ripped off by the taxi
planetarium sucked
art institute awesome – miniature rooms surprise hit
didn’t go to Famous Dave’s
Weber Grill
Ann Sathers
Gold Coast Dogs
Chicago trendy, keeping it real, more superficial, poor, clean, urine
All posts by markdangerchen
Game making projects
So, I had this really laid-back interview with a guy at ApexLearning. I could tell where the interview would go as soon as I saw the box for a foot bath thing behind his desk.
Anyway, it sounds like I’ll be doing some contract Flash animation for electronic textbooks. The stuff I saw was slideshow-like, but maybe I can throw in some interactive stuff.
I also met with Theresa on Wednesday and we talked about making a Flash or Game Maker game together. Basically, I want to explore 2D adventure game mechanics but don’t really have any content other than having the player role-play interesting ethical and moral dilemmas that have complex consequences. Hopefully, we’ll think of something good.
Me rude?
A guildmate and fellow officer a few weeks back mentioned that I was blunt in the way I talk to people and that I make situations worse off. That made me think about the plane incident and I wonder if I need to be more cautious of how I say things… Have I always been like this and is it consistent? Or maybe I am now noticing it since I’m maturing, and maybe it is just sporadic. Everyone has bad days, right?
Last week, some people in guild were making one-liner references to a movie. It was getting a little extreme, and the references were really obscure. (My way of telling when someone’s entered the nerd-zone–the socially awkward part–is if they persist in talking about something no one else in the room gets.) I got a tell from another guildie saying that they were getting annoyed, so I said something in guild chat to quiet it down. Only, the way I said it was really rude. My excuse was that I was in the middle of wiping in MC and that we were having a particularly frustrating night, but still… is that an excuse? When do you chalk stuff up to “he’s having a bad day” vs. “you shouldn’t let your problems effect relations with others?” Luckily for me, the people I chastised in guild chat didn’t login all their alts and /gquit, and I was able to apologize publicly and in tell. But… I still feel bad about it and don’t know how they feel about me and the guild now…
Ushki has a bladder infection
Joy of joys… 🙂
Actually, about 2 months ago, Ushki, our cat, was urinating blood and not going pee in her box, so we took her in to an emergency vet and she had formed crystals in her bladder from too high a pH. Apparently, her diet is not acidic enough. Or maybe she’s licking aluminum or maybe she gets magnesium from the bonito fish flakes we treat her with…
She got a couple of shots (pain killer and anti-inflamatory I think) and we got some antibiotic stuff to give her for like 2 weeks (which we only used about a week of, since she started barfing on it). The blood went away in like a day.
Anyway, we have been vigilant about aluminum foil and we don’t give her fish flakes anymore. But last week she started bleeding again. A visit to the vet again and we’re now trying out samples of prescription food. So far, she won’t even go near the canned food, and it’s taking a while for her to settle with the dry stuff. At first we had to mix in her old food, but now she’s only on the prescription stuff.
But she’s still peeing blood and her new favorite spot to pee is on our futon. We have towels down and clean up every time she does… but since we have guests coming over this weekend, we decided to buy another litter box and put it outside the room with the futon. Hopefully she’ll start using that.
So far she likes it. We’re trying out some corn-based, eco-friendly, flushable litter. It actually kinda smells good.
While we were at the store, we saw that PetCo has a couple of brands of catfood that make urinary system formulas. Also, they have some pills you can give your cat to help out with urinary stuff (like human pills, they have cranberry in them). We need to ask the vet if those over-the-counter things are just as good as the prescription stuff.
Also, how long will the blood last?? We see the vet again on Monday, so hopefully we’ll get some answers then.
Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education: New Atlantis grapples with gaming and flops
Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education: New Atlantis grapples with gaming and flops
Wow… Here’s a criticism of an article in the New Atlantis. It’s not super-recent (I’m cleaning out my old bookmarks today and stumbled upon it), but it is definitely worth a read.
AERA conference
So, I’ve been sending my paper on cooperation in WoW to various people. I was also thinking of submitting it to AERA, the annual big conference for educational researchers, but I figured… I can’t afford going and they probably wouldn’t accept the submission anyway. The deadline was August 1.
On the morning of August 1, Constance Steinkuehler emails me and asks if I want to be part of a panel on virtual worlds in a SIG at AERA! The other panelists would be her, Lisa Galarneau, and Thomas Malaby, with Kurt Squire as the discussant. hahah… Of course! The networking alone is totally worth it. Luckily for us the deadline for submission to SIGs was August 2.
So I spent the next two days writing an abstract and sending it to her and then revising after she revised.
Anyway, we submitted it fine, but it turns out that Constance cites my abstract in her abstract… Only she says “Chan” rather than “Chen.” I hope it isn’t too late to fix. Ah well… I find it funny that *she* has the hard to spell name and *my* name is the one that gets misspelled.
Now we wait to see if it gets accepted. I assume if it does, we’ll have a chance to update the abstracts at that point.
Chicago trip and the family reunion
The first weekend in August my mom’s mom’s side of the family had a family reunion, the Hsu Family Reunion. Now, I am not entirely certain about other Chinese families, but this one is really, really tight and accomplished.
My grandma has quite a few siblings. Those guys mostly all had multiple kids who in turn had multiple kids. We had over 100 people in attendence at the Eaglewood Resort and Spa near Chigago in the town of Itasca. This was the first reunion in about 70 years.
My family came from all over the world (mostly the US, Taiwan, and China but also Switzerland and Vancouver… maybe more). It was awesome meeting everyone. I only wish we actually had more time and more activities that mixed up people so we talked to people who we hadn’t met before. Most of the activities were instead lecture or presentation format leaving little room to mingle. Heck, I brought a couple of card games (Bang! and Munchkin) but never broke them out.
One of the great uncles mentioned that some great philosopher (was it Lau Tsu?) said that we study the art of war so that our children can study the art of governance and that their children can study art. And this is clearly seen in the three generations. The first generation were in the military. A lot of the second generation folk are physicians and engineers, and a lot of my generation are artists.
Made me want to break out the paints and brushes and start doing some art again. Why did I stop for all these years? I dunno. I feel like… what’s the point? But time to put that feeling aside and get inspired again.
Anyway, my grandma (the oldest of her generation) had a bunch of kids. My mom is the oldest of her generation, followed by uncle David. David and his wife Ming-shu had three boys, Leo, Lee-hom, and Lee-kai. (Those in the know, might recognize Lee-hom‘s name.) Leo followed his dad’s footsteps and became a physician. He’s married to another (Stacy), and they have two kids now. (Crazy hectic life, I imagine.)
What’s the point in all this? Leo and Stacy! I love you guys; you’ve taken the pressure away from Robin and me to have kids! Well, pressure coming from grandma, anyway.
I have no idea if Leo and Stacy’s son is considered the top of the 4th generation. This is because I have no idea if grandma is considered the top of hers since maybe her oldest brother is the top. Preference to males and all… which means maybe there wasn’t pressure on Robin and me in the first place in terms of the family line. but whatever.
At one point there was a talent show and Lee-hom sang some songs for us which people were agog over. He’s very talented. I think I don’t quite appreciate how popular he is in Asia… In fact, it kind of takes me by surprise every time I hear about it. He’s a main actor in the next Ang Lee movie, by god (and no, it isn’t Brokeback Huan Shan or anything like that).
What was particularly cool was that our uncle, Li Chien-fu, was also there. He’s the original singer of Dragon’s Descendents back in 1978 or so… you know, that really, really famous Chinese anthem that basically has been adopted by Chinese people around the world as a unifying song… well.. maybe you didn’t know. I didn’t really until the reunion, either, though I’ve heard the song before. Anyway, apparently, Lee-hom covered that song a few years back and even threw in some rapping. Well, they did a duet which seemed like it was a historic occasion. They really should get together and record an official duet of that song. Chien-fu is trying to get back into singing and it would boost his career like crazy, I’m guessing.
Another thing I should mention. Lee-hom and his dad have asked us family members not to post photos or videos of him. That’s fair. We should respect his privacy. One of the reasons Lee-hom doesn’t want videos on You-Tube and stuff is that he has no control over the quality of the videos. I actually think this isn’t that big of a problem if he spent effort on educating people about new media rather than trying to prevent it from happening. In fact, he could probably pull off some rabid fan-base viral marketing type of thing pretty easily. But I’m not sure he’s that internet savvy. No official website, even… Wow. He should get a myspace site at least. Then he could talk about why he doesn’t want speculation stuff on You-Tube and blogs and I bet a lot of his fans would respect that or at least know how to interpret it if it happens. Admittedly, I know *nothing* of the Asian pop-star market so maybe I am just blowing crap…
Anyhooo… Robin and I and my brother Dee and his girlfriend Nancy spent too much time hanging out with each other and not enough time hanging out with the other “kids” from our generation. Sorry. Of note, we have some cousins (er… I dunno what they are technically, the grandchildren of my grandma’s sister) who actually grew up in Palo Alto, like me and my bro. While growing up we would occasionally go and visit their place. It always seemed so foreign though since they spoke Mandarin in the home and the kids were a little young for my brother and I to hang out with. But now they are all grown up and actually quite cool. Word.
Also, another uncle (of some sort) and his family live in Wisconsin. Of note is that he seems to be really into console and table-top gaming. Heh. His son who was 15 wasn’t into meeting the family, though. Ah well… I remember feeling that way when I was a teen, too. Damn our lack of sight. I remember him saying at one point, “Why the hell should I learn Chinese; I will never, ever have to use it.” I find it very funny that a 15 year old knows how the rest of his life will be…
Sooo… all these accomplished folk in my family. I look at my life and have no regrets, yet I am envious that they all seem to have direction…
Lee-kai (who now goes to MIT) was super prescient (and I am reminded by how impressed I was by his intelligence back when he was 5) when he said that as the years go on, the family will naturally drift farther and farther apart. The only way this won’t happen is if we fight it and make a concerted effort to stay in touch. I think it wasn’t clear before the runion why it is so important to do this, but now that I’ve met everyone, I am amazed at how close everyone already is. Having that as a stable force in a life of chaos is totally empowering and something we shouldn’t take for granted… at least, not anymore.
Criteria for being mature
One of my guildmates recently left the guild in a high-drama fashion by /gquiting all of his alts because of something another guildmate said in chat to him. The thing is, he was being passive-aggressive and undermining our sign-up system for ZG runs, basically pissed off that we weren’t starting the raid 30 minutes early because we were trying to coordinate who was invited and trying to make sure we didn’t invite those who didn’t sign-up before those who did (we have a full raid every week and thus need a sign-up sheet online–it is the most fair system I’ve seen).
Anyway, he started making snide remarks in guild channel to which one of the organizers basically said “1. fuck you, 2. we have the system for a reason and it works. if you have a problem with it post about it on the forums.” And so the guildie left without a word and proceeded to log in all his alts and quit them too.
Now here’s the weird thing. This guy has always been helpful at the drop of a hat, willing to help level our lower level members, answer questions, what have you… He’s always been cordial and really laid-back. I guess he has zero tolerance for shit.
But I’ve come to realize that shit always happens. I think part of being mature is how you deal with it. The person who offended him was very quick to apologize, only the guy who left never heard the apologies since he quit. An aplogy was posted on our forums but who knows if he ever read it. We were more than willing to talk about what happened and to talk about the system we have in place for sign-ups. I don’t think our guild has been anything other than open.
Yet, another member who also recently left claims we have clique issues. I don’t buy it. The two guys who left seem to me to be hams. They like being the center of attention and when they weren’t getting that in our guild they left. When something happened that they didn’t like they left rather than try to work through the issues.
I think they don’t see it the way I do, but we’ll never know because they don’t talk about things. Why should they? It’s much easier to just find another group of people to hang out with.
Not skin cancer!
I noticed that the thing on my foot was getting kind of scabbie or something. Robin noticed and removed it with tweezers. Easily. Heh.
Snakes (and social dilemmas) on a plane!
Robin and I got on board the plane back to Seattle from O’Hare, as usual, getting in line a little later rather than earlier since we see no point in waiting in line to board. Anyway, I know what the point is now, I guess… to be a jerk and claim crazy overhead bin space.
When we got to our seats we noticed that someone was already sitting in one of our seats. That was easily cleared up by looking at the woman’s ticket. What was troubling was that there was little room in the overhead bins for our fancy new carry-ons (mine a backpack/roller thing and Robin’s a pretty green roller thing).
Looking around, there was a very nice spot right above our seats that was taken up by a little laptop bag. It was an awkward space, though–one of those mini-compartments only big enough for one standard size carry-on. I saw plenty of other places near-by where the little laptop bag could fit, thereby making room for my carry-on. So I picked up the laptop bag and announced that I was going to move it. I didn’t want the owner to freak out when he or she couldn’t find the bag when we got off the plane. Unfortunately, I guess I should’ve been a little more tactful than just announcing. The owner freaked out and argued that he got there first and that it was my tough luck that I couldn’t find space for my bag.
Here’s a difference in the way I think and the way I think a lot of Americans think (lots of thinking going on here). To me, everyone on the plane is in a trip together and it was our collective task to make the journey as bearable as possible for everyone. To him, well… I think he didn’t give a shit about anyone but himself and was overly protective of his property. I dunno, maybe he had government secrets on his laptop or something.
So anyway, he got bitter but offered to put his bag near his feet. When I said thanks, he said “anything to suit you, buddy.” Whatever. I wasn’t going to press it since people were waiting and we succeeded in getting my bag up there. But Robin called him out and said that he was giving us attitude. Tensions were high, but nothing happened out of it.
A girl who we sat next to offered to let us move her bag so that Robin’s could fit. That was nice of her, but we didn’t need the space. Since the guy was sitting right behind us, however, I didn’t feel comfortable talking, so I didn’t talk to the girl much even though she seemed really nice. High school student near Seattle who’s dad is a superintendent and mom is a teacher. Oh well….
Here’s an example of how social dilemmas are socially situated. By the numbers, this was a classic social dilemma. The guy was only interested in himself and was making decisions based on his self-interest. I was interested in getting the plane going. My choices were much more cooperative, yet, in the end, enough people behaving the way I did actually benefits each of us individually more so than being selfish would have. Only… being selfish did benefit him in the sense that he didn’t have to exert any energy in cooperating and still benefited from enough of the other passengers behavior. (He was a free-rider…) But I wonder how much benefit he really had… I mean being an asshole all the time seems like it would take a lot of energy and add undue stress in life.
But maybe I am projecting. It is possible the reason he gave issue was because he thought I was also being selfish. That I just wanted to put my bag near where I sat. I could see that, but it is sad when your world-view is jaded because you are jaded.