How I Bullied Ricki Lake

I must have been in 1st grade. It was recess, we were on the asphalt outside our classroom. A circle of boys formed, with one boy in the middle, helplessly being pushed around. I didn’t know what was going on. I don’t remember anyone’s name. I just remember everyone shouting “Ricki Lake. Ricki Lake.” Another boy took me by the shoulder, joining me into the circle. We started chanting louder.

Who was Ricki Lake? What was I doing? Why was everyone so enthused?

A teacher came and broke up the ring. She took down all of our names and we one by one went to different adults. Over the next few days, I’d visit a special faculty member. Looking back, this was either a counselor or a conflict resolution HR type of deal. In the moment, she just treated me as a kind lady asking questions.

She asked me why I called the boy Ricki Lake. I was confused, wasn’t that his name? She replied that his name was indeed Ricki, but that his last name was not Lake. She asked me why I thought his last name was that.

“All the boys were calling him that.”

“Ricki Lake is a television host.”

“So that’s not his name?”

She replied no, explaining that the kids were making fun of him. The boys were making fun of Ricki’s size, calling him the same name as an overweight celebrity.

“So you don’t know who Ricki Lake is?”

No, I replied. I really thought that was his name. I was just joining in with the other boys.

She asked me a few more questions about my family. I told her I was the only English speaker in my family and that my parents would use a mix of Chinese and English with me. She grabbed some flashcards and sat down with me. “So you don’t have any older brothers or older friends?” I replied no. I remember this question sticking with me, because in the future I’d refer back to it whenever I had a culture lapse.

She showed me a flashcard with a pear on it. I remember looking at the card and looking at her. “I know what this is but I don’t know how to say it. I only know how to say it in Chinese.”

She was kind. “How do you say it?”

“Li”

“In English, it’s called a pear.”

I told her how much I liked them. But only the Asian kind. My mother once gave me an American pear and it was really different. She laughed and agreed.

Shortly after, I never saw her again. She must have deemed me a good kid who lost their way. I don’t think I ever saw Ricki again or the other boys. I do remember becoming a lot more aware of social bullying after that, despite not remembering any direct teaching or scolding from that woman. Maybe she asked if I knew if it was wrong to bully people. In my eyes, I never wanted to bully him. And she probably saw that.

I would go on to join Breaking Down the Walls, an anti-bullying club in my high school that focused on short, informative skits and targeting popular kids to be a part of the club. I never really saw bullying in my high school, but that really was before cyberbullying and Facebook became prominent.

I once saw some bullying on a school bus. Some guys were hassling a girl for whatever reason. I told them to stop cause they were being obnoxious. She thanked me and a few months later invited me to her birthday. I lost the invitation.

I believe I still inadvertently bully people here and there. With social awareness and a good community, we should all be able to identify and stop bullying when we see it.

Gym: Graduation or Indoctrination

The gym can be seen as a microcosm of society, with a constantly changing population and different levels of dedication and skill. My girlfriend and I had a discussion about whether the gym is more like a school, where people eventually graduate and move on, or a club, where the population grows and becomes stratified over time.

From what I’ve observed, there seems to be a mix of both. There are certain times of the week and year that are busier than others. And I do see familiar faces and a similar crowd on particular days of the week.

From a business standpoint, gyms do not differentiate between a satisfied gym goer and a satisfied gym absentee, as they rely on a subscription-based model, rather than attendance. This means that even if members stop going to the gym, as long as they continue to pay their membership fee, it’s beneficial for the gym.

The way a gym markets itself can also give insight into the type of population it attracts. LA Fitness as it’s name, Local Access, implies is an approachable and accessible environment. Slightly more advanced gyms target their power users with physical therapy/massages, more specialized classes outside of aerobics, and dieting/nutrition programs. There are also more casual gyms that indoctrinate their users with targeted activities like bouldering or CrossFit.

Gyms that target their most skilled and experienced members and offer specialized classes and services are likely to have a more experienced and dedicated population. On the other hand, gyms that prioritize accessibility and offer a variety of activities may attract a more casual and diverse population.

Personally, I prefer evergreen activities and clubs where I can continue to grow and improve over time. But, it’s also important to remember that everyone has different goals and priorities, and what works for one person may not work for another. I don’t think gyms inherently graduate its users, but I do believe many find their results and satisfactorily leave. My girlfriend’s observation about LA Fitness may be correct.

Film Friday: Entergalactic

Kid Cudi stars in an animated film as Jabari, an upcoming artist in Manhattan. The film shares colorful aesthetics in line with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Great Pretender, capturing a whimsical and artistic New York. The film’s storytelling is well paced, allowing for a natural emotional rollercoaster filled with unique details. Covering themes of identity, modern dating, and growth, Entergalactic is a perfect fit for me.

The film has great attention to detail, exposing characters’ emotions with visual arts, music by Kid Cudi, and fantastic dialogue. The characters, especially Jabari, have incredible wardrobing by Virgil Abloh. Jabari’s imagination and the films lightly liberal interpretation of reality provide a kiss of magical realism, heightening the world immersion.

The film has beautiful transitions and animations. Sticking to a classic formula, Entergalactic‘s three act arc is well executed with beautiful art, music, and story keeping our attention every moment. The story is kept simple to allow for full exposure to the film’s world building. The voice acting and music by Kid Cudi, the beautiful animations, and the wardrobe by Virgil make this film an incredible pleasure to be immersed in and cannot be understated.

Doing light research on the film, Fletcher Moules directed it, having experience with a few animated films before this. Writers include Ian Edelman, experienced with American immigration storytelling, and Maurice Williams, multitalented entertainer with a focus on Black entertainment. As mentioned before Virgil Abloh plays a heavy stylistic role in this film, with his vision honored posthumously.

While the romantic comedy skeleton of this film is quite conservative and classic, the execution, detailing, and expression are phenomenal. I hope that Netflix continues its route of engaging talent directly and empowering artists like Kid Cudi to create special pieces like this one. There were certainly some artistic liberties and risks taken with this film and I’m sure there are dozens of Netflix films that failed to capture our attention. Don’t let this film get away, especially if you love animation, hip hop, or modern romance. A near perfect film, my only critique is to remaster the animation as some scenes have lower FPS, an understandable production cost or time save. Other than that, a classic I could enjoy again and again.

Unique ID Gaming

Pokemon Originally Had 65,535 Versions

The idea of unique adventures in gaming is an age old one. From choose your own adventure books to text scrollers on word processors to collecting cards to opening rare loot boxes, there’s always been some form of custom experience for the user. Beyond personalization and frills, it becomes harder and harder to create large scoped games with multiple paths and endings.

From a mathematical standpoint, within four splits we’ve created 30 different outcomes, causing a huge spike in production or asset cost and design. This is unsustainable in the long run, creating possibilities of meaningless outcomes, random outcomes, or simply taxing the production team too high.

Designers can create the illusion of choice by offering a limited variety of choices only to return the user to a single track experience overall. The epitome of this was Mass Effect with its infamous colored ending, leaving fans extremely disappointed after a long journey, in turn causing the studio to respond creatively.

Going back to the Did You Know Video about Pokémon, the designers intended there to be thousands of unique versions of the game, all based on the player’s trainer ID. As mentioned before, scaling this size of a project requires a lot of scope management. The video goes over procedurally generated maps, which is one process of massive diversity. When needing to create thousands of variations, simply make variations smaller and easier to produce. Make variations minimal, yet have tangible impacts to the experience. While Pokémon did not pull this off due to scope and timing, we have developed technologies over the years that makes this process easier than ever.

Enter the blockchain. This technology is very similar to Pokémon’s trainer ID system. Everything can be catalogued and every receipt is permanent and accurate. This allows for verifiably unique experiences no matter how large the scope of the project becomes. Unfortunately that’s really as far as blockchain and video game technology have merged. There are numerous crypto projects that have Pokémon style qualities, from battling to breeding to trading and selling. but their scope of gameplay remains limited. That is not to blame crypto game developers, as having a visual be unique and having gaming content be unique are totally different things, as mentioned above with cosmetics, personalization, and frills. Typically, crypto games that pride themselves on their scope shy away from bragging about their game design.

I’ve brainstormed a few ideas on how to create completely unique gaming experiences that scale upwards correctly. Games like Role Playing Games or Trading Card Games lend themselves to being better blockchain games, but face serious scaling problems nonetheless. Without incredible designer foresight or intervention, completely unique and random mechanics can scale in extremely non-intuitive and unexpected ways, leading to dissatisfying gameplay. There are hundreds of versions of the Branch and Bottleneck problem and there are hundreds of versions of cosmetics that provide the illusion of choice. In a future post, I’ll breakdown foresight design and tools inherent to blockchain that may help overcome the original trainer ID problem.

Short Term Distraction, Long Term Uncertainty

It’s easy to claim the life we live is surrounded by distractions. There’s more stimulus than ever, with technology competing for our attention day and night. It’s not unusual for us to grab our phones first and last thing each day, as we go to and get out of bed. Some argue blue light addiction is what is killing us all. I even wrote about The Digital Divide previously, and how we’ve become farther the more connected we’ve become.

There are pros and cons to everything. The benefits of technology are obvious, allowing us luxuries such as globalism, the internet, social media, smart-technology, and more. We’re on the cusp of incredible technology as well, with nascent developments in artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, supercomputers, and more. The obvious downsides of technology are described in aspects such as the digital divide, technology addiction, and old knowledge becoming obsolete.

There’s a much deeper issue than just the pros and cons of technology: it is our cultural behavior and acceptance towards technology. We’ve seen tech companies rise, spawn, and compete with each other for what ideas and apps are valuable and to manifest what they believe to be important to us. We’ve seen pushback from audiences asking for those who grew in prominence to hold more responsibility. As our culture adapts and accepts new avenues, new laws and regulations are placed upon them.

That’s easy to see from the conglomerates point of view. But what about the people using the technology day to day? How have we become affected outside of the direct benefits?

I’ve previously written about the change in our dialogue, and how generations before the internet have different conversation skills with those after the internet; the same goes for smartphones. Communication is just one avenue.

Another is our forecasting of the future. As technology transforms more rapidly in front of our eyes, the amount of lifetimes it requires to see dramatic change reduces. When it once took several generations to go from ocean travel to sky travel, it’s taken remarkably less time to go to space travel. The same goes for our ability to communicate. When it used to be one village, it then went to one country, and now we can speak to anyone in the world quickly.

Rapid changes to developing industries is not a new demon. There’s always been early adapters of technology and there’s always been schools or groups dedicated to honing crafts by any means, including forward-facing technology. Yet as technology grows faster and faster, these changes are harder to implement. In my college days, professors could not teach the most current material but they would at least acknowledge its existence. It was difficult for just a few professors to quickly change the pipeline of education, so no matter how fast technology grew or changed, the academics would be lagging behind, struggling to catch up.

There in lies the most uncertain future we’ve ever seen. I graduated college 10 years ago and life is only changing more quickly. It is true some things never change. Yet it is also true that what works today may not work tomorrow. We’ve seen megacompanies fall to the wayside by refusing to grow with the digital era and we’ve seen companies that are less than 10, 20 years old become the wealthiest and most powerful companies ever. It is already taking less than one generation’s lifetime to see our lives change more than our parents could expect. Soon, it’ll change faster than the current generation can expect. From there, how can we be certain of any future?

Distraction comes from the Latin roots of “dis” meaning apart, and “trahere” to drag. We are dragged apart from our duties when we are distracted. Yet what are our duties if the future is uncertain? All the stimulus we react to may not actually be such a distraction. In times of survival, when our lives were most uncertain, hyper-attention to any stimulus may be the only thing saving us from a tiger in the jungle. The anxieties was face today are boundless by society and boundless by arriving technology. Is it all a distraction? Or are we just trying to survive?

Swallowing Disappointment

I previously wrote about The Valley of Disappointment. In that post, I explored how time and accountability are often the enemies of our progress. I discussed how external factors and perspectives can shape disappointment, but I didn’t delve into the importance of navigating disappointment for our long-term potential.

Navigating disappointment can be tricky. It’s easy to get caught up in the moment and let it define our entire experience. But when it comes to long-term goals and aspirations, it’s important to remember that disappointment is just a part of the journey.

Throughout my life, I have suffered serious leg injuries both congenital and accidental, depriving me of physical joys like sports or running around. I’ve directed that energy towards gaming, becoming obsessed or competitive with any game I set my mind to. That led to my competitive Super Smash Bros. journey.

It took me over two years to win my first official tournament and there were a lot of defeats leading up to it. Sure, there were moments of hope, such as placing 3rd and earning some prize money. But, there were also tournaments where I was eliminated immediately and tied for last place.

Surprisingly, defeat stung worse the farther along I went in my journey. During my peak performance in Melee, I was earning enough to cover my rent through tournament winnings, yet I still faced defeats several nights a week. Despite this, my drive to earn an income from my passion for the game and the desire to win competitions kept me motivated.

However, that wasn’t always the case. Early into my career, after one particularly devastating tournament, I considered giving up completely. I felt overwhelmed and questioned if the game was worth the effort. I didn’t touch the game for a week. Then I watched my brother play and started watching videos on YouTube, and suddenly my passion had reignited.

My ability to swallow disappointment allowed me to have an amazing journey with Melee. My passion and desire for the game helped me to push through tough times. From the moment I decided to compete, I believed in the game’s unique magic. Through passion and perseverance, I met thousands of people, visited dozens of cities and venues, and even moved across the country. Remember, if you can envision yourself still enjoying something despite its toughest moments, it’s definitely worth pursuing.

Daily Prompt: Name Origin

Write about your first name: its meaning, significance, etymology, etc.

I was named after this handsome man. Born Archibald Alec Leach, he adopted the name Cary Grant at the age of 27 for Hollywood. Every description of him includes “debonair demeanor” and how well he handled himself on screen. Not only was he easy on the eyes, he delivered his lines effortlessly, had great chemistry with costars, and starred in several movies.

Grant had a difficult childhood, with an alcoholic father and a clinically depressed mother. Often described as a trouble maker, he found his way to theaters and back stages before landing various starring roles. He began to pick up an accent working with music halls in both the UK and US, developing an iconic transatlantic dialect, often heard in old news broadcasts.

Cary inspires me to reach far beyond our origins, working past his childhood, his name, and even the way he spoke. He carried himself professionally on screen and off, dedicating his retirement to his wife and daughter. He had a fantastic career on screen and off screen invested his fortunes into real estate and business, retiring a wealthy man. When he died of a stroke, he refused medical help and requested no funeral.

Called the “greatest leading man Hollywood had ever known,” Cary left a huge mark on the golden age of Hollywood. His mark was caught by my immigrant parents first moving from China to the United States in 1990. Wanting me to have an American name, they named me after Cary Grant and even created a Westernized version of my name in Chinese, an extremely unique name.

I have only seen two of his films, An Affair to Remember and His Girl Friday. Both films were exceptional, aged well despite being very obviously from the golden age of Hollywood, and showcased Grant’s natural acting skills. I do recommend both, whether you’re an oldies fan or not. He starred in dozens of other films which I’ll watch slowly over my lifetime. It’s very enjoyable looking up and seeing the remarkable man I was named after. He hasn’t done anything directly for me, but just like all of his fans before me, he inspires me.

Spirit of the Escalator

A term coined in French, L’esprit de l’escalier, is afterwit, or the witty remarks thought of after having descended stairs. The Wikipedia article does a great job of detailing the origin of the story, including a reference to “the bottom of the stairs” which indicates a guest has fully left a gathering.

Witty or remarkable, our ability to reflect upon things allows us to speak greater on that topic. It is why skilled conversationalists carry conversations with their charisma, because conversations are rhythmic and the best don’t drop a beat.

Typically writers experience this phenomenon the most, as collecting and organizing thoughts can become an instrumental task to their expression. I’ve sometimes thought of this as introversion and the extraversion, but charisma comes to both spectrums. The life of the party may not be the speaker of the party and the person least engaged may have the most to say.

The term Spirit of the Escalator resonates with us because we have been in dialogues where we couldn’t properly reply and we thought of a reply afterwards. We appreciate its French origin because we like to think of ourselves as witty and cunning. The spirit captures but one element of conversational reflection, that element being comeback.

As our conversations take shorter and shorter forms, the desire for sharper and snappier comebacks increases. With more accessible conversations that have become narrower in digital spaces, from lack of intonation to lack of context, we have allowed conversation to boil down to bullet points and sound bites, thereby increasing the need for comebacks. Nuanced conversation, with give and take, becomes less attractive to traditional broadcasts day by day.

Now there is an equilibrium, where an opposite and equal reaction manifests at a critical point. When our distaste for short form content becomes too great, we gravitate towards long form content. Of course, these long form content creators will produce smaller pieces of their own content, indicating a self-awareness and sense of ownership towards sub-content. But the major draw of long form content is the ability to reintroduce long conversation, without the conversation turning into a martial art of offense and defense, of maneuvering around sound bites.

The term Spirit of the Escalator carries a modern invention’s name in it. Sure, I could be taking the translation too literally, with any set of stairs mechanical or not considered to be “l’escalier.” I wonder if the term’s genesis comes from a different age of conversation. When conversation was once communal, it now has became guarded in ivory towers with both speakers and audience on the defensive. It is remarkable the internet has recreated these ivory towers in some ways, in the form of closed communities and echo chambers, while the internet has also opened doors by removing gatekeeping and allowing different forms of conversation to be tested in the market.

It will be truly interesting to see what terms we’ll be using to describe texting or leaving a zoom call. Hell, we can’t even slam phones anymore. Our technology shapes our responses and sometimes the responses we’ve learned become phased out entirely. What will be our next Spirit of the Escalator?

The Digital Divide

I first heard the term phone world from a book called Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari. I’m fascinated by modern dating and would say I’ve spent more time than the average person thinking about and spending time on dating apps.

But this post isn’t about dating. Rather, it’s about how we’ve become farther from each other despite becoming more connected.

We’ve all been in the presence of a phone party. There’s multiple people standing around, sitting around, but there’s nothing happening. Everyone is plugged into their phone, engrossed in their phone world. This isn’t a new phenomenon, as we’ve seen commuters ignore each other since the dawn of commuting.

This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned the term phone world. It’s one of the primary forces of loneliness in our Western world. Unlike distractions of the past, our phones persist with us throughout our lives, spanning several years of time now. Contacts, photos, and social media have created an inseparable bond between us and our phones, allowing us to always return to our comfortable world whenever we desire.

The ability to always return home is one of our first metaverse abilities. It is the ability to center or ground ourselves in digital space and reliably express ourselves. Unfortunately until our phone worlds connect, that is the end of our current state of the metaverse and it is why the best way to socially enjoy a phone party is to stand next to each and show each other what each individual phone is displaying.

Until we have the ability to enjoy an in-person live experience of our phones connecting, they will primarily be seen as a force of escape. Escape is necessary, but to have it be the only option seems disappointing. As technology develops, our connections with each other should slowly adopt a more in-person touch. We can see this from looking up directions on our PCs and printing out MapQuest, to using digital maps, to using live data, to soon asking AI.

Conceptually, it is easier to refine processes like looking up directions than it is to counter-disrupt what our phones have done to our social exchanges. Our phones and apps do try to talk to each other, and they’ll become better at it over time. The question is, do we try to talk to each other, and will we become better at it as our technology divides us?

The Waffle House Has Found Its New Host

Seeing this comment randomly spring up in my youtube shorts, I found it sometimes humorous, sometimes missing the mark. Seeing this comment a few times made me realize it wasn’t just a poor, unsuitable joke someone misused, but rather a developing meme in response to content. Typically the content contained some kind of “Don’t give a fuck attitude” that would do well in customer service, other times it was just a random reply.

Googling the phrase yields two important results. This article, written just three days ago, concludes that the phrase means nothing at all. This video on the other hand, stands to legitimize the phrase by creating a user-generated advertisement.

Has strong “Library Takeout” vibes

It’s nice to see two polar opposite reactions to internet nonsense. And that’s what this post is really about: invoking meaning from the meaningless. Or rather, contextualizing that which has no context.

I have been doing this type of exercise in all sorts of forms, from content that had much more concentrated meaning like books assigned to me for literature classes, to content made from internet celebrities that is low-brow and well accessible. It is in our nature to find patterns and to dissect them, finding meaning in things that may not have meaning.

Ideas live in generations, from its genesis to each retweet or repost, to how those ideas are consumed by the end user.

Meaning is not only defined by ourselves and by our culture, but also by generational digestion and regurgitation, meaning ideas can evolve over time, especially when ideas grow larger than the speaker and become entrenched with society before any firm ground has been laid on what has been said. This comes largely in the form of catchphrases, used to propagandize the public’s opinion on things, like “Black Lives Matter” or “Believe all Women” which started as humble phrases with good intention and ended up as weaponized rhetoric. This is not to say all catchphrases will fall to the dark side, with some phrases having harder to misinterpret messages, like “Stop Asian Hate.”

Without making this whole post about the power and use of propaganda, I’ll just say that the specifics around bite-sized sound clips has become a business, a science, and a force of politics. And while that is an extreme and harrowing view, this post also started as a dissection of memes spreading around, even without roots.

I’ll touch on the topic of meaning and phrases more in a future post. For now, I’d like to end on an actual Waffle House story, which is not all that related to semantics.

There were not many Waffle Houses in Illinois, where I spent most of my young adulthood. When I traveled for competitive gaming, I would stop by restaurants local to the area, and this area had a Waffle House. I had been told the food was legendary, the service not so much. I’m a fan of these types of places because I can handle being ignored, especially if the food is worth the social experience.

I enjoyed my meal alone before my tournament. As I was paying the tab, I looked over at a mother and her son finishing up their meal, They were asking for a to-go container. The servings were decently large and a to-go container’s nothing new for a big breakfast.

This was not their leftovers. This was a to-go order after their meal had finished. Okay. I’ve seen this before. Maybe someone at home is hungry or maybe they just love Waffle House and they wanted some more for later. What I saw disgusted me. After this mother and son had finished their meal, they had asked for two large waffles to take home. And when they received their Styrofoam package, the son revealed his waffles, took a syrup dispenser from the table, and unleashed an oil spill level of syrup onto his to-go waffles. His mother carefully supervised the whole encounter, only saying “good” when her son twirled the dispenser upright. He closed his food with delight and they hopped off to their car.

Believe me, there’s a lot of things I could comment on. But those waffles are going to be soggy as hell, bro. C’mon you can’t be doing this to yourself. Amongst the several other reasons.