LIFESTYLE Newsletter Vol. 6 No. 6
Nick’s LIFESTYLE Newsletter Vol. 6 No. 6
THIS IS AN INTRODUCTION
Hello again everyone. It's been a few weeks. Weeks of incredible last minute planning. Weeks of supporting others. Weeks of weirdly being able to cross 1 of 3 things off THE BUCKET LIST. Weeks of already being sick of the 2024 election cycle. Weeks of adding new subscribers to our SECRET SOCIETY. Welcome. On to the bullets (my favorite part).
- LIFESTYLE JAMAICA RETREAT UPDATE: Due to the continual shittyness of Sun Country, the LIFESTYLE JAMAICA RETREAT has been rescheduled to 16-23 March 2024. I hope you can join us! YES, YOU.
- In my apparently almost monthly trip to The Parkway to see a cover band, I went to see The Shabby Road Orchestra perform all of Abbey Road (and assorted other songs) and they were AMAZING. They perform Beatles songs that the Beatles never did live with a 16 person group including horns and strings. Hearing the cacophony of A Day in the Life was amazing in person. Highly recommend.
- Two very interesting articles highlighting how old I am and trying not to shout at the clouds. High-School English Needed a Makeover Before ChatGPT and TikTok has transformed the concert experience
- This article from the incredible Minnesota Reformer (SEND THEM MONEY!) really hit home with the profound disappointment I have that the abundance of information has not brought upon a new enlightened age: Rural broadband isn’t closing gaps; it’s widening them
- I think this guy would get me: The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge
- An amazing quote I heard this week: If your circle of friends are not lifting you up, they are a cage keeping you down. THANK YOU FOR LIFTING ME UP.
- This newsletter is even more enjoyable after I purchased Klack for my computer. Since I cannot use a nice BUCKLING SPRING KEYBOARD on my laptop, this gets me halfway there. It makes me so happy. KLACK KLACK KLACK GOES MY THOUGHTS. Honestly, if my laptop made modem sounds (like 14.4k era) every time I wake it, my life might be perfect.
ITEM THE FIRST:
THE DISAPPOINTMENT OF VIRTUAL WORLDS AS CURRENTLY CRAFTED. I had a week of vacation in late August so I cleared my schedule and decided I would play a fuckton of VR games. I've had VR for a little over a year now (see Vol. 5 No. 5 for the first discussion), but I've really only played a few games and had a few experiences in it.
I loaded up about 20 VR games I had gotten over the past few years as parts of bundles or comp codes, etc. and wow. VR is fucking broken and desolate. Many of the games were hardcoded to a specific type of VR controller I don't have (nor is it "standard"), many games were simply broken, not recognizing where your body was, etc. Even once I got into the games, a lot of games had a hard time with pathfinding and navigation. I struggled trying to figure out what I was being told to do as commands did not match up to my controller or where to go next. As gamers, you understand a language and conventions of non-verbal communication where subtle (or not subtle) things show you where to go next or what to do next. VR is much more difficult to do that since you cannot control where a player is facing or pull focus to things. A lot of dev teams are not up to the task...
Games with online components had EMPTY lobbies. I was playing mid-day, which means I should have at least seen some Europeans, but I never found another player in the three games that had multiplayer support.
Another thing that I hated was reloading guns. In most non-VR FPS games, you just press the R key, some animation plays and you are good to go. Obviously that is far removed from the same action in real life. In VR, it is much more "real." Most games have this sequence:
- Random button on controller to eject magazine.
- Grab from your side or chest with unsteady hand tracking where your magazines are stored.
- Hold gun hand out and load magazine without physical feedback of the edges of the gun or push back from inserting
- Find the bolt and, grab it with unsteady hand tracking and pull it back without feedback.
One minute later, I am ready to go. Not fun. The games that simplify this action are much funner, but most games do not as they are striving to be a simulator of sorts.
Speaking of simulators, VR is amazing for flight sim....kinda. I was originally super excited to do a lot of private plane flying in VR, but boy is it hard to control at a simulator level. Trying to use your hands to hit tiny buttons or knobs on a multi-function display without any feedback is impossible. Trying to coordinate that with a mix of real controls is even more impossible. For example, on my real throttle quadrant I have a lever for flaps. During a landing, I need to adjust that lever in the real-world while adjusting my radio in the virtual world and consulting a airport diagram and making calls to ATC. The mish-mash between physical and virtual components is terrible. Going all physical is possible but expensive, this is about $4,000. Thus, it's a hard pass on VFR flying in VR for anything other than "how cool is this flying and looking around."
That being said, on more simplified airplane combat games where my hand stays consistently on my controller and I don't need to find a keyboard, it is AWESOME. I can follow targets all around and not lose sight of my target. However, this is a pretty limited use case.
In summary, the best VR game is still Half-Life: Alyx and if you have the chance to try something, that is it. Sadly, it is also a 3 year old game and nothing comes close to it.
Is VR a disappointment? Yes. Not in the tech sense, as the visual hardware is incredible and only getting better. The controllers and software are just not there, however. Some of this is better in someways on an Oculus since Meta controls the whole experience, but then you are using Meta/Facebook and the visual quality is significantly worse.
It was nice to see what it was like to have friends my own height, to experience companionship looking down instead of up and to contort my head all around chasing planes, but after over a year in VR, I think it is a pass. Try again in 10 more years...
ITEM THE SECOND:
THE FAST TIMES OF DEFYING AND OBSERVING DEATH (A STORY TOLD IN PARTS). The last few weeks have been a whirlwind. A few weeks ago we learned that Melonie's mother was rushed to the hospital and about 4 days later we got that call at 4am that causes you to book a one way ticket to Las Vegas. I'll spare the details because it is not my story to tell, but a few assorted notes from my time in Vegas.
PART ONE. I have been married to Melonie for 16.5 years now and I have not once met her brother. He is two years younger and they were close as children, but he joined the army after high school and does not travel often. After years of hearing stories good and bad about him, I was finally able to meet him. He's tall. He has a big beard. He has a big truck and lives a very different life surrounded by a wife, 7 dogs and like 7 other people of all ages living in their house. It was so loud and just constant stimulation that ASPIE BRAIN WAS NOT HAPPY. I doubt we have similar views on a lot of things, like guns or bell hooks, but when forced to be together it was fine. I'm sure I seemed as much of an alien to him as he did me.
Melonie's mom was at the hospital at Nellis Air Force base (a legendary place in my mind because part of Top Gun was filmed there and the Thunderbirds museum is there). The first time we walked in was the first time I was surrounded by people in military uniforms. As a DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST™ I have a very uneasy sense around the military and generally believe that it does a lot of harm around the world and domestically. Being in that environment, especially through the eyes of a vet really forced me to re-exam some of those beliefs and at least take a deeper internal dive on why I feel that way. I was able to have a few brief conversations with Melonie's brother about military things and he was patient and reasonable with his responses.
I was able to take part in one of the most touching things, a Honor Walk. With Melonie's mother and family we moved through multiple hallways, an elevator ride and another hallway with service people lined up on all sides, at least 150 people. These people stopped what they were doing just to celebrate the sacrifice and life of someone they didn't know.
The commander of the hospital and a few other high-ranking military people spent time during the end for well over an hour and took the time to talk with us. I overheard the commander tell someone that they just told a few people and it spread life wildfire. No one was ordered to do it, they just valued this ritual and what it represents. Melonie's brother told me that this is not uncommon in the service, but as a civilian, it was something I have never experienced.
While I may not agree with a lot of the goals of the military and the people that have wielded it, I do need to acknowledge there are good parts as well. It is an important reminder that nothing is only good or bad and sometimes good things come from bad and vise versa (seen Oppenheimer yet?).
I never got a good chance to say it, but Ross, I appreciate your service and the sacrifices you made in service to the United States of America. Hearing about how you and your family literally pack backpacks full of stuff and hand them out to homeless people during the holidays was inspiring and a real template about how we CAN ALL BE BETTER.
I think we can all agree this is an incredible place to live (maybe not the best, but top-tier for sure), we might just disagree on what aspects need to be improved and how to accomplish that. There are a lot of people spending and making a lot of money trying to divide us and to dehumanize an ever shifting "other," but deep down, most of want the same things. TIME TO PROVE LOVE BUDDY.
PART TWO. Melonie's brother works for Battlebots. Yes, the robot fighting show. I remember commercials for it years ago, but never watched it. It was cool to see someone who actually had passion and excitement for what they did for work. VERY STRANGE. As part of this, I got to go "backstage" to see the engineering teams and ran into someone who builds robots and KNOWS FRIENDS OF THE LIFESTYLE. MINNESOTA IS THE DEEP STATE. After that, we got to see the show. First, it was very loud. Aspie brain was about to melt down Chernobyl style, but thankfully they had earplugs available and I was kindly provided some. Second, there is something uncomfortable about hearing a crowd chant "fight! fight! fight!" even as someone who has watched a ton of combat sports. Third, as I told Melonie's brother, it was the dumbest thing I have ever seen. I don't mean that in a bad way at all. It seems silly to spend all this time and energy making something that fights, but it was very neat to hear the stories about how they were made and all the work that goes into it. Still, can we build one that will get me to the moon instead of cut another robot? Fourth, if you are in Vegas, you should totally go to the show. It was like two hours and enjoyable, even to a robot pacifist like myself.
PART THREE. When we arrived in Vegas, I remembered, "Wait!?! Wasn't one of the things on my bucket list in Vegas?" AND YES IT WAS, THANKS FOR REMEMBERING. Sunday morning, about 4 hours before we flew home, I got to cross FLYING IN AN ACROBATIC PLANE off the bucket list. I went to Sky Combat Ace and signed up for the basic package getting to do these: aileron roll, loop, barrel roll and hammerhead. Then I WAS UPSOLD, AS EVERYTHING IN VEGAS IS ABOUT, to the ADVANCED PACKAGE to add tail slides, tumbles, spins and a high g turn.
After safety and pre-flight, we sat on the runway at the North Last Vegas airport and waited for a window to take off during a busy time. Takeoff was awesome because we got to speed, hovered about 5 feet off the runway and when we ran out of tarmac, we just went straight up. I told the pilot I've done that same take off for about 30 years in flight sims. We flew out to the desert, got to about 6000ft and did all the maneuvers.
Needless to say it was SO. MUCH. FUN. We pushed about 7.5G during the turn and did an inverted negative G barrel roll that put us around -4G (looks like this). I always love stalling maneuvers, so my favorite was probably the TAILSLIDE, which looks like this.
As we finished up with the tricks and were in route to another strip of desert, it started to hit me. I started getting the cold sweats a little and my tummy was a bit uneasy. Much like a plane stalling, I recovered after about 30 seconds and was ready for more. I was also upsold to THE LOW DESERT PASS. That was disappointing. We got low, but not TOP GUN LOW. Fucking government safety regulations telling me how low I can fly a plane.
Overall, I highly recommend it. I would add the Advanced Package and the Extended Run, which is an extra 30 mins and you get to fly through the canyons. I think I would have enjoyed that more than the desert pass, so let me know if you go.
I was upsold again to a VIDEO AND PHOTOS package, the result is basically a super cut of me giggling during the flight. As READERS CAN ATTEST, I do the same thing on a roller coaster.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2-m0TNh2ZQ
I did learn a few important things however:
- I'm good on acrobatic flying (at least on my own dime). I enjoyed it, but honestly my favorite parts were takeoff and landing and just being in the sky. If you have not, you NEED TO TAKE A GLIDER RIDE WITH DON (see Vol. 5 No. 1). Right now is PRIME FUCKING TIME with the fall colors.
- I may be closer to the vomit in the vomit comet than I thought.
- 1 down, 2 to go. The rest are very spendy.
ITEM THE THIRD:
OF MINT MACHINES AND JUDAS PRIEST. As referenced in last issue, the MINT MACHINE has been rebuilt. Better and stronger (hopefully). I have received the new bike but have only taken it out for about 40 miles, so the shakedown continues.
While on my way back home a few weeks ago, I was at the intersection of the freeway exit and the road (Northbound Highway 35E to Cliff Rd. to be specific). The light facing me was red, a car was coming up the ramp, but they were just starting. Being the scofflaw that I am, I saw the intersection was clear so I did my usual cranking on the speed to blow through it. The cop that was sitting at the light did not agree with my situational assessment and hit the light and siren and pulled me over at the next intersection. His opening line: "You're going to tell me you just blew through a red light with a cop right there" and my reply: "Yes. It's a dangerous intersection and I was 100% certain no car was close so I wanted to get through it as soon as possible." I don't think he was expecting that and stammered through a speech about safety, which seemed a bit silly when we both agreed there was no car coming. He started telling me about jaywalking and how he is a biker too. I'll take your opinion under advisement, Officer whatever. So kids, remember jaywalking laws are largely racist and uniquely American and don't plow through intersections in Eagan on your bike. Or do and exercise your privilege.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR (please mark "ok to print"):
Feedback from last issue on the topic of ALBUM OF THE SUMMER, obviously Janelle Monáe's The Age of Pleasure:
Just one comment. I absolutely agree with your assessment of Janelle Monae's new album. I've been dancing to it ALLL SUMMER and by far, the best new album lately.
That is all
IT'S ALL TRUE.
MANDATORY FUN BUCKS MANDATORY UPDATE:
Well...this will be brief because I spent A YEAR OF FUN BUCKS on riding in a plane for about 45 minutes.
WEATHER CORNER:
It's getting colder now.
FAVORITE THING TO GO IN MY HOLES THIS WEEK:
Too many good things to limit to one sensory input orifice.
The new Romy album is super fun and catchy.
The new Chemical Brothers is probably my favorite Chemical Brothers album in 20 years.
If you love absurd satire movies like I do, enjoy the lesbian fight club high school comedy of the year, Bottoms. Starring the amazing Ayo Edebiri from The Bear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vH5NAahf76s&pp=ygUPYm90dG9tcyB0cmFpbGVy
THIS IS THE END OF THE NEWSLETTER
THANK YOU DEB FOR HELPING SHAPE MY WIFE TO THE INCREDIBLE WOMAN SHE IS.
I WOULDN'T BE WHO I AM WITHOUT HER AND YOU.
BUT I'M NOT EATING AT APPLEBEE'S EVER AGAIN.
THAT IS ALL.