Since I’m a gamer I tend to run across a lot of Worst Games lists. Likewise with movies and Worst Movies lists. And since the Internet is a place with a lot of information, a large desire to fit in, and a disturbingly pervasive zeitgeist, a lot of games and movies make these lists time and again. For video games, we have E.T. the Extraterrestrial (which almost singlehandedly collapsed the home video game market in the early 1980s) and Custer’s Revenge (revenge rape porn** on the Atari 2600, and no I am not making this up, and no I will not link it to you). For movies, it’s fare like Manos: the Hands of Fate (“popularized” by its feature on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and North (great actors, actually kind of an interesting premise, catastrophically bad implementation).

These entries turn up a lot. And when I say “a lot” I mean “on every list of this kind”. So here’s a thought: let’s give them a bye. Let’s all universally acknowledge that yes, these games and movies are stinkers. If someone put one on the coffee table you’d run out of the room holding your nose. We get it. The next time you make a Top Ten Worst Whatever list, look for entries that you know are on every other list out there – and remove them. Make a note at the beginning: “Yes, we know ET was absolute crap. We’ve all agreed on that. It transcends the scale. For the purpose of this list, it’s actually in negative numbers. Let’s move on.”

Because, really, I’d like to see a Top Ten Worst Games where I didn’t know with absolute certainty what was going to be #1 on the list. I think we can all agree that that would be a good thing.

* It entertains me that I have a pre-existing WP tag for “kvetching”.
** Man, the Google hits I’m going to get for that.

I download a lot of ebooks. Right now I have 238 PDFs in my “ebooks” directory, and that’s not counting the ones that I’ve downloaded but haven’t sorted yet (which is in the double digits). I’ve read most of the ones in “ebooks” – I’d say about 60% – and none of the ones in “Downloads”. The ones that I’ve downloaded but not sorted yet often have names like – I am not making this up – “download.pdf” and “My eBook.pdf” and “blogging.pdf”. These are not helpful names. These are names that are easy and convenient for the producer but have little to no bearing on the content or the source and are therefore of little to no value to the consumer.

Why is this so common? Because it’s easy and convenient for the producer. Maybe the producer assumes you’ll be reading it right away, so the knowledge of what PDF it is will be fresh; or you’ll be reading it in a browser, so the filename won’t really matter; or that this is the only ebook you’ve ever downloaded (believe it or not, I know one producer who relies on that).

But the truth is, people Save Link As… and then forget about it. Once a week when they clean up their Downloads folder they find “mygreatpdf.pdf” and decide to delete it so they’ll have the space for more downloaded episodes of “Laverne and Shirley”. Your ebook doesn’t get read, because your target reader doesn’t remember what it is, or from whom they got it, or why they even have it in the first place.

The important part:

Make sure the name of your ebook (or audio file or worksheet or whatever) is an accurate reflection of both the source and the content of the file. Sure, the consumer could rename the file to whatever she wants. But that requires opening the file, finding the name of the content (actually not always very easy), finding the name of the author, closing the file (since Acrobat won’t let you modify an open PDF), and renaming the file (“I double-click on the name to rename it and it just opens the damn file again“). Why take the risk that she’ll just say “eh, can’t have been that important” and delete it? It is trivial effort on your part when you’re making the file – you have to give it a name, after all, and you may as well give it a useful one – and significant effort when your reader is looking at the file.

In browsing TV Tropes today (I won’t link, so as to save you from wasting the entire day), I came across the page for The Casey Effect. It’s a sports trope that dictates that fictional sports games invariably go down to the wire, with one final push, buzzer-beating shot, or last-ditch home run winning the game for the protagonists who were otherwise sure to lose. The page reminded me of a baseball game I’d watched about ten years ago: it was a Mariners game, where the opposing team had scored a large number of runs – 20 or more – in the early innings, but then the Mariners came back from behind in a massive rally that won them the game. I remember watching it at a friend’s house here in Richmond, and I remember all of us being sure that the Mariners couldn’t win the game, and getting more and more excited as they fought out a win anyway.

The trouble was, I couldn’t remember who they were playing or what date the game was on, or even what the final score was, and records of the Mariners’ seasons about that time didn’t mention a comeback like that. So I went hunting. I knew that the game had to be in 2001 – in 2000 I hadn’t met the friends I was watching the game with, and in 2002 I’d moved away before the beginning of the baseball season – so I went to the definitive baseball reference and started looking through each game of 2001, looking for a high-scoring, close-scoring game that involved the Mariners. After about half an hour, I found what must be the game in question: on August 5, 2001, the Cleveland Indians defeated the Seattle Mariners 15-14.

Wait, what?

According to my memory, the opposing team (the Indians make sense; since Cleveland is nearby, we had a reason to be watching the game) scored at least 20 runs early on, and then the Mariners came back from behind to win the game in a breathtaking rally. In reality, it was the Mariners who’d scored 12 runs in the first three innings; the Indians scored two in the fourth, but the Mariners scored 2 more in the fifth to re-establish their lead. The Indians then spent the 7th, 8th, and 9th innings tying the game – they were the home team, so they really did tie the game up in the bottom of the ninth – and then scored another run in the 11th inning to win. The majestic Mariners comeback that I’d been holding in my memory for almost a decade was actually a game where the Mariners had been the favored team – they were 18 games ahead of the Indians – and they’d lost the game.

Strange how our memories choose the wrong things to remember.

He’d been to therapy because he was abused as a child and became a bully to compensate. It was the only way he’d known how to get the anguish out. “I wish I had your coping mechanism.” It was a therapy term. “Nobody should have to put up with that shit. I’m sorry.”

Funny how different we look from the outside.

Inspired by this post by Kyeli.

One summer, my sister and I both went to the same camp that revolved around horses. (I think I was starting to feel left out.) She rode, while I did archery and crafts and such. We did all have the opportunity to get on a horse, though, and walk around a bit. They were very well-behaved horses, but when I got on mine, we walked around a bit like we were supposed to and then he reared up a little and I was so startled that I fell off. I figured that my turn was up, so I started walking away. The trainer shook her head. “When you fall off the horse, you get back on.” Then she led the next kid over to my horse and that was the end of my riding experience.

I thought about that day today, for the first time in about twenty years. Today was an exceptionally hard day, in Havi’s parlance. Money stress, and family stress, and work stress – all the big problematic stressors showed up and made a big mess of my day, and every time I’ve tried to push through and get going again, something else comes up to slap me back down. It’s been, to coin a phrase, one of those days.

There’s a significant part of me that’s trying to retreat. One of the things I tend to do when I’m stressed is to go into a quiet room and listen to water falling. In this house, since the only quiet room tends to be the bathroom, I’ll go in and run the shower for a few minutes. Often I’ll turn the showerhead outward, so that it’s spraying against the curtain, and let the pressure and heat relax me. I can’t express how much I’ve wanted to do that, pretty much all day. But instead, for whatever reason, that horse trainer’s voice keeps coming into my head. I can still hear her – with perfect clarity, my memory tells me, although twenty years and the shame and dizziness from falling off a horse have probably introduced a few artifacts. “When you fall off the horse, you get back on.”

So instead of retreating and finding a safe spot, I’ve been getting back up. Every time I fall or am knocked off the horse, I dust myself off and get back on. That trainer keeps prodding me. “No more being the ten-year-old who fell off a horse and just walked away,” she says. “It’d be easy to walk away. You could wipe the slate clean and never have to worry about it again. But if you want to be stronger, and show the people around you what kind of person you are, then you look the horse in the eye and get right back up on its back.”

When you fall off the horse, you get back on.

It’s hard. These difficulties hit me in what’s charitably called the solar plexus. I get dizzy. My vision contracts and I feel my skin tightening and growing hot. My stomach hurts, and I spend a moment reeling. But then I breathe, and smile for ten seconds like my dad taught me to do, and start going again. In the face of so much difficulty I want to be strong. I want to show the people around me that I can come out the other side and be okay. I want to get back on the horse. And it’s strange, because even though today has sucked so hard that Hoover is filing for patent infringement, I’m feeling better about myself than I have in years.

* Yes, I know, you hated horses and wanted a machine gun.

Here’s what I want:

I feel like I’m still a kid. I was young for my class (August birthday) AND I was skipped ahead a grade, so I was always about two years behind everyone else in school. So I always feel like the youngest one in the room.

I take myself WAY too seriously. Even though I was young for my class, I was still the oldest of three children, and I felt like I was constantly being told to “be mature” and “just deal with [perceived hardship or favoritism] because [I'm] older”. I stopped taking piano lessons because my sister was also taking them, and she got precedence on practice time because she was younger, and by the time she was done my mom was sick of hearing the piano so I never got to practice. Long story short, I learned at an early age to take myself REALLY seriously because it was the best way I’d found to Act My Age.

Even if I felt like I was Younger Than Everyone Else.

So what I want is a way to be myself without feeling like I’m way too young to be taken seriously (I’m older than Naomi, for heaven’s sake) and without feeling like I have to take MYSELF excessively seriously.

How this could work:

I’m actually open to advice on this one. Suggestions that aren’t just “suck it up and grow up” are welcome. I’m really not sure how to proceed. Please leave a comment if you have any thoughts about this.

My commitment:

I will do my best to notice when I’m feeling excessively young or taking myself too seriously. I will do my best to correct for it, without BLAMING myself for it. Just because it’s a part of me I’d rather not have doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s bad to have it.

I’m taking a three-prong approach to this, because it seems like the most logical way to go about it. All of the below start with “I want to…”, but they’re divided into sections according to their function.

Intentions

These are aspects of myself that I’ve decided I want to change, or actions that I want to take. They’re not endpoints; they’re processes and beginnings. (You might recall my issues with process, and focusing on these is a way to work on that.) They’re roughly analogous to Havi’s “My commitment” section in her Very Personal Ads. My current intentions are that I want to

• improve my posture;
• exercise more frequently;
• eat better (by which I mean both higher-quality food and food that’s better for me);
• do at least one thing each day that makes me actively happy;
• spend at least one hour each day learning a new skill;
• spend less time in front of the computer; and
• write more often.

Desires

On my paper list, this went under the heading “What I Want”, but I figured for the formal writeup it’d be better to have a consistent naming scheme. These are the desired results of the intentions. They’re deliberately vague, to represent that this is, in fact, a process; I’ll never be done improving. I can’t just get to 180 pounds, say, and decide that okay, I’m done that agenda item; by keeping my desires nebulous, I’m reminding myself to keep moving forward.

As a result of my intentions, I want to

• feel healthier, lighter, and more active;
• improve my skill in things I actually enjoy doing;
• be generally happier with myself and my life; and
• help my family be happier with me and with their lives.

Milestones

These are concrete, but they’re not goals; a goal implies an endpoint. Rather, they’re signals that I’m moving ahead in my intentions and achieving my desires.

In the pursuit of my intentions and desires, I want to

• release a Flash game;
• finish 10,000 words on a single writing project;
• have someone commission art from me; and
• hold a brief conversation in a modern non-English language.

Your thoughts

Like Havi, I’m practicing asking for what I want.

What I’d like to receive in the comments:

• Your intentions, desires, and milestones.
• Thoughts on how I could start on my intentions.
• General support.

What I don’t want:

• To quote Havi, practical concerns (“you realize you need X because…”).
• Negative thoughts.
• Shoulds.
• Judgment.
• Non-productive “advice”.

Thanks for reading!

but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself

- Don Marquis, The Lesson of the Moth

On the one hand, I want to write a blog that provides actual value and has readers who are there for the content.

On the other hand, I want a place to talk about the issues I’m dealing with.

Lost In Translation is, sadly, kind of a middle ground, and suffering for it. On the one hand, I feel somewhat safe talking about my issues here, because frankly, I don’t have a lot of readers and so I’m relatively insulated from shoe-throwing. On the other hand, I feel like I should be providing value with my blog, and so I tone down the discussion of issues (and often don’t discuss them at all). On the gripping hand, I never post any content that’s not All About Me because I feel like anyone who came here, saw that, and then went back into the archives and saw just me and my subscription would be disappointed and frustrated.

And yet I don’t really want to start Yet Another Blog, because it’s already hard enough keeping up with two.

Back to the horns for now.