Here's to Hoping I Don't Regret This Decision: Ped Xing, Now Online

One thing I've always been concerned about when it comes to the internet is privacy, and the fact that once something gets posted to the internet, it's basically available for anyone to see and use, forever and ever, amen. Sure, websites allow you to pull or edit things, but who's to say someone hasn't already downloaded what you've said or done and shared it with the other half of the world by now?

This is one of the main reasons why I've always been fearful over sharing what I would consider one of my "creative highlights" of my life, Ped Xing. Ped Xing is a project I did back in 2005 for one of my school district's "senior project" requirements. (That's a long story by itself, so I'm not even going to try explaining it.) Honestly, it was a project I had always wanted to do, but now that I had a legitimate reason for "having" to do it, I figured that now (then) was as good of a time as ever.

Since the final project was submitted, Ped Xing has stayed under my watchful eye for over four years now, residing only in a photo album that I show curious friends, and the occasional CD that I send out to people who I can't directly show the album to. (And maybe a random sample photo for some online friends or two.) I've always been afraid to go into other forms of publication with it, just because who knows who's going to steal it.

Recently, I sat down for lunch with Katie Sekelsky, a good friend and founder of the famed Taco Club. As a professional graphic designer and long-time webcomic writer (I suppose I should give a courtesy link to her newest upcoming project, Magpie Luck), she's had a bit of experience with copyright issues, and planted some seeds in my head. Seeds like, "You really need to put Ped Xing up on Flickr." Evil seeds.

But I'm afraid my work will be stolen or plagarized, he said tepidly, possibly misspelling that last word. "Don't worry, you can put it under a Creative Commons license," she said, or at least that's how we're paraphrasing it.

I don't know why it's taken me so long to do this, but I've finally decided to upload Ped Xing for all to see. For now, I'm being kinda stingy with my license, putting a "Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic" Label on it, which, I won't lie, I'm not entirely sure what it means, but it's at least a step in protecting my work. (I might peel back the No Derivative bit later, but for now, my idea = my idea, kthnxbye.) Hopefully in the future, I'll be able to bring this project back for a second go, and we'll have even more fun with cardboard men.

For now, click the picture below to see the album on Flickr. At some point in the future, I'll upload the photo captions/descriptions and other literary bits that went into this project. Enjoy!



Fair warning: I had long hair at the time of this project.

The Nice Thing Is, All of My Failures Are Usually Delicious in Some Respect

The Annual 4th'o Taco Party is coming up, and I'm in a bit of a panic at the moment. I usually have a game or two or three up my sleeve to play, but at the moment, I'm having a bit of trouble coming up with new ideas for games. I've got one activity planned, but it'll literally take no more than ten or fifteen minutes to play. I could always resort back to the old classics, like 1000 Blank White Cards or Things, but I want to try something different, so I'm trying to think of Other Things to play.

I did have one idea come to mind, partially out of necessity, partially out of curiosity. In a previous party, I had a game where two teams raced to build a pyramid of cups (11 cups in the base, which was the killer, as one team thought they had won after only ten), but then in subsequent rounds, letting a member of their team fire at the other team's stack using homemade marshmallow guns. I still had the marshmallow guns (washed, of course) in storage, and found them recently when going through some old boxes of junk.

Also pertinent to this story is a gingerbread house kit, which I had bought back around Christmas, with the intention of getting together with some friends and making it, but we never got around to it. The kit sat around my room for some time, taking up space. When I found the marshmallow guns in the box in my room, my gaze shifted, if only for a split second, toward the gingerbread house kit.

The theory for the game was, each team has a gingerbread house (pre-made or made by the teams that day, I don't know), and a supply of marshmallow guns, or other sweet-flinging objects. In a sort of weird capture-the-flag variant, each team would set out to try to destroy the other team's house. Honestly, the entire game is just an excuse to do weird things with food. In reality, it wouldn't work for several reasons. One, cleaning up would be a pain, since I'd likely be peeling half-melted marshmallows off of just about every external surface of my house, two, people would likely have to be peeling it off of each other, three, if even one sweet wasn't picked up, we'd instantly become a haven for all sorts of insect problems. So in all practicality, this idea wouldn't fly.

But... Just... What If...

So summer's here, the weather is good, and a lot of my friends are home from school. I threw an open invite up to a group of them to work on "a project". Very vague on details, but I hinted that it involved food, which eliminated about 2% of all possibilities. On the day I had planned, only one was able to show up, Steve, my SSS brother. We got to work on the gingerbread house, and it was working pretty well for a while. (Gotta love the ominous addition of the words "for a while".)





Getting the house to stay erect while adding the decorations was hard, but we at least had the opportunity to blame it on the fact that hey, it's almost seven months old now. Unfortunately, while adding (ironically) a frowny face to the roof of the house, all four sides instantly decided to collapse inward, and that was basically the end of that house. There was no salvaging it anymore.

On the bright side, the gingerbread man, snowman, and tree were still standing (albeit leaning). With what would probably become the quote of the day, I blurted out (and let's see if this gets me on a terrorism watchlist), "We still have people, let's take them outside and shoot them!"



Not much more to say here, so let's cut to the moral of the story: Gingerbread house icing becomes cement if you give it enough time to dry. Amen.

Rec

This post sets the record so far for shortest title for a post, yet leaves enough wiggle room for one or two to slip by there. Feel the suspense!

On Wednesday nights for the last, oh, I don't know, maybe ten years or so, I've been going to a youth activity night at our church, called "Recreation," or "Rec," as the cool kids call it. In a nutshell, it's an hour and a half of getting together, playing games, getting sweaty, and having fun. The faces running it have changed, and the games and people playing them have changed, but it's been a pleasure to participate for all this time.

Each night of Rec usually starts with a large mesh bag (or two) of balls. A few basketballs, about six or seven cheap dollar store nine-inch balls, maybe a soccer ball or kickball of sorts, a smaller wiffleball-type ball, and maybe a frisbee or two thrown in for good measure. The gym is (intentionally or otherwise) littered with the balls for the first fifteen minutes or so, and all of the kids run around throwing them into the basketball hoops a/o each other. After this, some sort of organized game starts to form. Dodgeball, kickball, ultimate frisbee, or some variant of one of those. (And trust me, we have a lot of variants.)

Part of the fun lies in those bizarre variants. Dodgeball is a fairly run-of-the-mill game. Dodgeball where you can only kick the ball is different. Dodgeball where you become a member of the other team when you get hit is strange (but ensures that everyone wins. Yay!). Dodgeball where everyone plays on a team by themselves is fairly common, but dodgeball where everyone plays on a team by themselves and as soon as the person who got you out gets out, you get back in, meaning that the only way to win the game is to effectively knock every single person out of the game at least once without getting nailed yourself, that's not as common.

There was one time when, I can't remember how, we got the center of a hubcap from someone's vehicle. It was basically a seven-inch round piece of aluminum with SUBARU printed across it. This became the centerpiece of a game of ultimate frisbee. It was nearly impossible to throw with any consistant accuracy, and it didn't help that there were probably only three people per team, but it was one of the most fun ways to risk getting tetanus that I've ever experienced.

Similarly, a game of frisbee outside in the former front yard of the elementary school went slightly haywire when someone threw the frisbee and hit the flagpole. Someone declared, "Well, that's two points for our team!" And pole frisbee was born. Goals are still worth only one point, but hitting the flagpole with the frisbee got you two points. Pole shots could only be taken if the pole was still "forward" along your team's offensive line, although you could pass back to a teammate behind the line, and they could hit it from there. Scores would often reach ridiculously high numbers (occasionally in the 40's or 50's), yet very few goals were ever scored.

As I got older, everyone else who came started getting younger. Or at least, it felt like that. Eventually, I was one of the few high schoolers who still attended, and one of the few college students who came back to help (ie, play). There were a few kids who also grew up with Rec, and it's still pretty neat to see them change from these young, annoying little kids, to these bizarrely mature high schoolers, then they disappear again until the summer.

The leadership's changed hands a couple of times at Rec, but it's not really ever lost its shine. The most recent "version" (for lack of a better word) has a prayer time in the middle, which is really neat, and is a cool way to minister to the neighborhood kids who come, but might not regularly attend a church. All in all, the same friendly spirit has been maintained for well over a decade now, and I felt somehow compelled to write about it in a blog post. (*shrug) What's it called when you're currently living through something you know you'll later recall as nostalgia?

Your Funny T-Shirt is No Longer Funny (Part 1 of a series, I'm sure.)

T-shirts that have the text "The Man" with an arrow pointing up at the head and the text "The Legend" with an arrow pointing down at the crotch: Funny.

Men who wear this t-shirt while walking down the street holding a little girl's hand: Not nearly as funny.

I'm just saying.

Now We Are Six(th Kyu)

I finally broke down and bought the Orange Box. I'm kinda excited because I can now play Team Fortress 2 with some fellow reviewers, and I can finally play Portal, which I've heard so many good things about (and the fact that it's a puzzle game is an amazing plus), but I'm bizarrely not excited about Half-Life 2. As is, it's a miracle in itself that I'm playing TF2, a kill-your-opponents game, because I've never really been into shmups (although yes, TF2 technically is more than just a shmup). Maybe someday I'll get around to playing HL2, or maybe someday I'll just pass it off to someone as a gift. Does anyone know if you can pass off games that you've purchased on Steam but not yet installed?

Anyway, while TF2's downloading, I thought I'd put in a little blog update. Not that I expect to be playing it anytime within the next six hours (wait, this is taking up how many gigs of space?), but with my connection slowed down a bit due to having something better to do, I figured I might as well put in some time doing something productive elsewhere. I felt bad about leaving my last post being something that really only mattered for a couple of days (although BFG had another game sale this past weekend with code SPRINGBREAK... whoops), so I wanted to get something up as quickly as possible just to freshen things up. I actually tried two separate posts late last Tuesday night, but they were both so amazingly incoherent that I couldn't bear to even finish them. (That, and the general fact that they went absolutely nowhere anyway.) Today though, I have a solid topic to talk about, so let's put the Maria Rita on loop and go for it.

The title for today's post was lovingly lifted from a book of poems by A. A. Milne that I got a while back (it was... oh yes, on my sixth birthday). Unfortunately, poetry didn't really interest me back then, nor does it really interest me much now. I usually read over a piece of poetry like any other bit of prose, rather flatly and emotionlessly. So far as I can remember, only one poem has ever really stood out to me in a "huh, that's interesting" sort of way. That was Walt Whitman's "When I heard the Learn'd Astronomer."

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

For whatever reason, the events I'll eventually get around to detailing in this post made me think back to this book of poetry, which I never even read, even in the almost fifteen years I've owned it. I dug out the book, and found that there really is no poem entitled "Now We Are Six," but instead the title comes from the last poem of the book (entitled "The End"), which is apropos for this post, so I might as well retype it here as well:

When I was One,
I had just begun.

When I was Two,
I was nearly new.

When I was Three,
I was hardly Me.

When I was Four,
I was not much more.

When I was Five,
I was just alive..

But now I am Six, I'm as clever as clever.
So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever.

Abrupt subject jump: Let's talk karate. For those of you wondering, the famed "5000 Katas" tally disappeared rather quickly. Why? Well, once I started getting into the dojo and practicing the katas more heavily, I realized a tremendous problem: I lost count almost immediately. All of a sudden, the need to actually think about the movements in the katas and to focus on my stances and strikes and blocks completely overshadowed a petty little tally. If I focused on the numbers, the katas wouldn't have been good, and the entire exercise would have been futile. So for the 5000 katas plan to actually work, I would need to rent a midget to do the counting for me, so I could focus on the katas. (Why a midget? Simply put, he needs to fit inside my gym bag.) So yeah, 5000 Katas is dead in practice, although not in spirit. I'm still chugging along, just without the tangible steps toward a goal.

Since I've not had much more important things to do during the day than write reviews, prepare for work in the evening, or do whatever oddjob needs done around the house, I've been finding myself at the dojo roughly six days a week to work out. There are a couple of us who try to get together roughly lunchtime-ish (according to their work schedules) to spar around a bit, and there are another cluster of us who have been meeting after school-ish (according to their school schedules) on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to work on different things, and I still have the usual classes Tuesday and Thursday nights and Saturday afternoons for organized group practices. To say the least, I've been practicing a lot, and a lot of different things. I've since started work with on a lot of kenjutsu exercises, including working on the Toyamaryu katas and preparing for a possible trip to a chanbara tournament in P'burgh next month. I'm pretty sure that if I could spend full days practicing in the dojo with someone, I'd sign up in a heartbeat.

Last week though was sort of hellish though. Why? Testing. Need I say more? Those who know me know that I am bizarrely panicky when it comes to any sort of major test or examination. This past week was no different. I still went in town to the dojo everyday to practice as usual, but I could feel my nerves taking a hold of me. My mind was racing the entire week, and I had a hard time relaxing. (Okay, so not being able to relax is a running problem for me, but you get the point.) The night before the test, I had a hard time falling asleep, and I felt sick to the stomach for that entire day. I went into the test an absolutely jittery blob, and came out feeling like so much less. All of the katas that I had been working on for months were terrible, I blanked when it came time to recall terms and wazas, and honestly, I feel that it's by miracle alone that I passed that test.

Now I am sixth kyu. A blue belt. I was quite displeased that I had gotten to that level in the way that I did, because I felt that I had done a terrible job. I have no doubt in my mind that what I did was a terrible job. Nonetheless, I somehow passed, and found myself in the dojo the next day, wearing the hakama I wear for practicing kenjutsu, with a blue obi. I don't think I actually practiced that day. Instead, I sat on the floor of the dojo and meditated something fierce. I love the irony in how I phrased that, "meditated something fierce," but it's really the most accurate way of describing what I did then. I've never really been able to meditate before, but something actually worked this time around. For the last week, I had been completely unable to empty my mind and just relax, and the morning after, I finally accomplished thinking about nothing for probably the first time in my life. It's a nice feeling. I kinda miss it.

Anywho, I guess if there's one thing I "got" out of that time, it was that I came to accept my "fate," per se. I've come a long way since when I first started practicing karate back in what, June? Since then, I've picked up so much knowledge not just on karate but also kenjutsu and other fun forms, and it's weird to think that at one point in time in my life, I never thought I'd even make it this far. And yet, here I am. I have great potential, and I can't talk myself into thinking otherwise. After the test on Thursday, I managed to learn Heian Sandan in a matter of ten minutes on Friday and fifteen minutes on Saturday, with more fine-tuning today. When I first started, Heian Shodan took well over three days to get the hang of, but here I am now, understanding everything that's going on, and everything flowing so much more naturally.

I'm still by no means perfect in what I do, nor do I expect to be anytime soon. I'm still bitter about the test, but all I can do is just work out my kinks (and my tics) and just prepare myself for next time. I've come a long way, I can't deny myself that, and I have so much further to travel. Now I am sixth kyu, and I am clever as clever. But I can only hope that I will continue to grow for ever and ever.

Actually, in retrospect, that was kind of a dumb way to tie everything together.