Author Archives: Michael Trice

I Love Honest Reporting

I hate when national reporters smooth a quote for print. SI.com and ESPN.com both used the sanitized AP version of San Antonio Spur’s coach Gregg Popovich’s quote about the beatdown they received from the Mavs last night. Not the Statesman, however. The Statesman went with full verbal honestyin printing this from Popovich:

“They kicked our ass every which way but loose,” Popovich said. “Their energy and aggressiveness was great.”

Not bum, rear, butts–or whatever other safety word would pop to mind. And frankly, asses is what Popovich meant, and it’s the word that most exactly fits the Spurs miserable showing. Kudos to the Statesman for sticking to the truth of the matter. That’s some honest reporting.

Taking Your Kids to Work Day

So, I work at home 80% of the time. This is useful because it allows me to work for six or so different places, which would be logistically impossible in any other format. That and I sometimes don’t have to shave until 3pm. And when I get fed up, I get to go to the garage to lift wieghts and not worry about being stinky when I return to my desk/cubicle/conference room. So, I like the fringe benefits.

I do worry about how the arrangement affects what my kids see. I’m a bit of a night owl, so sometimes I put in a ton of hours after they’re in bed. That can send mixed signals on how much Dad actually works. Given that I’m a strong lead by example of practice type, this does bother me now and then. 

It also makes for some interesting conversations about, “So what does your dad do?”

“Um, he spends lots of time on the computer and complains about driving 2 hours to San Marcos once or twice a week.”

So yesterday Texas State’s English Department had their annual award ceremony. This happened to overlap with Take Your Child to Work Day. Since Texas State is the only employeer I currently work for within the same state as our home (at leats until I also start working for the University of Texas in August), it was a nice opportunity to show the kids that I actually do a little bit more than “play” on the computer.

To fully embrace the opportunity, my wife and I took all three kids down to the English Dept awards, where I was receiving the 2008-09 Outstanding Grad Student award for the English Dept. Not really related to my job at all, but it was happening at the place where the kids associate with my working. On a personal level, it was also something I wanted the family to experience because it represented a big moment for the MA in Technical Communication program at Texas State. Not only was it our programs ten-year anniversary, but we swept the Department’s graduate student awards, and it was our program’s first time to receive the Outstanding Graduate Student award.

Anyway, the most rewarding aspect was that when I went up to accept the award my son started gravitating toward me from the assembled audience. I finally waved him on over to the podium and his younger sister immeditaely joined him at my signal. My wife and our near-teen daughter joined at the urging of the crowd, and everyone received a healthy round of applause.

All in all, it was a good day “at the office.”

The Basement’s Take on the New Cobra Commander

Cobra Commander 4E

Cobra Commander 4E

What follows is a Bill Simmons-esque discussion many of us recently had about the new Cobra Commander toy relased by Hasbro. Well, except all the frat talk is replaced with Net jargon, but this is the Basement after all.

Sam: They’ve raped my childhood.

Jake: qfft

Me: So, Cobra Commander wasn’t a metrosexual version of Jason X in your childhood?

Sam: I will shoot you with ten guns.

Derek:  You know it’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt, right? From Brick, and 3rd Rock from the Sun?

Me: My bad. So, Cobra Commander wasn’t a short metrosexual version of Jason X in your childhood?

Sam: I want to murder the world.

Kurt: Holy shit.  I feel violated.  And to think I was actually sort of looking forward to the movie…

—

Yep, and we’re all married or in long-term relationships. There’s hope for all of you. All of you.

Texas Geeks Know Sam Houston > Rick Perry

Anyone who knows me understands that I’m one of those annoying Texans who really digs being a Texan.

I blame my parents. You see, I actually grew up in rural Texas. So we had horses, cows, cattle guards, and dirt roads. Not that I lived on some big glorious ranch. More like ten acres of hard-packed red clay with patches of bull nettles and ragweed. Ragweed so prominent that I sweetened milk out of instinct for years afterwards because of what it did to our cows. Hell, my first girlfriend’s dad knew me because he recognized my last name from all the times he’d been called out to our house to turn off the electricity for delinquency.  A cavernous maw of washed out dirt and gravel quite capable of devouring the undercarriage of a county utility vehicle served as our driveway, so I’m sure he remembered the trips distinctly.

Now, I admit that for all that Texas cred, I lean to the left. I’m a mild liberal by most standards–or a dirty pinko socialist by my uncle’s standards (he always meant it with love). So the fact that I dislike Gov. Rick Perry might not be a big surprise. That said, his secessionist rant this week should offend anyone who embraces the name Texan.

I’d like to point back to a true leader of Texas who opposed secession, Sam Houston. Yep, the Raven opposed secession in 1861. I understand that Perry is full of himself and doesn’t have the cajones to do anything like secede. He just wants some face time before Kay Bailey Hutchison kicks him out of office next year. However it’s still worth acknowledging that Houston opposed secession when it was an inevitable tide here in Texas. It’s an important distinction. Perry’s sedition of ego versus Houston’s willingness to put aside personal power out of dedicated belief could not offer a more stark contrast in what it means to be Texan.

Me, I have enough pride in the term to want to talk about the the Raven over footnote Texan Goodhair. So, not just to annoy Sam, I started up a little Facebook page to further illustarte my contrast. It seemed the geeky thing to do. 

For some extra enjoyment, here’s Perry making a fool of himself and then being granted an unwanted education on Texas law by Rachel Maddow:

Meta Geek Tagged

If you know these men by name, you're an Office Space geek.

If you know these men by name, you're an Office Space geek.

Being a geek to me means loving something to the point of marginalization. Anything.

Do you argue over whether 50 Cent is fiddy or fitty? Rap geek.
 
Do you know the individual ERA of your team’s entire bullpen over the last five years? Baseball geek.
 
Have you mentioned Thac0 at a party? D&D geek.
 
Can you recite the measurements of Limbaugh, Hannity, and Neil Bort? Teabag geek. (Could. Not. Help. Myself.)
 
It’s about marginalization. When you get passionate, does the conversation start flowing with you or does it stop and eyes start rolling? It’s “geeking out” when your passion surpasses the audiences tolerance for your obsessive interest. Now, this doesn’t mean a group of people can’t be geeky about a topic because within the group they aren’t marginalized. It just means if that room was full of average people, the dedication to the “geek out” would be relegated to, well, those geeking out. Believe me, when I start discussing Lockean linguistics with gamer friends, I can tell from their reactions that I’m the geek. 
 
So you aren’t either a geek or not a geek. Everyone’s a geek about something, likely more than one something. So you’re not a geek, you’re a geek about X. Like Curly said in City Slickers, it’s up to you decide what that one thing is. Except I still think it can be more than one thing. So it’s more like City Slickers two where Jack Palance’s zombie twin showed up.
 
But what about terms like dork and nerd? Okay, we should do a little parsing since it’s a clear definition we want. If geek implies obsessive interest, I think these days it does so without the added burden of intellectualism contained within nerd–and dork is just a diminutive without classification. Geeks have something to be geeky over, dorks are just “not us” without any burden of addressing what makes them dorks. It’s self-evident that a dorks dorkery is such because they simply are a dork and thus not us. Seriously, it’s hard to parse the term dork and not sound like a 5-year old. Embarrassingly hard. In fact, I concede the line of thought for now on its own silly merits.
 
So geekery is like a metatag. When you have a marginalized interest that you spend way too much time on per societal norms, welcome to geekdom. You’ll find a lot us around–everywhere you look. This is a place to revel in that obsessiveness.
 
My geekery? Game systems, words, rhetoric, football, politics, linguistics, philosophy, 80s pop culture, and addressing minutia in overly analytical ways…
     

Pirates Still Cooler Than Zombies?

Creative Commons Photo by Marcus Metropolis

Creative Commons Photo by Marcus Metropolis

So, I’ve heard increasing chatter that pirates might be losing their geek cache due to certain real world events (yeah, I’m looking at you Somalia).

@omarg even wondered earlier today if Talk Like a Pirate Day would ever be the same again. So, have pirates been downgraded in coolness by their recent rise on the world stage? It’s important because pirates completely pervade geekdom. Consider:

If pirates become a “real” again, does homeland security start freezing the assets of Texas Tech coach Mike Leach? (and Mike a pirate can beat a soldier, just not a Navy SEAL–but no worry, the Aggies will never be that competent)

Should we rename electronic piracy to distance theft from “real” piracy? WotC would you like to weigh in on this? Is Adobe Acrobat the AK-47 of the 21st century?

Finally, when discussing if zombies, vikings, or pirates are more cool, must we now include Navy SEALs?   CNN cleaned up this article, when I first read it they used headshot at least four times. 

On the last question, I think the SEALs win. I mean even a zombie pirate dies from a headshot. However, a Valhalla-risen zombie viking may not be stopped by a headshot. Frankly, I’m not sure what stops one and hope never to find out. Unless some SEALs are around.

#amazonfail Update

Looks like Amazon has elaborated a bit on the glitch. Also, Seattle PI has some theories from an ex-employee of Amazon about how this happened. Basically, that it was a coding area that propogated from version of Amazon throughout the system recatorgizing tens of thousands of books.

Still, it’s an important lesson about the power of search, ranking, and rating technology.

#amazonfail?

Just to show this won’t all be about RPGs, I have to admit that the #amazonfail fiasco fascinates me. The company’s failed response. The maelstrom of twitter and blog activity–I had all but forgotten that LiveJournal still existed. The possible mainstreaming of bantown as a concept and term. And a beautifully reductive shattering of our trust in search engines due to limitations, controls, and susceptibilities we too often forget.

For those unaware, Amazon delisted a load of gay-themed books this weekend (and possibly before) from their sales rankings, effectively making these books non-existent to many buyers and reviewers. Maybe it was a glitch and maybe it was a hack and maybe it was a policy of distilled epic fail? The speculation is as deafening as Amazon’s silence.

Just a completely wild scene, but I’m glad it brought my attention to the idea of hackers using flag technology to incite active, marginalized groups against corporations for the hell of it. Nice to know about that.

Just to Make Certain the Idea Man is Last

I’m still trying to figure out what our wellspring meant by geekery going mainstream. I know that in the court case that CJ discussed Wizards suggested that 6 million people play D&D. You can either view that as .1% of the global population–or dream of some Chicago-sized Xanadu filled with DMs, GMs, and the sound of rolling dice echoing through the streets like police sirens in New York City. So Sam’s right–there really are a lot of viewpoints to float around here.

Now, I have a confession. I haven’t played a tabletop game in many months. I think I’ve played 4E about four times. Mostly this has nothing to do with the game itself (my mainstream life has been insanely busy), but I have my biases.

Back in 2000, the first column I ever wrote for Dragon became one of the first to be translated into Third Edition. At that time, I likely would have been a slow convert to 3E if not for a circle of early adopter friends and a personal desire to keep getting published. Turns out that while 3E tightened the reins on some of my more ludicrous 2E free-wheeling, it also created a system of content generation that tapped into the very essence of rising Internet fandom. 3E embraced fanfic and spawned some current hotshots in game design because of it (Mearls is the clear example of this). This fan-driven design scheme is an idea that other companies like Bioware (with NWN and Dragon Age) and Maxis (Spore) have embraced. Get your fans excited about the design process and let their creativity drive your product’s shelf-life. 3E was an open API half a decade before Facebook or the iPhone.

The OGL was highly entertaining for me as a player and as a (very sporadic) game writer. I met a ton of fun and talented people due to OGL. Monte Cook via AU/E, Justin Jacobson at Blue Devil Games, Bill Collins from both of the above, Mike McArtor at Paizo, and a host of others that defined the community power of an open system for me. I have to admit that when WotC closed OGL in 4E, my interest moved closer toward those electronic game designers who kept the spirit alive–well, that and other joint writing spaces like wikis, but that’s neither here nor there.

So, yeah, I’m a little prone to discussing the system and culture of gaming. But I’m sure I’ll find plenty of other geekery to go on about. Moreover, I’m also the resident sports geek. I’m awful at paying attention to fantasy leagues, but I’m totally jazzed that the Cavs might tie the ’84-’85 Celtics home wins record for a season. To clear up my biases on the sports front: I grew up in Dallas and I attended the University of Texas. I maintain all expected and implied affiliations from those occurrences without apology. Disclaimer done.

Hope we can keep this entertaining.