Some folks consider wearing a pair of thick framed glasses to be nerdy. For others, it’s watching the Big Bang Theory and getting at least half the jokes. Real nerds know: if you’re going to take the title you need to rock it old school and paint tabletop miniatures. Small pewter figurines and a bottle of Jack? That’s a real Friday night… minus the bottle of Jack.
This here’s my first video for Troll in the Corner, a roleplaying game blog that I’m penning a few posts for. It’s short and sweet, and by the time you’re done you’ll know a little more about something you probably didn’t care about.
Three articles, one month each apart. Late to the party?
Today’s RSS reading held a bit of a surprise for me; I had to do a double-take because I thought I’d already done a double take. What do I mean? I started to read this article by Buzz Bishop–a former Vancouverite turned Calgarian who thinks his old town would have fewer riots if they had more pancake breakfasts (true story, he tweeted exactly that in mid-2011–from Future Shop’s TECH Blog.
What seemed odd to me was that it felt like I was reading the same store twice; Buzz has penned a brief article that consists of very little original content and links primarily to a NYT piece by Nick Bilton. It didn’t feel like I was reading Nick’s piece over again though. It felt like I was reading the December 29th, 2011 article by Time ideas writer Touré again. Indeed, the same anti-aeronautic-establishment sentiment conveyed by Touré is echoed by Buzz in the scant 375 original words he had to write on the topic–most of which were framing the quotes from Nick Bilton’s piece. I’m not really sure I see the point of his article; if, as a writer, all you’re going to do is parrot a main-stream media piece while retreading another, then why bother?
There are plenty of interesting things to write about at CES. Re-writing someone else’s story on why gadgets should be allowed during take-off and landing isn’t one of them.
To top it all off, doesn’t it seem just a little entitled when we whine about not being able to use our widgets during the time most likely to kill us on a plane? Touré made a strong point about the act being another morsel of the American TSA security theatre that’s spread across the globe in the name of compliance. Buzz, however, doesn’t bother with that level of depth, ignoring the fact that technology tends to move a great deal faster than legislation, especially when cross-border travel is involved.
Really, is it that difficult to separate yourself from your tech? God forbid you should have to put your iPhone down for ten minutes. Really, if you’re going to complain about it, bring something new to the table–or perhaps, on a Canadian blog, you could inquire with Canadian agencies. The last time I checked, the FAA doesn’t rule our airspace.
Braces and Invisalign compared
It might be time for a little TMI. My father is British. My mother is Irish. The amounts to a few things: I have a dry sense of humour, I’m a bit of a ginger, and I have stereotypical British teeth.
Or at least I would, had my parents not forked out for orthodontics for me at a very young age. I was 12 the first time around and it was (as anyone who has had serious orthodontic work can attest) one of the most painful things I’ve ever had to endure. Pure misery for roughly two years. I didn’t have to suffer through headgear or any of that non-sense, but it sucked. One of the worst parts? My canines were extracted to make room for other teeth–something they apparently don’t do anymore. They’re the coolest looking teeth and it’s definitely a first world problem that I don’t have them anymore.
Even with retainers my teeth shifted as I grew. Add in the arrival and removal of my wisdom teeth, and by the time I was 22 they were started to look depressingly European again. On with another round of braces, this time for a year; being in your early twenties and having train tracks isn’t a joyful thing for anyone. When they came off I spend a few grand afterwards and did the Lasik thing. They can rebuild me, faster, stronger. They have the technology, as long as I have the credit limit.
Time has passed again and these damn things won’t stop shifting around. I’ve wanted them fixed once and for all, but I’m not going through another round of metal glued to my teeth. So our final stop on this oral tradition is an expensive one, but it should be a good one: Invisalign.
Invisalign is orthodontic treatment for grownups; it’s a series of barely noticeable plastic trays that you wear all the time and swap out every two weeks. The first few hours can be a little tender, but it’s not nearly what you’ll experience with regular train tracks. The best part? You pull them out to eat, meaning you can eat whatever you want; you don’t have to worry about schmutz in your brackets.
I did have to have a few “buttons” constructed from bonding to act as anchor points for these trays on my bottom teeth. The top simply slides in, and the bottom clicks on to the buttons–it can be a little hard to try to remove the bottom tray, but it’s not a big deal.
I’ve got eleven months to go before the treatment is finished, and I can only hope that the third time, finally, is a charm.
In the middle of last year I joined my friend Tristan Jutras at UBC to help him teach a course on social media fundamentals. We spent a few days over several months working with a variety of different class groups, imparting the important stuff about blogging, tweeting, Facebook, Google+ and more. The irony is that with the hectic nature of my end-of-year, I was failing to follow my own rules, and wasn’t practicing what I’ve preached. If you’re reading this now it may be because you’ve added my RSS feed to your reader based on one of those classes. If so, hello.
One of the things I tried to convey in those classes was how many blogs become orphans; simply left alone when the author no longer has any more time or content to give. That was precisely what happened with me. I neglected the rather lengthly list of blogs that I wrote for, leaving them free of new content and timely updates; it’s a death knell for a blog when that happens.
In one case, the Future Shop Tech Blog, I was unceremoniously retired. I don’t mean that in a mean way, there truly was no ceremony about it. I didn’t get an email, a text, or a call. I tried to log in a few days ago and was listed as retired. It’s tough to see; this time last year I was winging my way to Las Vegas as part of the Future Shop TECH Blog team (a brand I helped to build), and this year… chopped liver. That’s what you get in the dog-eat-dog world of unpaid blogging.
Which brings me to Harlan Ellison. He’s a dick of galactic proportions, but he makes a very strong point in this video: Pay the fucking writer.
There was the problem of a conflict of interest when I worked for Future Shop; they couldn’t very well pay me for my blogs or else it would appear that they were impartial: I can state honestly for the record that I was not directed to write anything other than my honest findings for that blog, which makes me feel good about the program and its intentions. Still, putting in all that work kind of sucked, especially to be dumped at the end of the year like a high school girlfriend as her life-long-love heads off to college. All things considered, it would have been nice to be paid.
Maybe it’s just late.
So this week has been one of rest and renewal. Updating my blogs to the latest WordPress platform has been a start; it was a real pain with 360 Arcadians and PS3 Arcadians as their PHP processor doesn’t have enough memory to do the upgrade automatically, and I can’t force it with a line in PHP.ini (it just kicks out an error). So I had to upload the software manually there, and ended up losing some content; let this be a warning: back up your damned blogs.
There’s new content up there, and I might be writing for a gaming blog called Troll in the Corner. All things considered, I intend to wear out a keyboard by July. Challenge? Accepted.
