blakerson.com

Life is pretty grand right now. I'm making a niche in San Diego, I've got a dream job for a research gig, I can handle the academic pressures of school, and I'm beginning to be exposed to the joys of southern California, such as lots and lots of promising concerts from artists I love.

Still:

It's easy to be nostalgic when my life in Japan was so relatively easy, but I think what draws me most is the same thing that sent me there in the first place: the sheer unpredictability of each day. I didn't know where I'd eat, or who I'd meet doing so. I didn't know what I'd learn. For all my training, I still couldn't read a lot of the signs I'd see along the way, and they became miniature intellectual curiosities as I walked along.

And I could really go for some legit sushi right about now.

I still miss that general sensation of "I'm in a foreign land! I'm in Japan! Wowwwwww!" It's still a motivator, even after having lived there. For the last three years, I've been in Japan at least once every 8 months. I'm about to break that trend, and it's disappointing.

It's been a while since I've done a round of recommendations for stuff I'm consuming. Let's fix that!

-Crystal Kay: Japanese-born, halfie, bilingual R&B. All the catchiness of Japanese pop music with some seriously solid vocals on top. Lots of fun to listen to, even if you don't speak Japanese.

-DJ Hero: I understand the complaints about DJ Hero. But I don't care. Even if what I'm doing in this game isn't actually what DJs do, it's a fun enough facsimile. There are enough tracks that completely kick ass to make up for the weak ones. And I really don't care about the reportedly blah multiplayer modes. I just want to do cool DJ things, and I get to do that. The art direction is cool and the game is good. DJ Hero is, honestly, what I've wanted ever since Guitar Hero came about. I wanted a game built around an instrument I care about more than guitar, and I got that. I paid the stupidly high price for this game and don't regret it. It's pretty rare that I enjoy a game that isn't critically acclaimed, at least outside the presence of diamond-in-the-rough-seeker John Martone, but this is one such rare moment. I'm going to revel in it, even if no one else does.

-Left 4 Dead 2: I have a little clique of Left 4 Dead playing buddies, and we've really enjoyed the last 6 or so months playing together. We had mixed feelings on whether L4D2 would mess that up, but after a week with the game we're all on the same page. And it's the page I wrote a few months back: It's more Left 4 Dead. How can this be a bad thing?

-Modern Warfare 2: It unfortunately fit with the trend in Infinity Ward games: an amazing, innovative, emotionally investing game gets followed up with a solid, but relatively not boundary-pushing, sequel. See: Call of Duty 1&2, Modern Warfare 1&2. 

Clearly IW was trying to break the pattern with the infamous airport scene, but this was a hugely blown opportunity. The setup was this: you're an undercover agent sent in to root out an evil, evil former Soviet dude. So you're supposed to fall in with him, build his trust, and eventually bring down his whole empire. All of that should have been playable, in-game narrative instead of dropping you in this story's climax at the start of level fucking two. What the player gets instead is a paper-thin context from a load-screen briefing and a command: open fire on these innocent people, and go on a terroristic rampage. And when it's done, you get shot in the head and die. You play as a specific character for one level and then you're capped in the face. How much more disposable can your own in-game avatar be?

Compare that to the heaviest moment in the first Modern Warfare: halfway through the game, after you've followed this American soldier through to a climax in the Middle East, you die. You die. It was the biggest moment in gaming in 2007, and the biggest moment in 2009 is the bungled result of a very difficult development schedule dropped on IW. There wasn't time to make the player gain the trust of the evil Soviet guy, but IW couldn't spare the game this seriously heavy moment. Thanks for the mix-up, Activision. Now when anyone wants to explore the 24-esque theme of "doing horrible things to save more people," gamers will have this disappointing precedent to look back to. When will the core game publishers realize that short-term schedules impact the long-run quality of their product and their industry?

-Mos Def, The Ecstatic: I admit, I haven't given it an honest listen yet, but it's every bit as odd as other Mos Def albums. Maybe a little too out there.

-John Mayer, Battle Studies: Mayer's at his best when he's singing about things other people don't think about or can't put into words easily. His first and third albums were great for this reason, not because they were good music. So now he's adopted the most common theme of all, love, and done an entire album around it. It just seems like a waste of talent. At least two songs borrow their structures from tracks from Continuum. And what is Taylor Swift doing in my John Mayer?

PS: The cover of Crossroads is seriously lame. If Mayer is a young Eric Clapton in terms of guitar virtuosity, why isn't he showing it off here?

Supposedly the "new word going into the dictionary this year" is unfriend, the teen-drama word referring to the removal of friends from Facebook and other social networks.

Unfortunately, they got it wrong. It's defriend. Nobody says unfriend, not even 16-year-olds with questionable grips on grammar.

That's a smidge too many. Once you start asking "who is that person?" or "have I had any contact, let alone meaningful contact, with that person in 5 years?", you know it's time to cull the list.

Don't worry: if you're the kind of person who reads this stuff, you're not defriended. I'm mainly talking about people I met once at meetings or parties during college and never contacted again.

After a quick look through my list last night, I managed to bring my list down to 699, but I feel like that's not enough.

There are certain things that you've gotta do about once a year: a thorough house cleaning, IM your oldest online contacts, clean up your computer, and now, clean out your Facebook Rolodex. 

In the same sense that modern games are escapism, Monopoly must have been a capitalist fantasy escape for the world of the time. In 1935, Keynes was putting the finishing touches on his masterpiece, the book that set out what we now call Keynesian economics. (Remember all that stuff from high school about the business cycle and the government intervening in recession with public works spending to reinvigorate the economy? Yeah, we're talking about when he published that.)

The crash of 2008 showed us that the world of economics has changed. Why hasn't Monopoly?

Monopoly needs mortgage securitzation. And loan sharks. And since you can have loans, you can also have credit-default swaps.

It's sooo 1930s to simply "go out of business" - that is, lose at Monopoly - from being pushed out by competition and simple market forces. It's almost 2010, ladies and gentlemen! An honorable Monopoly winner actually saves his friend as he's about to lose by offering him mortgages on all his houses and hotels, creating a new 'deed' for the collection of those mortgages, and letting friends buy in for a share of all the revenue from the houses and hotels that people land on. Then, your friends see you're in a compromised position and take out bets on you going bust. 

Not that people really want to keep an unsustainable game of Monopoly afloat at the 3-hour mark, but it'll be worth it for the payoff. Stay with me, trooper.

So now everyone has a stake in everyone else. Loser #1 is doing OK - he's given up any chance of making any money off his houses and hotels, but he's alive. You were peachy by taking advantage of Loser #1, but now you're starting to sink since your other two buddies invested in your securitized mortgages of all the Loser's houses and hotels and are reaping all the returns. But one of those two buddies *really* wants to see you lose, because then he'll cash out on the credit default swap he took out with the second of the two buddies. Buddy #2, meanwhile, does *not* want to see you lose because he'll have to pay out, which means he'll lose too.

But wait - Buddy #2 has a secret weapon! He took out a credit default swap of his own, financed by Buddy #1, on Loser #1 going bust.

Eventually, someone misses a payment somewhere - probably Loser #1 missing a mortgage payment - and he goes belly-up. Buddy #2 cashes in with money from Buddy #1. That sends #1 into bankruptcy. Now you go bust, because you can't afford your securitized payments to everyone else. Buddy #1 would cash in on his credit default swap with Buddy #2.. except he's already bust. Whoops.

Everyone loses in spectacular fashion. Rather than get mad after 3-and-a-half hours, yell at Grandma and swear never to play Monopoly again, you've all gone down in flames, and your board game session has turned from a get-rich-quick fantasy to a reminder of how connected we all are, thanks to money.

It's a brave new world out there, friends. Your board games should be ready. Just don't let Grandma be the loan shark - she will get medieval on your kneecaps if she really has to.