February 29th, 2012

What is This, I Don’t Even

We’ve all heard the news. And it’s not often I have few smart-ass things to say.

…

But I’ll try to smart-ass a little. It’s really the only way I know to deal with this sort of thing.

I grew up and went to school 15 minutes from Chardon (Google Maps claims 30, but that’s not true), in Mentor, Ohio. I’ve frequented the city of Chardon on hundreds of occasions. My favorite apple orchard/farmer’s market is there. A great restaurant as well. Even as it grew from rural to suburban, the only things to really be angry about is that you were in BFE, there was a metric shit-ton of snow on the ground, and you were on top of some hill. In BFE.

If you didn’t click the link above about the news, what you missed is that two days ago (February 27, 2012) was a school shooting that would result in the death of three Chardon High School students, and leave one injured (and finally released from the hospital).

The very least I can do is extend my sympathies to all the students, family, faculty and friends.

Yet I can’t stop myself from analyzing the hell out of this. This was something that was never going to happen in my backyard.

Ever.

I suppose I was, to use a word I hate, “desensitized.” I mean hell, Columbine happened while I was still in my high school, Virginia Tech while I was in college, 9/11 too; these things happen.

But what of the other bunch of school shootings and tragedies that occurred between 1999 and now.  I kinda hate myself for not remembering them without research.

Here’s what I do remember: scoffing at the security guard booths that were posted in my high school after Columbine. Us students knowing that wasn’t enough; what the fuck could a few rent-a-cops do? We all knew how to get around them.

I’m not about to jump into the old, “back in my day, blah blah and such” argument from antiquity that kids are the same as we were fifty-odd years ago. There are similarities (we all still want to get laid), but the children are not the same. They’re growing up completely different: globalized. With the internets. And the MyFaceSpaces and whatnot.

What’s still left up in the air is the suspect’s motive, and it’s still too early for that.

And frankly, I’m not sure I want to find out what the price of a human life is.

 

CategoryGeneral | CommentNo Comments »

June 3rd, 2011

Idiocracy

As probably has been said on almost every medium out there, I’m not usually one to get involved in politics. In fact, I generally hate the subject. To me, it’s akin to watching a bunch of 15 year olds fight over whose cock is the biggest. And to think, I only named mine The Filibuster to be funny.

Amusingly in the same vein (ha!), we’ve seen this week how completely out of touch our representatives and government officials are with regard to internet security and privacy, what with Weiner’s wiener on the Twitter (a shoutout to @maverynthia for the phrase), and the successful phishing campaign on Gmail to get passwords.

I don’t know about you, but I’m fairly sure any 12 year old could have spotted something in that email or the site it linked to that would have tipped them off that something was awry. And while the jury is still out on whose bulge is pictured and where it came from, let us apply Occam’s Razor.

Ha, ha! Manscaping.

These elected (or appointed) officials are supposed to be representing us, our interests, and what we believe is important. And personally, I find basic use of computers and internet important, nay, necessary here in the twenty-first century.

As a proud member of the pioneering internet generation, when the people who are representing me are duped by classic social engineering, it’s absolutely infuriating. How is anyone surprised that we feel completely disconnected from their world?

Sending things across the internet is not anonymous. It’s not all that difficult to track, at least to the point of determining if an email message is possibly fraudulent. Get with the program: you’re dealing with national and international security; the safety of billions. Not some company’s patent on a juicer.

To me, this signals the complete inability of our leaders to function in the world as is, and worse, accurately represent us in government – the job we’re paying them to do. They don’t understand technology, they don’t understand privacy (or lack thereof), and they don’t understand simple scams.

Or are we waiting for the Nigerian prince to repay us the million bucks from the thousand we sent him so we can finally begin to pay off our deficit?

 

Disclaimer: Title clearly stolen from the excellent movie, Idiocracy

CategoryGeneral | Comment2 Comments »

April 7th, 2011

Pre-Midlife Crisis

I recently joined Facebook.

Against my better judgement, of course. But I had a friend move from coast-to-coast, who threatened to not talk to me again if I did not have better communications channels.

As most people find, slowly family/friends/ex-es from the past fall out of the sky and find you on this site. I am no different, amusingly, considering my relatively dull and boring life.

However it has brought up a very interesting paradox. That is, when people contact me via Facebook, most of them are from my past where I surfed the internet via GOPHER and LYNX, and most of them didn’t know what an internet was, let alone that it would be “invented” in the extremely late twentieth century, then pluralized less than a decade later.

These were friends who could only operate a Nintendo (queue the obligatory exhale into the guts); looked to those nerds like me to even begin to decipher starting a game of DOOM on the computer.

Ok, more starting the game with the DOS prompt than the playing. I never was any good without my IDKFA (50 Falquan Fun Bucks if you know what I’m talking about).

How now, are they just as versed in internet lingo as I? So ready to drop a “lol” and roll an emoticon? Where did I disappear to in the last ten years? I learned this all through my nerdery and such, but, now… it’s almost cheapened.

Maybe I’m more concerned that the year of the nerd is over before I actually made a living off of it. It’s not super far-fetched; every day systems, integrations, and programming languages fall closer and closer to a “functional” syntax, in that they will get to a point that anyone can very easily instruct a computer to perform a task in almost native syntax.

A proposition I find very cool, actually.

It’s not there yet, no. But I’m starting to wonder exactly where I fit in, again. Much like back in the day when I was outcast for my nerdery.

Now, my nerdery be mainstream.

What, exactly is the next step?

CategoryComputers, Development, Technology | Comment3 Comments »

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January 27th, 2011

The Greater Good

I do love my Falquan.com. Frequently, in fact.

However I do feel it necessary to inform everyone that I take part in a new effort to bring my love of food, beverage, and…other delights, in the form of Epicurious Whores.

Friends (and non-friends) of mine are joining forces to take the fascist out of “foodie.”

Falquan.com will of course still run, still be updated (technically), and still be bizarre as ever. But, since the world needs more Falquan, this is how you find more Falquan.

Wait, you said the world needs less Falquan?

                    ---
                   !   !
                   !   !
                   !   !
                   !   !
               ----!   !----
          ----!    !   !    !
         !    !    !   !    !    --
         !    !    !   !    !   /  !
          !                 !  /   !
          !                  !/   /
           !                     /
           !                    /
            !                 /
             !              /

CategoryBeverages, Food, General | CommentNo Comments »

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June 17th, 2010

Rock Band’s Moving Goalpost

I’m an unapologetic, completely infatuated fan of Rock Band. Yet, the announcement of Rock Band 3 gave me a bit of the red ass. What could they really do that couldn’t be pulled off in an update/add-on pack and save me 100-odd Falquan Fun-Bucks? Keyboards sound like fun, but how that possibly work.

Then I saw the gameplay video from E3. Intriguing. Still, the concept of vocal harmonies and backup singers was far more interesting.

Then I heard this concept for the new guitar controller. For those uninitiated, it is supposed to contain enough button combinations to simulate a fretboard accurately enough that one will (in Pro mode) be forming accurate chord patterns on the controller, thus effectively learning the actual chords needed to play the song on a real axe.

If they pull this off, not only is Harmonix perhaps the greatest game studio of all time, but they’ve set the bar so high for every other game in the world that it’s almost frightning. Of course, I would hope that Rockstar would stop short of actually including a Glock controller and half a dozen loosies in their next Grand Theft Auto game.

Now, I’ve always wanted to learn the guitar, so this is of particular interest to me. First off, I’ve tried learning instruments before. And I inevitably fell off the wagon when it came to practicing, and since most of practice is mind-numbing repetition, I quickly lost interest when something shiny floated by.So the fact that they’ve created a way to make practicing “fun” seems like win-frickin-win, baby.

“And of course, with the birth of the artist came the inevitable afterbirth… the critic.” (stolen with credit)

Just like when Guitar Hero/Rock Band first hit the shelves, immediately those who can’t stand children on their lawns decide that they are threatened in some way by people having a great time jamming on plastic instruments. Previously it was, “[it's not like playing a real guitar, why not just learn]?” Now that Harmonix has (supposedly) found a way to do exactly that, it’s still not good enough.

So let’s jump in our Hypothetical Machine and say this works, and Rock Band 3 can actually teach us how to play real instruments. If/when I melt your face, and you ask me where I learned to play, and I say Rock Band, are we going to have this same bullshit argument of, “you didn’t really learn how to play!”? Just because a video game was the catalyst to get me interested in playing music by being completely intimidating about it shouldn’t mean my current ability is any less.

At the same time, I’m not saying playing a rousing round of Phoenix Wright is going to teach you to be a lawyer, I get it. But if after you’ve played the game and then taken the skill to the next level, who cares what got you started — wouldn’t it be a lot more fun to just rock out together and combine creative efforts rather than complain that the only real artist is the one who learned the old-fashioned way?

I’d like to return to my previous point of moving goalposts, because I just love a good phallusy. I mean fallacy. Someone came up with a way to legitimately teach the basics of music and rhythm (and guitar). Now that we can learn from the game, it’s still not good enough. Come on, this is basic logic!

And frankly, what *is* the appropriate way to learn music, exactly? We all interpret music differently. We all hear it, sing it, play it differently. What’s the difference if I learned it while shooting up heroin in a basement on a urine soaked mattress, or on my XBOX in my parents’ living room when I’m 35? Track marks are what make a person who plays music an artist?

Now get off my lawn. I’ve Green Day to play.

CategorySkepticism, Technology, Video Games | Comment1 Comment »

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