Maybe it's a cultural thing

I've been getting to work very early hoping that I can do my own work before the real work starts. Today was a little different, I got some weird sleep after some odd dream of being chased by a gun-wielding maniac. I just didn't have the full motivation to get going.

Instead, I read the news. Today was depressing.

There is some supposed Quran burning in central Florida on Saturday, some real winners there. It has sparked a firestorm of complete idiocy in this country. I read another story about how most people in Ohio think God will take care of global warming and people need not worry. Last but not least, I read some long conversation about video game addiction, and I weep inside both for the victim of the addiction and the fact that I'm not playing games anymore. Ugh..

America has become a depressing place for an intellectual. Instead of the "American Dream" of growing up, earning based on your hard work, and doing what you want in life, you are stuck working for other people because that is the only opportunity that exists. You want to make something grand out of your life, but you are limited by lack of education. I am a very smart person - and yet I still have to play by the rules that people that are too scared to lose theirs have set up. When I eventually naturalize to some European or Asian country in a few years, it will be one of the greatest days of my life. I can't wait to leave this shithole. Last night on the news, I hear the German Chancellor talk about European freedoms. They have freedoms of speech and religion, they are safe from the worst crimes and you really can't go toting around a gun everywhere you go. People are important - not some multinational global corporation calling all of the shots and making sure that the low classes stay low. I will definitely be some polyglot at that time. What's an even richer factoid is that most Americans are learning Spanish as their second language to deal with the increased flood of Mexicans who live in this country now. If they were to naturalize to Europe, they would end up living in the poorest shittiest country in Europe! (ok, eastern europe is a true shithole, but Spain is just a fucking joke).

As humans, we are living in a truly strange time for "animals". I don't see dirt and grime, I don't have to hunt for my food, I don't really have any animal left in me to do these things anyway. I sleep on a space-age bed with processed blankets in a room that has scientifically proofed air filtration and cooling systems.

But I'm not happy.

My wife experiences complete anxiety - she's not worried about eating her next meal or getting enough water to live another day. She is worried about global catastrophe, about getting enough sleep for a night so she can do her homework. Homework for somebody else so she can prove to an employer that won't pay her her fair salary to make sure crazy people are ok. What a country.

I, on the other hand, just want to play with information and science. I want to create a program that would simulate life. I want to create a program that would interface cleanly with a person's mind and let them go through different stages and tunnels and understand a completely different part of themselves reflected back at them through the world they create. Of course, that sort of software takes time - and resources - and I have to do work for other people because the kind of software I want to create doesn't look like it's going to generate any money in the short term (the kind of money people are really worried about now!)

I am really excited for December 21st, 2012. I think that is the turning point for the world. There is going to be a lot of shit going on in the 6 months up to that point, and then the 6 months afterward.

more later.

construct

Ever watch The Matrix? Remember that part where Neo is on the Nebuchadnezzar and Morpheus loads him into the first white area? Morpheus calls it "The Construct Program".

I've been a real computer programmer for about 8 years. My background is different than your usual software engineer, though. I graduated from DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, WA in 2007 - a Bachelor in Real-Time Interactive Simulation.

Real-Time - lighting fast

Interactive - you can change it as its happening

Simulation - computer worlds.

I'm a video game programmer.

Your usual software engineer is good at creating data processing applications. I'm good at creating computer simulations. It's a distinction I deal with every day at the office, every office I've ever worked at. Most other engineers don't understand this distinction and think that I have less education than them. Turns out, my mind works "per-frame" and theirs looks at a different big picture that allows for less interaction and less simulation ability.

This distinction isn't important for the rest of the post, but it is important to point out for someone that doesn't know too much about programming video games. Games are a very special piece of software - they must operate a subset of commands very quickly 30 times a second as well as produce 1-2 million colored boxes in that same time so the user can see the progress of it.

When I first was tasked to create one of these simulations, I was completely naive. I had a barebones program that could display computer-generated fireworks in real-time. It did not allow any user input to change the fireworks. Today, I'm running 4 cores trying to synchronize how the physics and artificial intelligence systems work with drawing them in a breathtaking real-time world. Oh, how times have surely changed.

Ignorance is truly bliss. Back then, things were so simple. If i wanted to "press A to continue", i sat on something called a block that "listened" for the user to press the A button. If i wanted to navigate a menu, each box of the menu was some specific call to draw a rectangle at a location, and as the mouse's cursor's math was between some decidedly tweaked numbers (if the cursor's location is greater than 128 and less than 228 and the Y is between 50 and 100 and the left mouse button is down this frame but wasn't last frame, then tell the program that some button was pressed!!!)... today, things are a lot more "smart" where a menu button has it's own structure and coordination with the input system (oh yea, it's a system now) to check to see if a callback needs to be called because the button was hovered over and actually clicked.

I had lost my job this February. I was really excited to be home again - i could work on a brand new engine! I had programmed a physics simulation a few months before and had thought long and hard about programming a Deferred Lighting engine. That is a special way to visualize a computer world with a large number of lights - i only light things that you see from your perspective. Before this, I could only have a few lights in the world because every single object, no matter if you could see it or not, would deal with all of the lights in the world. I had a very fundamental naive knowledge of how to program this. Before this engine, I had really just got something called a Render Target working the way I wanted it to, and the entire engine could look at all of the render targets at any time.

But today, which is why I'm tying today, I want to lay everything about the construct down somewhere so my brain can thouroughly process this information properly. Talking to my wife is great, but until she responds back with actual answers, it will be easier to just tell the vast interwebs what I'm feeling and everything will be ok in the end.

I had drawn a few ideas on paper for a new threaded construct program. I'm only calling it "construct" because that was the concept from The Matrix that my wife actually understood. I wanted the user to be able to drag and drop any asset from his desktop into the program at any time, and have it show up as a usable asset. This was a huge difference from previous engines, these were ones that had big bulky asset management schemes that required everything to be plotted in some XML document and linked up to objects individually. lame. A better system exists.

After working at two different companies do I realize that a threaded program is the only way to go. Now that everything has more than one processor (xbox = 2, ps3 = 6, my home pc = 4) I should be writing simulations that can take advantage of all of these processors. I was so naive about that, too. I just sat down and banged out a system where different threads would run different processes, one for rendering, one for input, one for simulation, one for...... and magically it would all work! And it didn't. I had issues where I just simply couldn't deal with the entity format without memory problems. When you thread, two processes can't read the same memory at the same time. So much for that.

Last week, I sat down and designed a system that would work. 4 threads; Simulation, Render, Loading, and Synchronization. It is a beauty. Render would be one frame behind Simulation. Synchronization would be in lock with those two threads. Came up with an object format that would work. Came up with enough data to transmit between the two easily and with a small data format. Everything may work this time around.

So why am I still so anxious? I just suck at this or something. Honestly, I don't know where to start. I wanted to write this post to talk about it. Now I've talked about 200 other things to set it all up for you. Such is my life.

To start, I had to create a system to lock the sync thread between the render and sim threads. That was not as hard as it sounds, but it took 5 minutes to come up with a decent algorithm. I am essentially creating 4 gates. Sim and Render wait for their own gate to be opened, walk through it, and lock it behind them. When it's done, it unlocks one of two gates that the Sync thread is sitting behind. When Sync goes through its 2 gates, it locks those gates behind it, syncs everything, and then unlocks the sim gate and the render gate. Sweetness.

To load things, messages are generated in the sim thread and sent during a Post Message step to the loading thread. When the object is done loading, it sends a message back to the Sim thread that the asset is ready.

Today, I was starting to write the render thread. I was really stressing out about this. Render needs to order and cull things to render before it starts to draw. It needs to order them in a special way. What is all an asset? What is the least amount of information needed to draw things? God this is a crazy world.

If I have time to work on it tonight, I'll post how it went. I feel good about this. I just want to make the first level of Zelda64 from tools in the construct. God i have so fucking far to go.

Tuesdays are sometimes like Mondays

I had a good Labor Day weekend. Lots of rest, even though I wanted to spend time programming on the construct. There will be time to work on it in the future, but I definitely want to work on it right now. It sucks!

At work, nothing is going right. I am supposed to write up some documents for programming the next stage of the game. Unfortunately, nobody really knows what that is. It is not my job to create these documents without design input. Some people have already created a few game types, some things they want to see for next game, and level pitches. I don't know. My job is an AI programmer. There is some ideas for AI, but almost all of the pitches include head to head play with real players and not with whatever the fuck random characters we want doing tricks in the world instead. I feel like the other people on my team in my department have no idea how to do some of the things they should know how to do (especially for their pay scale!) and yet they are allowed to make the big decisions. I don't hate my job, I just wish it were a little bit better.

Japanese takes another interesting turn. I feel like I'm getting better at listening myself. Our exchange student said that exact thing 2 days ago when I asked her what had improved the most. I think that she doesn't understand construction on a few things, but overall she is doing quite well for someone just dropped into a society completely different than her own. I feel she will be a lot more comfortable speaking both English and Japanese around us in a few months, I hope that is soon enough for us, too.

Today I just really wanted to work on my own project. At work, nonetheless. But, I can't do that. I spent a lot of time creating something that would work, but it's not working. I fail, yet again. I don't know what to do! I have a beautiful and complex system in my head that I want to put in the computer. For some reason, I just can't make it work because I either don't have the time or don't have the concentration.

new blog time, gonna write something else

Frustration Thursday 90210

Shit all around. Frustration from every angle. Discomfort. Unhappiness. Sounds great for a Thursday.

On one hand, I have simple frustration from everyday things. Things that, regardless of my mood and the people around me, are frustrating. A great example is American politics. No matter how I feel, some asshole with a louder megaphone is going to say something that makes people around me agree with him; and these are usually things that I do not agree with at all.

On the other, I have frustration from things I'm encountering today. Coworkers are unusually loud today, a project I'm trying to work on in my spare time is not going at all like I want it to.

So I'm frustrated.

I don't have a lot of solutions for this feeling. It's just a stressy mess and I live with it.

I thought this blog post would help, but my fingers are not even cooperating with me.

Fuckkkk

Nostalgic

It's been awhile since I last wrote something. I used to write everyday in a leather journal; after meeting my wife and getting married, I'm fortunate to have enough time to write blogs online.

Over the weekend, our exchange student arrived from Japan. She is a very shy girl and her English leaves something to be desired. My Japanese is ok, my wife's is not terrific, and overall we can communicate fairly well with her, even though sometimes she answers a yes/no question "yes" when she really wants to say "no".

I was reading a thread this morning about nostalgia. There is a picture of the first few screens of Pokemon red/blue, and a caption saying that of all the wonder, since you don't know what is to come, you have amazing hopes and desires and excitement for this game you are about to play. And after you play it the first time, that feeling is gone because the wonder is gone. Other people in the thread commented about other games and experiences they had that felt the same way. I am not a man to cry at my desk job, but I felt compelled to write a bit about that experience and maybe understand other times in my life I had that feeling.

"Wonder" is a great way to express the feeling. It is a combination of the unknown, things you just haven't yet experienced but know you will, and amazement of knowing there will be excitement during that experience. I wanted to write this blog today to cover some of the finer points of "wonder" and "nostalgia".

For sake of definition, "nostalgia" is remembering the wonder from your past. I can't quite describe it any other way. You get this feeling when thinking about new toys, watching old movies, going to old locations that you had great times when you were young.

Can we duplicate that feeling? Other people like to attribute it to specifics. I remember the first day I'd ever played World of Warcraft. It took about two hours to get to level 6 and make the long journey for my Horde Troll to get to Ogrimar. I remember seeing characters at level 50 and thinking that was so much higher leveled that I would ever get to (that troll only made it to level 34!)

Old games really do it for me. Thinking back to sleep-over parties playing Final Fantasy VII; even the first run through Link to the Past. There was an expectation of greatness to come. And greatness did come - both through the actual power I received through in-game mechanics (bigger weapons, chaining Materia) and the emotional connections I had with the characters (Death of Aeris)

My wife just played through Chrono Trigger for the first time, and I don't think she experienced the same level of emotions that I do on every re-run I play. Maybe that sense of wonder can't be shared between people on those same levels. Maybe she feels that same way when reading a new book. As I have gotten older, I also understand that a game has a finite limit of characters, levels, weapons, and spells. Programmers and artists are human, after all. I understand that my journey will end after 10 hours. When I was a kid, a game could have taken a month to complete, and knowing that the end was so far out was something that is hard to relive now that I am an adult.

Another recent bit of wonder I have experienced is Japanese. When I first started learning the language, even the most basic kana symbols gave that same sense of wonder. あかさたなはまやらわ. There were over 2000 kanji I needed to know. They could have meant anything!! Japanese also reminded me of a game - each individual kanji could represent a specific statistic on a menu screen in old japanese RPGs. Your player could have 強　薬　魔　勇　知. Each kanji had this complexity and beauty and they all represent something so powerful and rich and wonderful.

After learning the language for 4 years, I still felt that way. I had over 1300 kanji to learn, and that was just to know "everyday kanji". One day, I decided to simply write down the meanings of all the kanji I didn't know still from the first 2000. It was a little overwhelming at first, but the more I did it the easier it became. And slowly, one by one, my wonder melted away. I realized that the rest of the kanji were either concepts that I'd already covered, simple verbs, or worse - names. By the time I finished the last one, there was no wonder left. There was really no excitement, either. All of the kanji were things and simple concepts that someone from ancient China would need to know. No magic words, no secrets, no wonder, mystery, excitement. Bummer. I did run across 衡 which is a kanji I adore greatly. It means equilibrium.

As a game developer, it would be wise to figure out how to create a game full of wonder and mystery and excitement. Gamers have an expectation to have magic and power in a game. They want to see space flight; levitation; ability to bend rules of physics, spacetime, mathematics, and art. They want to leave a mark on the world they are exploring. They want to meet characters. They want to live in this world that is not at all like the real world. Even more, they want to do it while interacting with other people online at the same time. How is this going to be possible? Do we design that feeling and that wonder into the game? Can a game even be made with that much emotion and feeling and power? No wonder games like this are rare :)

I will think this over. I look forward to the day I have the confidence to break away from the emotions and feelings and create something breathtaking and amazing.

The Problem with America

Might as well string me up right now and get it over with. I'm going to criticize America and there is nothing you can do about it. I'm going to say some terrible things about the way the government is run, how ignorant the public is, and somethings that are just plain wrong with the country I grew up in. By the end of my letter, pitchfork futures will skyrocket. It's one hell of a country, after all.

Since this is the internet, I might as well put a disclaimer right up front:

tl;dr, some guy said a bunch of true yet uncomfortable things with ways to remedy our country's unrest, failing economy, and political system.

Also, I don't mind putting my real name on this post. I'm not affiliated with any political party, and frankly it shouldn't matter one way or another. I am a citizen that wants something different to happen. I'm educated. I'm better off than most. Some of you are already quaking in your boots because that is a dangerous combination of traits to have.

I think this all started late one night when Sarah Palin was being featured for some comments she made on Fox News being shown on The Daily Show. That sort of thing happens all of the time. I finally got fed up with it. It was the kind of quote that makes people on the left facepalm and people on the right all giddy. It was the kind of quote where the next day, people on the right always say "you liberals are scared of Sarah Palin because she is such a strong independent thinker!"

So I began to think about why I really don't like Mrs. Palin, and the answer was incredibly complicated. I don't hate her because she is beautiful, I don't hate her because of what she says. In fact, I don't think I "hate" her at all. She just makes me uncomfortable, that's all. The thought that millions of people hang on her every word and think she is some great speaker and thinker? That's discomfort. When she completely contradicts herself and then lies about her opponents? That's discomfort. When she invents some new meaning for a word like "fungible" and that becomes the topic for debate for over an hour on CNN? That's discomfort.

When I was a kid, we used to watch the Miss America pageant every year. I never understood why Miss Montana never made it to the round of 10. She was just as talented playing her French Horn as Miss Nevada! There would be that talent competition, she would wear a pretty nightgown and walk around to connect a few stars marked on the stage floor, then later in the evening the ladies would do the same thing only this time in skimpy bikinis. Isn't America a great country afterall? They would then whittle the group down to five or three, and the host would ask them some profound question about world peace or international politics and she would fumble around until a little bell would ring by the judges. At the very end, the judges would decide that Miss California was going to be this year's Miss America. She was awarded a bright diamond-encrusted crown and a bag of fresh-cut roses. That would be the last I heard of her until the next years pageant when she got a 15 minute cut-away about her help with mentally handicapped cancer patients during one of the wardrobe changes.

Before I go back to my main point, let's talk about world peace for a second. "World Peace" is a very complicated topic. For tens of thousands of years, humans have survived and evolved because of their fighting nature between tribes. Even though humanity has conquered every square inch of land on this planet, they still live with tribal mentality that demonizes outsiders and protects insiders. England and France, Israel and Palestine, China and Japan all have fought wars because they could not get along. And those people are very similar! Just different land and language disputes, different religions, and different trade policies. Until the entire world homogenizes (which will never ever ever happen unless the number of humans drastically reduces) there will always be fighting and wars.

But, if Miss America spouted off an answer that had anything to do with that, the audience would fall asleep, or would be branded as some person who doesn't think world peace is even possible! We can't have a winner thinking like that, now can we. Even a more classic example is Miss Teen South Carolina a few years ago talking about children not having enough maps. We only care about her image, not her substance.

That brings us back to Sarah Palin. Whenever she speaks, she produces a feel-good answer that never addresses the underlying issues with the topic at hand. Energy policy? Drill, baby, drill. Government regulation? Socialism. The list goes on and on. She never actually discusses her policy positions about these things. They are all one-thought buzz-phrases designed and carefully crafted to elicit certain responses from her audience. She does not need to critically analyze any of these important policy positions because if she did, her audience would fall asleep. This is why I don't like Sarah Palin. She is a beauty pageant contestant who gets a lot of airtime for her softball responses to questions we need to be having a true dialog on in this country. As John Stewart best put it, we don't like Sarah Palin because of "the ... Nothing".

If this post was just about her, I could end now. Unfortunately, she has become such a big distraction that we forget that there are much more pressing issues to be discussed. This is the part of the post where I start sounding like a crazy conspirator socialist, that the Bildenburger group and the Circle of 3 with Lizard People are going to take over the world. Or not, if you actually feel like something needs to be done with the economy.

We have a big budget crisis in this country where the federal government is $13,000,000,000,000 dollars in the red, states are in a similar situation, and even the everyday Joe has to borrow to make ends meet. It sounds like a terrible situation because IT IS. But, there is a totally other side to this that never gets talked about that would solve all of the problems almost instantly, given the right policy.

It's not like that money just disappeared out of thin air. The money is kept very safely and very secure by private citizens in private banks. Whenever somebody needs a loan, one of these rich people gives out a small amount of money (which nowadays is just an electronic record, not actual riches or dollar bills) and over time the person who borrowed is expected to give back all of that money plus some small percentage. What does that mean? The rich are, well, getting richer. There is more money being funneled into private banks and private accounts.

So here is where I get all conspiracy-y. There is plenty of money in the banks and private accounts to completely take care of the debt and economic crisis. Back in the 1950s, people that made more than $400,000 had to give 90% and more of their income in taxes to the government. Now, with some cute accounting, that amount is as low as 15% no matter how many millions or billions you make. No politician would ever want to take the political hit (or the money hit from his donors) to write some law that makes the people that have money give some of it back to the government, or the people who really need it to survive. Are you following me?

If the government took over the banks, all of the debts would be paid off instantly. So why don't we?

Too much money. We only elect politicians we know about. If you've ever traveled to a country where you didn't understand the language, you have no idea what stores sell what products. If you watch TV in those countries, you might catch a commercial for some restaurant - and now when you're on the street, you'll start to recognize those restaurants! Advertising is fabulous that way. But, in America, it's working against us because the things that are being advertised are not always good for us. We could easily elect a completely new set of senators, representatives, and executives that would do this dirty work for us, but there is so much money being spent to make us think the politicians that are in power now are doing the right thing for us. What always happens? They promise the world, and when they get in power they do nothing. A few pen strokes is all it would take to fix everything wrong with this country, give us clean energy legislation, give us a great education system, research tons of new medicines and cures for desease. So why doesn't this happen?

Too much money. Banks don't want to be taken over by the government. They are willing to spend a tiny percentage of a fraction of their operating budget making sure the candidate in your district gets a lot of advertising so he gets elected. His vote is guaranteed to go against any "take over the banks" bill.

Too much money. Big pharmaceutical companies want to make sure they don't have any competition. Did you ever notice how a lot of these pills don't really cure anything, but just treat symptoms? If the government was spending billions to research and develop real cures for things, these big pharmaceutical companies would really take a hit to their bottom line. They are willing to spend a tiny percentage of their money to make sure the candidate in your district gets a lot of advertising so he gets elected. His vote is guaranteed to go against any "have the government spend money curing things pills just treat symptoms for" bill.

Too much money. Big oil companies want to make sure they don't have any competition with electric/solar powered transportation. Why do we still use so much gasoline even if we are positive it is bad for the environment and costs us hundreds of billions a year? If the government was spending billions to research and develop new technologies for energy, oil companies would lose a lot of profit. They are willing to spend a tiny percentage of their money to make sure the candidate in your district gets a lot of advertising so he gets elected. His vote is guaranteed to go against any "research alternative fuels and get us off big oil" bill.

The list goes on and on. Did you ever wonder why we have so much corn in this country, even though there are way more healthy alternatives around? The government gives billions to the farming industry, which turns around and spends it where? You guessed it, to make sure that politicians get elected that will keep giving money to their cause. It's brilliant and so simple. Greed is greed is greed.

The problem is compounded by media companies that only show us non-stories (what pretty white girl was tortured/raped/murdered and in what island nation this year?); they prop up people like Sarah Palin even though she is not going to answer to any of these big issues. We have beautiful distractions like YouTube, Facebook, Monday Night Football and Antiques Roadshow. If any real politician ever spoke out and asked to nationalize the banking system to fix any problems I just talked about, they would be branded a socialist, compared to Hitler, and a significant amount of money would go into his district in the next election cycle to get rid of him. It's a terrible cycle.

So what can we do about it? We have the internet, the most brilliant tool mankind has ever created. But, the vast majority of people have such a small attention span that it's not going to help our cause. Even if Uncle Joe sends you to a webpage to support the perfect candidate, you are going to be bombarded with advertisements of A-tier candidates that say the support everything and the moon and you will see his ad on TV, in the newspapers, in the sidebars of your favorite websites, and more. It is incredibly difficult to mobilize an entire district to elect just one member to the house if he doesn't have any name recognition.

That is all. Good luck, America.

aliens, republicans and consciousness

I want to type more, but my arms hurt from typing the other two posts. I feel like this is a great place to complain about my life, about everything in my life and the people that piss me off, etc. As I'm typing this I feel like people are looking at my screen, thinking I'm doing something important with the ever-so-loud clacking of the keyboard keys.

I must be reaching an equilibrium with all of this typing today. All of a sudden I just feel like nothing else was in my head that desperately needed to get out.

Ok, just bit the last of my fingernails off.

I just want to learn more japanese, have some real friends, discuss computer simulation and have a sweet AI simulation to think about, be good on the piano and with other instruments, be able to draw, be able to read, while all at the same time love my job, love my wife, be happy with every breath of fresh air that enters my lungs and go on with my life knowing that every step of the way something great is going to come from just being.

And we know that some utopian society never works, greed and humanity just always get in the way of it. As I type that last sentence, I can't stop thinking about how much I hate republicans, how much their lying and corruption is destroying the country and the environment, how the economy would have been so much better off if Ronald Reagan would have never existed at all. It's a frustrating sort of life, one that reminds you every moment that if I just believed in something different or if I were just born in a different part of the globe, everything would have been alright. But then I remember that people over there have even worse problems. Maybe aliens have the same problems with democracy and politics on their home planets, too. They must be. Unless some of them had lobotomies at very young ages those aliens have the same greed and guilt and hatred that humans do.

another post

I can write and write and write, but without any direction does it really matter? It's not like i have a bunch of notecards in front of me laying out some structure to the words, they just leave my fingers.

And it's sad. Really. I can barely read a book and understand. Along with this, I have listened to a lot of songs and had small visions of the content of the lyrics. Unfortunately for me, my wife points out something like "this song must really be the internal struggle for the singer at the time of his mother's death" and i go HOLY SHIT I DIDN'T THINK OF THAT AT ALL!!!!!! that's the kind of world I live in. When i was in school, i was the smart kid. Now that I'm not in school, I have trouble performing to the level that others want me to. Fuck, even now I'm starting to swear and get all beligerant-like. I can't spell when the red lines are turned off, I don't really care at all. It's unbelievable that this is the type of sentences that come out of my fingers because if you were trying to read and comprehend any of this nonsense you'd say to yourself holy cow that is one upset and angry individual. blah.

I've typed so much in the last twenty minutes that I feel like my hands are about to explode. Fire and smoke, little green plastic toys erupting out of my metacarpels. You'd have to be in one of my physics classes from college in order to understand that.

So lets talk about perspective just a little bit because it is oh-so important but its a topic that never comes up in american life. People are too concerned with the physical objects they have and don't have (more importantly the ones they don't have) and so they fail to see that they have so many things already. Don't care, too hard, will type about later.

I have tried really hard not to chew my fingernails. It's like the hardest habit ever to break. I tried not chewing them for almost a full week. My fingernails were long and unsightly (to me). I tried filing them, clipping them, anything. But then the stresses build up in my life. I go in for the kill. I start on one little corner and just barely sink my teeth into them. It feels so amazing. I rip it slightly, just one little piece won't hurt. It creates a few more places to rip off and bite. The tip of my fingernail is now rough and unruly. It must be bitten off. I then start to chew the dead skin around my fingernails, ripping it into the quick and blood. New flaps develop and the process goes on until my fingertips are bloody, barren. No fingernails left to chew on any finger. I then pick away at any loose skin on the fingertips at all, and it doesn't matter if they are bleeding out everywhere.

I feel like I just want to talk and talk and talk all the time but i have no audience. I sit in my office and don't say a word unless people talk to me. I am an intellectual with a whole pile of topics to talk about and words to use. But people don't care, people would rather tell me about some dumb movie or tv show they had the privilage of watching the night before. I never felt like talking about these things because they do not represent me in any way. People ask me questions about japanese or the books I read or TV shows I watch. I have no idea what to say. I'll say something simple, something dumb. Barely scratch the surface of my thing. They MUST interject with the most incoherent first thing that enters their minds. OH MY GOD DID YOU SEE AMERICAN IDOL LAST NIGHT THAT GUY FROM THE PHILIPPINES SAID THAT THING AND HOLY CRAP WASN'T IT SOOO FUNNY!??! I hate my life most of the time.

People ask me questions about the sad state of the world. I don't know how to respond ever. I feel like the top percent of people have simply stolen all of the money, whether or not through "legal" means or not. It's not like people that legitly use capitalism to get their money are actually bad people, for instance Bill Gates, he has decided that there is no need for one individual to have so much money so he gives away billions upon billions of his money every year to people that truly need it. But greed and security with money seem to ruin the world for everyone who does not have any. People with nothing are demonized for being greedy, people with everything do everything they can to make sure they do not lose anything. There is no transparency to the way this works. It sucks. The rich get upset when they lose some insignificant percentage of their money. The poor live the burden of not having anything to give away in the first place. No justice, no equality. Just greed and unhappiness.

Here is the part of the blog where I type in a voice i don't usually have. It takes a few paragraphs over a few pages to get into that mindset. In the beginning, it's just about how i feel, how i don't have the emotion i want or the world's impact on my own ego. But then down the page something really changes, my emotions give up and only the sight remains. I feel like killing people is the only real solution, but bulletproof vests and bodyguards always get in the way. Is this not how entropy works in the first place anyway? Only a few can succeed. There is no future for the rest.

But lets talk about the rest, shall we. I drove through Wisconsin over the weekend and it was one of the most horrific visions I have ever had in my entire life. Everywhere around me walked people who were 300lbs or more. They look like cattle, and for good measure. They are loaded with cattle growth hormones! No wonder humans look that way. They eat and eat, the food they eat is laced with chemicals that makes them want to constantly eat more. They are told they just need to watch what they eat, they need to exercise a piddly 30 minutes a day. That is impossible to follow; people live in a world of instant success and instant gratification. There is no way people can follow a regimine of eating proper and exercising proper for six months to a year. Try it yourself, unless it is some serious lifestyle change and routine, it is impossible.

But that never matters, there are pills for everything. Are you a sick disgusting blog of a person? Try the new Califragilax now in suppository form. It will make you shit pure oil and eliminate your diabetes. Why eat less or exercise when you could just ask your doctor to make you take some fucking pill instead. From the makers of Widgipulfrilax for men.

My profession makes me hypocritical, too. I want nothing more for people to leave their houses, put down their shining screens, leave their greed behind. But no, in my day job I try my hardest to figure out how to make people want to sit on a couch staring at one of these screens for as long as possible. It is impossible to deny. But since i fail at that, i fail at life. This is like the most depressing blog post of all time.

start of something fresh

I needed a new place to put my ideas down. Someday somebody is going to type in the name "self synopsis" and be frustrated that they cannot have this space for their own. That's life on the internet these days, once you have a good idea you are always sad to find out somebody else has thought of it first.

I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing with my life at this point. I've been studying japanese for years, am a professional game programmer, make a great living in Chicago, married to a wonderful woman who loves me and pushes me forward every day. My life is full.

But it sucks.

I have to live every day worrying about the fate of the planet, I watch in horror as humans maim and kill each other over the dumbest of things. I feel like my entire life is some referrendum where I watch insanity defeat normalcy. I was fortunate to be born into an upper-middle class family in Montana. My thoughts are random, my ideas are random. My creativity has taken a backseat because of all the shit that goes on in the world. It's chaos, it has always been chaos.

But now I'm just typing to get some of these words out of my head. I feel like it has been innundated with so many different concepts and musts that now I'm stuck creating a blog so I can have a little piece of privacy! amazing. I don't care if anybody on my facebook can read this, I don't care if anybody on my facebook even survives to the end of the decade. I am a bitter sociopath with no need for 90% of the rest of humanity.

My wife challenged me to think if I would remain sane if I didn't interact with humans for a full three years. She likes to challenge me. I hate it. It makes me completely uncomfortable. And that thought there tells me that maybe I would be ok alone for that period of time. As long as I had regular food to eat, I wouldn't be stressed out by all of the other problems that face my world. Of course, I'd probably be concerned about wild animals trying to eat my face. It's that sort of terrible place out there.

I like the freedom and free-flowing ability that a blog gives me, I haven't typed anything up like this in years. Before it was always about religion or politics, homosexuality or drugs. I can't control what thoughts leave my fingertips and their polished black aoeuhtns layout.

Back to the imagination thing because that has been on my mind constantly. I was very content not knowing my flaws, but my wife has a way of getting me to notice them, no matter how uncomfortable they are. The big issues that seem to get me in trouble nowdays are my creativity, my left-brained world (and thus lack of a right-brain), my inability to comprehend anything in a book, and thus any problem relating to my inability to imagine things with that ol' right-brain of mine. I've been trying to blame its imperfection on a playground incident from 23 years ago where a horse-shaped swing slammed into my right temple with two kids riding it. Close range. I remember the incident so well, but my head has never been the same. People tell me that my head is smaller than the rest of my body, I have the worst headaches (on the left-side of my head of course) and whenever i close my eyes to imagine things it's just dark outlines that go away after a fraction of a second.

I tried today to draw with my left hand, but the images were scary, barely visible, just stark strokes of a crazy person on white paper. In the end the images somewhat resembled what I was going for but not at all what they would for someone who knows what the fuck is going on. Maybe the more I do that the better I will become. I can tell you already that writing this online has made me feel a lot better about myself, even if i am the only person on the planet that knows it exists and will ever go to check it (and never read it again, because i love the stream of consciousness thing that is going on right now.)

with the Dvorak keyboard layout you can type really fast as well, and with very very few mistakes. Only when i start thinking about mistakes do i make them. My fingers flow over the keyboard like the soft ...... ERRURRRERRE see i can't even come up with a valid analogy for that picture. It's not like soft creamy icecream cream that a wind surfer would surf over. Now that's brilliant writing right there. fuck my life.