Author Archives: Alan V
Meme: KoL and board games
There was a Pittsburgh marathon a while ago. I failed to post photos from that. Here’s a Chris and bblum.
Continuing meme topics, we have KoL and board games.
With most video games, I tend to go through phases of obsession followed by periods of general disinterest (and, if they have enough social pull, I go back to being obsessed). I went through this with PSO, and I go through this with KoL.
KoL, as a game, is awesome, but extremely repetitive (much like PSO, actually)… once you get reasonably good at the game, you just do the same few things over and over every 5 or 6 days. But a couple things make it worthwhile… first is that the devs are extremely involved in the game and therefore new updates (or world events) happen fairly frequently. These are usually extremely fun and interesting and break up the normal grind of the game. And there are also seasonal challenge paths which change the core of the game (either slightly or drastically, depending on the path). And those are always pretty awesome.
Second, it’s always fun to talk to people about the game. My periods of inactivity in KoL roughly correspond to times when I know people that play. For example, I played a lot in undergrad when most of the housing group played (at least casually). And I play a lot more now since I know a few people that play (and talk to them about new paths and items pretty regularly).
I suppose sometimes the world events bother me though, because I somehow feel obligated to participate or I’ll miss a one-time item. I was burned out of the game back when they released the Haunted Sorority House clan dungeon for Halloween, and somehow forced myself to finish the run I was in and get some dungeons completed. In retrospect, I’m glad I did, because there were a bunch of awesome things that can no longer be obtained, but that probably just reinforces the requirement that I play when I sometimes don’t want to. That’s the downside of having invested so much time (and real-life money in the form of donations) into a game, I suppose.
But in general, I think KoL is pretty awesome. It also limits the number of turns you have per day, which means I don’t have to obsess over it and spend as much time as possible playing.
I think I’m approaching a period of inactivity again in the game, since the new challenge path isn’t too appealing to me and I’m going to be out of the country for a month. But it was still fun.
Board games are one of those things I wasn’t really into before college. The group of friends I lived with liked board games, and they were fun, and I liked being social, so I kind of got into board games. (In high school, I was much more about video games, but those seem to hold little to no appeal to me now.)
I suppose they’re good because they involve a lot of social interaction and are (usually) short (so you can play a lot of different games in one sitting) and there are so many options so you’ll always find something that you like.
With the absence of Tim, I’ve been trying to build up a meager board game collection so I can have people over to play them. It’s unfortunate most of the good ones are so expensive.
I’m not sure that I really have a preferred type of game, or even a favorite one. If you count card games as board games, then I generally am a fan of TCGs (creating and collecting and playing). But as far as actual board games, I’ll play anything from quick pointless games (Pokemon dice game!) to long strategy games (Through the Ages) and enjoy pretty much everything inbetween.
Meme: The Tartan
The year is a third over, which means life has been updated both with new photo stats and with new main life updates. Yay.
Continuing Jess’ meme topics for me, we have The Tartan, CMU’s student newspaper.
The Tartan is one of those things I wish I had done in undergrad, because it’s just *fun*. I had previously tried joining their photo staff during an activities fair my freshman year, but no one ever emailed me or anything, so I joined The Thistle (yearbook) instead.
After I moved back to Pittsburgh, it came time to put together the Orientation issue of The Tartan. Not having much to do on weekends, I tagged along with Greg to help lay out the pages. We pulled some crazy hours (finishing and sending pages to the printer as the sun was rising), but got it done, and I was kind of hooked.
After that, with permission from the editor-in-chief and publisher, I joined the staff mostly to do layout. At some point, I got copy certified and started doing copy editing as well. And at some point I submitted some photos (because they needed last-minute ones and I happened to have some on me), so I kind of joined photo staff as well. I wrote one opinion piece last Carnival on the new hardhat requirement, so I guess the only thing I haven’t done for the paper is ads-related things. And apparently, they like me, because they gave me the title of senior staff.
I think the best part of The Tartan is the people. It’s not a social organization, because everyone is there to get things done and everyone has a job to do, but sometimes it feels like it’s as much about being around awesome people as actually producing a paper. And you pick up a lot of good skills too. (And, if you’re still in school, it’s excellent stuff to put on your resume.)
Not really sure what else to say about it.
Meme: Social Media
There’s a meme going around where someone gives you 7 topics to write about. I’ve been neglecting the ones Jess gave me a while back, so I suppose I should actually write something on them.
“Social media” is a vague term. I guess it generally refers to the collection of websites where users make the content and provide information (Twitter, Facebook status updates, forums, reddit, etc), so that’s how I’ll deal with it here.
Social media is one of those things that bothers me more than it should. Most people reading this are probably aware that I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts last September after being disturbed by the things I was reading about Facebook online.
And that’s probably the first thing that bothers me about it: it concentrates information in the hands of a few big companies, and you are at their mercy as to what happens with that information. There’s a reason I maintain my own journal, hosted on a website by a webhost I pay. There’s a reason I dump my photos to my own website. I am uncomfortable with the idea that some corporate entity somehow holds this information and that it could disappear at any time. (Yes, I have backups. Yes, I know anything public on the internet can be mined and extracted and archived anyway. But it still feels different.)
After deleting my accounts, it occurred to me that my interactions with people, while being less frequent, were more meaningful. It’s not interesting to read 140-character updates from someone 50 times a day, or to read status updates about mundane things. And it seems more and more that these superficial means of interaction are replacing long-form writing (journal posts, letters, meaningful email conversations).
Maybe I’m just a curmudgeonly old guy, but I really miss back when people wrote long, meaningful entries in personal blogs (or used LJ or even Xanga). I don’t really need to know when a particular person is eating or where they are eating or what they’re eating. But a well-written post afterward about the restaurant, the food, the service… that’s something interesting.
So I guess, as a whole, social media is making it easier to share *everything*, and I’m not convinced that’s a good thing.
Still, there’s something I do miss from when I participated in these websites, but they’re more a result of people moving toward them than the sites themselves: It is now nearly impossible for me to reach certain people. Emails seem to be rarely read nowadays, resulting in responses a month or so after the email, rather than near-instantaneous with things like Facebook. IM is used far less often (or not at all by many people). Phone conversations also seem to be dying out (and texting isn’t always a feasible alternative). As a direct result, planning events (or getting invited to events) has become far more difficult; it’s now nearly impossible for me to try and meet up with some people when I fly back to California or Arizona, because I simply can’t get in touch with them in a timely manner.
I suppose there’s also a weird effect on news reporting that I’ve been noticing more since I’ve been with The Tartan (a topic for another update). People not only can’t tell the difference between news and opinion anymore, they also can’t seem to recognize bias (or, really, even care about bias) in articles.
In my opinion, this is a result of the way information is shared nowadays (which relates back to social media)… when it is so easy for people to share information, people will share everything, resulting in a huge amount of information to wade through to get anything relevant out. When information is shared in tiny snippets instead of longer, meaningful articles, people get less information out of them. When articles are read through social sharing rather than by sitting down and getting the news from a reputable site (or a collection of known RSS feeds), it leads to a tendency to treat everything as fact (or, at least, equate articles written by the New York Times with articles posted to Queerty).
Additionally, when news propogates down a social graph, each node introduces its own level of bias. Imagine discovering an article on the NYT on your own, versus being linked to it with a note “OMG can you believe they’re doing this?!” Imagine seeing multiple comments below the shared link in agreement. You’re biased against the article even before you have seen it, and resharing only serves to exacerbate this effect. (There’s an excellent example of this in a Tartan article a couple weeks back where it was primarily shared on Facebook, resulting in an overblown and wholly underdeserved backlash as the article was interpreted as an officially-sanctioned attack rather than a general opinion piece. But I have already ranted about that separately.)
So social media helps spread more news faster, but it likewise leads to lots of misinformation.
I suppose this is turning into a bit of a rant, so I will leave off here.
Life and Booths
life has gotten an update bringing it to today.
The Celebrations expansion of People Wars has also been released. Yay more cards.
Booths have been happening all week. For some reason, I’m generally less interested in midway this year than previously. Which is still quite a lot of interest, but not as much as prior years (only about 1200 photos since Saturday, as opposed to previous years when I shot easily 1000 a day during Carnival week).
I think maybe the combination of being in Pittsburgh anyway, only taking tomorrow and Friday off (instead of the entire week), and having been through 6 previous Carnivals is making the entire thing seem less like a big deal.
Regardless, Ian gets here tonight (technically tomorrow), Tim and Kayleigh get here tomorrow, and Mars and Dan get here Friday, so there will soon be awesomeness with awesome people. Al-Tim has been here since Sunday.
Yay awesomeness.