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John over at The Mighty Atom has some good advice.  Reproduced here:

Connected: The character has relationships (positive and negative) with other significant characters in the situation.

Committed: The character has a stake in the outcome of the situation, and will stay to see it through.

Capable: The character has the capacity to affect change in the situation by taking decisive action.

Conflicted: The character has beliefs and goals that are in conflict. They must make choices about which are more important, and which must be abandoned or changed.

Also, Gregor Hutton has some great advice in 3:16:

PLAY, DON’T WORK
Play is fun, so embrace the kill-happy machismo [this particular point is specific to the game. –Kit] and play with it. It’s not work, right? You shouldn’t be stressing over this.

LIVE THE MOMENT
Each moment might be your character’s last, so don’t try and plan ahead. Events and dice rolls will throw you a curveball all the time. You’ll find that the bigger picture will take care of itself in play.

BE A TEAM PLAYER
Listen to your other players at least as much as you speak. Do share your ideas but learn to enjoy the contributions of others too.

DON’T TRY TO BE TOO CLEVER
If you spend all your time trying to be clever or bring in more twists and turns it’ll just be tiring. Instead, just go with the intuitive and obvious answers that pop into your head. Simple is best.

BE DIRECT
Trying to be subtle can be confusing, and trying to make a convoluted plan worse. Be straight to the heart of the matter.

BE OPEN
Be open minded and honest about how you feel. That’s the way.

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I suppose I must comment on it.  I went, I saw, I enjoyed.  But I don’t think I enjoyed it for the reasons one “should” enjoy a movie.

Avatar has been dominating the airwaves and the conversations around me a lot.  It’s certainly good in many respects, and the amount of conversational fodder it has provided is one of those.  But the problems almost balance the good aspects.  It has a schizoid attitude towards and portrayal of the indigenous people, well-addressed in this review.  There are so many problems with it requiring a white, male, American soldier to make the indigenous people win that I don’t know where to start, but the short version is that all those things would be OK if they mattered to his ground-breaking plan.  But actually?  His plan was a non-plan.  I’ll avoid saying more for spoilers-sake, in case you care.

So why was it good?  I enjoyed watching it for much the same reasons I would enjoy looking at a painting.  It was, quite simply, visually stunning.  The story was thin, archetypal, problematic in terms of race-attitudes, but man was it pretty to look at.  But it was also good in terms of inspiration for secondary-creation: the conlang for the Na’vi was fabulous, and well-acted, and the world had many compelling features, inspiring me to some fun co-exobiology thoughts.  And the movie’s ecological message is not subtle, either, which I think is fabulous—no need to tread softly around such a message, just put it out there.

So, ultimately, the movie is good not for much in itself, besides the pretty, but it’s quite good for the topics it gets you thinking about and talking about, most clearly race/privilege, and the environment.  I’d recommend it.

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Too much happening lately to catch up on writing about: saw Vienna Teng, awesome as ever, with Allie, awesome as ever.  Snow again, just after I made it into NYC for a quick seeing of Miles and Mendez and Lisa, and Avatar.  The movie was visually stunning, had a fine but thin story, and some real problems with portrayal of indigenous cultures.  But was basically fun.  Now, I’m working on all sorts of coding projects, and really ought to admit to myself that I have many people to buy gifts for.

Too many project ideas is a great state to be in, when you have the chance to work on them as much as you want.

Oh yeah: snow, twice, BEAUTIFUL.

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Is still cool. I’ve got a pile of invites; anyone want one?

(Since people keep asking: Google Wave is not, in and of itself, anything new.  It is, rather, a beautifully conceived [though not yet quite fully implemented!] melding of existing technologies.  The tag-line version is that it is a integration of wiki, IM, email, and collaborative document editing, with line-item threaded responses and real-time typing from other users visible.  Many people balk at this last point, but it’s (a) really surprisingly useful and makes communication a lot more like, well, real conversation, and (b) eventually going to be configurable.)

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The inimitable @andrewa121 pointed out that the iPhone has greater extended-latin input abilities than I had ascribed to it; he suggested touch-and-hold to get options for accented characters (which is exactly what one does in Android 2.0). I would like to state for the record that I had tried this unsuccessfully on an iPhone 3GS prior to writing the last post.

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Well, I’ve had this phone for a bit now, and thought it time to give my thoughts on it. They are basically positive—if you’re a nerdy guy, this is a good smartphone for you.

The pros are good pros for me, and the cons are cons that don’t bother me, but might be bad for other people. I like the speed, UI, option for on-screen (for general use) or slide-out (for intensive, or SSH, use) keyboard. I like the selection of apps (by which I mean that there’s a good, free, SSH app, and then other, very Google-oriented apps, and a Pandora app).

I like the battery life, I like the resolution, I like the camera. I like running six different apps at a time, and I still like the battery life.

I think that the shape of it is very male, it’s a little thicker than I’d like (for fitting in my erstwhile cell-phone pockets), and many of the apps seem buggier than I’ve seen on the iPhone—but they’ve yet to be destructive bugs. Mostly, the Twitter app I use complains that it needs to force-quit a lot, and then doesn’t, because, actually, it doesn’t need to.

This point is a slight win for the Droid over the iPhone: it can input extended latin characters quite easily, and — and … particularly, but it doesn’t have the fonts to display weirder Unicode, like ♆.

It can’t (yet) play arbitrary Flash embeds, so I can’t watch ZP on it. But it can catch YouTube links and redirect them to the YouTube app.

In the end: nerdy guy, yes. Anyone else, probably not. Price is completely equivalent to the iPhone, in terms of data plan as well.

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I sat in on a seminar at Berkeley. Fantastic. I feel like a fish back in water, my mind latching on to novel approaches to familiar problems—the Problem, really. Human language, what is its form? What are its possible forms?

There are reasons I love Cyteen.

The department seems to offer the most wonderful mix of field work and cognitive theory. The brain is most certainly not a Von Neumann architecture computer, though I think that the arguments for considering it a species of computer are compelling. And to talk of Language, of course you need a broad spectrum of data.

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First impressions: I like this place a lot more. It reminds me of Cambridge, MA: the urban environment is vital, not kept at arm’s length, and has and independent life. Also, the area is denser with people I know—not something to sneeze at.

Yesterday, went to a ling department colloquium, and had great fun there and at the post-talk reception. It had a pervasively academic feel.

I’ve come away from both visits with more targeted ideas of how to write my Statements of Purpose. That’ll be good. If you catch me on I’M the next week or so, yell at me to write. I don’t expect I’ll take much cajoling.

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Good:

• Awesome research happening here; chances to do grammar induction with sparse data, or, more accurately, work on it.
• They sure have funding.

Bad:

• Beautiful lawns with no one on them.
• Feels like southern California.
• Definitely exclusive; will my patent application make up for my lack of published work?

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Well, I feel like I’m officially in the future, now that I have a smartphone.  I got the Droid, a bit of nice Motorola hardware running Google’s nice open-source OS Android, and carried by the icktastic Verizon.  So it goes.

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I spent much of today rewiring the house (with my dad’s assistance, or, more accurately, I was assisting him).  Lots of drilling, crawling in the basement, getting dusty, trying not to inhale fiberglass insulation.  I found it quite fun, but it’s not a usual thing for me, which I suppose makes a difference.  But there was something exciting and satisfying to that kind of work—a nice combination of manual work, and basic network set up of a sort familiar to me.  Satisfying work is satisfying.

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I am here at Swarthmore, doing some work for Professor K. David Harrison.  It’s fun work, and going well—which is always profoundly satisfying when dealing with programming—but that’s not quite what I’m thinking about.  More interesting to me is that this is the first time I’ve been back on campus not explicitly for a social visit.  In fact, the campus is nearly void of people I know, or at least seems so, after the social busyness of senior year and the fact that every visit in this past year has been filled with other people from my year visiting too, and all of our various friends in 2009 being on campus.  I know relatively few people in 2010.

It’s interesting.  Kinda satisfying.  There are things I like about this place independent of the people, but I can also feel free from it.  I will mull over these thoughts more.  Unsure of them yet.

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I’ve just rediscovered an old love: Skulls Unlimited.  It’s still fantastic.

Baboon skull

We used to get their catalog, when I was little. It was the best thing ever.

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Yesterday: thirteen vultures circling above us, as we stood on a hilltop overlooking the river, watching the trees turn golden.  At our feet, a dead snake with its head crushed.

On the way home, a fox.

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Sometimes, life causes you to make it.  In this case, no Toronto/Montreal trip.  I was in a car accident yesterday.  I wasn’t driving, no one’s hurt.  The car lost the front driver’s side wheel.  That’s what you get when an SUV veers into your lane, and clips you.  And the SUV had only a scratch.  Makes me hate ‘em. The people who drove it were very nice, though.

In any case, thanks for the suggestions on Montreal, and when next I’m there, I’ll act on them.  As it is, this week will be good for getting done all the things I was hoping to defer.

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I’ll be in Montreal in about a week.  This will be the tail-end of a trip which will include seeing friends in Toronto beforehand, and I know what to do in Toronto, but Montreal is all unknown to me.  What should I do there?  Let me know what’s cool in Montreal.

In other news, vests.  More vests.  Working pocket watch.  I need more nice shirts and ties; I love my black-on-black paisley tie dearly, but I need some variety.  Toronto should help for this.  Perhaps Montreal also has good vintage and used clothing stores?

No news, of course, on the real activity, which is grad school applications.  No news on that for a while, I suppose, which is the frustrating thing.

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I went contra dancing last night, for the first time in too long.  Advantages to dancing at this altitude include the fact that my lungs were not burning after one dance.  I was also dancing a bit more sedately than I tended to in Boulder, though, as I forgot my shoes, and barefoot dancing, while fun, is hard on the feet.

After, hanging out in Princeton with Chris and Laurie.  There was chocolate and peanut butter and accordion and painful-to-listen-to field recordings.  Good times.

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I got my first case of poison ivy ever the other day.  It’s been quite interesting; it’s all over my leg, due to my not realizing that there was a bit of P.I. leaf stuck in my pants leg for a lot of the day.  It’s a very mild reaction, just small and rash-like, and barely itching—that is, it itches, but no worse than a random something-brushed-against-your-leg itch you might otherwise have.  Yet it’s frustrating, because I’m trying very hard to keep from scratching it.  In any case, Tecnu has been doing good things for it.

So much to do.  It’s good.

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I am going far in the other direction, into activity almost more than thought.  It’s refreshing to be back east, to be home, to see familiar locations with new eyes.  I’ve been making progress on my primary project (grad school applications), and my quaternary project (figuring out what to do with all my stuff, particularly stuff from my Boulder apartment).  My secondary (travel plans) and tertiary (making my various webapps) are a bit stalled right now.  This will change.

One common train of thought for me has been quite absent: food.  To those in NYC that I was going to give cooking lessons to, worry not, I still want to.  But my ability to think about food has been quite sapped since leaving Boulder, for better or worse.  I find all I want is a handful of nuts or berries, water, the occasional bit of meat.  I should try making pemmican, and turn this lack-of-food into something productive.

Beyond that, I want to move, walk, dance, fence, something.  I’ve been doing a lot of hauling-boxes, which is not the most satisfying form of activity.  Still struggling with nocturnal inclinations—it’s nice to hang out with friends, but I feel weirdly bad about being asleep through the day.  The empty night-streets are lovely, though.

More east-coast travel needs to happen.  I’ve made it to Philly lately, but I need more of that, and then there are the other cities: NYC, Boston, Toronto, DC.  To all those I owe a visit: sorry, I’m working on it.

Originally published at Transneptune. Please leave any comments there.

I just wanted to say that I’ve taken the GREs, and now am free to work on grad school apps and plan my Grand Travel Plans and go on an orgy of visiting folks and being super-social.  It’s good.  My mind is freed.