My infant son spent basically all of June insisting on relying on the army crawl technique as his preferred method of locomotion. For an entire month, like some sort of wounded soldier, he dragged himself around the house, and I could always tell where he was based entirely on the sounds of his strained, grunting breathing as he exerted way too much energy to go from one room to another.
On Monday, June 28, he had his nine-month doctor's check-up. When he returned home and was placed on the floor, it was if he just flipped a mental switch and he was suddenly crawling all over the place using the standard baby crawl technique. It was an amazingly fast transition that took us completely by surprise. In a single day, we went from being able to follow the sounds of our army-crawling baby, to frantically chasing the curious little terror all around the house.
When we finished most of the basement earlier this year, I thought the unfurnished family room would be an excellent place for my son to crawl around in; it's spacious, carpeted and almost completely free of obstacles. I thought I'd be able to put him down in the basement and he'd be crawling in a hazard free environment.
Much to my surprise, when I put my boy down in the basement family room last night, he covered the distance from one end of the room to the other in ridiculously fast time, and I practically had to catapult myself over to the stairway when the little stuntman managed to get to the third step in just a few short seconds. I didn't want to discourage his efforts, but I simply couldn't believe it when he was over halfway up the stairs. I mean, he'd never climbed a single stair in his life, but yet there he was zipping up the staircase as if he'd been doing it from day one.
And his sheer determination was also remarkable. Even though I was hovering right behind him, ready to catch him at the slightest sign of a misstep, he kept his eyes locked on that top step. That was his goal, and he wasn't going to be denied.
In the end, however, his reserve of baby energy proved to be his Achilles heel. After burning so much energy crawling around the basement, he had to abandon his quest a mere four steps away from the top, at which point he just stopped his progress, sat on the step and panted, like an Everest hiker at high elevation.
And so we begin the next phase of baby vigilance. His world has now gotten much larger and more accessible, and our world has gotten much more interesting.
To use the parlance of our times:
Spam: This is bulk, unsolicited e-mail, usually in the form of bad advertising for boner pills or Nigerian royalty scams. It's unclear what kind of success rate spammers realize, but they nevertheless exist in the hundreds of thousands.
Trolls: These are Internet commenters or e-mailers who exist anonymously (mostly) primarily just to be jerks. They typically ask you to kill yourself or to otherwise shut up. It's unclear what kind of psychological need is filled by being a troll, but they nevertheless exist in the hundreds of thousands.
Back in 2004 and 2005, I spent several months playing Star Wars: Galaxies, and I had a blast doing so, because I played by the rules and made my way up through the ranks, including grinding out all the mind-numbing "Camping" requirements to become a bounty hunter.
Players of the game gradually sorted out little exploits and hacks within the game to carve out powerful little niches for themselves, so you eventually had spaceports populated with doctors who, for a price, would offer "buffs" which would improve other players' vital stats for a couple hours, basically making people virtually un-killable by in-game enemies.
The game developers didn't like that, so they kept tweaking the rules, yanking the rugs out from under the players who had invested considerable time building their characters.
Doctor characters became useless, while other characters found themselves with all sorts of new, unearned, skills and powers. This, obviously, made a lot of people mad, while also making some other people very happy, so a transition period ensued during which people settled into the new roles, discovering new exploits and hacks. Weapon makers, for example, created some seriously powerful guns that could mow down in-game enemies with ease.
The game developers didn't like that, so once again they kept tweaking the rules, yanking the rugs out from under the players who had invested considerable time building their characters.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Whenever characters started getting a little too comfortable playing the game, the developers kept intervening to get the game's economic model working the way they envisioned by knocking down the incentives for characters to truly excel.
All of this culminated in 2005 with the much-reviled "Combat Upgrade," which marked the point at which I began to lose interest in the game. Rather than a tweaking of the rules, the combat upgrade completely overturned the applecart. For a good 20 minutes after I logged in and experienced the effects of the combat upgrade, I couldn't even get my character to move around, because my once-awesome armor was suddenly too heavy for me to maneuver within. This was followed later in the year with a New Game Enhancements surprise that was inflicted on players with only 24-hour notice.
So why do I bring all this up? Well, I stopped playing SWG in 2005, because the constant changes just drove me nuts, and it was ridiculous how poorly-thought-out some of the major changes were. I loved the game I originally started playing, but those damned developers just couldn't resist messing it up in an effort to attain a fair and balanced system. In the end, they just totally blew up what was originally a really awesome game.
And I can't help but see a lot of parallels when I look at how governments also butt in and try to fix things they deem broken. Just when people get comfortable playing the game under familiar rules, everything gets messed up when government steps in to try to make things more "fair," whatever the hell that means.
Eventually, the people simply aren't going to like the product being sold, and they'll find ways to leave the game.
Ryan: I really thought I'd have my freelance check by now.
Caroline: I expect mine on the `5th.
Caroline: 15th, even
Ryan: The `5 only comes around during Leap Year.
Caroline: two years, then
Ryan: What's sad is I initially couldn't figure out how you made the ` symbol.
Caroline: magical keyboard
Ryan: I was looking at the "1" key, thinking "did she use the Wingding font for that or something?
Caroline: I hot wingdingin'
Ryan: Heh. Wingding. I'm just happy we live in a world that has a wingding font.
Wingding 1, 2 AND 3, no less.
Caroline: Totally. One Wingding isn't enough. It's kind of like Ghetto Booty in that way.
Ryan: OH MY GOD.
Ryan: I was JUST GOING TO PROPOSE A GHETTO BOOTY FONT.
Caroline: LOLOLOLO
Ryan: That's some powerful fucking brainwave action there.
Caroline: Indeed it is
Ryan: With the Ghetto Booty font, any time there's a double o "oo" it will be represented by a miniature pair of sunglasses.
Caroline: I'd use that font ALL OF THE TIME.
Ryan: It would totally kill off Helvetica.
Caroline: And forget about Arial.
Ryan: Already forgotten.
Ryan: We have some of the geekiest convos in the universe.
Caroline: That's what makes them awesome.
Ryan: Our Ghetto Booty font would have so much bling, it would almost be illegal.
Caroline: BlingDings
Ryan: LOLO!
Caroline: And to think this convo started thanks to a typo.
