Grim News

Ok, I have a confession to make.

I have spent almost my whole life– 31 years–  caring far too much about offending people, worrying if I’m cool enough for them, or asking myself if they are judging me.

I can’t take it anymore. It’s stupid, and it’s not good for my well being. It has made me a punching bag–  a flighty, nervous wuss. But worse than that, it has made me someone who doesn’t take a stand for anything. It has made me someone who stood in the middle, far too often, and not where I cared to stand, for fear of alienating others. No more. Not today.

Today, ladies and gentlemen, is different.

We’re going to talk about the cure. We’re going to talk about what’s necessary. We’re going to talk about the truth.

Do you wonder if someone is talking shit about you? Whether your friends will approve? Have you become conflict-avoidant? Spineless?

Well, it’s time you started not giving a fuck.

FACT NUMBER 1. People are judging you right now.

Yes, it’s really happening right at this moment. Some people don’t like you, and guess what? There’s nothing you can do about it. No amount of coercion, toadying, or pandering to their interests will help. In fact, the opposite is often true; the more you stand for something, the more they respect you, whether it’s grudgingly or not.

What people truly respect is when you draw the line and say “you will go no further.” They may not like this behaviour, but so what? These are people don’t like you anyway, why should you attempt to please people who don’t care for you in the first place?

Right. Then, there’s Internet trolls. That’s a whole other thing.

Regular people are fine– you don’t actually hear it when they’re talking behind your back. But on the web, you do see it, which changes the dynamic drastically. They have an impact because they know you have your vanity searches, etc. But the real problem with Internet haters is that they confirm your paranoid delusion that everyone out there secretly hates you.

Thankfully, that’s not actually true. So the first noble truth is that most people don’t even care that you’re alive. Embrace this, my friends, for it is true freedom. The world is vast and you are small, and therefore you may do as you wish and cast your thoughts of those who dislike it to the side.

FACT NUMBER 2. You don’t need everyone to like you.

This stuff is crazy, I know, but it’s cool, you’ll get used to it. Here’s the next thing: not only do most people not know that you exist, and some are judging you, but it totally does not matter even if they are.

How liberating this is may not even hit you yet, but it will. Check this out: when people don’t like you, nothing actually happens. The world does not end. You don’t feel them breathing down your neck. In fact, the more you ignore them and just go about your business, the better off you are.

You know when they say “the best revenge is a life well lived”? Well, this is true, but it isn’t the whole truth. A life well lived is great, yes, but it cannot happen while you are sweating about who your detractors are and what they think. What you have to do, what you have no choice but to do, is accept it and move on.

So not giving a fuck is actually a necessary precedent to create a good life for yourself. It can’t happen without it. That’s why you have to begin today.

FACT NUMBER 3. It’s your people that matter.

Ok, so you’ve adjusted to the fact that most people in the world are barely aware of your existence, and you’re also conscious of the fact that those who don’t like you are in the obscenely small minority and don’t actually matter. Awesome. Next you need to realize that the people who do care about you, and no one else, are those you need to focus on.

Relationships are weird. Once we’re in one (with family, a spouse, whatever), we promptly begin to take the other person for granted and move on to impressing strangers instead– say, our boss. Then, once we’ve impressed our boss, we start taking him for granted too, and so on, in an endless cycle of apathy. It’s like we always prefer to impress and charm the new than to work on what we already have.

But these people– your champions– they understand your quest or your cause. They make you feel good when you’re around them, make you laugh or make you feel like you can just be yourself. They make you feel relaxed or at ease. You’ve shared things with them. They’re important. Focus on them instead.

FACT NUMBER 4. Those who don’t give a fuck change the world. The rest do not.

So I’m reading this horrible book right now by Stephen King called the Long Walk. It’s a contest where people walk without sleeping or resting, and if they do stop, they are killed. (That’s actually every Stephen King book– “there’s a clown, but it kills!” “There’s a car, but it kills!” etc.)

I suspect this book is a metaphor for war, but it also captures perseverance very well. What it takes to move past anything is to simply realize that your obstacle is unimportant, and that it can be dismissed. This is true whether you’re running a marathon or trying to get to Mars.

If you dismiss the things that do not matter; if you remove those things from your mind and focus on what must be done; if you understand that your time is limited and decide to work now; only then will you be able to get to the finish line. Otherwise, you will be dissuaded into living a life you aren’t interested in.

Side note: You need to handle failure and obscurity better. You may be in a tough place right now where you feel lonely or like a loser. No worries, we’ve all been there. But it’s time for you to realize how common these things are, and that they’re experienced by even the most successful and happiest people in the world. Those people get past them, and you will too.

The eye is watching

You want to know something? This actually has nothing to do with anyone else. It has everything to do with you.

I had a discussion with Jonathan Fields the other week that was about the use of swearing (and “true voice”) on blogs. I watched him on a Skype video as we did this, and I could actually pinpoint the moment where he was about to say “fuck” but almost stopped himself. It was amazing. So I called him out on it. “You felt it just now, didn’t you?”

Everyone has an internetal eye. It always watching. It has been slowly constructed by society at large and by your friends and family, and it checks you for unacceptable behaviour. If you have had it around for long enough, you actually start to believe that the eye is you, and that you’re “being reasonable” or some other rationalization.

But the eye isn’t you at all. It is a prison, and you have justified its existence by obeying it. It’s strong because you let it be strong.

But the secret, the part that’s amazing, is that it can’t do anything to stop you, even if it wanted to. It’s an eye. It can only watch. The rest of you is free to act as you wish.

How to get back your self-respect in five easy steps

STEP 1. Do things that you consider embarrassing.

My girlfriend and I have been breaking in Vibram Fivefingers in preparation for the massive walk we are doing. Have you ever seen these shoes? They’re amazing for you knees and give you no blisters, but they are the ugliest thing imaginable. Yesterday, I wore them with a sweet bowtie I put on for Easter. I looked like a crazy person.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I am deeply aware and can become quite upset by people’s judgment– I think a lot of people are, but don’t admit it. But as I walked by people in my techno-clown outfit, not a single person looked at me. Nobody cared, and it slowly dawned on me that even if people did look at me weird, they just walked by. Later, they would forget about me entirely.

You must try this. Find your internal filters and break them, one at a time. Notice how society, like an ocean, smoothes over the waves you make, until what you do gets eliminated, or becomes the status quo. Work with this.

STEP 2. Accept, or deal with, awkwardness.

It’s widely known that interviewers get their best material by being quiet and allowing silence to force words out of a politician or celebrity.

You may be uncomfortable with silence. I know I still am. But I have been working on it and have to say that it is a much more serene state to be in than trying to cover it up with random babbling just to fill up the air. This is one type of awkwardness, a kind that you should feel comfortable about and learn to live with.

Another kind of social awkwardness is this in-between space where you might have done something wrong or been wronged, but don’t say anything. I’ve been given a few harsh lessons in my time and come away realizing that the freedom that comes from talking about an uncomfortable truth is better than the comfort of avoiding that talk altogether.

Someone told me recently that the Clintons’ method for earning respect in politics is this: if someone pushes you, push back twice as hard. This is much better than awkwardness. It’s clear, it’s not passive aggressive, and you know where you stand. Start doing this immediately.

STEP 3. Refuse boundaries.

The video above was taken in 1970, right when the Front de Libération du Québec had killed Premier Pierre Laporte and put his body in the trunk of a car. Trudeau’s “Just watch me” is one of the most famous phrases in Canadian political history. The journalists are trying to trap him into choosing on-camera between a safety/police-state and civil liberties/freedom but Trudeau refuses their boxes.

The Liberal Party of Canada no longer has any balls, but for us, there’s still hope. Walk where you want to walk. Don’t accept false choices. Don’t let people dictate how you should live your life. Definitely don’t listen to the eye.

STEP 4. Tell the truth.

You don’t need to be an asshole, but the world does not need another conflict-avoidant, evasive person. No one wants another individual who steps in line with everyone else. The status quo is doing fine without you, so it’s up to you to call bullshit if you see it.

Don’t mind-read either. Telling the truth means seeing the truth, not adding your own layer of sugar coating or suspected emotion on top of it.

STEP 5. Begin your new life.

This step can’t happen without the others, but once you’ve gotten here, you can safely begin to explore a whole new world– one where anything you do is fine as long as it isn’t seriously hurting anyone else. Wanna explore old abandoned buildings? No problem, as long as you’re ready to live with the consequences. Feel like hanging from hooks or get whipped by a dominatrix? Go ahead, but be safe about it.

Once you begin on this path, you start to discover that practically everyone is capable of understanding the weird things that you do. In fact, it makes you interesting and worth paying attention to, further feeding into your plans of world domination, should you have any.

But none of this fun can happen without you recognizing, and walking past, the eye. Doing this is a powerful act of control which builds momentum and makes you strong.

Take back your self respect. Do it today– try it right now. Wear something ugly. Do something stupid. Tell someone the truth.

It doesn’t fucking matter.

It seems like people are always talking about “starting over” or “redefining themselves” when things go to shit in their lives.  Makes sense to shake things up a bit if life isn’t going quite the way you planned, but it takes a true madman to shake things up when things are going well.

I am that madman.

I’m working my last week for Northrop Grumman as a CDC Contractor this week.  I’m not unhappy at CDC, in fact, it was a very tough decision to leave.  So why am I doing it?

There are occasions in a person’s life when that person has an opportunity to “leap forward”.  When Internet Security Systems hired me away from AirTouch 13 years ago, I went from a “safe, corporate job” to a company that had just gone public and was growing by leaps and bounds.  It was one of the happiest and most rewarding experiences in my career despite the fact that it ended a bit worse than I had intended.

10 years later, with lessons learned, I have such an opportunity again, a chance to expand my skills and professional horizons that doesn’t occur in larger companies.

Something that goes along with such a change, I am re-evaluating a lot of the things in my life.  I’m deciding what is important and what can be left behind.  There is something healing about leaving behind some of the baggage that you carry around in your soul, and not all of the jettisoned “cargo” is bad.  Sometimes you have to give up/leave behind some things that have run their course, even though you enjoyed them.  You have to unpack your bags from time to time to make room for new stuff.

I’m looking forward to discovering what new “stuff” is out there for me.

I’m bringing this back from the dead eventually.  Suffice to say that I have a lot to say, and don’t care to do it via social media.

Short Version:

• Wife and kids are great. (Yes, I said kids… #2 is on the way!)
• My mother is a psychopath who has proven most of my father’s last words absolutely freaking accurate.  Thankfully, my in-laws and step-mother do a wonderful job of taking up the slack.
• Health is as good as it has been in years.  I’m back in the gym and enjoying the hell out of it.
• Jobs are going great. (technically… 3 of them.  I keep busy)
• Even raiding in World of Warcraft is… going great. =)
• Life is pretty much peachy f’ing keen.

So why am I resurrecting a blog that is home to most of my rantings and ravings?  Because I need some place to say all of the stuff that scandalizes “decent folks”.  Things like…

• It’s not Sarah Palin’s fault that some whackjob in Arizona shot up all those people, no matter how much I think Sarah Palin is a malignant force in this country who should shut the hell up.
• Obama is a typical politician, and while I think he’s doing a fair job, he is in trouble next year if the GOP runs the right candidate. (Yes, I have an opinion on who that candidate is… Ron Paul.)
• Congress is, top-to-bottom, the largest collection of scum and villainy seen since the Mos Eisley cantina.
• The TSA is staffed by a bunch of mouth-breathing morons who give government employees a bad name.
• If nobody else will say it.  I will.   You want to balance the budget?  Take a good hard look at Defense spending.  I could cut the military’s budget in half without sacrificing the safety, effectiveness, or quantity of troops one iota.  If I can do it, those assholes in Congress should be able to figure it out.
• I hope the NBA and NFL have labor stoppages… and stay that way for at least 2 years, then people might realize that not only are sports not life-or-death, but there is a lot out there to watch that isn’t mass produced mediocrity.  I wish sports in this country would adopt the promotion/relegation model so that cheap-ass owners who don’t spend money to put a good team on the field don’t get to split revenue with the teams that go out and work for it by signing the best players and putting the best team on the field.
• Ricky Gervais is a freakin’ genius and I was thrilled to see him skewer all those celebrities on yet another bullshit Hollywood Awards show.  Can he host all of them?  I might actually watch.

More to come.. I’m out.

-Grim

So it has been a while since I just cut loose with some good old fashioned vitriol.  I’ve been too busy with Dragon*Con, Work, and most importantly my wife and kid to be concerned about much of the rest of the world.  Today, I have a few minutes to vent some spleen about the things that have managed to fuck with my domestic serenity in the last few months.  As always, if you are offended by coarse language and politically incorrect thought, hit your fucking back button now. (Yes, that f-bomb was completely gratuitous, that’s the point.)

Continue Reading…

This is a post I didn’t publish about a month ago in response to EVE’s PLEX changes: “I’m curious as to the legal ramifications this may have. I’m guessing they’ve already figured any of those out because you can already sell PLEX, just not outside of the station you got them. Still, it’s $14.95 that can either be taken by another player or destroyed entirely in a blast. The latter is actually the scarier of the two for CCP, I think, because you’re now able to give them $$ for something that they can (be accused of) destroy(ing) via code.” Less than a month later, and someone destroyed more than $1000 of PLEX in one PvP battle.

74 PLEX, at a cost of $14.95 per month of game time, were destroyed by Method Of Destruction players. That amount of PLEX could have been used for six years, two months of EVE subscription time and cost $1106.30 US to whomever purchased the game time initially. All 74 PLEX cards were destroyed in the PvP battle, leaving CCP the benefactor of $1106.30 worth of unrecoverable destroyed virtual goods.

What this represents is a fundamental shift in the way certain PvP activities must be considered. Before, you could attempt to attribute a real dollar value to destroyed virtual assets, but it involved a lot of hocus pocus. Now, you can actually know the exact dollar value of certain destroyed virtual assets, because they were purchased for real currency.

I’m not accusing CCP of destroying the 74 PLEX in the conflagration (though their loot code needs some work), but it’s still interesting to watch player reaction to an unprecedented event in MMOs, and it’s a decision I certainly would never have made as a game designer (that said, CCP makes a lot of decisions with EVE that I would never make, such as making it literally impossible to catch up with other players if you didn’t start playing EVE on day 1 and maintain a permanent subscription).

Source: Massively