Random Dialogue

Thankfully, good cheer and better health has returned to our apartment. Things were pretty miserable around here this past weekend, with both Katie and I doing the sleep/drugs/books (or in my case, games) routine to keep our sanity.

Yesterday our fevers broke and our breathing pretty much cleared. Our sickness still cost us: a D&D session, dinner with my family, a showing of ‘300′, and two of Katie’s Barnes and Noble shifts. I always think we lead pretty boring lives until something disrupts things, and I remember that we tend to keep pretty busy. Blarg.

I just wanted to reach back and comment quickly on GDC, because it was a really excellent experience for me. To give you some perspective, this is the third year I’ve been to the show. GDC 2005 was in San Francisco (just like this year), and the highlight of the show for me was getting to meet Simon Carless in person. Other than writing up sessions, that was pretty much all I did during the show.

GDC 2006 was even sadder; I met some new folks (like my counterparts at Joystiq and Kotaku), and had lunch with Danc and Grimwell. More would have happened, but it was in San Jose that year and I was waaaay out by the airport. The shuttle to the place stopped running at some really inconvenient hour; like 8pm or something even on Saturday. Choosing between having somewhere to sleep and going to a party is a mean thing to do.

This year was, in comparison, quite the blast. I didn’t really realize it until I started meeting people whose names I recognized, but I’ve done a lot of work in the last 12 months. My writing has shown up in new places (1up, Escapist, Gamasutra, GameSetWatch, MMOG Nation), and I’ve ‘worked with’ a bunch of new people. This was the first year that *I* got recognized by people, and I even went to a party. The only bragging I’ll do: I had dinner with one of the guys who developed Once Upon a Time. Kickass.

I’m an extrovert, to be sure, but my childhood still drags at me. I feel socially awkward in situations like GDC, and it took a lot of work to do what I did the week before last. I think it worked out really well (several actually supportive comments on Slashdot), and I’m really hopeful about future events this year and next.
The way these two tie together: GDC filled me up with a lot of creative energy and enthusiasm for what I do (both freelance writing and posting to Slashdot). I came back filled with piss and vinegar … and promptly got sick. Blech. My job tonight and tomorrow is to re-capture some of that enthusiasm, and try to jot off some work for my benefactors.

I know a lot of folks think industry events (be it the games industry or golf courses) are just for drinking and networking, but at least some of them can also be about reaffirmation.

Plus, damn is San Francisco a nice place to live.

Friday I approved a story from the WSJ about Twitter, a service that lets you annoy people with those ‘I’m having a sandwich’ mini-blog entries that so many folks find terribly annoying. Apparently in the last few weeks the thing hit a sort of critical mass and kersploded. That’s the danger of getting a bunch of smart people together for stuff like South By Southwest. John Edwards recommends you check out Twittervision … so who’s to say what’s interesting anymore?

update: I went to log into Twitter again today, to add the twitter display thing to the sidebar here. I thought it would be fun to just be able to update a part of the blog sooper-quick. Twitter, for me, is already dead. It took about 20 seconds to load, and then timed out when I tried to log in. So … quick fad.

I’ve been sick this week, and I’m not feeling much better today. I’ve taken it as an opportunity to relax a bit after last week’s hustle and bustle of GDC (undoubtedly the reason I’m sick in the first place). One of my relaxations has been the joy of reading; I don’t allow myself to sit down with a book anywhere near as often as I used to. My chosen reading material this week was one of my favorite Christmas presents: Dawkins’ The God Delusion.

To use a thoroughly non-scientific term, it was a transcendent experience reading through this book. I’ve been bouncing back and forth between agnostic and atheistic since I was about 15 or so; haven’t needed a deity in a long, long time. As such, I wasn’t converted by the book. My mind wasn’t changed in the slightest … though I do think I’m going to be fairly firmly in the atheist camp from now on. What was transcendent for me was the laying out, via the crude tool of the English language, the beauty of science and the joy that reason can bring about. I’ve experienced it before reading Dennet’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, and of course Dawkins‘ seminal work The Selfish Gene.

What was special about this book was the presented contrast between the beauty of science and the shuttered ignorance of blind faith. Dawkins argues powerfully against the influence that religion has in the modern world (with obvious special attention paid to the nearly-theocratic underpinnings of American politics), and his arguments are all extremely compelling.

For me, though, it was simple comparsion that made me step back and marvel in appreciation. When you consider the infinitely interesting history of the universe, the extremely unlikely happenstance of our galaxy’s formation, the extraordinarily small chance of life emerging on our planet, the astronomically unlikely event of your birth … it’s all just so damn beautiful. Compare that with the petty workings of some creator deity and the unimaginative tales of humanity’s genesis that weigh down every major religion.

Religion, Dawkins makes clear, is nothing less than the clothing of the human mind in ignorance. By accepting things ‘on faith’ instead of seeking out truth via fact and experimentation, we blind ourselves to the possibilities of the world around us.

From the book, a quotation from J.B.S. Haldane:

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball ninety million miles away, and this is considered to be normal, is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.

Above and beyond that, the book’s thesis that religion is nothing more than a memetic parasite, preying on the minds of impressionable children and passed on by well-meaning parents is something that resonates very strongly with me. It’s given me a lot to think about, and ultimately it’s reminded me that there’s nothing to be ashamed of in looking for (and expecting) answers better than “because I say so”.

For better or worse, I know that I’ll be less adverse to keeping my personal opinions about the existence of some sort of higher power under my hat. To whit: I don’t believe in a god, and that’s perfectly okay.

I highly recommend the book to anyone grappling with their own problems reconciling faith and reason, and even more so with someone struggling with whether to be agnostic or atheistic. Good stuff.

It’s like a hilarious British comedy. Only, when it’s happening to you it’s not so funny. The Mosser hotel chose GDC week (a week when they are literally full to the rafters) to replace their elevator. EVERY room in the hotel is full, and we’re forced to climb extremely narrow, steep stairs in order to reach our rooms. And … wait for it … I’m on the 8th floor! No rooms available below that! HILARIOUS.

So, instead of my hotel room being a sanctuary, some place to freshen up between sessions and meetings and whatnot, I’m going to need to take three showers a day just to compensate for all the aerobic exercise I’ll be getting. It’s the opposite of awesome. Double-plus ungood, as it were.

The room itself is nothing to write home about either; though I guess I kind of am. It’s D&D dungeon-standard (10 x 10), with a teeny tiny closet-sized bathroom off of that. I should have known, I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN when I was booking the reservation that 120 bucks a night was too good a deal. They apparently are offering that killer rate by not running the elevator.

So, the long and short of this is that I’m going to have to live mostly out of my bag, outside the hotel. To say that this is non-optimal would be an intense understatement. Would have been nice to get an email about this Mosser. Would have been reeeeeeal nice.