On the train ride into work this morning, I wasn’t able to get a seat. The train was running just late enough to pick up enough stragglers to sell all the seats just before Downtown Berkeley. I had to stand and observe instead of read and recede.

Almost immediately, I noticed the middle-aged man two rows up and to the left with a laptop. I noticed him not because of his balding head or tall stature, but because he was playing Civilization III on his laptop. It took me a few minutes to determine, from my vantage, which version of Civilization he was playing, but the menu screens gave it away.

Before I could definitively determine that it was Civ III, it occurred to me the man may work for Sid Meier in some capacity and that he may just be heading into the office early by loading up the laptop. But realizing the version confirmed my actual suspicion, that this man was simply trying to prolong the delay before his workday really began and he had no time for games.

There was something profoundly resonant about this man’s experience and the fact that it occurred to me fairly soon after this that I should try to get a closer view so as to vicariously play and thus get some leftover utility from his game to make up for what I was losing in not being able to read. Then the question: would trying to closely follow a Civ game over the shoulder of a stranger give me the same headache I would otherwise get from reading while standing in a moving BART car? Sigh. It simply wasn’t worth it.

But watch I did, from long range, just enough to determine the man’s general approach to gameplay – he seemed to espouse the quick expansion and massive city-building that has always been a hallmark of my own approach through ownership of all four Civilization editions, plus the esoteric unsanctioned alternative Civ 3 that came out about a year or so before Sid Meier’s actual release of same. My vision isn’t what it used to be, so I could only make out terrain and general unit types, but nothing too specific (or headache-inducing).

Back when my vision was more like 20/12, my friends and I infiltrated the brand-new computer lab at the Albuquerque Academy library with freshly minted pirated diskettes of the original Civilization. The librarians were about to get an extended lesson in the first rule of computer lab setup: always face the computer monitors (screens) toward where the lab monitors (people) are going to be. One’s initial inclination is the opposite, because one thinks of a computer lab like a classroom. Students should face the front and the teacher and the monitor all at the same time. And for a full-time classroom, it might work, but not for a free-range computer lab.

It was of course forbidden to play games (let alone install them on the hard drive) in the library lab, perhaps even more evocatively so than it was illegal to copy the game in the first place. But the librarians there were all too stereotypical: lonely overweight women pushing sixty with all the technical savvy of John McCain. They were slow and lumbering and suspicious and you could see them coming in plenty of time to save your game and quit and open a Word document while trying to feign that ponderous, vaguely constipated look that signifies being stumped in the first paragraph of a paper.

It should be noted that this was just before the Internet age, about 1994-1995, so there was none of the alt-tabbing and massive multitasking and assumption of illicit Internet activity that pervades modern education with computers. Hence the naivete to set up the monitors facing the back wall and the incredible innocence of allowing students write-access to the hard drive. The computers were immensely expensive pretty new toys with capabilities entirely unknown to their adult overseers. Keep in mind that this is the school where, about this same time, I would join with a co-conspirator and a classroom full of willing amused accomplices to successfully convince a teacher that she was using a voice-activated VCR.

Eventually, out of sheer boredom or a truly teenage desire to constantly push the envelope, we got less diligent about saving and closing games every time a librarian would pop their head in (can you believe they only came by once every 20 minutes or so?). We would line up in the back row, sometimes four of us in the back and two more in the next-to-last, all playing our various games (my kingdom for network multiplayer in those days!). We would often laugh too loud or curse too much and draw more frequent visits from the stern gray-hairs. And look up innocently, making eye-contact only with that perfect blend of “I-have-nothing-to-hide” and “what-are-you-so-suspicious-of?”

I forget how it all ended exactly – a couple people got busted from time to time, but they really never punished them much (it was outside of school time, after all), sometimes suspending them from coming to the library for a couple days. They didn’t really comprehend the depths of Civ’s infiltration on the computers until much later, maybe after a year and a half or so of our reign over the lab. They locked up the hard drives from student access and we moved on to the Mac labs and text-based Internet (!) RPG’s that were harder to detect as anything other than scrolling word processing.

On the return trip on BART today, I got a seat and chose, since I was getting off early, one in a four-plex of facing seats. Next stop, at Montgomery, two noticeably overweight young women, just on the border of high school and college, piled in diagonally across from each other, each flanking me laterally (one across, one next to). The third empty seat they reserved for… their shopping bags. And they more than occupied the seat. The instigator of the dump-bags-on-seat plan kept having to tamp down the pile of colorful plastic.

Now I don’t know if you’ve ever been on BART in rush hour out of the City, but it is no place for bags on a seat. Not that people don’t try this occasionally, with luggage or their feet or a bike. But the withering peer pressure and angst of so many crammed unseated passengers coveting one rest-worthy surface that isn’t even being occupied by a sentient being – let’s just say it’s not something one generally wants to subject oneself to. Inevitably when confronted, people’s reactions for overtaking this space are huffy, defensive, and entitled, as though they know such a front is the only reasonable-seeming response to being called on being so downright unreasonable.

In any event, these did not exactly strike as BART neophytes, but bag-tamping was underway. And despite the Walmart-on-Black-Friday throng of boarders at Embarcadero, the last SF stop, not one person asked that the six (yes, 6!) bags be removed from the seat in their favor. Perhaps because it looked like it would take the length of the Transbay Tube to even undertake such extrication.

It was only midway through my incredulity at their audacity and selfishness that another amazement struck: what person age 16-20 is buying six bags worth of stuff? Who are these debutantes with their obliviousness and their functioning credit cards?

Being wedged very much into the center of their conversation, I was able to learn a few answers. They were very involved in a health or science class of some kind, where they’d each just completed a final project on a different disease. Indeed, the non-tamper was waving around a 10-pager with a cover sheet that simply read “Herpes” in eighty-point font. (I mean, really, did I imagine these people could have a lick of self-consciousness when one of them is animatedly waving the word “Herpes” in the air?) Amazement at the ease of transmission methods of a particular disease whose name eluded me (perhaps the aforementioned manifest on text). Mutual reassurance at the virtual lock on securing an A in this class. Detailed analysis on how to adjust double-spacing and margins to reach 10 pages.

Just before my stop, the non-tamper hauled out a cell phone and started calling home (a good indication that they were pre-collegiate). She rolled her eyes and half-gasped and mused on why she ever calls home in the first place, since everyone has cell phones. She informed her comrade that she had, in fact, just cancelled caller ID and call waiting on the home line, since no one ever used the phone anyway. She was waiting for someone to notice.

With savings like that, you could bring home a whole extra quarter of a bag. But who would notice that either?

They were overly gracious in moving their legs aside so I could pass out of the train, up the escalator, and into the night.

Just because I don’t write Introspection anymore doesn’t mean that I don’t often think in terms of quick updates. This blog format affords the luxury of doing both short blippy quips about my life like the old days, as well as the longer, more thoughtful pieces…

One of the grand ironies of the American experience is that some of our greatest themes and anthems for revered concepts are actually songs lambasting said concept.

The least subtle example of this may be Peter, Paul & Mary’s “I Dig Rock-n-Roll Music”. This is a more obscure case, but it remains PPM’s only really fully legitimate radio song. With lines like “But if I really say it, the radio won’t play it, unless I lay it, between the liiines,” it’s not really hard to see exactly where this song’s loyalty lies. And yet it made the radio and remains there to date as a sincere tribute to rock-n-roll (as opposed to folk music, which PPM were actually advocating). I’m sure the even crueler irony of this being their one radio hit when it complains that the radio won’t play folk music… yeah.

The most damning example may be Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”. This tune has become third only to “Proud to Be an American” (a song guaranteed to induce vomiting within 30 seconds) and the national anthem itself as the theme music to flag-waving jingoistic American patriotism. And yet the song was written as an indictment of American hypocrisy and the Vietnam War. The non-refrain lyrics are just hard enough to understand and the chorus is just loud and brash enough to ensure that this song will always bring a smile to the face and a cheer to the voice of those who are unaware they are celebrating an anti-American tune. “So they put a rifle in my hand, sent me off to a foreign land, to go and kill the yellow man.”

But the song that’s stuck in my head from this category today is “Takin’ Care of Business”. Office Depot or a related office store has become the latest in an unending string of businesses using this anthem to explain how productive you’ll be when using their products. “It’s the work that we avoid and we’re all self-employed, we love to work at nothing all day.” Yeah. This song is about quitting your job and starting a rock band, which is explicitly stated to be a lazy sort of scam on those who actually slog away at day jobs. Business indeed.

The song is stuck in my head because it’s one of the rotating theme songs for my baseball video game of choice these days, the 2007 mod of the greatest baseball game of all time, MVP Baseball 2005. My Mariners are getting massacred in this game on a regular basis, but any time I win makes it all worthwhile.

And speaking of the Mariners and winning, last night offered a glimpse at the best inning of the year for the (real-life) Seattle Mariners. Raul Ibanez had 6 RBI in a 10-run seventh inning that catapulted the M’s from a 6-1 deficit to an 11-6 win. When I tuned in around the fourth or fifth inning, it was 6-0, Twins. I wasn’t even sure why I tuned in when the score was already that lopsided. The M’s haven’t exactly been specializing in comebacks this year. But Ibanez hit a grand slam that made it 6-5 and the M’s proceeded to tack on and on and on, all the way to bringing up Ibanez again in the inning as the 14th man to come to the plate, and again with the bases loaded!! He only smacked a single up the middle to plate two and the inning only ended because Willie Bloomquist tried to score too on a throwing error and got barely tagged out.

It’s funny how just an inning like that can redeem a mood and a perspective for a day or so. Even in a hopelessly lost season.

It’s the sun that’s hopelessly lost here in San Francisco, and it’s looking like my trip to Las Vegas (Thursday evening departure) couldn’t be coming at a better time. The 10-day forecast in San Francisco does not get above 65 degrees (high temperature). The same 10-day forecast in Las Vegas does not get below 81 degrees (low temperature). I am a little nervous about “Florida Syndrome” in LV, wherein people will air-condition casino interiors to the point of being as cold as August highs in San Francisco, but then I may just cancel half the poker to go sit outside on the Strip and bake. I desperately need to feel the illusion of some sort of summer.

Meanwhile, my job continues to be my job. Slightly more livable than two weeks ago, ebbing and flowing, constantly leading me on only to crush my spirit. If nothing else, it’s giving me great fodder for future books and stories, future tales of how the American work model fails its people on all levels. And I know that where I’m working is better than 95% of what else is out there. We’re not even driven by a profit motive.

And speaking of profit (and even prophet), is it too early to declare the End of Capitalism? Today, Wall Street wants to think so. It’s just so exciting to have a negative net interest rate! To just feel that money devaluing in your pocket. I mean, how often does your pocket burn a hole in your money? That’s just nifty. Let’s buy financial stocks before they fail.

What surprises me is not that people are revealed to lie, cheat, steal, cut corners, and fabricate in pursuit of almighty profit. What surprises me is that people are surprised by the revelations.

Work out.

I am so frustrated. With myself.

I often think that the answer to everything is time. Time heals all things, right? Wrong, I know, but at least time should give one the time to do things. This seems almost tautological.

But I surmise that the way time is distributed prevents one from using it properly or effectively. There’s that old issue of distribution again. And honestly, I don’t have much to say beyond a reaffirmation of that last post. I don’t think time in the seat and working are values. I think that we should all be thinking. But when so much time is consigned to the proverbial seat, it gets very hard to want to do anything else with the rest of one’s time. So it gets overly wasted.

This is a common pattern, and one that I usually dig myself out of. After all, I just got things together to put out a quiz about 2 weeks ago. I shouldn’t be riding myself too hard. I think that I was telling myself about that productivity in justifying my utter squandrance of time yesterday. And now it’s Sunday night again, late. Very late. And we know all about Sunday night.

Is this blog getting too self-referential? I think it’s part of the larger story of this telling. It’s all related somehow. It’s all interwoven, interconnected. Like this overwhelming series of tubes.

Emily and I made a list of to-do’s today, though we only really got going into the day around 2:30 in the afternoon. We knocked off several, even got a Christmas tree and put it up. We cleaned the house. Got cat food. Washed and put away the dishes. Figured out where we’d be going to the dentist.

But the most important things remain uncrossed from this list. And just the idea of making a list, let alone a list as long as this (30+ tasks) of bland duties for the maintenance of life (very few are at all creative or interesting) is exhausting. I get run down very quickly by life’s repetitions and mundanities and upkeep. I think I kept my spirits up today, but the list is sitting there, making me a little nauseous.

And yet I waste so much time. So much. Utterly thrown away. I mean, yes, we all need recreation, but do I really need to play so many hours of video games? Really? How much does it take to recoup what work has taken away from me? Why does it seem like I never catch up?

It’s worse in December and late November. ‘Tis the nature of my current employ. I know it’ll be like this for a while, and I can get through it. Who starts a project in December anyway? But still, it’s got me down tonight.

This is chaff. But it’s important to put it on the board. Some day, I will have methods of discipline that do not compromise my need to avoid spending too much time on rote maintenance. Until then, this is how it is.

Future me, I hope you’re kicking me now for not knowing the answer, not because I remind you of you.

While you’re waiting for the Country Quiz II to be out (maybe tonight?), here are some random assortments to tide you over. And if you’re wondering why there hasn’t been anything big, it’s because the CQII is about to come out. Latest calculations have it that it takes me an hour to write 8 answers, fully coded. There’s also the question tree (done a while back), the image collection (done more recently), and getting all the merchandising ready to go ahead of time (a significant time-suck). So it sort of saps the creativity. Non-stop writing and coding will tend to block out other writing.

The 2007 Mariners (in my MVP 2005 season) are 9-2 (.818) since switching back to All-Star level. One of the losses was a heartbreaker where Travis Blackley coughed up two solo homers in relief in the 7th inning of a 1-0 lead. They also lost the first of the 11 games on All-Star, so they’ve won 9 of 10. This is looking most auspicious, but admittedly most of these games were on a tour of NL Central ballparks – not exactly stellar competition. The sweep of the Pirates just completed was the first sweep of the season – in the second week of June. Just before, RJ took a no-hitter into the 7th in Milwaukee. Thus, the playoffs are looking at least like a longshot instead of an impossibility.

The CQ2 has 32 of 64 answers completely written. Full merchandising of about 80 items per design will be available at launch. Additionally, a new advertising strategy is going into place with the launch of this quiz. You wouldn’t want everything to be just like the original, would you? I briefly thought about holding the launch till the day of the 5th anniversary of the original (it would be 18 January 2008), but timed launches of quizzes have never exactly served me well. It’s going up this month, and probably within minutes of me finishing it.

After a few months of notable average improvement, I’ve gotten beaten down with the migraine stick this month. Maybe seasonal changes have something to do with it. I’m also noticing a November pattern, given how concerned I got about these things last year at this time. Still, overall severity seems down big in 2007.

After the longest-ever 4-day week last week, it’s hard to get as excited as I’d be inclined to be about a 3-day week upcoming. Who knows how long those 24 hours can be? But there’s reason to believe they’ll be relatively straightforward, a brief lull between twin storms of last week and the entirety of December. In other news, there is no news yet, but there will be by ‘08.

Finally, Free Rice is perhaps the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

This is my 62nd post in StoreyTelling, in its 48th day. Duck and Covers count for exactly half (31) of those posts.

Okay, so I got to thinking. And I can’t just leave the last post where it ended.

You might be wondering, for example, what the statistical probability is of me making the playoffs after switching to an easier difficulty after just 57 games (35% of the season). Maybe this doesn’t sound very challenging to you.

Last season (2006), my M’s went 101-61, for a .623 pace. Assuming that same winning percentage greets my next 105 games in 2007, I’ll go 65-40, for a final record of 72-90. Which will NOT make the playoffs. For an indication of how much I’ll miss by, the Angels are on pace to win 101 games (sound familiar?) and the A’s 94.

Now, you might say that after playing 57 games on Impossible Mode, I’ve improved over 2006. I sure hope so. But I’ve also set my players back a notch. And if this baseball game is like any other, the player progressions for the season are at least partially impacted by the start the player gets off to. So one would think this might mitigate any improvement.

For example, Ichiro is hitting .186 with 3 HR, 5 RBI, and 16 R. Last year, he hit .271 (yes, last year’s difficulty was hard) with 78 R. It’s unlikely that he’ll suddenly bounce back to hit .271 or score runs on that pace for the last two-thirds of the season.

Similarly, Randy Johnson is 0-11 with a 6.13 ERA in 12 starts and 3 relief appearances (61.2 IP). Last year, he was 11-8 with a 1.70 ERA in an injury-shortened season (22 starts, 158.2 IP). Staff ace Mark Mulder is 1-8 with a 6.47 after going 20-6 with a 1.71 (in 247 IP!) last year. Only Eddie Guardado is within 2 points of last year’s ERA of anyone significant on the staff. And he won the Cy Young Award last year, with a 2-0 record, 54 saves (in 54 chances), and an 0.61 ERA in 59.1 IP (64 appearances). He almost won the MVP Award. This year, he’s only managed to get into 9 games so far (8.2 IP), but has posted a 1.04 ERA, no record, and converted all 6 save opportunities.

What to conclude from all this? (Besides the fact that I’m a tremendous dork who loves baseball, statistics, and video games?) That this will be mighty difficult. Assuming the A’s go on to a 94-68 record, which is a very standard mark for a Wild Card team, I will need to compile an 87-18 (.829) record to catch them. In my Pro-level (3rd hardest of four levels) season in 2005, I only went .722. And that year, Ichiro hit over 30 HR.

Good luck.

I’m well aware that I haven’t posted in a while, and this isn’t really a “real” post anyway. The holiday season is hitting full stride and people have been crazy at work and at home. It’s a three-day weekend, but Em will be spending most all of it in Sacramento as the powerful at the capital try to play “Deal or No Deal”.

So hopefully I’ll have some time to update various parts of the webpage, catch up with my life, and maybe even do something meaningful.

But not yet.

Saturday mornings are some of my biggest video game times, when the whole world of possibility with free time unfolds and I can just let my mind go and relax a little. And of course I can’t stop playing MVP 2005, despite my aforementioned growing hatred of its hardest difficulty level.

So I’ve decided, in the 2007 season, to attempt the greatest comeback in the history of baseball. Rather than languishing on my 20-win pace for the season, I’m switching back to All-Star difficulty for the last 105 games of the season. The goal is to make the playoffs.

Here’s a testimony to my abysmal performance so far:
7-50 (.123) record
28.5 GB (Angels) in the AL West
26.0 GB (A’s) in the AL Wild Card
112-363 (-251) Run Differential
2-27 Home, 5-23 Road
.188 BA, 6.18 ERA
3-16 vs. West, 0-18 vs. Central, 4-15 vs. East, 0-1 Interleague
35 HR, 54 SB

And Ichiro is hitting under .200.

Can this band of scrappy Mariners, defending champions for the past two seasons (who broke their own AL record for wins with 117 in 2005) add to their accomplishments with the greatest seasonal turn-around in the history of sports?

Stay tuned…

It’s in the game.

MVP 2005 is widely recognized by those who are obsessed with baseball video games (most of my friends) as the best baseball video game ever made. The only reason that we have not gone on to anoint EA-constructed games MVP 2006 and MVP 2007 as eclipsing this game is because they weren’t made. After the 2005 season of games, MLB sold their baseball license exclusively to 2K (for the next decade, I think), and we’ve been left to play 2005 forever. It’s fine, though, because MVP 2005 lets you play through 120 seasons and that’s enough to keep one plenty occupied. Plus, savvy people are releasing roster updates for the computer version every year.

I, however, play on the PS2. And until recently, I’d been following a very predictable and stable pattern of sports video games. In the first season (in this case, obviously, 2005), I win the World Series on a relatively easy (but not the easiest) level. For 2006, I upgrade to the next level and, again, win the WS, but winning far fewer games. For 2007, I upgrade to the highest difficulty (in this case, the eponymous MVP level). Normally, I would expect to make the playoffs barely or just miss them, and probably have to wait till 2008 to return to a world title.

However, my ‘07 Mariners, built into grandeur by the reputation of back-to-back championships and intelligent front office management (I’m coming for your job, Bavasi!) are 5-36.

It’s not even like I’m getting better. After a dismal 4-22 (.154) April, I am 1-14 (.067) in May.

I have tried everything. I have tried taking almost every pitch, not swinging till I have 2 strikes. I have tried starter-by-committee, where no one is allowed to pitch more than 3 innings. I have lost plenty of 1-run games, including a back-to-back 2-1, 1-0 set of losses that were so profoundly frustrating because the pitching was actually good. Loss #36, incurred this morning, extending a losing streak to 10 games, was 13-5. 5 runs would have been good enough to win any of the 4 previous games.

I even get thrown out of about 25-30% of games lately (usually in very late innings), which is consistent with a real situation in which defending champions who brought their same starting 5 pitchers back for the next season (in this case, Mark Mulder, Randy Johnson, Joel Piniero [but good], Curt Schilling, and Gil Meche) would be like. I just got an e-mail from my front office warning me of a possible firing if I don’t turn things around. After all, my team is rated to be the 5th-best in the majors, with the 3rd-best pitching and the best speed.

This is mind-numbingly frustrating in a way that video games almost never are. I adore this video game, putting it in an echelon with Civilization and SimCity, maybe DAoC, and trumping all prior baseball video games. This is the baseball game I always wanted to be playing, from the days of the Miller Associates all-text adventure and my hand-held 2-player game I used to play with friends on car rides to Seattle. It has everything, from detailed general management to management to stunning graphics. It has taken out most every other video game for the better part of a year, even securing the cessation of my addiction to Dark Age.

And yet, I hate it. I hate playing it. It is really not fun to lose 88% of the time. Even the Mariners never did that in real life.

So I now go through this weird Pavlovian shocking situation every time I want to play video games. I immediately want to play MVP (even after exactly 365 regular season games, plus 6 rounds of playoffs), but then recall how aggravating the experience has been. I usually end up turning it on, only to wonder why when I contemplate breaking my controller over my knee after swinging at a terrible pitch, or screaming swear words after giving up another homerun that was barely a strike deep in the opposing hitter’s cold zone.

I hit up Russ, grand guru of this game, for some advice, since he has been winning championships on MVP mode while having 5 players break the home-run record in the same season. He gave advice that was good at getting most games down to being close, but still not being enough to, say, win more than one game out of 15.

At this point, I am cleanly torn between trying to reap the benefits of hating my favorite video game (more time for other more productive pursuits) and switching back to the last level at some point in the season to see if I can claw my way out of this colossally deep cellar.

But video games usually take up free time when I wouldn’t otherwise be productive (probably like drinking-alcohol-time for most people). And if I hate this enough, I will find another one to play. So when is the right time to switch back? I was originally going to wait till the All-Star break, but I somehow think hitting the halfway point with 11 or 12 wins is going to be questionable. Even by switching to the easy mode, it would be hard to salvage respectability from that point.

Maybe at 50 losses. If they don’t fire me first.