Five Words
The latest meme; glamoursnipe hit me with five words she associates with me, and below the cuts are what I think about them etc. If you want words, comment with WORDS - if you otherwise want to comment, fire away. And because I can, each one is illustrated with an icon!

Cut because it got long...

Gratuitous Sex & Violence - Ah, the lizard brain. I'm a geek who spends the vast majority of each day in front of a computer. As such I live inside my own head a lot, and prefer escapist fantasy to take me out of it. One of the joys of gratuitous sex and violence is that there's essentially no way to introduce it without turning your project into an escapist fantasy. Because that's more or less the definition of "gratuitous" - not essential to the story.

With that said, freeing oneself from the constraints of social correctness by introducing these gratuitous elements sometimes frees the creator up to make other interesting commentaries as well, and the best of these trashy tales gain from it. Russ Meyer is a prime example. Take Supervixens, in which every woman that appears on the screen seems instantly infatuated with the milquetoast everyman protagonist for no very good reason. This puts the women in the role of sexual conquistador - they're not being predatory ala most MILF porn, they're just being up front and direct about their desire to sleep with him, damn the consequences - and our red blooded all American man in the position of having to fend off these unwelcome advances. That sort of role reversal NEVER happens in mainstream Hollywood - well not never, per se, but when it does it's in drek like Disclosure, which basically just took a standard male boss harassing female underling scenario and flipped the genders without addressing the gender ROLES, which is disingenuous at best. And I don't care what anyone says - Faster Pussycat was the original Thelma & Louise.


Southern California - It was, I should state up front, never my intention to land here. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, spent a semester in Manhattan, and largely came of age in Portland, OR, during which time I met annamaryse. We together headed back to San Francisco when I got an offer for what has thus far turned out to be the best job of my checkered career, but the implosion of the dotcom industry, however inevitable it was even at the time and definitely in hindsight, made living there spectacularly unreasonable for anyone with a gross household income of less than six figures. As Anna was culturally a native to these parts, at her suggestion we relocated here.

As is true for many NorCal natives, my suspicion of life here was based on inaccurate assumptions that border on stereotypes. NorCal mostly thinks of LA as exclusively South Central (desperate slums where violence on the level of Kosovo is a daily fact of life) and the San Fernando Valley (acres and acres of McMansions broken only by the occasional glorified strip mall) - with Hollywood and Beverly Hills thrown in mostly for show, inaccessible to us "real" people. What I discovered after an exploratory mission was that life here is more akin to a Photoshop-expanded version of the Big Apple - different and distinct regions and neighborhoods on a grand scale. The business of show is without question the harsh mistress who controls the flow of life here, but it is surprisingly easy to adapt to this; "You can't deny the living is easy/If you never look behind the scenery," sings Bad Religion, and this is true both for worse AND for better.

I'm not honestly sure whether or not I've come to consider this "home" yet, but it's definitely been a place of success for me in a way that San Francisco, as an adult, never was.


Photography - I cannot draw.

This has been a source of intense frustration for me pretty much as far back as I can remember, not helped by the fact that my mother is actually a brilliant sketch artist. I have always lacked the particular combination of motor skill and patience necessary to do anything beyond an XKCD strip. This wouldn't be a problem if I had trended toward something like coding or plumbing or mechanics, but I've always been artistic - just without the skills of an artist to back it up. Photography, then, began to appeal to me because the limitations I suffer as an artist apply only to the preparatory stage; a sketch of the desired final output helps (unless you're insanely talented like visioluxus) but ultimately the only thing between the lens and the final piece is the world. I've an ear for music but cannot play; I've an eye for line, form, and color but cannot draw. No cure for the former yet exists, but photography is a neat end-run around the latter.

This is by no means to denigrate the photographer's art; there is a very particular skill set that goes into creating stunning photographs, which I've at best managed to stumble into from time to time, though I'd at least like to believe that after years of practice I'm getting a little more consistent with the stumbling. That said, while the concept of art without drawing is what first drew me to photography, what crystallized it for me was digital technology. The first composition (warning: nipples) of which I was ever really proud involved half a dozen pieces of software to come together. It's primitive, but I still look at it fondly from time to time.

For me photography is a combination of capturing a moment and making the impossible seem everyday. It's therefore likely unsurprising the the major influence I name is J.K. Potter, with at one time a touch of H.R. Giger thrown in for good measure, but these days he's more someone whose work I admire than an influence per se.


Star Wars - To some extent, fandom in at least one of two franchises is pretty much a given for the geeks of my generation. Obviously there are never only two kinds of people, but putting reality aside for a moment, there are two kinds of geeks in the world: Jedi and Trekkies. Trekkies are inherently optimistic of the human condition, believe that centralized order can civilize and improve the world, and value science and honor. Jedi are inherently suspicious of authority (perhaps ironic given the monolithic structure of the Jedi Order in the new movies, but that's an essay for another time), treat technology as a means rather than an end, and value loyalty and justice. Some could argue that the Trekkie view of the world is more mature; others that the Jedi view of the world is more realistic.

I don't wish to involve myself deeply in this debate. But when I was taken at the tender age of 3 to A New Hope (simply called Star Wars back then) it imprinted on me in a way that Star Trek simply did not, despite the daily ritual of watching reruns with my dad when he got home from work. It formed a common ground over which I bonded with the football players; it germinated the inklings of what would later become my particular brand of spirituality; it has better one-liners than even TOS.

Also it spawned a kick-ass boardgame to which I owe a not insignificant portion of my online social circle.


Video Games - This one, in many ways, was predestined. I grew up in Silicon Valley in the 80s, and the first job of my dad's of which I was really aware was...wait for it...with ATARI, the company that literally invented the domestic video games industry and in the heady days of the late 70s was going to take over the world ala Microsoft. Mine was a childhood filled with prototype cartridges and religious battles over whether Atari or Activision (employer of my best frenemy's forebearer) offered superior titles. My first major investment was a Sega Genesis; my first paid writing gig was as a freelance reviewer with GamePro Magazine; my first attempt to build a business was a website dedicated to Macintosh gaming. In an odd sort of way, my ability to walk into a store and walk out with a Sony Playstation was one of the first moments I actually felt like an adult. Indeed, the possibility of becoming a QA engineer for video game publisher THQ was part of the siren call that lured me down here.

The medium has always attracted me, and I even spent the obligatory geek summer hacking together a swords n sorcery dungeon crawl replete with classes, armor, weapons, and dragons. I've probably dropped the GDP of a developing nation into coin-ops in my day, and I relieve past glories and dooms alike via emulation. It's been utterly fascinating to me to watch the evolution of the medium, from the catch-as-catch-can early games to the establishment of distinct genres to the innovation of graphics to the almost accidental advent of story telling to the bizarre landscape we find today. If I had it to do over again, I'd probably find some way to make studying video games academically a career - it wasn't quite viable at the point when I was coming up in college.

The irony of course is that I'm not especially GOOD at video games; as I've mentioned, you can count without running out of toes the number of games I've actually, honestly beaten in all that time. But hey, what fun is life without an unattainable goal or two?