That’s all.
I’m busy. Busy busy busy. Chances are that updates to this blog are going to be few this semester, but don’t lose hope!
Photo by eston on flickr
Unless you’ve been living in my household, you’ve probably heard of a game called Apples to Apples. It’s quite popular, and everybody I know seems to play it and adore it and love it. I, however, had never played it before a few weeks ago.
It’s common for “the group” mind to overhype things—”like” turn into “love,” and “eh” turn into “blech”. It confused me how this game could be hyped up so much, though.
It’s fun… ish. The premise of the game is that each person gets some “noun” cards—cards with things, places, ideas, names, common and proper nouns. You go around a circle, and when someone is up, they pick out an “adjective” card. This card is any generic adjective. Everybody else then picks one of their nouns that “works” with the adjective, and the person who chose the adjective card chooses which noun he or she “likes” best. It can be funny, it can be silly, it can be true, it can be random.
This is where the game falls apart in my head.
The game is silly. The cards have funny sayings on them, and the odd pairings are enjoyable. But that’s about it. Other than that, there’s no rhyme nor reason in this game. People can choose whatever card they like, there’s no strategy, no skill, and what I like to call “self-realized” cleverness—the pairing you submit may be genius in your mind, yet absolutely not to the other person.
My family played a lot of board games, and I love most of them. My parents were never the biggest fans of games like Monopoly (it takes too long), but they—and I—love word games, like Boggle and Scrabble and the like. The thing about any of these games—strategy, word, and whatever else—is that they involve thought. Thought in the sense of planning or tactics or cleverness. And perhaps even more underlying is the fact that these games are competitive. You can win. You can lose. You can play a certain way to affect your outcome. It isn’t all random. And with this competitiveness comes a satisfaction that a game like Apples to Apples cannot come even close to matching. By winning Apples, what have you done? Well, not much. You’ve essentially been randomly selected as winner. Congratulations.
I guess you can argue that based on people’s personalities, some people like funnier pairings, some people relevant pairings, etc. But after playing this game, observing others, and attempting at some semblance of strategy, I’ve realized this isn’t true. So I went back to picking what I thought were the funniest pairings, playing for my own self-amusement. In terms of the group game, it worked sometimes; it didn’t others. So the game goes. Sure this game may not be about “winning” in the same sense that other games are, but after a while the game didn’t really seem to be about anything.
It comes down to this: It isn’t a competitive game, nor a game that requires skill, nor a game that requires strategy, nor a game that requires much thought or effort. It’s a game played for the sheer silliness and group enjoyment. And there’s nothing wrong with that, really. It’s a decently fun game, and I’d say I like it. But there’s nothing about it that would turn that “like” into “love.”
I’m back in Los Angeles after spending a month in New York City. Though I’ll write fuller posts about my experiences in NYC later, I just wanted to say… man, what an awesome place. Easy to get around, easy to explore, so much life.
I realized that I don’t really know Los Angeles so well. My goal for the next month or so, because I don’t have a job, is to explore LA. Harder to do than NYC because LA is so ridiculously big, but I’m going to try. In fact, I’ve already started:
I went to the kickoff event of this thing called Trekking Los Angeles, which is a program that takes you around LA to experience the culture, street food, music, art, and more. The event I went to was sponsored by GOOD Magazine (where my friend Wesley works) and was held at Mercado La Paloma, a very nice community center with some stores and restaurants inside. The place used to be a sweatshop, until it was converted and remodeled; you can see it when driving on the 110 freeway—it’s a huge building with a large mural on the back.
The event was an awesome chance for me and my friends to chill, eat good food, listen to music, talk, and more. At one point, we were standing around when I noticed a girl that looked really familiar. I said to my friend, Cole, “That girl looks really familiar,” thinking it was either Natalie Portman or a girl from my elementary school. Well, Cole assured me it was Natalie Portman. And yes, it turns out, it was Natalie Portman. At this semi-small event (40 or so people at a time, 100 folks total, maybe?), it was crazy seeing her chilling there, eating with her friends.
A couple days ago, I went to the second day of the Electric Daisy Carnival. I made the decision to go around 6pm after debating for, oh, a month or so whether or not to go. It’s a pretty expensive concert (80 bucks for Saturday), and none of my high school friends in my grade/group were going that night. But the lineup was AMAZING, so I said, to hell with it, and I went alone.
Turns out Electric Daisy Carnival is the biggest dance party in North America, boasting record numbers this year (90,000 the night I went), and the experience was phenomenal. People were dressed in ridiculous costumes (and wearing ridiculously little), there were lights everywhere, and many of my favorite house/techno/electronica acts ever were there. I got to see, in order, Kaskade, Groove Armada, Benny Benassi, David Guetta, Simian Mobile Disco, and Infected Mushroom.
Kaskade and Groove Armada had great sets. Benny Benassi is a PHENOMENAL dj, spinning and mixing some awesome beats. A couple DJs did a classy thing and played some Michael Jackson. (The fireworks in the background were an awesome touch too 
). David Guetta is fun—very poppy, very catchy. I stayed for about half an hour or so, then left to check out Simian Mobile Disco. I love their stuff, and their live set was awesome. They seemed to be hovering around a table with two laptops and two large boxes with a bunch of buttons and dials and wires. Who knows what they were doing. Whatever. As long as music came out. Infected Mushroom had a sick set too, performing their songs live. This may be what they do every time, but seeing it for the first time was amazing. They were drumming their own beats on an electronic drum set; they had a guitarist; a guy on some synth instrument; and a guy singing. Wow.
To put it lightly, it was epic. Imagine partying, dancing, and rocking out to the sickest beats ever for eight hours. I (luckily) was able to find a couple folks a year younger than me from high school, and later I found my friend Shivani from Yale. Honestly, it was an amazing, fun, beautiful experience, and I’d go again in a heartbeat.
Now what? Well, we’ll see. I’m still on the lookout for fun stuff to do, cool exhibits, concerts, places, restaurants, beaches, and whatever else.
Quick links that all happen to be from Wired’s Underwire blog:
- Story that takes 1,000 years to read. Awesome.
-Ponyo, the cute Japanese movie that I haven’t finished watching, is premiering in LA at the LA Film Festival on June 28. Voice actors include: Tina Fey, Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett
- Beck and friends cover classic albums in a day (sans rehearsal) and offer tracks for free every week
This is our group’s final project for our Intellectual Property in the Digital Age class. I hope to pursue this in the future (with the help of the new Yale Students for Free Culture).
Crossposted from ipinthedigitalage.com
Our group wanted to figure out the state of Open Access (OA) at Yale, and what it would take to improve it. Our project basically consisted of three phases:
We read about OA, finding some really excellent resources (SPARC, Peter Suber, OASIS) in the process. Then we talked to seventeen professors (none of the administrators we tried to talk to were available, unfortunately). We listened to some of their concerns about OA (mostly arising from misconceptions about the peer-review process for OA journals), heard their opinions, found out what the general perception is. To summarize: we found that most of them had some sort of idea what OA was about. Several were enthusiastic, most were willing to give it a try, and only a few were skeptical. This is intended to go beyond a simple class project: we’d like to extend it to an effort to get an actual organized OA campaign going here. That shouldn’t be too hard; professors didn’t mind the idea, and there are enough people high up willing to listen (and enough people down low willing to talk) that we could get something really moving.
Our research and our results are available at http://openaccess.its.yale.edu. Check it out!
-James, Christian, Adi, Evin, and Ben
I haven’t (macro)blogged in forever. It’s not good. I have so many stories. jiodsjafoidjsaf.
Let’s start in reverse chronological order (that will probably fall apart):
My friend Cole Ott from Dartmouth was here the past couple days. Hope he had a fun time. Also, a friend from my high school is coming to Yale! Yay!
I went to a “floating dance party.” Three 30-minute mixes were sent out via email and loaded up to iPods. Everybody gathered, pressed play at the same time, and danced ALL around campus.
I saw Nandan Nilekani, the co-founder/co-chairman of Infosys, speak on the future of India. That was pretty cool… learned some interesting facts about disparities in India economically, socially, politically… but, honestly, speakers need to learn how to answer questions.
Mark Sonnenblick and Gabe Zucker wrote a short musical based on Ray Bradbury’s The Toynbee Convector short story. What a cool story. And good music.
I gave a bunch of tours to middle schoolers. It’s fun.
I celebrated Holi. It’s an Indian holiday celebrating spring where everybody throws red and blue and white and green paints and powders and water. We were all covered. It was wonderful.
We had our last improv show 
The Purple Crayon said bye to our three lovely seniors, Ned, Axel, and Ashley.
I went to master’s tea with Jodie Foster (Calhoun ‘85!!!!!) which was really good. She talked about acting, her time here at Yale, and more! She was surprisingly blunt, but at the same time vague. Weird huh. She also doesn’t see the humor in romantic comedies, which I thought was funny.
Spring Fling @ Yale. Epic. Three Yale bands (including Great Caesar and Suitcase of Keys, who were phenomenal) + Colin Munroe (who I missed) + Wale (who was fun) + The Decemberists (who were amazing, true to their sound, and had fun with the audience) + N.E.R.D (who were SO much fun, though the crowd got crazy) + Girl Talk (who always has solid sets)
EDIT: I also chatted up with Girl Talk afterwards. I “made him” a headband in the middle of his set… as in, I took my headband and put a CC sticker on it 
He thanked me, then I said I was a part of Yale Students for Free Culture. He then was like “Nice! You guys are my crew!” We talked a bit afterwards. It was nice.
Yale Students for Free Culture had an event where we screened the movie RiP: A Remix Manifesto four days before the New York City premiere. Guest speakers included art student Ely Kim, director of content at OLPC SJ Klein, and (before the event) co-founder of Facebook, Chris Hughes. It was a huge sucess (in my book)… about 35 to 40 people came!
I visited the particle accelerator at Yale. Axel took a group of us in the morning. Epic. Like, honestly, the feats of science will never cease to blow my mind.
I’m excited for FOOT (freshman outdoor orientation trip) stuff. The people are amazing.
There was a big school-funded rave in Becton plaza called “Electro.” Epic.
I’ve been interviewing teachers for my Intellectual Property in the Digital Age project. Our group is doing research on Open Access at Yale. It’s interseting what science teachers have to say about this. More on this in the future!
Once again, a million plays are going on.
I briefly saw the president of Liberia speak. She was funny
Bulldog Days, which is Yale’s admit weekend, happened on an unfortunately very rainy Monday and Tuesday. But besides the weather, it was a lot of fun. I met a bunch of cool prefrosh, had a LOT of Purple Crayon-related events (including our show, which PACKED Pierson dining hall), and had fun giving tours. Overall good times.
I saw Of Montreal at Toad’s. They were great! It was one of the most fun concerts I’ve ever been to… strange side performancesgoing on during the show, but fun music/people! Our group worked our way to the very front, so we got painted red and interacted with the performers. Chris and I both got setlists too!
The Purple Crayon performed an hour-long improvised Shakespeare, which was AWESOME. It was a lot of fun (and it worked out really well!). It was called “Proteus Tacklus” (the suggestion was “pro wrestling,” and someone in the audience–Tully?–Shakespearized it).
Low Strung, an all cello rock/pop group here, played an outdoor concert, which was phenomenal. They played MichaelJackson, Britney Spears, and Metallica. Epic. Epic. Epic.
The Wednesday before was epic:
1. I had dinner with Vint Cerf, the guy most popularly known as “the father of the internet.” He’s currently the Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. We chatted over food about various things, but he was really interested in intellectual property issues (and I plugged Students for Free Culture multiple times). Yay.
2. FOOT had an epic capture the flag / lap tag session on Old Campus at night.
3. Foam party at Toad’s? Nuff said.
I’m a member of Cheese Club. We get together and eat different types of cheeses, usually themed by region. Yum.
Mark Sonnenblick’s in a band called The Fortune Five. They had a concert. They’re great. Great.
That’s pretty much where I left off. I’d love to go into more detail on a lot of these… if only I had time. I promise I’ll be a better blogger in the future.
Yale Students for Free Culture is holding a conversation on remix culture and its implications on music, new artists, and the industry in general.
So I just went to a talk that was part of the Walker speaker series at the MacMillan Center with former National Security Advisor during the Carter era, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Let me just say now that this man is an absolute pleasure to listen to. He’s clear, eloquent, commanding, brilliant–all with the touch of a Polish accent.
His talk was called “A Historically Relevant Foreign Policy,” and he addressed many issues in foreign policy today. He talked about how we’re moving beyond internationalism into a more globalist environment. We’re very interdependent these days, so we need to collaborate more and more and tackle things on a global level–as seen with the US financial collapse’s effect on the rest of the world. He talked about Israel and Palestine, and how that must be solved right away. He suggested an agreement that the Americans should declare to the world–I would put it down but i don’t remember it–and he claimed that within a week the entire world would subscribe to it. He talked about dealing with the Balkan states, dealing with the Middle East, and dealing with a rising anti-Americanism in general. He talked about how the world needs to accept how Japan/China/India are huge powers now and that the Atlantic isn’t the place to focus on anymore.
He also talked about ignorance. After stating a lot of facts about how Americans don’t know geography at all, he made a great point. Americans are getting more and more ignorant. And ignorant people are more highly susceptible to demagogy. We’re a democracy; we need to be informed. He also blamed this on the decline of newspapers and the rise of these things called “blogs”…. whatever Brzezinksi.
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
