So I stopped posting

I haven't posted in a while.

Grad school happened.

I might get back to this. Maybe. There's currently a strike so it ain't like I don't have time. Regardless, the lack of posts will continue until further notice.

Boxing's getting spoiled

This September to December stretch has been a little slice of heaven for a boxing fan like me. There has been a very impressive run of fights booked, and I would be lying if I said I wasn't giddy like a teenager at a Bieber concert.

Canelo-Mayweather was everything it was hoped to be. Floyd gave up approximately twenty pounds in weight to a known power puncher, and didn't even bat an eye at this supposed disadvantage. Not a word of an exaggeration, this was one of the best Floyd Mayweather fights I have ever seen. When you haven't seen Mayweather fight in a bit, especially against a super aggressive opponent, it's kind of easy to forget just how good he is. Watching him against Canelo, I just kind of sat there slack-jawed at how good he is defensively. Simply put, you do not just hit Floyd Mayweather. You practically need to burn 2 minutes out of the round just pinning him down, and then go to the body hard ala Miguel Cotto.

Oh, and the undercard to that fight? Was Matthysse-Garcia. Also a fantastic barn-burner. Both of those guys can pack some serious heat. Turns out Danny Garcia is all that, and that Matthysse is in fact human. Still a real treat to watch.

Next up we had Adonis Stevenson absolutely demolishing Tavoris Cloud. Another treat. It's always nice to see a supposed journeyman or gatekeeper have a late career resurgence to force themselves back into relevance. In some ways Stevenson is a lot like Malignaggi. Both guys were used as stepping stones for bigger better fighters for a long time, until they got hot and started piling up wins against these supposed prospects. God-damn does Stevenson have a right hand on him. Another fantastic fight out of Stevenson, and another fighter coming out Montreal. At some point that city became the boxing hub of Canada, and I like it.

Also on this card? Vera-Chavez Jr. The less said about this fight the better.

Next up will be next weekend. Timothy Bradley against Juan Manuel Marquez. This is one of three fights I have circled on my calendar, because I am unabashedly a huge JMM fan. Sure, Bradley showed in the Provodnikov fight that he can take a hell of a lot of punishment, but in the same vein he also showed that he's too dumb to not take that much punishment. Given that he's bragged since then about how he didn't talk exactly right for two months after the bout, I'm not expecting him to really try to outpoint Marquez. As sad as it sounds, with a supremely gifted counter-puncher like Marquez, that's about the only way to win. If he wades in behind his chin and tries to brawl Marquez, he's going to be fed a steady diet of counter-rights. Pulling for Marquez in this one.

THEN we still get both Klitschko brothers, Pacquiao-Rios and Gennady Golovkin pulverizing Curtis Stevens. The only downside to this incredible upcoming season? Not enough Sergio Martinez.

I'll expand on this later, but it has been supremely disappointing to watch the boxing media cover what's coming up. Suffice it to say, I feel like the current dedicated coverage of boxing is one of the primary causes of the sport's supposed downfall.

2013. Turning out to be a hell of year for the sweet science. I'm child-like excited.

Now if only school wasn't in the way.

RANT SHOTGUN BOOM

I haven't blogged for a while, and for that I apologize. Without my periodic cathartic release, I've built up a backlog of rants that need to be unloaded. Today's blog post will not be my usual long form thinking-onto-a-keyboard but rather a rapid, staccato of hatred and unsettling in-depth opinion.

1) Traveling. Fuck traveling.

I understand the appeal of travel. Go somewhere new. See something neat. Learn about this world we call home. Release, relax, recharge, it's good for the soul. This bit I get, I sympathize and dare I say I agree. What really grinds my gears is people who travel and start talking like they have experienced some life changing spirit journey. They won't shut up about how much their life changed. How relocating to another part of the world for a week granted them magical perspective to understand and solve all of life's problems.

There was no magical journey to life changing wisdom. You just went somewhere for a bit. Nothing changed. Nothing. You're still you, the rest of the world is still the rest of the world, so please oh please shut the fuck up about how you have enriched yourself so much by the act of being somewhere else for a bit.

2) Labels and conditions.

Single noun explanations are not appropriate devices to make everything better. You can't say "I'm insecure" or "I'm an introvert" or "I haven't had my coffee." No one cares. You have attached a new descriptor, perhaps a shorter one, to describe what many of us already knew; You have some kind of crippling personality a flaw. Take for example people being total assholes. The label "I'm busy" or "I haven't had my coffee" as their justification for their behavior. The expectation is that by this hand waving gesture you have somehow made yourself immune to the hatred you so justly deserve. I don't care if you have or have not had a coffee today, you're still a cunt.

Perhaps the frustrating part of this is that once a label has been assigned, people just don't see the need for any attempt resolution or improvement. You attach the label onto yourself and say "Yup, that's just the way it is." There is no literally other way in the world to say "I'm incapable of functioning like the rest of adults, and that is a-okay."

3) Bad drivers.

Jesus fucking christ, you are literally directing a tonne of metal fuelled by repeated explosions through a populated space. The car is capable of far more than you. Go to a performance driving class. You will rapidly discover that the car is not the limit or the problem, the problem is that you are a distracted dumb slow lump of meat that clumsily tries to direct this miracle of science. You don't know how bad you are at directing this machine, and you think that if anything bad happens you can miraculously get out. Guess what, you can't. And when this situation arises because you're driving like a fuckhead, you get to have the joy of killing someone and/or yourself.



Okay...I think....I think that's most of it.

The audacity of dreams

I am going to buy an OUYA.

It may not be tomorrow. It may not be this weekend. But before the calendar year has expired, I will be purchasing an OUYA. I am aware that it is not running on anything remotely near top of the line hardware. I am aware that many of the games it features will become available on my Kobo. In fact, it is both possible and depressingly likely that at the end of the day my PS3 will simply feature more, better games.

I am going to buy an OUYA because I like dreams.

Tomb Raider, will critically popular, sold 3.4 million copies and this was still not enough for Square Enix to turn a profit. Hitman barely broke even. Some estimates peg MW3 as costing 100 million dollars to produce. This model that every game has to have unbelievable hype and sell like gangbusters is not going to work for very long. Rising dev costs will tank how many games can be made, and the need for guaranteed sales is going to kill creativity. The AAA model is going to kill gaming far faster than it will save it. I mean, look at me. The most fun I had in the last year was easily with either Space Marine or Transformers: Fall of Cybertron. Neither game was particularly huge and neither game stood a chance in hell of matching the CoD marketing juggernaut, but god-damn they just cooked.

This is why I want to throw my money behind OUYA. Games don't have to be marketable or sexy, they just need to be fun. How they're fun doesn't matter, and the mechanics that make them fun are probably independent of the processing power required to generate a photo-realistic city in real time. If this crazy experiment works, devs will have a chance for creativity to matter again. They will have a chance to nurture a product from beginning to end, at a normal person pace, instead of the development hell behind every major title now.

It will not replace my PS3. It will never compete with the big boys. That expectation is foolhardy and unrealistic, and anyone who resorts to that as an argument against the OUYA should be struck with an open hand. What it will do, hopefully, is provide me with an easy to use outlet to find some fun, simple games. Something for me to get into if I don't want to drop 60$ and 20 hours. Maybe I only want to throw down 10 dollars and 5 hours, whatever, hopefully it with fill that niche in my gaming hierarchy.

And, if it doesn't, well I guess I still have my 3DS.

Future Planning

Planning is a weird thing. Generally speaking, I tend to be a person who plans out everything in detail, complete with contingencies and back-ups. This is all done with the knowledge that despite however many hours, how much detail and how much dedication I pour into my plans they're never going to be quite right. I try to think things through in advance, but then lo and behold something new comes along. What's worse, sometimes exactly what I planned for comes along.

I've gotten back onto the job application train. For those counting, this train is now at 150 applications with one phone interview. Whoo whoo. Recently, I've revamped my resume into a new format and I've started using a new cover letter format. Consequently, I've convinced myself that this was the change needed to turn it all around. However, there was a three week hiatus where I did not apply for anything as I was frantically filling out last second grad school applications. One of them has already gotten back to me with a heartfelt "HAHAHAno." What I had told myself, and what I had told my friends and family was that even if hell froze over and I was accepted to a Master's program I would still be applying to jobs right up until day 1. Now I've started to question that.

The funny thing about planning for the future is that you get excited. On paper, UPEI having a stroke and accepting me would appear to be the worst thing ever. Moving to a small city on the other side of the country, signing another lease, enjoying geographic and social isolation all in exchange for a degree that has questionable merit from a professional standpoint? This looks like a raw deal. Yet, for some reason I really really want to. Getting hired in Calgary? On paper, the best thing ever. I could actually make money instead of hemorrhaging cash. I wouldn't have to move. I wouldn't have to reboot socially. I'd be near family. Yet somehow, while I remain hopeful for this possibility, it doesn't seem like the golden ticket to a magical chocolate factory that I had envisioned.

Do I miss university? Apparently yes. Except that I categorically despised large chunks of it.

Right now, I suspect my worse fear is actually that both dreams might come true. An employer AND a graduate committee might think that I am competent. If it came down to it, I don't know which I'd choose. An improved version of what I do now? Or blowing it all up and starting again for a year? I know one of those is good, but the other keeps winking at me and promising impossible things.

The worst part of all of this, this planning, this fear, this hope, this excitement is that all of it, every detail is reliant on someone I have never met reading 800 words about me and determining whether or not I deserve a chance. Despite my best efforts, I can't plan for that.

Window Dressing Activism

The following is one side of a conversation I had with a friend in Ottawa.

"I am about to write something offensive

Remember how the "hot" social cause of the day back in 2003 was global warming? And every fucking wannabe social activist was all like "OH THE HUMANITY WE GOTS TO SAVE THE WORLD" But it was really just an excuse to go to "green parties" and get tanked and then feel like you're not just another alcoholic manwhore/womanwhore? In 2013, a new social cause has risen up to take its place.

Gay Rights has become the new Global Warming.

The cause most socially acceptable to latch onto and preach about, while simultaneously requiring an almost non-existent amount of dedication in order to maintain the facade of giving a damn.

I hate. These. People.

This really crystallized for me while looking at Facebook today. So many photos of people being tanked at 302. And posting shit like "OMG PRIDE 2013!!!" "LGBT EQUALITY GUYS!!!11" You have truly advanced the cause of ending discrimination based on sexual identity by dressing up like a banana and pounding jager. And I know, maybe I'm just a stick in the mud, but to me this window-dressing support of valid and important social causes would seem to diminish and mock the cause."

Phew. There it is. Some good 'ol fashioned hatred.

The beauty of economics...

Every once in a while, I feel a need to get all misty eyed for the field I studied for five years.

I was listening to NPR's Planet Money, a fantastic show everyone should listen to by the way, and was enthralled by their episodes discussing their t-shirt. I was so enthralled I signed up for Kickstarter just to back them, and have since sunk 200$ into other projects like a god-damn junkie. What stuck out to me, aside from the super interesting story of the t-shirt, was their mention of John Maynard Keynes and his description of "animal spirits."

A quick rundown for those who haven't done history of economic thought: For most of time, the dominant way of thinking about economics was the "rational actor model." It carries with it the assumption that all people are blessed with perfect information and perfect rationality, and that all decisions they make are done so in the interest of minimizing costs and maximizing utility. Generally speaking, it worked out pretty well. This sort of thinking isn't 100% accurate, but it does a damn good job of aggregating millions of personal decisions into an understandable form. Keynes wrote in the 40/50's about this idea of "wild animal spirits," this idea that people are far from rational. They are impulsive and impassioned, and make decisions based on things that cannot be quantified by numbers. Recent years, and in fact the 2012 nobel prize in economics, have started to centre around attempts to rehabilitate the rational actor model or at the very least improve it to more accurately simulate real people. One of the topics we discussed in game theory was this concept of asymmetrical or inaccurate information, the idea being that everyone wants to use perfect information but something stops them. This is a line of thought I've always really enjoyed, because it offers some solid explanations for why people make bad choices.

So I look around my house right now. The TV furniture is from Italy, the dvd towers are from poland, my water bottle is from china, my t-shirt is from Vietnam. And these are just the final stages of production. The dvd towers had to be bought from a store, which had them shipped to calgary from a port which received them from poland. In poland, the lumber had to come from somewhere. The tools had to be made elsewhere, and the machines built from parts built somewhere else. In turn, those parts are constructed from metal which had to be mined. All in all, for me to sit where I am at this moment, looking at what I am looking at now, there had to be hundreds of people working in concert.

For the most part, each one of these people played their part because it was the best decision available to them. Somehow the insane, roundabout, varied path necessary to get from metal in the ground to water bottle in my hand made every single turn because it was the least expensive. Dozens of steps, all across the world, all the cheapest available, to put this water bottle into my hand. We live in a world where that is easier than building a water bottle factory in Canada to sell water bottles to Canadians. And still, somehow, this entire process can be totally mocked by me making the decision that I am willing to pay $2 more for a green bottle than a black one.

That is crazy. This entire complex chain of events still relies on my impulse being the correct impulse, manipulated via advertising or otherwise, in order to justify everything that has happened.

Pick an item nearby. Ask yourself "why did I buy it," and "how many people touched this for it to be here?"

Economics. Surprisingly inspiring sometimes.