John Zeitler

For anyone interested, there’re photos of the Warhammer 40K event I participated in over here. Surprisingly all three of my matches are documented there, early on, at any rate. You can tell they’re early on because I still have pieces on the board…

As mentioned, I’m not terribly fond of the Space Marine faction to begin with, but this trailer does show da Orkz in fine form. Odd, then, that the SMs are my first full army…

So today I had a better Pittsburgh Transit Experience than I did on Thursday.

Let me set the stage for you. Wednesday night I got it in my head that I wanted to take the bus to work from here on out, as it was (in theory) possible. I had schedules and a fairly strong sense of where I needed to be, and at what times, in order to safely convey myself to and from work. Turns out that getting to work wasn’t a problem at all– I got downtown fairly early, was able to get a hot chocolate from a coffee shop, and was at the door to work before 7:30a. Beautiful. Getting home, however, was a four-hour-long exercise in pain. First, I waited for half an hour at the stop I’d been dropped off at for the bus to take me back downtown, only to discover that it doesn’t stop there on the way back. I instead took a different line downtown, which then became an exercise in finding out where the Port Authority moved my stop for the one line that directly connects downtown to the area near my house. It would have been very helpful for them to put up a sign saying “this stop is closed, please go X blocks that way to catch your line”. Obviously, that didn’t happen. By the time I realized where I needed to be, I had already passed the deadline for the last run of that line anyway. So I caught another line which was supposed to take me directly there, but which instead dumped me off in Wilkinsburg (about halfway between downtown and my house). This was around 6:25p; bear in mind, I left work at 4:30p. I had to wait half an hour for a connecting bus to take me to the Monroeville Mall, which actually overshot where I needed to go but (naturally) didn’t take a route that went anywhere near my house. That line then landed immediately before the connector back to my house arrived… of course, that connector took the long and ridiculously windy path, overshooting my house twice more. By this point the dramamine I’d taken at 5:30a was starting to wear off, and I was starting to get very carsick. Conveniently this negated the ravenous hunger I’d been enduring since, oh, 4:35p.

That was Thursday. Today I managed to find all the correct stops and get there on time every time. I had enough time in transit to finish a game (almost– there was one last puzzle for me to solve), no less. I left work at 4:25p and arrived at the plaza near home at 5:30p, whereupon I had dinner at the Chinese buffet. Simple.

Despite the aggravation and tension involved in catching a bus constantly, I’m probably going to continue taking mass transit to work for three reasons. The first is that it forces me to get some amount of exercise in each day; specifically, the stop near work is about a quarter of a mile down a mild hill from the office, and the interval between the stops downtown is anywhere from three to six blocks. This averages out to about half an hour on foot each day, give or take. The second is because being on a strict timetable helps me with impulse control: I work near the hobby shop that hosts GASP, and if I had my car available every day, I would pretty much be going directly from work to the shop to dump money into Warhammer figures. Same goes for games and anime; removing the easy daily access to the store reduces the temptation to spend money there.

The third reason is that 99% of the hassle involved could be alleviated if I didn’t live out in the middle of East Nowhere, and as a result my next big task is to find someplace within reasonable access of a real bus line.

So my grand experiment on not using this blog as a free billboard is coming to an end today. Did I learn anything from it? Oh yeah. Did I affect anything because of it? That’s a bit harder to gauge.

Let’s start with what I learned. Thing is, I cheated a little bit; I wound up having to drop the generic bit on my micro-blogging service because I realized I used that more as a direct communications tool than I initially thought. Most of my posts on that service had to be ‘branded up’ because they were recommendations to friends and so forth, and going generic would defeat the purpose of the message. I went as long as I could, and tried to keep things generic afterwards when they weren’t replies (such as the miniature painting progress), but that wound up being more or less a failure.

Although, I did realize that there’s a distinct difference between word-of-mouth support for a product or service, and false-grassroots “movements” in support of one. It’s probably unjustly cynical of me to presume malice or monetary impetus for anyone talking up something they like on the web or in real life, but sometimes it’s really hard to tell. In general, though, if someone makes a forum post about something cool they found, they’re not likely to be getting paid for it– particularly if it’s someone you know or trust. (We’ll set aside the issue of whether or not you can really “know” or “trust” someone you’ve only met online for now; I think everyone knows my stance on that, but as with everything it’s not a universal experience.)

Advertising in and of itself is not an evil thing; it’s just been so grossly misused and misapplied in modern society that it can get very overwhelming very quickly. To a certain extent I can sympathize with the views of folks like the Adbusters or their comrades in culture-jamming, even if I think they’re being just a tad bit too radical in their approach. It’s easy to say “f*** it all” and want to just withdraw from the commercial world altogether. Then again, that approach is dangerous as well.

Ads serve a twofold purpose. Their primary purpose in the world today is to garner sales for the product or service depicted in the ad (we’re assuming that the product or service actually is depicted in the ad– I’m looking at you, scuzzy pharmaceutical companies). However, their original purpose, and one which is more or less relegated to a side effect these days, is to inform the populace that a new product or service is available, and to tell the public about it. One can draw a distinction, then, between ads which serve primarily the first function– let’s call them “hypes” (as in Don’t Believe The)– and ads which primarily serve the second function– call those “dopes” (as in The Straight).

Hypes are everything negative associated with advertising. They’re glitzy, flashy, attention-grabbing or in some cases attention-arresting, and offer little to no substantive content. What content a hype may contain is either deceptive, misleading, or in some cases completely false. In computer terms, they’re viruses: they hijack a user’s computer for fairly small slices of time at a time to self-propagate and perform a detriment to the user.

Dopes are the more benign usage of advertising. They are detailed, specific, subtle or even understated, and tend to err on the side of the uncomfortable truth. A dope winds up being obviously an ad, but one that sometimes gets sought out by a consumer. In computer terms, they’re the documentation for some underused command-line arguments on a program: you don’t need it all the time, but when you do seek it out, it tries to present itself as the best solution to your problem, whether or not it actually is or you happen to have the problem it solves.

Modern ads can’t be so clearly and neatly divided into these two categories. How do you define, for example, a particularly pleasant earworm of a jingle? What about a dry, deadpan ad for a slimeball ambulance-chaser portraying himself as legit? Furthermore, the thought that pervasiveness equals success has caused most ads to shoot for viral status over being informative. Witness the titillating ads for a particular domain registrar that pop up every Super Bowl; how many average football watchers are going to give two rats’ asses what a web domain is? It gets worse in that hypes tend to be viral in a very literal sense, “infecting” consumers to the point that they themselves, either knowingly or unknowingly, start spewing hypes: commonly manifested as fanboyism.

I’ll freely admit to starting this month in anger and outrage, but the irritation was mostly with myself. It seems like I was constantly regurgitating the hype mill from some source or another without adding anything meaningful to the commentary. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that my decision on what to talk about and what I didn’t want to talk about was itself a form of commentary, and that most of the time, when I made a post about something commercial, I felt the need to make at least some brief (ha ha) remarks on it. A lot of my irritation was being directed at the aftermath of a few product revelations, or in some cases lack of revelations, that had been going on at the end of January, and as a result I found myself defending a position that wasn’t even mine to begin with. It turns out, though, that taking this month to reflect on my online activity and what I was posting did me a world of good.

It’s probably obvious by now that I’m going to start talking about commercial interests again starting tomorrow; I’ve already got the next three days’ worth of posts lined up, and that also includes two Game Clear notices (I’m skipping doing Save and Quit for those games). The thing is, though, you can count on the fact that all of what I discuss here is my genuine opinion. I’ve only been paid to promote something online once in my life, and I’ve made it abundantly clear what that thing was (also, my obligation to do so is probably long since expired) and didn’t proverbially pee in the well; so, honestly, this blog is what I actually believe. Warts and all, perceived fanboyism and all, it’s my opinion. I’ll try not to jump to the defense of companies in comments on other blogs, of course– if I see some flagrant stupidity or fanboyism, I still feel obligated to point out logical fallacies and inconsistencies at the very least– but I’m not going to censor myself just because I’m not being paid to promote something I genuinely like.

As a final little coda to this, remember that buyout plan I left open in the initial post? Yeah, nobody bit. I didn’t expect anyone to, of course, but it was worth a shot.

A few years back, when I was in between jobs, I would spend my days literally camped out in front of the computer all day, getting up for soda and snacks, and when it became dark out (which was made longer by the fact that I was doing this in the summer), I would look up at the time, realize I’d lost an entire day, and curse myself for not accomplishing anything.

Today, I did stuff. Not a lot of stuff, but stuff nonetheless. Painted some models; brought one project to a pretty good pausing-point until an external event gets lined up; did some number-crunching in advance of some news that’s going to be on here next week; and, since I still have some time here before I want to go to bed, I’m probably going to try marathonning a disc of a TV series (likely a short-runner).

However, I still “feel unproductive” because I also spent about five hours playing an online game, when the stack of unplayed games is still ridiculously high. I suppose I can justify it by saying that I needed to relax, but in all honesty, I don’t even particularly care for the game I was playing… it just is scratching an itch I guess I never really knew I had. Ah well, hopefully tomorrow I can move on to something that gives me the “having done something” feeling I’m missing.

Things already done this morning:
* Downloaded, installed, and synced a new todo list application for my phone and main computer, and had it put its information on the desktop.
* Resized font sizes of the podcast and task list displays on the desktop so they don’t interfere with one another. Also realized I need to listen to some freaking podcasts.
* Found my birth certificate so that I can go apply for a passport tomorrow.

Things I need to do this morning:
* (cut for length)

For the first time in a very long time, my list of tasks for the coming week is silly-long. Heck, today was insanely busy, and that included a lot of “wait, I need to do this too” and “holy crap must find wi-fi” moments. Of course, the chaos I dealt with today is dwarfed by the balancing act I’ll be doing tomorrow. Still, the end result wound up being more than a little worth it.

I’ve not done any serious, hard-core gaming for well over a week now. I’m starting to get the shakes because of it, I think…

I’ve been keeping myself busy this week with a lot of household projects, but in between mending things and breaking others I’ve had the opportunity to get some primer on my miniature armies. Well, one of them. I ran out of black primer just now, about a tiny way into the first major unit of the secondary army. (They started out as my “primary” army, but I wound up building up the other one pretty quickly as it seemed to be less massive of a numerical investment.) In any event, it’s pretty much assumed that I’m hooked now, and I’m eagerly awaiting the coming of spring so that I can prime up the rest.

I’m still reading, this time tackling a large set of tomes that I’ve had on my list for a ponderous amount of time. I would say a long time, but honestly the weight these books have kind of implies the word “ponderous” even without being metaphorical. I mean it. These are big damn books.

Of course, some other interesting things came across my path, and once March rolls around I’ll be glad to tell you all about them. Patience.

There was a lot of good news today, some of which I’ll be able to share very soon– not the good news that I suppose is obvious in this situation, but many smaller, still pleasant things. I have an appointment tomorrow, at the very least, and a ticket to a concert as well. So Friday will be interesting, to say nothing of what’s going to follow it.

I’ll keep you advised. This week has been frustrating but it’s nice to feel it finally turning around.