Aperti Gnosco

Oh Fez, how I desperately wanted to like you. You started out all cute and indie with the Cave Story type appearance and the semi-well done 3D world turned into a 2D plane, but then you just started to horribly, horribly fall apart. I even gave you a second chance, but you didn’t redeem yourself.

In this post I’m going to talk a lot about Fez, and unfortunately, it’s fairly hard to talk about the game without talking about spoilers, so be warned. I’m sorry, but let’s move on with our lives.

The main problem I have with Fez is that the traversal of the world, and the navigation is not very fun. Sure, at first it’s neat and somewhat new, but after a short while I found myself frustrated with trying to navigate. There is an map, but it’s horribly done. Areas fade in and out seemingly randomly and links sometimes disappear so that you can’t tell how to get to one place from another. There are warp zones which are colored uniquely, but on the map they’re all the same color and so you end up guessing a couple of times to get the right location (especially because some of the colors are very similar like light blue versus dark blue versus greenish blue).

The actual areas are interesting and, generally speaking, quite gorgeous, but I really found myself frustrated with them more often than not. This entirely rests on the shoulders of the controls, which are not very good. I could never get them to make the character go where I wanted, and when it takes you ages to jump up a level (since almost all of them are vertical based), falling into the water down below really sucks. Even after you beat the game for the first time and get the ability to fly, it’s still poorly done. You can fall too far (while flying), and die, so that you get sent back to the top. This means that on certain levels it was almost impossible to go down. You could really only traverse up easily, and it’s quite apparent that rarely were the levels designed the other way around. When you’re trying to find all of the secrets and go around all the levels looking for doors, this means you’re going up and down quite a bit (especially because some of the doors are hard to find) and it sucks when something simple like jumping down is so hard. Speaking of finding the right door, when you have 6+ doors on one section, you need an easier way of seeing which door goes where other than standing in front of it. Some of them are a pain to get to, and it was annoying when I’d do just that (especially before the flying), only to find out that wasn’t the door I wanted to get to. Couple that with the poor map and it just sucked going from one place to another place fairly far away.

One other thing that made traversing the world frustrating is that the game was choppy as hell. It lagged like no other game I’ve seen on Xbox. It would hitch, have a black screen as it loaded in assets, and then finally load the section you were going to. In certain sections, the entire game lagged so bad it was a slideshow. When you already have bad controls, having a laggy game makes it that much worse. On top of all of this, it crashes. A lot. I really, really can’t believe that it got through the cert process, because this game crashes more than any game I’ve ever seen. Quite shameful. I heard it also had a save corruption bug, which also sucks quite a bit (thankfully I never hit it).

One area that was done really well was the music. It always seemed to fit in perfectly and would calm my nerves from getting annoyed at all of the other things I was having to deal with. The music combined with the art style was very nice, and, like Limbo, fairly unique and well done.

What I’ve described so far is, generally speaking, close to your first playthrough. What irritated me most about the game, more than anything else, is that you can’t complete all of the puzzles your first time through. No where in the game does it mention this, and so I found myself trying to figure out some puzzles in certain sections for quite a while. It made me feel stupid, but in retrospect, the game was just poorly designed. I can’t stress enough how annoyed I was at this design, it made me practically yell in frustration when I found out I had to beat the game once to find out how to do some of the other puzzles. No other game works like this, and so to try to be unique in this manner frustrates the player more than makes them feel good.

So what is all the hubbub about this game, then? Why were so many people talking about it after it came out? There are a couple of puzzles in the game that make you use a pen and paper to decode messages, inputs, or figure out things in the world. Unfortunately, some of them (according to my friend Troy) are taken, pretty much verbatim, from Riven. Once you figure out how to decode the messages, there aren’t really any more unique puzzles; the game just becomes going to all of the areas you haven’t finished and getting the stuff you haven’t gotten yet. I did, however, enjoy the puzzles with the controller vibration. That was unique and pretty fun to figure out.

On the topic of puzzles, fuck the clock puzzle. It required that you go to a certain place in-game at a certain time of day. Not a certain time of day of the in-game day/night cycle (which also existed), but a certain time of day according to your Xbox’s internal clock. To get those anti-cubes, I had to disconnect from Xbox Live, then fiddle with my Xbox’s clock, start the game, realize I was fairly off, quit out, change the clock, boot up again, repeat for about 10-15 times. That’s fucking painful and makes me feel like a tester. Really, really bad design. Just because you can do something with the low level function calls does not mean you should. It’s tedious and not very fun.

So what was cool about Fez? The puzzle aspects were interesting as puzzles, but I didn’t really care at all about how they affected the in-game. There’s a language that you can decode, but I didn’t want to spend hours decoding every message that people said or that were on walls because that is tedious as shit. I probably would have done it if I were 12 and had unlimited time to play the game, but I don’t anymore. There were some super secret things that you could figure out that the internet has detailed quite a bit, but the unfortunate part of it is that one of them was brute forced. People on the internet tried every input until the correct one was figure out, but no one knows where the answer comes from in-game. Kind of sad. The takeaway from this is if you want to spend time decoding puzzles, this might be a fairly fun game for you, but if you want good gameplay with some puzzles on the side, it’s probably not for you. The puzzles weren’t necessary to “finish” the game the first time either, which is probably going to make 95% of the people feel that it was a poor platformer with not much else to offer.

I wanted so much more from this game, and it just seemed to never deliver it. I could see why Fez appealed to some people who collectively tried to solve the puzzles, but if you’re trying to do it on your own, it’s very frustrating and tedious. If you use the internet as a guide, you’re not really playing the game, you’re just doing as the guides tell you, which I don’t find terribly fun. Lastly, the endings (both the good and the bad) were pretty weak. I felt like I was watching a college student’s first try at a 3D engine and what they could do with it. In fact, most of the game felt that way to me. I think it could have been so much more than it was if they had a slightly better design and integration of the puzzles into the gameplay aspects (instead of just side puzzles used to 100% the game).

I wanted this game to be good. I’m really sad it’s not, but I guess I can’t be too surprised when the guy who made it is a giant douche. I still can’t believe it took 5 years to make as well.

Facebook friends and users, we need to talk. This isn’t working out for me. It’s you, and it’s probably a little bit of me, but this has gone on too long and I need to cut the cord.

I’m tired of the stupid memes, the pointless life updates that no one really cares about but reads anyway, the twitter-like brevity of posts which turns them into drivel, the vaguebooking, the check-ins to places I’ll never be or visit (and don’t care about), the horrible segregation of friends (work-friends, family, acquaintances, and random people you may have met once), and the horrible history/timeline page in which you can’t find any of the actual information you’re looking for.

Facebook, you try to do so many things and end up failing at almost all of them. I know I’m probably not your target audience because I rarely post, I don’t upload pictures or video, I don’t buy stuff through the facebook apps or games, and I certainly don’t evangelize the site to other people, but god damn you’re bad.

I want to take a little bit of time to go through all the problems I have with Facebook.

1) People post the stupidest shit I don’t care about way more than the stuff I actually do care about. This is probably my main complaint with it. I initially signed up for Facebook because I wanted to see my best friend’s wedding pictures, but it was also to keep up to date with friends that I don’t interact with very often. This, it turns out, it is not very good at in most of the cases. The signal to noise ratio is so low, that I often start tuning out most people’s updates. I care about marriages, big trips people went on, nice surprises that happened to them, well thought out ideas or commentary; things of that nature. Unfortunately, these seem to be the rare things that people post. Don’t even get me started on vaguebooking, where people post things like “Uh, oh, something bad just happened.” If you have the time to post that something bad happened, GIVE CONTEXT. Are you ok? Do you need help? Don’t be an attention whore since all those types of posts imply is that you want someone to say “What’s wrong?” Next to vaguebooking as the worst types of posts are the slactivism ones such as “Post this on your wall if you care about this thing.” How about you volunteer, donate, or do something else other than sitting on your lazy ass making you think you’re actually doing something. These types of posts on facebook suck. I’ve tried to stay away from this type of thing, and if you look at my history, I’d say I’ve done a fairly good job. People complain sometimes that I don’t post enough, but if they really want to know how I am, there’s always e-mail or the phone. I wish that other people felt the same.

2) I really don’t care about what game you’ve been playing lately (on Facebook), what song you’ve been listening to (on Spotify or elsewhere), what article you’ve read recently (on the NYTimes), or what physical place you’ve checked into. What does this tell me? There’s no context to any of this. I don’t have the time to check out all the links that people put on Facebook, so tell me why I should care about it. Also, fuck you Facebook for not allowing me to disable every single thing like this. I know you want the ad revenue and the clicks and what not, but it really, really sucks for the user. Facebook has been trying to monetize their operation for a while, and while this is a good way to do it, it’s really annoying.

3) Facebook is a terrible history keeper. I was trying to find out some information on a cat litter box that my friend had posted about several years in the past, but I couldn’t do it. There’s no search function, the timeline only shows you what Facebook thinks is interesting (and not what I actually want to find), and it’s not indexed in google since it’s a walled in garden, so I can’t use traditional search engines to find it out. Facebook is a place where you put in information about yourself, but you can’t get it out, at all. If I want to find something out that I put on my blog, there are very easy ways to do so. I wish that Facebook was half as functional in that regard.

4) Discussions suck on Facebook. We learned out over ten years ago that a flat comment system is one of the worst ways to hold a discussion on the internet. You can’t reply under people, which makes the comments fractured and hard to read. Don’t even get me started on posts that have more than 20 comments. It gets unreadable very, very quickly. It’s fine for posts that have 2-3 comments, but anything past that is really bad. The other bad part is that discussions often have groups of people that are very different and have no relation to each other aside from the original poster. Combine this with the fact that some people use Facebook as a popularity contest and have 1000+ people on their friends list, and you may be conversing with idiots. There are no moderators and people say the dumbest crap sometimes. Unless you personally know the people you’re commenting with, more than likely the anonymous aspect of the fact that you don’t know them will come out even though you’re not technically anonymous. Even if you’re in a group that’s trying to have a serious conversation about a serious topic (abortion, politics, soccer), it’s really hard to do because of the structure of the comment system is so poor.

5) There’s no good way to segregate my feed like I would a normal RSS reader. Some of my friends have started posting music on a daily basis, which I enjoy, but it tends to take up a BUNCH of space. I can’t filter these music posts and put them in a folder that I’d like to read later. They’re all under one global feed. It’s like an RSS reader (which is awesome and super extensible), but without any of the good parts. I can’t mark posts as read, unread, save for later, etc. They’re in a stream of consciousness that just doesn’t seem to be formatted at all. Also, the fact that, by default, Facebook doesn’t show you all of the posts/updates from friends is really aggravating. I want to keep up to date with what’s going on, I want to see music, funny videos, etc, I just don’t want them to all come to me in the same manner. Some people I like because I play sports with them, some people I like because I work with them, some people I like because I’m related to them; none of these things mean that I’ll like all of those topics with everyone. Filters.

So what does Facebook actually do well? Events, groups, and having nearly everyone on it. Hardly anyone uses Evite.com anymore as it’s easier to add people to a Facebook event and update people that way. It’s very good at this and is one of the primary reasons I haven’t left Facebook altogether. There are also groups that I’m a part of that are low chatter but have important updates similar to a mailing list. Lastly, having almost everyone on Facebook means there’s an easy way to figure out how to contact someone. It’s a huge white pages directory that’s semi-easy to find people on (much easier than Googling someone’s name and wondering if this is the same Sam Robinson that I know, or if it’s a completely different one).

I wish that I could get a facebook lite, in which people rarely update except with important information or pictures I actually care about (from important events), and have an easy way to contact them with, and be able to set up events that people can respond to. That, for me, would be ideal. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’d make much money and I don’t think people are trained to do that sort of thing. In this day and age a lot of us are focused on the 140 character update, the simple checkin, and the quick post instead of the well thought out post, the informative article, or something else of that nature. The latter group takes time, which most people don’t want to dedicate to doing those sorts of activities.

I think what I’m going to end up doing is closing down all functionality of Facebook aside from adding friends and accepting/initiating events after today. If I really want to know what’s going on with someone, I may check up on them from time to time, but generally speaking, the day to day drivel that goes on on Facebook is worthless to me. I’m more than likely to hear about how someone is doing from either themselves or second hand, which is fine by me. I want to believe that Facebook is actually going to change at some point into something that I want, but I just don’t see that happening. Unfortunately, Google Plus seems to have many of the same problems that Facebook has, so I don’t think moving over there is going to solve much. I don’t know if it’s indicative of the medium, or just how people have implemented it, but I hope it changes.

I just got back from the longest vacation I’ve ever had, and it was amazing. London, Paris, Reims/Epernay (part of Champagne), and Munich. Ashley has a pretty good writeup of what we did. I’m not feeling particularly well, so I figured I’d just do a quick “moments” writeup instead of a full post.

• Being in a HUGE pub in London and having a guy come up to me while I’m waiting to buy a drink and tell me that there’s a famous rapper outside signing autographs. Then walks in this white kid who can’t be older than 17 and the guy tells me it’s him. The kid proceeds to go up to one of Ashley’s friends and rap at her for a couple of minutes and then pick up on her until leaving dejectedly.
• Seeing Occupy London and how impressive looking it was. They had tons of fliers up and looked fairly organized.
• Juggling Balls
• Shitty Travelodge which didn’t initially have toilet paper, only had one towel, didn’t have a phone, and offered to give Ashley’s friend our room key (without us telling them to) so that she could get into the room.
• Seeing a government building and thinking it looked exactly like a Daft Punk Helmet
• Somehow managing to miss soccer matches in all 3 cities we went to because they were either not playing or out of town.
• Taking the train from London to Paris and falling in love with train travel. I love watching the scenery outside the window while listening to music.
• Realizing that everyone smokes in Paris.
• Having an awesome half Portuguese half French waiter at some random restaurant and trying to talk to him about a Portugal soccer game.
• Open spaces in Paris are amazing. I wish we had some in Seattle.
• Thumping bass in the middle of the night until 5am.
• I could easily see living in Paris. That place is awesome.
• Driving in France is not fun when your GPS navigates you onto roads you’re not legally allowed to drive on.
• Going to visit the Dom Perignon cellars was mind blowing. So very, very cool.
• Shackers are awesome even if they live outside the US.
• Going to the most crowded (Mohito) bar I’ve ever been to and having someone make me drop my drink on the ground and having it shatter but being unable to pick it up because there are too many people in the bar and I’m on my way out anyway.
• It was nice to be able to speak small amounts of French to get directions and not feel like a complete tourist.
• Everyone speaks English. It’s pretty impressive and makes me really sad for the state of affairs for US citizens and their ability to speak other languages. It makes me want to get better and to learn more languages.
• Night trains, while fun, don’t give you particularly good sleep.
• Watching the scenery go by in the dark with Ashley while listening to the Beatles.
• Eating our best meal at a German restaurant when we thought it would have been in Paris instead. Wiener Schnitzel is soooo good.
• I want a metro in Seattle after having seen London’s, Paris’s, and Munich’s. Munich’s had one of the nicest metros I’ve been in.
• The Hofbräuhaus is amazing. Liters of beer and delicious, but cheap food. Even Ashley liked the sausages, sauerkraut, and beer.
• The BMW Museum was fantastic. I highly recommend it. It reminds me of something Apple would design if it did a museum.
• The best museum we saw on the whole trip was the Deutches Technology Museum. We were there for 4 hours and I could have easily spent double that there. So much cool nerdy stuff, I just wish all of it were in English instead of only half of it.
• Walking around the Nymphenburg Palace grounds and wishing it were Summer because it must look amazing and not be so fucking cold.
• Going through security 3 times on our trip home

So much fun.

There is a god, and it is this man. He finishes Super Meat Boy in 19 minutes and 24 seconds in one run. Crazy.

I think that programming is 75% knowing the language and 25% knowing little tricks you can do with it to make your life easier. Here’s one that I thought I’d post about (although it’s super basic).

When you’re creating a vector, matrix, or some other well known storage unit class you often want to access the data in multiple ways. A simple way to do it without adding any accessors is to do this:

union
{
  struct
  {
    float x, y, z;
  };
  float m[3];
};


This allows you to both access it using x, y, and z like normal, but you can also index into the same memory using m[0], m[1], and m[2] without adding the extra overhead of another variable or accessor!

Yay little tricks :).

Another video from Macklemore. He’s easily becoming my favorite hip hop artist. His lyrics and message are just so utterly truthful and honest that it comes through crystal clear. He also puts on an amazing live show as well.

I don’t much talk about my religious beliefs to my friends much and especially not on this website, but I just finished a book which has made me think a lot about them and felt I should write a post about it. The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, written by none other than Carl Sagan, is a book that I can’t recommend highly enough. It has cemented my beliefs as an atheist and a staunch believer in the scientific method and process. If I had any doubts left before I read this book, they were pretty much eradicated by Sagan’s ability to list all of the reasons why he believes (and in concert why I believe) there is no proof there is a God and how science and religion have intertwined and fought over the years.

I grew up having been baptized in my Grandparents’ church and going regularly to a Methodist church fairly regularly until my parents’ divorce. I never much though about church much as anything other than something we did on Sundays until I was a teenager and hadn’t been going regularly. I briefly dated someone whose father was as close to a pastor as you can be without actually being one and it really showed me a different side of what church could be like. The older I got, and the more I researched things I’d been taught in church, the more and more I began to doubt what I had been told over the years. I think one of the funniest things I’ve been told about my young self was when I found out Santa Claus wasn’t real, I then asked “Does that mean that God isn’t real either?”.

I think one of the things that has really taught me a lot about religion and beliefs is the internet. I’ve been able to do research on topics and find articles and information and, most importantly, see videos of incredibly smart people talk about these topics. Neil deGrass Tyson, Carl Sagan, Richard Feyman, and many of the people I’ve watched in TED talks over the years have taught me so much about the world as it is, has been, and has been perceived to be over the years. That last part is a big one. Over the years we humans have learned an incredible amount; our knowledge pool is ever increasing and our ability to make accurate statements has grown tremendously. Unfortunately, there is still a large amount we don’t know, but that will slowly decrease over time.

So how does all of this relate to religion and god? One of the core tenets in science is the ability for anyone, anywhere to be able to reproduce results garnered by someone else. Studies are submitted to public journals, equations are able to be re-derived, and work is shown as how you get to a conclusion. Religions tend to rely on word of mouth, old books (that may or may not be historically accurate), and social structures to convince people of their beliefs. There is no way, many times, to prove or disprove statements made by religious people about their faith or beliefs. This is the basis of faith and why some people (like me) have a hard time having discourse with people who ardently believe things that are scientifically unprovable.

So back to the book. Carl Sagan gave a Gifford Lecture in which he talked about God (in all its possible forms), religion, alien civilizations, ufos, miracles, the origin of life, the universe, and our knowledge to date of most of those things. The book is a transcription of those lectures and is absolutely fascinating to read. I’m not sure I can adequately summarize everything he talked about, but if I were to try, it would come to this: belief without proof is wrong. Not wrong in the sense of murder is wrong, but in the sense that if you can’t prove anything, then having actions based off of those beliefs could have harmful consequences. For instance (and this is an extreme example), the Heaven’s Gate group ended up killing themselves because they believed something that wasn’t provable at all. There are many instances of groups of people believing the end of the world is coming. My point in all of this is that action based on unprovable belief may cause you to put wasted effort into activities that may completely hinder things that would help otherwise. In current day terms, embryonic stem cell use, gay marriage, and anti-global warming beliefs are just a few of the things that hurt peoples’ lives because of beliefs in things that aren’t accurate.

So then is all religion bad? No, of course not. Religions have grouped people together and spurred them to make changes to the world for the betterment many times. Slavery is one very well known case in which Quakers fought for the freeing of the slaves. On an individual level, many people like the community and the belief structure and believe it makes them a better person. These things don’t bother me in the slightest. Some of my best friends are ardently religious. I do believe, however, that if religion and unfounded beliefs weren’t prevalent, the world would be a better place and we’d be a happier populace.

I can’t recommend The Varieties of Scientific Experience enough. I wish everyone would read it as Carl Sagan has a way with words and how he describes things that is so much better than what I’m able to on this blog.

Really, really inspiring talk about a guy who wants September 21st to be a day of peace, and how, he actually manages to do it.

Two more videos from the same guys (on the same trip).

While I can’t imagine going on 18 flights in 44 days was fun, this video is still quite amazing. Travel is quickly becoming one of the main reasons I save a bunch of money and I absolutely can’t wait for my first trip to Europe in 3 months. Going to be a ton of fun!

I love seeing technology and how it can expand what people do in the arts. This is quite the amazing dance.

I’ve been listening to this constantly for the past couple of days. It really just makes me smile and want to dance.

I’m creeped out by this and fascinated at the same time.

I’ve started programming at home once again, after a nine month break. It’s kind of bizarre to think that I program at work for 8-10 hours a day, and then after that, sometimes I still want to program more at home. I’m starting from scratch, yet again, but kind of not at the same time. I’m taking pieces from my previous two personal projects and combining them together. One of them I haven’t changed since October 18, 2008, the other August 8, 2010. I’ve learned quite a lot in 3+ years from the last time I tried to do something like I’m attempting, and my style has changed since the last project as well.

It’s going to take a while to get up and running, but the interesting part is that I know what I’m working on and how it’s going to play out and help me toward the future. I’m compartmentalizing things much, much better than I had previously done, and once I get the setup going, it should be easy to add projects to the group to combine to a bigger whole.

If it sounds kind of vague and nebulous, that’s because it is. I’ll be writing technical posts in the future as I go on to help myself and others possibly learn some things that I’ve picked up over the years.

What’s up first? Config files. So simple, yet so incredibly powerful. Hopefully that post will come soon.

I’ve thought about doing one of these videos for a long time, but have never had the courage or dedication to doing it. This Chrome ad (over 6 months after the It Gets Better project started) made me cry. I’ve watched it several times, and it has subsequently made me cry each time. Kind of sad and awesome at the same time. I really do need to make one of these videos.

I found out on Sunday that Bin Laden had been killed by armed forces and I’ve been sad ever since then. Why would I be sad when he was a terrorist that is behind the 9/11 bombings, when he’s done incredibly bad things in the name of a faith that doesn’t necessarily believe those things, and when more than likely the world might be a better place without him? I’m sad because a man was killed. I’m sad because the United States celebrates a death. I’m sad because it seems like the only way our country knows how to respond to aggression is aggression in return. I’m sad because we seem to be very focused on the here and now, the four years we have a specific President, the current war we have, or whatever is in front of our faces without thinking about how our actions are going to cause waves 10, 20, 30, even 50 years down the line.

I’ve been reading many, many responses from the internet and people’s responses range from ecstatic and celebratory to somber to ambivalent. He was, after all, not that important in this day and age anymore; Osama Bin Laden was more a figurehead. He stood for an attack on the United States and the possibility of another attack, but not really much else.

The problem I have with how this was handled was that it doesn’t deflate the situation. Defeating Osama Bin Laden isn’t like defeating Hitler. The group doesn’t crumble. There will be another terrorist cell and another terrorist strike on the United States. In the almost 10 years since 9/11, we’ve surrendered our liberties, gotten into two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and become a much more scared nation of something that, statistically, has very little chance of harming or killing you.

One article that my friend linked on Facebook that I liked is called One Buddhist’s Response and is the catalyst for this post. It’s fairly close to how I feel as well, so I suggest you read it. I don’t have the answer to when it’s acceptable to kill a man, but as much as Bin Laden did to us, I don’t think this was one of those times.

There’s a quote going around the internet right now:

I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate
multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.

It’s attributed to Martin Luther King Jr, although really only everything past the first sentence is something he said (from Strength to Love). I still like the quote and believe in it very much. I also think of:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. […] Is there no other way the world may live?

That’s from Dwight David Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Apr. 16, 1953. I wonder what we’d be able to accomplish if, instead of fighting our enemies, we tried to make the world a better place. Could you imagine what would happen if we took the military budget and 100% turned it into a budget for health, knowledge, and aid? I can’t even fathom that, but I imagine it’d be a much better world than the one that we have now. I liked this section from the Buddhist response I linked to earlier, so I think I’ll end on it:

Perhaps the way to kill your enemy as a way of putting a stop to violence rather than escalating is to shift our view of “enemy” altogether. Our enemy is not one person or country or belief system. It is our unwillingness to feel the sorrow of others—who are none other than us.

So take aim at this enemy completely and precisely. Feel your sadness for us and them so fully and completely that all boundaries are dissolved and we are left standing face to face, human to human, each feeling the other’s rage and despair as our own, one world to care for.

I haven’t really been blogging much lately, and that probably has to do with some changes in my life. First off, I got a new job. I now work at Pop Cap. I wasn’t really looking for a new job, but this one dropped in my lap and I couldn’t say no. Let me tell you, this place is the work that dreams are made of. I can’t talk about what I’m working on, since it’s not announced, but I can say that it’s a lot of fun to work on it again. The structure at Pop Cap is so very different from anything I’ve worked on professionally. It’s almost like going back to DigiPen a little, with the small teams. It was a little sad to leave Surreal after almost 4 years, but after they moved over to Kirkland, my commute turned into an hour on the bus each way. Now, it’s back down to a 15 minute walk through downtown. That’s pretty much perfect, if you ask me. The company itself is pretty fantastic as well. I really can’t describe it without gushing like a five year old on Christmas day, so suffice it to say that I enjoy it quite a bit.

In between the two jobs, I went to Costa Rica for 9 days. The trip was nothing short of awesome. I went to Puerto Viejo de Talamanca for two days, and then moved on to Manzanillo, where I found heaven for five days. That town, if you can even call a place with less than 100 residents a town, was gorgeous. The people were super friendly, and I had an incredibly relaxing time walking through the beaches and the jungle. I met an Italian couple and hung out with them a bit. Over all, I’m incredibly glad I went as it was very relaxing and exactly what I wanted. You can see the pictures of my trip here.

Lastly, but certainly not leastly, I started dating someone. I don’t tend to talk about my personal life here much, if at all. I will, however, say that she’s been a ton of fun to hang out with and be around. We go on adventures, one of which will be heading up to Vancouver this weekend for a half marathon race. We’re also heading to New York next month, which should be a blast.

So all in all, my life is going pretty awesome right now. Good times.

Every once in a while you find something awesome on the internet. This is one of those times. It just makes me smile.

This is an awesome short film about what a group of kids did when they wanted to play soccer but couldn’t because there was no space.