Update
by Srol on Jul.16, 2010, under Ought to give Iowa a try
I have arrived in Cedar Rapids. Currently living out of a hotel room going through the hotel hunt. I’m a little nervous I won’t be able to find a place before I need to start work. Oh well, blogging won’t make it better. Gotta get out there and start looking.
Comics
by Srol on Jul.08, 2010, under Nerdical Sciences
I forget how old I was when I got my first comic book. I can pinpoint it as being sometime between 3rd and 5th grade, because that was the time period when the kids at St. Rose of Lima were trading Marvel superhero trading cards and the X-Men animated series was on Fox. This was my main source of knowledge on the Marvel world: the X-Men were the good guys, Magneto was the bad guy, plain and simple.
Around this time, my family was thinking of possibly moving to Connecticut, and was driving around a bunch of towns in that state looking for nice places to live. We stopped at a convenience store for gas and I noticed there was a comic book rack there. I bugged my parents until they let me buy a comic for the ride home, along with a roll of bubble tape. Of course, I grabbed an issue of X-Men.
Hoo boy, was I confused.
Colossus and someone named “Shadowcat” were protecting Arcade along with robots made to look like the X-Men when they “were still alive.” Also, Storm was bald in a field with a knife and a black guy at a diner turned into a purple thing named Nimrod and disintegrated some people trying to rob the diner.
What?
I never really gave mainstream comic book covers a try until a few years later when I was watching the Spiderman cartoon on Fox, I decided to give Spiderman a try. I managed to pick up an issue during the Clone Saga where Peter Parker comes home to find Peter Parker arguing with the Scarlet Spider(a clone of Peter Parker), while Mary Jane is held hostage by Kane(Peter Parker).
Yeah.
These were obviously terrible first impression, and it was silly for me to expect a medium that depends upon sequential progressing story lines from month-to-month to cater to a new reader. Still, these bad experiences really kept me from being submerged into the superhero genre beyond what was available to people who watched Saturday morning cartoons.
Beyond the fact that I had no idea what was going on and nothing made sense, I hated how these things looked, from art to writing. The art was always these heavily shaded drawings that moved dangerously close to uncanny valley territory depending on how expressive they tried to be (see fig 1). The text would have random lines and phrases bolded, and I could never understand why. There was so little text in there to begin with, it wasn’t like I might miss something without the emphasis.
I’m not sure what my problem was, but I never got into comics as a result. It’s definitely not the medium. I follow about 30 webcomics on my RSS feeds. Maybe it was just the way D.C. and Marvel did things during my formative years. Although I haven’t picked up many other comic books recently …
You are a huge nerd
by Srol on Jul.04, 2010, under Nerdical Sciences, Ought to give Iowa a try
It’s mainly Charles’s fault.
He was a huge fan of Triumph: The Insult Comic Doc. When we would be cruising around Garden City after getting out of Chaminade High School, he would say in his best Zeckendorfian accent, “You are a huge nerd!”
I had been called a nerd many times before. In grade school, when people saw me playing Magic: The Gathering during recess. In London, when I spent free time in computer lab building my custom campaign for Freespace. In high school when Charles, myself and the other ETV nerds would spend hours after school playing with a Video Toaster.
But this was the first time I associated the term with something positive. It wasn’t a bad thing to be a nerd, in fact it was a desirable trait.
My nerd pride still was developing. College helped a lot. The entire jocks-on-top, nerds-on-bottom structure of high school evaporated. Nerds like me became just another component of the egalitarian social structure on campus, while the people who enjoyed that kind of abusive high school power structure exiled themselves to fraternities. I wouldn’t describe myself as a Pokemon fan, but I feel this comic sums up the experience pretty well.
Moving to New Mexico was a bit of a set back to my pursuit of all things nerdy. I lost all of my existing social structure, except for that which I could continue to pursue online. As a result, that part of my interest became internalized a lot. I had no one to talk about the launch of D&D 4E with, so I just didn’t. I tried to show Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog to my friends, they didn’t get it. I gave Nintendo DS’s to friends for their birthdays, but they never played Mario Kart with me.
PAX was a major turning point. Seeing thousands upon thousands of nerds coming together and just being themselves with no trepidation was a very liberating experience. It still took until the second PAX for it to fully sink in that this didn’t have to be a twice-a-year occasion for me, that I could immerse myself in nerd culture, un-afraid, the entire year ’round. This was my mission as I came back.
Thank God for Fortress of Holding. That place has been such a huge part of my life the last few months. Zach and Laura have set up a haven in the desert for the nerd to be his or herself. It’s definitely one of the parts of Farmington I’m going to miss the most.
So looking ahead to Cedar Rapids, I am determined not to make the same mistakes I had in the past. I’ve done some research and found some promising signs that Eastern Iowa is a much more welcoming place for my kind.
Here’s hoping I get a good initiative roll.
Cold as a falling thermometer in December?
by Srol on Jun.29, 2010, under Ought to give Iowa a try
I don’t know much about Iowa. This could be a fatal flaw, as I’m moving there in less than three weeks.
Since I first learned about my move, all I seem to be able to wrestle up out of my memory is the song “Iowa Stubborn” from Meredith Wilson’s classic musical “The Music Man.” So what does that tell me? People from Iowa are stubborn and have a propensity to randomly break out into song.
Sounds like my kind of place, actually.
In all seriousness, from what I’ve seen so far, there’s a lot to like about Iowa — specifically the part of Iowa I’m moving to. It’s the kind of environment I’ve always envisioned myself living in. Urban, but not in decay. Small, but not minuscule. Remote, but not isolated. The downtown area where my office is going to be is a particularly neat-looking area, although it appears to not have completely recovered from the flood just yet.
If nothing else, it’s a part of the country I have never visited before, and it should be a neat adventure getting to know it better.
So I’m gonna give Iowa a try.
The year of eating dangerously
by Srol on Jun.27, 2010, under Food Thoughts
The warning signs came in the summer of 2006. My mom was helping me move to New Mexico, and along the 3-day drive from New York, we stopped at a Cracker Barrel in Amarillo, Texas. It was early in the day andbreakfast-time. I don’t know if it was the strange shell-shock state of mind that comes with moving, but for some reason I ordered scrambled eggs despite being pretty sure I didn’t like eggs.
Turns out, I love ‘em.
I credit this incident with really opening my eyes to the idea that I couldn’t trust my memory with regards to what food I liked and disliked. They were memories formed by perceptions I had at very young ages that really couldn’t be trusted by my adult mind. I may have thought eggs were gross as a five-year old, and translated that thought into a memory-warning not to eat them. What relevance did this really have to the 22-year-old me?
But it still would be three years until I delivered on that realization. Starting sometime last spring, I began to deliberately seek out the foods that I had labeled in my mind as disliking. The results were staggering. My palette expanded a thousand-fold and my options opened up to an incredible new range of food. At the same time, a lot of the unhealthy mainstays in my diet began to drop out as I found I had so many other choices.
Here is a list of foods that I’ve changed from dis-like to like in the last year:
Spinach
Grapefruit and grapefruit juice
Bell peppers and chilis
Radishes
Nuts
All seafood (I used to always say I “didn’t like fish.” Turns out I do, as well as crab, shrimp and other shellfish)
Mustard
Steak sauce
Avocado
Goat cheese
Onions
Hot sauces (sriracha and tabasco primarily)
Sushi
Beans
BBQ sauce
Muesli
Yogurt
Curry
Mushrooms
And Many More
Climbing the wall
by Srol on Jun.27, 2010, under There's a New Mexico?
It’s been a while, but I have big news. The other day I gave my two-week notice at The Daily Times just shy of my four-year anniversary.
Animas and Berg Park Riverwalk during Riverfest.
I’ve now lived in New Mexico for the same amount of time I was in college in Philadelphia, for a year longer than I attended Chaminade High School, and four times as long as I lived in London or Switzerland. The word “impact” doesn’t begin to describe how living here has affected my life. It was a while ago that I stopped describing myself as a New Yorker and started describing myself as a New Mexican. It just felt like the honest thing to do.
There have been things about New Mexico I loved. The scenery. The art. The food…oh man, the food! There have been things I disliked about New Mexico. The isolation. The politics. The fact that it takes hours of driving through the middle of nowhere to get anywhere. Overall, I think it’s been a good experience that has made me a better, well-rounded person.
It’s kind of odd, this change is coming during one of the best years ever. I made a commitment early on to get out more and meet more people that started with the Farmington Young Professionals and ended with me hanging out almost every weekend at the Fortress of Holding. This was sort of kicked-off by the fact that so many of my friends at the newspaper — Jeff Golden, Lindsay Pierce, Lucas Coshenet, Cory Frolik to name a few — were leaving. I still had friends at the paper, but our interests diverged a lot, so I saw them less and less on the weekend and needed to come up with different ways of staying busy.
At the same time, I took the initiative to make a big professional change to move away from copy-editing once and for all and start writing full-time. It was a terrifying decision to make, but one that I do not regret the least as I look back, as it’s opened so many new opportunities for me.
I’ve been sort of rambling because I’m still a bit far away from the day I’ll be leaving and I don’t think it’s sunk in properly yet. In two weeks, most of the familiar things in my life will be gone. How could anyone possibly process that fact all at once. But let there be no doubt, this is what I want. Farmington and The Daily Times have been good to me, but my new job is a great chance to live in an awesome city and do great journalism.
It’s part of why I re-launched the blog from scratch. A new start and all that. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep the posting going this time. No promises.
So, long story short, two weeks left in Farmington. Suffice it to say, I’m going to be eating Mexican food like CRAZY from here on.
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Wot?
Let's give this another try?
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