A Minor Personal Note

While Critically Correct has been a focused mix of technology and random bits of fiction posts since December of 2008 - and will continue to be as such - I never ruled out the occasional personal post, which this post will be... it has to be.

For the past several months I have been moving towards change... a personal change, a change in the way I behave, the way I see the world and the things I take interest in.

But I'm at a tipping point. Without a catalyst, without worry or stress, and without pain, I find myself entirely and completely consumed in the obsession that something is missing in my life, and when I feel like this, I feel like doing the one thing I do best: being alone.

I'm not a religious person by any stretch of the imagination, but I am highly self-spiritual and extremely reflective at times. This is very apparent right now... all I can seem to do is reflect on every aspect of my life. I ask myself dozens of questions every day: Am I doing the right thing with my life? Am I on the path I want to be on? How have my past decisions influenced where I am today? How might things be different now if I made different choices 1, 5, even 10 years ago?

With no desire to do anything other than entertain my own thoughts and reflect on my past, I turn to the things that have, in the past 24 years, become the foundation for everything I stand for. Things I love.

"The Lion King" is the single-most influential piece of media in my life, and for no light reason. Symba's journey from a young lion cub to adulthood is a perfectly told mirror of the aging process - from the young and innocent years of childhood into the confusing teenage years and through the responsibility of adulthood. "The Lion King" details what I believe is the single most important life lesson any person can learn from: the choices you make now will influence your future, and if you make a wrong choice, you should learn from your mistake rather than run from it. I'm all about making mistakes and learning from them, and although not everyone around me is as forgiving as I wish they were, I will do everything in my power to learn from my past to better my future potential... to make better choices.

As I write this, I am cut off from the dull, painful peace of my quiet house with the sound of music blasting in my ears. No where else other than music can I find almost instant solace. Some of the most powerful songs in my life include "Plush," "Everything You Want," "Far Behind," and "Breakdown." Of course I have hundreds of songs that I can escape into at any point of the day, but rarely do I put the same ten or fifteen songs on loop all day long... rarely do I find the same ten or fifteen songs so utterly moving no matter how many times I listen to them. My favorite music reflects my solitaire nature, and that brings me to my final point.

Throughout middle school and high school I thrived on the fact that I was somewhat of a loner. I've always had plenty of friends throughout school and plenty of people to stand by my side, but truth be told I've always been the best off when I am me and me alone. Here at 24 years old, I'm finding the best solace of my life in this same ideal, and I don't mind pushing the highly social years of my college career aside for more time alone. For one, I get to focus entirely on things that I normally can't with a busy social life: physical self-improvement, writing, video games, and spending lots and lots of time outdoors.

So whatever becomes of me in the coming days, weeks, months, and years, I hope that I will be better off in the future for my decisions now. A lot is on my mind at the moment and until I get everything sorted out I don't expect to want to do much else other than be myself, by myself.

Music to my ears. B3 out.

Spending Some, Spending Little

While I was in college, particularly near the end of my college career, I devised a philosophy about my spending habits. Being busy every day of the week and almost always away from home, I found myself in plenty of positions to spend money crazy. Sometimes I did spend money excessively. In five years, I spent money on lots of new gadgets: two cell phones, a PDA, a half dozen memory cards, three new digital cameras (more on that...), two netbooks, two MP3 players, four USB flash drives, a new TV, a Wii and lots of games/accessories, two Nintendo DSes (games as well!)... and plenty of little odds and ends in accessories for all these things.

In addition to these "big ticket" items that I've bought for myself, I also have had to spend money on plenty else: car loan, school supplies and books, daily spending (food, etc.), and whatever might come up.

Point in case, I feel like I've spent a ton of money in the last half-decade or so. While I've spent thousands of dollars on these gadgets and more over the years, I've also come to develop a theory of sorts on my spending habits.

As college came to a close, I realized that I would have to be prepared for a future in which all my spending is my own: no more living at home (eventually) to have parents to fall back on. With that in mind my beliefs on spending quickly shifted as I entered my final year in college. Saving money became just as important as spending it, although truth be told, I didn't want to always give up my spending on gadgets and other things that make being young fun.

So what am I to do?

What has worked the best for me isn't hording money at all... "smart" spending has helped me to strike a balance in my life between saving for the future and having a good time when I can. Even when I was working at Meijer for under $10/hour I did my best to spend money wisely. I still ate out three or four days a week, spent money on my car when I needed to, bought the occasional video game, and saved for a new gadget or two every few months. In addition to this, I kept three separate banking accounts that each dictated my spending: one for saving money every paycheck, one for moderate spending (bills, food, daily whatevers, etc.), and one for saving up to the next "big ticket" item on my list.

Keeping control of my money like, along with saying "no" plenty of times to dinner out or the occasional video game (still haven't played Boom Blox), has helped me stay in a relatively healthy financial state.

Now with a good-paying job, I'm finding my old principles tested, as I now easily have the money to buy what I want, when I want. Despite new financial freedoms, I've found myself still sticking to my old ideals on spending... and so far, so good.

At this point a new philosophy arises: why do I have to spend so much to live a certain kind of lifestyle? What's wrong with living frugally even when I'm making plenty of money? At this point in my life, I don't see a reason for anything to be wrong with this idea. And so it stands for me: I will continue to be a smart spender, a mostly frugal spender, and efficient enough with money that I'm never stressed about finances while never bored with myself either.

Sounds good to me.

B3 out.

"I'm Like a (Song)bird"'

I recently raved about how Songbird is slowly becoming my music player of choice on Windows, and with the upcoming version 1.1 release, some much-appreciated features will be available that will bring it very close to being feature-complete for me. I won't reiterate my previous article here, that's for your reading, but I will cover the new features and why I feel they are awesome for this 1.1 release.

Folder Watch: One of Winamp's best features is roughly called "folder watch" - the ability for the program to "watch" a folder for new or missing files and automatically add them to the main music library. I consider this feature paramount to any music application. Why can't I store all my music in the folder structure of my choosing and have that music available in my program without tedious drag-and-dropping? iTunes doesn't believe in this: tracks must be added manually once you have them stored where you want them. Bad, iTunes, bad. Songbird mimics Winamp's folder watch feature, and this will be awesome.

Album Art: I have an iPod touch... and being all screen, I find that a lot of the screen ends up being wasted when I'm just listening to music. Case in point: album art is displayed by default when a song is played, but better than 90% of my music collection does not feature album information, let along album art to go with it. Songbird 1.1 ups the ante here a bit by providing automatic album art recovery from the internet source of your choice. It goes one better by allowing Last.fm to be one of those sources, which is a big deal to me for one reason... without proper album names in all of my music, I cannot get the proper album art, but Last.fm also features a band picture/profile for every artist, regardless of album. Thus, in the event that a song does not have album information associate with it, Songbird will simply pull this default photo from Last.fm, meaning that one way or another, all of my music will be tagged with art... simply awesome.

There are still a few features that are keeping Songbird from completely replacing Winamp, but they are still in the pipeline, and should be implemented fully this year:

CD Ripping: Although I rarely buy CDs anymore, I still do have the need to rip music on occasion, so I'm glad this is coming.

Full iPod Support: While iTunes will always be my main app for syncing purposes, it would be nice to get around Apple's sometimes restrictive rules on directional syncing and take music off my iPod, something Songbird will eventually get around to. Also, while most iPod models are supported for syncing now, my iPod touch is not one of them. It would also be nice to selectively sync with music I have at work as well.

Well the 1.1 release of Songbird is in beta right now, so hopefully within the next week or two it will be released as a stable product, and I can't wait to update all of my album art finally.

B3 out.

Digital Identity

Facebook has been in the news lately for it's terms of service changes that have come and seemingly gone all at once. The short gist of it is that Facebook updated its terms of service to include wording that were interpreted to read as though Facebook could claim copyright and grant itself full use to any of its users uploaded material and actions. This of course sparked debate (despite Google having similar terms for it's network of services) from privacy advocates all over the place, Facebook users or not.

I've taken time to step back from my online world and examine what the impact may be of having so much of my life available in public, digital form spread across the Internet.

My first foray into creating a digital personality was way back in 1998. When I played my first PC games online (Warcraft 2? Battlezone 97?) I needed to come up with a handle, and I cleverly thought of "youbdead" almost instantly. I can't quite remember what the appeal of that name was at the time, but it stuck, and it became my common handle for at least a year. Outside of games, I used "youbdead" for my first personal email account on Hotmail, although I doubt that account even exists anymore.

EverQuest in 1999 saw a much more common identity appear. When I created my first character on EQ I found "youbdead" to be an inconsistent fit with the fantasy universe of the game, so I chose something more fitting. This was my freshmen year of high school, a year in which I took my first art class, and we studied a bit of Roman art history that year, and while working to come up with a character name for EQ, I mistook the spelling of "Pantheon" as "Partheon" - which became both a character and my longest-running common name online.

I jumped on the Yahoo Instant Messenger bandwagon first. I didn't have any friends connected on Yahoo, but I needed a new e-mail address and the IM service came along for the ride, so I signed up with Yahoo as "partheon2000." This is my oldest, still-used online identity, and of course spawned "partheon2001" on AOL's IM network a year later (as more of my friends from high school had AIM screen name's too). "Partheon" became a common name in many aspects of my life: game characters, website user names, aliases on the web.

In 2004 I began to feel as though the "Partheon" moniker was becoming a bit tired, so I began searching for something else. I initially tried variations on "Partheon" by looking to other Roman and Greek lore or history for inspiration. Nothing stuck; I wanted a short, easy, exclusive name that would likely be portable across a wide network of websites. I found a name that wasn't nearly as tired as "Partheon" was, and it was borne from a nickname that I had acquired from a teacher at my high school two years earlier: The Big B Bruno - "B3." While "B3" was certainly catchy, it wasn't portable at all - every website I've tried registering at already had that name snatched up. Despite this, "B3" is still my most common modern online identity, and I use it as much as possible.

"B3" may be my last anonymous online identity, however. With the rise of Facebook, my real self is finally online and exposed in ways that I would have freaked out about five years ago. I'm known on Facebook as "Brandon Bruno" - my real name - and I have tons of personal information about me on display or archived somewhere on Facebook's servers.

What Facebook is wants to become some day is the digital, Internet-based mirror of ourselves. One day we will exist as ourselves and as our online identities, and Facebook wants to be that identity. I find this convenient, if not a little revolutionary. Anonymity has always been the rule of the Internet, but Facebook seems invite our true selves to the Internet: our names, our phone numbers, our pictures, our addresses - anything we want, really. At the same time, this is Facebook's biggest strength and its biggest weakness: it has access to a highly marketable database of our personal lives, but it must strike a balance between selling its users or selling them short.

I believe that Facebook could one day be an important tool for online identity management. With features like Connect already rolling out, the convenience of having one online identity that is centrally managed from a clean-cut, organized portal is highly desirable to me.

With my identity no longer masked behind "youbdead" or "Partheon" or "B3," what makes my online self unique from my real self?

That might be the big question worth asking in the coming months and years.

B3 - err, Brandon - out.

Another Perfect Day

What is your perfect day?

This may be just one question in a million that could be asked at any point in our busy lives, but it's one that I feel is worth asking myself, and of course, sharing my immediate thoughts with my readership.

A perfect day for me begins with a solid start. As cliché as that might sound, it's so true for me. My years at Meijer conditioned me into liking the morning hours, and this holds true today. While I'm not always up at two in the morning anymore, I do get up as earlier as I can on the weekends, usually 7:00am, an hour earlier if I can afford it. The morning is undoubtedly the most tranquil time of the day. Especially in the winter when animals and bugs are almost zilch outside, the morning can be absolutely silent. I've discovered my fondness for this setting at Sidecut Metropark in Maumee. I've been taking Elli out there early in the morning when I can, and the park is just beautiful. With a solid layer of snow and a bright morning sun, the park is still and calm, save for the occasional rustle of deer from time to time. This is a wonderful time for me to connect with nature... something I used to be all about until I hit college.

A perfect day continues into the late morning with time to organize at home. This might sound silly, but I do enjoy organizing myself on the weekends... it's just about the only time I get to do it, so I like to take an hour to organize everything that needs organizing: calendars, to go lists, my car, my desk, emails... I feel a lot better about the upcoming week once everything is in order.

Between my late morning and mid afternoon, I like to relax to the max: a light lunch - a sandwich or such - with lots of video games in between. My family is usually out and about of the house by midday, so I get to relax with all of my favorite video games, whether new or old, on my own time, with my own schedule. I don't mind burning the afternoon away in front of the television... this is what I've grown up doing, and it's uniquely me.

In fact, on some perfect days, I'll keep on play games all night long, usually on the console of my choice until well after the sun goes down, after which I prefer to move onto my computer for multiplayer action, either for a six hour World of Warcraft session or various rounds of Counter-Strike or Day of Defeat.

But most weekends I like to mix it up, and by dinner time I'll be making something delicious with my family. I prefer weekend dinners in the summer, when we almost always grill outside every day for dinner. Chicken, pork, or steak - either one will do, with a heaping of mashed potatoes and corn on the side.

My perfect day - if it doesn't resolve back into video games at this point - is best spent in the summer time around a small fire at night. Just as the sun hits the horizon I load up our clay fire pit with wood and start a solid fire, lighting up just enough for me to see what I need to see. The sky is clear and full of stars, the moon bright but not overwhelming. Sometime before midnight I put my fire out, climb into bed, and do it all over again.

This is just one scenario, full of moments that individually add up to my "perfect day" - a weekend, of course. I could never be content like this on the weekdays, like tonight, when I'm stressing with work and managing my time between my social life and personal life. It's stressful.

So what do all the moments of my perfect day have in common?

If you know me well enough, you'll know this answer without second guessing yourself.

B3 out.

A Literary Type of Change

I'm currently working my way through the novella A Clockwork Orange. The author, Anthony Burgess, has an interesting and insightful introduction to the 1986 edition of the story. To paraphrase his words regarding fiction: Change is what makes fiction. Characters who do not exhibit change over the course of a story are not characters worth telling a story about.

Indeed, this is the driving force behind every piece of fiction that I have ever read (and even some occasional non-fiction, as well). Any story worth telling, any story ever told, and most any story you find today, whether it's fiction or non-fiction, is character-centric, even if the character isn't always obvious (a place can be a characters just as much as a person). These characters must change. Change makes a character interesting. Why is this? In becoming a better writer, I have to ask myself this question at some point, and now is a great time to lay my thoughts out.

First, what would a character that doesn't change look like? I give you Peter, a 15 year old paperboy who is bullied at school on a regular basis. He gets beat up, picked on, stuffed in his locker, and has no will or want to stand up for himself. Over the course of our story, Peter is repeatedly severely beaten, and aside from concern from his parents, nothing comes of it. By now a reader might feel sympathy for Peter, and resentment towards his bully. Now late in the story, Peter is still bullied around, but finds help in a new friend, Marvin, who stands up for Peter, dispatches his bully, and sees to it that Peter never gets bullied again.

In this scenario, Peter has a problem, the problem is overcome, and his story finds resolution. But would this really be a great story? Has Peter changed in anyway? We know he's still lacking a will to stand up for himself, and there's no reason to believe that another bully could come along and put Peter in the same position as he was in our story. Do we have a story? Yes. Do we have a good story? It's hard to say, but I believe not.

Now let's introduce change.

Peter, the 15 year old paperboy who gets bullied at school, meets Marvin halfway through our story and learns that Marvin used to get bullied when he was younger. Marvin and Peter become close friends, and Marvin bullies Peter around in a playful sort of manner. With Marvin's guidance, Peter learns to stand his own ground, and by the end of our new story, confronts his bully and puts him on the ground in a fantastic show of strength in front of half the student body. He becomes respected and popular at school, while making sure to put himself first when standing his own ground.

Here, Peter starts the same as before, but certainly undergoes some form of change that leads him to become a different person - in this case, a stronger person. A reader can understand Peter's initial situation and desire for a change all the same as Peter might (after all, no one likes getting bullied). What causes Peter to change can be half the story, so I will leave this part vague on purpose - all that matters is that Peter evolves and changes, that he leaves the story a different person that he began it. Wouldn't Peter's story be much more interesting in its second form than its first?

Of course every reader is different, and there might be a time and a place for the first story, but by and by large, great fiction needs change. Going back to A Clockwork Orange, Alex, the protagonist in the story, undergoes change that has a real impact on the story, yet in the end (of the original American version) Alex ends up becoming the same crude, devilish person that he began as. Burgess specifically wrote that he hated this original ending, and for the 1986 edition, the publisher put his original British-edition ending in, which sees Alex learn from his experiences throughout the story, and strives to be a different person. Perhaps more tidy, but perhaps more fulfilling, as well.

In my own fiction, I try to create characters that need change. A character who is at the top of his game in chapter one might have a hard time finding change. A character who just fell from the top of his game because his wife left him and skipped country with all his money in chapter one? Bingo.

I'm constantly designing and redesigning characters in my head, sometimes struggling to create an interesting character for a compelling narrative. But I do keep this solid advice in mind, and I try to create characters in need of change.

Thanks for playing along with my little diversion tonight. I'll try to get some new fiction up on Critically Correct sooner or later, hopefully demonstrating everything I just discussed.

B3 out.