Category Archives: Essays

This is a very boring name for me writing about the stuff that’s on my mind. I strive to make the essays more interesting than the word “essays” and this description.

Essays

Muting, And Why I’m a Selfish Twitterer

Twitter has a mute function, and I use it rather indiscriminately. I’m kind of selfish that way. Life is short, and while there are thousands of people willing to listen to me (a happy accident no doubt related to how I earn my keep) I don’t have the time to listen to each and every one of them.

But I have friends whose tweets I want to read, and with whom I want to converse. Publicly, even. I also enjoy interacting with random fans, assuming the interaction is a nice one. I especially enjoy interacting with interesting people, and learning new things.

Unfortunately, Twitter creates the illusion that we are right there in the room while our favorite entertainers banter with one another. The temptation to interject is strong. So we interject. I know, I’ve embarrassed myself doing this exact thing.

In the real world, walking up to a conversation and dropping a one-liner is a bit of a faux pas, and holding up your tablet to show everybody a video, even if it’s related, will get you shouldered out of the circle in short order. (I could tell you a story about that exact thing happening in a bar at Westercon, but then you’d want names, and the location of the body, and I may have already said too much.)

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that Twitter works similarly. Conversations are interesting to listen to, but we should take care before jumping into them with our two cents.

Sometimes I’ll invite all kinds of random input by putting a call out to “the Hivemind.” Recently I asked about Android devices, and got lots of good feedback. The only people I muted were the people who replied by telling me I should stick with the iPhone.

And that brings us to my criteria. Here are a few of the things that will likely earn a muting from me:

  • At-messaging me with unsolicited advice, especially medical advice
  • Tweeting unsolicited links at me
  • Tweeting a video link at me without telling me what it is I’d be watching
  • Answering a question by haranguing me about the context
  • Complaining about a joke I told
  • Not getting the joke, and replying with unsolicited medical advice, or a video link, or really anything
  • Complaining to me about something I retweeted
  • Trolling (sometimes this merits blocking)
  • Spamming (this usually merits blocking)
  • Tweeting at me a lot, especially in a short period of time, when we’re not actually having a conversation.

Does this sound selfish? It should, because it is selfish. But I haven’t listed the worst one yet:

  • Telling me a lame joke.

Jokes are everywhere, and while most people can find the easy punchline, it takes a lot of thought to reach beyond the low-hanging fruit and find something genuinely funny. And as I’ve said before, Twitter is the garden of low-hanging fruit.

Sometimes I’ll tell a joke on Twitter, reaching high into the tree for a good punchline, and somebody will reply at me with the low-hanging fruit that I reached past. Tweets like that correlate strongly with feeds full of underdeveloped jokes, and the desire to share them indiscriminately.

Muted. Life’s too short for me to listen to the same joke over and over.

(Note: if I’m ever guilty of these things, and that bugs you, by all means mute me. Or unfollow me. Because life’s short, and frankly, your time is worth as much to you as mine is to me.)

Essays, Journal

They Know What To Do, But You Have To Tell Them

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There was a minor medical emergency on Friday night at World Fantasy. I share my account of the events, and my role in the process, because the event pointed up the fact that some people don’t know how to respond to this sort of a problem.

I didn’t do very much, and anybody could have done what I did, but somebody should have done it ten minutes earlier.

I was engaged in a late-night conversation in the lobby bar when one of the bikers with whom we shared the hotel approached our group.

“You guys, man… you guys gotta take better care of your own.”

“I’m sorry, what’s wrong?” I was puzzled. He seemed frustrated and worried.

“One of your girls, she’s sick drunk outside. She needs her friends to take care of her.”

At this point I excused myself from the conversation, and strode quickly out the door and around the hedge to where we’ll-call-her-Jane was sitting slumped against one of the bikers.  A couple of other people from the biker event were standing close trying to wake her up and get her attention.

I read her name tag, leaned in (without touching her) and said “JANE, WAKE UP PLEASE.”

No response.

“I’ll be right back.” I strode into the hotel, marching with purpose to the front desk.

“There’s a woman on the bench outside, and she’s non-responsive. It looks like alcohol overdose.” (Note: I used the word “overdose” because I wanted to make sure they took the problem seriously — not because I have any medical training in the matter.)

That conversation was the point at which my involvement effectively ended. Hotel security arrived within seconds. They DID touch Jane, checking for a pulse, and attempting to roust her by loudly explaining that unless she answered them RIGHT NOW, they were going to have to call an ambulance.

They called an ambulance. Summing up, after an overnight in the hospital Jane was okay, but I didn’t see her back at the event until Sunday night. Apparently the alcohol didn’t agree with one of her medications. (See? Not an overdose. I was wrong!)

Here’s the salient point, the take-away for you, and for any convention-goer who finds themselves in a similar situation: HOTEL SECURITY KNOWS WHAT TO DO, BUT SOMEONE HAS TO TELL THEM THERE IS A PROBLEM.

When I returned to the group I’d been conversing with, they treated me as if I had done something amazing, like I performed CPR, or a field tracheotomy. Guys, I didn’t even call 911. I thought about it, then realized I didn’t know the address of the hotel. All I did was take ownership of the problem for just long enough to hand it off to the folks who knew how to solve it.

To be fair to the bikers, they probably see a lot of friends overdo the consumption, and they take care of those friends on their own. They’re a tight group, and they know each other. Still, the moment one of them realized that Jane was out cold, they should have called hotel security.

I’m an Eagle Scout. I can staunch bleeding, and feel for a pulse. I can do the Heimlich, and though my CPR skills are rusty, if I’m the only guy around who can do it, I’ll do all I can. But the critical skill in this particular situation, and in most of the convention medical emergencies I’m likely to run into, was the ability to speak clearly.

Oh, and the ability to decide to speak.

You can do this.

 

 

 

Essays, Journal, Reviews

Breaking the Borderlands

“Honey, I have a shotgun for you.”

I sent this message, and then I dropped the shotgun in question on the floor of the cave and awaited a reaction.

My 19-year-old daughter and I were wandering through the Zaford’s stash cave during the Clan War mission of Borderlands 2, so it’s totally okay for me to be giving my teenager a shotgun by throwing it on the floor of a cave. Video game shotguns can take a lot of abuse.

The color-code on this shotgun was orange, which meant it was from among the very rarest and most powerful class of items. When you see an orange item, you jump on it, so of course Kiki snatched it up, pulled up her inventory screen, and then messaged me back.

“Oh, Daddy. I love it.”

KikiGotAShotgun“Kiki” is my daughter’s online nickname, and by happy coincidence this particular weapon had flavor text associated with it : “Kiki got a shotgun.” When the player reloads the weapon, she will throw it, but instead of tumbling away and exploding like some other magical Borderlands video-game guns, this one will point itself at the nearest enemy and fly towards it, firing as it goes. The flavor text encourages you to imagine what it would look like if a witch on a broom had a shotgun. Oh, and when it flies away a new copy of the gun materializes in your hands, beamed there from your storage deck because video game science fiction is a lot like magic.

But that’s not really the salient point.

See, ultra-rare items show up in chests or loot drops with such tiny frequency that the average player might not see one at all during 20 hours of play. Most players spend dozens of hours grinding their characters up to high levels, and then gang-raiding boss monsters over and over in hopes of an orange drop. And even then, unless they’re doing this during the level-capped “Ultimate Vault Hunter” playthrough, the item is going to be several levels lower than they are. A low-level rare item doesn’t do much good against high-level enemies.

It is unusual, then, for someone to hand another player an ultra-rare item that is leveled perfectly for their character.

I’ve done it dozens of times, because I’m a filthy cheater.

See, from one perspective, the Borderlands games are all about finding new weapons, shields, grenades, and artifacts so your character can face higher-level enemies as you move through the game. Play runs like this: navigate through the level until there’s a fight, have the fight, then stop for five minutes and compare the loot drops to the things already in your inventory. In single player mode this is kind of fun for a while, but in multiplayer mode it quickly gets boring.

From my perspective, the Borderlands games are about teaming up with my kids to kill things in an imaginary world of endless violence, experimenting with play styles and team strategies while laughing at the things our characters say as they interact. Stopping every five minutes for loot comparison crimps the mirth. So I got my hands on an editing tool for our save files, and solved the problem.

The editor has a button that will bring all the items in my inventory up to my level, which means the super-cool stuff I found back during my level 10 slog is still super-cool when I’m level 35. It will let me duplicate items (I did not give Kiki my only copy of that shotgun), and I can even create items in my inventory—items that would exist legally in the game, but which I’ve not yet come across.

Better still, the editor will let me clone elements from one character’s save file and build a brand new character at whatever level or game stage I want, so that I can, for instance, jump online with my daughter and join her level 25 quest without grinding for eight hours to create a level 25 character first.

The Borderlands games do not have a difficulty setting. If they’re too difficult, you are expected to practice more, or grind for hours in order to find more effective weapons, and usually the player must do both. There are hard-core players who have done exactly this, and who have hundreds of hours of hard-fought game play invested in a single character who has lots of cool tools.

And I expect that some of those players resent the fact that people like me exist. I have a dozen different characters, and they ALL have cool tools, and while I also have over a hundred hours logged in the game, I certainly haven’t “earned” the collection of rare and ultra-rare items these characters field.

So what? When my daughter said “oh Daddy. I love this!” I felt like I had TOTALLY earned that moment. I also earned the four hours she and I and my youngest son got to spend together one Saturday, engaged in a quest that would have been eight levels too high for her, except I leveled a copy of her character and inventory from 25 to 32.

Kiki is coming home from school in a couple of weeks, and I suspect there will be lots of Borderlands mayhem spread across the screens in my house. There will be laughing and shrieking and cheering, and maybe we’ll pause for some loot comparison when something cool drops out of a boss piñata,  but whatever happens I’m looking forward to it, and I’ll have the editing tool handy in order to make sure that we all get to play the game we love.

(Dear “Rick’s Games Stuff”: thank you for creating Gibbed’s Borderlands 2 Save Editor, because family time beats the loot-laden snot out of frustration.)

 

Essays

Salt Lake Comic Con: Time for Big-Boy Pants and Postage Stamps

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The lines at Salt Lake Comic Con on Thursday were astounding. The turnout was absolutely amazing.

And appalling, because these lines were for picking up VIP and GOLD badges. If people wanted to just pay at the door and get into the show with a wrist-band, they could walk straight in, but tens of thousands of pre-registered attendees stood outside for hours waiting to pick up their badges. Meanwhile, thousands of vendors and presenters waited inside the building wondering where everybody was.

The problem is that Salt Lake Comic Con hoped to process 100,000-ish registrations in advance by having people come to  satellite locations for badge pick-up throughout Salt Lake and Utah Counties. These were open (and obviously under-utilized) on Monday, Tuesday, and  Wednesday.

Why didn’t it work? Because Salt Lake Comic Con expected customers to change their behavior. They expected these people to go out of their way, to make a special trip out just for badges.

Stupid.

Newbie mistake.

You don’t solve a problem of this scale by asking 100,000 people to act differently. You modify your OWN process so that their existing behavior becomes part of the solution. This is event management 101.

Put on big-boy pants, Salt Lake Comic Con, and do what the real conventions do: mail badges to people in advance. You’ve got tens of thousands of enthusiastic fans pre-registering with credit-card numbers. Collecting a mailing address during pre-reg is easy.

But how bad is the problem, really? Simply put, people who paid in advance for three days of convention will only get two days.

Dan Farr and the Salt Lake Comic Con organization know this.  If badges don’t go into the mail for the next show, Dan Farr knows that he’s taking a day of the convention away from tens of thousands of people whose money he took.

My real concern, though, is  whether the thousands of people who got turned away from entry after waiting in line all day Thursday will ever bother coming back.  This is the third time that Salt Lake Comic Con has failed to get paying attendees through the door in a timely manner.

I applaud folks like my friend Nick, who is their head of security, who scrambled on-site to make the most of a terrible situation. I’m pleased with the good behavior of the attendees who did make it inside, and who set aside their frustration and anger and enjoyed the show for the hour or two they were able to. I’m excited to be part of such a big, enthusiastic show. Of course, I was inside the building at 9am as a vendor, and by around 4pm I was seriously wondering where all the people were.