I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately. Surprised?

One of the themes for a bunch of my recent stuff has been to get away from the hard science fiction and fantasy writing and build stories around slightly more plausible fictions, in particular stories about the culture and ideas of the net. From a couple of perspectives, namely that of (a) a hack of a social anthropologist and (b) a card-carrying member of the geek tribe, net culture is fascinating to me. So, rather than make up fantastic realities, I’ve spent a lot of time making up fantastic scenarios inside the reality of people interacting online.

A story that I’ve been working on has piqued my interest, and if all goes according to plan I’ll be releasing it soon. But I wanted to pick the brains of my readers, particularly those folks with an interest in coding and/or games because I’ve placed this story in a world that is essentially parallel to ours, save for one thing: the world of video games has taken a decidedly different direction.

Now, the “why?” to this particular decision is not really important. The nature of gaming in the story serves two roles: (1) there is a conflict about games in the story, but the game is mostly a MacGuffin and I wanted to veer clear of as much real or perceived real-life correlation as I realistically could, and (2) even though I’m not writing fantasy, I wanted to explore some reality alternatives and I’m interested in gaming.

Now here’s the background: in our world, reality, we’re all quite familiar with the direction of gaming. In the last twenty or so years we’ve collectively put millions of billions of hours towards developing games and ideas for games that essentially translate a real life concept into the digital realm. We don’t even question this. Think everything from video game versions of board games to RPGs to FPS to whatever. All sorts of games come from the idea that we can mimic reality (or a fantastic version of it) inside a computer and then display it on a screen. Fine. This was probably the most natural way for things to go. And as soon as some folks did it once, that’s the way they continued. And now you think of the alternative — whatever that may be — and the primitive nature of what that might be in relation to the complexity of say an XBOX360 or a PS3 and there is no competition.

But here’s the thing: maybe it wasn’t always so obvious. Maybe there was an alternative. Maybe, rather than projecting fake realities onto television screens, back in 1983 or thereabouts, some company built a little more sophisticated version of Battleship(TM) or something, then someone built a better game to compete with that, and someone topped that one, until we got to the point where games weren’t data being spewed out onto a screen, but actual physical objects interacting with each other through sophisticated technology. You bought a console that didn’t hook up to your tv, but rather used computation to track and manage the information about actual physical game pieces in actual physical space.

Sure, I know what you’re thinking. How would a slightly better version of Battleship(TM) ever have competed with the likes of Super Mario? But the point I’m trying to get to is yeah… how? Your homework (or at least think of it as helping me with my writing research) is what kind of realistic game complexity do you think we as game consumers would have accepted in the late 1980s and early 1990s that would have filled the void left by the absence of a video game industry as we currently know it? Is it hypothetically possible that say, at about the time the PS2 was coming out, had we put our collective billions of hours into the development of sophisticated (alternate) game modalities, we’d we playing complex games using modular elements that were technologically advanced enough to have flexible purposes across gaming genres, boards with mod-able terrain, bits with capacities to contain sensors measuring relative proximities or tracking individual variables or changing shapes and colours or bonding together as required.

Here’s a more concrete example. If you think of a game like Warhammer or Warmachine for example, we currently play this using pewter painted dudes who’s movements and strategies are measured by rulers and rolls of dice all with real physical pieces. Now, we simulate similar sorts of play in video games using RTS concepts, the pieces rendered as 3D graphics moving around the screen at the click of a mouse attacking each other with nifty animations and complex randomizing mathematics and algorithms. But — completely hypothetically and in this fiction context — what would a technologically advanced version of Warmachine or Warhammer look like had we skipped the game-on-a-screen idea and instead put our societal geek brain power into building a game blending the real physical pieces with modular electronic components, Bluetooth-like networking, shape-shifting terrain, etc? How far could we have come in the current day? And what other crazy adaptations or ideas come to mind.

(All contributors get acknowledgment and credit in any published/printed/distributed work.)

Let the brainstorm begin.

I remember when I worked at my previous job, and working with folks with progressive disorders, incurable deterioration of body systems that would get worse and worse for the rest of their lives. And I remember what one of the biggest issues was around research.

Here you’re probably thinking that this is a no-brainer. Find a cure, right?

But in reality, no. In reality, the biggest priority of most of our research was not directly about a cure, rather it was about accurate diagnosis. And while practically this starts to make sense when one considers that (like if you’ve ever watched House) you can’t start treatment until you know what the problem is called, from a patient (or as we called them, client) perspective, diagnosis really meant one big thing: there was a name for the problem.

I don’t mean to equate life-changing disease with my own mental quips, but it is a fairly accurate analogy to the search by many people for definition in their career. The problem with so many professional folks like myself is that (when faced with the idea that we should probably be thinking about a career change) being a guy with jumble of skills and no easy title is kinda like being a patient with a jumble of symptoms and no diagnosis. How can you get a job, sell yourself professionally, pitch your skills in a well-rounded package, if you don’t have that diagnosis… ahem… I mean career definition?

If you are one of those folks who’ve trained for a specific role, this is probably quite abstract. (It took me half the trip to Red Deer in the car to explain this to Karin.) If you are a teacher, well, you have that career diagnosis. If you are a trades person, you have that career diagnosis. If you are an accountant, you have… you get the idea. That isn’t to say you are stuck or cannot switch, if you are so inclined. But if you needed to walk into a job interview (presumably for one of those jobs) you would just say, “I’m an [insert title here] and I have X number of years doing that job. Here are the details…”

But being a guy in the other category, a guy with a jumble of skills and a vague (and fairly meaningless) job title, consider the daunting prospect of interviewing when all you’ve got for your sales pitch is a bag of parts and not much purpose.

That said, I’ve been trying to find my own diagnosis for the last little while, and it is not nearly as straightforward as one might think. In fact, just coming to the idea that I might need a diagnosis was a conceptual leap in itself. This diagnosis — or perhaps it would be better to call it self-definition — is no easy thing, but in the end I’m convinced that such an exercise will have just as many benefits for any future career change as a diagnosis would have for a sick patient: having a name for the problem means there is something to work at fixing.

I gotta say… I’ve been following the hate-on that’s emerged for Apple since the iPad announcement on Wednesday. I suppose there is good reason for disappointment from all those folks who were expecting the blokes at Apple to ‘think different’ and design a product that is (a) exactly what a handful of computer geeks wanted and (b) does exactly the same thing as every other computer in a different package.

I’ve read all sorts of commentary on the device, and lots of remarks (some legit) about what it cannot do.

But I was actually quite intrigued and excited by some of the stuff it could do. Of note from my personal perspective is the possibility of using the device as a sketch pad. I’ve long pined for something like the Wacom Cintiq that has a single purpose: it’s a big ol’ draw-on monitor for artists. And it currently sells for about five times the list price for the iPad. Sure, more features to be sure, but a cheap digital sketch pad: that right there is worth five hundred bucks to me, and likely anyone who has ever had need to scribble a note, sketch, diagram, map, or whatever on the back of a napkin.

Just saying.

I mean, if I want a computer I’ll bring my laptop along.

… or, apparently.

My commute this morning was greeted with three rather unusual cargo sights. If only I’d thought to bring a camera.

1) A flatbed truck was hauling the sign for the new airport parking lot. That might not seem too weird, signs and stuff being hauled about all the time I’m sure, but this sign happened to be a thirty-foot diameter, hockey-puck-shaped, lime-coloured, monstrosity of a green disc emblazoned with the words “Value Park” in a bold white font.

2) Another flatbed truck was hauling what appeared to be a piece of the International Space Station. Or, maybe some other complex bit of technology. Though given that we’re in the middle of oil-rig country, it probably had something to do with that and relatively very little to do with NASA. Though did anyone else see that bright light in the sky last… oh, never mind.

3) A third flatbed truck was hauling what appeared to be a menagerie of life-sized and over-sized plastic animals, roughly twenty-or-so total. That might not have been so weird if taking up the rear of the collection was a ten-foot tall white chicken staring me down as I drove.

I’ve been thinking a lot about writing — why people write and, in particular, why I write — and other such silly navel-gazing-type thoughts, and I figured I’d explore some of those ideas through some (albeit very basic) application of writing rationale to various philosophies, as least as best as I understand them with my intro-philosophy and intro-psychology education. If people seem interested, I might turn this into a series. (Suggestions?) But, just so you know, this is likely all bunk, and should be read as such even if it does make for an interesting exploration of how these theories could be applied to the very modern activity of writing for the web, particularly personal and professional blogging.

First up: Freud.

What first got me thinking about this was my vague misuse of the word “ego” oft applied to cover the act of basic narcissism. Writing a blog is something of an act of narcissism, true. But while we might be happy to say that someone who blogs profusely is pretty much displaying big ego (as in “Look at his blog! What kind of ego does it take to think people want to read that crap!”) is that what we really mean… or is it even applicable?

Id, ego and superego, as I follow, were Sigmund Freud’s round-about way of abstractly explaining the various aspects of human behavior in a context that united our various driving habits of personality. As I get them, id refers to the pleasure-seeking part of our mind, ego to reality-seeking part, and superego to the moral-conformity part of our meat-computers. This hardly supports our narcissism definition.

So, let’s take them one at a time:

Id

At first glance the pleasure-seeking id doesn’t seem to apply — at least not to a non-writer who probably thinks of writing as more a chore than a bit of pleasure. While one could argue that there is pleasure to be found in writing, it is hardly measurable to think of writing and typing as very similar to an unconscious-kind-of-short-term pleasure like eating or other instant-gratification drives. Perhaps it comes down to the desire to create, a kind of emotional libido, that soothes an instinctive urge to produce something, or see our words in the wild. I suppose this could be a form of written extroversion, or something, filling the spaces with typed words rather than sounds and voices.

There is another aspect to this, however. Freud broke down the id into the factors of life-seeking and death-seeking. I’m not sure he meant that deep down we were all suicidal or something, but the latter is often applied to the universal search for peace and quiet, escape, or solitude. In this way, writing might be deemed to fulfill an id desire through escape or the isolation of bits of reality in an attempt for our minds to find peace between the activities of our lives. That is to say, by writing about something we are forcing ourselves to focus and drown out the rest of reality while we isolate a single element of information and re-create it in the form of a description or narrative. This can be at once cathartic, peaceful, and (one could argue) as powerful as closing (or killing) the idea from our minds by committing it to paper. Wham! Instant gratification. (Got a light?)

Ego

Building off the whole id theory, ego seems to couple that desire to parcel and package the events of our lives and actions for the immediate benefit, catharsis, of the moment, and thus then rationalize it with a long term pay-off: perhaps one could think of the ego role in writing a blog as archiving the momentary recording our own personal histories, thoughts, and ideas for the purpose of later reflection or idealization of those events. Or, that is to say, the id mind wants it now and the ego mind thinks it wise to save it for later. I suppose one could even go so far as to argue that, in the context of Freud’s theory, we are first building single facets of a fantasy to escape from reality, and then through the written word, constructing an elaborate history of ourselves as a single long-term perspective of that reality.

Ego then really is a little bit (or maybe a whole lot) of narcissism, but only because by writing the elements of a blog we are pretty much writing our own little me-as-protagonist fantasy novels, building a collection of recorded non-fiction narratives clouded by own own perceptions and memories, be they good or bad, right or wrong, whole or fragmented.

Superego

Of course, as the guilt-generating core of our minds, the role of the superego in blogging is mostly external. In contrast to the id need to escape and partition reality and the ego-mind need to save those partitions for personal rationalization, the superego part of the mind seeks to balance this action with a moral and social obligation to contribute to a society wider than ourselves. Freud’s idea was that the superego was a kind of abstract internal father figure, the old man of the child minds telling those kids to go mow the lawn, wash the car… or just do something. Less abstractly, I suppose this could be applied to the concept of blog publication in the sense of a relieving of guilt and a fulfilling of obligation — perhaps even a perceptual de-isolation of that aforementioned historic fantasy world — towards an audience one assumes is comprised of peers and other people who need to relate to the mind (and the body therein encompassing) at a rational, emotional, or personal level. Then do we publish our blogs because part of us would feel guilty otherwise? Or because we’d write it down anyhow and blogging completes the circle of societal participation than is only half-done with a private diary? Maybe without the superego we would simply construct elaborate self-histories and never share.

And so all this seems to be summarized neatly by the following redefinition of the three famous constructs: id is satisfied when I commit a thought to words, ego is satisfied when I save those words for later, and superego is satisfied when I publish them for the world. I write therefore I am. Or, something of a Freudian blog is borne.

Then, I could just be making this all up. I have always been a little skeptical of the whole Freud thing and folks who attempt to explain their own actions through it. …oh, right.

Three things have prompted me to give readers a bit of an update on the banoffee pie saga I wrote about here a little more than a month ago.

First, I’ve noticed that about thirty percent of the traffic that came to this site since I’ve posted that ‘informative’ anecdote has been as a result of people searching for “banoffee pie” in Google. Second, I made a very successful banoffee pie over the holidays — on the 24th of December to be precise — and the family enjoyed it that evening, and; Third, I’ve finally (as in just this past weekend) posted the pictures from the holiday season and thus now have a photograph of the aforementioned banoffee pie for everyone to see (and presumably drool over.)

Behold! Banoffee revealed:

You may notice that this particular recipe is about two-thirds by volume of whipped cream. You may also notice that we skipped the sprinkling of instant coffee that was meant to garnish the top. You may also notice that no one seemed to mind. All in, it was really good. Delicious, I’d argue. (Though, one should always be skeptical when the chef reviews his own cooking!) And, most definitely, one of the highlights of my holidays.

We’ve since been back to the Superstore to buy three more jars of the secret ingredient, thus ensuring a regular hit of banoffee goodness over the coming year. Now THAT’S a happy new year.

It was fairly nifty that a few days after I finished reading-slash-listening to The Year of the Flood, Margret Atwood was interviewed on CBC Radio promoting the book. Sometimes when you listen to those interviews you then it back and think that you’d like to read the book soon. Having just finished it was a whole new perspective, and something along the lines of “ohhhhhhh… so that’s what that was supposed to mean!” It’s not to imply it was an obscure read, but there were plenty of nuances to be decoded throughout.

I should add that I’m adjusting the format of these reviews. So see below…

The Mini Review

Following up on Oryx and Crake, Atwood drags us back into the twisted narrative of a world haunted by the self-inflicted extermination of humanity by engineered virus. One need not have read the original, but the re-introduction and overlap of characters between the two adds to the richness of the story. We spend most of this story tracing the adventures of two girls/women in the years leading up to the ‘waterless flood’ — the plague that will eventually wipe out humanity — their narratives intertwined and mixed together with that of a quasi-environmental, sciency-religious-cult kind of group, and of course, all that goes with. The characters are strong, female, — typical of Atwood’s style, I think — and inherently likeable (despite their flaws and fumbles.) And, we are never certain their fate even as the book draws to a close. I enjoyed the book, dystopic and dark as it is, but I don’t think I’d call it a must-read.

Best enjoyed…

…quarantined in your house, dressed in your pajamas, with the doors locked… eating a steak.

This work tells the world…

…that if you are a picky eater, you should get ready for a relatively short life after the apocalypse starts. Expand your horizons and learn a few recipes that use ingredients folks don’t normally consider food.

Borrow, Buy, or Avoid?

Unless you are a huge Atwood fan, this is a story you’ll likely read once and say you did. Borrow.

Having just returned from Red Deer where we were lured for a pair of belated holiday parties — the last two for a long while — I thought I’d take a few minutes and fix the biggest complaint I was offered all weekend: apparently I haven’t been prompt enough in supplying new photos from the past few weeks of merry-making. (After all, what are sister-in-laws for?) Though, now since I’ve collected a hundred-and-some more over the past couple days — and I still had pictures on the camera from weeks ago now (for shame!) — I figured a few of those complaints may actually have been justified.

So, as these things tend to go, those who already know where to find my increasingly massive collection of online photos will be happy to know that there are about one hundred and fifty more for your viewing pleasure and covering a span of late December through to earlier this afternoon. Those who don’t know where to look, and may have even the slightest passing interest in taking a peek, can get to the big ol’holiday album by clicking on the thumbnail above.

Now, no more complaining for a while.