My knee hurts.

Hiking is a pretty dumb thing to do, I suppose.

It takes up the whole day. You've got to buy a decent pair of boots and a pack at the very least. Then you carry a bunch of weight up steep terrain for basically no reason. And no matter what, you always get a least a little sunburned.

So then what's the appeal? You're not proving anything to anybody by hauling some water bottles to a place that's been visited by so many people they decided to mark it as a trail. And there are better ways to get exercize that don't take up so much time and resources.

Of course, I should pause here to note that middle aged-old people have a set facination with the natural world. It starts around 40-50, when they begin watching the weather chanel as though it's a hit sitcom, and before you know it they're dragging all the children/grandchildren in sight to drive up into the mountains to "see the trees changing color." They're like Pokemon for the elderly.

For me, the important part of the hiking experience* is the sudden realization that this place, and in fact most of the natural world, really doesn't give a crap about me. It is full of things older and deeper than I will ever be, and whatever my problems, plans, or concerns, they are all laughably small.

*http://www.facebook.com/v/820698571370

You and your snoody Brittish spelling

Normally, Under Armour shirts are something I'd ignore completely.

Like energy drinks, titanium necklaces, and green M&M's*, Under Armor seems like just another athletic fad, bought into people who say they just like it, even though, deep down, you know they think it makes them run faster.

But when I joined up with a certain group of hard working volunteers, and found that members of "The Black" were singing the praises of Under Armour from all sides, I decided it was worth a try.

So I bought one of their shirts to use at PAX this year. Does it work?

No idea, haven't even put it on yet. That's not the important part.

As I clipped the tags off of my purchase, I realized that it doesn't matter if it really does keep me cool and dry while working the expo. The price of admission is covered completely by the little tag of ridiculous features the Under Armour people have attached to the product.

Let's take a look-

Anti-Microbial: Prevents growth of odor-causing microbes

Moisture Management: Moisture wicking keeps you dry, light and comfortable.

Ok, not so bad, that's what I'd understood about the shirt to begin with. I don't know if the product lives up to these claims, but they both seem reasonable enough.

Stretch & Recovery: Provides greater mobility and fabric recovery via lightweight materials with exceptional stretch.

WHAT DOES THIS STATEMENT MEAN?! I've read it like ten times now, I still have no idea! What are they trying to say, that their shirt is lighter, so it won't weigh me down as much as a regular shirt? Cause I'm pretty sure that my 100% cottons aren't exactly the limiting factor when I work out. Fabric recovery? What is that? Is the shirt really easy to find? I don't know! Explain yourself, Under Armour!

UPF 30+: Blocks 97% or more of the sun's harmful rays.

Yeah, ok, Under Armour man, we're not even to the bottom of the list, and you're already stretching to come up with new features. It's ok that you're stretching, though, since the shirt you've got on has excellent FABRIC RECOVERY.

But yeah, I guess the shirt does block out those rays from the sun, physical objects that I place over my body usually do. In fact, honestly, 97% seems a bit low.

Noise Reduction: Makes the garment exceptionally quiet so you can focus on your game.

Yeah, that's always happening. I can't tell you how many times I've missed a final shot in a basketball game because my shirt wouldn't shut the hell up. Typically, I can't even hear the sound of the ball bouncing on the floor over the terrible roar of cotton against my skin.

*I hope seeing this again gave you that dizzy form of nostalgia where you see something that's long been mentally filed away with stuff you dreamed once. I think about it nearly every time I eat M&M's, so ingrained was their marketing message.

Why?*

-I want to get employed in a highly technical field where my work produces some kind of potentially-dangerous waste product that has to be disposed of in a particular way. Why? So I can tell people "You're not even qualified to take out my GARBAGE!" and have it literally be true.

-I want to become very serious about the broadcasting industry, dedicating my time to becoming a great on screen personality, so that one day I'm finally working on a live national show. Why? So I can break from the script in my first appearance and tell the whole audience what a big jerk this one guy at my high school was.

-I want to write an elaborate set of fantasy fiction where cannons are referenced heavily. Then I want to get someone else to write an "extended universe" book about a particular, especially powerful cannon. I'll get him to title his book "The Cannon." Why? So geeks will have to argue about whether "The Cannon' cannon is cononical."

-I want to go to the wedding of someone I don't know, meet a whole bunch of their friends and family and hear stories about things they did. Then I'd do a fake testimonial on the wedding video, and reference all the fun things we did together, making sure to include the names of the people I'd met. Why? So they'd spend WEEKS trying to figure out who the heck I was.

*Because I'm a dork like that:)

"Art's aim"

Ever since my discovery that "hotel channels" can be interpreted as a circle of hell, I've been applying the principle to all forms of advertising, public service announcements, and any other corporate "sanitized" message.

The result? They're all far more compelling!

When you simply watch an ad, your brain is dragged down, grasping for significance at a production that has no real relevance.*

But when you attempt to view the whole thing as hell's sick puppet show, a dark punishment reserved for only the worst souls who are reconstituted as clean-faced model/actors . . . you flip the whole advertising paradigm on it's head! Suddenly their forced smiles and feigned indifference are merely thin masks hiding a web of desperation and regret.

The best are the little mailings I get from clothing stores. That guy who looks like he's effortlessly cool? He's not effortlessly cool, he's some ancient, ruthless warlord bound for eternity to pose on a couch and pretend like he doesn't care. But he cares. He cares a lot. And he wants OUT.

Go ahead, pull up the website of your favorite boutique and see what I mean.

It's a fun game, but there's an even better one for enjoying bad movies. Oh sure, you could go get the Rifftrax for a bad movie (in fact you probably should). But if you don't have the time, there's an easier way.

Just turn on the director commentary.

There's really nothing quite like listening to a human being defend their worst work. It's fascinating and hilarious at the same time. No matter how terrible the final product is, it seems like every director of a bad film considers himself a poor, misunderstood artist who's work is unfairly bashed.

Just once, I'd like to start up a commentary and hear the following:

"Ok, I'm gonna be honest, this thing is a steaming pile. It's the worst thing I've ever made. Sending it off to be reproduced was painful, and I'm sorry I brought it into the world. I'd like to use this opportunity to take you though the production and enumerate all the problems and mistakes along the way. Perhaps, if nothing else, this movie can serve as a warning to others."

*Drink Coke

Really more of a fluttering

A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon, they say, and it causes a hurricane half a world away. One tiny change can set off a series of events that culminate in a gigantic outcome.

It's a marker of human thought, I believe, that when we see a hurricane we blame a theoretical insect, rather than the warm, moist air that fuels it, the sunlight that warms the air, or the coreolis effect that starts the whole thing spinning.

For some reason, we love to blame all the little details that led to a thing, rather than the large-scale forces at work. The exception, of course, is when one of the large-scale forces involved is an entity that can be sued for money. Then the fault lies in exactly one place, the defendant.

Butterflies just don't have the bankroll your insurance company would like, nor the lifespan for a lengthy trial.

The "butterfly effect" bothers me, in the same way that the concepts of "fate," and "determinism,"* and even "everything happens for a reason" bother me. It all sounds an awful lot like surrender. If the world is out of our control, we've got an excuse to give up.

It's a marker of human thought, I believe, that the idea of being enslaved by causation is considered comforting, rather than terrifying.

*"Imagine all the events that led up to someone inventing determinism." Would people get that joke? Or is it too high-concept?

Salisbury Sadness

There's something inheriantly tradjic about a frozen dinner.

Frozen food is one thing, where the aim is purely to preserve. But a whole meal, fully constructed, mostly cooked, and held in stasis for highway transport . . . somehow that process is robbed of integrity.

Certainly, as a child, frozen dinners were an exciting prospect. Those rare nights when the parents were going out, and I was given license to roam that humming tundrant of the supermarket, choosing for myself what I would eat. I clearly remember the process, weighing the appeal of the main course with the quality of the desert. And then, microwave! No longer is it reserved for the making of popcorn!

But time brings perspective. Having tried the vast range of culinary options in the world, a frozen dinner no longer represents a fun choice. It represents a complete lack of effort.*

*Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go get some cereal.

Ooo-E, Ooo-ah-ah

If the water from your drains stopped suddenly, you wouldn't stand for it.

If the power in your house stayed on most of the time, but blinked off for a couple of minutes every half hour or so, you'd be on the phone to the power company in seconds.

If your cable tv sent images to you at a slow, jittery pace, you'd probably skip the phone, drive over to the local office, and simply bang on the door until someone made all the cooking shows come back.

And this is just one of many things that doesn't make sense about the internet. For some reason, we put up with way more from our home internet connections than we do from anything else that we pay for.

Has there ever been a utility where so much was tolerated by the customer? The only one I can think of is witch doctoring, a service where one claims to provide a conduit into the etheral netherworlds.

And that analogy holds up. We tolerate so much out of our cable and dsl because, like the shaman's cup of future-telling bones, the fact that it could work at all is pretty amazing.

All told, I think I'd prefer a witch doctor over Bell South or Charter. Regardless of how questionable his practices are or what strange rashes might develop from his remedies, at least I wouldn't have to stay on hold so a recording could take me through a long checklist of things that I already know aren't the problem. That process makes a little bloodletting look pretty good in terms of customer service.*

*"Hello, sir. Thank you for your patience as we diagnose this issue for you today. Our technician believes that your connection blinks are the result of tiny devils working in the phone line. We'll be sending someone out to purify the line, but in the mean time please disconnect your wireless router and wash it's aura with incense. Thank you for choosing SpiritNet."

Authoral Gaming, Part 1

So, I beat Fallout 3 the other day:

But then saying that I "beat" Fallout 3 is a bit like saying that, upon winning the World Series, I "beat" the game of baseball. While I certainly conqured the "main event" of Fallout 3, it is by no means over.

Fallout 3 is an "open world" game, a "go anywhere, do anything" approach to the medium. And as with other games of this type (the Grand Theft Auto series and Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, for example), the main quest of the game is just one of dozens that can be found and completed. Finding all this content across Fallout 3's vast nuclear wasteland is left entirely to the player.

You can get one side quest by talking to a shop owner. Another can be found by exploring an old jail and finding two kidnapped humans who need an escort home. Still another can be picked up by wandering through a certain section of the map, where a snall boy runs up and asks for help.

And all of these were things I didn't HAVE to do in "finishing" the game. They were optional goals that I could take or turn down.

Now what's interesting about this structure is that a number of people I know, even serious gamers, are completely befuddled by it. They experience a paralysis of options. When given the freedom to do anything, they don't know what to do, where to start.*

With open-world games, I think this phenomenon is an issue of character. More linear games do all sorts of subtle things to tell you who you're taking the role of:

Solid Snake is highly disciplined, but detached, and I know that because of the no-nonsense fighting style he employs. I do not have the option to dual-weild uzi's while playing as Snake because that's not who he is.

Chrono's father is not present, and he's not even referenced. Combined with Chrono's almost constant silence, I have to think that he's been deeply affected by whatever led to his family situation.

But in a game where full authorship of the character is turned over to the player, from personality characteristics to moral choices and right down to facial features, there's no place to start from. The paralysis comes not from having too many things to choose, but no way to know who this character is and, thus, what he would do.

It's a lot like picking a career.

*We have this in dancing too, it's called "West Coast Swing."

Putting my foot down

Some people claim to be "into nature."

Another way of putting that is "some people like to believe that nature is something besides what it really is, a teeming mass of bugs and gooey stuff and things that wish you'd die so they could eat you."

And I'm ok with that.

But I'm always a little surprised when someone tries to stop me from killing a bug inside my house. When did so many people adopt this "catch and release" program? We're not talking about some endangered species here. I'm not cutting down trees in my yard because I'm annoyed by a spotted owl living in it. This is just killing a spider or a cockroach, of which there are approximately 1.26 bajillion in the world. These are species that have been existing virtually as-is for millions of years. And you can bet they'll be crawling around when humanity has long been lost to nuclear war (which will be fought with weapons that those "nature" people should have been protesting, but they were too busy saving roach #129,385,203.939, 992.)

In short, I think the bugs will be just fine, no matter what I do.*

But then sometimes these people will come back at you with more ethical arguments. The most common ones are:

1. "Because he (the bug) didn't do anything to deserve being killed" - You can only kill animals that deserve it? So, like, if I see the cockroach cut another cockroach off, does that make it ok?

2. "Because bugs feel pain the same way as we do." - . . .

Only that's not true at all. Well, to be fair there's no way to tell for sure how animals feel. But the fact is that human beings have both highly evolved nervous systems and highly developed brains, much more advanced than any insect. I would submit that those evolutionary advancements allow us an incredible understanding of hurt.

Pull the leg off of a cockroach and it'll go scurrying off, probably capable of living the rest of it's life normally. Crack a person in the shin with a stick and he'll likely take several minutes before he can walk nomally again.

Of course there are plenty of animals that probably interpret injury on a near-human level. But it's just strange to think about . . . by developing a deeper sensory dialog with the world around us, we've also gotten an excuisite understanding of pain.

*And you know what? Really I'm helping them out. I'm encouraging the survival of bugs who DON'T like the indoors. It's like a cheetah going after the weakest deer in the herd. I'm just like that cheetah, fast and awesome.

The fifteen most common statements that precede the phrase "uh oh".

(Not that *immediately* precede it, mind you.)

"Yeah, that ought to hold it."

"Relax, I know what I'm doing."

"Faster!"

"Well it doesn't LOOK poisonous."

"Ok, just one more, and then I'm done."

"You can let go, I've got it."

"Well we should at least try it once."

"Alright, I'm pretty sure that's how it's supposed to go."

"Hey guys, come look at this!."

"You're just gonna have to force it."

"I'll bet I can eat thise whole thing by myself."

"Hang on, I can probably get it out of there."

"What's that sound?"

"Um . . . yeah, I think . . . I think I'm ok now."

"No way that will happen twice."*

*To be fair, many of these are said in conjunction with one another.