The Last Candle

Dear Internet Friends: I’m back from San Francisco! Hello.

Actually, I returned from the west coast a week ago, last Thursday, but regarding how completely dead tired I was after Wednesday’s return flight and resulting jet lag, most of my physical and ethereal body was still in San Fran. Too bad all of me couldn’t be there — the trip was lovely, lovely, lovely. Lovely in an oh-man-I-could-definitely-live-here kind of way.

Actually, I’m hoping to start looking for jobs in April, and after landing new work moving to California. That’s the big news. The bad news is that due to a restrictive lease that I stupidly renewed just two weeks ago, that April of prospective freedom won’t arrive until 2009.

But who knows — even after a year, the glow of a west coast abode will probably have worn off to a great degree, and I might rethink the whole escapade. But then again, something tells me that just looking at the 630+ photographs and couple hours ‘o video from this recent trip would rekindle the flame. Nothing is happening quickly for this move, that’s for sure.

On the bright side, during that year I’ll accrue another twelve months of resume experience — including an extra day, thanks to the leap year! — and twelve months of income to collect, all the better to assist a west-ward move and assimilation. Not bad, really, and besides, I have plenty of things here in Michigan to love at the moment. And besides, why San Francisco? Plenty o’ other nice Californian towns to consider too, although SF is a tough candidate to beat. In any case, the extra year of Michigan-nesse will be put to very good use.

I can’t stay away too long, though. Another San Francisco visit will take flight in late April, and then in June I’ll be off to visit family in San Luis Obispo. Needless to say, the funds gained through those ugly hours worked during the busy season (now over by about a month) are being put to a very good use.

As for an hour-by-hour recollection of the trip, I’ll let the multitude of photos do the talking for me. I’m currently sorting through and touching up the media, and a gallery is forthcoming within a week or so, and possibly within a few days. Some marvelous footage of the Sonata Arctica show is also on deck to be edited, but that’ll take a bit longer — I tend to fuss with these little video compositions for weeks, even if the original film lasts only a couple minutes.

But yeah — happy leap day. I am proud to announce on this tetra-annual occasion that my own Project 365 has grown up to be Project 366. Rejoice!

Actually, the only indications that the project was upgraded are the new album art, the button within the navigation bar on the right on this page, and the assumption that the gallery will end up with at least one picture for every day of this year (so far, so good). The name of the gallery is still Three-Six-Five — changing it to Three-Six-Six would require changing all of my current hyperlinks as well as blowing away the current RSS feed due to the way that the Picasa Web Albums handles identifiers, so screw it.

Three Sixty-Five, or Three Sixty-Six? Just like most art, it doesn’t really matter — choose what you like, and you’ll probably be wrong about it in one respect or another.

Pictures of the west coast due soon. I hope. Gah!

I’m hopping about in San Francisco-town for a few days. I don’t expect to do much blogging, but I’ll be posting pictures and small updates to the tumblelog for the duration.

And if I suddenly stop updating the t’log, it’s probably because of a sudden and untimely death. Surely.

Friends, success: I have joined the sub-elite class of Portal players that, having beaten all of the game’s advanced maps, have bitten down on the elusive Vanilla Crazy Cake achievement. Not that the Cupcake and Fruitcake achievements weren’t delicious, but layer cake is pretty high on my leaderboard of cake-like desserts. I’m pretty satisfied.

But now I’ve started on the challenge maps in Portal, and, living up to the namesake, appear so far to be more challenging than the advanced maps. How about that? Seem like they’d be similar in difficulty, right? How big can the distance between a “challenge” and an “advanced” map be?

The answer: pretty big, but by an interesting sort of contrast. Both the advanced maps and the challenge maps are revisions of maps from the original single-player game. Both modify the flow of the original levels, but in distinctly different ways. The advanced maps alter the geometry and mechanics of the original level, requiring the player to rethink how useful a portal gun really is, while the challenge require to pare down and refine a particular and already-familiar skill set.

Advanced maps are basically a further-along progression available after playing through Portal’s single-player adventure. In an advanced map (or in the original game), shortly after entering a room that is seemingly impossible to navigate, the realization sets in (again) that this isn’t the typical shooter, or one at all, really — this is a puzzle game, and the portal gun allows the player to move around the environment in a unprecedented way.

After grabbing ahold of that notion, the PC realizes that, “Hmm, I can’t jump way over and up there, but I can fire a portal there, which will get me halfway…” And so on. It’s a terrific gear shift from the usual run-and-gun-and-hop, one that required a entirely different set of wheels.

Speaking of wheels, my car has new brakes and tires, so I’ve been thumbing my nose at Mother Nature all week amidst all this nasty precipitation. Oh, but I wasn’t always the Road Warrior of the Winter. Two weeks ago, the Ford service dealership told me that 1) the car’s rear brakes were nearly down to the metal, and 2) the treads on all four tires were nearly gone.

The combination of the two maladies explained why driving while the road was even the slightest bit slick felt like one continuous, extremely subtle but perceptible fishtail from here to there. The best I could say was that I was generally in control of the car, but by that measure I might as well give equal culpability to how not-slick the road was on the days of haphazard travel.

But the days of fishtailing are over: the new brakes are good, and the tires, more than fair. And then I have my secret weapon: leather driving gloves. I swear, these gloves are serious +2 to steering control, which means I am, in essence, driving a front wheel-drive vehicle that behaves like a four-wheeler. These gloves are that sweet. Really.

But back to Portal. While advanced maps make the player create a passage across new levels using old tricks, the challenge maps are all about polishing up those old tricks. Challenge maps keep the same levels from the original game, but restriction the amount of portals, steps and seconds elapsed that the player can take. No more blasting a few hundred portals in the midst of a level, trying every which-thingy to get from the elevator to the end — now the player must get from the beginning to the end within five portals. No more sloppy, wasteful portal creation!

So far I’ve found the challenge maps to be extremely difficult. Chances are that the method used to beat the original level wasn’t achieved using five portals, or only 50 steps, or that the level was accomplished within 40 seconds. Nope, the methods of firing a weighted cube across the room a dozen times, and repositioning the portals each time to get the angle of trajectory correct, are over. The challenge maps graduate the player beyond beyond point A to point B — the player must now get from point A to point B using a very particular set of actions and movements.

Having limited portals is tough, but at least the PC can move around at his leisure, deciding and scheming where portal placement is most advantageous. The limited footfalls challenges are a couple fold more nasty since movement itself is no longer an adversary. Even just entering the level and entering and exiting portals takes a few dozen steps, leaving very little room to do the actual level legwork.

Finally, the time limit has the player character — me, that is — sprinting from wall to wall, vaulting cubes and myself across the room and firing off the portal gun as if it was the only way to keep breathing, all in an effort to beat the clock. Not surprisingly, I have yet to get even a bronze medal in any of the time challenges, but I’ve at least done decently at limited portals.

Portal: some of the best money ever spent on a game. And since Portal was given to me as a gift, the purchase indicates that the giver was not only an extremely shrewd shopper, but they had excellent taste as well.

— Actually, I just remembered that I have to be somewhere. Well, not right this minute. Not until Saturday, actually, but I’ll be roughly 2,000 miles and several time zones away for a couple days. The trip will be something of a vacation, although a hastily and perhaps foolishly planned one, having chosen to ship myself off to an unfamiliar city for a few solitary evenings. We’ll see how that turns out. The pictures ought to be good, at least.

With the complexity that must go into a massive, international, overnight and over-day shipping and tracking operation like FedEx, griping against the business when their cracker-jack operation cocks up occasionally feels a bit unappreciating. Speaking personally, however, while I won’t make generalized claims about how the sheets aboard FedEx’s frigate o’ business are managed, I can state that it is at least the kind of business that doesn’t deliver the packages I’ve ordered.

I bought a thinger from a store — well, this thing may have been something from Apple — or maybe it’s from a wholesale cracker and butter supplier — and FedEx was expecting to have it plonked onto my doorstep today, Feb. the first. That’s what Ye Olde Tracking Website said, which I accepted as high truth, just like everything I read that’s contained within an Internet browser.

Unfortunately, these shipping plans were evidently, as they say, penciled-in, because as the first of February — today — wanes, the package is absent, AWOL, MIA. I would’ve even accepted DOA (but not COD), because I would’ve at least had something concrete to complain about.

My hypothesis is that someone at FedEx is just simply having a bad day. Fortunately for me this statement is largely unfalsifiable, allowing me to charge ahead with arbitrary evidence like this picture:

Folks, that screenshot, an up-to-date info-graphic, describes the alpha and the omega of my parcel. Four days ago, the goods arrived in Sacramento. Then the goods departed from Sacramento. And then they were gone. As per usual in my life, everything bad goes down on Tuesday.

So maybe my package is somewhere over the Canadian border, nested within a crag in the Rockies, acting as deified monolith o’ worldly knowledge to the fairy folk, or enjoying a drink with a cooly-dressed ladyfriend within a Boise dirt bar. I have no idea, because Fed-effenheimer-Ex hasn’t said anything. It’s as if the person who manages the package tracking updates — and it’s just one person — received a call regarding a series of packages (“They’re gone? All of them! You’re kidding: termites?”), put down the phone, threw their hands in the air and then pushed the “We Give Up” button.

Or whatever. Anyways, the whole point of this post was to fret over the following famous literature passage that I discovered while reading, of all places, a productivity blog:

If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.

Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind.

Thus spake a very wise man, Paul Rubens. Or maybe Thoreau.

While the wisdom in Thoreau’s well-padded rhetoric is evident, even in light of the man having spent hours of his life holed-up in the woods and musing over the social and political structures of ants, this passage has given me an unexpected amount of grief since I first read it a couple weeks ago. In short, my sole New Year’s resolution has been cast into a stormy sea simply because of Thoreau’s vetting of vestments.

My one resolution for the year was to stop wearing white socks. The dresser stores of cotton-sewn crews would be thrown out over the course of the next twelve months and replaced with superior, non-white socks. The plan was going well until I stumbled, unwittingly, into the Duke of Walden’s screed against new silk suitcoats and the like.

Here was one of the great, famous and noted philosophical thinkers in American history tearing down what could be called my Polaris, my only guidance during a sea-borne adventure to the well-groomed lands to the west. What’s more, Mr. Tax Evasion wrought this destruction across time itself, from almost 150 years ago. I tried to dip my toe in the fashonista pool, and Thoreau reached from his place in the mid-19th Century across the Civil War, prohibition, and the creation of Twinkies to dump a bunch of piranas into the bath.

At first this rebuke across spacetime affronted me only mildly, as if I had been slapped across the face by a shortish, balding man who was well-attired, possessed a handsome and impeccably twisted mustache, and who brandished a single delicate velvet glove that had been slipped from a small, well-manicured hand as his weapon of choice.

But now I’m beside myself with torment — I don’t know what to do about the socks. Am I worthy to don the new argyles I’ve already bought? The socks are new, but am I new? How do I change? If I bought a new pork pie hat, would that act as a intermediate step to new-ness, considering the positive statement that a good pork pie hate lends to the wearer? Or perhaps if I bought white socks, but new white socks they’d act as my gateway to the new horizon of footwear. But then I’d have bought white socks, new or not, and the resolution would be shattered into tiny bits as if was a piece of dropped Corelle tableware.

Such a mess. What on Earth am I going to do?

As per usual these days, I’m going to take a walk in the brisk evening air and muse over what is, roughly, fashion or painful death. But you know what? I’m gonna wear my nice new wool Wigwam socks while I’m out musing and weeping. Suck that down, Thoreau, you damn ant-gazing drunk.