I hope that Jean-Paul Sartre will forgive my paraphrasing of his title, but I generally like people, and it's only certain types who get my back up. In this case, other drivers. Specifically, drivers who wield their high-speed, ton-weight missiles of destruction without respect for the damage they can cause.
Now, I don't claim to be the best or safest driver out there. I usually drive a bit over the speed limit, and I have been known to change lanes without signaling. (Hey, in New England, signaling a lane change is considered divulging secrets to the enemy...) But for some reason, I have noticed a particularly high rate of driving idiocy lately. Maybe the arrival of Spring is messing with everyone's mind or something, but today was a particularly bad day, and I saw several head-shake-worthy events in the span of 30 minutes.
First was the woman in the SUV who approached the intersection where I was stopped from the perpendicular street just as the light turned green for me. I started to pull forward, and she decided that "right on red after a full stop" meant it was okay to peel out (in an SUV!) to get in front of me before I crossed the remaining 25 feet of the intersection I was already moving through. Luckily, I wasn't moving that fast yet and was able to tap the brakes and avoid a collision. (Although, my car *is* getting on in years and miles...)
Then came the guy who blew past me on 495 as if I were standing still when I was actually going about 80 miles per hour. Now, being passed on the highway isn't all that unusual. But, being passed at really high speed on the right-hand side as I'm changing into the center lane by a guy who is also moving into the center lane without signaling (see previous comment about divulging secrets to the enemy) after whipping around a panel van traveling in the center lane is a bit eyebrow-raising. Luckily I wasn't further into the middle lane when he went flying past, or I might be in a hospital somewhere instead of writing this.
Lastly, there was the idiot backing up in the breakdown lane trying to get to the exit he just passed. There was a lot of traffic on the highway, including people getting off at that exit every few seconds, and he was just blithely backing up as if he had all the right in the world to be traveling opposite the direction of traffic. On the highway. Really? Is it so hard to just continue down to the next exit and turn around, rather than doing the one thing every high school driver's education class clearly stresses you must NEVER EVER do? People like that cause stupid accidents that kill other people and then don't have the good grace to die in the accidents they cause.
Okay, I don't really wish anyone to die, but stupid, dangerous driving gets under my skin. I sometimes wish I were empowered as a secret, civilian traffic agent, so that I could pull people over, berate them and then write them tickets. Hmmm, I wonder if I could pitch that to the state as an alternative revenue stream for them. I wonder what the certification process would be...
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Monday, March 14, 2011
Geeking Out A Bit
As I write this, tens of thousands of people are missing and presumed (or confirmed) dead in Japan due to the 5th most powerful earthquake in recorded history and the tsunami that it produced. It's a tragedy of literally biblical proportions, and my thoughts and wishes go out to everyone suffering in the wake of the event. But, this space has been filled with words of sadness and grief of late (when there have been words, that is), so I will not dwell on that tragedy at this time.
This past weekend, I celebrated my geek and gamer side in an epic fashion: I attended PAX East in Boston.
For those who don't know, I have been a gamer for most of my life. I have whiled away hours, days, weeks and years on various types of gaming pursuits, filling up what time I could spare on flights of fancy. Early on it was computer games, mostly single-player turn based simulations like the famous Civilization franchise and sometimes first-person-perspective shooting games like Half-Life. I never quite made the leap to the massively multi-player online games that are so popular these days.
As computer games surrendered their place of honor in my mind, collectible card games took their place. For years and years I got together with small groups of friends and played cards. We primarily played Magic: the Gathering, but we made occasional forays into Vampire: the Eternal Struggle, Star Wars, Star Trek, Wyvern, the Lord of the Rings card game, and others whose titles I have since forgotten.
My tastes continued to evolve, however, and I stopped playing collectible card games. (Influenced in no small amount by the fact that the cost of keeping up with the ever-changing landscape of Magic cards can be *really* expensive. Luckily, I got into the game early and had a lot of collectible cards that eventually were worth a fortune on the secondary market -- I'm pretty sure I broke even or made a small profit on my collection overall.) For the past couple of years, I've really gotten into board games. Not the standard fare that we're all familiar with from our childhoods -- Monopoly, Scrabble, and so forth -- but a wide range of games of various styles and flavors that come out of the renaissance of board games that has sprung up these past 15 years or so. Strategy games, horror games, deckbuilding games, cooperative games, dice games, tile-playing games, resource management games. I've discovered a love of pretty much anything that helps me get 6 friends together around the table for some fun and laughter, and maybe a beer or two.
As my gaming tastes wandered through those three massive territories of the mind, however, my foundation was always roleplaying games. It started when a friend introduced me to Dungeons and Dragons when I was 13 years old, and I've been playing these games ever since -- usually D&D, but I have tried a double handful of other games over the years. Roleplaying games engage my creative side and let me get together regularly with close friends to build entire worlds of shared imagination and cooperatively tell stories about heroism in the face of adversity, generosity in the face of loss, and the victory of light over the forces of darkness. How cool is that? Especially the getting together with friends part.
PAX East was a celebration of all that love of gaming, in the company of a few tens of thousands of people of like mind. (At last count, almost 70,000 people attended -- it was the largest gaming convention in the U.S.!) The lines for events were often long, and the food in the convention hall was too expensive, but in the face of the veritable tidal wave of shared joy concentrated in that massive building, these petty irritations were easily ignored. I spent most of three full days with a couple of close friends and smaller amounts of time with other friends I encountered while there, but I had something in common with everyone who attended: we loved games. It didn't matter if we played the same games or not. We had a shared vocabulary, and a shared understanding of the importance of a little fun with friends.
I could go into the details of what I did over the weekend -- the panels I attended, the games I played, the game I ran for a fun group of total strangers when the event organizers ran short of people to help run the event, my fanboy moment -- but such minutiae don't really communicate the power of the experience. I grew closer to the two friends who attended the convention with me as we gamed together, ate meals together, and talked about everything under the sun while waiting in line together. I discovered a few new friendships that have the potential to become real ones. I witnessed the amazing ability of 70,000 people to gather in one place without (as far as I ever heard or saw) any incidents of theft or violence against one another.
And in the midst of this exuberant celebration of fantasy, I witnessed an uncommon outpouring of generosity. There were event attendees selling home-baked goods to raise money to donate to a children's charity. People who had spent hundreds and hundred of dollars to travel to Boston for the weekend and were spending a small fortune for meals for a few days found a few dollars to give to homeless people they encountered on the nearby streets. By the end of the weekend, a coalition of gaming companies and game distributors had set up a system through which gamers could contribute to help alleviate the suffering in Japan caused by the earthquake that had happened just a couple of days before. Despite all the time gamers spend exploring imaginary worlds, many of us care about and give back to the real world we all have to live in.
There's a funny quote in an old X-Files episode that features a gamer in a not-so-complimentary light. After telling Mulder about some daring actions he took, the gamer character says "I didn't play Dungeons and Dragons all those years and not learn something about bravery." That might not be an exact quote, of course; it's been years since I watched the episode. As amusing as the moment is (and I confess, I laughed), there's a bit of truth at the heart of it. Many of the games I play feature triumphing over adversity, putting an end to something horrible, pitting the limited resources of the heroes against the forces of evil and/or nature despite long odds of success, and that can easily translate to the real world. I may not wear steel armor and carry a sword with which to smite villains, and I may not be able to cast magical spells to reshape the fabric of reality, but I am not helpless against the evils of our day and age. I have money, time and compassion. These are powerful weapons, and I am not afraid to use them.
This past weekend, I celebrated my geek and gamer side in an epic fashion: I attended PAX East in Boston.
For those who don't know, I have been a gamer for most of my life. I have whiled away hours, days, weeks and years on various types of gaming pursuits, filling up what time I could spare on flights of fancy. Early on it was computer games, mostly single-player turn based simulations like the famous Civilization franchise and sometimes first-person-perspective shooting games like Half-Life. I never quite made the leap to the massively multi-player online games that are so popular these days.
As computer games surrendered their place of honor in my mind, collectible card games took their place. For years and years I got together with small groups of friends and played cards. We primarily played Magic: the Gathering, but we made occasional forays into Vampire: the Eternal Struggle, Star Wars, Star Trek, Wyvern, the Lord of the Rings card game, and others whose titles I have since forgotten.
My tastes continued to evolve, however, and I stopped playing collectible card games. (Influenced in no small amount by the fact that the cost of keeping up with the ever-changing landscape of Magic cards can be *really* expensive. Luckily, I got into the game early and had a lot of collectible cards that eventually were worth a fortune on the secondary market -- I'm pretty sure I broke even or made a small profit on my collection overall.) For the past couple of years, I've really gotten into board games. Not the standard fare that we're all familiar with from our childhoods -- Monopoly, Scrabble, and so forth -- but a wide range of games of various styles and flavors that come out of the renaissance of board games that has sprung up these past 15 years or so. Strategy games, horror games, deckbuilding games, cooperative games, dice games, tile-playing games, resource management games. I've discovered a love of pretty much anything that helps me get 6 friends together around the table for some fun and laughter, and maybe a beer or two.
As my gaming tastes wandered through those three massive territories of the mind, however, my foundation was always roleplaying games. It started when a friend introduced me to Dungeons and Dragons when I was 13 years old, and I've been playing these games ever since -- usually D&D, but I have tried a double handful of other games over the years. Roleplaying games engage my creative side and let me get together regularly with close friends to build entire worlds of shared imagination and cooperatively tell stories about heroism in the face of adversity, generosity in the face of loss, and the victory of light over the forces of darkness. How cool is that? Especially the getting together with friends part.
PAX East was a celebration of all that love of gaming, in the company of a few tens of thousands of people of like mind. (At last count, almost 70,000 people attended -- it was the largest gaming convention in the U.S.!) The lines for events were often long, and the food in the convention hall was too expensive, but in the face of the veritable tidal wave of shared joy concentrated in that massive building, these petty irritations were easily ignored. I spent most of three full days with a couple of close friends and smaller amounts of time with other friends I encountered while there, but I had something in common with everyone who attended: we loved games. It didn't matter if we played the same games or not. We had a shared vocabulary, and a shared understanding of the importance of a little fun with friends.
I could go into the details of what I did over the weekend -- the panels I attended, the games I played, the game I ran for a fun group of total strangers when the event organizers ran short of people to help run the event, my fanboy moment -- but such minutiae don't really communicate the power of the experience. I grew closer to the two friends who attended the convention with me as we gamed together, ate meals together, and talked about everything under the sun while waiting in line together. I discovered a few new friendships that have the potential to become real ones. I witnessed the amazing ability of 70,000 people to gather in one place without (as far as I ever heard or saw) any incidents of theft or violence against one another.
And in the midst of this exuberant celebration of fantasy, I witnessed an uncommon outpouring of generosity. There were event attendees selling home-baked goods to raise money to donate to a children's charity. People who had spent hundreds and hundred of dollars to travel to Boston for the weekend and were spending a small fortune for meals for a few days found a few dollars to give to homeless people they encountered on the nearby streets. By the end of the weekend, a coalition of gaming companies and game distributors had set up a system through which gamers could contribute to help alleviate the suffering in Japan caused by the earthquake that had happened just a couple of days before. Despite all the time gamers spend exploring imaginary worlds, many of us care about and give back to the real world we all have to live in.
There's a funny quote in an old X-Files episode that features a gamer in a not-so-complimentary light. After telling Mulder about some daring actions he took, the gamer character says "I didn't play Dungeons and Dragons all those years and not learn something about bravery." That might not be an exact quote, of course; it's been years since I watched the episode. As amusing as the moment is (and I confess, I laughed), there's a bit of truth at the heart of it. Many of the games I play feature triumphing over adversity, putting an end to something horrible, pitting the limited resources of the heroes against the forces of evil and/or nature despite long odds of success, and that can easily translate to the real world. I may not wear steel armor and carry a sword with which to smite villains, and I may not be able to cast magical spells to reshape the fabric of reality, but I am not helpless against the evils of our day and age. I have money, time and compassion. These are powerful weapons, and I am not afraid to use them.
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