Nerds of all Trades

I've been watching a lot of "The League" lately, a show I usually describe as about a group of assholes who are (sort of) friends linked by their obsession with fantasy football. This show has such a strange hold on me, because I've never been into football. However, I do have a lot of friends that are assholes which probably explains the appeal.

However, as I was watching the show again , I realized there is a person in "The League" that isn't a complete and totally irredeemable asshole. If you've only seen the first season or so, you'd probably think it was Pete, but that's definitely not the case. It's Andre.

Seriously. Hear me out.

Andre, for all of his many faults, is the only member of the league who isn't just a total asshole. He rarely does anything totally out of spire, he actually cares about his friends and he even acts selfless from time to time, which is more than I can say about any of the other characters.

He's always willing to help out the other guys in his capacity as a doctor. Even though the frequently refuse, he continues to offer anyway. When the guys do take him up on his offers, he even does it free of charge.

Andre is the guy that was still going to marry the girl who was allergic to his semen. If that isn't true love and dedication, I don't know what is. Of course, when a terrible handkerchief incident goes horribly awry and Andre's fiancee goes blind, do his friends comfort him? Of course not. They tell him to fetch beers and he DOES it.

Whether or not that makes him a selfless character or one with almost no self-respect is something for the viewer to decide. I think the show itself leans a bit towards no self-respect, but I like to interpret it as a mix of both.

The weird part is regardless of how good a guy Andre is, if only comparatively, he might be the worst friend in the league. Barring Ruxin, of course.

He usually becomes obsessive with new hobbies to a terrifying extreme, he is not self-aware enough to realize when he's irritating his friends and is so worried about losing his friends that Andre will try to latch onto little details to force more bonds to tie them together. When Pete had to go gluten-free, Andre thought they would have to be GFFs.

I think Andre needs to take a step back and realize that if all these assholes keep him in their lives, that they probably like him at least a little. Well, that or the members of the league are even worse than I imagined.

But just because Andre is the only remotely trustworthy person in the league, it doesn't mean I'd ever want to hang out with him.

Is it weird that I'd hang out with Ruxin?

With all of humanity’s attempts to know everything, there is so much that remains a mystery. We have this obsessive desire to be in the know in regards to the universe and everything around us, and we only rarely stop to wonder if everything we want to know wants to be known. Questions like these are relegated to the world of fiction and horror, but it’s a legitimate question. Is the unknown so because it wants to remain that way? 

Movies, books and video games in the horror genre want to scare us with an otherworldly thing that wants to tear us apart. But haven’t we learned that truth is stranger than fiction? Haven’t we learned that the real horror, the most terrifying of concepts, is one that exists in our world in such a way that we face it on a daily basis? I propose that the truest and purest form of fear is the fear of the unknown.

Horror genre fiction makes a fatal mistake whilst trying to scare us in any meaningful way; it quantifies that which is meant to induce dread in our hearts. It gives us a physical form to run from and to fear. What I've found is that what scares me the most is what’s in my own mind. 

All of the facets and functions of the human mind that science has failed to understand, and that we may never truly grasp, are what keep me up at night. Why can we imagine things so vividly? It serves no real biological purpose to be able to vividly see a demonic face staring at you through the darkness, so then, why are we able to do just that?

Many writers have made it known that most of their work is done during the night. And for writers of horror, this is doubly so. Our bodies have a biological clock that lets us know when we should be sleeping and when we should be awake, according to the position of the sun. This instinct has probably been established over millions of years of conditioning. The night time is associated with sleep. Sleep is then associated with dreaming. Could it be that the best writing is done at night because our brains are attempting to dream whilst our bodies remain awake?

There have been correlations in language and fiction between the phenomenon of sleeping and death. Death causes an end to your stream of thought and consciousness, and no one will ever truly know what happens to the consciousness upon death, at least not in the waking world. And if this correlation between sleep and death can be a plausible one, would it make sense that dreaming is our consciousness drifting to the place it will one day permanently be upon death? When we write at night, when our brains and trying to enter the world of the dream, are we writing what our brains can perceive in this gray area between the waking world and the dream? Are we glimpsing some forbidden knowledge that the living are not meant to be able to know?

Many works of fiction have been scrutinized as being dangerously true to real life events that have yet to transpire, whether it is in books, movies or television. There are examples everywhere, just a simple Google search away. I would argue that these writers glimpsed something in the dream that they carried with them into the waking world. Something that stuck with them, and they felt the need to write it down and spread it. Which sounds similar to how the bible came to be, doesn't it?

Then, if dreams are glimpses into hidden truths, what are nightmares? Nightmares could be when we get too close to the final truth. The Eldritch truth, if you will. It could be meant to scare us back into the place where we belong and to tread no further. When you wake from a nightmare, you resist going back to sleep, right? We must tread no further, for we are not ready for what we will find. 

The ultimate truth is one that would drive us mad, and leave nothing left but a husk of flesh where there once was a person. We may wish to know all there is to know, but what if it’s too horrifying? What if we can’t comprehend what we've seen and we morph it into the twisted monsters that we fear in fiction? That IS what happens when we have nightmares.

If death is when we permanently reach the dream, where we discover the truth behind all of the mystery, then why do we dream while alive? Why have we been allowed nightly glimpses into the all-knowing realm? We may never be able to find and explain the answer to this. 

All we can do is lay our heads down at night, and welcome what little knowledge we can scrape away from the dream, and pass it on to whoever will listen.

That is our true purpose as story tellers. And the unknown that we can glimpse for just a moment: that is the true horror.

You've heard the scenario before: The earth has been struck by a terrible plague that has killed 90% of the population and left them shambling the urban wilderness as zombies.  So what is your plan?  Eke out a meager yet fulfilling existence eating rats and not shaving?  Form a small society and wage a campaign of brutal violence against a different society because of a few philosophical differences? Experience character development; including making a simple descision, but later when a similar scenario occurs, making the opposite descision?  Nope, none of those things, because you dead, sucka.  That's a ninety percent mortality rate, hell, even a fifty percent mortality rate would kill you because you're not a deranged shut in; you go outside, talk with others, use public spaces, handle money and food prepared by others, don't wash your hands nearly as much as you should, and drink water from the city reservoir even after that meteorite fell into it.  

So, OK, you're a zombie now, but everything's all good because undeath is still technically life, just ask any ancient mariner (if you have a spare hour or two).  Now the problem is making a better place for you and your colleagues in the decaying, shambling, empire.  The only thing standing in the way of the rotting utopia being, of course, those plucky survivors; those unique misanthropes who decided to actually stockpile enough ammo to specifically kill everyone in the city; those people well prepared to live on high amounts of preservatives and canned food because that's how they've lived their entire lives anyway.  In this case, fellow zombie, we in the undead horde need to take special steps to secure a future where we are free to groan, lurch, and have some sort of black ooze gush out of our mouth unmolested.  We need, as it were, A Survivor Survival Guide.

A few good tips to start us off:

- Wear armor.  Specfically headgear.  Now take note that most of these tips will only apply before you've died and came back, so be sure to take the proper steps once you've realized you're terminal.  Headgear is crucial and will stop all of that "you gotta shoot them in the head" nonsense.  Keep in mind not to wear anything with a mouthguard like a football helmet, as it will prevent you from getting your nosh on.  Ideally, an army helmet is your best bet, but don't underestimate something like a metal bucket which is sturdy and might get those nerds thinking about what a sweet Plants Vs. Zombies ref that is long enough for you to rip their arms off like popcaps.

- Eat a proper diet.  Really what you want to aim for is a lot of good soluable iron so you can be bursting at the seams with blood.  Keep in mind that as a decaying corpse that has been granted limited ambulatory functions, you are a playground for not only whatever deadly disease managed to off you, but also a host of other disgusting bacterium and parasites.  Making sure anyone who has to mess with you up close has a good chance of getting sick and dying themselves.

- Become magical.  If you're ever given the chance to become a magical zombie, you should take it, it's a huge step up.  Less shuffling, glowing red LED lights intead of eyes, motivated by nondescript evil instead of hunger, this is the big leagues.  Plus there is always the chance of sloughing off all your flesh, picking up a shield and cutlass, and finally fulfilling the prophecy that is Killer Instinct Gold.

I’ve been a fan of From Software games (Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, Dark Souls 2) for a little while now. I fancied myself a bit of a pro at the phenomenon known as “git gud.” I pumped endless hours into all three of those games, so when Bloodborne, the next From Software game, was announced, I thought to myself, “Great! I’ll be able to play it without issue and I won’t have that steep learning curve most others will because I’m a pro! Yeah!” Damn, son, I was sorely mistaken.

The first challenge I had to overcome was waiting for a day one patch download. And it was miserable. I have pretty awful internet, so that alone took about three hours. But once that was installed, it was game on. I was going to enter a world I knew I would be able to conquer with no issue. I was about to enter Yharnam with the confidence of a 15 year old who just lost his virginity.

And I got absolutely slaughtered.

I spent the entire first five hours getting killed mercilessly by mobs of angry townspeople. And I had no idea why they were so mad, as I had not gotten far enough in to realize what was even going on. I fought valiantly, but every time I felt I was making progress, BAM! I got murdered again. I kept a death count during my first playthrough of this game, and at least 20 of those deaths occurred in the first area of the game.

I realized the problem. I was playing this game like it was Dark Souls. But it isn’t Dark Souls. It’s BLOODBORNE. This game wanted me to be aggressive and fast, not defensive and slow. These enemies had done that, and I wasn’t up to snuff. These enemies had changed into vicious beasts with no regard for their own safety, who just charge in and kill me easily. I was envious of them.

Somehow, I was able to beat the first boss, The Cleric Beast, using my old style. Albeit, after about five tries. I thought that maybe it would work out… and then I met Father Gascoigne. This boss is the embodiment of the play style Bloodborne wants you to adapt. He did everything you were supposed to be doing to be able to conquer this game. I died to him twice, and then, somehow, during my third attempt, something happened. I metaphorically transformed into one of the beasts I had spent the last nine hours fighting, I abandoned my defensive play style… and I fucked his face.

From then on, I no longer faced any real choke points in the game. Most bosses were beaten in 1 to 2 attempts, most areas could not best me, and there were very few times that I was at a loss about what to do next. This game FORCED a metamorphosis of sorts onto me, and it turned me into the type of gamer I needed to be in order to survive and thrive in the world of Yharnam. What other games can say that they forced you to change with their game mechanics?

None of this is even touching on the setting of the game of the themes therein. Let’s discuss that.

Most of the game is set in a gothic Victorian area, where people are out hunting “beasts” as their ritual. This all seems pretty awesome, the beasts are lycanthropes, and there are crazy townspeople. There is nothing unappealing about all of those things. But I felt that there was something beneath the surface, something more than just this hunt and the gothic setting.

Dear baby Jesus, was I right.

Halfway through the game, it changes into something H.P. Lovecraft probably had wet dreams about. Suddenly, we’ve got Old Great Ones, Cthulhu looking bosses, and so. Much. MADNESS. There are enemies that literally drive you insane by looking at you. Around this point, I also discovered that the in-game currency known as Insight had an entirely different function that was not explained. As you gain insight, things about the game world change; enemies gain new movesets, secrets begin to be revealed, and if you get enough insight, you’ll see giant tentacle creatures out in the pre-Lovecraftian areas. Just clinging to buildings, no big deal.

EXCEPT THAT I FREAKED THE FUCK OUT AND SCREAMED LIKE A LITTLE GIRL. OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT THING AHHHH!

This game also has a never ending fascination with the horrors of pregnancy and childbirth. And blood. So much blood.

This game immersed me into its world so completely, that I scavenged every item I could find so I could read the item descriptions, hoping for another piece of lore to this amazing story puzzle. The beginning has an unknown character say, “Yharnam is the home of blood ministration; you need only unravel its mysteries.” And I painstakingly unraveled. Every victory, every failure and every discovery felt extremely personal to me, and I was more invested in this game than I have been in my love life. I’m glad I was single when this game came out, because I would have neglected my significant other something FIERCE.

Bloodborne is the best game ever. That is my statement in this article. I’ve listed my reasoning and I’ve fanboyed all over this article to the point that I feel the need to grab some tissues and wipe it off. So, if you haven’t, buy this game.

Or I’ll find you.

I've been a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire since I was in high school, so about ten years now, and I have a distinct memory from that time. I was gushing about the series to a friend of mine, trying to get him to read it, and mentioned how there should be a movie, except there was so much content it would have to be a TV show.

I wish I could go back in time and slap my teenaged self in the face, because it turns out that isn't what I wanted at all.

Don't get me wrong. From what I've seen of HBO's Game of Thrones (admittedly just the first season), it's fantastic. In fact, it's exactly what I would have wanted, except for one caveat: the books aren't finished yet.

I try not to be the pretentious asshole that won't shut up about how "I read the books first" with every form of media. Really. I do. In fact, I'm successful more often than not. With A Song of Ice and Fire though, I find it almost impossible. Mostly, I think its from this false sense of entitlement I get from having these books in my life (and a fairly big part of it, as far as books go) for almost half of it.

When I see the show get to the point where it's beginning to outpace the books, my initial reaction is simply "how dare they!"

I know it's a completely ludicrous reaction to have. I know the adaptation is its own entity. I know there's no logical reason for me to feel this way. I know that my way of enjoying this wonderful saga isn't the only way to enjoy it. I know all these things.

But god damn it, I don't want to spend who knows how many years of my life avoiding spoilers for the show on the internet, waiting for George R.R. Martin to finish writing these books.

Sure, the show may have a different ending compared to the books, but I can guarantee that there will at least be a seed of what happens in the books, especially with Martin consulting. There's even a chance the ending of the show will actually influence the ending of the books. All I know is that the show will stop airing long before the books stop being published.

So, I'm going to make my plea now, before the show actually gets farther: Please no spoilers on Facebook. At least on Tumblr, people can weed out any relevant tags to keep themselves from spoilers, but that's much harder to do on other social media platforms.

I love that so many people have fallen in love with this world and its incredible characters. All I ask is that the way you enjoy the saga doesn't affect the way others enjoy it. Let's just all agree right now to be cool about spoilers, because it's gonna take me forever to get to where the show watchers will be in a couple years.

I've kept my mouth shut about what happens for years, so now it's your turn to return the favor. Please. I'm begging you.

Bobby Drake is gay, but Bobby Drake also isn't gay. So now sexuality becomes the latest victim of the increasingly complicated and convuluted X-Men timeline.

For those of you unaware of what's been going on in the X-Men comics for the past couple years, the original five X-Men (Iceman, Cyclops, Beast, Angel and Jean Grey) have been taken from their time and placed into the current 616 timeline, causing a whole mess of weird time-space issues.

Most recently, it was revealed in the latest issue of All-New X-Men, that the wise-cracking and flirtatious Bobby "Iceman" Drake has been putting up a front this whole time and is actually gay, information found out when Jean decides to rip into his privacy and read his mind (which is a whole other problem).

What really complicates things is the confirmation by Jean that Bobby's future (or current, depending on perspective) self is NOT gay. The scene is actually kind of strange because Jean both says that she KNOWS Iceman isn't gay, but also uses his failed relationships as circumstantial evidence that he isn't. But when she said that she knew, based on the fact that Jean is basically just a super-powered snoop (like any teenager with telepathy might be) I figured she had read his mind. Which is not that much of a jump to make, honestly. When she was at the Jean Grey School, she had even less boundaries than now. Why wouldn't she glance at the mind of the guy dating her beloved teacher?

That little bit of information of current Bobby being straight is what makes the whole thing offensive to me, and I feel like I'm the only one who sees it.

I think this could have been a really interesting moment, if when Bobby said "my future self isn't [gay]" Jean said, "Yes, he is. He's been hiding it just like you." Instead she says "I know." So what is the message here about sexuality?

Did Bobby somehow change his sexuality? Was being straight his secret secondary mutation? What exactly is going on here? My first thought would be that maybe they actually are from an alternate timeline, but the Battle of the Atom event showed current Cyclops phase out of existence when young Cyclops was fatally injured, so that theory goes right out the window.

So, there are two options left: Bobby changed his sexuality at some point, an idea that I find deeply offensive, or current Bobby will become gay, which is basically the same thing. I can't even think of a reason Bobby would WANT to change his sexuality. I mean, he already faces death and is persecuted because he's a mutant, so I don't really see what extra fuel being gay could throw on that fire.

I know Brian Michael Bendis has already responded to claims about bi-erasure by making him not bisexual, but nothing about what happens to the straight Bobby Drake.

(As an aside, I think making Bobby bisexual would have been the better choice here. It would allow more facets to his character without making things weirdly complicated.)

What exactly happens to this character that we know and (some of us) love? If the Bobby I've been reading for years is, like Jean says, straight, what happens to him now? Is he the same character?

This is where things get tricky, because sexuality isn't a defining characteristic for a person, but it's definitely a big part of who you are. Imagine waking up one day and everything about you is the same except for who you want to bed. It would be pretty jarring, wouldn't it? You wouldn't feel like you even though you WERE you.

It's this weird idea of a sudden shift in who you are that leaves a bad taste in my mouth with this story. I don't care that there are two Bobbys and one of them is gay (except for the fact that then Iceman and Kitty won't get back together and that was kind of adorable). I care that there is one Bobby and he was gay, but now he isn't? Or he was straight and soon won't be? I honestly don't know what's going on.

Bendis has said to see how the story gets wrapped up in Uncanny X-Men #600, so until then I'll keep an open mind. But this needs to be handled delicately.

So, godspeed, Bendis. Please, make it believable. Make it real. Make it actually a striking blow for the LGBTQ community. Make it not another weird timeline hiccup that consistently plague X-Men comics.

Daydreaming is a crucial part of my thought process. Sometimes it directly contributes to my work, offering new ideas when I get stuck, but mostly it’s self-serving and purely for entertainment. Sometimes it’s both. I used to think “daydreaming” was insufficient in describing the experience, but I reconsidered it after remembering how awesome dreams are. The major difference I make between daydreaming and regular dreaming is the level of control, and even then the lines can blur (spoiler: I used to be way into lucid dreaming).

“What’s up, Nick?”

“Oh, you know. Just exploring what I perceive as an infinitely large thought space where anything can happen according to my conscious and subconscious desires.”

The way I describe daydreaming - programmable rules, “infinite” storage space - somewhat resembles a Turing machine. We don’t explicitly define the states required to run the simulation because we don’t need to. They’re inferred, but imprecise. What we lack in precision, however, we make up for in imagination. Most of us don’t actually take the time to mentally compute precise values for measurable things like distance or color because it’s not necessary when building a reasonable model of something. We need a ballpark estimate, not 64-bit floating point values. For example, I can imagine what it would look like if the force of gravity flipped and everything in the room fell to the ceiling without solving physics or collision equations. We automatically apply our experiences and knowledge to any mental scenario. This is also why I win every argument I ever have in the shower when I’m by myself.

I had more time for daydreaming before grad school, but before grad school I used to say that I had more time for daydreaming before college, so you can probably see where that goes. Realistically, I probably spend about as much time per day on it as I ever did. There was a lull during college; the time was reallocated to prioritize computer shit. After years of learning and practice, I’m gradually earning back my daydreamer certification.

Long before I saw The Matrix, I yearned for brain-computer interfaces. It was one of my very first daydreams - the kind that distract you long enough during school to get in trouble. The original thought came to me when I was about 6 years old. I had just gotten the hang of using the mouse AND keyboard simultaneously, but I had plenty of room for improvement. Ultimately, I wanted to play Warcraft with my mind and overcome the limitations of my physical form. For a very long time, this was the extent of my wishes. That’s a bad thing. When an idea stops developing in my daydreams, it becomes boring and eventually gets replaced with something more stimulating. That’s not exactly breaking news for anyone who is human, but it drove me nuts when I was younger. In the past few years, the brain-computer thing started to return in a big way.

It began with Snow Crash, a staple for cyberpunk fans. I’m hesitant to use that genre name, as people always argue about this shit. Call it what you like - I’ll call it an awesome cyberpunk novel. The technology described in the text was a wet daydream - a diurnal emission - for someone who had just been given a piece of paper that symbolized some level of competency in programming computers to do things. I don’t like sharing too many details about books for fear of ruining someone’s first contact, so I’ll leave it as highly recommended by me, Nick.

In real life, I paid more attention to news stories on prosthetic limbs and robotics. Every week, slashdot would have a new story on a team that had either built a stronger, lighter, more responsive robotic hand, or slapped it into some human and made the damn thing actually work. Later, I saw a study that reconstructed video clips from brain scans using some clever applications of machine learning and data mining. Mind-controlled helicopters were next, then most recently, the story of a guy who moved another guy’s body parts by using a brain-computer-brain interface. Turns out we aren’t stuck in read-only mode after all! This was the article that got me thinking about the next steps.

See, we can hold a conversation, if...

We can speak the same language or have a reliable translator

Vocabularies should be reasonably compatible

We possess the emotional intelligence necessary for not only expressing ourselves, but understanding others

We use a medium compatible with the message contents. Available options:

Face to face (audio, visual, touch)

Webcam (audio and video)

Phone or VoIP (audio only)

Text (written note, email, instant message)

You don’t have to be a programmer to understand that a lot of that shit can go wrong. Humans are exceptional at compensating for limitations - emoticons, italics, memes - but at the end of the day, I’m still attempting to capture an expression that resides in my brain using symbols that hopefully mean something to you and translate correctly so your understanding of the expression is (functionally) equivalent to mine. You don’t know how I feel just because I told you. Instead, you know what you think I feel based on your translation efforts and my attempt to symbolize what I actually feel.

Thankfully, humans excel at this, but there are still no guarantees. Some of the biggest arguments I've had with people were because of simple misunderstandings. What if you could instantly feel how I felt? How would our communication change? I would love to see a brain-computer-brain interface where the users could relay abstract thoughts or emotions without saying a word. When I talk with my wife, I wonder where the depth of our thoughts ends. If I tell her I’m feeling a little sad one day, I usually don’t explain that it’s because the eventual heat death of the universe signifies that everything we do is meaningless, even though the life and time we have as a species until then is incredibly valuable and important, so it’s not really that bad, but it’s still kind of bad. If I don’t share that information, then all you know about that transaction is that Nick’s feeling a little sad. Who cares? Chalk it up to brain chemicals and get back to work! If you know the reason behind it, does it make a difference?

Do the details even matter? If they matter, should they be shared? Part of the beauty about being alone in your own brain is not having to explain yourself to yourself. I’m given the freedom to express myself at my disclosure. Moreover, I’m not sure I could stomach letting anyone besides my closest friends feel my every impulse, and I’d only be game for it on my good days. But the prospect of “truly” feeling how someone else feels, without losing anything in translation, is enticing. I say “truly” because I imagine that even a direct link would be problematic. Even if the technology is perfect, the individual neurological differences between participants could make raw messages wholly incompatible. Instead, they must be forced through personal calibration filters before they can be understood. And even if the transmission is flawless… do you really want to know the reasons and feelings behind someone’s words?

That’s only the beginning. Long-term brain storage, human brain simulation, transplanting memories… There’s much to see, if we’re lucky. All warnings and implications aside, I’d love to try this in my lifetime. I’m hopeful that we’ll see it, although I hope that the old-fashioned way is still an option when it comes to sex.

I just returned from six hours of interviewing at the beautiful, yet intimidating Microsoft Redmond master hive. Only four of those hours were spent in actual interviews; the rest is allocated for essential things like lunch and tours. The position I applied for was a summer internship as a Software Development Engineer in Test, or SDET, which I would summarize as a coding position where your primary objective is to break other people’s code with your code. Is Code Wars copyrighted? Never mind, it’s already being used.

Preparing for these interviews can be daunting. A seemingly endless amount of programming knowledge is at your disposal, so how do you prioritize what to learn and practice? To be perfectly honest, I haven’t really gotten the hang of this yet. To prepare, I wrote some implementations of quicksort and mergesort, cracked open my ADTs textbook, and fucked around with template classes to make array-based and node-based stacks.

I had four interviews, each with a single interviewer in a private room with a whiteboard. After formalities, they’ll ask you to work on some kind of problem, then you’ll have some kind dialogue as you work toward a solution. I’d say three out of the four interviews went very well. I had very nice discussions about interesting problems. The interview prep material provided before your interview highlights that the problem-solving process is what’s being observed, not whether your solutions are correct, never mind optimized. To an extent, I believe that’s true. Regardless, I really wanted to straight up kill anything they threw at me. It didn't quite work out that way.

One of my problems was on finding all paths in a graph between a start node and an end node. I wanted to say “Look man, I do graphics, not graphs,” but it’s generally a bad idea to make snide remarks at the interviewers. Graph problems can be notoriously challenging; what seems like a simple approach can be difficult to formalize, especially on the fly in an interview setting. I spent some of my interview preparation time looking at stacks, so I worked on a depth-first search solution that used stacks to solve the problem.

Long story short, parts of my shit worked and seemed to be on the right track, but I ran short on time and didn't have a working solution by the end of the interview. I was afraid of that, so during the process I asked plenty of questions and spoke out loud about the issues I was having and what I might do to approach them. My interviewer was helpful and pointed out useful things, but ultimately I still felt like I let him down. I’m hoping that the whole emphasis on process, not product is true.

The other three interviews felt like they went extraordinarily well. I’m not sure that my first interviewer even had a question for me. I mentioned that I worked in graphics and animation and he asked me to go on. So I did. I spent about 40 minutes talking about rendering, handling and skinning meshes, performing character animation, the model-view-projection matrix paradigm, you name it. I made sure not to go totally hog-wild and asked him a few times if he’d like me to keep going, and he said yes. I didn't really solve any problems, but I apparently gave an entertaining overview on some of the shit that I handle on a daily basis.

After the interview, he mentioned how his background was in physics, so some of the challenges I discussed for realistic rendering were easy to understand and interesting to him. It was a good way to start off my interviews, and it was a nice reminder that I really do find all of the shit I work on interesting since I had so much fun talking about it. I’m not sure that this was how he planned the interview to go, but he seemed pretty happy with it.

The other two interviews were far more oriented on testing. For one, I was told that my résumé wouldn't print on a network printer from the interviewer’s laptop, and I had to develop a way to find the problem using testing methods. With enough questions and clarification, I narrowed it down to an issue with the printing driver in his version of Windows.

The scenario he described was a real bug in Windows ME that they encountered during development, and it made for an interesting discussion on how testers try to pinpoint the precise area of failure. Another question from the same interviewer involved how I might test that two web browsers rendered a collection of websites identically, which was surprisingly fun to discuss and design.

The final interview was the easiest and most relaxed. I wrote and tested a function that evaluated whether two strings were anagrams, then we talked about some issues with testing cloud services between multiple devices. I felt extremely thankful for such a nice end to a long day.

With that in mind, here are some helpful hints for any technical interview!

Don’t study. You almost certainly won’t be tested on the very little that you attempt to cram in during the few days before your interview, so why bother?

Make as much small talk as possible. If you spend more time talking about the latest episode of "Once Upon a Time" or “those fuckin’ Mac users,” you have less time to answer their technical questions and screw up!

Don’t ask questions. It’s a sign of weakness and shows that you don’t have any confidence in your problem-solving skills.

Don’t talk. Figure out the problem entirely in your head or with illegible, microscopic handwriting on the whiteboard before simply stating, “I’m finished,” then sit down and stare at them until the interview finishes.

Eat and drink as much sugar as you can. You've got a long day! Sugarless foods and water only take up space in your body. It’s all about acquiring as much sugar as you can fit inside your skin for the longest amount of time.

Alternately, do the opposite of those things and have fun!

So, I have my final exam of the semester tomorrow (hooray!) and I’ve had next to nothing going on the last five days. What do I do when I have next to nothing going on?

Go on a television binge!

I love my television binges. It allows me to relax in bed with my trusty laptop and mull about watching my favorite series along with a pack of Tic Tocs. (For the Americans of the group, this is a Tic Toc and they are DELICIOUS!)

Now, when I say television binge, it takes a very special show to perfect this already magical experience – in this particular persons case, it is anything narrated by Sir David Attenborough. I love Attenborough – to put it in a non-obsessive way.

Believe me, my Attenborough fandom is pretty intense.

The particular Attenborough goodness I vegetated with this week was his "Africa" series. It is by far my favorite series yet for a variety of reasons. I often will find myself screaming with excitement as I see baby ostriches crawling across the desert in search of their first ever drink. Then there are all the mischievous actions of the birds as they tease meerkats, but I can’t sit here all day and gush about  adorable animals.

My point, here, ladies and worms – is how informative, educational and intriguing Attenborough makes his documentaries. Never have I ever found a documentary interesting until I set my eyes on one by Attenborough. Whether it is his British accent, the interesting facts he tells, the remarkable footage they capture (or a combination of all three,) I think it’s safe to say that all the above and more are what capture audiences’ worldwide and keep their eyes glued to the television time and time again. Just a short and sweet rave here today, lads. However, I do give David Attenborough’s Africa, 10/10 Tic Tocs. Go and watch it, turds!

Well, thanks! Hope you enjoy it! We're all having fun with it.

I do think Christine may be offended at the lads bit, if she weren't off drinking and probably acting tougher than me.

I had a very terrible thought the other day: when inequality is truly eliminated from this world, I'm going to miss one of the byproducts of it.

No, I'm not talking about the privilege I get from being a straight white male in America. (Although, if I'm being perfectly honest, it's nice. Wrong, obviously, but it's one less thing I have to worry about.) What I'm going to miss is really good X-Men stories.

I love the X-Men. The X-books are the ones I look forward to the most every month. I can't even begin to explain how psyched I am for “Amazing X-Men” on Wednesday. Kurt is coming back? That just made my year. The struggles of the mutants are what will always keep me firmly on the Marvel side of the perpetual Marvel/DC war. Well, that and the editorial gaffs at DC.

However, the Marvel mutants have always been a thinly veiled allegory for whatever group is the most downtrodden at the time. Right now, especially given the current political climate in America, the mutants are pretty clearly the LGBTQ community.

There was the recent marriage between Northstar and his long-term boyfriend, Kyle. I even saw mutants with a “Don't Legislate Hate” banner in a more recent run of “Uncanny X-Men.” In the current run of “Uncanny X-Men,” when some of the parents find out about their kids being mutants, they act like stereotypically conservative parents would act if they found out their kid was gay. So, for better or worse, the mutant community is the gay community.

(As a total aside, the cynic in me has a really big issue with Northstar's wedding: Marvel brings back “Astonishing X-Men” so a couple issues later they can have a giant, gay, interracial, mutant/human wedding. It really hits every button. “Astonishing X-Men #51” seemed like such a huge publicity grab. I'm excited that it was a thing, honestly, I am. It's nice to see interracial/homosexual couples in the media, but a big wedding for a couple that happens to be both seems less like organic storytelling and more like a way for Marvel to show off how accepting they are. Just be cool, Marvel. Nobody likes the straight guy who loudly mentions how accepting he his of his gay friends. Be the guy that doesn't treat them differently.)

I can't help but wonder, though, what the next group mutants will be an allegory for. Humanity changes enough, that I'm sure something is going to come up. As a species, we love to find groups to exclude. I wonder what new marginalized group of people will see their own struggle in the adventures of Kitty Pryde, Cyclops and Wolverine? I wonder if that will actually change the stories being told?

If it weren't for intolerance in America, there's no way we would have had the X-Men, at least not as they are. When humanity finally becomes accepting of different types of people, then what will happen to them? Will they die out or will there stories just become toothless? Yet another group of superheroes, without a uniting struggle.

I do my best to promote tolerance in the real world, but I know it's working against one of the things I love most. Which is a really weird thought to have.

I certainly appreciate your more optimistic view, and really, I hope it's the right one. I hope the only reason they're all on that book is because Al Ewing wanted them there, because you're right: they certainly don't have a reason to be in Stark's Avengers.

I'm just always a bit of a cynic, and a team of almost exclusively minority characters seems a lot like a move for attention more than anything else. I'm waiting for the book to prove me wrong.

I do feel that saying diversity is NEVER forced is a bit of a stretch. At the very least, it's forced on almost every college pamphlet ever.