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. 

It was called "Google's experiment with gaming" when it launched an abortive Second Life clone and shut it down a few weeks later. Not only was that a horrendous misnomer - that nonsense wasn't a game in the slightest - but the press sounded as if they permanently shut a door on Google's entry into an ever-growing market. Google stuck its toes in the water, the water was filled with piranhas, Google will never go near the water again. In truth, the Goog ignored the possibilities entirely, and its lack of gaming projects has left them excluded from a marketing sector.

And thankfully, someone is bringing it back. Bungie integrated basic online stats lookups in Halo 2, and really unleashed its potential with Halo 3. Players are getting a kick out of following their numbers (like accuracy, favorite weapons, best-performing maps, most likely areas to die) as much as simple stuff like Achievements. A few strategy-game makers are following suit, and Blizzard is sure to make a big feature out of it in StarCraft II. Valve also keeps detailed stats on its games for balancing and anti-cheating purposes, but its keeps all its data to itself.

Not only have I attempted to help a friend improve his quality of life (by way of advice on schools and skills and careers) but the TV version of Ira Glass' This American Life has left me wondering about my own.

The finale of Season 2, John Smith, borrows the concept from an old Washington Post piece looking at one complete life by piecing together the lives of seven different men, who don't know one another, but share the name John Smith, the most common name in America.

The baby John Smith was a few weeks old, and lived vicariously through his parents. Their dreams for him were big - maybe President or CEO - but they hoped for the usual things - a happy family, a life as a working man, an education.

The 8-year-old John Smith was a bit like any other kid - he went to school, he played in the yard. Like me, he looked for something to control. At school, he played the policeman whenever he could. At home, he often played by himself.

The 24-year-old John Smith was unlike me - unsure of himself, looking for direction, trying to balance a steady job with drug offenses. I'm lucky to not be in such a situation.

The 40-or-50-something John Smith welcomed his son home from Iraq, and set about repairing a strained relationship. 

A 50-something John Smith visited his father - the 79-year-old John Smith - at the nursing home every day after work. Even when the elder was in a bad mood, the loyal son was there, saying what he could to a man who was confined to a wheelchair, jaw stuck open, and said little in response. But, in the paraphrased words of the infant John Smith's father, he may have sat at the head of the table at Thanksgiving and simply silently admire d this family that he had created.

In order of age, I skipped one, because his story hit home. The 30-something John Smith worked in the Xbox division at Microsoft. He spent his time in meetings or answering emails, was tethered to a Blackberry, and traveled frequently. He had a wife and a beautiful baby girl, but his mother was on the way out the door. And the piece focused on what this did to John. To him, it felt as though everything had been thrown into the air, leaving him unable to focus on everything that he knew he had - the job, the wife, the baby, the house, the car. (The same things that the eldest John Smith had black-and-white photographs of, to illustrate this eponymous American life - one of aspiration, of acquisition, of work and of family.)

It could have been me, 10 or 20 years from now. That was the point - the whole show was essentially telling the stories that we all have to go through, from growing pains to the search for one's own identity to parenthood and grandparenthood. But the 30-something John's story hit home because I know that it's what I'll go through. Many years from now, I'll have the wife and baby. There's not an ounce of doubt in my mind. And I'll lose my mom - that I couldn't possibly doubt. And it's mortifying; it's the only thing that's made my brain grind to a halt more than the thought of my own death.

Remarkably, John's mom was very brave. "I know she's not scared, but I am," John said of his mother's downhill battle with cancer. I think my mom will have the same bravery, the same peace of mind. She's smart and self-aware that way. But like John, it will throw everything I know into relief with that one giant elephant in the room - she's going, or she's gone.

John picks up the phone to call his mom on the way home from work, but then, realizing he can't call her, he just gets stuck in an infinite loop. He can't put the phone back down as easily as he picked it up.

In 10 or 20 years, I'll have the wife, the child, the house, the car, and the job. Of these things, I have no doubt. 

Whether I'll be able to appreciate them, with the distractions of American aspiration and the fear of lost loved ones, is a different story.