Category: Angst

March 9, 2005 /

It occurs to me that I really don’t care about my GPA. This is literally the first time in my life, or at least in my living memory, I’ve been able to say that. I was always ashamed of my Cs in Handwriting, and since fourth grade I’ve been straining for As (and, since junior year of high school, usually getting Bs). Right now I want to get through my two classes, finish a project and graduate. All that matters is passing.

Of course, that project may be the lurker below. I had a solid setup with a professor at the beginning of the semester; it sounded like work I’d enjoy, and there was even compensation involved. All we had to do was wait for the company that wanted the code to sign off on the contract.

It’s March 10. Guess whether they’ve done so. Guess also whether the aforementioned professor appears to care, beyond a little guilt.

I’m going in tomorrow to talk to my advisor and find out what I need to do to get the DBCAC site approved as my final project. It’s for a nonprofit organization, and the work is easily as complicated as what I would have been doing otherwise; I’ll even write a paper about it if they want one. The quiet assumption is that MS students get a rubber stamp on their project requirement by building a professor’s resume, but I tried that and it didn’t happen. I’m not going to let someone else’s short attention span keep me here another semester. School has ceased to interest me, and I’m going to be finished in May, one way or another.

March 4, 2005 /

The "advantages" of paying with a bank account.

I get this every time I buy something with a PayPal button and change my funding source to be a credit card instead of my bank account. The advantage of paying with my credit card is obvious: I have a 20-day grace period to actually pony up the cash, while the thing I’m buying is shipped immediately. The disadvantage to PayPal is also obvious: electronic bank transfers cost them nothing; credit card usage requires a per-transaction merchant fee.

But it’s still sad that they’re trying to talk me out of using my credit card like this, and that their reasons are so flimsy. Look at that: it says “the benefits of paying with your bank account,” but none of those things are benefits. They’re implicit conditions of any reputable interweb transaction. I mean, “you’re still paying instantly and securely?” That’s not a benefit, that’s explicitly the same! And am I to assume that credit card payments are somehow delayed, or that they don’t keep my credit card information “safe and secure?” (Note also that “military-grade encryption,” historically, has not been that great a qualification.)

A-list? More like <i>F</i>-list! HA!

February 28, 2005 /

I was wondering when somebody would get around to this. Tycho weighs in about the sound and fury surrounding Jason Kottke’s idea that hey, people should donate lots of money to him so he can just do his “web log” all the time. Crucial to Tycho’s statement is the fact that, as I and all my cool friends know, webcomics have been doing the same thing for four years.

Yeah, yeah, bloggers are all USA Today thinks is important on the interweb, but some of us young rebels are actually into other kinds of sites! Nice lag time, new media.

“Gonzo” is another word for “bad”

February 21, 2005 /

My poor friends page and feeds page are all full of grief and sorrow. Fear not, bereaved hipsters! I know you’ll miss that guy who took a lot of drugs and helped you realize that editors are Satans, and also took a lot of drugs. But remember that you can still see him whenever you want: dancing, forever dancing, rendered almost as realistically as he was in his own writing.

February 18, 2005 /

I’m sick again, which I’m positive is against the rules. I only get sick once a year! Being sick is fired!

February 9, 2005 /

Addendum: I have officially quit reading The Well at the End of the World. I’m sorry, I just don’t have the strength. I really want to know where those entries in the dictionary came from, but there’s a reason I rarely read anything written before I was born (the reason is that I’m a terrible person).

Pipe Dream #sRAND()

January 28, 2005 /

I want to open a game-comic-bookstore with two attachments: a set of rooms with gridded tables and whiteboards, reservable cheaply for gaming or brainstorming meetings, and a coffee and sandwich shop. The place would be called The Purple Hippo, possibly.

Problems with this pipe dream:

  1. The Purple Hippo is not as funny a name as I thought it was in high school.
  2. I know jack shit about running a store, a coffee shop, or a business in general.

Shockingly enough, #2 is the sticking point for a lot of my pipe dreams. (I also have no capital, but I assume that’s implicit.)

In an oddly appropriate segue, I should probably talk about The Louisville Game Shop now. I was lucky enough to find out about TLGS before it opened, back in December, and I even managed (through dint of extreme endurance and sharp eyes) to show up at its grand opening. It’s got a great inventory, and its owner (Colin) is friendly and helpful. Almost painfully so.

I really, desperately want TLGS to succeed. I want it to draw in thousands of customers and ignite a latent gaming esprit de corps in the Highlands. I want Colin and his business partners (if any) to be rolling in filthy lucre. I want them to experience so much demand that they have to buy adjacent buildings. I want there to be a real game store in Louisville.

I’m aware that no link on the interweb is really one-way, so I assume that Colin will eventually read this, and I wanted to make sure I said that stuff first. Consider it a preface.

Because it really doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. The place has “Nice Guy Tries To Start A Business, Goes Bankrupt In Under A Year” written all over it. I try to patronize it whenever I can, and most of the time I’m the only customer there. When I came to the grand opening, they didn’t take credit cards yet; I hesitate to think how much that cost them. Like I said, there’s some excellent inventory–I bought my copy of Nobilis there–but it doesn’t look like any of it is moving. (This is also the situation at Great Escape, but that’s because their game inventory is crap and they make their money on comics and DVDs.)

I don’t have the money to even be a good regular customer at TLGS, much less support it entirely myself, as I’d like to. I find myself thinking of ways to give in-kind, as if it were a charity project–I can host your website! I’ll print flyers! The advertising for the store is pitiful, by the way. I found one flyer in an engineering buildings at U of L, and I think there was a half-page ad on the back of LEO once. There appears to be a little interweb buzz, but in Louisville that’s really not worth much.

Anyway. I’m going to be crushed when TLGS fails, as I’m pretty sure it will. And even though I can think of things they could be doing better (1: don’t put your shop on the first floor of a musty double-zoned house), I know that the same or worse would happen to me if I tried to start a business now.

But now is when I want to start a business, because I have only myself to risk. When I’m thirty-five and understand business better and have capital, I’ll probably also have a family of some kind to worry about; I won’t have the option of living on ramen noodles for a year, or whatever, if I fail.

PS As if I needed another reason to be bitter, Fourth Street Live is doing great!

January 21, 2005 /

Sumana, as often, prods me into deeper consideration of a topic–in this case, the aforementioned “Twixters:”

“I skimmed the article at a colleague’s request – she basically wanted to see whether I got enraged. My basic response: this should have been a one-page article containing the following points:

Rent as percentage of income has gone up tremendously in the past 30-50 years. It is harder and costlier to get health insurance at your job, especially at low-paying entry-level/part-time jobs, in the past 30-50 years. Thanks to rising college costs and the increasing perception that college is a necessary for a decent career, people in their twenties have way more debt now than did people in their twenties 30-50 years ago.

Ergo – the number of people who live with their parents goes up from 11% to 20% in 30 years.

There have always been families where grown children stayed in the house where they grew up, whether the kids were spoiled brats or not. In fact, in India and many non-industrialized countries, this is closer to the norm than to the exception.

Anyway. I just noticed the title of your Twixters entry. I automatically skipped the anecdotes in the article – probably some of them are babies or spoiled brats or cowering overgrown teens, and some of them are hardheaded pragmatic entrepreneurs, and some are pathological leeches. But the economics of the past 30-50 years point me towards, well, an economic explanation of this phenomenon.”

My response, plus reference-links:

“I agree with you on all points re: humans who move back into their parents’ homes after college. There are sound economic and social reasons for it, and in fact, growing up, it was what I always expected most other people to do (I became aware that I wouldn’t be doing so myself around age 12).

But I think the use of that statistic and the accompanying reasoning are largely unrelated to the author’s points; there’s a serious gap between that premise and his conclusions. Moving back home is not the same thing as ‘expensively educated, otherwise well-adjusted 23-year-old children… sobbing in their old bedrooms, paralyzed by indecision.’ In fact, not a single one of the people interviewed lives with his or her parents.

Part of my objection to the article is the author’s statement that ‘one way society defines an adult is as a person who is financially independent, with a family and a home,’ and his tacit refusal to consider other definitions–but I doubt he’d label a fortysomething couple, without children, living in an apartment in the city, as ‘twixters.’ I’d define an adult as a financially independent human who can handle responsibility. I joke about grad school as ‘putting off being a grownup,’ but in fact it’s nothing of the kind. I buy my own food and pay my own rent, work a white-collar job (albeit for absurdly low pay), invest time and money in building my job skills and carefully manage my debt. Why would owning a building or getting married before I was ready magically endow me with adulthood?

I also love the statements by people who are astounded that ‘everybody wants to find their soul mate now,’ or that twixters ‘expect a lot more from a job than a paycheck.’ Yeah, the conflict of choosing love or practicality in a marriage is COMPLETELY new! Not like it was a favorite topic of authors over a hundred years ago! And we all know that before 2002, nobody expected satisfaction or fulfillment from a JOB.

The rest of my objection–and the source of that post–comes from statements like those of Matt Swann, who is apparently bitter about this situation: ‘Oh, good, you’re smart. Unfortunately your productivity’s s___, so we’re going to have to fire you.’ Does ‘being smart’ mean taking six and a half years to get a bachelor’s degree (on one’s parents’ dime, I can only assume)? Before the 90s, did smart people have jobs where they didn’t have to produce? The title of the post came from the question ‘is it that they don’t want to grow up, or is it that the rest of society won’t let them?’ Great, now the people with ‘flat-screen TVs in their bedrooms and brand-new cars in the driveway’ are being Held Down By The Man.

I agree with you that your reduction contains the only worthwhile points in the article (or those that should have been in it, anyway). Making people like Swann out to be a) a mass phenomenon and b) deserving of pity is both irresponsible and incorrect. Implying that people my age are ‘huddled under [our] Star Wars comforters,’ without even anecdotal evidence for it, is worse. There’s no reason to write such material except as an excuse for the tongue-clucking condescension to young adults in which small, bitter members of older generations have long taken joy.”