Catalog for a while now. Perhaps I’m wrong.

Anyway, for the quest I am writing a short story about a couple inconvenienced by the neighboring Transhumanists. I will also node about Cortex Command. The trick is finishing within the next six days.

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Historiography is the study of the discipline of history, or how people record and come to understand history. It is pertinent to note that newspapers and others have taken to making decade retrospectives these past few weeks. They are justified in doing so, but their limits reveal their selection. Obviously, George W Bush’s administration dominates the American decade and how it is reported reveals volumes about the author in question. Similarly, a primary focus on American events (again acknowledging space limitations) speaks to a limited view. Any representative memoir for the Ones would need to at least touch on more of the dynamic events that occurred.

In that vein, I will avoid the format my host favors: a chronology. I am incapable of producing one because I have stopped making useful notes. This suggests an existential query, how will anyone know I was alive this year at all? From here, I will chide myself with the scant evidence I have produced in this ninth year of the second millennium in Anno Domini.

The candidates I most wanted to rely on are ‘newsworthy’ text files that, ideally, I take notes during the entire week on. When I first began the practice last year, I made the lazy error of only recording the week number. This year, I had only a short reprieve because at week fourteen, year nine and eight would only be distinguished by internal context and Microsoft’s valuable metadata. I opted for ‘9 week 5,’ so the whole year comes in sequence. I confront the annoyance of a more complex naming scheme in another type of record that should be ‘9 12 29’ but I only thought of that just now. Otherwise, I have been using my favored notation – European, 29 12 9 – which causes all sorts of problems with Sorts. As much as I cringe at all the retyping this involves, I can not shirk the superior organization.

The weekly notes feature some different styles of organization as well. Each mostly indicates the amount of time devoted. Sometimes, though, I wrote them on Sunday so it became a struggle to remember what happened on Monday and if it was actually during the other weekend. The task was harder when I didn’t have an externally enforced schedule to segment my days. The current vacation feels like the eternal present, although I have exacerbated it with sleep arrhythmia.

The most common form is a mass of keywords representing events, what I finished reading, what I have watched, and only occasionally some thoughts about events. The better formed files have two more lines. One notes the books I am currently reading, even if only distractedly. The other notes significant websites I visited. All too often, I only noted the newgrounds games and movies I liked. An example, 9 week 31:

The March, another sleep fouling morning and afternoon, Marta’s last ruination, Monica’s friend watches Who Framed then Big Fish, I started 1919 from wikipedia, I officially give up on the Everyman schedule for two months now, Uumpect, cat jumped on my face at night, I admitted I’m a potential bug eater, credit card finds monica at our forward base, NOD32 upgrade, I missed the Colony but Sat 8am, cd testing again, papi gave me Tata’s opener at last, car inner light dimmer switch, finally replied on mafia boring, I need to sinning register, W and rejected commentary, Miriam, Celi beat back her lymph cancer, Fables: Storybook Love, downloaded itunes podcasts, yank, I bought it all finally, she put my registration in my glove compartment, dvr means colony ep 2, carwash, bike ride & carlos offers ticket, genius bar & sears, IRA vs Taliban, Brad arrives, colony and californication finally, Sun Quincineiera 5,00pm past la palma?

So what does any of that mean?

I finished reading E L Doctorow’s The March.

I had decided to practice the ‘Everyman’ sleep schedule but kept it poorly. I didn’t take my naps at the same time every day, making the transition increasingly difficult. As noted four later, I decided to give up. Unfortunately, the author I consulted suggested two months of dutiful, normal sleep before trying again. By the time the opportunity came, school made it neigh impossible to have breaks that also jived with workdays. (I fully intend to document my experience, yet twenty weeks have elapsed.)

Some friend of Monica, name unknown and now gender unknown, came and watched movies.

I took notes about what occurred during 1919, intending to make an Everything2 article about it.

On Facebook’s D&D Tiny Adventures, I created Uumpect, a genasai warrior whose name parodies the font Impact.

I hadn’t started sleeping (and spending virtually the whole day) with my door closed yet, so Monica’s cat jumped on my face.

I published “The other, other right meat.” I’d link to it, but it’s a few posts below, so you can find my radical liberal environmentalist sentiment.

Papi confided to me (or I heard through secondhand gossip) that someone had spent … I am not at all sure how that went at all, actually. It seems as though Monica bought something in Costa Mesa (our forward base, my father’s home) that prompted either a call from MasterCard or Papi turned it up in the bills he scours. While I relish some comeuppance, really, it impacts me when their negative mood shortens their patience with my habits or situation.

The rest continues on and wastes your patience. These are meant to be mnemonics for a post that I should write the week following. Obviously, this is foolhardy as I have only done it twice. The better weekly form involves noting what happened each day, as it happens or at night before sleep. I only did so once, and only partly, for 9 week 41:

Fri – - – work; papi installed the fan but I had to vacuum

Sat – - – y—ing all day; The Surrogates; bought my first woot shirt, a sequoia; finally tripped on the sinning paint cover and scraped my elbow

Sun – - – papi finally read the water purification article and related an anecdote about the foolish shooting range lawsuit, writing more on mafia wars, papi cleaned house,

Unfortunately, I only noted fifteen weeks: 1-5, 25-33 except 27 and 32, and week 41. However, I did experiment with a more demanding beast, daily notes during the year’s first week and three closing April. But only the twenty-second and third match what you imagine they should look like.

I plan to leave at 2:00 to a bus station to reserve it for Araceli for Friday or whatever, at 3:30 we need to arrive at physical therapy; if there is a big gap, I may go to recycle our bottles and so on. I need to finally store all my clothes, I just ran out of shirts on the rack.

It turns out she meant she would call the bus station so I ended up annotating more (African) events during 1846 and eating lunch concurrently, Monica came to eat as well and watched a rerun of project runway; we left to phy therapy a tad late (so I could finish my sandwich). I read more from the most recent issue of the Economist and we returned.

I parked in front of Gloria’s house; I sent Coryr out again; no one has spoken on Mafia; I just finished reading all the webcomics; it seems appropriate to do some pushups and situps when I finish watching the Zero Punctuation episode in a few seconds. The reason I ought to do it now, as opposed to more annotation (Miriam is downstairs), is because I am somewhat committed to watching three more hours of television content today: Mythbusters at 6,00 (it is currently 5:30), Lost at 9:00, and the Unusuals right after.

While these qualify as posts unpublished, they are only a shadow of my full day. I tried that foolishness for a few days following February second. Unfortunately, I was still on Everyman time and neglected to take down dates or even put AM and PM. I conceived of this as a challenge to see whether I could emulate Buckminster Fuller’s full life documentation. Annoyingly, I took this as an opportunity to try out a tiny notebook that my mother foolishly gifted me. ‘Foolishly’ because it measures 3” x 5.” I like to open bound books and notebooks only 90°, to preserve the binding. Spiral wires are more forgiving, except to their first and last pages. Seeing someone bend magazines or sinning books so the covers meet is like seeing someone’s arm twisted or hearing someone grind a car’s manual transmission. I witness the abuse of a valuable object. So, the small size becomes smaller as I decide to hold the book awkwardly and I confronted that dread foe of the exhibitionist, a sense of (affronted) privacy. So I stopped. Before turning to the next though, let’s look at a representative sample:

12 finished cereal, bring back my car, abuela returned. 12,06 eating again. 12,17 cooking Canadian Bacon, peanut butter banana sandwich tomorrow. [[earlier, I noted that I should carry a highlighter to distinguish between events, commands, and musings.]] 12,36 I didn’t cook it long enough to melt the fat like on normal bacon; I added little bits of Monterey Jack. 12,42 finished eating, going to call therapy now and play it by ear. 12,54 appointment at 2,00, on computer now. 1,56 we left late because of (one?)

It was just as thrilling to interrupt my thoughts and activities to ‘confess’ what I was doing as it is to read it. As I am on the subject of this Twittimitation, I created an actual twitter account during early December. With these harrowing confrontations of my reticence, I only plan to update it with pithy observations. As of late, these come less quickly than I like, but that stems from the fact that I am barely writing anything at all.

I’ll admit, I overstated my case above. The point of this tremendous list of how I failed to record what I did on my summer vacation isn’t about that foolish plea for Posterity to notice me. I referenced the problem when complaining about rebuilding my week from just a few days later. I look back on a year with my fleshy memory cells, but primarily with these external annotations. I inwardly scoff when people say “where did the time go?” You spent every second just as fast as I (unless you are an astronaut). The trick is keeping perspective of all that happened in between those visits by maturing youngsters.

I’ll admit it is exceedingly difficult to keep that sort of stuff in mind. When I was younger enough that I didn’t drive, I would daydream during stretches on the freeway, mostly about what was passing by. Often that would take the form of hyper-destructive ‘I have telekinesis and throw SUV’s through buildings et cetera.’ Another, relevant, daydream involved trying to visualize the distance we travelled. Not the total distance, but just a smaller amount like a mile or two. You have seen the helpful signs that list the miles to the next exit. So, I would note one and start ‘laying tape.’ I could see the sign receding behind us for a time, but we might go over a rise or turn and I would still have to project its hypothetical location moving back at the same speed as the car. I could never keep it for farther than, perhaps, half a mile. The ‘tape’ would seem to reach a limit where lengthening it more would seem to have no effect: I lost perspective. The same glass ceiling blocks attempts to visualize a billion dollars, or the cells on the back of my hand. Arguably, walking two miles could make it clearer than sitting in a vehicle travelling at seventy miles per hour. Still, when I walked (briskly, of course) four times around the track for a mile in middle and high school, the linear distance still felt occult and unwieldy. So too with the passing days.

I’ll admit, I felt some of that foolish shock this Christmas in noticing that my (female) cousin’s voices had changed, probably deepened. Partly, I’m missing the point because it has to do with updating my representation of them. I treated this in an older post here, so I’ll be brief. We would remember every day if we had really emotional experiences through the whole time. (And those would mash together too unless they engaged different emotions each time. “Yeah, I went to Paris for a week, but had to swim back until the pirates captured me and I was afraid they would go from ransom to killing, then I broke out and landed in Bolivia, where I won the lottery, and then Tarzan and Batman fought to seduce me, but I ignored them because I only just started to read the whole Harry Potter series, and then I nearly died in an auto accident driving back home and saw Jesus and all the Mormon angels, and then, and then, and then.” I had fun stringing that together.) I’m inclined to say that pulp adventurer would have a better chance of resisting the “golly you are sure big,” because change is such a predominant part of hiser life. The rest of us deal with a great amount of routine. We wake in the same bed, take one of two paths to work – at most, and eat one of the classic livestock cuts (“Turdunken again? When are we going to have emu, mom?”). Soooo, that is why noting down what happened is so important. I may not feel the miles under my feet any longer, but I can look at miles of ink spilt or one megabyte of text and fake that sense.

Before I turn to another device, I should clip a loose thread. I stated that the latter daily notes were blow by blow reflections. The first few reflected an altogether different approach. One of my ‘oft referenced’ files is called ‘immediate use,’ but I treat it more like an immediate deposit. I use it to place notes I intend to use somewhat later, but seldom do. The result is a mishmash that indirectly shows the evolution of my interests, albeit defunct or idle forms. In an attempt to circumvent this unmeaningful stockpile and instill a more aware attitude, I opted to use each day to document which sites I visited and copied in the more eloquent paragraphs of whatever I read. Sure, I could go through my browser history – and sometimes do if the memory and site was distinct enough – but a fair number are spammy, like deviantart, which classes each user as a separate site. I gave up, but with the right organizational strategy I may incorporate it eventually.

I shouldn’t, but often blame that habit of filtering depositories. I maintain a normal notebook as a journal. But it is too big to take to work, for those occasions when I operate the elevator, so I have a smaller work journal. When I have forgotten the work journal, I often resort to writing on a napkin (they stock a kind well suited to my needs). Should I copy what I wrote verbatim back into my normal journal; would that bore me? I maintain the aforementioned text files about weekly events. So, even if I made a comprehensive file for stream of consciousness, events, and what I’m looking at, I would feel divided about whether and how much to trade with my physical journals. Of course, more writing is better, but the anxiety I created forestalled most writing in general and doomed that experiment in particular.

I use a 180 sheet spiral bound notebook that I began the fourth day of last year and haven’t yet picked up this year (oh, ho those are timeless puns). I could list the sort of entries I most often relied on, but that isn’t entirely the point. Revealing patterns in my writing may entertain, but involves more history than historiography. Instead, I’ll illuminate via a ruthless mathematical device: statistics.

The vertical values are plain by the legend: days elapsed in between journal entries. The numbers on the bottom indicate the month and its frequency indicates the number of posts made during that month. From the outset, I admit a major compromise in the way I compiled the data. If you add all the days elapsed, it should miss 365 by the number of posts. Where ever you see a data point but no column, that indicates I wrote another post the very next day. I could have made that ‘one day elapsed,’ but that would seem to punish me. A week where I wrote every day would show seven days elapsed, even though I didn’t miss an opportunity. So, to keep it consistent, I always subtracted one day, even when I didn’t write the next day. Perhaps, a more honest legend would have been ‘consecutive days without writing.’ In the end though, the graph is exactly the same but just shifted one up for all data points.

Nevertheless, the graph does reveal an important seasonal trend. I wrote least during periods of least responsibility. The lowest month was June, which correlates with when the rest of my family went on vacation. I even forgot about my birthday until they came back and reminded me. I can’t tell you what I did because, appropriately, I didn’t write anything down. Very likely, I surfed the net and whomped on Cortex Command’s AI. My best month was September. Unsurprisingly I was in school and using my journal to plan out homework, both essays and programs. However, school (and elevator duty) incentivize journaling because they are the most entertaining thing to do during lulls in activity. At work I can get a tremendous amount of reading done because I have nothing to do for eight hours straight (barring interruptions). At home, the offered content on the internet presents a temptation that I resist only with effort or boredom.

I decided against checking the frequency for my work journal. The option of manning the elevator only comes up once a week and isn’t always offered, so its delays are unrepresentative to my overall writing effort and more reflect my work schedule.

One entry, the second, in my journal deserves mention. I read through the journal I had just finished and made a brief index for it. While cool, putting it in a totally different book makes no sense if they aren’t kept in sequence and the conceit isn’t known ahead of time. So, I conceived of an alternative to mucking up the inside back cover. I could, but haven’t yet, reserve one spiral notebook solely as an index. A table of contents would be nicer but I don’t focus that much on any given day. It might begin with a list of what I should do, then some unpleasant event to vent about, and finish with some meandering possibilities about how to handle my current project. And then, I do the same thing the next day or, possibly, copy straight text out of a library book.

I can surmount the problem of ordering my journals, but with some uncomfortable compromises. These past few years, I have used a single notebook to completion (supplemented with my work notebook). But, before then, I used to write in several at once depending upon which I found most conveniently. So a chronological path jumps between two or three sources for a few years. Less helpful is if I miss an early journal and have to index it after much newer material. There are more complaints, but I must recognize that if I include the date (which I scrupulously put) in addition to the page number, the index itself resolves all these difficulties of future reference by explicitly showing the chronological order of entries within the space of a couple sheets rather than spread across books as is the present status quo. It doesn’t make it easier to compile the index, but at least future reference is much easier. I may yet put that into practice.

The preceeding has been, as Hamlet is made to say, “words, words, words.” The most engaging references are visual. I sympathize with the injunction to take loads of pictures, of myself, my surroundings, and anything out of the ordinary. Their value is unquestionable. Pictures from our Europe trip are superb mnemenotics. And, I know the gap of forsaking pictures. We may be a couple thousand feet from where we used to live, but I have no idea what the inside of that house looks like anymore. It is a shame that it has traded again since then so I can’t use the excuse, “Remember when you bought this house (ten?) years ago? Could I look around to rekindle my memories of when I used to live here?” Of course, I don’t need to go there. My parents took plenty of pictures that I can look at for reference. Wary of forsaking change, I made a (one minute) video of my room the year before.

Unfortunately, I have ignored the more personal subject, myself. One set each month seemed like a reasonable goal last January; but, I failed to take half that many. Further, I usually only remember to charge my camera after a change, like cutting my hair.

My more favored visual media is pencil. My journals occasionally have doodle addenda. While these illuminate the passage, few are of any consequence. Only two projects received much dedication. I drew several versions of Supheter, my character embodied in D&D sessions. I noted the more engaging project in my report on Cortex Command. I do admit that most involves deciding elements of the larger story rather than drawing the next segment at all. However, close to the semester’s end, I reevaluated the climax for the first episode and gave it a much more meaningful conclusion. I let myself fuss about layouts and word balloons in abstract rather than mocking them up. Until I commit to inking a real version or using a stylus with Flash, the project bangs on the metaphoric glass.

Those, however, only represent the mandate of my muse. This semester of drawing forced me to produce even more work. That journal contains portraits, rooms, and horrid contour drawings. (Those are hand-eye coordination exercises, wherein the artist draws without referring to the page at all.) They haven’t digital copies yet. Because she asked us to use graphite layers to simplify ‘shading,’ I am concerned it may dirty the glass more than usual.

Deviantart reminded me that I did upload another collection. Way back when I still ground out turns on the Conquer Club (risk imitation), I made some potential submissions. In fact, I made a big, blank world map in anticipation of playtesting it with real pieces. When I grew bored, I used it to cover my books from dust. A couple months ago, I hung it over my laptop, so it is silly of me not to have remembered. Hidden in plain sight. I use another site to distribute forgettable creations, Flickr. Besides my stock logging, I primarily use it to show people stuff.

Chase’s album has a couple pictures of me during our D&D sessions. He also recorded an entire session on camera, but I understood it went straight into storage. (Size precludes sharing.) My sister may have caught me once or twice in family gathering photos. I admit that, as camera man, I seldom remember to take more than one of myself. I justify the absence by relying on my self-portraits. Nevertheless, unposed shots are my absolute favorite. While participants may resent it, I try to catch them before they can group hug and tooth show.

I did shoot one video myself. At Froi’s wedding, Manolo gave a speech as the best man. So he would have a copy, I taped him. Unfortunately, he compromised his computer so we had to restore it to day one. Even worse, he kept his ‘account’ password protected. We did save all the ‘my documents,’ but his is unreachable because we haven’t the ‘authority’ anymore. I don’t recall if I uploaded a copy because it was on his camera and so sinning big. I can report one novel recording. I made an audio file of me singing. One of the songs I have engraved into muscle memory is the ‘Modern Major General’ parody from the last episode of the show Reboot. It turns out, I misheard some of the words when I first learnt it, so I have multiple takes where I stumble reading the divergent lyrics.

There are more, trivial records online. I discovered (forum based) Mafia on Conquer Club and still hope to play it in a group some day. I saved the entire log of conversation for the first four or so games, to analyze who might be town or mafia or cult. I used my datarealms account, but it pines for when I finish some episodes of my Cortex Comic. Such is the difference between wanting the perks of a writer and wanting to write as a hobby or job. Earlier in the year I announced which book I had just finished, as a Facebook status. Now I pollute with their brand of ads. Soon after I joined, I cordoned it to only those who play Zynga’s games, but with the new rules, I think it has seeped out to everyone again. Perhaps I should check but it isn’t as though I don’t ignore the great majority of my ‘friend’s posts.

I sent seventy five emails this year. This semester saw fifty. Of those fifty, over half are from me to me. Actually, it would be more but I deleted some because yahoo doesn’t sense when I am sending it to myself so I end up with two copies. I resorted to this primarily when I worked on papers at school or had to print one out here. Since I moved into my room, venturing around the rest of the house is exceedingly annoying. My battery has devolved to the stage where it lasts twelve minutes. It is my fault for leaving it plugged in all day. I don’t need it’s portability for the common use; I value it for when I transition between my parent’s houses. Five years ago, during some of the LAN parties at Kevin’s house, I drug around my family’s tower and that was a major pain. When I move into my own abode, I will trade up for a desktop.

Various agencies update their records of my activity. School has its grades (and updated its host to a more convenient system, to the chagrin of the professors). SFFCU gives me all sorts of receipts, bank statements, and credit card bills that I should shred but mainly stockpile. The credit card bills are the least useful, as I tell to everyone who will listen. Because I pass the credit union on the way home, I can deposit my pay and clear my balance without using a nonperforming checking account. That is why I will never take out a line with any retail outlet for a one time benefit. Common sense suggests that the libraries I patronize should keep a record of my rental history. Since the Patriot Act scare nine years ago, most systems live like they have Anterograde Amnesia. I guess it cuts down on their storage overhead. Sigalert is another agency that absolutely should keep archives of the data stream it transmits. Sure, I want to know how traffic is right now. However, if I am going to leave some time within the next two hours, but I want to ditch rush hour traffic, their site is no good. I can’t sit there for the next two hours hitting refresh. The moment I see some reduced flow, it is too late and I will hit a bigger dam by the time I reach there. A long time ago, I managed to find a site that did host pictures of freeway traffic for several years in hourly segments. Fool that I was, I didn’t save the sinning address and don’t really expect to find it again with so many fool traffic news reports cluttering the search results. If you know of such a site I would be extremely grateful if you share the link.

We have just about reached the end. Microsoft formats this to the end of the fourteenth page. So, dead last is the worst record: those unshared. At various points during year nine – and elsewhen – I began some posts and gave up the moment I got tired. For example, I began a review that would have contrasted the reality shows True Beauty and 13: Fear is Real. I still despise the inept and largely dishonest ethical basis of the former. However, in disgust, I stopped watching it. Typing the potential article felt less urgent. It was easy to let it lie. At least it is saved, even if I don’t publish it.

That, as much as keeping up with the Lloyds, prompted this (weeklong) effort. My own posterity is undoubtedly assured. Despite the meager rate of documentation, I am perhaps average for my generation (substituting journaling for tons of vlogs or photos). In contrast, my grandmother has a bunch of pictures, but because she had to leave middle school and work the rest of her life, hers is currently an oral history. I must write her biography this year. And that of my father’s parents, but she lives with us so it is more convenient. I would like to leave it at just interviewing her, but that forsakes a lot of nuance. Some years ago, I made a tape recording of a family friend some weeks away from his death. It was obviously too late and I didn’t have posterity in mind, so I went with the strongest association I had. He was with my mother’s father as a political prisoner in Cuba. His answer left much to be desired, but in retrospect he had lived decades since then. It would have been nice to press him about his life in general and perhaps make a copy as a gift for his family. Ultimately, there was a conflict of interest.

With my own relatives, I have the opposite concern. I want to know everything, which makes the project feel unwieldy. Most advice is geared toward genealogy hobbyists, who focus on finding the whole tree and perhaps regard stories as a happy, yet incidental, surprise. The rest treats biographers’ methods which may be as impersonal as studying MLB’s journals and such or some interview techniques. They strive to make a compelling narrative, focusing on unusual anecdotes or ‘formative experiences.’ That too can underrepresent my subjexts. Should I try to get a blow by blow account; let her just tell stories about whatever she wants for an hour; or use her as a way to look at life in Cuba, Florida, and Orange County through different periods with her particulars as ‘secondary?’

I looked through a couple of historical societies’ websites but didn’t notice a mission statement declaring what is of historical value. How do I know what to preserve? Sure, it isn’t likely that I will donate these to a similar group, but it would be nice to have some suggestions about what to focus on. Likely, a text on historian’s methodologies will confirm my suspicion: everything is of value. Because of the dissertation system, new graduates must fragment out into whatever isn’t covered yet but has a good body of suggestively similar opinions. On the other hand, what would my descendants want to know about her? Regardless, the interviews are valuable in themselves. The biography serves as an index for them more than a concerted effort to memorialize her. That would take too long and I might lose other sources before I am ready.

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I still clock in at the door of our state’s wheezing educational institutions. This cuts into the time I spend daydreaming new posts or researching California history for an E2 node. However, this only became a shift in focus as I am still writing, just not on topics of my own behest. My english professor tasked us with analyzing Freud’s argument in a shorter analysis of an unsuccessful psychoanalysis. Reading the tract showed me that I had maintained an altogether too kind attitude of his work. When his patient gave him the lemon of her illness, he indelicately tore up the skin’s layers to make a lemon rind collage in the shape of his oedipan cigar. The meat of her lemon left a fragrant odor on the sculpture, but ended up in the trash. But, I can’t fault him for inspiring Eric Berne to create Transactional Analysis – the most inspiring psychological paradigm I know of. Here follows what I submitted:

Artificial Stratification

Sigmund Freud still commands a strong audience despite the dated nature of his analyses. His case study, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, particularly embodies this problem in the divergent fashions he dealt with Dora’s illness. The main consists of finding a huge number of potential symbolic connections he spun around her behavior and dreams. Only his technique shines through to assist the frail, yet challenging woman under his care. His therapy fails to capture Dora because his brush with therapy is almost always subsumed by his interpretive indentification of problems.

Freud brooks no facts in his all-consuming quest for relating Dora’s dreams and memories to his paradigm. Dora relays she saw a painting of nymphs the day before Herr K’s fateful proposal. Freud gives so much significance to the recollection of nymphs in conjunction with her second recurring dream that Freud ‘discovers’ a new sin that Dora has no memory of:

“ ‘Nymphae’ as is known to physicians but not to laymen (and even by the former the term is not very commonly used), is the name given to the labia minora […]. But anyone who employed such technical terms as ‘vestibulum’ and ‘nymphae,’ must have derived his knowledge from […] an encyclopedia – the common refuge of youth when it is devoured by sexual curiosity. […] [One of her symptoms] must have been inflicted as a result of a process of displacement, after another occasion of more guilty reading had become associated with this one; and the guilty occasion must lie concealed in her memory behind the contemporaneous innocent one.” (91, 94).

Freud commits a plethora of fallacies in the above passage. The translator notes that the german word for nymph and the anatomical term he prefers are the same. Rather than rely on a word association supplied by Dora, Freud uses his ‘not very common’ knowledge to supply the preferred meaning. Nymphs populate many paintings depicting woods because the Greeks considered them wood spirits. Very likely, the artist titled the painting and included the term Nymphs. Instead, Freud commits his most common error: projecting his interpretation onto Dora. The exclusive term implies, to him, that she browsed an encyclopedia for names of the genitals and other sexual topics. Strangely, this trounces his earlier discovery that Dora’s governess and Frau K spoke candidly on sexual topics. Their influence was no small import in earlier interpretations and Freud even made a game of testing how much she knew. In light of his turn of phrase, the likely vocal communication might have supplied the hypothetical connection. But, Dora denies having read the encyclopedia for more than learning about appendicitis. Freud considers this no obstacle because the memory is repressed, unconscious. Manufacturing an event based on his interpretation of a word exposes a deep hypocracy in Freud’s method. He regards his interpretation as the only possible one of the word and its source, necessitating the repression. Another interpretation exists – wood nymphs – and makes his conclusion less likely by half. The patient’s testimony oftentimes serves as little more than grist for relating their lives to his paradigm about the tripartite self.

Freud succeeds primarily when he subsumes his wish fulfillment to the gritty task of therapy. One fashion this occurs is in his reliance on the Socratic method. Very often, Freud led the session by asking Dora to relate her thoughts on particular feelings or dreams. Before he received the recurring dreams, he generally treated her relationships with her family and the K family. Eventually, this inspires her to take on the task of understanding herself outside his paradigm. “For some time Dora herself had been raising a number of questions about the connection between some of her actions and the motives that presumably underlie them.” (86). Of course, she is more interested in conventional motivations rather than infantile prototypes for her symptoms. She weighs the different motives behind waiting and then revealing Herr K’s proposal. Freud, in contrast, complains of lingering surprise at her “having felt so deeply injured” (87). On the face, these mark the difference between the behavioralist and psychoanalytic schools of psychology. Her focus concerns how her conscious – yet contemporarily inattentive – thoughts propelled her various decisions. Freud insists that all important factors reside in the unconscious. Her id’s unquestionable acceptance is buried underneath three or four unconscious resorts to sensory transference, the reinvigoration of her Electra complex, and so on. Nevertheless, these tangential objections have evidently expanded her self-awareness. Her perception of the complex relationships around her show intelligence, but she failed to turn the searchlight upon herself. At Freud’s insistence, Dora admits that her own illness may have been learned through imitating her father and cousin’s illness and finding the technique effective. There is no question that a great portion of our personalities come from the earliest experiences. Freud argues most effectively when he strays from finding parallels to his own thought in favor of values Dora actually holds.

Much as Freud deviates from expectations, his approach in this and other therapies show a marked improvement over his peer’s approach to understanding neurological disorders. Despite centuries of classifying hysteria as a female exclusive disease, Freud stood with his mentor, Jean-Martin Charcot, in recognizing cases of male hysteria. In this fashion, both considered a disease as a collection of symptoms independent of any particular victim. He erred, however, by substituting an inherited paradigm for another inferred from unrepresentative cases. While studying people to understand general human behavior makes sense, Freud’s enduring theories came from strikingly idiosyncratic sufferers. This ironic inclination to distance himself from the (less afflicted) patients actually under his care explains why Freud’s greatest satisfaction came during the penultimate session. Then, he stood agape that Dora completely missed the significance of his connection of her infant foot dragging and an expectation that she should be pregnant. In contrast, the final session moved her as he showed her how she likely identified herself with the scorned maid that her father abused. Freud could only have resolved Dora’s problems by resisting the desire to flaunt his ideology and concentrating on her problems.

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I ended the last post with an inclination to try Mafia Wars. (Obsolete numbers signify delay in writing.) I sit ten days after that fateful compromise, feeling somewhat as though I have played it much longer. For a time, it was a harrowing obsession. My choices have propelled me to the opposite extreme from my bored lamentation before. In short, I have joined a cult whose preening updates eclipse almost all the legitimate relations I kept tabs on before. Without dropping the game entirely, I can’t go back. Woe and enjoyment keep watch over the gateway; see how lightly I ignored both.

For the uninitiated, Mafia Wars is (yet another) economRPG. Perhaps strategy game is more appropriate than rpg. A prospective player makes some lasting, permanent decisions – with little guidance, mind – and generally attributes stats to one of two paths: fighting or working. I chose working. As with Tiny Adventures, I made a point of researching the game prior to making the all-important initial decisions.

While there are traditional forums and a couple short articles by fans, I found a shocking divergence from Tiny Adventures. There is a faq that the forums and certain sites reproduce that comes from a promotion page. It turns out that people can spend money for game perks or advancement. This inclined other people to create a strategy guide for playing Mafia Wars, an e-book strategy guide. (They show a picture of a printed book, but its digital nature makes the next all the more damning.)  The website for the top search hit suggests that a niche is actually willing to pay the twenty dollars demanded. The particular style of the promotion is one I have seen before, suggesting a similar web design company or at least imitation.

Any purchase, in retrospect, represents waste because I have seen indications that we are not playing quite the same game. Old reviews … sin. I was going to point out that some old reviews show obsolete costs for many items, suggesting my cousin leveled up more cheaply than I. But, the forum posts in question have been updated to my costs. Still, I know that some new players have complained about using a different system than I. My predecessors and I buy properties to provide interest accrual. Newer players (which I appear to have avoided by less than a week) use a system that dominates on the next stage involving collecting from rackets instead. As I play with restaurants and hotels for the moment, I can’t make any comparison about balance or retention.

Nevertheless, I can’t imagine paying for advice on a facebook game. I admit that I came close (to paying for ‘perks,’ not advice) because the economics looked so harsh until I paid by sacrificing my user interface entirely to this hobby. I am actively resisting that level of commitment (and the game helps too, perversely). Besides Tiny Adventures’ bare imitation, I have used similar economRPGs. Five years ago, I tried and dropped a text based stand-alone called Fantasia Five. My friends in high school were far more successful and described anecdotes (killing noobs via crushing them under huge gifts of gold) and changes to the experience (the introduction of a degeneration system to prevent players from battling a particular low-threat, yet infinite opponent). The game’s learning curve put me off and I forgot about it.

Some months ago though, I found a descendent via an ad banner. Though a cool little graphic enticed me, Improbable Island is another text-based RPG. Its authors produced a clever setting, but its stamina system keeps me away for three hours at a time. Websnark introduced me to the reason in his lamentation for Tiny Adventures long ago: server load. Obviously, meting out participants’ demand in subjective or objective units offers more opportunity to replace or cool down the machines responding to my fervent click storm. Improbable Island enforces an objective window, four hours long. Mafia Wars is crueler by letting me choose subjectively. As  the character ages, the player likely increases the energy or stamina to accomplish more. No, explaining this ahead of a better introduction is backwards. Let’s start over.

Mafia Wars, and its kin Vampire Wars, offer two choices for the prospective player: hiser name and regeneration advantage. Both offer the opportunity to change that name later, but Mafiosi pay far more dearly for the privilege. I strongly suggest creating an enduringly satisfying name either in either case to save the effort. The regeneration choice has a tremendous influence over your progression and, while offered lightly, ought to be given real thought. Again, Zynga (the company that runs both games over several platforms) favors the Vampire crowd by letting players change their regeneration profile.

You may select a faster regeneration for your energy (Maniac or Modern), money (Mogul or Noble), or health (Fearless or Primordial). They offer, as so many publishers do, that your preferred playing style ought to guide your hand. No one can really make that choice prior to learning the incentive structure of the game. Consider real D&D, the Player’s Handbook suggests you think about whether you like to deal damage to one foe, many foes, protect your mates with your health, or by ‘healing’ them. Strictly speaking, a responsible DM ought to offer a variety of fights to rotate the importance of each class’s advantage. In the static program though, like Diablo 2, my choice has no real basis until I play each class for ten or so levels (lest the weakness of early levels dissuade me). Of course, computer games encourage this unwieldy complexity as “dozens of hours of replayability.” So, you need to know which regeneration matters in which way.

Again, I note that my advice only holds for systems like my own. I have no idea if the racket version offers a different flowthrough. Energy represents the number of times a ‘character’ can perform jobs that give experience and money. The money is worthwhile for buying weapons/abilities to unlock levels that require them and to buy the properties/minions that offer interest. A (blood) bank exists to store money at a 10% deposit fee so when other players fight your character, they can’t steal from your pocket change. I am fairly sure that is only possible, in Mafia Wars, when you are logged off. I vaguely recall being notified during Vampire wars that I had defended successfully, so you may not be safe while logged on. Health functions intuitively. If your character is reduced below twenty hitpoints, shhe is safe from being attacked or put on a hitlist. If that final attack kills the character, some experience is lost and the (Mafia) victor can offer perks to ten friends. Zynga’s introductory note says health regeneration enables more fights, which is true.

On its face, this looks like the health regeneration is the least valuable. The real limitation on fights is stamina/rage, which regenerates in five minute increments universally. One stamina point allows for one fight. Fight doesn’t really represent the interaction justly. There are a couple early jobs in both games that function as a stereotypical fight: I attack and defend from an opponent until one avatar’s health meter expires. Attacking a player more resembles a mugging. I do some damage, the victim may damage me, and if I succeeded I may gain experience and money from the event. Whether it turns up any money depends upon whether that player has any money in hand.

The system I described in Mafia only gives that opportunity if the player forsakes the bank or if shhe has some defense winnings. The server also gives a small chance of helping one of my ‘family’ during one of their fights (or jobs) and rewards me commensurately. The interest from properties needs to be manually withdrawn, so it remains safe. Vampires, in contrast, receive blood directly to their hand hourly (or every 54 minutes for nobles, like me). Visiting hourly would obviate any loss, but I have more money than I can reasonably spend at the moment, so I let them have what they can carry. A particular assailant’s stamina and health represent the upper limit on potential gains, but some courtesy exists. Zynga established a maximum theft at a given level. For the last ten or so levels, the most I can take is 70,000. In that case, I hit the person again before moving on. And yet, we embody criminals and monsters. No game mechanic stops me from sucking that person dry. Of course, shhe could put me on the hitlist for a fee, but the damage is done. For the moment, that represents courtesy enough, though I won’t trust anyone else to return the favor.

That number, 70,000 deserves a second look before moving on. I hadn’t created a fighting character when I began and only shifted my focus after thirty or so levels. Still, with judicious selection, I can succeed with the majority. The problem in comparing fights with jobs comes from the rewards and predictability. A fight may give five or so experience for each success. If the victims chosen all have more in hand than stolen, each may give that maximum. But, it depends on success and favorable conditions. Jobs, in contrast mark out explicitly that twenty energy returns thirty experience and three hundred-thousand dollars (at my level).

In a single fight returning the maximum, the two skill points to buy that point of stamina appear worth the cost. 70,000 / 2 = 35,000. 300,000 / 20 = 15,000. But, I steal the maximum intermittently. Let’s be overgenerous by stipulating super-success each third turn: 70,000 / 6 = 11,666. The trade pales further if a player focuses on the single job each tier that returns the best energy to money ratio. In the particular tier I am grinding out, that comes to 3,420,001 / 35 = 97,714 per skill point spent. The experience difference hammers the last ten nails in the metaphorical coffin. Yet, overfocus entails a weaker character, certainly. A great many of my family fight all the time, but not as much as they perform jobs. This merely highlights the problems in Zynga’s under-explanation of the game’s structurally favored tasks.

Which culminates in the strong contradiction of what I imply above about the fearless character, specifically. The following does not apply to primordial Vampires. With the preceding, regenerating health looks to be the least valuable type of character. The real limit on mugging comes from stamina points chosen, which don’t levy that sweet racket reliably. It seems better to go through jobs faster or unlock jobs faster via buying the necessities earlier. It seems demonstrably foolish to choose a fighting profile, until the tenth level. At that point, Mafia Wars unlocks the player’s “Top Mafia” board.

Now, a player can promote seven members of their family to positions (mastermind, buttonman, safecracker) that randomly return particular bonuses of experience, defense, money, and so on. In addition, that player’s character now has a tiny chance of receiving an extraordinary bonus. The bagman might get twice the money when performing a job. However, only your mogul friends can be a bagman. And only fearless characters can be promoted as their friend’s wheelmen. A wheelman has the miniscule chance of performing a job for no energy at all. Over the course of several months of play, that could represent a great boost over even the maniac’s faster regeneration. The sixth tier’s jobs require, on average, thirty energy; the seventh requires forty. Likely, the progression holds in addition to offering slower rates of mastery. (That means times these jobs must be repeated before awarding a skill point bonus.) So, even if I regenerate 3:5 minutes faster than the fearless character, one out of one hundred jobs (or less, or more) costs nothing, which represents two or so hours to me.

That could be a fantastic boost or average out. The math involved is complicated and depends on rates of play and, especially, when that character is promoted. I want the highest level wheelman because that, randomly, decreases the energy that I spend on jobs by one or seven points. Generally, this will depend upon the makeup of your friend’s families. But, if a person is of a sort to sink money into this game, that isn’t worth trusting. Shhe may make a facebook profile for hiser infant sister, or a fictional person with a shell email address. That way, each puppet promotes the other to the more important job and one can serve as a consumable miner and the other as a primary account. But that spirals into its own uninteresting grand strategy with goals I neither understand nor value.

For the rest of us, the preceding ought to give the proper basis to decide which of the three regeneration types might suit your perceived need. I like performing the most jobs in a sitting and seeing the colored bars increase. Maniac does suit that. A wheelman may get an extra job (weekly? Every other day? I have no idea, and if promoted by several friends, maybe one daily) occasionally but has fewer until that point because of slower energy regeneration. Perhaps unpredictable rewards and contesting players rather than the System appeals more. The fearless Mafiosi makes sense, but so does the mogul. To increase the chance of success, we buy the strongest guns, armor, and vehicles to equal the number we have in our family (which is poorly explained on the website). A faster income could speed that stockpiling.

As any adult-oriented must be, Mafia Wars incorporates much more complexity. Whatever its real value, that strategy book will certainly run into dozens of pages. I may describe my strategies at a later time. For the moment, this post represents all that you need to be aware of before creating your character, for Mafia Wars. Vampire wars balances the need for fighting more evenly with jobs. I suggest choosing a modern or primordial vampire because their meters come into play more often. I have seventy million blood points in the bank but only use five in a given day and currently earn one million each hour. In sum, its overkill even with the inflation tweak I saw during my first week of play. Either of those two would be fine.

Should you feel restless with your choice in Mafia Wars, try it on Myspace, tagged, or yahoo. Should you try out Improbable Island (which I may describe some other day), I would appreciate it if you told them that I sent you.

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Sunday, I went to a wedding reception. My father supervises the inspector-engineers for the LA County Sanitation District. (The city of La Reina de Los Angeles has its own Sanitation Department.) One of these, Froiland Urfano, asked my father to serve as his best man. 58 year old Philippine immigrant has worked with him for twenty-five years. This event marked his second marriage, but his bride’s first, so they splurged with an open bar and inviting 175 people. Some cancelled their reservations early so my father substituted my sister, her boyfriend, and me.

Unlike virtually every other occasion, the wedding was extremely close by. My father’s condominium is five or so blocks from the termination of the 55 freeway. Froi chose the ‘Turnip Rose’ in a building that sits at that intersection where the 55 transitions into Newport Boulevard. Given the opportunity, I delayed more than necessary and arrived as the entourage had begun taking pictures in all the permutations: only the bridesmaids, only the groomsmen, each group with the bride and/or the groom plus the whole family.

My father wore a tuxedo chosen by the wedding planner. His coat had a half mandarin collar over a grey vest. Beneath that, he wore a white shirt, and, to his chagrin, a pink tie. The groom wore a similar outfit but he and Kun-shan maintained the Asian tradition of changing clothes several times. Froi later affected a grey coat with red piping.

I chose a look I saw in the movie Scotland, PA, albeit during a funeral scene. I wore all black except a thin white tie. The convention center relaxed its policy on facial hair last week, so many of my peers arrived with goatees. I considered growing my first full beard but confronted the realization that desire sprang from contrariness and curiosity. Nevertheless, not shaving allows for a bit more sleep, so I skipped the treatment then. Besides, I have been growing some longer side-burns already. After bathing, I decided to compromise and now sport an Amish beard.

My sister arrived ten or twenty minutes after me because she and her date worked until an hour before the wedding began. Monica brought a short, white sundress with orange flowers on it. Tom joined a black pixel tie with a light blue long-sleeved shirt that he resolutely kept at his elbows.

When I arrived, Kun-shan had on a normal strapless bridal gown of light peach. A royal blue strapless dress followed during dinner and during the money dance. Rather than damage the gown with pins, I believe they used stickers to hold up the bills. After dinner, she put on a red dress which may have had a collar. She may have changed another time, but I left soon thereafter. I woke six hours later to prepare for work. Mind, I begin Monday at 4:40, so the party undoubtedly continued.

Let’s return to the moment the reception opened and the guests tramped inside from the courtyard. My father had introduced me to Dan, the third and newest supervisor. Though it escaped me at the time, he looks like David Letterman, down to the gap teeth. Inevitably, age asks youth about education, so I told him I am studying History. He asked why the Roman Empire fell. He expressed concern that ‘the basis of our civilization, incorporating so many people just collapsed.’  Surprised, I gave an unsatisfactory answer comparing [Edward Gibbon’s] theory against Graeme Snooks’.

Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (which I own but avoid) is the famous exposition of the opinion that ‘decadence’ ground down the structure. I guessed that he cited the death fixation via gladiatorial games. The Wikipedia entry’s author(s) clarify that he believed the Romans entrusted their vassal Barbarians with all the important work and took to navel-gazing Christianity. While there are criticisms of his argument, understand that he published the three volume work in 1776.

Graeme Snooks, in Ephemeral Civilization, instead emphasizes the lack of growth after the Emperor Trajan. I made some ineffectual sounds about soldiers and land and gave up (so we could take our seats). Snooks classes the Empire as one of the conquest societies (as opposed to a trade or industrial society). In particular, the economy funded and drew predominantly from military conquests. So, when the Legions conquered a region, the officers were given governorships over the area and locals conscripted into the army. When the Empire failed to conquer new lands, the strategy soured and introduced proximate causes: tax evasion, provincial resistance, and so on. The military hierarchy could no longer promise its members adequate rewards for attrition warfare and so on. Though I think it the best of the interpretations I am aware of, it is one of many.

The reception proceeded, much of the rest pertains to the unified families rather than me. Perhaps I may relate the intricacies of her courtship, as revealed in five speeches given by Froi’s children and sisters, some other night.

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In addition to playing tabletop D&D with my friends, I participate in the pale shadow that Wizards of the Coast licensed to Facebook. I have described encountering and rediscovering the ‘app,’ but not playing it. Basically, this resembles a card-based game wherein my character of the moment submits to drawing the cards of a particular adventure’s deck that (via simulated die results) determine whether he receives loot or blows to the face. I repeat this – distributing and buying equipment to maximize success – until he has graduated past the tenth level. The program retires the character and lets me pass on the particular benefits of that generation. Obviously, the GUI only barely resembles this analogy and incorporates a few other nuances.

One is the buff and healing of fellow player’s characters, which I can neither use nor rely on any longer. I am the last of my social circle still putting time into it. The majority that did, quit some months ago and haven’t pushed past the fourth generation. Only Chase pushed beyond me, likely from beginning earlier and in sympathy with his brother Brent. Brent no longer uses it because he beat the game, as much as one can. He reached the twentieth level and either tired of the long summited plateau of perks or received his virtual cookie and was told to buy the real thing. The difference in between us all has been attitude or interactive strategy.

With the limited interaction, boredom or ennui (confrontation with meaninglessness) easily sets in. My path has been perfect to keep my interest despite evolving needs. Besides reviews off site, the first thing I read about playing D&D Tiny Adventures resides in its forum. Like most boards, it had a nostalgia thread on top, but more useful than any other. The originator asked people about whether they named their characters based on a theme (eg: successively using all the characters in the Wheel of Time series). While the replies escape me, I absorbed the idea that I should prepare a set rather than take the intuitive route – use the names of characters I actually roleplayed. That became the first warning to be stoic and bemused about any particular iteration.

I settled on a pleasing solution affording me uniqueness, propriety with irony, and a large set to draw from. I chose to modify the names of various font types into fantasy-esque names for each.

Tines Ne-Roma	male human cleric
Lucita Sans	female dwarf fighter
Trey-Buche Emis	male eladrin wizard
Gnomic SansEmis	female Elf Ranger
Coryr Neu	male dwarf Warlord
Wendyngs	female Tiefling Warlock
Miss Trall	female Half-Elf Paladin
Uumpect	male Swordmage Genasi
Sam Bole	male human cleric

I made a grave mistake soon thereafter. Despite distancing myself from the character’s progress, I took too great in interest in the adventures themselves. Occasionally, I toy with the prospect of DMing an rp campaign. Chase’s example showed that store-bought material could furnish a complexity that a novice might omit. Cory somewhat made this mistake in his vampire chronicle when he sent us across Canada or something like that. Appearantly, he hadn’t planned out challenges for the trip and collapsed under Rob’s badgering of “and then what happened?”

Foolishly, I copied and pasted each encounter’s flavortext into a file for later study. While seemingly simple, mid-level adventures have thirteen encounters and high levels feature eighteen. The whole became unwieldy and unreadable, not in the least because the system reused encounters no matter the level. The game chafed under the class “work” rather than amusement. I quit the task midway into the second generation.

In retrospect, I needn’t have bothered copying the encounters at all. Others had done so already. The second character gets to inherit one item from its previous incarnation. Like many new players, I stressed about this and another aspect: potions. The program lets a character carry two potions during an adventure. Two types exist those that increase a particular statistic, whether strength or resistence to undead, or those that heal the character. The first time I played, I checked in every ten minutes to witness the encounter update. Then I’d copy the flavortext and sweat about whether to use a potion or not. My stoicism had crumbled under pointless obsession.

Finding the Tiny Adventures Wiki dispelled all that. Its contributors have uploaded every encounter (story and random), piece of equipment, and character class ability. They even revealed the different generation perks. For some reason WotC kept these a mystery, which works against them. Knowing that I could eventually inherit some of my ending money encouraged sticking with the game. Keeping it a big unknown fostered disappointment and ennui, especially after the third generation unveiled “ironman” mode. That gifts the user a character that retires when its character fails an adventure through death. Ordinarily, death (x<0 hitpoints) sends the character home to heal. Instead, you can have your character retired with midlevel equipment via underconservative choices. The wiki page dispelled the disappointment of similar features by fostering hope.

My relationship evolved in other ways with the app. I debated whether stat potions and then even healing potions are worth the price paid. I tried every class and resisted revisiting some when their best and otherwise unequipable items turned up. These struggles informed my current strategy.

The strongest character is one who has the highest mean ability modifiers with a given set of equipment. This informs most decisions. Which item do I pass on to my next generation? The wiki reveals the base ability scores and, depending upon gender, this could be two or three 10s or 11s. The best item plugs these gaps, preferably via a crown. Encounters reward crowns least frequently, so later items of greater frequency(amulets and bracers) will tempt less juggling. Shouldn’t I use items that beef up my hitpoints? No, I thought so too, though and kept wasting gold on troll skin armor (+10). The character loses hitpoints when he fails; using equipment that increases ability modifiers might have ensured success instead.

There is one exception to the above principle, story encounters. The wiki documents the scores each tests, so a dedicated player can check in just before the encounter updates and redistribute items to maximize the modifier. As I don’t care to time out this reappearance, I just leave them. As I am finishing up my ninth iteration, I sell all my useless equipment to bump up my gold inheritance. In fact, I will test a new technique. Normally, I end wearing my best equipment since these are tenth level encounters. I get to pass on a quarter of my gold. So, I saved the loot from the first levels to replace all the elite armor. Likely, Sam Bole will fail a lot more encounters. But, he is too close to retirement to chance wasting the opportunity.

My next and final character will be a rogue, so I will have played with every class. The male’s dump stats are Intelligence and Constitution. I will inherit a ring to plug int and use the five thousand inherited gold pieces to buy whatever will fix my con. While I would like to have used a woman for variety, the female rogue has three dump stats instead of two. His name will derive from Haettenshweiller. It isn’t as popular a font as Calibri or Tahoma, but the name I chose is cooler than “Cal Ebree” or “Ted Oma.”

But for the opportunity to throw lots of gold to the last character via a naked, final adventure and writing this review, I have no interest in playing Tiny Adventures any more. The stoicism necessary to play a game with almost no interaction nulls my interest. The real benefit comes from justifying visits to Facebook, which I would otherwise visit less frequently. Besides checking on Sam Bole, I check our D&D group’s page for updates and comment on other’s status updates or renew my own with whatever book I am reading.

Still there is one final word on maximizing the encounter survival: potions. They are not worth the gold paid at any level. I didn’t intuit this because I had stopped checking what stat the encounters tested. The wiki has noted the two most likely for each terrain type. Since these seldom last more than a quarter of the adventure, I didn’t bother studying. But, I wanted to know when it was worthwhile to buy healing potions. Seeing the answer pushed me toward the realization that succeeding individual encounters benefits more than lasting to the final one.

To test, I noted the total gold awarded for each adventure, grouped by level, for two generations. I averaged the three or four adventures per level to hide the idiosyncracies resulting from completion or early death. In writing this review, I noticed my first character’s encounter notes could have been used to further dilute outliers. But, it isn’t altogether important since the success rate (and rewards) reflects the strength of the presiding strategy rather than a general reflection of the adventures themselves.

Level 1	58 gold
Level 2	93 gold
Level 3	171 gold
Level 4	203 gold
Level 5	245 gold
Level 6	357 gold
Level 7	489 gold
Level 8	636 gold
Level 9	589 gold
Level 10	1120 gold

So while you could buy healing potions as soon as the fourth level (on average), it isn’t really conscionable until the sixth level because the hero would spend all his income on the potion itself. The stat potions are even worse value because – during the four encounters each lasts – the adventure will test it once or never. Money buys potions or equipment, so equipment’s permanent benefit justifies the expense.

Wizards of the Coast likely hopes we will use potions or test our luck with potions or iron man mode because of the scoring system. Encounter success under these conditions or higher challenge ratings net a higher score. What they ignore is the very point of a scoring system in the mind of the player. The app fails to maintain scores into the new generation. Somehow I suspect others parallel me in not writing down my scores so I can measure how lucky I am now compared to two weeks ago. They show our friends’ scores, but these are incomparable when we are different levels. I wouldn’t even mention the “feature” if it didn’t reflect the generally foolish design of the whole game.

And yet, Tiny Adventures figured largely into my visits to Facebook. I would log in every three hours or so (90 minutes for the adventure, 90 minutes to heal) to send himer back out. Now, I am only returning to check and comment on my friends’ status updates. I did it before incidently; but, without other justification, the whole feels like an exercise in stalking. This realization came before its time because I failed to make the right character. I inattentively pressed a Fighter character rather than a rogue. In protest, I decided to stop early.

I have some options at this point. I can visit Facebook less frequently, just daily. Tiny adventures holds no value, but it gives some structure to my schedule. Or, I could try some other game app. Mafia, which I tried months ago in sympathy with the forum version of the game, blows chunks. Scrabble is nice but demanding, in time and effort. I guess I will check out Mafia wars. My cousin does not shelter his friends from occasional, obscure updates (Mark is looking for a tie and a rubber ducky). Chase also mentioned he plays it, so now is the best time to try it. Facebook runs counter to a solitary experience.

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I read the chapter for an argument class that waxes on summarizing or paraphrasing arguments and how to do so. In total contrast to its banality, the author ended with Susan Jacoby’s “First Amendment Junkie.” I encountered it elsewhere but time hasn’t blunted the editorial’s clarity. On a lark, I read the suggested exercise for the chapter. If the professor had assigned it, I would be writing 250-500 words about freedom of speech. Specifically, the author solicits opinions in regard to a hypothetical letter to the editor in a school paper that included a racist/ethnist remark (“deny Arab immigrants entry because they want to destroy America”). He even did some of the work by offering three general responses that reaction letters gave both in favor and against (favor).

For a couple seconds, I considered answering unabashedly, as practice. In my notebook, 350 words is roughly a page and three-fourths. But, I can’t let myself. Obviously, the prospective task tests neither our summarizing ability nor our conclusion. It is practice forming a reasoned argument, how cute. The likely majority of responses suffer from a general lack I sense in argument classes (and some philosophy classes): conveying a sense of a totalized context.

What would I normally write? “Our country was (somewhat) populated by religious exiles. They fled the notion that the beliefs they espoused were spiritually deviant. [Feh, argument from Authority.] We, a more enlightened populace can ignore the intellectually bankrupt rather than censor them.”

Alternately, I can argue the opposite just as easily. “The editors were chosen to ensure a level of quality within the publication that the ethnist letter subverts. Certain acts are impermissible in any society that endeavors to escape self-immolation. [Snore, slippery slope.]  Giving space to similar opinions cultivates the impression that all is encouraged and nothing is forbidden.”

These – and any artificial debate constructed between those two representatives – fails because they are ships passing in the night. Namely, they are trading premises, or selected facts supporting them, without either listening or convincing the other. The pointless exchange happens in every forum’s political/unrelated section. The atheist says “god doesn’t exist;” the theist says it does. (Oh, that is why it is so important that people take these critical thinking classes. They progress past the juvenile mud slinging.) No, not at all. Here they learn about sophist tricks to use and catch opponents invoking; but, no one pursues a totalizing view of the world so as to make lasting decisions. (Nicholas, that is outside the scope of any single class.)

Yes, that is why I pursue a major in History. I am not interested in teaching history (at least not initially). I am not interested in learning the daily routines of the third Ming empress and Charles De Gaul. History, to my mind, presents the simplest means of obtaining a totalizing education.

Consider a ‘perennial problem:’ recreational drugs. Nimrod says, “Addiction drives people to steal and impoverish their families.” Dimwit responds, “Such already happens to alcoholics, even underage alcoholics.” I want these student presentations to involve greater depth. (Presumably they encounter that depth in the books they use to write their research papers.) Fine, permit superficiality as a consequence of impacted time. But, my coworkers, my father argue or exchange complaints about the world at that same level.

I acknowledge that the level of competence I desire for myself and others demands a lifetime of study. Rigorously testing the idea of only legalizing marijuana requires searching out specialized statistics that even congressional commissions and reports summarize. That constitutes the reply to ‘read a book about it.’ Which book do I read? The great majority present facts and eloquent arguments in support of a specific thesis. Any student of history knows this bias as Historicism. To my understanding, a totalizing view can counteract, or at least indicate the level of compensation required to mitigate limited viewpoints.

I am not the only person to desire a totalizing reference. Consider the Utilitarian, who survives in the mainstream under the aegis, “do the greatest good for the greatest number.” Obviously, that is a gross simplification of the philosophy. Still, generally utilitarians should subscribe to a periodical of the sort I imply. If I am to spread the fruit of my labor to those who most benefit from it, it is imperative that I be able to compare the (universal) return of donations to surgically correcting cleft lips versus paying for African’s school supplies. Yet, previous searches returned nothing. (Perhaps, the problem is my search term.) Nevertheless, without a central (usually liberal), comparative encyclopedia, the utilitarian relies on the inefficient osmosis his social circle offers. (Hey, check out this new NGO I learned about.) For any committed Utilitarian, the philosophy represents a rejection of suboptimal charity schemes that typify factionalized altruists (communists, Christians).

This post can not end effectively. (Unfortunately?) I am self-aware enough to know I did what I discourage: declare my core belief and bid you adopt it. (Well, attitudes are rather hard to measure and correlate against ‘decadant’ societies.)

Learn all you can about an issue before forming (arguing) an opinion about it.

Oh, but I don’t have time to learn about minutia. This particular Aspect ought to shock you into agreement anyway.

Well, here is an opposing (limited) set of facts to counter-balance your own. Is this really an effective way to learn about contrasting facts? We are in an arena where one is called to integrate and respond to them with short notice. Sure, we could go home and research the other’s citations, but wouldn’t I have done that if I were interested beforehand?

Well at least more facts are aired in these situations than people otherwise encounter.

But the presentation is somewhat jarringly structured. Who are we informing, a mythical ‘undecided’ person? Those who hold – comparatively – weaker convictions will more likely hear soothing arguments to support their initial feelings than use this as an opportunity to rethink the issue entirely, especially with the hectic pace of conversation.

You short-changed my side of the argument there, reflecting your own bias, Nicholas. You haven’t transcended your position because yours isn’t neutral. Despite dismissing the ‘for or against’ positions to the question of free speech as superficial, your entire thesis revolves around examining all facts and interpretations of those facts. You can’t bootstrap yourself beyond the dualistic answers via any logocentric dialog.

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