Entries tagged with “Friends” from Things You Don't Care About

I went up to Chicago this weekend for Gracie's baby shower, which was a lot of fun, despite the fact that it's a little freaky to me to be going to my friends' baby showers now (weddings were bad enough) and the fact that the ceiling decided to leak on me in the middle of it.

After the baby shower, I went downtown to meet with Marc, who had picked up a pair of tickets to see Morrissey at the Aragon Ballroom.  This was the first time I'd seen Morrissey live and the first time I'd been to the Aragon, and I have to say I was impressed by both.  The couple sitting in front of us in the balcony had seen him quite a few times, and they manged to really make me look forward to the show.

As far as the venue itself, the acoustics left something to be desired (though I noticed the sound for Morrissey himself was a lot better than for the opening act, so I don't know if that had something to do with it), but it's a pretty impressive place.  It must have been gorgeous when it was built; it's still quite elegantly appointed, but it does seem very much like something from another age (at least before the lights go down and things kick off).

The opening band, the Courteeners, was pretty decent; they're very much in the "indie mold" so to speak, but for an opening act I thought they did their job pretty well and the crowd seemed to get into at least a few of their songs.  I don't think I'm going to run out and buy their CDs right away, but I can't complain about them.

The main event, though, blew them away.  While it seems like some reviewers were not too impressed, I thought it was really good -- and if this is a weak performance by Morrissey, I really want to see a good one, because it must be pretty crazy.  It seemed pretty obvious to me that he really likes performing and playing for a crowd, and even though I have to admit that I didn't know a fair number of the songs (mostly the ones from last couple CDs), I had no problem getting into it.

I was a little disappointed there weren't too many Smiths songs in the set, but it's not really fair to expect him to play a bunch of stuff from 20 years ago when he's promoting a new CD.  And really, what there was couldn't have been done much better.  The version of "How Soon Is Now" that they played, complete with a brutal drum solo at the end, brought the house down (and I was kind of surprised it came as early as it did in the evening).

Overall, while relatively short (I think he only played for maybe an hour an a half), he was just belting out the songs and plowed through twenty tracks in that time.  I would like to have heard more, but I certainly don't feel like we were cheated.  I'll definitely be looking for a chance to see him again when he comes back to town.

Something interesting I got from the slacktivist: the Typealyzer.  You know those personality tests that give you one of those four-letter acronyms to classify your personality?  Well, it does it with a blog.  Or any webpage really, I suppose.  Surprisingly accurate for me, I think (though I am not exactly a race car driver):

ISTP - The Mechanics

The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

Taking a look at a few friends, we have CK also an ISTP, Mike as INTP, and benoc as ESTP.  Judge the reliability for yourself. :)

So here's the second part of my trip from earlier this month, the week Marc and I spent in Boston.  There's probably not going to be as much text in this one, but there should be a fair number more pictures than the Iceland entry.  Unlike my trip to Reykjavik, this was really a tourist thing only; I've been to Boston before, but Marc hadn't, so we spent a lot of time seeing things in the city as opposed to me spending all my time in Iceland at the convention.

I'll start off with this view of the Boston skyline from one of the sightseeing ferries, to contrast with the Reykjavik skyline; everything else I'll stick behind the cut so I don't clutter the front page.

Well, with less than two weeks now until I go to Iceland I realized that I am long overdue for posting again, especially since I've only posted a handful of times since getting back from Arizona.  It's not like nothing has been going either; Marc came down a couple weeks ago, and last weekend I went up to Chicago.

First off, as far as recovering from surgery goes, everything is going well on that front -- healing is going very nicely and I'm back at work again (unfortunately).  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that everything will be just fine while I'm away -- I admit that having some sort of horrible medical problem thousands of miles from home gives me the willies, but I realize how irrational that really is.

So what've I been up to for the last couple months?  I have to admit, a lot less than I'd hoped.  I did manage to do a fair bit of writing, but between taking care of things post-surgery and just generally feeling a bit of a malaise I probably squandered an opportunity to push through a lot of things I really should have.  I have continued to watch a lot of movies, and I'll try to post some short reviews in a bit.  Marc also got me to watch One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which I had never seen (it was good, obviously).

Last weekend, I went up to Chicago and Marc and I had dinner at Giordano's with Sam and Gracie on Friday.  Saturday, unfortunately, Marc had to do some work so we went downtown and I spent a few hours at a coffee shop doing some writing while he was working on his rollout.  I was surprised how much I got done really -- I think leaving myself disconnected from the internet actually got me to focus on my writing -- a trick I'll try to put to good use in the future.  I even managed to get back and work on some projects I had left a while back; I'm thinking that maybe this weekend I'll try heading out to in the morning and doing the same thing and see if I can't get more done.

After that, we went to have dinner at the Twin Anchors, which is, I gather, a bit of a Chicago institution.  It certainly had the crowd to match -- we had to wait about an hour and a half for a table, so we spent most of that time wandering around the neighborhood it's in, which is really pretty neat.  In addition to a beautiful cathedral -- the first real cathedral I think I've ever seen, as opposed to just a church (Edit: Evidently they call it a church, I'm not sure what actually makes a cathedral a cathedral) -- it had a lot of the kind of old architecture that I'd really like to live in someday, and the kind of neighborhood close to the heart of a city I'd like as well.

The restaurant was very good, though it is small and cramped.  Marc's ribs were probably the most tender I've ever had, and were very good (he let me have a few), though I can't speak for the sauce (I prefer my meat without sauces usually).  My steak wasn't mindblowingly spectacular, but it was pretty good, and the ambience at the place is pretty hard to beat.  It was evidently a big hangout for Frank Sinatra back in the day, and a ton of other celebrity photos and news clippings and other assorted accoutrements cover the walls.  A scene in The Dark Knight was also filmed here, although in the movie it is nearly empty, which is hard to believe considering how crowded it was when we were there!

After that, Marc surprised me and took me to the last Second City show of the night, which was my first time to Second City and really I think the first real live show of anything I've seen in a very long time.  The show we saw was Campaign Supernova, and it was pretty good -- there were a few kind of meh sketches, but the good ones were really good, and I had a lot of fun.  The only bad part about it was that we went to the late show, which has some extra improv and sketches being tested out for the next show stuck in it, so we didn't get out of the theatre until almost 0200, which was a little later than I had expected!  Well worth seeing though and I would definitely like to go there again and see another show sometime.

This week, heading back to work has been a little tough -- it hasn't helped that I seem to have either come down with bad allergies or a cold, though.  This morning I woke up and felt like I'd been run over by a truck, so I actually called in sick -- something I'm pretty loathe to do when I'm trying to get back in the swing of things as best I can before I fly off on another two weeks of vacation!

Speaking of which, I'm getting really excited about going to FanFest the closer it gets, despite all the recent craziness in the Icelandic financial sector that the CCP CEO felt necessary to calm fears about in a dev blog.  Despite the fact that the last time I spent any time around Eve devs I came down with a terminal case of foot-in-mouth disease, I really am looking forward to hopefully talking to more of them, and with any luck making a better impression this time.  I am also promising to take lots more pictures, both there and in Boston on the way back, and I'll be posting those here so everyone can see what it was like.

Look for at least one or two more posts this weekend, and then I'll probably try and get something up next weekend before I depart.  And, while I can't say I'll be liveblogging from FanFest exactly, I will try to post regular updates while I'm there!

-- from Deidei, describing how she looked after spilling pancake batter all over her butt and down the back of her legs.

So here it is, the multimedia debut of Things You Don't Care About.  These are thanks to my new Canon SD1100 IS camera, which I picked up on the recommendation of both Sam and Consumer Reports.  I've opened this article with a shot of the convention floor from the main entrance, looking towards where the electronic gaming section of the floor is.  You can clearly see the top of the Eve Online booth, which was much larger this year than last year, when it was squeezed on the back of the White Wolf booth.  This year, White Wolf and CCP both had a large presence, which was nice to see.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  We stayed this year in the Hilton Garden Inn, just east of Monument Circle in Indianapolis.  A bit further from the convention center than where we stayed last year, but still close, and the war monument makes it pretty easy to tell people how to find your hotel.  It's also a pretty impressive monument to boot.

I spent Thursday afternoon playing NSDM, a Cold War game with the Russian and US cells that never went to crisis mode, which was surprising in and of itself.  I played a West Coast representative, and ended up getting nicely screwed because everything that had been conceded to me got eliminated in the final budget cycle, which was a tad annoying.  Most of our minor crises seemed to get snuffed out before flaring up too much.

Sadly, I have to say that I didn't get any pictures of NSDM this year; I was too busy with the game to do so, and I am still not quite used to taking pictures (or being in them!) after being such an anti-camera person for so long.  However, it looks like pictures from last year are finally up at the NSDM site.  In this lovely photo, you can see me in the middle right, grinning like an idiot, and the garishly dressed Pezzle, our illustrious friend from the CVA, on the middle left.

Thursday night, I had dinner with three other members of CAIN at the Weber Grill. While it was an excellent dinner, we were disappointed that two other members weren't able to make it.  Next time, Derrys, you need to let us know what's going on.  Maybe it's time to join the 21st century and get a cell phone. :)

Here's another random selection from the convention, Cardhalla X.  Cardhalla is a charity event that GenCon runs, where over the course of the first three days of the con, people build towers and sculptures out of cards (no coincidence this started a few years after CCGs took off).  Saturday night, anyone who wants to can gather around the exhibit and at an appointed time, everyone tosses coins at them and knocks it all down.  The change is collected and given to a charity.  These pictures were taken Friday afternoon.

Friday, I spent most of the day talking with folks from CCP (including Tony Gonzales), and then Friday night I went to dinner with the Fiery Dragon folks, publishers of Adam's Iron Heroes books, and actually a few very nice people from CCP North America/White Wolf as well, at St. Elmo's Steakhouse.  I had a good time, as I did last year, and even though I am by far the smallest fish at that table, they made me feel very welcome.

Saturday, I had another NSDM game, this time an eight hour megagame I was brought in to facilitate.  This one was a bit more eventful than Thursday's game.  Two fully-staffed cells, the US and China, and 48 players, and we had everything from presidential scandal, to terrorists causing havoc in western China, to a situation in Pakistan that nearly sparked a shooting war between the US, Pakistan, China, and/or Russia.  I think the most surprising, and probably the most disappointing part of the game was the reaction of the US Congress to many of these events; they spent much of the game buried in haggling over the budget and issues of considerably less importance than the president sitting on evidence of spies in USAID for over a year (true, they were American spies, but they didn't know that...) or the CIA and the JCS selling arms to Uighur rebels.

I realize that I haven't been blogging as much as I really should lately, and I suspect that the promised second part of my Empyrean Age review is not going to happen (I think at this point I've dealt with my disappointment and I really don't want to stir that up again -- it's not really useful anyway).  I may have some more general thoughts on worldbuilding at some point though.  I will,however, be blogging quite a bit this week, hopefully, with some updates from GenCon with accompanying photos (assuming I don't screw up with my new camera too much).

Adam and I arrived in Indy last night and after a quick stop at the packed registration hall so he could pick up his GM materials, we went to dinner with Wolfgang and Cierra from CAIN at the Rock Bottom Brewery. That was my first time there to actually have dinner, and it was pretty good; I had some sort of Southwestern pasta that was decent enough, and I didn't hear anyone else complain.  While there wasn't really any line, it was pretty full; you could tell the GenCon crowd was starting to come in to town.

After dinner, we met up with another CAINite, our slumming Amarr Yoshito, and went out for coffee to talk and give him a chance to get a bite to eat, and we ended up doing that for a good two or two and a half hours before heading out.  This is really what I love about GenCon, being able to just hang out and talk games or whatever with people for hours on end; I don't get much of a chance to do that back in Champaign, since most of my friends there, with a few exceptions, are not huge gamers.

Anyway, on tap for today is a fastplay game of NSDM and probably a few of their seminars, a quick swing through the vendor hall, and then the CAIN dinner tonight at the hopefully-as-awesome-as-it-is-in-Chicago Weber Grill, all of which I'll hopefully get some pictures of.

I have had this scene running through my head for the last day and a half.  Thank you so much, Gracie.

I had to be up in Chicago today for my second surgery letter, so I went up on Saturday to spend the weekend so I could see Sam, Gracie, and Marc.  Sam and Gracie are always gracious hosts (no pun intended), and as always I had a great time with them (and obviously with Marc).

Saturday I didn't get up to Chicago until almost 1800, so Sam, Gracie and I just stayed in for the night and watched some movies while I caught up on some email (Deidei also introduced me to the Totally Rad Show over IRC Saturday, which I encourage folks to check out if you have some time to waste).

Sunday, Sam dropped me off downtown where I met up with Marc near Union Station and we went to the Art Institute, which is the last of the "big" Chicago museums I hadn't yet been too.  I have to admit that I am not exactly a huge art buff, but I do like to consider myself at least a bit cultured, so I figured this was as good a chance as any to see the museum (and frankly, to live this close and never visit some of the most important artistic works in the world seems a bit neglectful).  Marc and I spent most of the day there, and I definitely enjoyed myself -- we managed to see most of the museum, though some of it is closed for the construction of the new Modern Wing, and I got to see Nighthawks, which is one of my favorite pieces of "real" art.  I think the biggest deal for me is just seeing things that are hundreds of years old sitting right there in front of me; knowing that something can survive that long and wondering about everyone else who has been in that position during their entire history.

After the museum, we walked from there to Fogo de Chao to meet Sam, Gracie, CK and Mel for dinner.  This was Marc's first time there and he was very impressed (and very full) after the experience as usually happens with a visit to Fogo.  Stuffed to the gills, Marc and I went back to the Hotel Blake where we were staying for the night.  After checking in, we went to see Hancock since we were too full to really do anything else. :) I have to say that I wasn't quite as impressed with the movie as Mike was; my opinion is pretty close to that of Roger Ebert, though I don't know that I would give it three out of four stars; it was a solid two and a half though.  I certainly don't feel like it was a waste of time or money, but the movie wasn't really anything super-special to me; if we had chosen something else to see instead I think I would have been just as happy.  Worth checking out if there's nothing else you are particularly interested in seeing at the theatre though.

Monday morning, after dropping Marc off at his office, I went back to Sam and Gracie's and hung out with Gracie for the day, catching up on some of the writing I've been slacking off on, and then the three of us went to the Greek Islands for dinner (unfortunately, Marc was stuck at work; I'm definitely looking forward to when he'll be done with this project!) and I had saganaki for the first time, as well as some very tasty calamari and their ambrosia dessert, which was delicious.

Today I had to go to Evanston for my appointment, which was a pleasant commute, once I actually figured where I was actually going (I need to learn to trust Google Maps instead of my own sense of direction -- I spent about 15 minutes looking for Western Avenue when I was actually on Western Avenue to start with *sigh*), and I was back on the road by about 1300 and home by 1530, so it wasn't too bad a day of driving, despite some construction on the Kennedy.

All in all a good and fairly productive weekend -- I think that's the last of the preliminaries for my surgery, which is probably a good thing with it only six weeks off now (which means the first half of my payment is due this week).  I am not looking forward to writing a ten thousand dollar check, but on the other hand, I've been saving that money for a reason, and it's about time I did something with it.

I spent last weekend up in Chicago with Marc again, perhaps at an inopportune time Eve-wise (more on that later), but it was definitely worth my while.  Aside from just being able to spend time with Marc, we managed to squeeze in a fair bit of fun stuff to the weekend.

• We went to another Wolves game on Friday, this time the first game of the conference championships against the Toronto Marlies (yes, that is a really silly name).  Unlike the last time I saw a Wolves game, this game was much cleaner and better played, and resulted in a pretty strong Wolves victory.  I had a lot of fun and am definitely looking forward to seeing more games next season, assuming I can fit them in (and that I am still living around here).  The Wolves do seem to have a problem with consistency though; you could tell during the game they swung between playing good hockey and just sort of lazing around on the ice, not challenging for the puck or bunching up.
• Saturday we saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall, another Judd Apatow production, and we weren't disappointed.  It was very funny, though I don't think it was quite as accessible or "friendly" as 40 Year Old Virgin or Knocked Up -- closer to the level of Superbad.  Not sure it really needed that much Jason Segel full frontal, though.  Still, it did a good job of not going overboard with cheap laughs and having some serious heart to it, so it keeps with the other three movies I mentioned in that vein.  It also seemed to be longer than I expected, but not in a bad way; the story just seemed to keep going.  I wasn't annoyed with that so much as just surprised.  It's also impressive how the old Judd Apatow players are turning out to be good writers in their own right.
  
• We also started watching Firefly, which was probably long overdue; I'm not a completely rabid fan, but it is one of my favorite shows and a good reference for taste.  We've watched all the way up through "Out of Gas" now, and Marc seems to like it, which is good.  I wasn't sure at first, because he seemed awfull quiet during "Serenity" and "The Train Job," and he finds River annoying (which I suspect is going to make the movie a little less enjoyable to him), but the fact that he kept wanting to squeeze in extra episodes makes me a little less nervous that he's just doing it to mollify me.  I suspect we'll probably finish up the series this weekend when he comes down to visit.
• Sunday afternoon we had dinner at the Weber Grill Restaurant.  I'd seen the Indianapolis location when I was at GenCon (it's on the way from the hotel I usually stay at to the Convention Center), and I'm a big fan of the Weber cookbooks, so I have been wanting to try it out, but I've just never had the chance.  We thought about hitting it on Saturday, but it was a bit far from the theatre we went to, so we hit it Sunday.  I wasn't sure what to expect, but holy smoke (no pun intended) was it good.  The rolls they start you out with are awesome -- they call it pretzel bread, and it really is just like a roll made from soft pretzel dough, from what I can tell.  I had the herb-marinaded flank steak, and Marc had the tomato basil chicken, and both were, quite frankly, mindblowingly good, and the garlic mashed potatoes with both of them were delicious.  I can't speak highly enough of the place, which has a great atmosphere in addition to the food, and I will definitely be trying to stop at the one in Indy this year.  Even the prices were not that out of whack with what I'd expect -- a bit expensive, but not really disproportionate with the quality.  If you get a chance to visit (I just found out they are only in Chicago and Indy), I highly recommend stopping by.

I'll probably have another post coming up today in relation to Thursday's events in Eve, of which I've been slightly critical -- look for that later tonight, probably.

So Saturday, Marc, CK, Mel, and I went to see Iron Man, joining the throngs of people evidently also doing so, by the looks of this weekend's take.  I don't think Marc, Mel, or CK knew much about Iron Man at all prior to the movie, while I have a bit of knowledge about the character, mostly through osmosis from RPGnet (and I read a lot of comics when I was back in middle school).  For all of us, I think, the movie was definitely a hit out of the park; for me, Iron Man is now competing with Batman Begins as my favorite superhero movie of all time.  As Jeremy pointed out though, the two are so different in tone that it is hard to really compare them.

Robert Downey Jr. does an awesome job as Tony Stark (evidently alcoholic playboy is not a hard role for him to grasp), and he definitely nails the personality in each aspect -- Tony as the pre-epiphany playboy, Tony as ubergeek, and Tony as post-epiphany superhero.  The supporting cast is good too -- Gwyneth Paltrow, Terrence Howard, and Jeff Bridges all do a good job, and the movie isn't overly crowded with villians or supporting cast like some recent movies have been (see the latest Spiderman outing, for instance).  There was plenty of stuff that was obviously for real fans of the comic book (I'll give some examples behind the cut), but you could definitely enjoy the movie without ever having read the comic.  The special effects, while impressive, never overshadow the rest of the movie, and "in helmet" shots of Stark keep Downey from being a glorified voice actor for much of the film, as can sometimes happen with movies heavy on the CGI.

This is a movie I'm definitely looking forward to getting on DVD, and I'll probably try to pick up the soundtrack as well, which was pretty good.

I'm usually pretty wary of most attempts to undermine the popularity of stuff like YouTube or other "upstart" websites by established media companies; usually they end up being pretty lame or at least critically gimped in some way.  However, after having both benoc and Deidei mention watching a few things on hulu.com, I checked it out just to see how it was, especially because Deidei was trying to get me to watch Kitchen Confidential (vaguely based on Anthony Bourdain's book, which I really liked).  So I checked it out this weekend, since it's easy enough to leave a webpage open while I play Eve in another window or something.

Surprisingly enough, it doesn't suck too bad.  You are forced to watch brief commercials at certain points; this isn't horrible, since most shows would have them anyway and the commercials are only 15-30 seconds.  The only time it gets a little annoying is when it's a show that was originally shown on pay cable, like Total Recall 2070, where the commercial breaks can come at odd moments.  Furthermore, the selection of shows is surprisingly good.  I knew that it was a joint venture between NBC and FOX, but I forgot how many shows on other networks are done through them, and the catalog of old shows is surprisingly good as well.  They don't have full catalogs of all the shows there, but especially the one-season shows that were cancelled (like Firefly) they have there, which is nice if you wanted to see a show you heard about but didn't see, and don't want to take a chance on buying the DVDs (or the DVDs aren't available).

So far, I've gone through all of Kitchen Confidential (which was okay -- it was definitely better having read the book and being vaguely familiar with the craziness in a restaurant kitchen) and Total Recall 2070, which I only saw a few episodes of when it was in syndication.  It's worth checking out if you have some time to kill and you're bored.

So I've been quite remiss in updating the blog lately, so I'll try to sum up what's happened in the last month or so since I got back from Arizona.  Still not a ton of details on some of my current projects, which are still a bit in progress.  I have been a bit busy this last month though, so here's some updates.

• As I'm sure most of you are already aware, I've started seeing someone in Chicago, so I've been going up there (and he's been coming down here) most of the last few weeks.  I won't spill too many details, but things are going rather well and that's all I'll say here, since I know my parents read this.
• Aaaand speaking of seeing someone in Chicago, we went and saw a Chicago Wolves game the last weekend in March.  It was the first hockey game I've seen in quite a while and we had a really good time, despite the fact that the Wolves got waxed by Houston and the game was...well, you could say it was a bit chippy.  I'm not sure how many penalties there were, but the first one was less than 30 seconds in and the Houston goalie got ejected with 5 seconds left (when he crosschecked a Chicago player in front of the net with three seconds left in the game and his team up by several points).
• The same weekend I spent Sunday with Sam and Gracie, and we did Fogo de Chao for dinner and went to see U2 3D at Navy Pier.  Dinner was excellent, as Fogo always is, and the movie was very good.  I'm not an especially huge U2 fan, I have to admit, but the movie did an excellent job of capturing the concert experience and it definitely made me wish I went to more live music stuff (which Marc has promised to drag me to).
• A week later Marc came down here and I got to introduce him to a pair of my favorites; Blade Runner and Jupiter's pizza, one of my favorite thin crusts.  Lucky for him, he liked the movie (it's only my favorite, after all) and the pizza, so it was a good result.
• I returned the favor and stayed up in Chicago over last weekend and had a lovely time.  Admittedly, we didn't do a whole lot but spend some time hanging out around the house, but it's been so long since I've been able to do that, it was a nice change of pace.  We had dinner at a nice Greek restaurant on Saturday, where I tried octopus for the first time (not what I expected, I admit, and not really to my taste), and on Sunday I had Giordano's for the first time.  I'm not ready to say it's better than local favorite Papa Del's, but it's definitely at least as good.
• We also watched Knocked Up and Wordplay.  Marc had never seen any of the Judd Apatow movies or series, and it was a bit hard to convince him -- let's face it, it does look a little juvenile when you don't really know what they are like.  However, I think he's thoroughly hooked now, and I expect we'll end up watching the rest soon enough.  Wordplay was really good as well, and actually exciting, something I wouldn't expect to say about a movie about crosswords.  I find it hard to believe that someone that can do the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle in less than five minutes is actually human, though.

All righty, I think that's about it for now.  There will be news about some writing coming up, but I don't want to make any promises before I actually deliver anything.  I promise not to let things go this long without an update again though.

Benoc made a blog post today that got me thinking about morale in general; note that his subject for that post is my current place of employment, so I don't think I'll say too much about his post in particular, but for people wondering why I have been a bit out of sorts lately, that might prove a bit illuminating.

I don't have any "professional" management experience; I've been a peon here at CITES for the last nine years almost, and I tend to like more hands-on tasks than meetings, budgets, and the other headaches that come with management anyway.  However, for nearly the last two years, I have been part of my corporation's command staff on Eve Online, and while I'm sure it's not quite the same as managing something people do for a living, as opposed to something they are at least supposed to be doing for fun, I would like to think that it has given me some insights on how a good manager can help people pull together and how important morale management is to the success of an organization, regardless of its type.

The most damaging thing to morale that I've seen is the same thing that causes customers to become upset with someone they are doing business with: a sense that the plight of the people at the bottom that the people at the top just don't give a damn about them, or aren't even aware that a problem exists.  Being told that your concerns are not important or watching someone tell you how awesome things are when you can barely bring yourself to come to work every day is one of the most depressing things imaginable, because it destroys the one thing that you might still have left, and that's hope.  If the boat is being steered into the reef, and you sit there trying to tell the helmsman to change course until you're blue in the face, but he insists that everything is a-okay and what really needs to be done is to lighten the load by tossing half the crew overboard, you can't help but feel like things can only get worse.

This is why I have tried to be as honest with rank-and-file members of my corporation on Eve, and not insult their intelligence by denying realities that they all can see.  I'm also honest about my limitations and recognize the strengths of not only the other members of the command staff but also those of the rest of the corporation's members as well.  This works well for a few reasons; first of all, in my opinion, we've done a good job of making sure the people in charge are actually good at what they do.  Second, we make sure to recognize the contributions of junior members of the corporation as much as possible, and reassure them that many of the mistakes they make are ones that we have all made in the past when we started.  Finally, and possibly most important, we get rid of people who don't contribute to the group, so that everyone in the corporation is a valued asset that we can count on in times of crisis.

Maybe I'm just naive (as Adam suggested in his comment to another post), but I've found that honesty is almost always the best policy when it comes to dealing with people.  It makes it harder for anyone to attack you, because it gives them nowhere to go unless they attack your accomplishments or lack of them specifically, it makes it less likely for you to get tripped up by your own words (which is closely related I guess), it gains you respect so that people will trust you in the future, and frankly, it makes it easier to live with yourself.  Unfortunately, I will also admit that it makes you look somewhat weak at times compared to people who inflate their own accomplishments or outright lie about what they have done.  When that's exposed, though, it all comes down like a house of cards.  There's plenty of people in my work life, my personal life, and my "Eve life" that I disagree with, often heatedly, on a variety of topics.  If they are well-reasoned and/or well-researched opinions, though, or even if they demonstrate that the person has put in a lot of thought and effort developing them, I still find it easy to respect them.  People who demonstrate that they have no idea what they are talking about, who haven't even tried to understand other points of view or dismiss them out of hand because of the source (or who call such things "insubordination"), will have a hard time getting any respect from me, and I suspect from many others.

It makes for bad management, poor leadership, and morale that makes German conscripts in Stalingrad look positively jubilant.

So a few days ago, Adam sent me an invite to LinkedIn, which is a "social networking site for professionals."  I'm a little suspicious about the whole "social networking" thing anyway, especially the ones where it's a competition to see who can get the most "friends," when they don't know half of them, but I have heard good things about LinkedIn from other people, and it's no surprise to anyone that knows me that I am interested in finding a new job and getting the hell out of Dodge, so I decided to take the plunge and give it a shot.

After creating my profile, I decided to poke around and see who else I was linked to with a few vague keywords like "game design," "roleplaying games," and a few other things.  I expected to get a fair number of hits, especially because Adam knows a lot of people in the field (surprise, surprise) and a few other friends of mine are somewhat involved with computer games industry or have friends who are, but I did not expect to see some of the names there that I did.  Probably the most surprising was to see Tom Dowd listed as three degrees away from me; as a screaming Shadowrun fangirl, that was pretty sweet.  I also saw that I was three degrees from Greg Costikyan and a VP of Engineering at CCP, both of which were pretty neat.

I'm somewhat suspicious of claims that this will totally revolutionize my world, but as a networking tool it's actually kind of neat.  Much better than my previous experiences with these sorts of things; the test will be to see if it actually helps me out in the long run.

A few weeks ago, I got a pair of books from Morrie, my friend from Israel, as sort of a belated birthday present.  The first was The Eyre Affair, the first Thursday Next novel.  I enjoyed it immensely, despite the fact that it takes place in quite possibly the most crazy, out-there alternate history-type setting I've ever read.  I burned through it in a few days of reading on the bus as I usually do with "fun" reading.  It wasn't particular heavy reading and the plot was very fast paced.

The other book she sent me was The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.  I have been trying to get through this book for the last two weeks and it has been slow going.  Not because the book is bad, by any means -- frankly, it's one of the best things I've read in a long time.  No, the bad part of this book is that every page is soaked in metaphor and subtext, the characters are so well painted, the plot has so many twists it feels like some sort of MC Escher drawing, and the locations are so detailed that you can almost smell the musty tomes in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.  It takes me much longer than usual to read and digest every page, and I still find myself wondering if I missed something.  This is a style of writing that I absolutely love, where everything is slowly coming together, and you just kind of drink it in, and feel the climax creeping up your spine, something that is best with this sort of novel.  I'm not sure how to classify the book, but I suppose right now I would have to say it is sort of magic realism, or gothic horror, or something sort of combination of both.

Zafon does such a perfect job of making you feel the setting of postwar Barcelona that, even though I've never been to Spain or even anywhere with Spanish architecture really, I can imagine what it looks, sounds, feels, and smells like.  Daniel's father's bookstore, the aforementioned Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Mr. Fortuny's abandoned apartment, the streetside cafes, everything seems to come alive.  The emotional content of the book just pours out and you're whipped along with the story.

Here's the problem though -- it all just seems so effortless.  The way everything just sort of flows together, it's like Zafon was divinely inspired and it just poured out onto the page.  It's hard to believe that something so deep and complex could possibly be written in any sort of conventional way.  Now, in my head, I know that can't possibly be the case, and I'm sure he spent many nights just wracking his brain for the right metaphor, writing and rewriting, but it just doesn't feel like it at all.  The book is, so far, just a masterful work of literature.

Reading books like this just seems to set such a high bar for myself, when I try to do my own writing, that it feels like everything I write is pale and lifeless, and just doesn't even come close to comparing something like that.  Part of it, I know, is just that not everyone has that same style.  Part of it is that I just haven't practiced enough, especially the last few years.  Part of it is that I'm still uncomfortable with the idea of putting that much emotion into the page, because it makes you vulnerable.  I just wonder though if I'd even notice if I wrote something with anything close to that kind of resonance though, because I pick everything apart in my mind.  Does Zafon look at the book he wrote and marvel at what he managed to put on the page, or does he just look at it and wonder what he could have done better, or what other people see in what he wrote?

It's really hard for me to take compliments about my writing, partly because I know my friends and family probably are not going to tell me to my face "this is the worst piece of crap I've ever read" but also because I think a lot of them just haven't had the exposure to really amazing works of literature that I've been lucky enough to have.  Reading even things I didn't think I would like, like Paul Auster's City of Glass, which I read only because it was required for a class, or things I didn't like at all, like Toni Morrison's Beloved, which I thought was a pretentious effort at making a completely unreadable "artsy" book (and yet still had to read three times for various classes in high school and college) exposes me to many more different types of writing that most people ever get exposed to in this day and age.  It's hard to feel happy with a compliment from someone whose library consists of Harlequin romances and Dungeons and Dragons tie-in novels -- you almost wish they would say they didn't like it.  Of course, no one I know has a reading list that is that bad, but I don't talk to too many people who have read everything from medieval literature to postmodernist novels these days.  Even when I was in school, when you are in a writing seminar and everyone there is writing another "slice of life" story about drunk or stoned college kids with crappy love lives, where you just wish everyone involved would drop dead and shut the hell up, it's hard to take them seriously when they talk about how they like what you wrote (or, on the upside, when they say they didn't like what you wrote).

I'm not going to stop reading things like The Shadow of the Wind anytime soon, but I have a real love-hate relationship with them.