Digital Alterity

Iron Man is the best comic book movie to come out since Spider-Man. I’ll admit my bias right up front; Iron Man was one-third of my holy trinity of favorite comic characters as a kid, so I’m naturally predisposed toward absolute cinematic adoration. Nonetheless, both of the folks I watched the movie with (including my wife Allyson, who thinks that “Tony Stark is a penis.”) were raving about the film just as much as I was when we left the theatre.

Tony Stark is not an insecure teenager. He’s not a haunted knight out to avenge the phantoms of his loved ones. He’s not an idealist out to recreate a new better world. Tony is a genius who gets caught up in the military industrial complex and then tries to climb back out of the rabbit hole. Unlike Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark doesn’t have to play at being a billionaire playboy because he actually is an over-the-top billionaire playboy. This film is the perfect gateway into an Ultimates-style take on the Avengers — a possibility strongly hinted at in the post-credit epilogue with Nick Fury.

Robert Downey, Jr. is the perfect Tony Stark. I have been saying this ever since the initial casting announcement, and the film fully bears out my faith. If you were one of the doubters, prepare to be proven wrong.

I don’t really like special effects as done in most Hollywood films. Too often, they seem like strange additions to the narrative of the film just to amaze the people who are fans of said special effects. The effects in this movie, however, seemed like natural and integral pieces of the plot. Every one of Stark’s gadgets and aerial feats as Iron Man served to help paint a picture of the character without getting bogged down with a drawn out origin the way that nearly every superhero movie of this decade seems intent on.

Iron Man is an excellent movie. It’s sci-fi enough that even non-superhero fans will find something to love. And if you don’t love it, then you will break my heart. Because this movie made me squeal with unmitigated delight like a nine-year-old girl.

Just in case anyone reads the blog and wants to visit me in World of Warcraft, I figured I would include some character information. Introverted I may be, but I promise you I won’t bite if you want to send me a tell or an in-game message.

All characters are listed in order of the amount of time I usually play them. In additiona they’re all the US Garona server because that’s the server my friend Richard was on when I started the game.

1. Hemlock, Tauren Hunter. Hemlock is Beast Master spec for ease of leveling and pure pwnage. At this moment he’s around level 24, and I play him far more than any other character. Moo.
2. Barga, Orc Shaman. I started up this toon primarily because I had never been one of the hybrid classes and because I had been reading some of the Warcraft novels focusing on the orcs. Barga seems to be fun, but I’m not a big fan of running out of mana. I need to work on my skill rotation for questing, but that’s a level of committment I haven’t reached with this alt. I’m almost level 12 with this character after completing my fire totem shaman quest.
3. Hrok, Orc Rogue. When I get frustrated with my other characters, I log onto this character to kill things very quickly with lots of big numbers. He’s still hanging out in Razor Hill at level 10.
4. Marilyn, Human Priest. Marilyn used to be a holy-spec priest. I used to level her that way. It hurt. Now she’s full shadow and able to level pretty easily. I’m sure I’ll go back to Marilyn a bit eventually, but right now I’m enjoying the horde side so much that she’s likely to stay at 36 for a while.
5. Mugwort, Dwarf Warrior. I like Mugwort fair enough, but he’s not as fun as my other characters. I’m sure he’ll guilt me into taking him out of Wesfall eventually.

I’ve included links over to the Armory so that you can all look at my gear / talent builds and laugh.

When I got my brand new blindingly fast Mac Pro, I had a weekend by myself with the new computer. You see, Allyson was heading out of town with my mom and sister for a “girl’s night out” sort of deal, and that left me alone in the house with the fastest computer I have ever owned. I got all my software installed. I ripped a DVD or two to illustrate the raw speed I was dealing with. And then I did something almost unthinkably dangerous.

I re-installed World of Warcraft.

After checking in with my old characters, I fired up a new dwarven warrior, which I played while I chatted off and on with my friend Richard all that weekend. I played pretty much all weekend and had a great time. Unlike most people who leave MMORPGs, I had never really gotten frustrated or even bored with WoW. When I quit playing, it was primarily so that I could do other things with my time. Nonetheless, I was blown away by all the enhancements they had made in my absence, leveling via questing — which has always been one of the great successes of WoW — was even smoother and faster than I remembered. The server economy had really blossomed, allowing even low level characters with gathering skills to make a comfortable amount of money. Also, with so few newbies/lowbies around, competing for mobs seemed to be a thing of the past. In essence, all the strong parts of World of Warcraft seemed to have gotten even stronger. WoW really seems to fly when compared with when I played before. I think that they increased the XP rewards and the speed with which you progress from level to level. That makes sense when you think about it from a game design perspective. I was playing WoW right when the game first started as a result they had an influx of people they were trying to slowly build to 60. Now that nearly everyone who plays has at least one level 60/70 character, they’re mostly dealing with people leveling alts. With fewer people in lower-level zones, it makes sense to give a boost to soloing and leveling in general.

Over the next several weeks, I reverted to my usual WoW form, starting lots of new characters of various class and race combinations with one or two primary characters that actually progress out of the starting zones. I’ve never had a character above level 36 (my trusty human priest Marilyn). For an extremely casual WoW player like me, I’ve found that it’s good to have several options for playing on the table. When I can’t bear to cast another Shadow Word: Pain, I put Marilyn on the shelf for a while. When I can’t bear to hit Mortal Strike one more time, I put Mugwort the dwarven warrior on the shelf.

What is slightly different this time, though, is that I’ve switched over to playing mostly on the horde side. I had pretty much always played on the alliance side because Richard’s main toons were both alliance. Then on a whim, I started a Tauren hunter, and I’ve really been consistently having a blast with that combo ever since. Hemlock the Tauren hunter is now level 23 with Nightweb spider pet, which looks frighteningly like a giant real-world black widow. I think I’m digging my hunter because they’re one of the ultimate solo classes. Because hunters have a pet, it’s almost like you’re something of a group even when you’re going solo. Your hunter is free to be your DPS damage dealer while the pet tanks for you. For someone who was stupidly insisting on leveling a holy-spec priest back in the day, this is truly heady stuff.

I’m really enjoying playing again, and I figure I’ll keep regularly playing until that changes and/or something shinier crosses my path. Feel free to send me a tell if you see me on the Garona server.

For the Horde!

Are you one of the few friends I have that actually still uses IM? Ever wonder why I’m almost always set to some kind of “away” status? I was pleasantly surprised to find that this article from Joe Kissell explains in excellent detail some of the challenges that IM presents to my way of dealing with the world.

From considerable reading and from personal experience, I’ve learned that introverts have a number of other tendencies. And taken together, these traits may shed some light on why I (and numerous other introverts I know) have a hard time with IM, Twitter, and the like. For example, introverts typically need to concentrate on just one thing at a time, and are often particularly sensitive to interruptions and distractions.

Another typical introvert trait is wanting to compose one’s thoughts carefully before sharing them (either verbally or in writing). Once again, while this doesn’t prevent me from carrying on verbal conversations at a normal speed, it makes rapid-fire online textual conversations rather unnerving. For me, interacting with other people in real time online is just as draining as interacting with other people in person. So my feelings about participating in, say, a lively multi-person chat are about the same whether we’re talking about iChat or a party. I can hold my own in the conversation and it’s generally fine, but because it takes a lot of energy I prefer not to do it very often.

The whole article is definitely worth a read.

Want to know how fast my new Eight-core 2.8 GHz Mac Pro is? Ridiculously fast. It’s so fast that I’m going to have to change the way that I work. I’m used to only doing one thing at the time, and I’m used to setting up “big” operations like ripping a CD or encoding a DVD to run unattended while I go play a video game, read a book, or just plain go to bed. My new computer (christened “Thor”) treats such tasks as routine commonplace things that don’t even slow down other operations.

This morning, I ripped a 95-minute DVD into PSP-friendly MP4 in ten minutes. With my Powerbook, this is the sort of thing that I literally had to setup to run while I was either sleeping or away at work — easily a 10-12 hour task during which my computer was absolutely locked-up and unusable. My new Mac Pro didn’t even slow down during this ten minute frenzy of encoding. The output from top indicated that the process was just casually using 125% CPU without degrading the overall speed of the UI or any of the applications I had active.

Spotlight searches are instantaneous. For the first time, the items pop into the results in real time as I type. Leopard made an extremely noticeable performance benefit in this regard on my Powerbook, enabling me to drop Quicksilver as my app launcher of choice, but the Mac Pro is in another frame of reference entirely. Using this beast is showing me exactly how much lag I had grown used to on a daily basis, and it’s retroactively shocking.

I expected my new computer to be fast. Yes, I’m still surprised by how obscenely fast “fast” actually is, but let me assure that absolutely nothing could have prepared me for the silence that continues permeate my office. The Mac Pro is somehow no louder than my Powerbook. I’ve had towers before. I’ve built fast desktops with really nice fans. I expected a lawn mower. I was willing to trade silence for sheer computational power, but in the end, there was absolutely no compromise. Even after experiencing the silence, I expected the noise level to jump while I was transcoding that DVD. Other than the spinning of the optical drive (which was quite noticeable even on my Powerbook), there was no increase in noise.

If I had any criticism at all after five or so hours of usage, it involves the keyboard. I’m not a fan of the flat keyboard because key action just doesn’t work for me. Now I’ll admit right from the outset that I’m a notoriously cranky person when it comes to keyboards. I want my keyboard to have an oh-so-perfect delicate balance between easy to press the keys and a definite tactile response. After a couple of hours, I had shifted back over to my Apple wireless keyboard and Logitech Bluetooth mouse.

Unfortunately (and this is no reflection at all on my new computer), my Powerbook really resented being booted into Firewire target disk mode, constantly locking up and generally rendering the Setup Assistant incapable of moving my files directly over. In the end, I skipped that part of the process and then ran the stand-alone Migration Assistant using my Time Machine backups, a solution which worked quickly and flawlessly.

How thrilled am I with the new computer? On a scale of 1 to 10, I’m really effing happy. I can’t wait to get home from work again so that I can play some games on it.

Technorati Tags: Mac Pro, Mac, Apple, Review

My new Mac Pro arrived here at work during my lunch break. The box is now sitting here at my desk tempting me for the next four-and-a-half hours. I don’t know how I will survive the experience.

I’m going to have to bring the car around to the front of the Florida Gym because this sucker is heavy.

For the past year or so, Allyson and I have been in a mad rush toward home-ownership. We’ve been throwing every spare dime into our savings account, and then donning the proverbial sackcloth every time an unexpected expense came in. You see, we really, really hate our current apartment. People steal our plants. Our neighbors are loud, obnoxious, drunken assholes. I’m increasingly too lazy to actually take things up and down the stairs. Our collective focus, our total awareness, was squarely centered on escaping this apartment into a small piece of the world that we could truly call ours.

We were optimistic. We had some money saved up. I got a surprise raise recently. In short, things looked good. I played with some online calculators, checked my credit score, and determined that the banks would almost certainly loan us more money than I actually wanted them to. I ran some further numbers on housing insurance and local property taxes just to figure out the exact point at which we could no longer afford a given house in the MLS listings. We contacted friends about realtors, got some promising names, and generally got pretty damn excited about the future.

Then we called the bank.

On the day before we called, new regulations went into effect in Alachua County, requiring more of a down payment because our housing market is depressed. The fellow at the credit union was super helpful with all this. He gave Allyson some exact figures for what we would need in order to start our home-buying process. Unfortunately, the final number was, for us, an unattainable figure. Screeching halt. Emergency stop. Plans on hold until further notice.

So yeah, upsetting news. It was clearly time to renegotiate our deal with ourself since our Katie-bar-the-doors savings strategy wasn’t sustainable in the long-term. We had put off nearly all big purchases in order to maximize our liquid assets for closing costs, down payments, etc. We were shell-shocked from the sheer effort involved. After some time off to mourn the loss of the house we never actually had, we sat down with our spreadsheets and Quicken accounts to figure out where to go from here. Allyson needed some clothes for job interviews. I needed a new computer about six months ago. We had dental bills staring us in the face so hard it made our molars throb. We reworked our savings strategy to be a lot more reasonable, made a kick ass savings plan that has us ready to buy a house two years from now (unless we need to move to a different county to find a teaching job for Allyson), and even figured out how to buy me a new computer without killing us in the long-term. Responsible adulthood, here we come!

The truly awesome news that comes out of this is that I’m buying a new computer for the first time in four years. The ol’ Powerbook has been showing its age of late, choking on all the background services I have it performing. When my Powerbook was having trouble running a freaking NES emulator, I knew that the time for a replacement wasn’t too far down the road. All of this led to last night, when I placed my order for a brand new Eight-core dual-2.8 GHz Mac Pro. After shamelessly paying $44 for two-day shipping, my new baby should be here by Wednesday or Thursday — just in time for Allyson’s trip out of town this weekend. That should leave me with plenty of time to get settled into my new digital digs without feeling like a bad husband for systematically ignoring my wife in favor of machinery.

Now all we need is the new version of Photoshop for this baby…

This morning, I was attempting to research something in some old emails around the time I got married (2001), and I happened upon an email to my friend Toby on 2001-09-12, the day after the bombing of the World Trade Center. At the time, people considered my views to be unnecessarily pessimistic and paranoid. I even got into an argument with one of my relatives at the rehearsal dinner for my sister’s wedding about this very topic. In retrospect, I feel a certain amount of validation:

I’m frightened for a lot of reasons, dude. First, I’m scared shitless that Bush v2.0 is going to lead us headlong into a needless war. Open declaration of war on terrorist (again I can’t help but wonder who would get to define who are “terrorists”) groups/countries would only invite further strikes on American soil. That means either one of two very bad things would happen. Either (1) Americans are either forced or voluntarily decide to give up certain civil liberties that we have previously enjoyed thereby giving our federal government even more control, or (2) We continue with business as usual allowing those who are careless about security measures to give anyone with nefarious intent the perfect opportunity to do whatever the Hell they wish. I don’t honestly know which would scare me more — probably the former but the latter isn’t a much more comforting alternative.

It sure looks like we took option one full force. And later in the same email…

I know that I’m really really terrified that this is going to set race relations in this country back by twenty years. I mean, the government and media started pointing fingers within *hours* of the attack — long before any sort of proper investigation could have been carried out. This whole thing feels less like a crime investigation and more like the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where they’re talking about burning the witch. It feels like McCarthy searching for Communist leanings in people who were never a threat to anyone’s national security. I’m terribly afraid that the less enlightened people in our country will start to discriminate/lash out against Muslim people and even those who are just of Middle Eastern/Arabic decent. I’ve heard the term “towel head” way too often in the past thirty-something hours, man — and not just from the native redneck communities of the American Deep South. I’ve heard that term on national media talk and call-in shows. And that scares me shitless.

I’m betting that my friend Jen would agree that the italicized portion of that text has certainly come to pass.

Last night, right before I woke up, I had a dream in which I met Joe Quesada, Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief, in a hotel lobby. I explained to him that I saw him at Mega-Con in Orlando, and he kept trying to place who I was. I told him that I was going to work for him someday. I explained to him that I was a published author but that I just recently got back into comics. I told him that I was working on some things now but that it was only a matter of time before I was working at Marvel.

And then I was inexplicably moving into a dorm room at college.

I may not look exactly like Quentin Quire, but I think I at least captured the “disaffected mutant youth” vibe.

I made that “Magneto Was Right” the night before we left for MegaCon. I made my own stencil with a piece of poster board and an exacto knife, and then I carefully filled it in directly on the t-shirt with a Sharpie. For the lettering, I used my lightbox. It only took a couple of hours, and I was really happy with the end result.