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The man-child’s delight

2011.03.31

Age 7 through 13 was Nintendo for me. I know life events came and went, but looking back, my strongest memory is Nintendo. At one point it jumped to Super Nintendo, but still Nintendo.

At 13, I coerced my parents into buying me a computer. Then, it was the PC. A string of Japanese gray boxes became a string of 3.5″ floppy disks. When I wasn’t drawing or making crude QuickBasic programs, I was playing some Microprose title or some virus-laden game passed through twenty other friends.

Suffice it to say, I’ve been playing video games for a while. Likely tens of thousands of hours that could have been devoted to reading, sports, homework, and various social fair, spent instead on poorly translated cut scenes and briefly satisfying boss fights.

And I know I’m not alone when I say I still have a video game system which I still play. It saddens me when I do the math. 32 years old, 2 children, 1 wife, 1 mortgage, still playing video games. Granted, video games are more an evening past time when the kids are in bed or a weekend vice when I should be doing chores, but the thought of a “man” playing video games seems really odd to me, considering our generation knew only kids to play with control pads and joysticks.

Clearly, the demographic has shifted. Think almost half of video gamers fall between 18 and 49 years old. That’s a whole lot of man-children.

I’m not sure what to think of the figures, and what folks a generation back would have been doing during these hours wasted nowadays on pixelated violence and simulated social interaction. What did video games replace? TV? Appreciation of the arts? Domestic violence? I don’t know, but I imagine it had to be more worthy than the Madden Football franchise.

All I know is, when I saw this Gamefly commercial recently featuring customer testimonials, most of the people looked like “men”. Sad, broken, 30-something men. Sure their hair was spiked and shirts pressed, but they had the look of basement living, mom’s cooking and night-shift jobs at Blockbuster.

I know I’ve devoted a lot of years to navigating fictional, digital characters, but at 32 are video games a retardant to maturity? Is casual gaming OK, and if so, where do you draw the line? Is it OK to play the games, just so long as you don’t own video game-inspired figurines? Are T-shirts with video game themes the final straw?

I’m not casting my XBox aside just yet, but I will say it doesn’t sit right with me. Not entirely.

I ran.

2010.05.15

Prologue…

(feel free to skip)
I was a husky kid. Didn’t take to sports much, ate big meals, and was sort of over sized kid most my childhood – height and weight. So it wasn’t until I was 11 before I ran more than 1 block without stopping. Several years later, I ran more than a mile for the first time to enter the Marine Corp “poolie” program. Bootcamp is where I discovered that I’m not too bad at running, and my time in Arizona pushed me to the furthest limits I’d ever seen on the trail. 6 miles was a normal day, 4 was short. Our farewell PT with SSgt Pulling was 11 miles – and we had no idea which turn or stretch would be our last the entire way.

After the military, I just used running to balance out my beer drinking. Casual smoking made it tougher for 6 years, but that didn’t hold me back during drill weekends with the Naval Reserve in Ft. Meade. Some days I’d light up a cigarette as soon as I stepped off the track.

These days, as an out of shape father and proud overweight American…

…I don’t take much to running with regularity. My time is precious: morning routine, kids, work, dinner, kids, kids, bedtime routine, XBox / beer / DVR, sleep… repeat. The best efficiency experts in the world couldn’t wedge more into this schedule – it’s airtight! However, my hat is off to anyone that maintains a healthy exercise regimen. It’s downright admirable – moderately, but nevertheless worth admiration. Different strokes for different folks, right?

Continue reading “I ran.” »

Environmentalism: the debate

2010.02.15

It’s been cold lately, and when it’s cold, people pipe up against Al Gore as though he’d said "it will never be cold again."

But, to start from the beginning, it’s pretty well established those fumes pillowing out of coal stacks and tail pipes aren’t great for the environment. If you’re still not sold on this wild idea, take a look at Mexico City.

A serene look at one of the world's largest collections of vehicles.

So, it’s not a far stretch to consider if thousands of factories and millions of cars could turn the skylines of Mexico City, LA, or Shanghai into a brown haze, that the same pollutants could be bad for our climate. Doesn’t take a crack team of scientists to tell you noxious fumes are bad.

Which they did. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - both large groups of internationally recognized scientists – have both ruled human activities are causing surface temperatures to rise globally, and that an overall “global warming” is very likely.

So, if it strikes a chord with common sense, it’s backed by the scientific community, and it’s prevention helps keep our global home looking its greenest, who could possibly want to argue against the ill-effects of carbon pollution?

Continue reading “Environmentalism: the debate” »

A yawn and fist shake at mainstream

2010.02.07

Anna and I had a “date night” last night, and we decided to see an IMAX 3D screening of Avatar. This is about a month or so after it came out, so it’s already clear how good the movie is – people can’t stop raving about it, and to date has earned over $600 million dollars (that’s the GDP of a small country – in about 5 weeks).

The experience is phenomenal. The 3D is crisp, colors remain unaltered – it’s just incredible. It’s the closest I’ve ever seen to being in the scene itself. Of course the CG of the film is top caliber as well. There’s tons of moments where you lose track of what’s real and what’s animated.  Facial expressions are so life like you often mistake the characters for actors in rubber suits.

In a nutshell, I can’t adequately describe how great the movie experience is. It’s two parts awesome to see a movie in that way, and awesome to see it with a movie like Avatar.

So what gets to me is the comment I’ve heard several times from various sources. “Avatar is just Dances with Wolves in Space.”

Continue reading “A yawn and fist shake at mainstream” »

Tiger's Transgressions

2009.12.03

So Tiger Woods cheated.  In itself, it’s a sad story. A man highly revered by the world for his golf prowess, new father, fallen to more base temptations and now fallen in respect by many of his fans.

The problem I have with this sad story is that it’s all too logical.

Tiger Woods is the best golfer in the world. Out of 6 Billion people, his name stands at the top. He makes ungodly amounts of money in endorsements, is in incredible physical shape, travels the world year round, and has superstar fame and fandom wherever he goes. This is his life: he leaves home, travels somewhere for 5 or 6 days, stays at the finest of hotels, has an outpouring of cheer and adoration, wins oodles of money, and travels back home.

I don’t think the story here is that he’s been cheating. I think a more surprising story would be that he hasn’t been fooling around while on his routine luxury tour of the world.

This is in no way to excuse the behavior. Marriage is an uncompromising bond, and a person is committing to full fidelity when they enter it. “Transgressions” can’t be watered down or excused because of circumstances when love and family are on the line.

My point is how can you ever expect to be a normal husband and father when you’re Tiger Woods? I understand the instincts to settle down and raise a family, but it’s a huge gamble if it’s your job to be at a different city and golf course 4 days a week, 40 weeks a year. And some point you got to recognize where your life and your plans fit together. It’s why celebrities treat their marriages like car leases. If you see one last more than 5 years, it’s a phenomenon.

In perspective, it’s not that fascinating of a story really, just a typical tale with fascinating people.

And NOW, you can hang Christmas decorations

2009.11.27

Why are we in such a damned rush to get the decorations hung about our homes and yards?

The homes around us started right after Halloween. Following quick math, that’s two months of potential Christmas cheer. Two months of inflated Santa Clauses, the before and after nativity scenes, reindeer parts and other Chinese-crafted, LED illuminated, plastic holiday cheer.

I know, Christmas is awesome. I’m sure Chanukah and the other end of year festivals are great too, but in America, it’s mostly Christmas. I’m will not dignify the crap that follows this topic. The folks that spaz out over the greeting “Merry Christmas” need to ease up a few notches, and the folks that spaz out over “Happy Holidays” need a percocet and a copy of the Bill of Rights.

So under the premise that Christmas is awesome, I understand why people would be anxious to celebrate it. I like my Birthday (or at least used to before I turned 30), but I don’t go prodding for Birthday wishes a month before it comes up. Why don’t you see this sort of hysteria over any other holidays?

Frankly for me, Christmas is egg nog, a (realistic) pine tree and Nat King Cole. A glowing altar on my home’s exterior never really attached itself to my fondness of the season. It almost feels like a competition in suburbia – who can really show it up for Christ’s birthday. Maybe it’s part American competitiveness, part kissing up to the king of kings. Not sure. Either way, it’s quite gaudy and in my mind, is close to warranting federal regulation (clearly since that did a great deal of good on Wall Street).

All I’m saying is, let me enjoy Thanksgiving for what it’s worth without stepping outside and momentary loss of bearing. Give the leaves a chance to fall before you start stringing up the garland and fire-hazard lights, mm-kay?

The Merits of Texting

2009.11.24

When I first starting seeing people in crowds staring down into their phones and thumbing out messages to their friends, it always struck me as an odd behavior. You’re using a device invented for the most convenient form of communication known to man – immediate speech communication – to awkwardly spell out conversations on a tiny screen with 10 keys using crude abbreviations.

Part of the confusion for me was seeing people opt for a cell phone’s more obscure features over it’s primary function, and the other part was seeing communication reduced to emoticons and terrible new acronyms. LOL! How R U IRL? It all just feels like a major step backward for human communication. In 1806 we’d be hand writing eloquent letters to one another using proper cursive, grammar and punctuation. Two hundred years later, we’re butchering fragmented phrases and incomplete thoughts into tiny devices. It just feels like we’re a century away from grunting and howling at each other.

Call me a cynic, but the structure of English language serves a purpose. If we’re given years of instruction to learn it and maturity produces articulate adults, moving away from this feels like regression.

Shoe on the other foot

Maybe I didn’t hang out in the right circles. Maybe I don’t have “friends”. Whatever you want to nitpick, I’ve never really traded text with someone until recently. Our friend / nanny has had to let us know on a few occasions “Hey, I’ve gotta run to the store with the kids really quickly” or “traffic’s bad – we’ll be there soon.” So, she sent it to our phones, and it finally made sense.

I was so wrapped up with the vapid conversations I saw conducted over text that I’d missed just how convenient it was. No small talk, no filler converation, as direct as humanly possible. “I require X- do you have it available?” “What time will you be ready?” Sharp, pointed communications that cut right to the message or question. I like it.

Of course, if I wasn’t using my work Blackberry, there’d be no way I’d be willing to thumb it out on an 10 digit pad. That’s nuts in my mind.

Kids TV

2009.08.23

I know a few parents who are strict with their children’s TV viewing habits, even a few who’ve blocked it out all together. It’s a big concern for new parents – at what point is my kid watching too much TV? Is it gonna make them a couch potato, slow their mental development, make them want to go to Disney World, etc.?

Of course, I write this as my own 1 year old is planted in front of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. That’s the immediate benefit for parents – it’s a distractor. They want to watch, you want to fix coffee and breakfast. Win win, right?

Deal is, there’s a ton of programming out there, from the moment they’re out of the womb all the way up through their segway to college. Specifically children’s programming has exploded over the last several years. It used to be a handful of public television shows that we relied on – Sesame Street probably the king of them all. Every kid growing up in the last 20 years should know Sesame Street well, and with good reason. It was creative, and it worked.

That’s the surprising part – it was fiercely researched and scientifically engineered to have to biggest impact on the youth audience. Reading Malcom Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, he explains the painstaking research that went into making the show what it was. Sesame Street is probably the most researched show of all time, because it broke all conventional wisdom about kids and tv. It proved children can learn from a television show, and that everything about a show’s effectiveness centered on how much a child could grasp. That’s where the puppets came in. They made adult concepts relatable to young children.

These days, the new cadre of shows has come in such large numbers that one can only imagine how few get the Sesame Street detailed approach. A great example of that in my mind is the Baby Einsteins series. It was targeted at new moms who thought it’d give their babies a leg up on vocabulary, early concepts and new languages. If you never saw a Baby Einsteins video, it’s pretty much a montage of 30 second clips that show various colorful demonstrations with narrations in different languages doing a voice over for each. After about 15 minutes, it cuts to about 25 more minutes of advertising for the rest of the Baby Einsteins series.

I’m not going to say it’s total garbage, but there’s no proof it adds anything to early child development (article). You can tell by the way they’re marketed, and the premise they’re built on: any arrangement of distracting pictures set to Beethoven will make your kid smart.

Clearly, there’s no substitute for one-on-one interaction with a child, but at the same time, not all TV shows are a complete hindrance to a child’s development. Of course there’s also the factor of parental tolerance: I will not sit through Dora the Explorer. It could teach kids Calculus, I’m avoiding that show like the plague. Her insipid voice just grates my nerves.

There’s a ton of children’s TV shows out there. I’d say there’s nothing wrong with a little TV, as long as it’s in moderation and you’re selective about the materials.

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