Wow, I haven't posted in 5 years

I have not done one of these personal posts in quite some time. The pandemic was part of that. Tenure prep related things are part of that. Family stuff is part of that. But also, I haven’t gone to the movies in quite a while, and that turns out was a lot of what I would write about here. Also, some of my creative efforts went into a D&D podcast that is out there.

So, what are some things worth writing about on the personal side of my professional academic website?

Travel

Claire and I were able to take a handful of trips since the pandemic kicked off, most scheduled very quickly (that’s how we’ve been rolling lately). We went to Colorado in 2020 to drive around and visit some national parts (I think I planned it 6 weeks out). We went to Alaska in 2021 (like 2 months out through Lindblad). We went to French Polynesia in 2022 (that was a leisurely 2 month trip where we hired a travel agent so, very cushy on my end). Then we went to Paris and the South of France in 2023 with the whole trip planned in 4 weeks or so.

Most of these trips weren’t planned quickly on purpose, but I have found some value in booking and going. First, a lot of the stuff that you have to plan for, we can’t do. So, in some ways that is really freeing. Some place isn’t open, is booked up, whatever, go somewhere else. For most of the places we went, there were plenty of things to do and see so being confined meant that we were forced to satisfice all the time, which has worked out just fine so far. As Claire says, as long as we can do X thing then everything else can be worked around, which I think is a good way to live life.

Also, I tend to over plan. If I have time to tinker and think and consider, I will. So, one of these years when we book something a year out, I’m going to be thinking about making it the best for months. That isn’t always the worst (I had time to train diving and snorkeling before we went to the Galapagos which was time well spent), but I just know that if I have time to fret before we go on an African Safari that I’m going to want to take photography classes or buy a giant lens for my camera. That isn’t all bad, but it can be too much.

The Expanse

Since I last posted here, the single thing that I have fallen deeply into would probably be The Expanse. I watched the first season of the show after Season 4 was picked up by Amazon so I suppose I am a johnny come lately. It became the show I watched when I was traveling to MA or out there for work. I thought Season 1 was okay but there was so much world building and different threads that I wasn’t really sure what I thought. Season 2 picked up steam and Season 3 I thought was excellent. Around here was when I stopped traveling due to COVID and got into season 4 which, among other things, is about an apocalyptic event. The companion podcast The Churn was an excellent companion and I quickly listened to the excellently narrated Audiobooks. I don’t think that The Expanse is the best thing ever, but it is very thoughtfully produced television and I honestly prefer the TV version of events to the book version of events for seasons 3 on (minus some elements of book 6). The world and politics are very interesting and there’s a lot to chew on from someone who is interested in groups and teams.

So, what is The Expanse about? Hmm, well, it is a sci-fi show set in a distant future where there are 3 major powers: Earth, Mars, and a loose coalition of peoples that can only live in microgravities due to being born in it called “the belt.” Various wars, political struggles, and outward expansions are setoff by the discovery of something very old and not  from around here. One of the more interesting elements of The Expanse though is that the points of view of the characters are very narrow so it is sometimes hard to know what the broader picture is. You can work it out but the books don’t hand it to you which is kind of nice.

Summer Movies

I have gotten in the habit of trying to see newer movies more often. I started this in part when I had all you can eat movies through Movie Pass. Now, I go see movies every other Tuesday or so at my local AMC. I thought I might write up this post to reflect a bit on Godzilla: King of the Monsters as I wrote a post when the previous film came out.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

Before I get into the film itself, there were some absolutely astounding trailers made for this movie. Unfortunately when I started seeing tons of ads play in the weeks preceeding the film, I was worried it might be a bit of a stinker. I spoke with my brother before seeing KotM and he encouraged me to lower my expectations. I think he alluded to Pacific Rim: Uprising in suggesting that I keep my expectations somewhere around “Hey, the monsters punch each other a bunch and that’s cool!” It was probably good I had my expectations at rock bottom. I’ll be talking about some of the major plot points of the film below so be warned.

One of the things I liked the most about Godzilla was that the thesis of the film is in part that we should try, as humans, but we don’t matter, that we have to relent and rely on God,…zilla to try and save us from external threats. This didn’t really jive with a lot of people and it certainly doesn’t fit in with some of the environmental messaging that is an aspect to the new film. In the new film, the human drama is front and center with the monsters distinctly in the background of a story of a family torn apart by differing viewpoints and brought back together by forgiveness and love. The human story is done much more competently in this film than the first which is frustrating because, again, I don’t think that’s a great direction for these types of pictures to go but maybe that’s just me.

Whereas the first picture was about human’s inability to make a difference, this film sets itself up as the antithesis in that one of the characters creates a magic box that allows them to control pretty much all of the monsters. Now humans can make a difference, and it turns out terribly.

Midsommer

In the last 10 minutes of seeing this film, I was struggling to figure out what the point was. I knew we were headed toward a climax but the goals of the filmmaker where very much in shadow. But, somehow, in the final seconds of the feature, some clever editing and acting did a nice job of bringing the goals mostly into focus. Interestingly, a woman sitting beside me turned to the audience of 5-6 and asked if “any of you figured out what was going on there.” I told her what I thought: grief, finding a community/home, revenge, etc. and I think she and I both thought it seemed to make sense. I wasn’t totally satisfied with my thoughts but whatever. Sometimes film is intended to be obtuse meaning it can be many things (i.e. mother!) and sometimes filmmakers give you a few things to say to make yourself feel smart but that aren’t entirely satisfying. For example, the main character is grieving for much of the film. We are encouraged to believe that she now finds something positive/admirable in the community in the film. After the character, however, thinks for a few minutes about who these people are and what they have put her through, it isn’t clear to me if she would continue to feel a connection.

Collective Actions

In the Summer of 2015?, I found myself driving an hour and a half past fields and through 1 lane stone bridges to an old mill town South of Pittsburgh. I was ordered there by an operator who was who was too sick/drunk to make it there herself. We had connected a few times and I knew that this mission was vital, it wasn’t until the next week that I knew why. But for the next 45 minutes I stood in an abandoned part of town praying that I would get enough keys for it to be worth it before I burnt out the portal for good. A few days later, I was taking some out of town operatives to the subway in downtown Pittsburgh when the whole county was coated in layer upon layer of green ‘fields’. I smiled and knew that my mission had been a success.

I am talking about the AR game Ingress made by Niantic that went on to make Pokemon Go. Though I mostly play Pokemon Go if I’m playing one of these AR games, Ingress’s strategic layer was always more interesting to me in the way that it encouraged collective actions. In the scenario I described above, I was ‘hacking’ a portal over and over again in order to collect ‘keys’ to the portal. You can link the portal you are at to any portal for which you have a key (as long as the link you make doesn’t cross any existing links). Whenever a triangle is closed, it creates a field which is where the game’s points derive. Thus, a main goal of Ingress is to create fields that cover as much area as possible. There was a particular incentive in the scenario above as an ‘Anomaly’ was happening in Pittsburgh where the points that were accrued in Pittsburgh from that morning to that evening would be more meaningful in the grander story of the game. [A story that very few Ingressers that I knew paid much attention to.] My farming for keys allowed two other operators to create a huge field by connecting two portals (in the NE and NW of Pittsburgh) to the one in the South I farmed. In addition though, other operators had to go and destroy links that would interfere with that large field while also distracting other operators from knowing what the grand plan was. Ingress’s main chat was notorious for containing false leads and information.

In Pittsburgh, the largest team when I was playing was the Enlightened (green) and thus each individual operator didn’t have to do too much for us to maintain control of the city. The Resistance (blue) was localized mostly to the Northside and, because there were fewer players, many of their players were much more active. This led to a number of defectors who said the culture in the Resistance was very negative and contained a lot of bullying.

I was never a very active member in the organized activities around Ingress but I enjoyed what I was involved in. Now that I have begun being involved in activities for Pokemon Go, it has become clear again that it is possible to have unique and complicated collective actions organized for these sorts of games. In a recent ‘Raid train’ in which I was a participant, individuals talked in detail about organizing that happened for an event in Chicago. But also there was a discussion about false information posted on our local Discord channel (a community message board) about a special pokemon appearing downtown, a false report that led to a lot of consternation.

Photo Hobby

I have a semi-sustained interest in photography and videography. Periodically I bust out the DSLR to get some photos but I almost exclusively use it for trips. My wife and I try and do a nature trip every few years, the most recent of which was to the Amazon and Galapagos, the upcoming one to Madagascar this August.

A stitched panorama from Ecudorian Amaszon.

My days in cmuTV taught me a lot about photography as did a long trip to Scotland in 2009. Back then I had a little HDV camcorder from Sony that shot decent stills and fantastic video (though it is currently quite broken in my closet). I have a very simple kit now with a mid-range Nikon and 2 lenses (18-55 and 70-300). These provided me with decent enough reach in the Galapagos (the animals are pretty close to you in general) but I have thought about getting a longer lens for our next rip. Now I shamelessly post some of my favorite photos from my last few trips.

Here we go

I at one point had the desire to do a fun little semi-intellectual section for the website for a while now about doing statistics badly. Not to demonstrate the correct ways to do stats necessarily, but more so that I can write more about statistics in a fun way. I do stats badly all the time, sometimes in fun ways and sometimes in frustrating ways. As anyone who may has spoken to me about R, my main frustration is the difficulty in importing data and then transforming it into different formats (I'm looking at you igraph, yuck). I've learned a lot about doing this stuff better over the last 6 months (thanks to my friend Luke for recommending DataCamp.com courses which are pretty nice). I don’t think I’m going to keep to a stats only focus in this part of the site, but thought I’d leave this original post.

I was also inspired seeing this Harry Plotter project. What I show here likely won't be that interesting but we'll see where it takes us. There will also be occasional forays into actual stats I actually did (albeit badly). Below is a snippet of code I wrote a long time ago because I was very angry at my inability to get a for loop to work properly (the r file is basically just this stuff and it's 167 Kb, double yuck).