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I do a lot of my worst work during finals. I don’t believe that I’m alone in this regard. Finals are supposed to be representative of everything that has been learned over the course of the term, but they usually fall short in assessing this. When I have three or so major projects to work on it is very difficult for me to really get interested in any of them. I generally do my best to strongly incorporate my voice in my academic writing- I like to think that I’m giving my professors a much needed break from the monotony of grading another loosely constructed appeal to legalize marijuana from the perspective of a student whose personal motto is “’C’s get degrees.” However, at the end of the semester my voice can sound pretty similar to that of these wannabe nihilists. Like everybody else I constantly attempt to raise my spirits by thinking about how quickly summer break is coming.

It’s much easier to care at the beginning of the semester. The first few assignments and tests set the pace for the rest of your year. It’s important to do well on these both to give yourself some breathing room for your grade and also to establish good standing with the professor. After a certain point the work tends to matter less and less. It’s easy enough to finish the assignments once they’ve become a part of your routine and as long as you keep up on the readings and lectures you’ll probably do well on them. When you only have one or two projects left the uncertainty that motivated you in the beginning of the semester has diminished. The focus shifts from establishing what needs to be done to keep up in a class to an assessment of where your previously earned grades leave you. Knowing the grade that you’ve earned throughout the semester with only one grade left to compute makes it easy to determine the maximum and minimum grade that can be earned in a particular course. When I look back at my old schoolwork I can usually tell what point in the year an assignment was completed. The differences between writing from the perspectives of “I would like to get a 4.0 this semester”, “I couldn’t possibly get an A if I aced this paper” and “I could totally fail this and still get an A” is painfully obvious.

The other problem with the end of the semester is that most people are having a lot less fun. Human beings simply do better work when our spirits are high. Writing done in contempt is visibly worse than writing done with enthusiasm. College is unreasonably expensive, and it’s important to complete your work and to do well at it, but what’s the point if you're miserable the whole time?

I spend a lot of time in the library during finals, but I make sure that I enjoy my time spent away from the stacks as well. Working hard and being miserable don’t necessarily walk hand in hand. Never forget to relax- personal tension will show in your work.

Get some sun. Drink some beer. Wreck some exams. 

An Object in Motion

This evening I did something that I had never done before. I made a to-do list. Somehow despite signing up for a course in leisure I have more projects to finish at the end of this semester than I’ve ever had previously. More than the time I took 18 credits. More than the time that I accidentally signed up for three writing flags (for the record you’re only required to take two such courses in your entire undergraduate career at WSU).

So why did I spend two hours on Friday writing a four page primer for Risk when I have so much going on? The easy answer is that Risk is way more interesting than research projects. The real reason is much simpler.

Inertia.

In the episode of The Simpsons titled “Mountain of Madness” Mr. Burns and Homer find themselves lounging beside an enormous table of snacks. After reclining deep into their chairs Mr. Burns quips that “The only hard part is getting up.” A remarkably profound metaphor, if unintentionally so.

A number of the assignments that comprise my to-do list are recent developments. I’ve been working on sustaining this blog for over a month and a half. Researching and writing are easy enough, but starting in on the process is a very high hurdle.

I’ve long been a heavy procrastinator and I’ve been content to simply blame the difficulty of starting and to rely on my ability to keep running once I can get off the ground. However, difficulty is a terrible reason not to do something. An easier life is an empty goal (thanks, Dad). What I should have been working on for years is a remedy for my vice.

What I’m trying to do is to find a better way to establish momentum than to just jump into working. This to-do list is my first attempt at this. It’s a compromise between working and not working. Writing a list is negligibly more difficult than doing nothing at all and it’s almost like starting on a project.

I’d be surprised if this one change alone fixes my work ethic, but it feels like a good start. If nothing else I’ve discovered that it feels pretty great to cross things off. 

The Same Thing We Do Every Night, Pinky

One of my favorite movies of all time is Battle Royale. It’s a Japanese film about a class of students who are sent to an evacuated island to fight to the death. Each student is given a small survival kit including a random weapon and three days to kill everybody else before explosive collars fashioned around the necks of all of the students detonates. It’s a rather morbid tale, but the special effects and goofy subtitles make it very campy.

In many ways this fight to the death is a lot like a game of Risk. The objective is to eliminate all other players, each player starts with a random position and if the game goes too long it becomes unplayable (I mean, once you’re turning in cards for 40 mans you’re just asking which player is the best at rolling dice). Having seen Battle Royale more than any human being probably should and having won more tabletop games than I could possibly keep track of I’ve come up with a few guidelines for free-for-all competition. I’ll mostly use examples from Risk but these are certainly applicable in other games. And if you ever find yourself reluctantly engaged in a fight to the death they just might save your life.

RULE #1: Be Proactive

Alternatively- Get busy killing or get busy dying.

In most games there are advantages to be gained by advancing your position. In Risk you acquire a “conqueror’s card” once per turn if you conquer any territory (which can later be redeemed for mans) and you get a significant bonus if you’re able to control an entire continent. Additionally you claim all of the conqueror’s cards of any player you eliminate.

Beginning players are pretty quick to realize that they want to conquer a continent, but there seems to be a slow learning curve for learning that you want to murder anybody else who tries to hold one. Being proactive is as much about hindering your opponents as it is about helping yourself. Depending on the number of players in the game you are only allotted a fraction of your opponents combined forces, which is the way that you should be thinking about your pieces. After all, you have to eliminate a lot more mans to win than your opponents do to cause you to lose. Allowing any of them to hold a continent only pushes this disadvantage and also makes it more likely that the game will be proceed to the “random phase” (the aforementioned stage in the game when conqueror’s cards begin to grant completely ludicrous bonuses).

Personally I like to only place my mans on one or two territories in the initial placement of the game and to either conquer Australia or (preferably) South America on the first turn. I’ve also been known to go for Africa. The general rule is to follow the path of least resistance. Being early in the turn order can be very important to this end as it both allows you to take over your continent first and then use your bonus mans to break up somebody else’s before they can get their bonus. If you’re later in the turn order then your time is probably better sent just sabotaging everybody else and waiting for an opportunity to go big.

RULE #2: Play Conservatively

It’s very important to find the balance between rules one and two. I was playing with my friend Joe one time and his game plan was to attack so long as he still had mans left to do so. I’m sure that it’s not true, but I want to say that he conquered two continents on the first turn, but this left him with only one man on each of his territories. He never got a second turn.

You can only get one conqueror’s card per turn, so you should have a pretty good reason to conquer any territory beyond the first. Spreading yourself thin is a good way to lose a continent and you only get the bonuses if you can start your next turn with it.

My favorite character in Battle Royale is named Kizuo Kiriyama, or as I like to call him Cheat Codes. Kiriyama is an ice cold murderer and chalks up more kills than anybody else on the island. SPOILER ALERT- he dies anyway. Proactive as he was, he failed to survive, which was after all the primary objective. Style points are certainly worth more in a board game because you, you know, live to tell about them, but few good stories ends in “and then I lost anyway.”

RULE #3: Words Speak Louder Than Actions

Diplomacy in Risk is a funny thing. Never forget that the game is a free for all. This makes promises almost meaningless, but that doesn’t mean that your opponents won’t value them for whatever reason. If anybody asks you for any favor it’s usually correct to agree to it and then to betray them. A lot can happen in a turn and you can usually come up with a valid enough reason to rescind on your promise. They should know better than to trust their opponent. The obvious exception is when something is mutually beneficial, which usually can only mean that you are aligning yourselves against “the threat” (more on this later).

There is a lot to be said about being an enjoyable player in a multiplayer game. If you’re cracking jokes and having a good time people will want to continue playing with you. You may have noticed that I refer to game pieces as "mans". Small, quirky things like this do a surprising amount of work in terms of being liked both in-game and in life alike. If you’re complaining about being attacked then people are just going to attack you all the more. Either because they want you to take your negative elsewhere or because they are amused by your displeasure at a simple game.

Table talk is a really great way to play mind games. One of my favorite things to do is to establish an enemy in name alone. That is to say that I will pick one player to verbally spar with without necessarily ever attacking them myself. The most successful application of this is when you can actually get the table to attack that player for like, no reason. And if it doesn’t work you probably had fun anyway.

RULE #4: Be Able to Identify “The Threat”

I can’t stress enough that every other player is out to get you, but after the game has had some time to progress there is usually one player that is obviously advantaged over all of the others. There is quite a lot to be said about managing the threat.

Never align yourself with the threat

In general I try to never align myself with anybody better positioned than myself, but that rule can certainly be broken. However, you should never ally with the best positioned player. The threat is Hitler, and if you align yourself with it then you are Joseph Stalin. I think we all know how that story turned out. If anybody is able to just turn around and start eliminating players, it’s the threat. Why would you trust the player at the table that is most likely to just kill you?

Promises actually mean something once the threat is established

Just reinforcing the point that I made earlier. Once the threat is established it’s usually in the best interest of the other players to team up against it. “I’ll break South America if you’ll break Africa” is a perfectly reasonable exchange.

Once you become the threat, it’s hard to unbecome the threat

This one is kind of weird, but definitely true. Even when your forces dwindle and you’re barely hanging on people are still going to be thinking about that time that you went for Asia. Once you go big everybody else is going to try to break you, and once they’ve broken you then it probably won’t be too long before somebody finishes the job to take all of your cards. Not every game has an incentive for eliminating players, but I think that most people gain personal satisfaction from eliminating their former oppressor.

If you must become the threat…

Do it in a big way. It’s important to fly under the radar for as long as you can so that you’re better positioned when everybody else finally realizes that the game is yours to lose. It’s not always easy to evaluate, but this is my rule for when to become the threat-

The game should turn into a team competition of everybody against you and it should feel unfair that there aren’t more of them.

RULE #5: Know When to Concede

This rule doesn’t really jive with the others, but I think it’s worth mention. A lot of people think that every game of Risk goes on for days when in fact the game should most often take less than two hours. You just have to accept that the way that Risk is designed makes the end game an unnecessarily long grind. It’s true that the chance involved in Risk makes it so that there are no impossible situations, but there are plenty of boringly improbable ones. Unless you’re playing for money (or blood, I guess) there’s no reason to play to your outs if that game play results in a negative experience. When your opponent is heavily favored and the only way you can win is through an agonizing, mindless sequence of chance then you’re usually better off giving up. Consider the following scenarios:

One player is overwhelmingly dominating the game, but the other players recognize a small chance for victory. However, the game state has become unpleasant and the losing players concede.

Alternatively;

One player is overwhelmingly dominating the game, but the other players recognize a small chance for victory. The game state has become unpleasant but the losing players decided to grind it out. The game goes on for another hour and results in the expected outcome of the dominant player winning.

Or, some-crazy-how;

One player is overwhelmingly dominating the game, but the other players recognize a small chance for victory. The game state has become unpleasant but the losing players decided to grind it out. Let’s say that things go perfectly and somehow a different player wins within an hour. Congratulations to that player. They are truly skilled at rolling dice.  

The only negative that I perceive from the first scenario is that some people are too proud to admit when they’re beat. I really don’t want to play with this type of person anyhow because oh my God we’re human beings and we lose sometimes get over it. The negatives of the other two scenarios are significantly worse. That hour of unenjoyable game play is both a drain on your life and your perception of the game.

This is by no means an exhaustive piece of strategy, and I think that the most meaningful content is probably in Rule #5, but I hope that this was at least an interesting read for table-top gamers. Until next time, good luck trying to take over the world. 

A Minor Setback

As of this weekend it is officially disc golf season. Yesterday Ethan, Cole and I set out for my first round of the year (though it was Ethan’s third… He’s kind of an asshole). As we departed from the liquor store to the course at St. Mary’s University the grey skies indicated that the day might not go our way. We weren’t going to give up at the sight of rain though. A little water we could handle. Before we could make it out of town we were bombarded by marble sized hail. Not like peewee marbles either- I’m talking mashers. In the time it took us to get home the hail had let up and without a second thought we were back on our way to Goodview.

 

For those unfamiliar with how nature works, the rain left the course extremely muddy. However, getting a little mud on my boots was minor when compared to finally being able to declare winter over. On account of the mud we spent much of the day trying not to but falling over anyway.

As per usual I took a pretty solid lead on the front 9 and racked up much higher numbers on the back end. Ultimately the game ended in a three-way tie after I gave up my one point lead on the 18^th. Just sayin’.

After that we made our way to The Great Hunan, which is pretty much the greatest restaurant ever. The ONLY problem I have ever had there is that they don’t offer free refills on soft-drinks. At any other restaurant this would probably be an absolute deal-breaker, but outside of this oversight the food is fantastic and comes at a very reasonable price. Cole didn’t want to come because he prefers Winona Garden’s “like, 300 item” menu. Whatever. I was just going to get orange chicken anyway.

Dropping Cole off at home left us within ten minutes of missing our window to be seated before the kitchen closed, but we made it in time to enjoy some delicious Chinese food with our friend Isaac.

The meal was expectedly delightful and after finishing eating it was time to crack some fortune cookies. I’ve always had a certain affinity for fortune cookies that I can’t really explain. They’re not an especially good dessert, I don’t care for horoscopes and the juxtaposition of these two things is really weird if you think about it, but damned if I don’t love them anyway.

Isaac received a laughably bad fortune that foretold of a generic “social event” in his future. Ethan’s was probably stupid too. I opened this:

Accept something that you cannot change, and you will feel better.

True that. 

Peer Pressure

I had all but forgotten about peer reviews until this semester. They’re the type of memory that one can’t help but repress. The entire process was obviously designed by and for masochists. I’m sure that most professors are fed up with the depressing fact that the overwhelming majority of college students have the writing talent of Rebecca Black, but there’s no reason that I as a student should be reduced to reading their drivel. The idea is that the better writers are supposed to help out the worse ones, but this is no easy task.

Here’s how it goes-

Everybody exchanges their papers for the group to comment on. At least one (only one if you’re lucky) of these papers reads as if the writer had just pulled it out of a time capsule that they buried for themselves when they were seven.  Now, let’s assume that I want to help this individual. How do I go about this? Do I say, “This paper was really bad. You should really just start over. And I don’t mean the paper, I mean the eleventh grade,” and risk coming off too strong? Or do I try to sugar coat it and dance around my words and risk leaving them feeling that they already possess a shred of competence that they clearly do not?

I tend to stick to the smaller, padded comments in the interest of saving time. Of course, these comments are almost all met with excuses which undermine the entire purpose of doing a peer review in the first place. I’m not saying that I’m the be-all and end-all of writing, but much like Justice Potter Stewart to pornography I know crap when I see it.

 When you get past all of the technical aspects of writing (that very few good writers even get right in the first place) it becomes a very subjective business. I find the number of completely arbitrary rules that people adhere to in their writing to be... interesting. My personal favorite is the idea that one shouldn't include the word “I” in any manner of formal writing. It’s true that scholarly articles should be unbiased, but this is hardly a useful rule when writing a short paper that will never be read by anybody other than one professor and a small group of students. I wrote a paper about E-books earlier this semester that worked in a lot of my personal experience and opinion and another student critiqued me on breaking the “I rule”. I lied and told him that I “respectfully” disagreed and explained to him that my paper would be ungodly boring if I removed my voice from the work. 

In my most recent peer review group I had the great pleasure of having my paper edited by a girl who was clearly more optimistic about the revision process than I. Her comments in the margins quite possibly exceeded the length of the paper that I submitted. Her first comment was that I neglected to type my name on the document which was attached to a post under my name on a discussion board. I’m not saying that all of the comments were useless, but that was certainly a rough start. This type of comment really highlights another major problem with peer reviews- the fact that they’re graded. This forces students to try to correct things that might have never even been wrong.

Her final comment on my paper was that my conclusions came off “a bit bitter” which detracted from my “scholarly voice,” which read to me like I was erring on the side of being interesting. What would I even have to be bitter about? 

Railed

I had unwittingly walked past the train station a number of times before. I never gave a thought to what that building was as it didn’t look like the type of place that I’d ever have any reason to enter. The pavement that comprised the parking lot looked as if it had gone at least a decade without repair.

When I walked into the station I was met by a crowd evenly split between AARP members and college students. I made my way to the ticket counter and recited the six character alphanumeric string to acquire my ticket. I took a seat across from a fifty-something couple and began reading one of the books I had brought along while we waited for our ride. The couple was making conversation about how much waiting is involved in riding the train and how the whole process is boring and tiring. I was amused by this line of thought, but I didn’t speak up. I was there to board the train- not rock the boat.

The train arrived about twenty minutes behind schedule. The man at the ticket counter instructed us to make our way outside to board the train but cautioned us to watch our step. It was darker outside than it was earlier, he said. “Funny how that works,” I quipped to the girl on the bench next to me as I gathered my things.

When the train pulled up a couple dozen people walked off. Some had reached their destination, others were just getting some fresh air. Others still were feeding their nicotine addiction.

The railway personnel informed us that our car was full and that we shouldn’t bother trying to sit alone. Occupied seats were indicated by tags hanging from the overhead shelf which also indicated that passenger’s destination. I made my way to a pair of empty seats with a tag with the letters “far” on it. I knew that it was an abbreviation for Fargo, but the tag was amusing nonetheless. The window seat was reclined while the aisle seat was upright. It was obvious that the window seat was taken but I sat in it anyway.

Soon after a twenty-something black man informed me that I had taken his seat. I apologized and asked if anybody was sitting in the aisle seat. I knew that nobody was, but I was gauging whether or not I would sit there by his answer. He said no and I moved to the aisle. I could tell he was irritated that I sat in the seat that was pretty obviously taken, but he wasn’t rude about it.

I started reading my book again while Window Seat made a phone call. To the best of my knowledge he was talking to his girlfriend, who he informed he had just left “Wiscosha or Minnowa or something”.

About a half hour after the train starts moving it makes a stop. There is no announcement made and it doesn’t seem like a planned stop. I don’t know all that much about trains so I don’t ask questions and about ten minutes later we’re back on our way.

At this time a very inconsiderate man towards the back of the car begins snoring. Heavily. Most of the people in my peripheral turn to look at the man as if that is going to have any effect on him. During a particularly obnoxious bout Window Seat and I share a laugh.

“Sounds like a bear found its way aboard.”

“Mu’ fucka is hibernatin’ fo’ real.”

I get back to reading and very little happens for a long time, which is more than fine with me.

When I finish my book I notice that we’re getting close to Minneapolis. I don’t recognize any of the surrounding per se, but I’m familiar with where the stretches of nothing begin and end between Winona and the cities.

Window seat asks me if the next stop is Minneapolis. I didn’t know where all the train stopped, but I told him that it was.

An announcement is made over the intercom that we will arrive in the Minneapolis/St. Paul station in thirty minutes and I put on my coat. Window Seat offers me some Skittles, but I decline.

“You heading to Fargo?”

“What?”

I point up at his seat marker and repeat myself:

“Are you heading to Fargo?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“My little brother goes to school out there.”
“NDSU?”
“No, he lives in Fargo, but he goes to Moorehead.”
“Oh, MSU?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s a good school.”
“Yeah, he seems to like it.”

I text my father to let him know I’ll be at the station soon, but that I don’t understand why it will take so long given that I can see buildings that I can recognize as belonging to the Twin Cities. He replies with this:

That’s odd. I’ve always thought of trains as one of the 19^th century’s fastest forms of transportation. Go figure.

Touché.

A young child walks past my seat to find his older brothers in the row behind me.

“Fatwad and midget it’s time to go!”

“If anybody is the midget it’s you!”

“I’m big for my size!”

“…”

“It’s true! I mean… Age… not size.”

Window Seat calls his girlfriend again to let her know that he’s passing through Minneapolis and I make my way off the train and to my father’s car.

“Thanks for picking me up.”

“No problem. It’s going to be interesting navigating our way home. There’s some road construction around here.”
“Is there any food in the fridge?”

“Yeah. There’s some lemon chicken. I think you like that.”

“It’s a good bird.”