Time Heals Wounds. Journals Reopen Them.

I love trips down memory lane, so occasionally I’ll go back through bits and pieces of my past in all their various forms. These include audio recordings, old TV shows and movies, classic video games, and of course journals (Oddball Update has been around since 1994, it just didn’t go public until 2003). Most recently, I’ve been looking at those elder Oddball Updates for a bit of a laugh at the thoughts and desires that I considered important during my early high school years.

Most of the pages are filled with talk of whatever computer-related technobabblery I was into at the moment, all of which now dates itself horribly as you might expect. In one entry, I complained that I couldn’t insert both a color and a grayscale photo into my document, because not only would that make the file size balloon to a ridiculous 800 KB (well, in the days of 400 MB hard drives, that was a lot), the photos wouldn’t display properly anyway because Windows 95′s 8-bit color depth would cause palette-swap problems when trying to view both color and grayscale images! God, the shit we had to endure. It’s no wonder we put up with such godawful page designs in the early days of the web; we were all too busy being impressed that there were any images there at all.

By far, the most conflicted period of my life’s history has to be my high school years. Despite being filled with enormous exploration and learning of new technologies (all on my own time, of course), those years were harder on me, emotionally, than any other. I’ve always hated school, mostly because I loathed its awkward social aspects and resented its trumped-up authority structure. But my hatred sank to all-new depths once I got to high school. The administration’s ultra-conservative approach to discipline, combined with their abject inability to communicate anything effectively, meant that despite my Herculean efforts to follow the rules and remain inconspicuous I routinely ran afoul of badly-written or miscommunicated rules. This landed me in all kinds of awkward and embarrassing situations, which to me are like pyschological Kryptonite. I started to feel persecuted and become paranoid that my every step, sentence or breath might be the next one to get me in hot water with someone. It was years before I was able to get past this, and I feel like a part of how I interact with people even today is defined by what I experienced in those years.

But a lot of time has passed between today and the 1990s, and increasingly, when I look back at high school, I am of mixed feelings about it. Or at least, I start to see things from an angle I didn’t have the capacity to perceive back then. I read about some of the agonizing high school situations I was going through in the pages of my old Oddball Updates and I wish to God I had a way to communicate with my past self, because it’s clear from some of the things I wrote that I was in serious, desperate need of lightening the hell up. Even my mom seemed to recognize this; I distinctly remember her suggesting not-so-subtlely that a girlfriend would take my mind off the stress.

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Introducing Singuloddity

Today I’d like to announce the launch of Singuloddity, a new companion to the Oddball Update that I’m referring to as a “microlog”. It’s a place for me to post spur-of-the-moment topics based on things that are happening right now. Whether that’s a tidbit of news I just ran across, a photo I just took, an interesting place or situation that I find myself in.

Given Oddball Update’s recently reinvented image as “Your Place For Reviews!” and the fact that Twitter is just far too textually limiting for my usual brand of blather, this seemed like a move worth making.

I plan to cross-post links to new articles here on Oddball Prime over at Singuloddity, and my Twitter feed is on there as well, so you could theoretically follow only Singuloddity to keep tabs on everything I’m spouting off about.

I freely admit: it’s an experiment. One that may end ceremoniously in a matter of weeks or days. And oh yes, there’s precedent. But in case it does work out and Singuloddity sticks around for the long term, feel free to subscribe to the feed and see how long you can take it.

New For The Nineties

Ever look at the trending topics list on Twitter to see what the perfunctory social network’s users are talking about? Each new trend is like a flash mob that the Twitter biomass collectively contributes to for five, ten, maybe fifteen minutes before it slowly dissipates and then winks out of existence. Many of them are completely insane, vacuous, even racially offensive, and as such, I almost never contribute to them. But for a few minutes this afternoon, #thingsisaidinthe90s was at the top of the trend list. This, as they say, is relevant to my interests.

Just this morning I was doing some serious nostalgic stargazing back at the ’90s. Understand, when I actually was in the ’90s, I never thought I would do this. I can’t think of any time in my life, before or since, when I have been so angry at life, felt so marginalized by society, and was generally disgusted with everything around me save a small subset of people and things. But the ’90s were also when I started to keep records — journals, audio recordings, actual creative things that I had produced — and when I look (or listen) back at those things now, the rose-colored glasses go into full effect and I wonder if it was really all so bad after all.

It was, of course. At least, to my teenage self’s mind, there was absolutely no greater hell on Earth than high school. Of the admittedly cushy life I’ve led, my high school years remain my least favorite. And yet incongruously, those years were also when I met some of my best friends, played some of the most memorable video games and explored my most diverse spectrum of hobbies. I dove into game programming and level design, I got heavily into anime (went to conventions and everything!), met people in chat rooms, engaged in video game tournaments and wrote stories like they were going out of style. With the exception of writing — and even that has been scaled back greatly — I don’t do any of those things anymore.

Granted, I’ve got new things to focus on now. The obligations of life that naturally come with adulthood — work, paying the bills, keeping up the homestead, fixing the car, that sort of stuff — naturally represent a significant portion of my time. With a newborn son at home, there’s also a whole new universe of shared hobbies and experiences that I’m eagerly awaiting the chance to introduce to him. Beyond that, I’m mostly too engaged in playing today’s incredibly huge selection of video games to worry about modifying them. And since I turned to console gaming a few years back, modifying today’s games is mostly impossible anyhow.

But it’s fun to look back at what I was doing in the ’90s, both as a source of amusement and a motivator for myself today. I was into so many things back then, what would be the harm in rediscovering some of that old hallowed ground now? Or even exploring new territory altogether? Even as recently as 2004, creating levels for the 1992 PC game Wolfenstein 3-D was as much therapeutic as it was anything else. It might be fun to get back to that from time to time. Or do some more serious story writing. Or blogging; at least then I’d be writing something. I’ve also recently toyed with the idea of going back to Tumblr and trying to find some sustainable use for it, because I still crave the concept of a microblogging platform with a complexity somewhere between Twitter and Oddball Update.

This morning I was listening to some audio recordings I made exactly 17 years ago, during this week of April in 1995. It was one of those heady times from my high school years when I had a week off for Easter, my parents had gone on vacation out of state, and I was spending nights at my grandmother’s house and days at home alone, whooping it up with computer games and Star Trek marathons and whatever the hell else. My parents’ acquaintances were always shocked to learn that they would frequently go off on trips and leave me at home by myself for hours, even days at a time. “Isn’t he going to tear up the house? Wreck the car? Do something illegal?” they all asked. In truth, about the most trouble I’d get into when I had the homestead to myself was eating too many Awrey’s cake doughnuts. I was too busy with my 486 DX2/66 to get into mischief of the traditional teenage variety.

I sound like an total dork on those recordings from 1995, a kid who thought he was way cooler than he actually was. But there’s an unchecked enthusiasm there that’s so genuine, unmarred by the outward reservation I usually apply toward anything I enjoy today, lest someone think me foolish. In retrospect, I envy it. And I think Steve Jobs was right when he encouraged those Stanford graduates to “stay hungry, stay foolish.” If you don’t, you risk tamping yourself down so far that you can no longer recognize a great idea — and you certainly can’t create greatness if you’re afraid to admit what you think it is.

So maybe it isn’t a bad thing to look back at the past for ideas about how to enrich life in the present. Perhaps a good start would be to rediscover some of the creative pursuits I used to undertake more often in those days. Game design? Creative writing? Journaling? Whatever; it’s got to be more fulfilling than sitting around consuming the fruits of someone else’s labor.

Just let me get through Mass Effect 3 first.

And as for that Twitter trending topic? Here are some actual #thingsisaidinthe90s:

• I really need a modem with a 16550 UART.
• Why won’t the Wolfenstein 3-D source code compile? Friggin’ Turbo C isn’t cutting it!
• This $15 I’ve got left in my wallet should be just enough to fill my car up with gas. I’ll get some after school on my way to pick up lunch at Bullet Bell. 12:50 schedule days rock!
• Rise of the Triad shareware is 5 MEGS? I’d better start downloading it this morning before I go to school if I have any hope of playing it tonight!
• I’m on the Internet, fragsters! Email me at blaze at oeonline com! (I thought that eventually people would stop pronouncing the “dot” in “.com” when giving out their email addresses and URLs, as if it would be assumed. It was a stupid thought.)
• Have you played Doom yet? I’ll bring it in on a floppy disk if you want to try it.
• Hmm, I’d like to play The Legacy tonight. Better find that boot disk so I can free up 628K conventional.
• Hey Damon, what’s up. Is my Trans Am in yet?
• I’d like to go on the Internet now, but I can’t because Mom’s on the phone…
• There’s no way I’ll ever fill up this 1 GB hard drive!
• Is The Next Generation a rerun this week?
• I will move heaven and earth to be with this girl I just met. She says she’s from Thailand…

Ran Into Influenza; Got Kicked in Mouth

Although I have no excuse for two weeks ago, I can at least explain why I posted nothing here in the last seven days: I ran afoul of this year’s strain of the flu. This seems to happen to me around every three or four years. It’s never at all fun, and you’d think that by now I’d be smart enough to get a flu shot so that I could extend that three or four year interval to the theoretically infinite. And now that we have a baby in the family, I think maybe it’s time that I smartened up. There’ll be an annual flu shot in my future, starting next year.

Speaking of the baby — and the wife — it’s a miracle that neither of them got sick. I know how easily it can spread; hell, my own case of the flu came courtesy of a coworker who was only in my vicinity for four hours after he himself had recovered from it. That’s all it took for me to pick it up. Granted, a four month old baby with the flu is about the closest thing to an existential nightmare that I can imagine, so I instituted some pretty serious quarantine procedures here to make sure he didn’t catch it: I slept in a room at the opposite end of the house, wore a surgical mask any time I had to get near him, washed my hands constantly and tried to keep my distance whenever possible. It was hard, but so far it’s paid off. Hopefully we’re in the clear now.

It’s been a hard week, even if I only went into the office one day. (My boss was on vacation with his family all week, so at least there was nothing new going on and not much for me to miss.) The first night of this flu thing, I had such a fever that I woke up panting for breath about once an hour, the whole way through the night. The fever took nearly a full week to finally subside, and although it was never dangerously high, it was enough to give me that maddening oscillation between “chills” and “flaming inferno” throughout the day.

My second night was the weirdest. I had finally gotten to the point where I was getting some sleep when I was startled awake at 4 a.m. by a loud series of high-pitched beeps, coming from somewhere in the house. To my dismay, the beeps kept coming, about one every 30-45 seconds, and I knew there wasn’t gonna be any further sleep until I got up and investigated.

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My Kingdom for a Visor

Oh, faithful GTO. For what do your initials stand? Ay; for thou would have me believe your name is “Gran Turismo Omologato”, I suspect truly that thy moniker be “Gets Troubled Often.” Or perhaps it is I to whom that nomenclature refers?

Ah…hmmh. As you might now have guessed, something went wrong with my car again. A very minor something, fortunately, in the grand scheme of things, but no less exasperating for it.

I had just backed out of my driveway this morning en route to work when entropy’s shriveled hand reached down once more to slap my vehicle where it stood. I keep my garage door opener clipped to my sun visor, but for one reason or another the remote’s signal won’t reach the door when the visor is stowed. So every day I have to flip it open, hit the remote button, then flip it shut. Not such a big deal to me, but apparently a bigger deal to my visor, which this morning finally decided that it had had enough.

As I flipped the visor down, it made a snapping noise. In truth, it’s been doing that for a few days now, but not usually in the mornings — only in the evenings when I come home. Aggravated and disturbed by this new pattern of behavior, I decided to unclip the visor from its bracket momentarily and swivel it to the side to see if I could determine why it kept making that snapping noise. Well, I sure got my answer. As I did this, the plastic swivel arm actually cracked and crumbled right before my eyes, leaving the visor to flop down and dangle in front of me like a wet flap of cardboard.

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Calm

On the heels of yesterday’s rant about an unexpectedly high (that’s putting it mildly) medical bill, I’m pleased to report that I’m no longer furious.

The weekend was smashed beyond almost all repair after the arrival of that $3,450 invoice on Saturday afternoon. Naturally, I was chomping at the bit to put in a call to the issuing office on Monday morning as soon as they opened, to the point where I actually got up half an hour early so I could do it before I went to work. After employing the secret not-so-secret “zero” hotkey that typically bypasses most phone menu trees and gets you to a live person, I let them have it with both barrels.

Okay, no I didn’t. Instead, after giving them our invoice number so they could get our account up on their screen, I asked for an explanation of why the first mailing we’d ever received from them had a big red “Overdue” stamp on it. Bizarrely, this was apparently just a product of their automated system. “The system looks at the date the service was performed and compares it to the invoice date,” said the woman on the phone, “and typically if it’s more than 30 days it just marks it as overdue, but it’s not really, because we never generate invoices that fast. It’s not overdue until we’ve attempted to bill you three times without success.”

Personally, I find it odd that they actually have a person putting a red rubber stamp of the word “Overdue” on something that is almost never, in actuality, overdue. But whatever; perhaps I come from a mystic land where logic is purple and trees are made of marshmelons.

More to the point, I asked them why we were being charged $3,450 for something that the hospital told us should be in the $700 range. Although the woman I was speaking to couldn’t explain why the hospital would have quoted us such a low number, she did ask if we were insured, and admitted that they have a “cash rate” they charge to uninsured patients in the amount of $1,200. That’s a far cry from $3,450. Both my wife and I had suspected something like this was afoot.

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Furious

I never really posted about it here, but when our son was born this past November, the delivery didn’t go quite according to plan. Actually, that’s a bit of an understatement: we had planned from the beginning to have a natural childbirth at a birth center with the help of a midwife. No epidural, no hospital, no inducement. What we got was exactly the opposite. It was an outcome necessitated by some minor complications, done out of concern for the health and safety of both mother and child. In the end, there were no problems, no C-section necessary and the delivery went very well.

Even so, we were a little scared because we had no health insurance. The wonderful people at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas, the administrator of my employer’s group plan, saw fit to throw us off the plan on some technicality the week my wife got pregnant. Both my employer and I had specifically asked Blue Cross about whether such a technicality existed before I signed onto the group plan, and multiple representatives assured us there was no trouble. Only once I had signed the paperwork did they conjure up the very thing we’d asked about and use it to throw me out. Of course, despite our searches, there were no individual health plans available that covered maternity. We were stuck going out-of-pocket the whole way.

For all that, the hospital we ended up birthing at treated us very well. They offered us a flat $4,300 “case rate” for delivery services if we paid by the time we checked out, so of course we did. The doctor’s services were covered by the money we had already paid our birth center for midwife services, which of course we didn’t use. A couple of separate bills came after delivery for labs and “hospital services”, but these were all pretty reasonable. A couple of months after our son arrived, the only bill we hadn’t yet received was the one from the anesthesiologist for my wife’s epidural.

Since we weren’t expecting to give birth in a hospital (or even get an epidural) until a matter of hours before it happened, I had to scramble on that day to try and figure out what I was going to owe for all of these services. The day after delivery, during a discussion of the charges, the hospital’s financial officer told me that I could expect the anesthesiologist’s bill to be in the neighborhood of $700. Obviously, like most hospitals, they subcontract anesthesiology out to specialists, so they couldn’t just give me a final cost. I did my own research on the Internet and found anesthesiology for planned vaginal delivery should cost anywhere from $400 to $1,700. Further, the Health Care Blue Book guide to fair healthcare pricing reports a $744 average cost in our zip code for anesthesiology services associated with childbirth. Putting all this together, I figured on setting aside $1,000 for it.

The bill finally came on Saturday. The charge? $3,450.

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The Xbox Acquisition Deliberation

In the old days, I would replace my computer every couple of years. Since I don’t game on the PC much anymore, I’m still finding myself perfectly happy (well, mostly) with the computer I built in October of 2006. The object of my upgrade fever, meanwhile, has turned to mobile phones and game consoles, and it is these items that I now find myself replacing on a two-year cycle.

Having just upgraded to the iPhone 4S this past fall, I’m now approaching the two-year anniversary of my last Xbox 360 purchase, an ordeal necessitated by the death of my previous console from a case of scarlet ring disease. Back in March of 2010, newly Xboxless, I picked up a Final Fantasy XIII Super Elite limited edition unit. It’s still going strong today, no doubt thanks to manufacturing improvements made over time (and the fact that I install all my games to the hard disk now, to minimize heat produced by the spinning optical drive). But I recently started thinking that having a second Xbox in the house might be handy.

Now that we’ve got bouncing baby Connor to keep us busy around the house, I find it more difficult on the weekends to shut myself away in the game room upstairs for Xbox sessions. Although I still like the theater-like ambience of the game room during the nighttime hours after Connor goes to bed, I’d like to stay downstairs during the day and, when I’m not busy keeping Connor entertained, catch a game session or two without having to remove myself from view. (After all, when you have a three-month old baby, you never know when you’re going to be needed!)

I’d be lying, however, if I didn’t simply feel like getting a shiny new Xbox to brighten my gaming future. Since I bought my last console, the Xbox 360 has been completely redesigned, resulting in a slick new look, near-silent operation, touch-operated controls, greater reliability and the addition of integrated Wi-Fi and powered Kinect ports. Since rumors have it that the next-generation Xbox console should be out in just shy of two years’ time — playing right into my next upgrade cycle — this seems like the perfect time to pick up one last console from this generation and enjoy it for the years to come. Maybe even hand it down to my son for his own enjoyment when he’s ready! (Who am I kidding; he’ll know it’s an old piece of crap by then. “Really, Dad?” he’ll say as he rolls his eyes.)

However, with the Xbox landscape a lot more cluttered and complicated than it was two years ago, I decided to hash out my thoughts in this handy Oddball Update (Relevance Not Included™) and try to come to some kind of decision about how to proceed. If you’re interested in taking the journey with me, meet me past the break and we’ll Jump In. (Har har. That’s the Xbox slogan.)

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Abandon Ship

The topic I was discussing in my last entry — which marked the unheralded return of the Oddball Oddcast in a pared-down form — was not really done being hashed out in my head at the time I posted it. Shortly after I recorded those oh-so-scintillating 12 minutes of gabbling about the MMORPG Star Trek Online, I finally decided that I was gonna blow some walking-around money and get the “Original Series Bundle” through the game’s online store.

The “TOS Bundle”, as it’s called, would have given my in-game character the ability to walk around the original Enterprise bridge and interior, several classic TOS uniforms to wear, the TOS-style Type II phaser, and a classic shuttlecraft to…do something with, I guess. Maybe crash-land on a planet of big hairy trolls, or fly into the maw of a planet-killer. Even if I never would up getting much further in the game than I did during the beta, it would be cool for a little while.

However, apparently the makers of Star Trek Online are not very interested in taking my money, despite the incredibly big show they make of it. And this, I discovered, was only the first of many reasons why I now feel increasingly compelled to just stay away from this game.

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