Dungeons and Dragons

For quite a while, I am addicted to the internet; and, with all honesty, to online games. I managed to spend a couple of years playing Utopia, a game of medieval fantasy (experience which I hope will turn into a nice research soon) and I generally get hooked to all types of games as long as they entertain me.

They have a lot of interesting features but their best one is, I guess, how the game style reflects one's personality (this and the fact that they create unexpected social ties and bonds). I am not a psychologist and, with my talent in people, I guess I shouldn't even consider this as a hobby. But I find it fascinating to think about the person behind the screen and how he/she must be like, given the visible results of the game. Utopia was a very mathematical game, but you could see a lot of other personality features - and, interesting enough, I met a lot of nice people and I made quite a few friends in that universe (read 'on that server'). For a few years, I was every day logging into my game and talking to people; with my good math skills and obsessive compulsive behaviour, I ended up running a kingdom. Besides the excellent practice for leadership and for team management (which I found extremely useful since then, tho' my gaming tyrannic policies are a bit harder to practice in the real life than in an online game), the game gave me the huge opportunity to befriend people from all corners of the world.

I spent a lot of time chatting with them, about the game at the beginning and then about me and themselves. The in-game forum was very often alive, and although the main part of it was dedicated to the strategy, there were threads with jokes, pics or with music. I flirted with a few of them, I found out when some were getting married and I was a shoulder for some of them, when they were being sad, or cheated, or were having I don't know what sort of problems.

The youngest member of the team was an Australian teenager of 15 or 16 when we got together in the same kingdom, and he was a college student when I left the game. The oldest one was a 45 yrs old Dutch squatter, having a lots of cats and a few ex-wives. There were the Canadians and then the Asian tigers, from all over (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore). When somebody new was coming to the kingdom, you could not know who hid behind the name... and the process of getting to know each other was then starting.

During all these months and even years (if I think about it, I spent definitely more than 'a couple' of years in the game... but this is not so relevant) we never met. But I don't think I had closer friends than my kingdom mates. And I spent a lot of time caring for them and for their provinces as well; from a certain point on, I started to notice the resemblance between the province and the person. Some were nice and caring, and they were always sending aid to others; some were just so eager to war and attack other kingdoms that they barely had any defense in their province; it was not hard to notice, for example, that the attitude towards risk was very well reflected in the construction of a province - the more the player disliked taking risks, the more defended his/her province was.

As life was taking us further, we were leaving the game one by one. Some were changing places, others were having newborns and no more time for online games, some others had to start to work for their living and so on. At a certain point, I myself left and the kingdom disbanded. I still talk to a few of my former kingdom mates and I know how and where they are and what are they currently doing. Of course, the relations are getting colder because we don contact each other on a daily basis, but they haven't stopped completely.

With my limited time, I now play a few flash games, mainly those which are so easily accessible on FaceBook. One of them is Farmville - not so relevant what the game is all about, because it is quite obvious from the name itself; it is a simple thing, where you build a farm, harvest your crops and enhance the appearance of a 22x22 squared surface. Not so complicated, but gives enough space for a personal mark.

For somebody who is both homeless and deeply in love with nature, building a farm is a fun hobby (even if you do it virtually); so I paid attention to my farm and then I started to notice others'. Apparently, in a small surface of 22x22 squares, there are infinite possibilities to arrange all sorts of items - from housing to animal cottages, while keeping enough land to plow and maintain your farm productive. Since you can watch the farms of your friends (if they play... and some of them do), you can also try to make some correlations between the persons (whom you know) and their farms. Again, a striking resemblance...

Am I trying to make a point here? I don't know, maybe I am. But for the time being, it's just an overview of a pretty interesting phenomenon. You cannot hide what you are even in the virtual world.

Words

As strange as it might sound, I deeply dislike academia. Strangely, because that's what I do for a living; not strangely, because it was not my first career choice, but something I ended up doing, for a number of reasons - decent (not great but decent) payment, relaxed schedule, sometimes fun environment.

A few years ago, it looked pretty well - nice people (we were graduate students then), a lot of alcohol (needed sometimes), smart talks (and smart asses), good quality humour. Well... that was just the surface, the visible part of the iceberg. The deeper I got into the academic waters, the more I hated them. And it's not only a matter of people... I have nothing particular against people. I mean... I don't dislike academics as a separate species among the humankind, but on an equal foot with everybody else. And, to be very specific, I don't dislike all academia - I fully understand why exact sciences or medicine should exist. But humanities?

Never until now in the history of humankind people were paid to produce nothing - and this is my main problem with Humanities: what they deal with and live out of is the production of words. OK, there were the king's fool and the king's poet... but they had a role. What role do all the graduates of some beautiful sciences (no, it's a very wrong word, this is anything but science... but how else to call them) have for the society?

Some time ago, I was having a rash when hearing the words 'French post-structuralism'. They all looked to me like people with a lot of time to waste and a lot of pens & papers at hand. Sadly, the disease seems to be spreading. I hear about new academic specialties and I can't stop wondering... WHY do they have to make a discipline out of everything? WTF is a specialist in Culture, huh? Why do you need to graduate 4 yrs of college to be able to have an opinion about a movie (and call yourself a film studies specialist)? OK, you can write about females and discrimination, but WHY start a gender department and create a school of thought called 'feminist studies'?

Don't take me the wrong way - I can understand all this as a... let's say... sect. Such as a group of people sharing the same beliefs. And I can also understand the students paying for getting a degree in one of those fields... in the end, we are all so deeply imbued with the idea that 'believing is paying' that we owe a big thumb up to the Church... but let's not divagate. Why does the society pay for this?

I know, academia is actually a business. We managed to convince everybody that the main asset of today is real time information and real time communication, so the poor students are buying the crap and pay their tuition, imagining they will end up being smarter. My fear is, however, that they will end up being just indoctrinated. We never teach them to doubt or to wonder... we teach them what the gurus said. But this is not a religion, a spiritual way... it's just somebody's opinion about how things are. All the respect for Foucault, but Jesus worked more to be quoted so often. And dying on a cross should give you more credibility than wondering whether a pipe is a pipe or just the representation of it.

Moreover, we don't teach them anything about work. Again, maybe the 20th and 21st century are a step closer to the Apocalypse (the one that my grandma is waiting for since the beginning of 2000), but all along history people were paid to WORK. What do the 'humanists' do, be them teacher or students? They produce words on papers. Are they inventing at least a sharpener for a ball point pen? Nope, they are INTERPRETING - because this is what they are taught to do. To interpret the interpretations of others.

In the world of interpretation, nothing seems to be real anymore. There are levels and meta-levels and a lot of psychoanalytical jargon trying to convince you that nothing from what you see is real, but it is a product of your subconsciousness, or of the collective subconsciousness, or of some Oedipus/Elektra complex or God knows what else. If it's not psychoanalytical, it's Marxist and it's about class and oppression. And if it's not Marx, then it's the Panoptikon and the ubiquitous relations of power. C'mon, people... WAKE UP. Even princesses take a crap, once in a while...

Liebe ist fur Alle da

A New Year spent in Lithuania, at home, gave me very little choices but to watch the Russian TV shows (having a Russian speaker with me, while I speak neither of the languages, it seemed like a decent compromise to make). I'm not gonna write a long plead about the inherent patriarchy, coz I don't feel like an European bel hooks for now. But a short one... yeah, for sure.

So... what could I see on the Russian TV channel I watched? Well, in a random order: Medvedev giving the New Year speech, old Russian stars with various amounts of money spent at the plastic surgeon doing whatever they were trained to do (like... singing, dancing, acting or something else) and half naked girls. This last part is what caught my eye. Why? No, it's not because I started to develop a certain interest in the weaker sex, but because I had the feeling that I am watching a men's club show and not a New Year TV program.

For like 4 hours, some guys came on and off the stage and pretended to sing, while he girls kept dancing - OK, we can count in here pole dancing, belly dancing, strip-tease (half) and sensual rubbings against few half naked boys. The first thought was that the few representatives of the stronger sex dancing there in their underwear, were for the delight of the few gay viewers among the Russian audience. But then I realized it's not this - it was too much macho breeze there to even consider introducing the idea of 'gay' - but it's actually adding to the voyeur pleasure of the straight males, by mildly suggesting sexual intercourse. OK, lesbians are fun, but how much of it could they take? So a few male counterparts had to be carefully inserted (pun intended) into the show.

I am by no means a puritan. I couldn't care less about the square cm of naked skin I see on the screen. In the same manner, I'm not a feminist - it's hard to belong to any other '-isms' when you are already a misanthropist; I confess I dislike men and women almost equally. However, I am a big fan of equality - if we are to use some of us for our sexual arouse, it's perfectly fine, as long as everybody is satisfied. But I can't stop wondering how much the women in the audience enjoyed that particular show? Or maybe... and I only say maybe... who cares about what women have to say, anyway?