Blog of Magic Cheese

Never get your children IQ tested. It's a poor reflection of ability, a test of only four types of the hundreds of identified factors of intelligence, and if my father is any indication, will fill you with hopes that your child is a mathematical genius that will breeze through school and enter MIT, and when she eschews your hopes and go into the liberal arts, will shatter you into a million pieces, from which you will never fully recover.

I went to elementary and high school with a lot of very smart people. My friends tended to be highly accomplished honors students with lots of awards and impressive transcripts. They were studious and somewhat introverted, thoughtful and philosophical. Despite the fact that I had a markedly inferior set of grades and study habits, and possibly due to either our collective lack of life experience or the arrogance of teenagerdom, I generally felt that I could hold my own in conversation, though I had some very smart friends with whom I was outpaced or out of my depth.

At UC Irvine, I had a harder time finding people I could hold a good conversation with. I say it's because people there seemed, on average, dumber, shallower, or more spoiled, my father tells me not to be an elitist prick and that it's just that we didn't have much in common. Culture or intelligence, 5 years passed with few conversations with my fellow students.

Now we come to working at Three Rings where at times, I am completely out of my league. There are freaking smart people working here, not smart in the sense that they lord it over you, but with whom it is very clear in a few short conversations that they are incredibly quick, multitalented, and well-read. I've met folks that I honestly believe are the smartest people I've met in my life, people next to whom I am as dumb as a bag of hammers, and about as blunt.

I really like where I work, but man. I don't know if I belong here. I feel like I've regressed back to high school and being an awkward teenager sometimes.

I got hit by the wushu train this weekend. The ankle still can't do everything, like drop into bow stances or sweeps, but I was able to do front jump kicks and butterflies and pretty much everything else combo-wise, so I was feeling great!

... until this morning. Now every time I get up from my desk I walk like somebody punched me in the ass.

It isn't helped by the fact that I accidentally drank a co-worker's milk tea today that he scrupulously brought from home, and now I'm afraid to pee because the path to the bathroom takes me right past his desk.

So until he goes home and I can scurry back to the Quickly near my flat and buy him Sorry Makeup Tea, I'm going to type here about a recent Wii survey.

For those of you that don't know, the Nintendo Wii console comes with a free channel called the Everybody Votes Channel that has periodic A or B questions that let you vote and pick the response you think the most people are likely to choose. It then divides the responses by location and gender, so you can check out who voted what after you see how you did compared to the average Wii user.

Some of them are pretty easy to predict, like "Have you ridden a public bus in the last month? Yes/No" and some of them spawn surprisingly interesting conversation between the members of the household. For example, one question asked if one thought a more accurate prediction of the future was a fortune cookie or a psychic, and the northwest was largely more into the fortune cookies, while Californians (go figure) invested more in psychics.

Anyway, one interesting question that came up in which I disagreed with everybody else was which one you dislike people stealing from you more: things or ideas?

I hate it when people steal my shit. It drives me absolutely fucking nuts. Things that I have tend to have taken me a long time to select and find and last me for a very long time, thus making them irreplacable. For example, my current bag was a gift from my friend Cathy. I've used it every day for years, and it has a little Wii controller keychain that I got as a piece of swag from GDC 2007. It also has a bead string of various glass beads that I hand-selected from a number of shops and a charm from the Central Valley when I used to drive through Harris Ranch on my way up and down California several times a year. I fiddle with these charms while riding the bus daily. If this bag was taken, none of it would be replacable.

On top of that, inside of the bag are my earplugs that I use for movies, my personal planner that I've been using for the last three years, all of my notes from work meetings, my journal, my makeup bag, the contents of which cost me plenty and took me a long time to assemble, and my medication. Without my ADHD medication, I might as well be fired.

If somebody took my bag, I'd know he wouldn't appreciate and treasure my stuff as much as I do, and that it would likely be thrown somewhere after being looted for all of the money in my wallet.

Now ideas, I have ideas all of the time. Most of them never get acted on or brought to fruition anyway, because I either lack the technical knowledge or the focus to follow through on them. Furthermore, as somebody that's had beautiful ideas that I've fought and sweated over and made reality, I can tell you that making an idea tangible is really fucking hard. If somebody took my idea, then went through all of the struggle and work to make the idea reality, who am I to begrudge him? At that point, the idea has become his from all of the work, changes, compromise, and determination he's put into it anyway, and I get my idea put into the world! We have ideas because there are things in our personal worlds that are missing and we think up things to fill in the gaps, so as far as I can see it, I'd just be happy that particular gap was filled.

At work, I think up ideas or little patches to the game I work on, but it's not solely mine by any means. First I run it by the developers who actually code the game, and if they approve, sometimes it goes through different iterations, and when it's implemented, I certainly can't claim credit about it all being "my idea" because I was completely dependent on the work and help of other people to make it reality. This doesn't mean it doesn't utterly tickle me when people say, "Hey, I really like this addition."

... no one agreed with me, though. The country didn't agree with me, either. That's all right, though. So long as they don't steal my shit. I hate that.